ConservativeHome's Local Government Blog

Sutton Council's road cuts adds to icy chaos

Cllr Paul Scully, the Conservative opposition leader on Lib Dem controlled Sutton Council, on how the wrong spending priorities have made road conditions in his borough worse.

Last February in a desperate bid to limit their above-inflation council tax rise, Sutton Council’s Lib Dem administration cut £20,000 from their winter road maintenance budget. This decision was ratified by their Finance spokesman just a few feet away from people falling on the ice whilst trying to get into the Council Offices and just days after the heavy snowfall that did more to change people’s driving habits than 140 private planes descending on Copenhagen, albeit for a few days.

This cut came a few months before they spent £16,000 on new air conditioning for the Council leader’s office. Angry Sutton residents have been hitting the phones this week with complaints to the Council reaching levels last seen when a £35 per bag charge was slapped on green garden waste collections in the Borough.

When the first snow arrived this week the main roads had been gritted well with side roads left icy. Tuesday saw rain which had cleared much of the snow, suddenly freeze after a rapid drop in temperature. This caused chaos across the Borough with the main east-west arterial road at a total standstill. People reported 2 hour journeys to get from Cheam to Carshalton. Side roads were treacherous.

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Posted on 24 December 2009 at 06:49 in Environment, Transport | Permalink | Comments (4)

Tory Council bans reindeer

I'm afraid that Conservative controlled Harborough District Council is the latest to be plunged into a scandal about health and safety absurdity. 12 reindeer were booked to entertain shoppers in Market Harborough. A very jolly idea and one organised by the Council.

But the Council own health and safety officers then decided to cancel it on the grounds of the snow and ice. Surely the reindeer are used to that sort of thing? The Council Taxpayers' money spent booking the reindeer will now be lost.

I am writing to the Council leader Cllr Alistair Swatridge to ask for his comments.

Posted on 23 December 2009 at 08:30 in Health & Safety | Permalink | Comments (32)

Essex outsource services to IBM to follow Canadian model

IBM have won the huge £5.4 billion, eight year, contract from Essex County Council for a mass privatisation of their services. This follows a report in March that IBM were competing for the contract with TI Systems. It promises to leave Essex residents very well placed to withstand the inevitable coming squeeze on Town Hall budgets. As well as driving up standards of service the aim is to secure savings of 20% on the Council's annual £1.2 billion budget.

The boldness and radicalism of what is planned can hardly be denied. There don't appear to be any sacred cows being hidden away from IBM. Libraries, social care, highways, school management are all under review. Services already contracted out will be reviewed. Sometimes Essex will buy in services from other Councils - sometimes sell services to other councils. But it sounds as though it is being implemented in a sensible, practical manner. The process will be rolled out service by service. IBM won't run everything themselves. If the service can be more efficiently subcontracted or remain in-house that will happen. The Council will remain management partners.

I suppose what Essex are doing will be attacked as "ideological" and naturally Conservatives are indeed ideologically attracted to a smaller role for the state. But it sounds very much as though the IBM/Essex approach will be open minded and pragmatic. What works best is what will happen.

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Posted on 22 December 2009 at 08:11 in Council finances | Permalink | Comments (29)

Telford and Wrekin increases grit capacity by 25%

I wonder if all the global warming propaganda about the science being "settled" has encouraged complacency in our Town Halls. They might try to persuade themselves that snow and ice on anything approaching the scale of last February will never recur. Anyway Conservative led Telford and Wrekin Council has not taken this approach. They have spent £15,000 on a new salt barn which has increased their grit capacity by a quarter.

Cllr Steve Bentley, a Conservative councillor and the cabinet member for the environment, said:

"Throughout the Christmas holiday period our gritting teams will be on standby and looking at the forecast they'll be pretty busy. Although we salt much a higher percentage than many other councils do, people still need to be aware that there are still a number of other roads that we don't grit."

I suspect that even if they are paid overtime the Council staff would prefer to do other things than road gritting at Christmas. But keeping the roads working is a basic duty.

Posted on 21 December 2009 at 07:57 in Transport | Permalink | Comments (10)

Why do councils let their staff get away with fraud?

Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance monitors a lot of Town Hall waste - but has a particular sense of outrage at councils that turn a blind eye to fraud.

Working at the TPA, I see a lot of remarkable examples of ways in which taxpayers’ money can be poured down the drain. Despite the amazing variety – from the police officers’ top trumps to the council staff who got travel expenses for time spent in their office lift - they never cease to amaze me.

