Posts from — October 2007

Labour’s preference to sell off all the publicly owned farms in Staffordshire took a new twist this week with a blatant attempt at using PR spin to get public support for their cash grab.

Yes, let’s be clear about our respective political views… Labour say sell the lot and Tories are saying, hold on you’re not thinking this through, you’re taking the easy option to find cash by selling off public assets. This week has seen a new approach from County Labour… propaganda!

Below is Labour’s statement and underneath a link to the full document put together by County officials. Labour are clearly hoping most people will read the statement/preamble and not read the official consultation document. Spot the differences between the PR spin and fact. At the bottom is the letter I’ve sent to media in the hope of exposing their scam. See what you think…

County Statement: On-line consultation on Future of Farming

County council bosses are calling on everyone in the community to help them make a crucial and difficult decision - deciding on whether providing land for farmers should be a top priority.

They want to know exactly how important people think the county council’s farm rental operation is. Is it up there with education, environment, economic regeneration, highways and transport, and social care and health?

All those with a direct interest in the future of county farms, tenants and farming lobby groups, have already been sent a comprehensive consultation document outlining the arguments and the options.

But now the county wants to harvest the views of the wider population; the taxpayers who fund the council’s basket of services and who also have strong views about where they want the funds spent.

The county is facing difficult choices in its struggle to fund the needs of a whole host of vital public services from an extremely pressurised public purse. There’s just not enough money to deliver on every front all the time.

That’s why the top team are reviewing all the council’s operations and deciding what provides the best value in delivering for the community as a whole.

Nothing is exempt and a review of the council’s farm holdings has proved particularly difficult, with the farming community, understandably, concerned to protect their holdings.

The land holding of county farms provides farming tenancies for 121 farming families. The aim is to provide opportunities for young people to set up in farming when land prices make it very difficult for those starting.

Staffordshire County Council Leader John Taylor said it was vital everyone had the chance to register their views. “County farms makes a small but valuable contribution to maintaining the farming community in Staffordshire.

“But the 8,000 acres of land is valuable and could provide extra resources to help fund other hard pressed priorities for the people of Staffordshire, including health and education, economic regeneration and transport.

“We want to ensure we get maximum value from this land holding for the community as a whole. We know how much it means to the farming community but we don’t know what the general public think about the choices we face.

“We want to know if you think operating a core of county farms for farmers should be a key priority for the council? Or do you feel the money would be better spent on maintaining other core services like regeneration, roads, public transport, education and social services?” he said.

The council is looking at two options to maximise that value. One protects a core of 60 farms, ensuring the service continues to provide start ups for the farming community. This would still release significant funds to be redirected to help the council maintain its other essential services for the wider community.

The second option would hand all the land holding over to commercial agriculture and maximise the asset feed back into other core vital services and priorities across the Staffordshire community.

The extra land, in both cases, would stay in the rural economy, but in the commercial sector.

People can view the complete consultation, and make their views known, by going onto the internet at home or at their local library.

Just log onto www.staffordshire.gov.uk/news/countyfarmsreview.htm

This is the letter I’ve sent to the media…

On-line consultation on future of farming in Staffordshire

I read with interest Staffordshire County Council’s statement and consultation paper on ‘The Future of Farming’ and proposed sell off of publicly owned farms. Whilst I welcome consultation I think John Taylor, the County Leader is misleading people when he directly relates county farms to Education, Social Care and Highways.

He talks of Highways. It is farmers around Staffordshire who maintain much of the verges and highway surrounds (on contract to the County) in rural areas. If they go, who takes that on? Commercial companies would be needed at greater expense still… or would rural highways and surrounds simply be neglected and deteriorate?

