Weight off my Mind

I have today, after a lot of thought, resigned from the council.

I wasn't going to do so originally, but in today's Soviet-style Britain, with all the pressures coming down upon us from on high and with yet more to come (as I recently reported HERE), all the indicators are that recent events have, funnily enough, afforded me an opportunity to 'get out from under' before even more bureaucracy hits local Councillors.

Just think of it: no more Government-imposed 'Performance Indicators' (a mere 168 of 'em!), no more having to explain why we can't do something because tens of millions of pounds has been deducted from our funding every year, no more Codes of Conduct and all of that, and no more briefings on this week's new legislation. Bliss!

Anyway, this means that this 'blog (which was initially just an experiment anyway) will probably close very soon.

As for me: I look forward to the next adventure in my life, wherever that should turn out to be -- just as I did when I moved here eleven years ago, not knowing what lay ahead of me then.

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...

Desperation

At last night's meeting of the Full Medway Council (which I have dubbed the "minus one" meeting as each of the three political groups was minus one member) the Labour and LibDem Groups' sheer desperation to make something they could use out of every single item on the agenda became almost farcical at times.

The Conservative Group, though, performed very well, with some excellent contributions by several of our recently-elected members. Over half of our 32 members present contributed to the debates -- 18 of us in total. We provided the positive messages, whereas the opposition tried to derail anything we were proposing -- sometimes by putting forward tiny and silly amendments, which were generally intended to delay or completely scupper new projects; or just by speaking and voting against all the worthwhile ideas that we were putting forward.

This did rather demonstrate that they hadn't much of a clue as to how to run a Council, as came out clearly during the debates. I don't know whether this will be reported properly in the local media (hopefully so), but there were several members of the public in the gallery and they will know. Although it soon became apparent that a number of them had been drafted in by the Labour group, and at least one of them misbehaved (always a sign of a Labour-driven and "loaded" public gallery, by the way), there were at least three separate more independent people up there "in the Gods", and those three stayed right to the end, even including the last item which was on Members' allowances, of all things.

That was an interesting item, as it turned out, and symptomatic of whole the whole meeting had gone. Every year we have simply accepted the findings and recommendations of the Independent Remuneration Panel (even if the Leader had difficulty saying "remuneration" until last year -- in previous years it came out as "renumeration"!)

This year, as had been happening throughout the reports section of the meeting, the Labour Group proposed an amendment to tinker with one aspect of the proposals. It would have made very little difference in terms of money saved, yet would have gone against the principle of letting the independent panel decide -- not us. What they had proposed was that the Special Responsibility Allowances, such as the one I receive for being vice-chairman of one of the Scrutiny Committees, be frozen rather than increased in line with staff salary percentage increases that year (the normal method). Labour claimed it was "a gesture". Notably, most of this would impact Conservative members, so it was hardly a "gesture" on the part of Labour members...

The reason for this wheeze was obvious: it was to get a cheap headline. I stood up (when called by the Mayor) and explained that I had given up a lot in order to be able to take on the mantle of Scrutiny vice-chairman, and I put a lot of work and effort into doing my job, and earning my modest allowance (£3,648 per year, with tax and national-insurance deducted from that) which a couple of Labour members also receive but don't bother to do much to earn it.

I added that, on the other side of the coin, I had already been making my own gesture for almost eight years, in that I had never claimed anything for travel, subsistence or any other costs, from the day I was first elected. I quoted a couple of examples (one regular, the other occasional) that showed this included some reasonably expensive travel costs -- but in all cases I have personally absorbed all of it.

The difference here was that I had never sought publicity for this, and indeed I think that was the first time I have mentioned it in a public meeting. I finished my speech by wondering how many members of the opposition did the same as I do. They were very quiet...

Then one of them decided to tell the meeting that it "hadn't been their intention" for anyone to state what they themselves did or didn't do -- obviously a pop at me (and another of our Group who had said something along much the same lines as I had) and an attempt to recover from a very obvious and visible backfire of their purely party-politically-motivated amendment.

It didn't work: anyone present could see who had started this, and why, and the way that my colleague and I responded was completely appropriate. I was tempted to stand to make a "point of personal explanation" to mention this, and the cause-and-effect nature of this: "If you don't like the effect, don't instigate the cause" would probably have been my way of sending a final message to the opposition members. I let it go, on this (admittedly fairly minor) occasion; but one day, when they try something similar with a more important issue, I'll have 'em!