Indeed, I’ve always been careful to make sure I don’t get blasé about it, or allow the feeling that such waste is inevitable to creep up on me. Sadly, while my sense of outrage is still heartily intact, in some councils it seems they have turned not being bothered about protecting taxpayers’ money into an art form.

It is reprehensible to squander taxes on barmy or self-indulgent schemes, but you can at least at a stretch imagine the mindset which leads someone to think that it’s a good idea to give drunk people free flip flops or to spend £2 million on a giant concrete head. The people who do so are wrong, but I can follow their (flawed) thinking, just about.

What I simply cannot even begin to understand, though, is councillors and council officials who tolerate the outright theft of taxpayers’ money.

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Posted on 20 December 2009 at 08:02 in Council finances, Crime & anti social behaviour | Permalink | Comments (13)

What role should Councils have in the school system?

The Localis think tank always come up with interesting stuff. Their latest paperis on what role (if any) local councils should have in the school system. Cllr Andrew Povey, the leader of Surrey County Council, makes the point that often when we talk of "choice" within the current system we mean "preference." Parents can express a preference for their child to go to a good school - but if it is full up then tough.

Cllr Povey says that if Councils switched to a commissioning role rather than a providing role they "would become champions for the consumer of education thus providing an essential energy to drive up performance without the current conflict of interest of also being the main provider of education." He offers the example of Britain's first privatised school. This was a failing comprehensive school in Guildford called King's Manor that was half empty it is now called Kings College for the Arts and Technology and doing rather better.

Cllr Povey says:

Surrey County Council was the first authority to create an aided school sponsored by a private company and with payments tied to a performance based contract. This included, for example, a limit to the number of exclusions, no adverse OFSTED report and the requirement to meet the Surrey average % A-Cs at GCSE level. This was a radical step that has great potential for the future.

You can argue about the details. (Often the shock and awe of mass exclusions, however temporary, are vital to turning round a failing school where discipline has collapsed. What matters is the GCSE results for English and Maths - not GCSE for Film Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, Citizenship, Leisure, etc.) But the basic idea is sound. Perhaps I was wrong to regard Cllr Povey as a closet socialist.

Another contributor is Rachel Wolf, Director of the New Schools Network, an exciting project set up to help new parents wishing to start up new schools so they can hit the ground running with the impending Gove Revolution. She also supports more City Academies and suggest that Councils should lose their effective veto. In other countries this does not apply yet for us:

"the Government controls when and where academies are set up and local authorities have an increasing say in whether this happens. This means a pool of potential providers - teachers, charities and international organisations, often in partnership with parents - are shut out from the process.

It also creates geographical bias. If a local authority does not approve of academies then - no matter how great the school might be, and how needy the children in the borough are - no academy will be set up. The pupils in one local authority are no less deserving than another, yet they can not access the same opportunities. This is unjust to those who need the most help - those who cannot afford to move elsewhere to acess the schools they want."

This will be part of an argument about localism - which will sometimes mean taking power away from Town Halls to allow schools and parents more independence.

Posted on 19 December 2009 at 07:44 in Education | Permalink | Comments (20)

Tories hold ward in Reigate

Only one by-election to report this week.

The Conservatives held Earlswood and Whitebushes in Reigate and Banstead.

Our vote was down 13%, however, to 38%. Lab was unchanged on 16%, the LDs were up 6% to 30%, UKIP were up 3% to 12% and BNP were on 4% from nothing.

I want to be cautious in interpreting all by-election results. Without knowing the local circumstances we always have to remember that such is our current dominance in local government that we are often defending high watermark gains and holding these landslide-period gains are often going to be the best we can hope for.

The next by-election will be held on 7th January.

Tim Montgomerie

Posted on 18 December 2009 at 12:25 in By-election results | Permalink | Comments (23)

A defence of CCTV from Gavin Barwell

Over on CentreRight Alex Deane has written against CCTV.

In the comments thread Gavin Barwell, a Conservative Cabinet member on Croydon Council and our PPC for Croydon Central, has written a defence of CCTV. I thought it deserved a bit more prominence:

