Tag: hove

Thursday night saw the last full council meeting of the year being held at Brighton Town Hall. It was the first without Cllr Smart who recently passed away very unexpectedly. So we heard a number of very heartfelt speeches marking the loss, particularly from Cllr Geoffrey Theobald.

On a more upbeat note the public took great interest in the meeting, the galleries were packed and we saw a huge number of public questions and petitions. Most focussed on the Bright Start nursery which the Tories have threatened with closure. The case for closure is not made, the nursery with a little management attention could easily be made viable. Rather than giving it a chance, or admitting that closing it in the middle of a school year makes no sense, they waffled. Then, with no forewarning, council leader Cllr Mears announced that a new consultation would be launched to see if parents and staff would take on the nursery themselves. I’m tired of hearing these ‘big society’ wheezes. The council is the way by which citizens are acting collectively to provide services. Why on earth should people – already with jobs and lives of their own – now run public services too when we have a council to do it?

Cllr Mears continued that evening to make numerous outbursts, often claiming them to be ‘points of order’ when in fact they were no such thing. Points of order are for highlighting breaches of council protocols and rules, not for debating matters or to get the last word as Cllr Mears was using them. Unfortunately this behaviour by his group leader put the Mayor Cllr Geoff Wells in a difficult position, and so he chose not to challenge Cllr Mears.

Anyway a Green motion on Bright Start and amendments to recommendations were both passed at the meeting, so I believe the closure plans will now have to be put on hold. Green Cllr Lizzie Deane delivered a superb speech, her maiden speech in fact, in support of the motion so victory was doubly well earned.

There was also a good crop of questions from councillors. In them I have managed to winkle out a number of commitments. Firstly Cllr Mears has agreed to advocate use of the Open Government Licence by the council, this is effectively a Creative Commons by attribution licence, thus setting the scene for much more use and reuse of council-produced publications and data.

I also learnt that the pay multiple for Brighton & Hove City Council is 13.1, which means the highest paid officer earns 13.1 times more than the lowest paid officer. Not as high as the worst offenders in the corporate sector, but still plenty of room for improvement. Cllr Mears agreed with my request to publish this figure as a regular council performance indicator.

I also used questions to pressure the council about their use of tax-evaders Vodafone and the decline of recycling rates in the city centre.

In other business the new, very much improved, council statement of licensing policy was approved. Greens were the only political group to submit ideas to the consultation process for this revision, and I was the only councillor from any party to attend the Licensing Strategy Group meeting which debated the policy. We also managed to pass an amendment which will institute a further review to expand the cumulative impact area. This area helps to reverse some of the laxity of the original 2003 Licensing Act, by making it easier to refuse new and extended licences in areas already with a high density of venues.

A number of important scrutiny reports were presented, including on city-wide 20mph limits, which stimulated heated exchanges with Cllr Geoffrey Theobald who just doesn’t quite understand the idea of large areas all being at 20mph being preferable to a patchwork of different limits. Or he didn’t appear to anyway.

Around this time Cllr Mears, in another abuse of council procedures, announced that there was heavy snow and more to come. So when the now-usual closure motion was called by the Mayor after 4 hours of business had passed, votes split as people worried about getting home. Personally I think that there are so few council meetings, and they are so important to the city, that a little bit of a late night 6 or 7 times a year is my duty. So I voted against the closure motion.

Unfortunately it did pass, and we emerged to find hardly a snowflake to be found. With her group outnumbered and out-manoeuvred had Cllr Mears used the snow to end a tricky meeting? We shall never know.

The remaining business was voted on without debate, so I couldn’t speak to the two Labour motions nor the Green motion seeking to control private rents and bring some sanity to the private rented sector.

Exactly two years go Cllr Kevin Allen had burbled a furious speech against a motion I had presented which opposed NHS privatisation. Both Tories and Labour had voted it down as their policies support PFIs and NHS marketisation. Yet this Thursday Cllr Allen was presenting a motion raising concerns over… privatisation of the NHS. Could it be?!

I share those concerns. But I’m more worried that Labour think they’re going to pull a fast one. Yes Andrew Lansley’s health reforms are shocking and regressive, but he did trail them in his health manifesto. Labour can’t now jump into the fight privatisation when for 13 years they pushed more PFIs and cracked the NHS open to corporate providers. What on earth do Labour stand for? It seems to me they like to appeal to ‘progressives’ but their agenda continues to be neo-liberal. Their shadow local government minister admitted on Monday that Labour also would have cut council budgets and they’ve not explained how or when they would have stopped the NHS privatisation process they started. Saying whatever it takes to win is not honest politics – it’s part of the problem.