Thus ended the often convoluted and sometimes rather tortuous formal business of the meeting. As I had discussed with a couple of our newer members before it all started, the universal rule of Council meetings is that they will invariably go on for far longer than they need to, and usually longer than they really ought.

That was certainly borne out again last night. Plus ça change...

Well, That Was Fun!

Got back a little while ago from two meetings of the full Medway Council. Yes, that's correct: two meetings!

First was a special meeting to decide whether to grant Honorary Freedom of the Borough of Medway to the Corps of Royal Engineers. That went very well, and was I believe agreed unanimously. I shall check when the record of the meeting is published.

This was followed by the customary "ordinary" Council meeting, with its usual mix of decision-making, petitions presented, questions asked and answered, and the inevitable political knockabout.

The interesting thing is that, although the Opposition Groups still have a lot of vitriol and a huge amount of negativity, in reality they have very little real material and have to contrive what they present in such a way as to apparently support their claims.

Unfortunately for them, our side is very well informed and have our facts at the ready -- especially me, as I have a wealth of information on my portable computer, so can summon just about anything I might need at a moment's notice. I have on several occasions dealt with unanticipated subject matter that opposition members have sneaked into the debate by some subterfuge. Being able to quote from official documents that are in the public domain (so anyone could easily check the veracity of what I state in the Council Chamber) is one of my favourite techniques. I always mention my source, also that it is public information, and indeed did so this very evening.

This particular occurrence concerned the severe (and deliberate) underfunding of our council, especially in the context of how much is going towards propping up wasteful Labour councils -- and Livingstone's increasing billions of overspend on the Olympics (another billion revealed just this week) for another example of a Labour-run Authority's drain on public funds. I was able to quote some genuine (and very interesting!) statistics and facts, such as: how many Directors does a council like ours need for its corporate services functions? We've never had more than one, yet a Labour council that isn't a million miles away and is quite similar in population and duties to ours has three, each costing around £150,000.

It is no wonder that with a fiddled system like the one in this country, there isn't enough money to go round, and the two "fiddle factors" were mentioned this evening.

The Labour group's latest wheeze to explain the huge discrepancy between us and a typical Labour-run council is that "there is no deprivation in Medway", and funding is being targeted towards deprived areas in the country. Their Deputy Leader even quoted from council publications to attempt to "prove" that there is no deprivation in Medway.

I was the first member of Medway Council to point out that there are no fewer than 29 deprived neighbourhoods in Medway, and this arrived at using the Government's own criteria in their Multiple Index of Deprivation. One of my colleagues reminded the meeting of this fact tonight.

Most significantly of all, the majority of these neighbourhoods are in wards with Labour councillors! Chatham Central, Luton and Wayfield, Twydall, and even Rochester East, all have such areas. I wonder how their residents will take the news that the reason they aren't getting the funding for their communities' needs is because their own councillors are making no effort on their behalf, claiming that "there is no deprivation in Medway".

Talk about shooting oneself in the foot! It is little wonder that the Labour presence on Medway Council has been dwindling over the past ten years...

Council Funding

It is now well known that the straw (no, not Jack Straw!) has finally broken the Medway camel's back, and we can no longer carry the extra burdens imposed upon us in the wake of years of deliberate underfunding by central Government to the tune of tens of millions of pounds every year. Oh, we'll still bring in a balanced budget -- we always do -- but at what cost to services?

What is less well known is the sheer extent of this underfunding, so we have been conducting research, from official published sources.

We now have a table (from no less an outfit than CIPFA) showing facts and figures on funding, population, and Council Tax for English councils this year. These make for very interesting reading!

For example, Leicester City received funding of £546.12 per head of population, whereas Medway received just £283.88 -- we get barely half as much per capita. If we were to be funded on the same basis as Leicester, we'd have an additional £65,849,000 Formula Grant per year!

Not that we need that much: a third of that amount would suffice as we are a very lean and efficient council, thus saving taxpayer's money -- as we in Medway tend to do very strongly, and our independent External Auditors consistently agree (and I have their reports on file to prove it!)


Indeed, it is in subsidising inefficient Labour-run councils to a degree that means they receive a far higher share (in those regions) of GDP than any other EU or OECD country, as follows (published in "The Times" a couple of months ago):

• 70.5% (Northern Ireland)
• 64.3% (Wales)
• 63.0% (North East)
• 55.6% (Scotland)
• 54.0% (North West)

By contrast we in the South East get just 32% of GDP -- well below even the national average of 44.1%, let alone the north and Scotland etc. Even the East Region gets more than 38%, and the South West over 42%.