"I am responsible for community safety in Croydon, London's largest borough. Whilst Alex is right to draw attention to instances where cameras are turned off, images are not recorded or are of poor quality or CCTV is relied on as the sole means of crime prevention and detection, he is wrong to imply that CCTV doesn't help deter or detect crime.
In Croydon, we have a network of about 70 cameras in our town centre and some of our district centres plus some mobile cameras that we can move to areas of the borough where there is a specific problem at a particular point in time to avoid the need to have a larger network of permanent cameras. All the cameras are managed from a control room which is staffed 24 hours a day. They can be rotated and can zoom in on a particular area. The images are recorded so that they can be accessed by the police. In the month of November alone, footage from our cameras led to 26 arrests. I don't know what practical experience Alex has of policing or crime prevention policy but if he would like to come and meet our local police they will tell him that the best approach is a mix of cameras monitored 24 hours a day and uniformed officers on the streets - as soon as an incident occurs, the control room can alert the officers in the area and they can be on the spot in seconds. Unless Alex wants to increase spending on the police massively (personally I don't want to pay higher Council Tax) we are never going to have enough police on the streets for uniformed officers on their own to be the solution.
Finally, in my experience CCTV is popular with local residents. I am constantly petitioned for additional cameras. Of course there are privacy concerns and it is a question of striking a sensible balance - one of the reasons we recently invested in mobile cameras rather than extending our permanent network. Sadly, Alex's post doesn't do that."

I know Gavin is an instinctive civil libertarian - opposing, for example, ID cards and Labour's pre-charge detention plans. On CCTV I think he makes a compelling case for a party that must keep fighting crime at the top of its priority list.

Tim Montgomerie

Posted on 18 December 2009 at 10:29 in Crime & anti social behaviour | Permalink | Comments (33)

Should Councils waive Boxing Day parking restrictions?

St Stephen's Day this year falls on a Saturday. This has alarming prospects for shoppers out hunting for bargains as many councils do not recognise it as a public holiday. A BBC survey of London councils found about half (including mine I'm afraid) will be imposing standard parking fines. Of course the uncertainty will make matters worse.

Haringey Conservative councillor Cllr Alan Dobbie has criticised his Labour Council for planning to go ahead with charges. He says:

"Labour claim that they want to help local businesses and the local economy in these credit crunched times, but their actions suggest otherwise. It's not too late for them to drop their scrooge-like parking charges and provide local businesses across the borough with a huge boost on this year's Boxing Day".

Justin Hinchliffe adds that traffic wardens would "rather spend Boxing Day with their families."

There is a cost for Town Hall budgets if they miss out on the revenue. But with all these empty shops on our high streets shouldn't we give them a break?

Posted on 18 December 2009 at 08:47 in Transport | Permalink | Comments (10)

Top Town Hall pay to be made public

The Government is to pass legislation requiring local councils to name those officers being paid over £150,000. They will be banded in £5,000 increments above that figure. I'm not sure how much difference it will make in practice as the Taxpayers Alliance have already obtained rather more information than this by sending off Freedom of Information requests to the 475 local councils in the UK.

Their annual Town Hall Rich List covers those earning over £100,000. Topping the league incidentally was John Foster, the Chief Executive of Wakefield Council, a great bastion of Socialism. He was on £545,000 annual salary before he left. He presided over a culture of sacking whistle blowers. We await to see what his successor Joanne Roney gets. A report in The Sunday Telegraph a year ago said it was £180,000 to £189,999. She says she wants to help with the "daily struggles" residents face. In which case she make like to consider reducing the £1,274 Band D Council Tax they have to pay. I wonder what cabinet ministers Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper make of their local Labour Council's largess as they crank up for a class war General Election campaign. Doubtless they are as keen as John Denham for the matter to get lots of attention.

I suppose the legal change should be welcomed as a matter or principle. We shouldn't have to rely on the Taxpayers Alliance to do all that donkey work to come up the information as to what our money is spent on. It also might be more up to date. The Taxpayers Alliance latest survey came out in April but covered the year 2007/08. In other words it was a year behind. Apparently not all Town Halls were desperately keen to cooperate. ("We're not going to tell you that, it is already in the public domain," is a favourite response. It would then turn out, of course, that it's not only far more vague information on the same general topic.)

Posted on 18 December 2009 at 08:29 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Epsom and Ewell Council deny honour to regiment

Epsom and Ewell Council, which is controlled by Residents Association, has decided not to honour soldiers from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment on the grounds that "it is not local enough." The regiment is based in Guildford and many other local councils have honoured them - include Tunbridge Wells which is 50 miles away. The custom is for the regiment to be given the "Freedom of the Borough" - this doesn't cost anything but is much appreciated when the soldiers march through the streets of their town when returning home from fighting.

Lib Dem councillors have backed the refusal to honour the troops. But Cllr Sean Sullivan, a Conservative opposition councillor says:

'The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment contains what used to be the East Surrey regiment. This is a local regiment.

'It would be wrong and downright offensive to refuse to honour this regiment.'