Similarly, Labour’s motion on Vodafone’s tax evasion was all well and good. But Vodafone (and others) didn’t start evading tax after this May’s election… it was happening under Labour’s watch too. Anyway both of Labour’s motions and the Green motion was passed – though notably the LibDems voted against the NHS privatisation motion.

All in all a rather anti-climactic council meeting. Once again debate was cut short just before the notice of motion could be addressed. But some good results and signs that the Tories are floundering.

After the Tories had passed their guillotining motion to end last Thursday’s council meeting, all remaining business was put to the vote. I was delighted that the motion Cllr Rachel Fryer and I proposed was passed in that process. However, that we were not able to debate it was a source of regret to me.

Here’s what I would have said…

Full Council 21st October 2010

Speech seconding Notice of Motion on Cuts hitting Children & Young People

Mr Mayor I stand to second this motion as a father, as a son and as someone who believes that family is about community and not just blood ties.

Greens don’t believe there is an economic case for sudden, deep government cuts at this time. However if there must be cuts, they certainly should NOT hurt the most vulnerable and those least able to make the case for the services on which they depend.

It’s a truism to say that children and young people are our future. I believe that how we treat children – who are inherently innocent and trusting – is a reflection of ourselves and of what we believe to be important.

Good health, education and fulfilling work are important. Yet the cuts this motion notes say the opposite. The cuts say bank bailouts, subsidies for nuclear power and cold war era arms like Trident are more important. They are not.

– freezing child benefit for three years;

– cutting the Health in Pregnancy Grant;

– cutting the Sure Start Maternity Grant for all but the first child;

– cuts in Housing Benefit – which will affect families with children the most;

– a cut in Tax Credit entitlements for the poorest by withdrawing the Baby Element;

– the cut in the Child Trust Fund.

These and other cuts say children aren’t important. But that’s not what we believe – children are our future and our inspiration.

Let us show this city what we believe in. By supporting this motion you vote for hope in a better future for our children.

[ENDS]

Finally a full council meeting rolled around. There are so few in the year that inevitably the agenda was groaning under the weight of items included – and that was before reams of public questions, deputations and petitions were added.

Once again the need for more council meetings, which start earlier, came to mind – but the Tories will have none of it, and I seem to recall Labour too being opposed last time Greens raised it.

As usual I had a number of questions to councillors which, as usual, were not properly answered. In flagging up issues with the council website I was once again promised that a new site was on its way – a new site has been imminent for the entire 3+ years I’ve been a councillor!

I also continued my attempt to win a commitment to the council using an open licence for its publications, however every time my question is misunderstood or deliberately misconceived.

My final written question was again twisted by the respondent. At a previous debate on the long delayed IRP report we were told it was being delayed because a return to the committee system was imminent. This was a pretty transparent wheeze. To pretend now that the two were unrelated was taking the proverbial biscuit.

The one oral question I’m now permitted  to ask related to how local government cuts would have a massive impact on the local economy. The answers Cllr Mears gave were, at best, tangential to the question.

The meeting saw an excellent debate on the cuts being made to the Connexions as part of public questions, a deputation, a petition and a notice of motion. I think the procedure that results in a debate when a petition has more than 1,250 signatures worked very well – it’s a welcome addition to council meetings.

At long last the Independent Remuneration Panel’s report on councillor allowances was voted on. But as I have long predicted, Labour and Tories voted together to preserve their allowances – so that Brighton & Hove continues to exceed government guidance on the number of special allowances handed out. They also voted against group leaders’ allowances being proportional to the size of their group – which would be patently much fairer than the present system. Once again, it was the old guard defending their interests.

As usual the 4 hour guillotine was activated by the Mayor to end the meeting. However to my surprise the Tories didn’t vote for it. They later revealed that they wanted a chance to rip into my amendment to their motion before going home. Of course once that had been voted on they did propose a new guillotine motion which was passed despite a very mixed vote from Labour and Tories, only Greens consistently voting to carry on with the business before us.

I will cover the two main motions I dealt with in separate posts. I think it’s high time council meetings were re-organised to happen more often. This would allow public questions and petitions to be dealt with a in a more timely way. The meetings should start an hour earlier and we should stay until the work is done. And the Conservatives should be ashamed of their approach – they continue to guillotine meetings as soon as the bits they want are done with, thereby removing the space for debate.

