Category: Blog

Budget under fire

Monday

Met with Theresa Grant and Ian Duncan to discuss the budget for Transformation and Resources.

I’m particularly concerned about:

• the ending of the mobile library service: according to the Draft Budget the termination of the Mobile Library Service will save just £8000 which seems remarkably low but the van is on a long lease and probably costs more to surrender than to continue. Given the low level of saving I can’t support the end of this service.
• Communications: Although there will be savings brought about by centralising the Council’s PR, Trafford has not put its magazine ‘Your Trafford’ into the mix and it’s being protected. I believe this is an insult to those staff losing their jobs. ‘Your Trafford’ is one of those anodyne and self-congratulatory indulgences beloved of councils. What’s even more infuriating is that the Conservative
  Secretary of State for Local Government denounced, Eric Pickles, denounced these town hall pravdas that end up in the bin. No doubt Trafford’s Conservative Group all nodded with agreement at this sage advice, failing to acknowledge that ‘Your Trafford’ was just another ‘Hurrah for Us, Aren’t we Clever’ piece of rubbish that goes straight to recycling. At a cost of approximately £100,000, it would more than be enough to save the Mobile Library service.
  

  Trafford’s answer to suggestions from the citizen’s debate ‘Some proposed that ‘Your Trafford’ be stopped was that ‘it is important that the Council has a way to inform residents of its services and performance, and other statutory requirements such as informing residents about how to vote in local elections. Loosely translated that’s ‘Hurrah for us’. With such a difficult budget, it’s simply indefensible to ignore the clamour for this to be scrapped.

• Whilst on the subject of publications, I asked about Trafford’s affiliation to the LGA (Local Government Association. I support Trafford’s membership of the umbrella organisation but I’m increasingly fed up with the paraphernalia that goes with it. All Trafford’s councillors receive a weekly magazine from the LGA and yes it’s another ‘Hurrah for us’ magazine. Now I don’t know how much the specific costs are but would guess it’s more than a £1.50 a week for each councillor and I haven’t come across a single councillor who feels its essential reading. And there’s all the other stuff that the LGA puts on with London conferences. I believe they can cut down drastically and reduce Trafford’s affiliation fees. I would not be surprised if we could achieve over £20k. Its rather academic as we couldn’t achieve the budget saving in this coming year.

• Finance – This directorate is getting a cut of £0.75m, nearly a quarter of its costs. Yes the public are asking for back office functions to be first in the line for cuts but Finance does perform an important function. Trafford has a good record in the collection of Council Tax. I would not like to be regretting this cut in a year’s time. There’s not a lot of IT enhancements going on in this team and the budget narrative refers only to training costs being reduced. This doesn’t fill me with confidence that the savings can be achieved. It was acknowledged that there were risks.
• Libraries becoming a Trust – This is in its early days of policy development but the Council has earmarked £40,000 to develop the proposals. There are savings that could be realised if the library buildings were to be placed in the ownership of a charitable trust particularly in respect of Business Rates. Both Wigan and Salford have pursued this line. But there are risks as well and I’m not sure what would happen if Libraries were to ‘fail’. Additionally we have Access Trafford – the customer interface of the Council placed in the libraries. How will this be affected? We really need to scrutinise these proposals before £40k is committed.

Tuesday

I wasn’t able to make it to Trafford Healthcare Trust Board. I attended a school governors committee meeting.
I also withdrew my objection to the ‘Bowlers Disco’ license application. I retain doubts about this; it’s a large music venue and will if successful bring three to four thousand young people at weekends to a very deserted part of Trafford Park. The main concern I had was of people being ejected from the premises and hanging around waiting for the coach to depart. There’s really nowhere for them to go unless they walk via Parkway to Lostock Circle. However the police feel that they’ve been able to extract agreement to conditions that evictees are looked after. In actual fact the conditions to the license are quite tight which is why I withdrew my objection; but we’ll have to see whether they’re workable or achievable.

