Posts from — May 2007

I attended a meeting the other day which left me furious and frustrated.

It was a ‘round table‘ of the main public agencies which serve the Lichfield district area…. Police, District Council, County Social Services, Fire & Rescue Service, County Education, NHS and County Youth Service.

One of the main items of business was the growing problem of anti social behaviour, mainly involving young people sadly. The figures provided to us showed that in parts of the district incidents of ASB have increased by a staggering 250% in the last year. And the problem is spreading…. and guess what…. it’s mainly alcohol related; surprise surprise!

Burntwood Town has serious problems although the police, the youth service (at last) and other agencies have put resources in place to tackle it…. a mixture of carrot and stick in the form of young people’s activities and strict enforcement. It is having some effect.

But other areas are not getting that sort of effort. Armitage, parts of north Lichfield, even Alrewas are having real difficulties with lots of youngsters gathering and doing stuff that is not welcome mainly, again, due to drink.

Most of the rural part of my County patch hasn’t seen any publicly funded youth services for years with the exception of Whittington although I doubt that will continue for much longer. On the whole though local parish councils and the community provide some community youth provision and there aren’t big problems with bad behaviour in the main.

The same can’t be said about Fazeley and Mile Oak…. ASB and large groups of young people drinking alcohol and causing upset is a big issue there. The County Youth Service ceased working at Fazeley Town Hall 18 months ago and although 3 hours a week ’street youth work’ is done I really do think it’s just lip service. Mile Oak got a new community centre last year and at the same time we managed to find over £30,000 funding for a purpose built youth centre too.

And I’m afraid this is where my serious gripe starts about the lack of the youth service work. The construction of the new youth facility was finished well before Christmas last year. Enter, at that time, Staffordshire Youth Service to organise consultations with young people on how to finish the place inside and what activities to provide for local youngsters. It has taken an age! Even when the consultation was finally done nothing happened in response to it for weeks due to a lack of staff and youth workers. So eventually the place was kitted out in part six weeks ago but the very best they could provide was 2 hours youth work on a Monday each week. Not much and no matter how much effort I’ve put in trying to secure a decent youth provision over the last 6 months the 2 hours is it.

Actually, because I think the front line staff in the service do a good job in difficult circumstances, I haven’t ‘blown off’ about this ridiculous situation publicly…. until now. That ’round table’ meeting was what did it for me. I don’t agree with the Youth Services’ insistance that youngsters don’t want activities on Fridays and Saturdays…. I don’t agree with their stance that it doesn’t have resources to do more than 2 hours a week in one of the main problem areas for ASB in all Lichfield and I don’t agree they are playing a full part in diverting young people in Fazeley and Mile Oak away from bad behaviour.

Then it got even better! I discovered that the Youth Service is actually putting up to 4 days a week work into Swinfen Young Offenders Institution…. a central government funded facility. And do the Home Office pay for that 4 days? They do not. They can’t find resource to carry out sufficient youth work in Lichfield communities but they can subsidise the work of central government. That is what has wound me up.

So I did some investigation into budgets and what I found was very interesting. The County Council has cut back funding for the Youth Service since 2004/05. Then the budget for the whole county was about £6million whilst currently it’s £6.3million. In real terms, taking account of inflation, that’s a cut of about £500,000.

For Lichfield District it’s even worse than that. Back in 2004/05 the County spent over £484,000 but this year the budget for our area is just £400,000. Taking inflation into account, that’s a whopping cut of 25% in budget.

At a time when anti social behaviour is becoming an epidemic, when diverting young people away from it should be a priority and when other public agencies are spending more on the problem, the County are cutting costs and resources. The terrible financial position of the Labour County is now really starting to have an impact on front line services. Lichfield and the fight at against anti social behaviour are taking a real hit.

I thought at the time the difficult job would be raising the money to build and kit out the new Mile Oak Youth Centre not actually getting the youth service to use it. I was wrong…. what a waste!

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Most of the time I thoroughly enjoy my role as a Member of the County Council…. albeit in opposition.

Of course I’d much prefer to have Conservatives in control of Staffordshire County and you’d expect me to say that we’d do a better job than Labour… I genuinely do believe it and that is what causes my frustration.