The County PR statement suggests clearly that, under the ‘Sell all Farms’ Option, the land would be ‘handed over to commercial agriculture’. However, the detailed consultation paper says something completely different…farm sales have the ‘potential to generate significant capital or revenue receipts in the future, from operations other than farming. This may include sites which have long term potential for development such as housing, or other development, or for wind farms’. All the way through Committee stages the issue of ‘development opportunities’ (housing) has been the core of Labour’s argument to sell farms. Development has been the underlying message but that is barely mentioned in the County’s PR statement although is in the main consultation document, albeit in the depths of it when most would have given up! It’s clearly a cash grab!

Talking of priorities, as the Labour Leader does, John Taylor, only three weeks ago, in response to a question from me in open committee, confirmed his wish to press ahead with a County Arts Space in Stafford Town (at a cost of between £20 and 25million). Where’s that in the mix? Would Labour hold a public consultation on the priority need for that? I think not.

The ‘financial pressure’ mentioned in his statement is the result of a County Council structure and method of working which hasn’t significantly changed in 20 years. It is the lack of modern working practises, a failure to embrace new technologies to fundamentally change service delivery to the public and the consequential bloated size of the work force (35,000) that is causing the worsening financial position and ‘pressure on the public purse’.

The argument is not as simple as Mr Taylor makes out. It is not just about farmers, it is about the rural nature of Staffordshire and the rural economy. He is clearly going for the jerk reaction and emotive approach of education vs farms to try and win his argument.

Do we want a vibrant rural economy in 50 years time? Is there pressure growing to source more food locally? Is it a fact that many large supermarkets are now catching on to the marketing advantages of providing locally sourced produce? If the ability for people to enter farming on the bottom rung is sold off, does that strangle the industry in 50 years time? Is there potential for these farms to grow low environmental impact energy crops? Is the rural economy put at risk by selling all the County’s publicly owned farms? Does income from County Farms directly contribute over £500K to the public purse?

The answer, I believe, to all the above is YES. Does the current way of managing county farms maximise opportunities for new people to start small, gain experience, progress to the next ‘rung’ up of farm size and then into larger scale private sector farming freeing up the farms below so everyone moves up one? Probably not! But that is the way successful County Councils do it.

Other County Councils put management of the publicly owned farms into the professional commercial farm management sector. This maximises income for the tax payer and the long term strategic approach promotes a genuinely vibrant and sustainable farming industry for the future with mixed diversity at its core.

I want to see Labour bosses put the ‘Expansion and Modernisation of Starter Farms’ on the table too. Then let’s have an honest and open debate!

Matthew Ellis
Member of the County Council for Lichfield Rural East

Let’s hope there is an honest debate on this and people don’t just fall for Labour’s spin.

If they get their way, they’ll not only be selling off the family silver to pay the weekly bills, they will also be ignoring the likely devastating impact in 50 years on the environment, rural economy and fundamental rural nature of Staffordshire and the county’s farming industry.

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Waste transfer stations, or to you and me places where skip companies sort out what they’ve collected commercially, can be very difficult for people who live close to them.

Dust, noise, smells, rodents and general inconvenience can be a problem, particularly if operators are, shall we say, ‘lax’, about how they operate the site. I have constituents who have had problems along the lines I mention for some time. It’s something that has proved very difficult to sort out partly because there are so many different agencies who have the separate powers to deal with different aspects of the site operations.

It is the County which is responsible for the regulation around where waste transfer sites can go and the enforcement of the conditions under which they operate. Then there’s the Environment Agency which agrees and monitors the amount of waste allowed on site and issues around any risk of pollution to the environment. The Health and Safety Executive are responsible for the safe working of the site in relation to employees and visitors, and finally, the local council (Lichfield DC) Environmental Health responds to things like rodents and ‘quality of life’ (as opposed to health) issues.

It reminds me of the complicated structure of organisations which were involved in dealing with the flooding problems earlier this year except that was even worse because they were both governmental and commercial bodies. In waste enforcement, another problem is that, despite best efforts, the different powers that each of the main enforcement agencies have are used in isolation rather than holistically. In other words there may be several different areas of regulations being broken which in isolution may be significant but added together could be an indication of an even more serious problem. Currently, each agency doesn’t really know what the others are doing enforcement wise!

