Tag: hove

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notes from JK

Election debrief – some thoughts on the 2011 result in Brighton & Hove

Well that was exhausting! We have emerged from the largest ever Green campaign in Brighton & Hove with the first ever Green-led council in UK history. An incredible achievement building on Caroline Lucas’ election as the UK’s first Green MP last May.

It takes an awesome number of voluntary contributions for a small political party to achieve these kinds of results. It’s impossible to thank everyone who gives their time and skills to support a campaign they believe in. It’s an incredible thing to see and understand that wave of support we’ve had in the past few years. Thank you to each person who has helped us, no matter how big or small their contribution.

As someone who has been deeply involved in the party’s electoral strategy since about 2007 it is quite gobsmacking to see our ambition and our plans realised. Of course things were not straightforward, plans had to be adjusted and so on. Still, we have effected real change. A party with a very different culture and values to the others is for the first time in administration. Real change is possible. I’m involved in all this because I believe this is one of the best ways to change the world for the better.

Now we need to deliver for the people of this city. Thankfully, we have an excellent detailed manifesto to work from, and also the goodwill of many people and organisations around the city.

And no doubt we’ll need their support because we face many challenges: We’ll be a minority administration and our group has 14 new councillors out of 23 and we will have to deal with the cuts and changes the national Conservative-led government will impose on us.

Our group of councillors elected me to be the Cabinet Member for Finance & Central Services. I am humbled by the trust they have put in me to serve the city with this portfolio. Expect more blogging from me in the future on the areas covered by my portfolio.

A quick comment on the election campaign itself: It was disappointing how few hustings there were, it did feel that the local election didn’t really capture the public imagination. I think Labour made a real error, as they did last year over who could win in Pavilion, in claiming only they could form the next council administration. They have further tarnished their name by making claims which have been shown to be untrue. I hope they will reflect on that and hope we can work together constructively whenever we find common ground in the coming 4 years.

For now I’m catching up on sleep, spending time with my family and getting up to speed on all the departments I’ll be responsible for.

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notes from JK

A positive vision for the future: The Green Manifesto

Last week Brighton & Hove Greens launched our manifesto. Given that it looks like we’ve gone first, the ‘start your photocopiers‘ line seems apt for the other parties. We’ve already see the other parties pile into Green ideas for example with bike rental and solar panels for council properties. Green Cllr Bill Randall tells me he’s got an old leaflet from over 8 years ago with him calling for a bike rental scheme in the city. I guess there is some chance of debate advancing if after eight years these policies get adopted by the other parties. Shall I hope that in another 8 years they’ll be opposing public service cuts too?

Tories keep saying Greens favour a congestion charge. We don’t, we have no policy for this and they’ll notice that our manifesto makes no mention of such a charge. Will that stop them suggesting it in their speeches and publications? Sadly, I doubt it.

I would say this, but the Green manifesto is full of clear, positive ideas for this city from more affordable housing, to 20mph limits for residential areas to a living wage for council staff. Lots of good stuff, but I want to highlight some particular areas of interest to me.

Democracy & Trust

We want to devolve power and introduce participative budgeting through neighbourhood councils or ward forums. We also want to return the council to the committee system which is more open and democratic than the current ‘strong leader and cabinet’ system imposed on us by the previous Labour government. We also would like to see a ‘one stop shop’ for people to be able to have their say on consultations, policies and services provided by the public sector.

We have a strong commitment to use open data formats and licenses for council information, reports, data and media. We also want to automatically publish Freedom of Information request responses (as long as privacy is not affected), remove restrictive terms on council web services and publish contracts the council signs up to.

Greens are committed to bringing services back in-house, reducing high offer pay and we oppose the move to abolish Sussex Police Authority with a single police commissioner for all of Sussex.

Waste & Recycling

We want to set our sights on becoming a ‘zero waste city’ which, until recently, was a status which brought councils extra funding. The new government’s waste plans are very much in limbo, but perhaps zero waste funding might return. Regardless we believe reducing waste and boosting recycling are the right things to do to save money and protect the environment.

