Taking a quick break from blogging at the Festival of Ideas, I draw your attention to this story from the Bristol Evening Post:
Liberal Democrats on Bristol City Council have been accused of "bottling it" after passing up the opportunity of taking power, leaving a clearly stunned Labour Party still in charge.
Labour council leader Helen Holland had every reason to expect she would be replaced by the Lib Dems' Barbara Janke after the council's Conservative group announced it would no longer back Labour in crucial votes.
For those who are not familiar with the mechanics of local government, this whole process may seem a bit confusing. But it's really pretty straightforward. The Council is a club of which all councillors - elected by Bristolian voters - are members. The club has a constitution which defines how decisions are made, and how the officers of the club - the leader and the executive - are chosen. Other than the scale, the Council of the City of Bristol is no different in concept to any other mutual association such as a Limited Company or a Cricket Club.
Since no party in the council holds sufficient seats to have a controlling majority, the body is run by a minority administration. At the Club AGM on May 13th, the Conservative group decided not to support a Labour minority administration again - a good decision in my view - but surprisingly the Liberal Democrats chose not to have another crack at the job under their new leader (again) Barbara Janke.
The party political stuff is probably not terribly interesting to most people. Suffice to say there are significant differences in approach between all three major groups (and Charlie), and we all believe we're right and the others are wrong; politicians don't just divide into different parties because we like the aesthetic effect of all the different colours. See here for a Lib-Dem perspective.
One thing that leaps out at me from the Press Release is that - in line with the reshuffle of executive leadership - we have a new set of department names, and they are another step removed from reality.
It was bad enough last year - this is the list of Executive Members and their respective departments in 2007/08:
Helen Holland Leader of the Council
Peter Hammond Deputy Leader and Executive Member for Care and Communities
Judith Price Executive Member for Neighbourhoods
John Bees Executive Member for Support Services
Rosalie Walker Executive Member for Health and Well Being
Mark Bradshaw Executive Member for Access and Environment
Derek Pickup Executive Member for Children and Young People
Chris Jackson Assistant Executive Member for Health and Wellbeing
Jeff Lovell Assistant Executive Member for Care and Communities
Now here's the list for 2008/09:
Cllr Helen Holland as Council Leader.
Peter Hammond - Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Cohesion and Raising Achievement
Derek Pickup - Cabinet Member for Care, Tackling Deprivation and Crime
Terry Cook - Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods and Involvement
Mark Bradshaw - Cabinet Member for Sustainable Development
John Bees - Cabinet Member for Transformation and Resources
Judith Price - Cabinet Member for Homes and Streetscene
Rosalie Walker - Cabinet Member for Culture and Healthy Communities
Now would someone please tell me what these departments actually do? Sustainable Development is easy - that's the Town Planning department, right? What about Streetscene? Is that the road sweepers? Cohesion and Raising Achievement - is that schools? Culture and Healthy Communities must be Adult Community Care. Or is that in the Care, Tackling Deprivation and Crime department? And why do we need a "tackling crime" department - aren't we already paying the Avon & Somerset Constabulary to do that? What does Neighbourhoods and Involvement do? And which department collects the rubbish?
One of my proposals for next year's election campaign will be that we get the local council out of the business of Tackling, Transforming, Involving, Cohering and Raising Achievement and get the organisation concentrating on more mundane tasks. Things that spring to mind include Cleaning, Collecting Rubbish (weekly) and Repairing Roads. It's time to remind the council that it has to stop all this high-concept thinking, get on with the job and keep out of the way.
15 May, 2008 - 12:14
Couldn't agree with you more about the increasingly obscure descriptions of Council responsibilities. I'll leave it to others more erudite to say if it's drifting towards some kind of Newspeak .
One wonders what the motivation for this is - perhaps to make them feel more important, dealing with, as you say, higher concepts rather than mundane reality. But does it not, above all, further distance the democratic process from the ordinary people on whose behalf it is carried out?
If I want to express concerns about the expansion of Bristol Airport, or the construction of the South Bristol Ring Road, or closing down a cycle path to build a bus route, how should I ever guess that these now come under the heading of "sustainable development"?
All right, an old cynic like me would expect as much. But do we really want to instill such destructive cynicism in everyone who has the misfortune to have to deal with the Council? Is it hopelessly naive to expect a Council to serve the people in a straight forward, transparent way?
15 May, 2008 - 17:04
I wonder what the difference is between "cohesion" and "involvement"? Would they know?
And I thought "deprivation" - formerly "poverty" - was now officially "exclusion". They can't even seem to keep up with their own jargon any more.
