We have a new addition to the family! Tamsin and I adopted the above ginger cat from the RSPCA in Rochdale, and he has been finding his feet at home today. He is called Mac (after Macavity the Mystery Cat, of TS Eliot and latterly Andrew Lloyd Webber fame). He only has three legs, and thus he has middle names including Tripod and Reliant Robin.

Right now he is sliding about on the floor in the lounge. It is very exciting. There are lots of cats in the neighbourhood, but none with quite the same number of limbs, so he’ll always be easy to find.

Rick

I have been in exasperated communication with the Council today regarding the continuing drama of the missing street sign on Butterstile Lane.

The sign has been missing, presumed nicked, for three months now. I reported it when it disappeared, and since then the forlorn signposts have been standing vacant like a football goal waiting for a cross bar.

I have blogged about this before, expressing my shock at the Council’s advice that it would take ten weeks to replace a sign. I was of the view then that it’d be quicker to design and build my own iron forging plant and cast the sign myself than wait for the wheels of Council bureaucracy to creak round and get this sorted. When I chased the matter up a few weeks back this view was confirmed when I was told that ten weeks actually meant twelve weeks. The reason for the further delays was not explained to me, so I can only put it down to someone not doing their job properly and treating the issue with the contempt it doesn’t deserve.

So we arrive at today, at the end of the revised waiting period, and still no sign. Quite why something this small yet this important to drivers and walkers and, well, anybody really who wants to know where they are, can’t be sorted in less time than it takes to walk across Europe is a mystery to me.

So I have made my feelings clear to the people in charge. We still don’t have a sign, but I feel slightly better and it makes me feel that at least I’m trying to do what I was elected for, rather than just having ineffective Council officers crush any notion I might have of making even a tiny difference for local people.

Honestly, sometimes I think talking to the Council and asking them for something is about as useful as begging a shrub to cook me my dinner. But we live in hope – my main current hope being that the press pick up this blog post and embarrass the Council, thus joining me in trying to up the pace towards “snail” from its current level of “corpse.”

Rick

Last night I went out to post a letter, only to discover that my local post box on Rainsough Brow had been sealed off without warning. A note (clearly printed off someone’s PC and without any Royal Mail logo or contact details on it at all) had been stuck in a plastic wallet and pinned to the box, helpfully announcing to the world the blindlingly obvious – “This Post Box has been closed.” It also said that the box would be removed within 7 days. And there ended the note.

I was surprised and annoyed to find this out – no warning, no information on the reasons for the closure, no information on where to find out more, and no directions to the nearest alternative box. I live at the end of the street and am the local Councillor, and I don’t know exactly where the nearest box is, so I don’t know how people less familiar with the area are to be expected to know. What they will know is that yet another local service has disappeared without warning or consultation, and there’s little option but for them to accept it.

This morning I rang Royal Mail “customer services,” a falsely labelled operation who’s job seems to entail passing callers around between operatives until they die of old age. After 15 minutes of recorded messages trying to direct me to the website (tried that…), interspersed occasionally with someone telling me I’d got through to the wrong department, they admitted their complete inability to provide me with a service and I was given the number of the Prestwich sorting office.

I rang Prestwich, and was told by someone shouting across the office to the colleague who picked up the phone, that the box had been closed “for health and safety” reasons. I wondered how unsafe a post box could possibly be. Were children getting trapped inside, I asked? Were letter-writers being met at the box by a pair of small eyes and a little hand grabbing their letters from within? No, apparently not, although the precise reason for the closure was not made clear to me. Maybe there’s been a plague of exploding post boxes of which I have not been made aware…

The box will be removed within a week, and nobody there seemed sure whether a replacement will be provided. I made it clear that there are lots of people in Rainsough, on Hilton Lane and on Butterstile Close and Avenue who care a lot more than the Prestwich sorting office and would very much like not to be deprived of their post box as well as lots of their post offices.

I was promised a call back next week when certain key staff return from their holidays. In the meantime I am left to wonder whether, having failed to provide residents with any information on this at all, or consult them at all on their views on this post box, I should believe the Royal Mail now. I will keep trying to find out information, and won’t let the box go without a fight.

In the meantime, please ring the Prestwich sorting office on 0161 912 6902 to make your feelings clear and to try and find out the information which I couldn’t.