Wednesday

Council Meeting – Chief Superintendent Mark Roberts, Divisional Commander of Trafford Police gave a presentation on a brilliant performance in reducing crime and increasing detection. The police are in line for huge Government Cuts and it seems criminal to doing this when we’ve all seen the benefits of effective policing.

Unfortunately we didn’t have a great deal of time to debate the five motions put to council. Having said that full council is really an opportunity just to be rude to each other. There are more important aspects of being a councillor and thankfully Full Council meets less than a dozen times a year.

Thursday

Holocaust Memorial Day – I’m not big on civic ceremonial engagements but I do try to make myself free for the Holocaust memorial at Sale Waterside. We should never forget.

Friday

Met with Kate Green and Labour activists outside Seymour Park Junior School for a school gate surgery session. Huge amounts of support for Labour and lots of worries over the damage the cuts are bringing.

Saturday

Labour Policy Planning Day – Standing only room – signifies the anger at the Conservatives and Liberal Democrat Government. People want to be involved in winning back power from their idealogically driven agenda.

image: Mobile Library by Bob Harvey, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Lincolnshire’s vehicle, but not dissimilar to Trafford’s version)

I watched last night’s programme from Andrew Neil with interest and would recommend it. The former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times newspaper looked at the increasingly narrow social spectrum from which our MPs are drawn. He exposed the similar route to parliament taken by David and Ed Miliband, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Boris Johnson, Ed Balls, Michael Gove, Yvette Cooper….the list goes on.

It’s a genuine problem. Andrew Neil seemed to be suggesting that we needed a return to Grammar Schools and went back to his old school which was now a comprehensive. Sadly the 6th formers he interviewed, despite being more articulate and worldly-wise than those interviewed from Eton, didn’t believe they had a chance to gate-crash the old school/University ties that had created this stasis. Neill’s right that it worsens Government, but he’s wrong about the remedy. There is nothing inherently essential about an Oxford PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) that is required for high office. Given the visible decline in the public standing of MPs, it could be argued that the opposite is true.

Frankly the onus is on the Labour Party to sort itself out. The Conservative Party has a tendency towards choosing its candidates from a certain privileged section and since it represents that class, I have no problem with them recruiting from it. Labour though does have a problem and it was sad to see Alan Johnson on the programme as the exception that proves the rule. However it seems somehow appropriate that he should have left office just before the programme was screened.

Andrew Neill focused in his programme on Labour’s parliamentary selection in Stoke in which the Constituency Secretary Gary Elsby was not shortlisted by Labour’s NEC to his eternal resentment. It needed to be clarified that the NEC plays no part in the vast majority of Labour Party selections. It’s only in by-elections and vacancies declared as the General Election is due it’s the NEC that decides the shortlist from which the local party chooses the final candidate. Technically (apart from the separate question of All Women Shortlists), the Labour Party allows local members a great deal of autonomy in the selection of candidates except in this small number of by-elections and late selections. However, interestingly (and Neill missed this), this minority of selections made on an NEC shortlist seem to have had a disproportionate impact at the top of the party.

Looking at the top of Labour’s current shadow cabinet it’s interesting to see how many came through the NEC shortlist:

Name	Position	NEC shortlist
Ed Miliband	Leader	Normal Contested Selection
Harriet Harman	Deputy Leader	By-Election – NEC shortlist
Ed Balls	Shadow Chancellor	Normal Contested Selection
Yvette Cooper	Shadow Home Secretary	Late Vacancy NEC shortlist
Douglas Alexander	Shadow Foreign Secretary	By-Election NEC Shortlist
John Healy	Shadow Health Secretary	Normal Contested Selection
Andy Burnham	Shadow Education Secretary	Normal Contested Selection
Sadiq Khan	Shadow Justice Secretary	Normal Contested Selection
Liam Byrne	Shadow Work and Pensions	By Election NEC Shortlist

Amongst those that did have normal selections, support from people at the top of the party played a part particularly for Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham. Ed Balls already had established his reputation before his selection.