24 May, 2008 - 12:01
I love your description of the private amateur club. If we had a rule that no public servant be paid more than the PM - so no huge salaries and pensions for CEOs - this might not matter so much, but the sums of money they are amateurishly dispensing with are vast, and we can't afford them. The only remedy is for local government to be reduced to something more resembling what it was originally intended to do: to keep the peace, and look after the public places.
I agree with all of your remarks and sentiments, especially on the new appointments - except on rubbish. That is the one good thing the Liberals did. Collecting recylables once a week, and the residue once a fortnight, means there is an incentive to sort, compact, and recycle, and no need for the spies or fines we read of other councils employing. However, the company which collects the domestic rubbish and cleans the streets needs to improve its performance. There is far too much noisy mechanisation and pollution associated with their work, very thoughtless timing, and not nearly enough care in leaving the place clean and tidy afterwards. It is as if the management doesn't concern itself with the morale of its workers or their manners and performance.
The companies which collect from businesses also need to be curtailed in their thoughtless and anti-social behaviour. Far too many of them going far too often to pick up rubbish. Do offices really need to throw out so much rubbish and does it really need to be collected every day, in some cases several times a day, by these huge, noisy, and polluting lorries?
People - and that includes businesses and restaurants as well as householders - who insist on keeping their rubbish on the pavement all week would do that even if it were all collected every day. They need to be tackled on this separately, and would have been in the past as a matter of course. You never see a dustbin in the street in Bath. But the more Bristolians get away with keeping their rubbish on the pavements the more of their fellow citizens join them in the habit. Collecting everything once a week wouldn't stop that.
This should all have been attended to long ago by the cosy college green club, and conditions for council tax payers made as nice as for the members of that club, which I notice is always spick and span, and very nicely catered for in every way.
24 May, 2008 - 18:57
Elizabeth,
Please ensure you are sitting down before your read this, as you're not going to like it.
The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is paid a salary as both a member of the House of Commons and as minister of state - specifically the office of First Lord of the Treasury.
As a parliamentarian - like all other MPs - the PM receives a basic salary of £61,820. Ten percent of that salary can be invested in the world's best pension scheme, the Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund. Parliamentarians also receive a staffing allowance of up to £90,854, Incidental Expenses Allowance of up to £22,193, up to £5,000 pounds of IT equipment, £2,916 of London weighting if they're in the Big Smoke, up to £24,006 of Additional Costs Allowance [a second home and the infamous "John Lewis" List], up to £10,400 for "communications" plus practically unlimited reimbursement for personal transport expenses and mileage, and up to 30 trips for WAGS and children. Have a look at The Green Book for the full story.
Ignoring the value of the pension (which is considerable) and the travel allowances (which are very nice indeed) - this is a total of £217,000.00 per annum. I have also not included the large chunk of cash MPs receive as "Winding Up" money if they lose their office at a general election
As First Lord of the Treasury, the Prime Minister gets an extra £128,174 on top of this, for a total of £345,363.00. (See here for ministerial salaries).
So I suppose I can reassure you that there are no Local Government Officers in Bristol earning more than the Prime Minister.
I must thank you for the rest of your comment, which is so good that I intend to write a new blog post about it. More to follow...
JMB
25 May, 2008 - 15:02
But I love it! Especially the careful detail you have gone into. Actually, I was thinking of Chief Executive Officers, as alluded to so vividly by Mr Liddell Grainger, not mere Education Officers. If you were to add the costs of CEOs' offices, expenses, and staff, to their salaries, pensions, health packages, and golden handshakes, I bet you could come up with a seriously indecent figure. Do try it for your next post - it would be beyond me. (And, as with the EU Commission, they can't be voted out.)
25 May, 2008 - 15:30
Here is another view on CEOs which I have come across:
What does a Council Chief Executive do?
Published by John Redwood at 9:23 am under Blog
Since 1974 we have seen the introduction of the Chief Executive Officer in to the world of local government. They arrived with the hated new counties of Avon and the rest cobbled together out of smaller cities and rural areas with differing senses of loyalty. They were introduced in the naïve belief that they would make local government more efficient and better managed, drawing on a false analogy with business. The bogus Counties have now been swept away. It is time to review what the CEOs have achieved and ask if the idea has lived up to expectations?
Link to Full Article
25 May, 2008 - 17:27
As it happens, you can get this figure from my analysis of the 2008/09 City budget
The total annual cost of the Office of the Chief Executive of Bristol City Council is £14,650,000 pounds. Using my ready reckoning rule, this is equivalent to a minimum of £76.03 added to every council tax bill.
JMB