Michael Foot’s biography of Nye Bevan tells how Nye wanted to make some difference to his home town of Tredegar. At the age of nineteen he was already the chairman of the Miners Lodge, but he got himself elected onto the town council. Too late, his fellow town councillors said, the power is now with the county council. So at the next round of elections Nye stood for the county council and won. Too late, said his fellow county councillors, the real power is now with parliament. So he became an MP.
The newspaper cutting in which this was quoted was kept by Ernie
Bevin for the rest of his life to prove his assertion that Bevan was a power hungry man of naked ambition. Ernie Bevin it was who said, when someone remarked that Nye was his own worst enemy ‘Not while I’m alive he ain’t.’ Although this line is sometimes attributed to George Coulouris about Orson Welles.
Anyway the days are long past when a man like Joseph Chamberlain could wake up one morning and think, ‘I know what we need to do in Birmingham, we need to build council housing for the workers. The workers deserve it and it will make them happy. And while I’m about it we’ll reorganise taxation to make it fairer. And we’ll provide them with allotments and build a
Politics are not like this any more. Local politicians are there to implement the policies of the government. And they have Comprehensive Performance Assessments to evaluate how efficiently they do it. By and large they also provide the money, although never enough. And councils which say hang on a minute, that’s not actually what we want to do are likely to be suspended while people like KPMG move in to do the job with proper zeal. This happened, I think, to Walsall.
When I first became a councillor these policies came from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and we imagined John Prescott waking up one morning and crying, ‘I know what we’ll do, we offload council housing to the independent sector.’ That will make council tenants happy. His next big idea, we imagine, was to shift the provision of social care into the private sector.
Actually I sometimes suspect in rare moments of rebellion that Prescott hadn’t the faintest idea what his back office was dreaming up. Although he did know about PPPs as a way of financing big capital projects, because I heard him advocating them as a way of financing the London underground.
The ODPM is now the Department of Communities and Local Government and Hazel Blears is in charge. She has been unusually quiet since the deputy leader elections, so she may be looking into the policies her back office visionaries are dreaming up. I hope she has discovered the latest policy for new secondary schools that had teachers, parents and children demonstrating in the streets last week.
My rebellious moments are rare – I was after all a local government officer for thirty years, and I recognise that most of these policies are sensible solutions to our long term problems. I also recognise that the people of Britain want the best possible social care, medical service and schools whilst at the same time wanting their taxes cut to a bare minimum.. I recognise that the people making and implementing these policies are not children, ill, old or unemployed.
But it seems to me that all local authorities, not only in Staffordshire, have a rare knack of revealing their policies in such a way that alarms the hell out of service users and staff and convinces taxpayers that life is not worth living and provides joyful copy for a hungry media. There is no blood sport as popular as watching a leader of the council or chair of this or that squirming under the penetrating glare of a good journalist.
I was intending to explain how the cabinet and scrutiny system now works in local authorities but I’ll return to this subject later.
I was also intending to illustrate the local casework we undertake with a couple of examples.
Grass verges, hedges and road surfaces.
The most frequent howls of protest I receive are from residents who have had the grass in their open spaces neglected for months until it is overgrown, then it has been hacked down by mowers that chuck lumps of turf everywhere and leave the area in a worse mess than before. This happened in Kingsley Close, where the residents now live in dread of the municipal lawn mower.
There used to be a service whereby old people with gardens could have their lawns mowed but this has now been stopped to save money.
The Mildenhall estate went up forty years ago, carefully designed and with leases stipulating a tree in every front garden and the height of the hedges. Over the years these have been forgteen in many cases, and the road surface has crumbled, been repaired, dug up by gas, water and electricity and telephone people, patched and repaired to such an extent that the whole road needs resurfacing.
Karen Hirons and I got up a petition which every resident we spoke to signed, and we were supported by Brian Jenkins MP. Enthusiasm was high. A few days later at a routine meeting of the six Tamworth county councillors I raised the subject with Clive Thomson, the senior officer responsible for the roads in Lichfield and Tamworth.
Clive talked reasonably enough about his finite budget and how his priority had to be the A51 and suchlike main roads. The other five Tamworth councillors nodded glumly – they all have areas like Mildenhall in a similar state of neglect. They were not going to jump in to support my patch. We talked about a rolling programme of gradual repairs and there the subject remains.
The Case of the Phantom Hedge Trimmer
A resident in Wiggington Road returned home from holiday in November to find that his hedge, lovingly nurtured with exotic bushes over the past five years, his pride and joy as a gardener, had been ruthlessly cut back by someone with electric cutters and no knowledge whatever of horticulture. He got in touch with his borough councillor.