We’re going to push for food waste collection, look to get the council collecting commercial waste and oppose any new landfill or landraise sites in Sussex.

Licensing

We are continuing to work with residents and businesses to find the balance between ‘peace and pleasure’. Being an old town with homes cheek by jowl with pubs and clubs, it’s always going to be difficult. However many businesses are responsive and understanding of the challenges. We want to support them with a responsible licensee scheme akin to the Scores on the Doors initiative for food standards in restaurants. We also want to improve the process for residents and businesses of nearby licensing applications. Where allowed by the law we’d also like to review the license fees charged by the council, as some seem too low and others too high.

Read about this and more in the full manifesto [PDF]

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notes from JK

A Green view on the 2011/12 budget council

What an extraordinary night we had at Brighton Town Hall last night: Adjournments as the rowdy public gallery expressed their displeasure. Possibly a record number of ‘points of order’ being made by councillors as speeches got nasty, tetchy and overly personal. They mayor was always going to have a difficult time managing the meeting, and all things considered, he did reasonably well – though Greens wanted to see more public allowed in the gallery.

I won’t report the meeting blow by blow: You can watch it on the webcast, the extensive coverage on Brighton & Hove news (see related posts at the bottom of that link for more) and The Argus’ multimedia coverage.

In essence the Tories repeated the usual nonsense that the cuts were inevitable and they were all terribly responsible for implementing ‘savings’. They attacked Greens for being profligate and irresponsible with money. Yet it was the Green Alternative Budget which spent less money than the Tory budget, and put more aside into reserves, putting us in a better place for future years.

I tried to speak to our desire to reduce the number of high paid council officers in favour of protecting frontline services and increasing wages for the lowest paid workers. Our amendment to this affect had already been blocked from getting onto the agenda, but the mayor then tried to stop me even talking about the idea saying I couldn’t talk about job losses. Rather bizarre given the Tory budget was proposing to remove 250 jobs from the city!

It was excellent news that the joint Green and Labour amendments were passed through, saving some important services and eliminating the worst of the Tories budget gimmicks. These joint amendments (which I’m disappointed to see Labour claiming as ‘the Labour alternative budget‘) changed about £2.7m in the overall budget. Which, compared to the only £20,000 or so we changed last year through a last-minute Tory concession, is a big achievement. But in the context of the overall budget there were still about £23m of service reductions included.

This was a secretive budget process: papers presented late, officers restricted from talking to us about the detail we desperately needed and cabinet members not even attending some scrutiny meetings. Other councils take a much more open and cross-party approach to their budget setting.

Greens chose to vote down this Tory-cuts budget, and we had thought Labour would do so too — but they blinked at the last moment and abstained, letting the Tories push their budget through. Which is a terrible shame. We wanted to call another budget council in a week. We would spend the intervening time finding much more detail on what the proposals before us entailed. We would involved the unions, voluntary organisations and public in examining the books which we would have thrown open. Then we could have set a better, fairer budget.

Yes, it’s a better budget thanks to the joint Green & Labour amendments. It was appalling that Tories wanted to hand out a 1% tax cut (worth only 20p a week to the average tax payer – and nothing to those on benefits who don’t pay council tax) plus a 5% reduction in parking permits whilst slashing services for the young, elderly and vulnerable. How can they morally justify cutting provision for orphans (for example) whilst spending over £1 million on removing a cycle lane?

So some of that madness was averted. But with details on posts previously claimed as ‘vacant’ so deleted being revised to not vacant but still deleted, there was clearly much more we could work through if we had the time and information.