Rick

The last few weeks in the world of Bury Council have been dominated by the issue of job evaluation / equal pay. As a result of an exercise in job evaluation designed to iron out pay inequalities, lots of Council staff face cuts in salaries. For some the cuts are more than 40% of their wage, a vastly unjust wage cut in anybody’s book. But at the same time, lots of staff are gaining, and the cost to the Council of paying for the entire process £7m+ in time-limited pay protection, fees and officer time.

The exercise has been extremely controversial, and like all Councillors I have had dozens of letters from staff set to lose out. My heart goes out to them, and my will is set to try and see a way out of this that ensures fairness and doesn’t cripple the Council financially.

The plans for re-grading of posts are currently out to consultation. My views on “consultation” are jaded to say the least, after exercises of that name have turned out to be nothing of the sort in the past. I only hope that all sides use the time set aside to really consult everyone and try to come to a consensus view.

As local leaders we Councillors need to be careful not to take the easy road and make political points out of this. I was very disappointed to read local MP David Chaytor try to pin the blame for this on the Conservative Council. Retorts from the Tories that Labour sat on the problem for years are equally irritating. These games make politicians look like children and, worse, they do nothing at all to help the dedicated staff of the Council who are threatened with serious financial hardships.

It is easy and natural to try and find somebody to blame for this. And that time may yet come. But it isn’t now. Whilst it’s true that the letters of information arrived at the weekend, and whilst the Council might not have been crystal clear with some of their briefings, these are not the issues which will be important in the final reckoning. We should not lose sight of the the bigger picture by focusing on these small points.

The reasons for the current situation are many and varied. We could blame the managers and leaders of yesteryear for setting up unequal pay in the first place. We could blame the Unions for doing nothing for so long and then supporting a process before opposing its results. We could blame the government for passing laws without thinking through their consequences. We could blame lawyers for being greedy. We could blame judges for interpreting the law without taking a broader view. We could blame the Council leaders, we could blame the officers, we could blame ourselves for letting this injustice go on for so long. I don’t think we should blame anybody at the moment. Hard working public servants should not have their financial security threatened in this way, and instead of looking to blame, all sides should consider how well-meaning measures have been used to create such a plainly unfair outcome, to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

And, in seeking to blame people now, whilst the issue is so raw and still undecided, we might risk ignoring real ways to try and get ourselves out of this predicament.

What we should be doing is looking forward. The Council’s leaders should be looking far and wide across the country to see how other Council’s have handled this situation. And if there is no other way for Bury within the law, then we should be looking at ways to make any wage cuts as bearable as possible for those involved, and thus minimise the potential damage to the Council, its staff and the people of Bury. That is what the Conservative Council has to do now. If they fail in it, they can be justly blamed. If they succeed, we should congratulate them. And as an opposition member it is my job to make sure that they’re doing it properly.

There is an appeals process, and we need to make it as transparent as possible. We need staff adequately represented, and we need to give them access to as much information as they want. If it’s inconvenient or it takes a bit longer, then so be it. We need to make sure that the appeals process is scrutinsed properly, and that it takes into account every stage in the evaluation process. We need to make sure that appeals take into account individual jobs, rather than job families. Again, the time to blame those leading the Council will be if and when they fail to do this.

And where, after a fair and open appeals process, people still lose out financially, we need to put in place every support mechanism possible to minimise damage to them and the Council’s services. That means supporting staff in training and development, re-examining job roles and team structures to take advantage of “natural wastage” through retirements and resignations so that people who remain suffer as little loss as possible.

I am glad that some of these steps are being considered now. But not enough of them are, and it is up to the Conservative Council to make more of them happen. The blame game has led to suspicion and almost open warfare between staff, unions, MPs and the Council itself at a time when we should be coming together for the good of everyone. Unions threatening strike action is understandable. But the Unions backed the scheme originally, and they should join with the officers and leaders of the council and finding a way out of this mess we’re all in.

In the end it will be the Council’s Executive that take the final decision. If that decision is arrived at without exploring every avenue to make it as equitable as possible to all concerned, then the Conservative Council should rightly take the blame. At the moment though, shouting at them rather than railing against the flaws in this process does the staff of Bury Council no good at all. 

Rick

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has warned that Visiting Britain’s energy security is under severe threat as a result of the Government’s disintegrating energy policy, which will lead to an ever-increasing dependence on vulnerable foreign energy supplies.

Setting out Liberal Democrat proposals to secure energy independence for Britain yesterday, Nick argued that politicians of all parties need to demonstrate the kind of vision, application and political will behind the Apollo Project that succeeded in putting man on the moon, in order to head off the threat to the security of our energy supply.