His borough councillor made enquiries and found no-one responsible on the borough. He advised them to contact me since it seemed as though the county must have done it. I made enquiries and found that they hadn’t. Perhaps it was the Gas Alliance, who had been digging up grass in the area and laying new pipes. But it wasn’t the Gas Alliance.
I raised this subject at the December meeting of PACT and PC Brian Lea promised that while his CPSO was knocking door to door in that area to ask about grass verges he would also enquire about the phantom hedge trimmer.
The resident’s exasperated wife meanwhile went to the police station and complained that malicious damage had been done to her hedge. They didn’t want to know about damage to hedges, they have more important things to worry about. At the January meeting of PACT PC Brian Lea was on holiday, his CPSO denied that the subject was one of the agreed priorities and since no minutes are taken of the meetings and different police officers may or may not attend the chairman moved on to more constructive subjects. Brown’s Lane, for instance, but the police ruled the topic out of order. It was a planning matter.
Are you still with me? Try to keep up. The resident’s wife then established that ‘the police’ had in fact decided that the bushes were obscuring a school sign and had ordered ‘the council’ to cut them back.. The persistent wife got back onto the local council and established that this being so it was ‘Street Scene’ who were responsible. She requested a meeting with the officer concerned.
Although as a county councillor I have no jurisdiction (mandate?) in this dispute I have every sympathy with the residents’ point that if either the police or Street Scene had mentioned to them that the shrubbery needed cutting back they would have happily pruned them in such a way as not to destroy them. I volunteered to attend the meeting as moral support. I have asked borough councillor Ken Norchi to arrange this, and he has agreed to do so. We await the outcome with keen anticipation.
The Gas Alliance – Private
The Gas Alliance was responsible for my next intractable
case. As you will see from the above, they had been digging up grass verges in the Spital ward to lay new pipes, and a resident in Brown’s Lane was horrified to find that when the Gas people finished work on the grass verge, tended by him and his wife over the years to the Wimbledon standard maintained by the houses along the south side of the lane and still visible as immaculate lawn standard verges, it had been relayed and left casually seeded over. Parking cars and winter weather left him with a muddy, furrowed verge. And nobody was prepared to restore the verge to the proud standard our resident had maintained for years. Himself. He and his wife had maintained it, not the council.
He was furious. His borough councillor put him onto me. Clive Thomson (see above) explained to me that the utility services are virtually a law unto themselves and do not need planning permission to dig up their pipes and there is no legal contract between the council (of whatever stripe) requiring them to restore grass verges to the condition in which they were found.
The chap at Gas Alliance had told our borough councillor that to do more than earth over the piping and seed it would set a precedent that they were not prepared to do because it would set a precedent (I would have thought this a pretty good precedent to set). But Clive Thomson had a quiet word with him, and he promised to have another look at what they could do to re-turf and restore the verge to its previous glory. By county council standards that’s a triumph.
I went up this lunchtime to see whether the situation had changed. It had not, but the aggrieved resident said that people in a van had been up earlier in the week to look at the damage.
Update 22nd February 2008
I have just had the following message from a member of Clive Thomson's staff:
'Please not that I have inspected the area and there is evidence of damage to the grass verge due to parked vehicles. Therefore I will arrange for a wooded bollard at either end of the verge to prevent vehicle from driving up the dropped kerb and parking.
I hope this is of assistance.'
Update from the Persistent Wife of Wiggington Road
‘Mr. Clarke from Street Scene and a nice gentleman who turned out to be a street warden came to see me this morning (12th February). After a certain amount of discussion the chain of events appears to have been as follows:
1. Early September ‘a member of the public’ complained to street warden that the hedge was obscuring the school sign ahead.
2. Wardens look at hedge from the pavement and deem it unacceptable – take photo from the pavement to prove their point.
3. Wardens pass info to Street Scene requesting something be done about the hedge.
4. Street sit on this until November, then instruct a sub contractor to cut hedge back. Street Scene did not inspect in person or attempt to check ownership of the hedge. Neither did they ascertain whether it was necessary to cut back the full length of the hedge.
5. Early December – hedge is mechanically cut back along its full length.
6. Wailing and despair in complainant’s household.
‘Mr. Clarke agrees now that he erred in not checking the ownership of the hedge. He also agrees that the hedge was not dealt within the best way but claims they have to use sub contractors and that is the best they can do. He has agreed that the hedge will not be touched again and will write to us to this effect. Street Warden has agreed he will monitor hedge and advise us if he thinks it is becoming problematic again. We disagree that the sign was in fact obscured for road users (as opposed tio from the pavement) but have agreed to disagree.