But, as I said earlier, even in opposition it is normally satisfying having the chance at committee to interrogate politicians and senior officials and quite often taking quite an adversarial approach to things. I do sometimes feel I’d have enjoyed an advocacy role in the legal profession and this, now, is the closest I get to doing that. Not quite the same I know, but great fun anyway.

Full County Council, when all Members (in theory) meet in the County Chamber, happened last Thursday and it is also usually a good day and certainly interesting with every chance of making a speech or two in the rather grand surroundings which lend themselves well to proper oratory.

But Thursday was unexpectedly depressing if I’m honest. Labour have a new County Leader in the form of John Taylor, an ex fireman and ex senior union official. As the opposition, we weren’t really sure what to expect of the change. Labour at the County have had a very rough ride of late…. the care homes closures controversy, a black hole of tens of millions in the future budget, huge problems with the unions (County are the largest employer in Staffordshire…. over 35,000 people) over something called Job Evaluation and a tediously poorly handled attempt at modernising the structure of the County Council have all caused public outrage and been very politically damaging for them. Add to that a virtual demolition of Labour at the recent local elections and one would be forgiven for thinking the County Labour Party would also be on their uppers like local colleagues.

They weren’t, or so it appeared. And worse than that, the previous Leader, Terry Dix, who gave way in that role at that meeting on Thursday, took up his new role as Chairman of the County Council. What does that mean? Well it means he presides over everything that happens in the County Chamber. He is the local government version of the Speaker of the House of Commons. The Chairman’s word is final on everything… he has ultimate power to control debate, who speaks, the order of business… just about everything. And with that comes neutrality. The Chairman is broadly a non Political role treating all County Members equally and fairly and without overt bias no matter which Party they represent. Well, that is the theory!

However, someone forgot to tell Mr Dix that was his role. In fact, at times, we were convinced he had forgotten he was no longer County Leader. To say there was a large dose of bias on his part is a massive understatement. Extraordinarily, even Labour Members appeared to be at first bemused and, as it went on, embarrassed. At one point a senior Labour Member who had in the past held the role of County Chairman intervened with a tongue-in-cheek remark about Chairman’s neutrality.

It might sound all rather light hearted… and at times it was so ridiculous it was amusing. That said, on a serious note, it is very bad for democracy. The full County Meetings are the main opportunity for the opposition to expose what we believe are Labour’s failures, all in the glare of the media, eagerly scribbling away waiting for something mildly scandalous or more likely of some public interest.

A very big part of those efforts centre around the part of the meeting called Leader’s Questions. Exactly as it sounds… an opportunity for any County Member to submit a written question to the Leader or one of his Cabinet Members, each of whom have responsibility for a County Department. The useful and challenging bit of this whole process is (or rather was) the fact that each Member who submits a written Leader’s question can follow up the written answer/reply with a further three off the cuff verbal questions which must be related to the original subject. And that’s where the fun is and also where almost all the real probing goes on.

The capacity of Labour’s Cabinet Members in tackling off the cuff questions varies tremendously. Some (I will mention no names) are hopeless and some are seasoned politicians who can normally avoid giving too much away. The fact is though that this part of the process usually provides some relevant information on issues like care homes or wasted millions which may not have been forthcoming under different circumstances and in a different arena. So, it’s good for openness, good for democracy and likely to be made very public via the watching media. You noticed earlier on I wrote ‘or rather was’. That is because, courtesy of the new County Chairman moving the order of business around (fiddling it in my view), a motion was ‘put’ and won by the controlling Labour administration to reduce the number of verbal supplementary questions to just one and, to add insult to injury, move the Leader’s Questions business to the very end of the day’s business… coincidentally, long after the media have left to do other things.

I’d got five questions in on the day, all of which had the normal half hearted and rather obvious written replies waiting for me on my seat, and none of which were now subject to the real crux of my efforts, three rather more taxing verbal attempts at getting to the real facts. Very irritating and, in my view, all round bad for openness in public affairs.

What it does mean is that we will have to work even harder at making sure more and more is reported to the media and also find ways of doing what Labour appear to want to do… play the Chamber rules and make them work better for us! Overall though, not a good day.

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It can be like buses…. they all come along at once. Occasionally I get a run of issues from constituents which are broadly very similar. Now, on very high profile issues, like the Care Homes closures or the massive housing development proposals for Staffordshire, I expect a hefty ‘post bag’.