Greens oppose Brighton & Hove City Council’s move to an ‘Intelligent Commissioning’ model, as I’ve detailed previously.

Commissioning creates a split between who buys a service and who provides it – which in the public sector is often rather artificial. Public services are not like the business sector and cannot be treated in that way. If I recall rightly, the council tried several times to outsource municipal waste collection before having to bring it back in-house after experiencing serious problems with managing the contracts with provide suppliers.

It’s much harder to manage and monitor contracts than many people realise. Which makes the House of Commons Health Committee’s March 2010 report on Commissioning [PDF] very interesting reading.

The report is fairly damning of Primary Care Trusts, the main NHS bodies tasked with commissioning. The committee also pulls no punches on the idea of commissioning itself. The report (which I highly recommend) finds that before introducing the purchaser-provider split (aka commissioning) the NHS had admin costs of about 5% of total NHS expenditure. Since then it has risen to be around 13.5% of NHS expenditure. That’s an absolutely huge increase.

“In the English NHS, the purchaser-provider split, private finance, national tariffs and other policies aiming to stimulate efficiency in the  system and create a mix of public and private finance and provision mean almost unavoidably that the more information is needed to make contracts, hence transactions costs of providing care have increased, and may continue to increase.”

(It’s worth nothing that despite commissioning the York study, the Department of Health never published it, the Health Committee had to winkle it out direct from the academics over protests from civil servants. The same civil servants were also rebuked by the committee for failing to provide accurate figures for costs themselves!)

The committee’s report concludes that unless some convincing, rigorous new data shows benefits for the 20 years of NHS commissioning, it should be abolished as a costly failure.

I find it hard to believe that the city council are going to be able to somehow avoid these risks and pitfalls. Commissioning would need to deliver some immense cost-savings (which nobody has the evidence to prove it can) to justify almost trebled admin costs!

I have asked, and will keep asking, for evidence to justify the council’s leap into ‘Intelligent Commissioning’.

So that’s it, we’ve had our council meeting and there won’t be another one until October. In spite of that Conservative and Labour councillors voted to axe proceedings at 9pm with two motions still to be debated.

The meeting started with my challenging the minutes of the 18th March meeting. Back then the Conservatives, backed once again by Labour, voted to defer the Independent Remuneration Panel’s report on councillor allowances (full background info). Four months later and the report still isn’t before us. In the meantime there are 34 councillors instead of 25 receiving additional allowances, which for a full year will cost the council £25k more than if the panel’s report was implemented. Back in March I had made a point of order noting that the deferral of the report would have budgetary implications. This point was not minuted and I asked for the minutes to be amended accordingly, but the Mayor refused to accept this. Not good.

Our new Green Cllr Lizzie Deane was introduced to the chamber and took her seat – well done Lizzie!

Next for me was the new system of questions. I can put as many written questions as I want to the administration, but they aren’t discussed at the meeting. You can read them online along with the rest of the agenda.

The replies were not particularly marvellous. For example in asking for an update on recycling figures Cllr Geoffrey Theobald gave me numbers for 2005/6 and 2008/9 but nothing for 2009/10 or a part of that financial year, which is several months behind us now.

I specifically asked for details of the licence under which the council’s financial data will be published. I would like it to be a very open, permissive licence that allows for all sorts of re-use and mashups. This point was not even acknowledged in Cllr Young’s reply. I also asked when they would start publishing the data, again no hint of dates was provided.

Asking about the council’s website, which has been due a rebuild for years, I received a lot of waffle about resident needs etc. The council website was supposed to be upgraded years ago, and every year it seems to slip a year.

Onto oral questions, which shamefully are limited to only one per councillor. I asked the Leader of the Council:

“In the face of drastic budget cuts which both Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors on East Sussex County Council are calling ‘unavoidable’, what policies does the Leader of the Council propose to put in place to prevent even greater inequality amongst Brighton & Hove’s residents?”

To which I received a rant about the Green Party but as far as I recall, no response to my question. I followed up by asking what evidence the Leader could provide to support her preferred approach of ‘Intelligent Commissioning’ would be able to meet the challenges this city faces. She could provide none, saying that because it hadn’t started yet there wasn’t any evidence. Which rather implies, as I suspect, that there is no solid evidence from other councils in the UK or elsewhere to back up the Intelligent Commissioning approach.

