ConservativeHome's Local Government Blog

Is the heart of easyCouncil to be found in San Francisco?

A recent article in The Times by Barnet Council leader Cllr Mike Freer said:

We could follow the lead of San Francisco. Waste disposal costs there are separate from other city taxes: residents who generate less waste get a rebate. Equally, if someone wants to pay the council to spend time sorting out their individual recycling items, they could pay us to do so.

San Francisco has a Democrat Mayor Gavin Newsom and many would consider the extent of its eco targets startling and rather draconian - often using compulsion. They have a "zero waste" target. But it is the success of the incentives aspect that is likely to appeal to British Conservative councillors grappling with the huge cost of disposing of waste in landfill.

> From Saturday: A three minute guide to the easyCouncil model

Planning for new homes

Regeneration expert John Moss says that getting acceptance for development would be easier by deciding the type of housing from the start.

There has been a lot of criticism of the Conservative Party green paper, Control Shift, which proposed scrapping regional housing targets and giving local communities a far greater say over development proposals in their area. The major house-builders, housing associations and housing lobby groups like Shelter and Chartered Institute of Housing have all suggested this could amount to a “Nimby’s Charter”, with the result of a BANANA situation, (building absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody). The consequences of this would be ever spiralling house prices and greater pressure on existing social housing.

The current situation often sees house-builders buying land speculatively, then negotiating to reduce S106 contributions and affordable housing percentages. Even then, their Housing Association partners often end up subsidising their purchase of the affordable element with social housing grants from Government. Those obligations ought really to be known up front and factored in to the costs of development and in doing so, squeezing the residual available to pay for the land first, thus reducing the amount of grant needed.

When you consider that the Homes and Communities Agency budget is £5.3 billion a year you can see why tackling this is of interest to the Treasury! However, and quite surprisingly, Labour’s planning legislation has created a framework which might actually help to deal with both these problems.

Councillors should pool knowledge on Council Officer recruitment

Mark Wallace, of the Taxpayers Alliance, says that Council leaders should check out the background of council officers with each other to ensure better recruitment.

Selecting the right council officers is essential. Get the right one, with the right attitude and ethic, and it is a great asset. Get the wrong one, and you could have serious problems. At best, they might just not be very good, but at worst you could get someone who either feels they should be running the council or even has a party political problem.

As we know, far too often councillors are undermined, obstructed or even actively opposed by officers. It is a severe problem for councillors, voters and taxpayers. If power actually lies in the hands of someone who is not accountable to the people, then it is a recipe for poor service, higher taxes and public disillusionment.

Thanks to the Standards Board and its absurdly overzealous approach to punishing councillors often for simply representing their constituents, officers have more power than ever over elected representatives. Numerous councillors around the country have experienced frankly vexatious Standards Board complaints from the very people who they are meant to be obeying.

A three minute guide to the 'easyCouncil' model

The BBC's Giles Dilnot talks to the leader of Barnet Council, Mike Freer, about a 'no frills' model of council services where the council provides every local resident a core set of services but where residents get a discount for not using certain services or pay extra for additional services.

Additional video: Susie Squire of The TaxPayers' Alliance and Kate Green of the Child Poverty Action Group discuss the easyCouncil model.

Tim Montgomerie

Democracy depends on independent journalism

Paul Canal, Deputy Chairman of Leyton and Wanstead Conservative Association and a Conservative Council Candidate in the 2010 local elections in the London Borough of Redbridge, says Councils should not produce newspapers

As a fan of Harry Phibbs's "modern conservatism" I was surprised at his latent conversion to the benefits of a Council Newspaper.  I was also alarmed at his evidently uncritical support of Hammersmith and Fulham Council becoming a mini Beaverbrook.  As a well known libertarian, I would urge Harry to reconsider his support for a local Government Pravda, much as Boris did with "The Londoner".

The ability of the press to hold to account those in power has been a cornerstone of democracy for 200 years.  Whether it was T Dan Smith and Poulson, in the North East's sclerotic Labour heartland, John Profumo or Jonathan Aitken, it has been the press that has ensured that justice was done and seen to be done.

The rapid demise of an effective local press is a profound threat to local democracy and accountability.  A lack of resources means that local journalists no longer scour the backstreets for the corrupt planning deal, the care home cover up or the simple case of fraud.  We are worse off because of it.  This reduction in scrutiny will allow those in power to abuse the system for personal gain.

Kensington and Chelsea freeze Council Tax

Cllr Merrick Cockell, the leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, announces a Council Tax freeze for his Council - which already has one of the lowest Council Tax rates in Britain.

In Kensington and Chelsea we have today announced that Council Tax will be frozen in 2010/11, just as it was in 2006/07 and in 2007/08.