Labour’s last minute change of heart on this was bitterly disappointing, and it was plain on the face of many Labour councillors that this was not how they thought they would be voting. Tories jeered as their budget passed. They had repeatedly accused opposition parties of not understanding ‘value for money’, otherwise we wouldn’t be putting money back into services with our amendments. Putting money into a service doesn’t mean it has to spend every last penny – quite regularly departments underspend as demand fluctuates or they find more efficient ways of doing things. That is quite separate from just lopping great chunks off budgets to the detriment of services and their users.

The Tory cuts budget passed as Labour blinked, but the blows have been softened by the joint Green/Labour amendments passing. Greens stood firm in our opposition.

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notes from JK

On the joint Green/Labour budget amendments

At tonight’s budget council meeting I will be proposing our Green Alternative Budget, setting our the Green vision of what we do if we were in charge.

However I recognise that, for now, we’re 13 councillors out of 54. Which is why, once the Green Group of Councillors had agreed our budget priorities, I (with our convenor Bill Randall) have sought to find common ground with Labour (who also have 13 councillors). Together we have produced joint amendments to the Conservative budget which reduce the harm of some of the changes, protect key services and support the council ahead of future cuts.

Due to negotiations going on for some time, they haven’t been presented as well as the Green budget, but I can point you to the amendments on the council agenda, and this spreadsheet excerpt laying them out as figures.

I’m pleased that we’ve been able to put tribalism to one side to improve what is a ghastly Tory budget implementing unnecessary cuts by the Tory-LibDem coalition government.

It’s a shame though that Labour present them on their website as the ‘Labour budget’ and not the joint work that they are. Also note that, at the time of writing, many figures on the Labour page are wrong. Refer to the amendments or the spreadsheet for the actual financial details.

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notes from JK

The Green Alternative budget 2011/12

As Green finance spokesperson I’ve spent nearly every non-working, non-sleeping hour in recent weeks working on the budget. Understanding the detail of the Tory proposals and pulling together our own Green budget. The fruits of that work, which depended on the expertise of all the Green councillors, were published last night in our alternative Green budget. I’ve posted my introduction below, you can download the full doc here [PDF].

Introduction to the Green Alternative Budget 2011/12

Cutting local government budgets is an ill-considered policy which will harm the most vulnerable. It runs contrary to the views of the Green Party, many leading economists, fairness and common sense. Cutting spending while the economy is fragile risks a further downturn and reduces services for those most likely to need them. The national deficit does not justify the cuts Conservative local government minister Eric Pickles is gleefully imposing on us all. This deficit is by no means the largest it has been in modern times, it is not an emergency.

In the course of an economic cycle, a government shouldn’t spend more than it has, and should leave some aside in case of troubled times. The previous Labour government’s failure to properly regulate the financial sector and rein in military spending left the UK more vulnerable to economic turmoil than it otherwise could have been.

Greens, including Caroline Lucas MP, will continue to make the case that the national approach to cuts is not the right one. But locally, elected councillors have a legal duty to set a balanced budget. The alternative would be to have un-elected council officers making the decisions on spending for our city’s services.

This leaves us the incredibly difficult task of minimising the harm caused by these budget reductions imposed by the Conservative and LibDem government. Council resources are far more limited than some commentators would have us believe. Their budgets are being centrally reduced whilst being given no new powers to raise funds.

This alternative budget sets out how a Green-led council would have addressed the challenges this city faces differently. It was produced in the very limited time the Conservative council administration allowed opposition parties to review the budget papers ahead of the vote. Information about this budget has been deliberately withheld to the very last minute. In forming this budget we have battled a culture of secrecy to understand the detailed financial plans for council services in the coming years.

However, whilst not perfect,  it is my view that the proposals here reverse the worst of the Conservative proposals, reduce the harm to the young, older people and the vulnerable whilst also leaving the finances in reasonable shape to face the further budget cuts we know the ministers in Whitehall will impose over the coming years. In a sense, it is the best that could be made of a bad job.

[Download the whole thing]

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notes from JK

Cynical, irresponsible, gimmicky – take your pick!