Next we debated a report on budget cuts. However all the report contained was a list of the reductions to grants that central government are applying. There were no details on when or how these cuts would be managed by the administration. The report was completely inadequate to facilitate any proper debate or scrutiny. It did emerge through the meeting however that the administration clearly do have plans written up, they just weren’t willing to share them to the full council. In the face of repeated questioning on several specific grants to community grants, the Leader started reeling off which funds were definitely secure. Cllr Mears knows the detail of what’s going to happen — she just refuses to share it with councillors.

I made the case that we should be open, inclusive and participatory in handling these budget changes. It’s only by engaging the entire city are we going to be able to find a path out of these unnecessary cuts imposed on us by ideologues in the coalition government.

A number of important reports were briefly discussed before moving onto Notices of Motion. We supported Labour’s motion calling for a return to the committee system of running the council. Labour have a bit of a cheek proposing such a motion after having tried to foist a directly elected mayor and several forms of cabinet system onto this council. Still it was good to see councillors agreeing that we all want a more democratic, collaborative form of governance if possible.

Next the two Green motions addressing cuts, first housing benefit and then cuts more generally as well as proposals for ‘Intelligent Commissioning’. Most of the way through the housing benefit motion, the Mayor activated the new guillotine motion supported by Tories & Labour in March. All debate ended and the motions were voted on. Both Green motions fell, without my having even been able to propose the one I had proposed.

Conservative and Labour councillors continue to show their preference for expediency over proper democratic discourse. They do their voters a disservice by their desire to shut down meetings rather than open them up with guillotine motions, limiting questions and speaking times. I have copied below the text of the speech I would have delivered if I had been given a chance. It is shameful when elected representatives are denied their right to speak because others just want to be home before the ten o’clock news begins.

Speech to Notice of Motion: OPPOSING CUTS AND ‘INTELLIGENT COMMISSIONING’ AS THE RESPONSE

In 1988 Eric Pickles, using the casting vote of the mayor, took control of Bradford council. On Tuesday 25th October, in a 12 hour budget meeting, Pickles forced cuts of £5.8 million from the council budget that night and cut £13 million within 6 months. His 5 year plan was to remove £50 million from the budget and restructure the authority to become a “holding company” that signed contracts with private providers.

By the end of that long October 1988 meeting Pickles had received a personal message of support from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as protestors roared outside. And now, the wheel has turned and Eric Pickles is a minister, unleashing his same awful vision on all councils in this country.

The cuts being imposed on this council are ideological – that is, they are completely avoidable. The country is solvent and credit rating solid, however Conservatives are committed to pouring yet more money into defence whilst failing to apply sufficient tax the wealthiest people and firms.

Let us not forget that Tories, LibDems and Labour all agree on the need for cuts – their only quibble during the general election campaign was when the cuts should start. Greens were alone in opposing cuts and offering an alternative path out of the mess, fully costed by economists.

Our motion speaks for itself on the cuts. We absolutely deplore them and believe it to be grossly unfair that the British government can find the resources to bail out banks and fight foreign wars, whilst dramatically cutting services to its own most vulnerable citizens.

Furthermore it is our view that Intelligent Commissioning is not the answer to coping with the cuts. We have yet to see evidence from any other councils that it works. Commissioning large corporations, who often have legal departments many times the size of ours, is a fraught business.

Only at yesterday’s health committee did we hear that a private contractor for the SOTC made an extra £750,000 profit last year, because of NHS commissioning which means they get the same fee regardless of how much or, in this case, how little work they deliver.

It cannot be good for staff morale, and it certainly isn’t good for the budget, for Intelligent Commissioning to require new directors at inflated salaries. We should be moving to a smaller gap between the pay levels of our staff, not a greater gap.

Of course there are times when a specialist product or service is needed from a private provider, we shouldn’t be re-inventing the wheel when, for example, software to meet our needs is readily available.

It is our view that the best possible value and service for this city comes from a different approach. It comes from dedicated officers, with decent pay and conditions, who are treated with respect and dignity by the leadership of this council. Constant reviews and the threat of being ‘commissioned into the private sector’ are not, in my view, the way to motivate people to deliver their best.

We and our MPs must fight these cuts as fiercely as we can. Furthermore locally I believe our response is for the council to come together, not to be split apart. We should focus on our positive spirit, that together we can meet these challenges and provide the best services possible locally, with public servants paid decent, but not excessive wages. We oppose these cuts and believe Intelligent Commissioning is not the way forward. Please support this motion.