‘At least the Police are off the hook!
‘During the course of all this the question of the siting of the school sign emerged as a core issue as the underlying reason for all these difficulties. The sign may lead to problems in the future as we will still want to grow the hedge upwards for screening purposes to have some privacy in the back garden. It was suggested that we should ask the nice County Council to move the sign to one end or the other of our garden to ensure that we avoid similar problems in future ... Given that our property was so brutally abused I feel perhaps that (Tamworth Borough Council) should pick up the tab. We weren’t warned about the sign going up in the first place – had we been we would have made representations at that point.
‘The saga continues.’ few free schools. It seems as though Gladstone, prime minister at the time said, ‘Oh, right. Yes, good idea. Carry on, Chamberlain.’
The newspaper cutting in which this was quoted was kept by Ernie
Bevin for the rest of his life to prove his assertion that Bevan was a power hungry man of naked ambition. Ernie Bevin it was who said, when someone remarked that Nye was his own worst enemy ‘Not while I’m alive he ain’t.’ Although this line is sometimes attributed to George Coulouris about Orson Welles.Anyway the days are long past when a man like Joseph Chamberlain could wake up one morning and think, ‘I know what we need to do in Birmingham, we need to build council housing for the workers. The workers deserve it and it will make them happy. And while I’m about it we’ll reorganise taxation to make it fairer. And we’ll provide them with allotments and build a
Politics are not like this any more. Local politicians are there to implement the policies of the government. And they have Comprehensive Performance Assessments to evaluate how efficiently they do it. By and large they also provide the money, although never enough. And councils which say hang on a minute, that’s not actually what we want to do are likely to be suspended while people like KPMG move in to do the job with proper zeal. This happened, I think, to Walsall.
When I first became a councillor these policies came from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and we imagined John Prescott waking up one morning and crying, ‘I know what we’ll do, we offload council housing to the independent sector.’ That will make council tenants happy. His next big idea, we imagine, was to shift the provision of social care into the private sector.
Actually I sometimes suspect in rare moments of rebellion that Prescott hadn’t the faintest idea what his back office was dreaming up. Although he did know about PPPs as a way of financing big capital projects, because I heard him advocating them as a way of financing the London underground.
The ODPM is now the Department of Communities and Local Government and Hazel Blears is in charge. She has been unusually quiet since the deputy leader elections, so she may be looking into the policies her back office visionaries are dreaming up. I hope she has discovered the latest policy for new secondary schools that had teachers, parents and children demonstrating in the streets last week.
My rebellious moments are rare – I was after all a local government officer for thirty years, and I recognise that most of these policies are sensible solutions to our long term problems. I also recognise that the people of Britain want the best possible social care, medical service and schools whilst at the same time wanting their taxes cut to a bare minimum.. I recognise that the people making and implementing these policies are not children, ill, old or unemployed.
But it seems to me that all local authorities, not only in Staffordshire, have a rare knack of revealing their policies in such a way that alarms the hell out of service users and staff and convinces taxpayers that life is not worth living and provides joyful copy for a hungry media. There is no blood sport as popular as watching a leader of the council or chair of this or that squirming under the penetrating glare of a good journalist.
I was intending to explain how the cabinet and scrutiny system now works in local authorities but I’ll return to this subject later.
I was also intending to illustrate the local casework we undertake with a couple of examples.
Grass verges, hedges and road surfaces.
The most frequent howls of protest I receive are from residents who have had the grass in their open spaces neglected for months until it is overgrown, then it has been hacked down by mowers that chuck lumps of turf everywhere and leave the area in a worse mess than before. This happened in Kingsley Close, where the residents now live in dread of the municipal lawn mower.
There used to be a service whereby old people with gardens could have their lawns mowed but this has now been stopped to save money.
The Mildenhall estate went up forty years ago, carefully designed and with leases stipulating a tree in every front garden and the height of the hedges. Over the years these have been forgteen in many cases, and the road surface has crumbled, been repaired, dug up by gas, water and electricity and telephone people, patched and repaired to such an extent that the whole road needs resurfacing.
Karen Hirons and I got up a petition which every resident we spoke to signed, and we were supported by Brian Jenkins MP. Enthusiasm was high. A few days later at a routine meeting of the six Tamworth county councillors I raised the subject with Clive Thomson, the senior officer responsible for the roads in Lichfield and Tamworth.