But over the last three weeks I’ve had a dozen or so people contact on one particular aspect of transport. The simple question has been, why does it cost almost as much to travel two train stops in Staffordshire up to the West Midlands border as it does to travel absolutely anywhere once within the West Midlands?

What’s happened to the ‘joined up travel by rail across the West Midlands Region’ which is being advertised endlessly during prime time tv? Remember that, according to Government, the WM Region covers all of Birmingham, the Black Country and the surrounding Counties. Well that may be the case in theory but when it comes to ‘transport’ it’s not the real picture. Not at all.

I didn’t realise until I looked into it but Birmingham and the Black Country have what is called a Passenger Transport Executive. That means that Local Government there has significant control over all forms of public transport, including routes, timetables and, importantly, pricing. However, in the Counties there are no PTEs. Warwickshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire etc. have almost no control over buses or trains or pricing or routes. So, quite simply that means that people who live in the Shire Counties pay much more for public transport than our neighbours in what we know as the West Midlands.

Now normally I finish off my posts with what I’m going to do about it but I’m afraid this time there is nothing I can do. What we need is for central government to allow the Counties to have PTEs because that would mean a better deal for local people, particularly in rural areas. Currently the bus and rail companies can charge almost what they want and decide almost entirely where and how they operate.

If we want a joined up public transport system which makes people really want to use it… one which means kids can travel to school outside the County, people can commute to work in Birmingham and if we want rural areas in Staffordshire to have any sort of public bus service, and all this at a fair cost, it needs sorting out.

In the meantime it looks to me that we are officially second class citizens in Staffordshire when it comes to public transport!

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The last few weeks have been manic for me with the local elections. My own Seat, at local District level, was sadly uncontested. You may wonder why I say ’sadly’. Well, quite simply I like democracy and I think it’s a great shame that none of the other Parties put anyone up for election in Shenstone. And also I would have liked an indication, via the ballot box, of whether local people think I’m doing a good job for them… or perhaps not!

Anyway it didn’t happen but that just meant I had an even bigger job on trying to get our district candidates in my County area elected. One of those district wards was also uncontested and one had two very experienced councillors standing. So that left two wards for me to focus on… Mease & Tame which had two excellent Conservative candidates, neither of whom had ever been involved with politics until six weeks before, and Fazeley which had one experienced current councillor, one candidate who had stood unsuccessfully at the last District election and, again, one who had never been involved until recently.

So, across the two wards there were 5 Seats available. Before this election the 2 in Mease were Liberal Democrat held and in Fazeley Conservatives had one Seat and Labour had 2, one of which was held by the Leader of the Labour Party in Lichfield.

One Seat in each of the wards was held by longstanding councillors with massive personal support so with the best will in the world it would be unlikely for us to take each of those. In reality my target should have been 3 out of 5 Seats but I couldn’t help really thinking we had a good chance of 4 and an outside chance of all 5.

Well, it wasn’t through lack of hard work… all the candidates worked their socks off and actually, even though I say it myself, we ran a very high quality campaign which on the whole went like clockwork.

But despite all that we only managed the 3 out of 5. If I’m honest I was disappointed. I really did think we had a chance of all 3 Seats in Fazeley but the Labour Leader got back in by just 33 votes. Everyone is telling me it was a great result in the two wards and I suppose going from 1 to 3 councillors was pretty good. But 33 votes… what could I have done to get that extra 34? Something I’ve been asking myself since.

As far as the overall District election is concerned it was almost a rout in favour of my Party. We gained 9 more Seats meaning the scores on the doors are now… Conservatives 44, Labour 7, Lib Dems 4 and 1 Independent. Now that’s a huge majority. Too big, if I’m really honest. That may seem a strange thing to say but very large majorities bring with them their own problems for the controlling Party. I’m sure I may write about that in the future. I can’t help thinking also that the opposition will be so weak that it won’t really be an opposition. We must be very careful of that… checks and balances are important in the democratic process.

On the whole a job well done both in the two wards I coordinated and, of course, the overall result. Mease & Tame now has a new Conservative councillor… Ellen Fleetwood. Fazeley sees Ian Lewin re-elected and Ben Adams joins him.

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