Posts from — November 2007

It’s been a busy few days in Sweden and, thankfully, I’m told my after dinner speech to an academic audience specialising in Democracy from 20 different countries, was well received. I was apprehensive about doing, as requested, a humorous speech to an audience like that but it’s done now and I’m relieved they liked it.

The Klosterhotel in Vadstena where we had the conference was an amazing venue. Remote and historic, dating back to the 13th century, it was originally a large convent with a myriad of reception rooms all exquisitely decorated and with ‘period’ furniture. I was only there for just over a day and when I left to get in my taxi at 5.45 this morning the snow was falling and it was that ‘cutting’ cold you find in Scandinavian countries. The open flamed lanterns which led the way from the hotel to where my taxi was waiting made it feel like a scene from a James Bond film.

Leaving so early in the morning, the flight from Linkoping Airport to Copenhagen made for some amazing sights of the sun rising over the frozen glacial scars in the landscape and despite a two hour stopover at Copenhagen Airport, the whole journey back to the UK has actually gone quite quickly.

I’m writing this post sitting on the train back from London to Lichfield. Despite the Heathrow Express, and more particularly, the London Underground conspiring to stop for no apparent reason at every opportunity I managed, by the skin of my teeth, to catch the train back an hour earlier than expected. We’ve been invited to a local Christmas ‘Cheer’ event in Whittington tonight so being a bit earlier will give me a chance to get my head down for an hour before we go.

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I’m sitting on an aeroplane on my second leg of a trip to Linkoping in Sweden. I’m going out there to a Democracy Conference in my ICELE role to give a speech.

The Brrrrrrrr! I refer to in the title of this post is the rather desperate sound our Fokker aircraft makes, particularly on take off, as it struggles desperately to get the 20 or so passengers plus crew off the tarmac. Admittedly where I’m going is not what you’d call on a main internation route but I assumed the second leg’s smaller plane would be one of those City Hopper jets that are used on short hauls all over Europe now.

But no, a traditional propeller aircraft that I’d forgotten even existed now on commercial flights. It was actually a pretty modern looking aircraft inside and out but that noise that happens when the props seemed to be turning at such a ferocious rate and yet we don’t seem to be picking up enough speed to take off.

Then just when you think there’s no more power available the pilot revs it up a bit more until there’s a mixture of feeling sorry for the poor thing and hope that it actuallt takes to the air before we run out of runway. Anyway, thirty minutes into the 50 minute flight and it’s actually very comfortable and the service is considerably better than on the SAS A300 which took me on the first leg of the trip from Heathrow to Copenhagen.

Now arrived at Linkoping, the smallest airport I’ve ever flown into. You know it’s small when a guy wheels the baggage straight from the plane into a small room and says help yourself. As you’ll have gathered I’m now on the ground waiting for my taxi to Vadstena so I can hit the send button to publish this post. At first sight Sweden’s very dark even though it’s only 3.30 local time and I’m sure I’ll write some more whilst I’m out here.

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The extraordinary circumstances around HMRC losing over 25million personal details of child benefit recipients is something that, if it were to happen in Local Government, would result in every single local authority in the UK immediately having imposed upon it new rules, restrictions and protocols (at great expense to local tax payers) for dealing with this sort of information.

That would swiftly be followed by a junior Minister announcing a review as to whether Local Government should be trusted with this sort of information and, if it is to be, there would be a new Government quango created to closely monitor and direct precisely how each local authority does do it…. probably the Local Government Information Security Inspectorate (LGISI) with a couple of hundred staff and a budget of 20million quid.

At both Lichfield District and Staffordshire County restrictions are stringent on who has access to sensitive information and how it is dealt with and I’m pretty sure there is an outright technical block to downloading the information to anything portable such as CDs. One thing I am very confident about is never ever would anything of any consequence (far less consequence than the HMRC records) be sent in an insecure and unregistered way. It doesn’t happen!

But then Central Government preaches very well to Local Government…. they don’t, however, appear to practice what they preach!!

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I’ve written occasionally about the work I do as Chairman of ATR (Lichfield)’s Independent Advisory Panel. ATR stands for Army Training Regiment and the Lichfield bit means Whittington Barracks.

It is a panel made up of 7 people who have expertise or experience in different walks of life… senior police officer, senior official from County Education, Director of Tamworth Borough Council, senior Execs from large business and me as the public life bod. It is supported by ATR (Lichfield)’s Commanding Officer, the Adjutant and the Regiment’s WO1. The Panel was formed about fifteen months ago and we have spent that time looking closely at the different ways the Army trains new recruits.

The work has been around inspecting aspects of the Whittington site but more so interviewing lots and lots of new recruits at different stages of their training programme and also families when they attend Passing Out Parades. We’ve had instant and unrestricted access to the Barracks at any time which, in itself, is an impressive signal that the Army are keen to cooperate with this.

Although we can’t instruct ATR (Lichfield) to change the way they do things, our experience, in the main, is that where we have discovered areas needing change or improvement they have made the suggested changes fairly willingly. The original brief I had that it would take a few days over my period of involvement went by the wayside long ago. It’s taken much longer to do the job properly but, that said, we’ve all tried to make the time because it has been a very interesting and, I think, worthwhile piece of work.

We produced our ATR (Lichfield) IAP Final Report recently and to a vast extent the Army are clearly very good at training new recruits and particularly concerned with their health and welfare whilst being trained.

With ATR (Lichfield) closing down next year and the training of new recruits moving to ATR Pirbright our work is now coming to an end. We had our penultimate meeting today and I’m planning one more to look at producing a short document on our experiences so new IAPs can be set up with some background tips to help.

I’m off to ATR Pirbright next week to meet Army top brass and the four other IAP Chairmen from around the country to discuss how things are going in general… should be interesting.

You can read our Final Report here.

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A strange title I know but one that has some relevance.

In Staffordshire all the schools are grouped in what are called clusters based around a Community Learning Prtnership. Typically there are six or eight schools, both primary and secondary, in each one and the idea is that they are an easy way of identifying and dealing with schools which have a geographical or catchment area connection.

But the clusters are not aligned to local council areas and recently I’ve found that may be causing a problem. To be fair it is a problem which hasn’t been obvious until I’ve started to understand the process around educational welfare, family intervention and all things connected.

I’ve, for some time, been concerned at the lack of an obvious escalatory process around problems with some young people in Fazeley and Mile Oak. A few youngsters or families (or both) cause regular problems and if you listen to central government this amazing ‘machine’, in the form of different services like the Youth Service, Education Welfare, Youth Offending Service and others, all come along and wrap themselves around the ‘challenging’ young people and their families to put things right before having to go down the Courts route.

The reason it doesn’t seem to be working is this cluster and district/borough set up. I’ve found that because the schools in much of my County area are in the Rawlett cluster (including several in Tamworth Borough) but in the local council area of Lichfield District, the Tamworth Borough teams of County agencies don’t seem to be interacting with other teams which work based on Lichfield District Council boundaries and conversely too.

So, for instance, Education Welfare which is based around the Tamworth cluster for Rawlett School doesn’t interact well with the Youth Service which is based on Lichfield District boundaries. There isn’t that connection or clear route through the various diversionary agencies if you have this problem where the geographical boundaries are different. This must be replicated across Staffordshire and it’s important because in my experience some young people are falling through the gaps and that answers the concern I raise above about the escalatory process not working.

A small but significant find and after talks with the various Departments involved I’m hopeful it will be addressed… at least around Lichfield.

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