For the current year we took a different approach, giving our taxpayers a £50 cash back dividend; that’s equivalent to a 3.5% cut for a Band D payer.

With this latest freeze we will have delivered a 6% real terms cut in Council Tax since 2006.

As a Council that has always been Conservative-led, we cannot find efficiencies from decades of Labour or Liberal Democrat waste. Instead we have to look hard at our services and find savings year after year whilst keeping our priorities in line with those of local people. That is how we have stripped out over £53 million since 2002/03 and kept our council tax the fourth lowest in the country.

One local by-election result

Lower Sheering, Epping Forest DC (Harlow) was a Conservative hold. Conservatives won 76% of the vote (up 1%) and the Liberal Democrats won 24% (down 1%).

The actual result: Lower Sheering, C302, LD 93. Turnout was 21.35%.

Recession boosts Blackpool

The recession, at least in terms of tourism, has been counterintuitive so far as Blackpool is concerned. Business has been booming in the city as people choose domestic tourism to save money. Blackpool Council estimate there will be 12 million visits this year compared to 10 million last year.

As well as the illuminations there has has also been a advertising campaign to promote European beach Volleyball and the World Fireworks Championship. In 2011 work starts on a major redevelopment scheme called the Talbot Gateway project on a site near Blackpool North station. The £220 million scheme will involve new hotels, restaurants, shops and offices.

Will it all be enough for the Conservatives to come back for our Party Conferences?

Should Councils employ private security firms to patrol the streets?

Labour run Tameside Council has hired a private security firm, Peak Combined Services, to police Armadale Road in Dukinfield. It has ordered the patrols, in response to uncontrollable youth annoyance and anti-social behaviour in the area. However, the Conservatives have slammed the patrols, and called them a “panic measure that exposes the systematic failure of Labour’s community safety policy in Tameside.”

Cllr. John Bell, the Tameside Conservative Leader, says:

“I am aghast that community safety in Tameside is now being put in the hands of hired heavies. Whilst I appreciate that the individual security guards should be subject to the usual legislative checks, they, nonetheless, have absolutely no powers, and no right, to be patrolling the streets in the name of Tameside Council or anybody else.

Barnet does do culture

Between now and the next General Election seldom with a cabinet minister's speech be complete without some invented or distorted quote from a Tory Council leader. In the case of Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw he always quotes the Barnet Council leader Cllr Mike Freer as saying: "We don't do culture in Barnet." Bradshaw said it in his Labour Party Conference speech. He said it in his Progress lecture. It shows he believes in recycling. But the problem for Bradshaw is that the quote, offered unsourced and without context, is not true.

Cllr Freer says:

What we said is that given the financial straightjacket the Council has operated in for the past eight years, we have had to make hard choices on our budgets. We have said we can't do everything and we had five key priorities and we have aligned our budgets accordingly. That meant we did not spend large sums of money on the Arts, we retained our grant to the Artsdepot and devolved the culture development officer to them. in a broadly middle class area we took the decision that our residents would buy theatres/arts if they chose and we would spend council tax on education, making the borough cleaner, greener etc. We have of course invested considerable sums on our Libraries (which is culture) to make them modern,. Relevant and fit for purpose.

If Mr Bradshaw thinks dancing topless at Glastonbury is culture then I think we've got it right and he's got in wrong. The fact that Labour Cabinet Ministers spend so much time attacking Barnet, suggests we've got it right.

Should Portsmouth City Council spend £970,000 a year subsidising a privately owned local newspaper?

Last week the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee looked into the issue of councils producing their own newspapers. My view on this subject has changed from objecting on principle to being a bit more pragmatic. Firstly because as my own Council has shown it is possible to produce a newspaper at nil cost to the Council Taxpayer through funding from advertising.

Secondly, I do think there is a valid role for a Council communicating with residents and in some boroughs such as mine only a small minority read paid for local newspapers. There are many issues where the involvement of residents as active citizens is enormously helpful to the Council achieving its objectives. (Would you like to start a Neighbourhood Watch scheme? Would you like to sponsor a street tree? Would you like to be a school governor? Are you in interested in fostering or adoption? Etc, etc, etc.) Then there are all the events and services which the Council is involved with which residents can only use if they are aware of them. We have a fireworks display on Saturday evening in Ravenscourt Park. The more who turn up the greater the revenue for the Council.

Scrap the Schools Adjudicator

Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, laments that £1.3 million of taxpayers money is spent on a body that seeks to frustrate parental choice.

Let's hope that yesterday's publication of the school adjudicator's Annual Report will be the last one ever. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator has only been in existence for about a decade and already it's costing taxpayers around £1.3 million a year.