Clive talked reasonably enough about his finite budget and how his priority had to be the A51 and suchlike main roads. The other five Tamworth councillors nodded glumly – they all have areas like Mildenhall in a similar state of neglect. They were not going to jump in to support my patch. We talked about a rolling programme of gradual repairs and there the subject remains.
The Case of the Phantom Hedge Trimmer
A resident in Wiggington Road returned home from holiday in November to find that his hedge, lovingly nurtured with exotic bushes over the past five years, his pride and joy as a gardener, had been ruthlessly cut back by someone with electric cutters and no knowledge whatever of horticulture. He got in touch with his borough councillor.
His borough councillor made enquiries and found no-one responsible on the borough. He advised them to contact me since it seemed as though the county must have done it. I made enquiries and found that they hadn’t. Perhaps it was the Gas Alliance, who had been digging up grass in the area and laying new pipes. But it wasn’t the Gas Alliance.
I raised this subject at the December meeting of PACT and PC Brian Lea promised that while his CPSO was knocking door to door in that area to ask about grass verges he would also enquire about the phantom hedge trimmer.
The resident’s exasperated wife meanwhile went to the police station and complained that malicious damage had been done to her hedge. They didn’t want to know about damage to hedges, they have more important things to worry about. At the January meeting of PACT PC Brian Lea was on holiday, his CPSO denied that the subject was one of the agreed priorities and since no minutes are taken of the meetings and different police officers may or may not attend the chairman moved on to more constructive subjects. Brown’s Lane, for instance, but the police ruled the topic out of order. It was a planning matter.
Are you still with me? Try to keep up. The resident’s wife then established that ‘the police’ had in fact decided that the bushes were obscuring a school sign and had ordered ‘the council’ to cut them back.. The persistent wife got back onto the local council and established that this being so it was ‘Street Scene’ who were responsible. She requested a meeting with the officer concerned.
Although as a county councillor I have no jurisdiction (mandate?) in this dispute I have every sympathy with the residents’ point that if either the police or Street Scene had mentioned to them that the shrubbery needed cutting back they would have happily pruned them in such a way as not to destroy them. I volunteered to attend the meeting as moral support. I have asked borough councillor Ken Norchi to arrange this, and he has agreed to do so. We await the outcome with keen anticipation.
The Gas Alliance – Private
The Gas Alliance was responsible for my next intractable
case. As you will see from the above, they had been digging up grass verges in the Spital ward to lay new pipes, and a resident in Brown’s Lane was horrified to find that when the Gas people finished work on the grass verge, tended by him and his wife over the years to the Wimbledon standard maintained by the houses along the south side of the lane and still visible as immaculate lawn standard verges, it had been relayed and left casually seeded over. Parking cars and winter weather left him with a muddy, furrowed verge. And nobody was prepared to restore the verge to the proud standard our resident had maintained for years. Himself. He and his wife had maintained it, not the council.He was furious. His borough councillor put him onto me. Clive Thomson (see above) explained to me that the utility services are virtually a law unto themselves and do not need planning permission to dig up their pipes and there is no legal contract between the council (of whatever stripe) requiring them to restore grass verges to the condition in which they were found.
The chap at Gas Alliance had told our borough councillor that to do more than earth over the piping and seed it would set a precedent that they were not prepared to do because it would set a precedent (I would have thought this a pretty good precedent to set). But Clive Thomson had a quiet word with him, and he promised to have another look at what they could do to re-turf and restore the verge to its previous glory. By county council standards that’s a triumph.
I went up this lunchtime to see whether the situation had changed. It had not, but the aggrieved resident said that people in a van had been up earlier in the week to look at the damage.
Update 22nd February 2008
I have just had the following message from a member of Clive Thomson's staff:
'Please not that I have inspected the area and there is evidence of damage to the grass verge due to parked vehicles. Therefore I will arrange for a wooded bollard at either end of the verge to prevent vehicle from driving up the dropped kerb and parking.
I hope this is of assistance.'
Update from the Persistent Wife of Wiggington Road
‘Mr. Clarke from Street Scene and a nice gentleman who turned out to be a street warden came to see me this morning (12th February). After a certain amount of discussion the chain of events appears to have been as follows:
1. Early September ‘a member of the public’ complained to street warden that the hedge was obscuring the school sign ahead.
2. Wardens look at hedge from the pavement and deem it unacceptable – take photo from the pavement to prove their point.
3. Wardens pass info to Street Scene requesting something be done about the hedge.
4. Street sit on this until November, then instruct a sub contractor to cut hedge back. Street Scene did not inspect in person or attempt to check ownership of the hedge. Neither did they ascertain whether it was necessary to cut back the full length of the hedge.