On Friday the Tory administration finally published the budget papers for the 2011/12 financial year. The papers claim the reason for the unacceptable delay in publication was late information on government grants. I don’t buy it and have asked the Chief Executive for an explanation. Since Tuesday we were told the papers were coming out the following day. Everything I hear lends me to believe that these were down to the administration – either playing games or struggling to come to a final decision.

Regardless their budget is breathtaking. It slices HUGE chunks of budgets for children’s services and social care. Almost £5.5m from Children’s & Families services, about £6.1m from Adult Social Care as well as smaller but harmful cuts from planning, licensing and central services including, for example, health & safety support work. Additionally the Tories propose to spend £1.1m capital funds removing cycle lanes from Grand Avenue & The Drove. Yes, that’s right, removing cycle lanes. They also wish to borrow just over £4.5m to refurbish car parks.

This is the year of the biggest cut in our central government grant, the cuts were front-loaded, so you’d think they’d hang onto every penny. But no, in a cynical gimmick to cling to power, the Tories propose a 1% cut in council tax plus a 5% reduction in resident parking permit costs. This is utterly irresponsible – and as there are waiting lists for residents parking permits this will hardly help manage that demand.

If one uses the admittedly imperfect analogy of a household income… Then this is like a family member getting a pay cut, and knowing more cuts are due in the future, voluntarily giving up MORE of their income. But when one of the family loses their job or gets a pay cut you focus on reducing spending, not reducing income! Income is the thing you absolutely need to stay afloat.

For the next two years the Tories are forecasting 2.5% tax increases, so the 1% reduction is very much a short-haul gimmick for election year. Furthermore they are making some very risky assumptions about inflation and waste tonnages, which are critical to their budget balancing. They are counting inflation to be 2% for the next three years, yet it’s currently 3.7% / 4.8% (CPI / RPI) which is quite some distance from their predictions!

On waste they are saying that they can save on the waste contract because waste tonnages are down due to actions by the council including promoting composting. Yet when I challenged the council about declining recycling rates, they claimed reduced tonnages were due to the recession. Which is it? There has been no major fundamental shift in supermarket’s dependence on packaging (though some incremental improvements by some of them) which leads me to believe that economic growth will also bring growth in waste tonnages again.

That’s it for now. I’m meeting officers next week to run through the many detailed questions and thoughts I have on the Tory budget. My colleague Bill Randall and I have asked to meet Labour councillors to discuss any joint amendments we might be able to agree on. We have until 28th February to submit amendments for checking by finance officers. Watch this space for more updates.

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notes from JK

Reform of councillor allowances & webcasts rejected

So, as I posted previously, I have been pursuing two reforms on the council: Firstly, that councillor allowances be fairer and meet government guidance, in other words simply adopting the report of the council’s own independent panel on allowances rather than sticking with the old regime. Secondly, given my successful tribunal over the use of YouTube, that councillors no longer be unfairly restricted from their freedom of political expression in reusing public webcast video.

Unfortunately at last night’s Governance Committee the old guard kept things just the way they are. My detailed request on webcasting arrangements was batted away with effectively a non-answer saying that the Tribunal judged me on a previous version of the webcasting protocol. True, but the Tribunal essentially found that a restriction on councillors using the webcast, which didn’t apply to members of the public, would be an unreasonable restriction on councillors’ freedom of political expression. And that is exactly what the new protocol does, it requires councillors to seek written permission to use a clip, when a member of the public under copyright fair dealing rules could do so anyway. I will keep trying on that.

With the Green attempt to implement the Independent Remuneration Panel’s report of March 2010 I’m afraid there was a heavy dose of condescending and patronising remarks from the old guard. Of course they don’t want to change things, that would remove some of the feudal control they have over their groups by handing out posts (with allowances) to folk they want to toe the line. So the Labour and Conservative councillors voted against my amendment seeking to implement the long overdue changes to our systems of allowances.