All the adjudicator  does is to pressure local authorities and schools to meet bureaucratic requirements on admissions. As far as I can see, he does nothing to improve parental choice. Surely, the very existence of the Office is an implicit admission that parental choice is not an official priority?  Why not just give autonomy to schools?

The pro-establishment position of chief adjudicator Dr Ian Craig is clear from his mention of what is obviously a failing local authority without telling readers which it is.  This local authority, apparently, controls 17 secondary schools, 7 of which are National Challenge schools – fewer that 30% of their pupils are achieving 5 or more A*-C grade GCSEs including English and maths.

Essex defends having a high paid Chief Exec

Cllr David Finch, the Cabinet Member for Adults, Health and Well being on Essex County Council, says the Council makes no apology for having a highly paid Chief Executive.

This evening, ITV's Tonight programme will detail the salaries of a number of leading public officials including a number of Chief Executives of the largest authorities in local government.

Unlike some others, Essex has actively engaged with the making of this programme in an effort help explain the responsibilities and complexities of the job, the unprecedented transformation journey that Essex is embarked upon but also because we are keen to engage in a debate around pay in the public sector.

Essex is a £2.2 billion annual organisation has 38,000 staff and serves 1.6million people. However size alone does not make a particular salary justified.

Our ambitions for the organisation are without precedent. Conservative Home readers may well remember that Essex announced a couple of weeks ago the largest savings targets in local government history - some £300m by 2012 equating to a third of our annual net budget.

Alongside members it will be the responsibility of the Chief Executive to deliver this programme of change that literally means looking at every part of our operation and asking whether it could be done better or more efficiently or if it needs to be done at all.

Content to sit back and simply let the organisation tick along we are not.

In the last 18 months with the Chief Executive in position, we have saved a total of £98.5m for the Essex taxpayer. And we are on target to save an additional £30m before the end of this year.

Hammersmith and Fulham Council delivers a 3% Council Tax cut for 4th year running

Council Tax is set to be cut by 3 per cent for the fourth successive year, Hammersmith & Fulham Council announced today.

The news comes at a time when the council’s services have officially been judged to be among the best in the country by the Audit Commission and a series of opinion polls show residents’ approval ratings continuing to rise substantially.

The council has taken out more than £56 million worth of waste and bureaucracy over recent years.

H&F Council Leader Cllr Stephen Greenhalgh says:

“Some critics have argued in the past that cutting costs is unpopular – this is nonsense. What we are doing in Hammersmith & Fulham is hugely popular with local residents.

“All councils have a duty to respond to the perfect storm of social and economic challenges caused by Britain’s toxic debt mountain which is fast approaching £1.4 trillion. Britain is heading for bankruptcy unless we all start making radical changes that can truly deliver better services for less money.”

When council tax demands go through letterboxes in May, hard-pressed council taxpayers in other London boroughs will be charged hundreds of pounds more than four years ago. But - if budget proposals are officially rubber stamped early next year - the H&F plan will see average bills £122 cheaper than they were in 2006/07. If other London authorities increase their share by 2.6 per cent - which has been the average over the past three years - an average H&F taxpayer is better off by more than £600.

Cutting waste and bureaucracy

Over the past four years H&F Council has:

Do small councils need a CEO?

Cllr Brandon Lewis, the former leader of Brentwood Council, says small councils should look at cutting the cost of a chief executive.

Following the recent coverage of the view of Eric Pickles MP on the lack of need for CEO's in local authorities, I thought a few words on the way this can work in practice may be useful.

I was Leader of Brentwood Council from June 2004 to April this year (2009). When our CEO decided to retire a few years back we were looking at how and how we recruit. We would be faced with a cost to the council of around £150,000 or more for a new CEO and we were a relatively small authority on the edge of the London Boroughs. So we were competing with size and huge differences in pay scale just 10 mins from our own town hall. We felt there was going to be real difficulty in recruiting anyone of the calibre we wanted (as we had found with other senior posts) and with efficiency savings required we were struggling to work out how or why we would want to spend around the £150,000 on another member of staff, when that money could be used to improve front line services.

Brentwood agreed a partnership with Essex County Council. They would share their CEO, who could then purely focus on our strategic issues whilst Brentwood’s own Executive Management team and Deputy CEO could focus on the daily operational issues and at the same time save local taxpayers a lot of money.

Tackling child poverty in Kent

This week Cllr Paul Carter the leader of Kent County Council gave evidence this week to the Child Poverty Bill committee. the Tory MP for Henley, John Howell, pointed out that Cllr Carter evidence was also relevant to another matter - the requirement under the Sustainable Communities Act for public bodies to give a breakdown of spending in different localities. The Government has effectively wriggled out of the undertaking.

