Farewell to the County Council

A year ago the borough elections we so bad for Labour that we knew our control of the county council was doomed, and that half of us were bound to lose our seats this year. An atmosphere of gloom descended upon us all. And so it transpired last Thursday. Twenty seven of the thirty Labour councillors were roundly trounced. I lost my Perrycrofts seat to Ben Adams by 703 votes to 1358.

The consolation for me was that Ben Adams is a worthy victor. I was on the partnership scrutiny committee with him for a year or so and he produced an excellent report for us on procurements. He conducted a friendly campaign, accepted the result with dignity and grace. I often feel that elections are won by winds of change, that a semi trained chimpanzee would have won with the breeze behind him and would have campaigned as zealously.

I was sad for my hard working team, Ian and Adam, Neil and Alex, Roger Smith and Garry, Karen and Gaynor, and especially for Carol Dean who organised the whole of Tamworth's campaign as well as her own battle. She did not deserve to lose Bolebridge. Her philosophical equanimity at the end of the night was heroic.

One does not exactly make friends on the county council, but I got to know some remarkabe people on both sides of the chamber. Janos Toth, Sue Woodward, two deeply different specimens of the ingrained Labour family. Ian Parry and Matthew Ellis, prototypical and opposite Conservative characters. And lots of decent people whom it was a pleasure to work with. Only one unpleasant and bumtious little man who probably thought I was a prize twit, so that doesn't matter.

My abiding memory of being on the county council was that our policies were tightly imposed by the ODPM and monitored by the CPA, who yet ensured that we didn't have enough money to carry out those policies. Their constant braying about efficiency savings were idiotic, and talk about taking tough decisions was a euphemistic way of telling us we had to do as we were told and if it meant we were kicked out at the next election then that's tough.

The alternative would be to raise the council tax, and we all know what the public would think of that.

Never mind. In four years time Carol will get back onto the county council, and Sue Woodward and Matthew Ellis will be in Parliament, and maybe Janos as well. And as Roger Smith would put it, the world won't have come to an end. I'm grateful to the voters who allowed me these past four years of privilege.

Tamworth Pantomime Company Youth Academy Variety Show

Tamworth Assembly Rooms
Mayor’s Variety Show 2009

The indefatigable Wendy Doyle, backbone of the Tamworth Pantomime Company, formed a Youth Academy fifteen weeks ago and instantly attracted about sixty enthusiastic youngsters. This one night only at the Assems was a showcase for their burgeoning talent plus a chance to enjoy the Steps dancers again and also see a few of the veterans from the pantomime company.

It was, therefore, a show for the parents and friends, who enjoyed it hugely, and it was in a good cause – the Mayor, Cllr. Brian Beales’ charities the St. Giles Hospice at Whittington and Headway, a charity that supports people who have suffered brain trauma, strokes, tumours, physical damage and the like.

Cllr. Beales has proved an excellent ambassador for the arts this year – he even went with affable good grace when Laura Doyle summoned members of the audience on stage to take part in the community dance. And it was good to see county council chairman Terry Dix among the distinguished guests; his support and genuine pleasure in the arts is one of his quieter achievements. It was apt that his granddaughter Alice took a solo role in the proceedings.

This is not, therefore, a ‘review’ of the evening in the Kenneth Tynan sense. It was not intended to be a coherent and balanced show and since some events were clearly put in after the programme was printed I cannot rave about Laura Doyle and the Hoagy Carmichael number towards the end of the first half.

It would not be appropriate to wonder why the Andy Pandy skit worked less well than last year, or to criticise the interminable and unfunny Castle Grounds Clean Up sketch. And if we were baffled by the way the excellent Terry Batham as compere sometimes went on too long it was because he was covering stage management problems backstage.

Actually the strength of the item is very dependent on the raw material – the dark scene was excellently done but the Pink Floyd number (from Umma Gumma?) is one of their more rambling self indulgences.

Perhaps at this point I should declare an interest as the director of the annual pantomime. Laura Doyle, Terry Batham and Alex Farrell are three of my star players, Juli Eccles’ Steps Dancers are a vital and exhilarating part of the productions. Wendy Doyle has long worked in mysterious anonymity with the children and last year in ‘Dick Whittington’ revealed herself to be a superb comic actress. I expected them to be brilliant, and I’m not surprised that they were. So what gives me most satisfaction is that Wendy’s Youth Academy project has begun with such enthusiasm and early achievement. Even if it did last more than three and a half hours.

Well done, Wendy Doyle.

JAG
20.4.09

Things Can Only Get Worse

Things Can Only Get Worse

(We're All Toffs Now)

The scenes at Crewe & Nantwich last week must have made the natives wonder what the political process has come to. For half a century an election simply meant they returned a Labour member to parliament. No philosophical arguments about the cost of petrol or the ethics of middle east invasions or what their MP would do about the sub prime mortgage market.

But this week, after the death of the redoubtable Gwyneth Dunwoody (herself the daughter of Labour party general secretary Morgan Phillips) they chose the admirable Tamsin as her mother's successor, and then found that the rough and tumble of twenty first century electioneering had arrived. Young Tamsin (49) had the support of the Labour suits from London to help her win (I remember the shock when they turned up in Tamworth to make sure Brian Jenkins won in 1996), the media came with them, and the battle began.

Labour strategists decided the Tory candidate was a toff - his father had made a fortune as a cobbler. Edward Timpson was educated at public school, like David Camerson and Boris Johnson. Floreat Etona. So naturally they followed him around the campaign trail wearing top hats and braying, 'I'm your Conservative candidate!' As I suppose did Edward Timpson.

Our Labour MP plus a senior county councillor and the constituency secretary went up to lend support. Whether they wore top hats and brayed I know not, but it seems improbable. And no doubt some of our Tory councillers went up there too, even though they tend towards the flat cap persuasion.

Mr. Bunn the builder may have set out for Crewe but his Jaguar was last seen heading absent mindedly towards Manchester. Mr. Rant may have meant to go but he got into a vehement argument in the British Legion and by ten o'clock he realised the polling stations in Crewe would be closing and anyway it was his round. Chippy Cheese, who has a black belt in Feng Shui, actually canvassed several streets, but since he kept offeribng to fight any Labour supports he found he was sent home by the toffs. Miss Lowe the games mistress also went up to give succour and encouragement were it was most needed, and a group from Wilnecote went to engage in some useful litter picking.

No sign of Maisie Doates and Dozie Doates and little Lambsy Tivey, but they embody more our proud mining tradition in Glascote and Amington, they are not Tory toffs. Alumni of Tamworth's comprehensive schools with only a GCSE in woodwork between them, they felt that somebody ought to stay behind and attend to council business. Diddle de ivy do, wouldn't you?

Classics scholar Boris Johnson caused some consequential panic by lobbing a few Latin quotations into his London mayor's acceptance speech. Our own mayor-making was almost cancelled, then there was talk of holding it in the nearest Cistercian abbey. Luckily common sense prevailed. 'Ne to confundant illegitimi,' he was advised. Or as we say in Tamworth, 'Don't let the bastards put you down.'

Fred Petronius
the sage of Perrycrofts

The Scraps and Shavings of Councilling

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.’

* * *

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.

****

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 19^th December. ‘It would be even better if John Garforth could come along and say a few words’ he wrote. I duly attended.

About me - Politics in the 50s - deleted see website