Holding to Account

At least once a year, usually around this time, every one of the Portfolio Holders in Medway Council's Cabinet comes before the Scrutiny Committee that scrutinises their portfolio. This is to give an account of what they have achieved during the past year and to answer questions from members of the committee. In a couple of cases, the one portfolio spreads across two committees so they are called to both.

One such is the Leader of the Council, Rodney Chambers (pictured here) whose portfolio covers both Regeneration and Democracy & Governance. Last night was his appointment with the Regeneration and Development Scrutiny Committee, and I was there as a substitute for an absent colleague.

It is no doubt tempting to ask a pre-arranged "friendly" question -- as Labour MPs so often (and rather obviously!) do at Prime Minister's Questions in Parliament. I don't believe in that, though, and prepare my own questions which are often quite challenging. The clue to this is how quickly and glibly the Portfolio Holder answers, especially at the start of his/her reply. When I ask a question, there is usually a lot of obvious thinking going on to formulate the answer. This happened last night, as usual...

As always at such events, I tried to think of something appropriate to ask, on this occasion bearing in mind that I was not a regular member of the committee. Thus I was able to answer a general question that could shed some light on why so much is happening now and did not do so before we took over running the council. I am sure that many people now living or working in Medway who were not here while places like Chatham began a long period of decline would find that interesting.

Indeed, I reasoned, as a relative newcomer here myself, it must seem strange that so much is going on at once, with disruption to places such as the aforementioned Chatham, whereas if this had been done earlier -- when traffic was not so heavy -- there would have been less pain. I commented that I was aware that all the preliminary work toward much of this (including Chatham and Rochester Riverside) was done by the early 'nineties -- and that would not have been conducted (at Council Tax-payers' expense) if there were no realistic prospect of taking those projects forward. This point was important as, with the change of political make-up of the former Rochester-upon-Medway City Council in 1991, these projects suddenly stalled.

I think the Leader was being rather generous in his reply, in that he did not blame the Labour administration of the period from 1991 to 2000 for sitting on all this while Chatham in particular fell into ever greater decay. He suggested that a city-sized council couldn't have afforded to invest in the necessary land assembly. I pointed out that the predecessor council had some £210 million is reserves in 1991 (most of which had gone by 2000, by the way!) but as Cllr Chambers came from the Gillingham half of the constituent parts of what became Medway Unitary Authority he couldn't verify this.

A second aspect to my question concerned the rate of progress we were making relative to other parts of the Thames Gateway region. Although all parts of the Gateway had already had substantial sums of capital investment funding made available to them, at around the same time as us, only we had made any real progress until very recently. Indeed, the Leader quoted the case of Thurrock in Essex who were setting up an Urban Development Corporation (UDC) to deal with their regeneration; but they had taken a year just to decide where the UDC would be housed. Similar tales apparently abound throughout the Gateway.

The Leader explained that the key difference is that we are leading, driving, and delivering our regeneration ourselves -- that's the Medway Renaissance Partnership, with us as the Administration of Medway Council being the lead partner. What has now become known as the "Medway Model" has been recognised elsewhere; and the Leader was able to tell the meeting that other councils were thinking of adopting it themselves. Indeed, Southend Council were due to visit us shortly for this very purpose.

Meanwhile, the Government Minister had recently visited and HERE is a short video made during that visit.

All fascinating stuff -- both the question and the response -- and I think it was well worth bringing this to public awareness right now. There was a press reporter in attendance throughout the meeting, but this part might not be considered worthy of reporting, so I have put it here for the benefit of anyone who might be interested.

As one would expect, the questions from the regular members of the committee were more to do with specific issues and details, and were also interesting in their own way, though most of it has already been aired in recent months so need not be reported here. It will probably appear in this Friday's local newspaper anyway...