And that’s why I brought the different enforcement agencies together in a meeting room at the Lichfield Garrick to find ways of bridging the gaps. Getting rid of ’silo mentality’ is something which government in general finds an enormous challenge and it’s something I’m passionate about tackling wherever and however I can. That’s what the Staffordshire Connects Partnership, which I chair, does in relation to ICT, information sharing and public services delivery.

So, the meeting at the Garrick was a first shot at getting the different enforcers to work closer and more collaboratively together. It was a good start and there was a genuine willingness to cooperate after everyone started to break down the ‘Chinese walls‘ which almost always seem to be there until someone knocks them down. I firmly believe that ‘difficult’ waste sites will be better enforced on behalf of the public and if my experience is anything to go by it can be done a lot more efficiently and cost effectively by approaching it cross-agency.

Anyway, they went away with pieces of work to do towards this and I made sure we got another meeting in the diary for early January just to keep the pressure on. I do believe this will go somewhere significant.

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I’m not a big jazz fan… never have been. That said, I had a meeting in the Viking Suite at the Lichfield Garrick late yesterday afternoon and, by the time we’d finished at around 5.30, the regular free Friday Night Jazz had just started so we all went to the Atrium Bar to have a look and have a glass of wine.

It was absolutely packed! It’s been a while since I’ve been to the jazz and the last time, a couple of months ago, I thought it was busy but last night there was hardly even any standing room. It was great… the atmosphere was electric. The band were the Ralph Allin Quartet. And what a band they were! Ralph played a bizarre looking electric violin… I’ve never seen, or heard, anything like it but it was stunningly good. Although the jazz takes place every Friday, Ralph’s band are newcomers to the Garrick and will be visiting on an occasional basis throughout the year.

In fact the next time they are back is quite soon, on the 9th November. Jazz fan or not, it is an exhilarating couple of hours and I highly recommend the music and the atmosphere. Remember too there’s live music in the Garrick’s new Green Room Bar/Cafe every Saturday lunchtime.

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I’m becoming increasing frustrated by the failure of County Labour to recognise the issues of speeding, rat-running and inappropriate HGV traffic in rural communities right across my county area and, probably, all Staffordshire.

It’s also wrong that where local parish councils have had the good sense to set funds aside to install traffic management measures, such as interactive speed warning signs, they are being prevented from doing so because of restrictive County Highways policy. I’ve got several areas where the local community have developed what are called Parish Plans and consultations have shown that worries about speeding traffic have been the main issue. I find it objectionable that Labour’s policy is not preventative but instead works on a points system which adds up the number of accidents and people killed and injured before anything is done about speeding problems. Stable doors, horses and bolted springs to mind! It’s even more outrageous that even when a parish want to fully fund a proactive approach, before anyone is hurt, they can’t.

What’s happened to democracy or empowerment as it is popularly called and the ’supposed’ principle of letting local people decide what their communities need? Well, John Wakefield, Labour’s Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport, clearly hasn’t heard of it and hasn’t even answered recent e-mails from me on the subject of highways.

I’ll keep banging on about this wherever and however I can but I don’t hold out much hope of Labour being too bothered about rural problems. Oh well, yet something else for County Conservatives to deal with after the ‘09 election. The list is growing!!

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Earlier this evening I met some of the people who’d won prizes in the Fazeley Festival raffle draw.

We met at the police outpost in the town and all seemed really pleased winning all sorts from family tickets for Drayton Manor Theme Park and also this Christmas’ Garrick pantomime (Cinderella) to meals out locally and a Christmas Hamper.

I’m delighted too that everyone there wanted another Festival and Mile Oak ‘Mile’ Run next year. For that to happen it’s important local people come forward before Christmas to offer help in organising it.

If you can help, contact Wendy at the Fazeley and District Initiative on 07783 374045 or click here.

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