Nick Clegg said:

“The Government has been looking at energy from the wrong end of the telescope.

“The scale of its failure to plan for Britain’s energy security has been brought into sharp relief by the Georgian crisis, which underlines the risks of increasing dependence on foreign energy sources as North Sea oil supplies run down.

“Rather than use its period in office to reduce Britain’s dependency on vulnerable supplies from unstable regions, Labour has dithered and flip-flopped for over a decade. Instead of an energy policy, we have a potential economic, environmental and national security disaster waiting to happen.

“But we have an enormous opportunity to create real energy independence for the UK, freeing ourselves from the shackles of foreign oil, coal and gas.

“Renewable energy is no longer a pipe-dream. It is realistic and achievable. All it requires is the leadership and vision that has been lacking under years of tired Labour thinking.

“That’s why today I am setting out Liberal Democrat proposals to become energy independent by 2050. This will require the kind of ambition and political will that succeeded in putting man on the moon.

“We need an ‘Apollo Project’ for British energy independence.

“Just as Britain invested in the North Sea in the 1970s to transform our energy prospects through oil production, we must today make similar investment in renewable technologies to harness Britain’s vast renewable energy resources, combined with major reductions in energy consumption.”

Rick

I have been spectacularly busy at work recently, hence the lack of a post yesterday, and this one which, as you will see in approximately nine lines time, will come to its conclusion. In the last few days though we have begun to print the latest St Mary’s Focus, which will start to hit doorsteps shortly, and I have been limbering up for the resumption of Council business next week.

There have been lots of interesting issues cropping up over recess, not least of which is the job evaluation / equaly pay issue which I know has affected a lot of Council staff. Recess comes to an end after the bank holiday and I know then that this and other issues will come to the fore again. And I for one am looking forward to it, because I’ve been pretty bored and stuck for things to write in the meantime!

Rick

You may have seen in the news last week that local Lib Dems were oppsoing the Council’s ludicrous heavy-handedness over the issue of graffiti.

The Council had sent letters out to local people who had graffiti on their homes, threatening them with court action and a £1,000 fine if they didn’t get the mess cleaned up. Many of the recipients of the letters were scared and annoyed, and local Lib Dem Councillors were livid. The Council were not only abdicating their responsibilities to act to prevent and clean up graffiti, but the letters were outrageously over the top.

Now though, after a campaign against this action, the Council have relented. The threat of court action and fines has been lifted, and local people will soon be contacted offering them free use of graffiti cleaning kits. This comes on top of news that four of the main culprits have been detained by Police, and will be given the option of cleaning their mess themselves as part of their punishment.

Whilst this is a major move forward, and a victory for common sense, I still think that the Council needs to do more to remove graffiti itself. Nothing displays crime in an area more than graffiti, and it sends a clear message that the law-breakers have one over the law-keepers. At the moment the Council doesn’t prioritise its removal, and I think it should. Our local environment is important, and whilst home-owners should be involved in cleaning up graffiti, the Council and its partners shouldn’t rely on them exclusively to clean up after vandals.

Rick

Bury South MP and Health Minister Ivan Lewis writes in the Sunday Times today , suggesting that the way to alleviate financial pressures for middle-income earners is to raise taxes for the rich. He is wrong, ignoring the glaring policy errors of his own government, and amply demonstrating the nannying, we-know-best mentality that is at the heart of the failing Labour administration.

Mr Lewis claims that now is the time to put the national interest first, and to move away from sound-bite policy initiatives to grab the headlines today or this week. A noble thing to say, but sadly his call for increased taxes on the rich is just the type of cynical vote-grabbing manoeuvre he claims to want to avoid. He says himself that he won’t talk about specifics, which is probably just as well because scratching below the surface of this hollow pronouncement will shows flawed his ideas are.

Mr Lewis claims to be in touch with the deisres of ordinary people, but he is mistaken if he thinks those desires include any sort of income-tax raise at all, even for the very rich. Until Mr Lewis and the government stop mis-spending the money we all already pay, they will never win any argument to the contrary.