Posted on 17 December 2009 at 10:21 | Permalink | Comments (18)

Why does Boris need to know the ethnic breakdown of transport users?

I've been reading the Mayor of London's Transport strategy. A lot of good stuff there is too. On the section on reducing noise it includes "road maintenance programmes to replace road surfaces with low-noise surfacing where possible" and "introducing speed enforcement measures which do not encourage noisy, rapid acceleration and deceleration" In other words goodbye to the humps. What a relief that these monuments to Ken Livingstone's mayoralty are to be gradually eradicated. During the eight years of Livingstonian terror we had Transport for London bullying and bribing borough councils to put humps down in street after street.

To promote walking with have the proposal of "enhancing pavement space for pedestrians and removing guardrails and other obstacles." Eminently good sense and a welcome prospect of decluttering the streets of our capital from accumulated nannying, Livingstonian detritus.

When I filled in the feedback section I encouraged the Mayor to get a move on in scrapping the Western Extension of the Congestion Charge. ("Je vous ai compris," said Boris over a year ago so why is the question still being asked?)

Also it still includes the usual questions on race and gender. I can just about understand asking about gender (I suppose pregnant women may have different needs to men), but race? Do GLA bureaucrats think that black people have different transport needs to white people? We need Rosa Parks to fight this nonsense

Posted on 17 December 2009 at 08:23 in Transport | Permalink | Comments (18)

Surrey rejects incinerators

Cllr Lynne Hack, the Cabinet Member for the Environment on Surrey County Council, says there are cheaper and more ecological alternatives for waste disposal than incineration or landfill.

Surrey County Council’s Conservative administration have announced that we are scrapping plans for any Energy From Waste (EfW) plants, more commonly known as incinerators, in Surrey. We have also set an ambitious target of recycling 70% of our waste by 2013 and we also aim not to be using landfill by then.

Thanks to the efforts of our residents and our colleagues on Surrey’s Borough and District Councils we are producing less waste and recycling more and we believe that we are now in a position to look at alternative methods of dealing with our waste whilst also saving money. We have always believed that by working with our partners and making it easier for residents to recycle we could help make Surrey a greener place and significantly reduce our reliance on landfill.

Simply burying waste in holes in the ground is not only destructive to our landscape and environment but the taxation on landfill alone currently costs us over £7 million per year. This tax is increasing at an alarming rate and will have almost doubled by 2013. If we didn't act now Surrey’s taxpayers could be paying as much as £13m annually in landfill tax alone within four years, and we believe that by eliminating landfill we are making Surrey greener whilst also making better use of our increasingly limited financial resources.

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Posted on 17 December 2009 at 07:34 in Environment | Permalink | Comments (13)

Labour hypocrisy on Council CEO pay

There was an interesting debate in the House of Commons last week on Local Government Finance. the Conservatives proposed the following motion:

That this House notes with concern that this year's local government finance settlement will increase average Band D council tax to over £120 a month each year despite inflation being negative; cautions that this rise will mean that council tax has more than doubled since 1997 with a third of the increase in the basic state pension being negated by council tax rises; expresses concern at the effect of the Government's social care plans on council budgets; urges the Government to help fund councils in delivering a council tax freeze in England, as is already in operation in Scotland; and asserts that this year's settlement will increase the domestic tax burden at a time when households are already having to restrain their spending as a result of the prolonged recession.

Shadow Local Government spokesman Bob Neill proposed reforms to the system and pointed out how the Government has imposed extra obligations on local authorities without paying the cost - "unfully funded obligation."

But the most remarkable contribution to the debate came from the Labour MP for Ealing Acton and Shepherd's Bush Andrew Slaughter. He said:

Is it particularly good value that both chief executives of the local authorities in my constituency are paid more than the Prime Minister? Is it particularly good value that, while boasting of a pay freeze for senior officers this year, those chief executives gave themselves up to a 9 per cent. increase last year? Is it particularly good value that the leader of one council attempted to give himself a 14 per cent. pay rise for doing the job that he was already doing? We in Hammersmith do not yet, however, have what Kensington and Chelsea has, which is the first £100,000 a year councillor, topping up his salary with money from London councils and, with great irony, the Audit Commission, too.

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Posted on 16 December 2009 at 07:42 in Council finances, Councillor and officer remuneration | Permalink | Comments (10)

Lib Dem councillor living in India

Cllr Yusuf Sidat, a Lib Dem councillor on Blackburn with Darwen Council, is living in India but still claiming his £6,000 a year allowance. Last year he was allowed back into the Lib Dem group after spending three months in India - they have now expelled him again.