It’s worth noting that the Panel’s report to the committee last night, an excellent piece of work in its own right, roundly rebutted all the reasons Tory and Labour councillors had used to reject the proposed reforms at last year’s council meetings. It’s a shame the other groups can’t agree to change on this, especially when we have such strong work from our independent panel to lead the way. I can’t say I was surprised by their vote against change though, those two parties have been taking turns running the city like and old club for years and they want to keep it that way.

One more point: Last night’s meeting also briefly discussed the move to individual voter registration. I do have some concerns about the changes planned with this reform, but overall it is a long overdue move which will help improve security. Keep in mind this was a policy passed by the previous Labour government, the timetable has just been brought forward by a year by the new government. So I was surprised to see Labour group leader Cllr Gill Mitchell trying to make something of this with a press release attacking the reform “Labour fears consequences of new electoral system“!

In the piece Cllr Mitchell attacks the lack of pilots – when there are pilots scheduled, the lack of additional funding – when there is £104 million of additional funding for this work, and suggests that this could undermine the integrity of our democracy – when ‘ghost’ registrations (the polite way of saying fraudulent entries on the register) have been a major problem especially with postal voting. So not exactly the most apposite comments I’ve seen. It does sum up how Labour will attack anything if they think it will get them something, even if it was their idea in the first place! I’m more than happy to accept that all parties have good ideas sometimes. I’m pleased the government have abolished ID cards, plan to scrap the councillor Standards regime and will introduce individual voter registration. There, I said it!

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notes from JK

Full council 27th Jan 2011

What an extraordinary meeting last Thursday’s council meeting was… There were no high-stakes votes on budgets, the next Mayor or anything like that. But public questions and declaratory motions draw out some extraordinary outbursts.

If you want to know why the webcast is not available yet, and why the council HQ King’s House is buzzing with gossip, then this Argus report fills in the details!

I mightily enjoyed a public question by Chris Hawtree querying whether our city could become like Hove, North Dakota, USA (population: 2) if we didn’t deal robustly with the cuts. Even the Tories couldn’t keep straight faces as the parallels were drawn by Mr Hawtree.

In written questions I continued to press on open licensing of council data and also raised a question about how the council ensures premises let to clubs really are only used by clubs.

There was some posturing by all parties that night with Labour trumpeting on the Education Maintenance Allowance and School Sports Partnerships, Tories on Housing and Transport and Greens on Post Office closures and the local government settlement. Labour shadow ministers have confirmed that they too would cut local government funds — so if they wouldn’t cut the EMA and Sports Partnerships, what would Labour have cut? Clearly they’re not going to say so they can try to bank political capital on opposing every cut under the sun.

At the least minute Tories backed out of their Transport motion (which was rather silly in the first place) when they realised the opposition parties were going to amend it to bits. Their housing motion unleashed the kind of petty point scoring and ancient history lessons that makes me want to disappear under my seat. Cllr Bob Carden delivered on the EMA what I think was the speech of the night , reflecting on how he had once been unable to send his daughter to college whilst he was laid up at home with a broken leg, unable to work. A personal message, delivered simply and with heart. Cllr Carden doesn’t speak often in full council, but that was a keeper.

I had a go at the administration for failing to open up the budget process, unlike most councils which involve members of all parties in the budget detail from a much earlier stage in the process.

If I recall correctly all motions were passed (apart from the Tory transport one which they withdrew), but let’s hope the webcast comes online so we can watch the best bits!

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notes from JK

Having another crack at sorting out councillor allowances

Councillor allowances in Brighton & Hove has been a long-running issue of contention. For an age they have been deeply unfair. Putting aside whether they are too much or too little, how they are distributed across the parties is due an overhaul.