And this is the main problem with Mr Lewis’ headline-grabbing suggestion - It’s simplicity ignores dealing with the problems that Labour themselves have created or ignored in the nearly a dozen years they’ve had to sort this out. Sorting them first would end the need for tax hikes for anyone:

There is staggering waste in public services. This most overly bureaucratic and centralised government machine in Europe is stifling local innovation and forcing public service away from local accountability and towards compliance with an expensive, inefficient and all-powerful government machine. Local Authorities pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for inspections; NHS Trusts spend similar sums becoming Foundation Trusts and satisfying government watchdogs of their fitness to operate; and God alone knows how much money is wasted on consultations which get us all precisely nowhere at a cost of millions. I don’t begrudge public sector workers their pensions, nor do I think any one of them does a bad job, but centralised drives towards efficiency, and an ever-growing list of demands fro Whitehall means that any form of local innovation is nigh-on impossible. And this needs to change.

The government should sort this out before imposing any more tax on anyone. And it should get its spending priorities right as well, so that it provides services the public wants, not services that it wants. The government ID Card scheme will cost £7.5bn, enough for 50 of the best schools in the world, or 10 of the best hospitals in the world, or world-class public transport in 5 of our cities. Why don’t government scrap the scheme, like the Lib Dems would? Don’t raise taxes Mr Lewis, spend them properly.     

Mr Lewis seems determined to tax the rich more, but where is the government zeal to collect the tax already owed by the super-rich? Climb-downs over non-dom taxes and a refusal to deal with accountancy tricks means that many of the richest already escape their obligations. Without dealing with these problems, the government could put up the top rate to whatever it wants, and they’d still not have grasped the nettle. 

The government has missed opportunity after opportunity to introduce fair, radical ways to introduce tax changes that will help poor people and middle income earners, alter behaviour to make the country greener, and serve to end massive injustices. Why were recent car tax plans so comprehensively botched? Why punish the poor by imposing retrospective taxes on Ford Focuses, when money would’ve been raised, and good would’ve been done (and votes would’ve been won!) by massively increasing taxes on far dirtier and far more expensive cars? People on the average wage drive average cars like Focuses. Millionaires don’t. Millionaires drive Porsche Cayenne Turbos. So tax the Porsche, which belches out fumes like a Victorian mill, back to the stone age, and leave the Focus alone. That’s a better way to help middle earners, it’ll get the dirty cars off the road, and it won’t give green taxes a bad name.

The same is true on the Council Tax. The formula is so skewed towards punishing the average earners it’s almost untrue. People strive their whole lives to afford a three bed semi, and are taxed to the hilt with raises every year even if their income barely moves. Yet the difference between the bill for the office worker in that semi and the Premier League footballer in the £5m mansion down the road is tiny in real terms. If it insists on non-income related taxation in the first place, why doesn’t the government grasp the nettle and re-band Council Tax to impose much bigger bills on the much bigger houses, and much smaller bills lower down?

Mr Lewis could also do well to consider not taxing the poor, rather than taxing the rich to help the poor. Why not raise the threshold at which income tax is paid? Allow those who earn the least to keep more of their money, rather than pay to fund a government machine designed solely to give it them back? What is the point of rhetoric talking about escaping poverty when this government more than any has slung millions into a culture of handouts with its tax credits and means-tested benefits?

And therein lies the fundamental contradiction in Mr Lewis’ argument. He talks of helping middle Britain and wanting to reconnect to the “aspirational” classes. And yet the method he proposes to help that aspiration is to impose ever greater reliance on the state.  The reward he proposes for those who achieve their goals of financial independence is higher taxes once they get there, and the solution to the financial problems of those he seeks to help is to dole out more cash from government coffers. His approach is as doomed to failure as it is woefully out-dated. It is like suggesting that the way to make a car go faster is by ripping out the seats and chucking on them on the back of the tow-truck in front.

Raising taxes on the rich to give back to the middle classes is not the way to help those in our country who aspire to better things. It’s the bluntest of blunt instruments, suggested by a Minister showing us all how far from sharp he is. Instead of Mr Lewis’ approach, I want my government to be far more imaginative in its solutions. Yes, impose greater taxes or financial responsibilities on those with the most where they’re just and required - an obligation on energy companies to re-invest their profits in environmentally sustainable fuel, or a crack-down on tax avoidance. And yes, use benefits to help the very poor where they really are needed. But real aspiration can only be supported by giving people the freedom to make their own choices and live in a society free as much as possible from government interference and unnecessary handouts.

We should not be seeking to tax our way out of our economic problems. We should be looking to give people more freedoms to spend their own money, to take responsibility for their own behaviour, and to make choices themselves rather than have them made for them by government. Mr Lewis should spend less of his time suggesting simple-minded ways of shoring up the votes in my ward, and more time convincing his ministerial colleagues to cut taxes and red-tape, and make the types of changes to the tax system which will make a real difference to peoples lives for years to come, not just until the next Whitehall cheque arrives.