Perhaps what would count for more than bobbing in and out of the Lib Dems - whose groups meetings he is unlikely to attend anyway - would be for the Council to cease paying his allowance.

Posted on 15 December 2009 at 07:20 in Local democracy | Permalink | Comments (22)

Fenland Council is a success story

Despite the controversy, Conservative MP Malcolm Moss calls for Party unity and pays tribute to Geoffrey Harper's role as leader of Fenland Council.

In the aftermath of the surprising resignation last week of Fenland Council’s Leader, Councillor Geoffrey Harper, no doubt speculation, and uninformed speculation at that, will be rife.

However it is worth reminding ourselves of some fundamental truths:

Fenland is the fifth best performing council in England according to the Audit Commission, achieving the classification of “excellent” as measured by Government criteria.
Geoffrey Harper is one of the most experienced politicians in the region let alone Cambridgeshire with a lifetime of service for which he was rightly awarded a C.B.E.
Because of prudential management the finances of Fenland Council are in as good a shape as you could hope, enabling services to be protected, despite reductions in Government Grant.
Conservative councillors number 39 out of a total of 40 in Fenland and, given human nature, opposition very often springs from within (as opposed to other political parties) in such circumstances.

Speaking personally I have much to thank Geoffrey for since he has served the Cambridgeshire North East Conservative Association in the very highest professional way for over 25 years. He was the Agent from 1983 to 1988 and was instrumental in my famous victory against Sir Clement Freud in the 1987 General Election. He later went on to serve with distinction at Conservative Central Office.

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Posted on 15 December 2009 at 07:11 in Local democracy | Permalink | Comments (10)

Is there enough salt to cope with frozen roads?

There was a debate this morning on the Radio 4 Toady programme between Edmund King of the AA and Cllr David Sparks, a Labour councillor and . Mr King and a quarter of million tons less salt than a decade ago there were also gaps in salt management. The disruption to transport caused by the snow last February cost the economy £1.2 billion. Mr King said he was "seeking assurances" that the lessons had been learnt. "Has the lessons been learnt?" asked James Naughtie. "Absolutely," says Cllr Sparks who accuses the AA of "panic mongering."

The AA's concerns sound pretty level headed to me. But if Cllr Sparks is worried about them "panic mongering" perhaps he should have made greater efforts to persuade them there was nothing to worry about. "We wrote to Cllr Sparks on November 16 seeking guarantees, he didn't bother replying to us," says King.

Posted on 14 December 2009 at 10:02 in Transport | Permalink | Comments (12)

John Healey attacks home ownership - for others

On Wednesday the Housing Minister John Healey gave a speech to the Fabian Society where he attacked the growth in home ownership that took place under the Conservatives. He said:

This decade is the first time ever that homeownership has declined – from 70.9% of all households in 2003, to 68.3 today. Some point to the recession having shaken people’s desire to invest in bricks and mortar. But in reality, homeownership had been dropping since 2005.

And I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.

At the moment, up to 70% of the population has their money tied up in property. The proportion was boosted by Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy. But you don’t need to be a grocer’s daughter to know that it’s not a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket.

For many people the aspiration for home ownership is about resolved the opportunity to pass wealth on to the next generation. Old Labour despised this, of course. So, it seems, does Healey.

He says:

As housing wealth is passed from parents to children, inequality is compounded over the generations.

That’s something that a party that believes in fairness should tackle and I’m pleased that finally the Tories are getting the scrutiny they deserve on their inheritance tax plans. A plan that makes Britain more unequal as time goes on, increasing the unearned windfalls that the children of wealthy parents get.

"Children of the wealthy?" In my borough someone who bought their council flat under the right to buy can find themselves above the Inheritance Tax threshold. Healey wants to punish those who wish to pass the asset on.

There is an inequality that some of us are home owners and some of us aren't. A survey of council tenants in my borough showed 70% would like to be home owners. Do we level up or level down? Do we follow Hesley approach of thwarting their ambition or do we seek policies to fufil to help make home ownership possible for the many and not just the few? I want more people to have the pride and independence that home ownership brings. Increased home ownership benefits everyone because mixed and stable communities results in lower crime and better social cohesion than the alternative of monolithic social rented housing.

Healey's belief that home ownership is a bad thing because it promotes inequality does not extend to his own conduct. The day after his speech it emerged that he had made an £88,000 profot after selling his taxpayer funded second home. While giving lectures to the rest of us about the unfairness of home ownership he plans to pocket the proceeds from the house he bought at our expense.

Posted on 14 December 2009 at 06:50 in home ownership, housing | Permalink | Comments (36)