Responsibility for this work lies with an Independent Remuneration Panel who do very good work. They published a report in March 2010 which essentially sought to fix a lot of the problems with the current setup:

  • They sought to make each political group leader’s allowance proportional to the number of seats their group held on the council;
  • They wanted to abolish allowances for deputy chairs of committees (who in most cases do very little) especially as this takes us over government guidelines. Regulations suggest that only up to 50% of councillors should be getting allowances. Currently it’s 61% in Brighton & Hove and could be 67% if all available allowances were being taken.
  • They also sought to resolve the balance between ‘front-line’ and ‘back-bench’ councillors by increasing the basic allowance by 1% but not increasing allowances for senior roles.
  • Finally all of this reform would lower the overall salary bill for councillors by about £18k a year.

Now whilst only two Greens have special allowances, most of the Labour group (I think all but one from memory) and a large number of Tories enjoy such allowances as did the LibDem group (now no longer as Cllr Watkins has become an independent).

So it was disappointing, but unsurprising self-interest, when Tories and Labour voted down the panel’s recommendations last year — after an extraordinarily long delay in actually getting the report onto an agenda to vote on it. It was supposed to be voted on in March 2010 but didn’t actually emerge onto an agenda until October 2010, only for it to fall and the status-quo remain.

Well the Panel have done more good work on best practice, and good on them. They’ve stuck to their guns in seeking to reduce the number of special allowances and so on. Their work is coming to the Governance Committee this Tuesday. But guess what, the recommendation on the report (I assume on advice of the Conservative administration) is to keep the existing scheme of allowances for another year!

I shall be proposing a Green amendment to that, seeking to bring in the Panel’s recommended scheme which will be fairer, help us meet best practice and save £18k a year. Will any other parties dare to challenge the status quo and join us in supporting the amendment…? We shall see!

(I’m still mulling my traditional report of Thursday’s full council meeting. It was, despite a not particularly high-stakes agenda, rather a remarkable evening.)

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notes from JK technology

City Council pleads with staff to surrender their Blackberries

Belts are tightening as we get ever closer to the date when the 2011/12 budget has to be set for Brighton & Hove City Council. With £30 million of front-loaded Coalition government cuts to find, council officers are quite reasonably reviewing and challenging every expenditure.

A recent email sent around by the Council’s IT department asks staff to consider whether they really, really need their Blackberry. If not, could they give it up and perhaps live without a mobile phone at all? Perfectly sensible, there may be people who don’t really need their Blackberries but still have one in a drawer somewhere.

What’s interesting are the costs the Council apparently incurs per Blackberry: A device on a two year contract costs £432/year before call charges plus £105 in setup and licence charges. (The monthly breakdown is £19 for Vodafone tariff and £17 for Blackberry & ICT support charges)

So before a single call is made or text is sent, a Blackberry will cost tax payers £969 over its two year contract period. That much of this goes to Vodafone is particularly galling given their tax avoider status.

This is another symptom of the Council’s gold plated approach to ICT. No criticism of the current Head of ICT, this predates him by some time. The Blackberries came in under the Labour administration and carried on under the Tories. As did the huge all-encompassing Microsoft licensing deal. Rather than find good-enough solutions, the approach has been to dive for the big name brands as soon as they offer a hint of a discount from their pre-inflated prices. Then we’re locked in.

A small number of decent Linux servers and any smartphone would meet the messaging needs of the Council perfectly adequately at a fraction of the cost. Why are we paying license fees for Exchange servers and Blackberry servers?

Yes, let’s cut down on the unnecessary issuing of mobile devices and excessive use of costly services (they’re also cracking down on football scores and directory enquiries via mobiles). But let’s reconsider whether the whole architecture makes financial sense too. Almost a grand for mobile access to email just doesn’t seem reasonable to me.

[Note: Most councillors from most parties use Blackberries. As far as I’m aware this is the first time we’ve been made aware of the cost they incur. This is no criticism of councillors for whom Blackberries are a lifeline to keeping on top of Council work whilst juggling their other responsibilities. I personally don’t have a Council Blackberry because I just don’t really like them, having tried an iPhone I couldn’t face going back!]