Rick 

It’s A-level results day today - a day etched into the brains of 18 year olds up and down the country like a farmer’s mark branded into the rump of a cow… I remember well the unending summer of misery I endured before my own results were published, including a night entirely devoid of sleep beforehand, and then a surprisingly good outcome at the end of it all.

Well done to everyone in the ward who picked up results today. No matter what the grade, the hard work necessary even to get to the end of an A-Level course is no mean feat. If the results were good, then you deserve particular congratulations. And if they weren’t, then I know that there are many options to consider, and all is by no means lost.

The results have shown another improvement. Now over 97% of papers are passed, and a quarter of them get a grade A. So with one in four candidates now achieving an A Grade, we need to be sure that the most talented students are being properly stretched.

Liberal Democrats today call for action to make sure that the value of these exams remains high, and that the efforts of young people are justly rewarded with qualifications that mean a good deal to universities and employers. The new regulator must now act by reviewing today’s top grades so that we can be fully confident that the apparent improvements are real.

Our Schools spokesperson Annette Brooke has also raised concerns over the geographical divide in results. There is now a clear divide at the heart of our education system. The rate of improvement in the A Grade pass rate in the south is nearly three times greater than in the north.

Ministers must work to find the reasons for this inequality and ensure that any improvements in our schools and colleges benefit all students.

This is a system that isn’t perfect. But the young people coming through it today have passed the next stage in their development, and will start in university or employment in a few weeks. I remember that the trepidation I felt waiting for my results was forgotten just a short time later when the next chapter in my life started at university. No matter how anyone receiving results felt last night or feels today, the results are just one small part of a wider adventure, and I wish every one of the students getting results today all the best with it.

Rick

The Policy Exchange published its “Cities Unlimited” report today. It was met with news headlines screeched at such a pitch that only certain dog breeds could hear them, because it suggested that citizens of struggling northern towns might be better moving to the south to further their prospects after the failure of current regeneration projects in the north.

This suggestion grabbed the headlines, but in fact the report contained several interesting ideas on devolving powers to local authorities and doing away with the types of centralised regeneration funding arrangements which haven’t worked in the past.

The report makes me think in a new way about what local councils could do with regeneration money if given the powers to do so. The report recommends that funding be allocated simply related to income levels, so as a reasonably affluent borough Bury mightn’t get that much. But what it did get would be up to us to spend, and we’d be accountable to local people properly if it was spent rightly or wrongly. If we wanted to spend it on a business park or a bypass or an urban forest, we could. We could give nurses a pay rise to attract the best ones, or pay for more police officers in response to local concerns. Or we could use the money to cut taxes locally, rather than respond to centrally imposed rules that give us no leeway for local innovation.

Bury could have its own identity, we could learn from others as to what worked and what didn’t, and as the report says, we wouldn’t just be one of 1,000 identical towns across the country.

The report points out that more power for local authorities makes them a more attractive place to work, will create diversity in terms of policy development, and will allow for local politicians to be held more reasonably accountable for local successes and failures. As a local councillor myself, a massive bug-bear is that my influence on policy is so tiny when set against the Whitehall machine, that I am reduced to the level of just a glorified answering machine for small-time problems like broken street lights. This is an important job, but it should be one of many jobs councillors have. Government moves to concentrate what little powers councillors have in the hands of an Executive of just a few of them makes the situation worse. The entire system needs overhauling, and these recommendations are a step in the right direction.

I don’t think that the report is spot on in everything it suggests. I think there is a lack of consideration of the ramifications of the suggested movement south-eastwards on other local services. And whilst the suggested seismic shift in local/central government relations is welcome in my view, it won’t work to give communities the power they should have without similarly locally-led police, health and other services. I also don’t  like the suggestion, however coyly made, that success for people from northern towns can be best achieved in the south simply because that’s the centre of much of our economy. Success is about more than just the opportunity to work for a financial services firm. It’s about family networks and geographical stability as well, and bringing up families in familiar places which appeal beyond having a tube station at the end of the road.

But this report strikes a chord with me in many ways as a guide to the potential of local government, and what we can achieve for communities if given the chance to. If we were trusted to do so, Councils could innovate and make a real difference to people’s lives - transforming failing areas into successful ones free of central red-tape and accountable as a result. That would be a major step forward.

Rick