Thus, not only the Medway-specific extreme case, but the regional disparities, become clear. We can with absolute certainty lay the blame for Medway's situation at the Government's door -- there is no other cause behind the budget problems we are experiencing and will continue to experience all the while this corrupt funding system remains in place. Using Britain's people as mere pawns in a self-serving party political game is surely unacceptable to any decent person; but that is exactly what is being done by the Labour Government.

Local Labour councillors claim that this difference is because of "need" and "deprivation" elsewhere in the country. The sheer size of the disparity makes this a nonsense: there might be a tweak here and there, but not a two-to-one ratio. Indeed, within the detail of the settlement (within which much is camouflaged!) there is a five-to-one ratio between the lowest and highest-funded ends of the spectrum. Guess who is at the low end? Yup, it's us!

It's all a nonsense anyway, as Medway has no fewer than 29 neighbourhoods falling within the worst-off 25% (bottom quartile, to use the jargon) in the country; and this is from the Government's own data in their Multiple Index of Deprivation.

This leads us to the reason for the sheer scale of difficulties, which stems almost entirely from the ever-increasing costs of what are termed demand-led services, such as many of the the services we provide for children (especially those in our care) and for adult social care. These can never be fully anticipated, but have rocketed in the last handful of years in particular. People are living longer, but need more care and over a longer period. Thus there are more adults in this category every year as more enter the field than leave.

New legislation (pouring out of Whitehall, thanks to the army of Brown's Bureaucrats) places additional burdens on Local Authorities, as a stream of headline-grabbing wheezes-of-the-month add to costs, but are generally either unfunded or only partially-funded and for a short time (say, a year or two if we're lucky).

Unhelpfully, once something is no longer generating headlines for the Labour Government's benefit, either the scheme is dropped or re-invented and launched anew (with consequent costs to councils) or simply no longer funded, and thus the burden is transferred to Council Tax, which is the main reason why that tax has doubled nationally over the past decade. Any reasonably competent researcher should be able to uncover a whole string of these during the last ten years, independently, which would be far more telling than my publishing a long list of them here.

Even core funding such as for adult social care is actually being reduced, while (as indicated above) the demand is rising at a rate of knots. Who said Labour were supposedly the party of the needy? Only in their voting heartlands, it would appear! They clearly care nothing for our needy folk, here in Medway.

Campaigning on the ground -- and in the air!

The original reason that I stood for election to the local Council was because I effectively ran the campaign to save Rochester Airport from closure and concreting-over.

At that time (August 1999 onward) Medway Council was run by a minority Labour administration in collaboration with the LibDem Group on the Council.

They had between them wangled a last-minute addition to the Medway Local Plan (an official document designating various sites for specific purposes) that would mean the closure of this famous small airport, and its (largely grassed/planted) land to be turned into what would most likely have been a "crinkly shed" distribution complex. No end of HGVs would have been bunging-up nearby roads, if that had gone ahead, and the oxygen-producing plant life would have gone.

This airport also has significant historical and strategic importance, so it was never a very sensible idea to close it, especially bearing in mind the "holes" in navigation cover within the region since several other small airfields had already been closed.

This site is close to a motorway (the M2), and pollution from the M2 has made nearby areas the official most polluted parts of the south east of England. We need the oxygen, and we therefore need the "green lung" -- all of it, including the airport!

It will come as no surprise that this idea of closure did not go down well with local residents -- by the thousands(!) -- and I, as the then secretary of an adjacent estate's Residents Association, ended up co-ordinating the campaign to save Rochester Airport. I gave up my weekday employment so that I could be available to residents, organisations, the media, local councillors and officers, which paid off.

This issue became really big; and we did indeed manage to save the airport from closure, and it is still operating today!

What made the difference was the information and assistance I and the other campaign leaders received from local Conservative Councillors. After it was all over, I was somewhat astonished when one of them suggested that I stand for election in the forthcoming polls in May 2000.

Well, I'd never been a member of the Conservative Party; and the LibDems had held our ward (then called Horsted) fairly solidly for nine years. It would take a huge swing to dislodge even one of them.

Eventually I was persuaded (much to my own surprise!) so stood with another "new recruit", and we took the two seats via -- yes -- a huge swing! And that, folks, is how I ended up here.