5. Early December – hedge is mechanically cut back along its full length.
6. Wailing and despair in complainant’s household.
‘Mr. Clarke agrees now that he erred in not checking the ownership of the hedge. He also agrees that the hedge was not dealt within the best way but claims they have to use sub contractors and that is the best they can do. He has agreed that the hedge will not be touched again and will write to us to this effect. Street Warden has agreed he will monitor hedge and advise us if he thinks it is becoming problematic again. We disagree that the sign was in fact obscured for road users (as opposed tio from the pavement) but have agreed to disagree.
‘At least the Police are off the hook!
‘During the course of all this the question of the siting of the school sign emerged as a core issue as the underlying reason for all these difficulties. The sign may lead to problems in the future as we will still want to grow the hedge upwards for screening purposes to have some privacy in the back garden. It was suggested that we should ask the nice County Council to move the sign to one end or the other of our garden to ensure that we avoid similar problems in future ... Given that our property was so brutally abused I feel perhaps that (Tamworth Borough Council) should pick up the tab. We weren’t warned about the sign going up in the first place – had we been we would have made representations at that point.
‘The saga continues.’ few free schools. It seems as though Gladstone, prime minister at the time said, ‘Oh, right. Yes, good idea. Carry on, Chamberlain.’
* * *
Borough Road – One Way Only
Also discussed at the January PACT meeting was the proposal, supported by the police, that Borough Road should become a one-way street. This area is pre-expansion Tamworth built before every household has two cars and before anyone realised that a high-speed short cut between Ashby Road and Wiggington Road was necessary.
I do not know who made this proposal or who was supposed to pursue it. Perhaps someone at the Highways Agency is sitting on it, or doing something about it, or threw it in the wpb in exasperation. I may be a dyed in the wool bureaucrat but meetings with no agenda where no minutes are kept are not a satisfactory way of making decisions or following them up.
****
Also discussed at the January PACT meeting was the proposal, supported by the police, that Borough Road should become a one-way street. This area is pre-expansion Tamworth built before every household has two cars and before anyone realised that a high-speed short cut between Ashby Road and Wiggington Road was necessary.
I do not know who made this proposal or who was supposed to pursue it. Perhaps someone at the Highways Agency is sitting on it, or doing something about it, or threw it in the wpb in exasperation. I may be a dyed in the wool bureaucrat but meetings with no agenda where no minutes are kept are not a satisfactory way of making decisions or following them up.
****
Borough Road and PACT
I have now discovered more details about the suggested traffic changes which arose at the November PACT meeting held at Flaxhill Primary School. They are contained in an e-mail from Mike Cooke addressed to Carol Dean and also sent to numerous Labour party worthies including me.
Mike wrote, verbatim: ‘Would it be possible to have the following suggestion considered which it was felt would help contribute in a seamless way to traffic flow, safety, improve the parking situation and effectively create a one-way traffic flow without many attendant planning problems? Ashby Road-Willington Road junction erect a No Entry sign. This would prevent traffic from turning from the Ashby Road into Willington Road. Borough Road-Ashby Road junction erect a No Exit sign 10 metres in from the Borough Road exit onto Ashby Road. This effective stabilises a hazardous exit onto Ashby Road that has created traffic incidents over many years.
‘By preventing vehicles turning out of the blind spot on Borough Road onto the busy Ashby Road, we would have created a one-way traffic flow and, at the same time, residents could see a positive reaction from Stafford to the value of the PACT initiative. It was agreed that this might be a friendly way of tackling the problem but a way of moving traffic in a more sensible one-way direction that is acceptable to the Spital ward residents.
‘The second proposal again concerns control of traffic and, in particular, safety. A light controlled crossing be established on Ashby Road, adjacent to Number 17. There is already a ghost island in existence but as traffic has increased over the years, it has outlived its original purpose. The proposed light controlled crossing would have great value in as much as it would create a safer crossing place for students attending QEMS from the north side of Spital. This area has an historical speeding traffic problem for as long as most people can remember. Doubtless mortality, accident figures and traffic speeding convictions for this stretch of Ashby Road will back up the suggested proposal. The benefit of slowing traffic down in the area would be immediate, significant and meaningful on the lives of the residents.’
In the final paragraph of his letter Mike asked for a response by his next PACT meeting on 19th December. ‘It would be even better if John Garforth could come along and say a few words’ he wrote. I duly attended.