The point is to look at the total amount of public spending from different sources to see if some of the duplication and bureaucracy could be stripped away.  Cllr Colin Barrow, the leader of Westminster Council, has outlined an approach of looking at the small number of families with serious problems and pulling together public services to provide effective help.

Cllr Carter says Kent are following the same course. He says:

We are only just starting the journey. Clearly, Westminster is further ahead in looking at the 50 or 100 such families in Westminster and therefore in trying to establish what the solutions are, what the totality of public resource going into the support of those families is, and what are the better solutions that give better outcomes at lesser cost. As I say, it is one of our themes in the Total Place concept around the Margate renewal programme. For example, I am told that, regarding the assessment cost of vulnerable families, you get two, three or even four different officers of the various public agencies knocking on the same doors and asking the same questions, so the assessment cost is not what it ought to be, because we have not joined up helping and supporting families with either single access to the support mechanism or single assessment of their needs.
 

He adds:

In one shape or form, the amount of public agency support going to each of those families is more than £100,000 or £150,000. When you then start to talk to the health economy and the educational economy through to special needs, all of them are acting in isolation. With the health economy, the special needs economy and the public agencies, if you looked at the totality of expenditure on those 15, 20 or 100 families—more than £150,000—and thought about that pooled resource, would you start to do things dramatically differently that would lead to much more positive outcomes for those vulnerable families?

Mayor of Nuneaton turned down judging "evil" pumpkin contest

When I was child my parents used the excuse of not bothering with Halloween festivities on the grounds that it was "an American thing" - as if they had invented it. I make some effort for my own children but Cllr Tom Wilson and Cllr Sonja Wilson, Conservative councillors on Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council, and currently the Mayor of Mayoress, would not approve. 

They have refused to judge a pumpkin contest on the grounds the whole thing glamourises evil. Cllr Sonja Wilson said:

"We feel strongly about the potential dangers of letting youngsters become involved in it. We never encouraged our own children to join any Halloween activities because it's unhealthy. The Bible says not to believe in other idols and Halloween is all about promoting Satan. There is a risk that it could lead to other things like an interest in the occult and witchcraft – it's like encouraging young people to drink beer."

The deputy mayor, Councillor Clive Stringer, also a Consrevative councillor, stepped in to perform the civic duty. He said:

"As far as I'm concerned it's just a bit of fun for the kids. I was brought up as a Christian but I don't see anything wrong with children dressing up as witches and wizards and making faces out of pumpkins."

Although I'm with Cllr Stringer it is entirely admirable that Cllrs Tom and Sonja Wilson have stuck to their principles.

Eleven Somerton councillors resign after blogger campaigns against them with Freedom of Information requests

Newsnight's Michael Crick has the story.

Here is the blog; Muck and Brass.

Tim Montgomerie

Cornwall Council's financial black hole

The new Conservative administration running Cornwall Council has reported that it has inherited overspending on the official budget of £8.8 million. Adult Social Care is running £5 million over budget. The new unitary authority has also inherited £20.4 million of debt from the old Cornwall County Council and six district councils that were amalgamated. The figures have emerged in a Financial Health Check that has been carried out and made public.

Four "key objectives" have been identified – managing the 2009/10 budget, containing reserves and limiting borrowing, controlling capital projects through robust challenge and exploiting opportunities for improvement.

Council leader Cllr Alec Robertson says:

"We need to tighten our belts and ensure that we spend every single penny of council tax payers' money wisely. This report shows that the council has serious financial problems. We are facing huge challenges in the second half of this year and we need to take strong action to avoid another large budget deficit. We must stop the habit of looking at reserves or borrowing as an easy option. All services should be financially responsible for their own expenditures."

Pickles urges Councils to ditch CEOs

The Municipal Journal has a story that Tory Chairman Eric Pickles is privately urging Conservative Councils to look at abolishing the post of Chief Executive as and when such posts fall vacant. Understandably no commment is being made about rumours of what might be discussed at private meetings. But Conservative spokesman have been open in the past about suggesting some Toown Hall CEOs are paid too much and praising Councuils which split the cost by sharing a CEO.

John Redwood has been open in calling for such posts to go. It would seem reasonble that leaving abolishing the position should at least be considered as an alternative to filling the vacancy - as with any other Town Hall post.

The Municipal Journal think Pickles raising these matters contradicts localism. As I stated before when a similar point was made over his complaining at their pay levels, I don't think it does. He is entitled to his opinion. As well as being Party Chairman he was a highly effective leader of Bradford Council so council leaders would do well to listen carefully to his advice. It does not mean he is giving orders.