It’s not that the party establishment overwhelmingly chooses all its MPs. It just seems that there’s a fast track to ministerial office that’s already in motion before the search to find a safe seat even begins. And if you’ve not established yourself onto that conveyor belt before you enter parliament, it’s going to me so much harder in parliament. That conveyor is a bit like the chute used on the Barclaycard adverts, it begins at Oxford PPE, weaves it way by ingratiating the chosen graduate into the world of a ministerial sugar daddy and then via a parachute into a seat ready to fight a quick election. No nursing of the seat wondering when the election is going to be called. No fighting unwinnable seats to cut your teeth and establish a reputation. Andrew Neill was partly right but he really missed the point that most Labour MPs still do it the hard way. And Blessed are the chosen few.

It’s not all bleak though, and I do think that the party is interfering less. Encouragingly both the Oldham-Saddleworth and Barnsley by-elections have been given strong shortlists to choose from. And my own experience in Stretford and Urmston was that once we’d got the decision on whether we were one of the seats designated as an All Women Shortlist, we received absolutely no interference from the national party in our choice. Labour is certainly more representative than it was. Unlike Sky Sports, the party is moving in the right direction. I want to see Ed Miliband look to the new intake for more of our shadow ministers; there’s absolutely enough talent there. Let’s move away from this transfixion with the old college network and make it a meritocracy within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Adrian Scottow from London, England, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I attended a presentation from the Environment Agency last night along with Labour colleagues and other councillors. The presentation also included an update from Simon Castle, Trafford’s Chief Planning Officer. I’ll deal with Simon’s presentation first:

• There is no date set for when the application will come to committee. It could be a few months before that happens.
• Although the consultation period is closed, representations are still being received and will be taken into account right up to the decision.
• The Health Protection Agency have been added to the standard consultees, although there’s been no request for a Health Impact Assessment (see letter from the Director of Public Health in previous post)

Presentation from Environment Agency

The slides from last night’s presentation will be added as soon as I receive them. The main point is that the Environment Agency’s permitting scheme is a parallel process to planning but runs entirely separately to the planning process. The project needs to pass both hurdles in order for it to operate. If the project was to gain its Environment Agency approval but be refused planning (after appeal), the project will not go ahead. The converse is also true.

• The application for a permit has not yet been accepted as ‘received’. There’s a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing as the final details of the application are refined.
• When it is received there will be a 20 day consultation exercise.
• Unlike planning, the regulating authority issues a draft permit for consultation – so it’s a two stage process
• Permits can change over time and the Environment Agency apply ‘Best Available Technique‘ standard to their permits. As technology improves, the operator must apply that technology. (This particular issue raised questions from Labour Councillors over Plasma Gasification which has been mooted by opponents as a cleaner and environmentally friendly means of extracting energy from waste). The Environment Agency representatives had received no guidance on Plasma Gasification and it seems they do not consider it is yet sufficiently mainstream for a view to be offered. It’s clear to me that the Best Available Technique is a notion that only applies to elements within a process and not to the nature of the process itself. I do not believe that even were plasma gasification to become be accepted as mainstream and the preferred model, that the Environment Agency would order the plant to be rebuilt to adopt that process. I do not say this right, I just believe it to be the reality.
  

  My view is that we have to be assured that the plant is safe from its inception and not take a view that it will become safer as technology develops. I take no comfort from the Environment Agency’s adherence to Best Available Technique.

• There was a lot of discussion around the inspection regime that will operate. Clearly this has become a contentious subject and views are polarised. I’m not reassured that even were the inspection regime be foolproof, that the poor air quality we already experience will not be impaired further and there’s the rub. It is already accepted that our air quality is shortening lives (in reality that means some of us are dying early as a consequence). Our focus should be on improving that air quality – actions to reduce road traffic etc, not allowing the air quality to deteriorate further.

I think the main message from last night’s presentation is that we will have to follow the progress of the Permit Application and contribute to the consultation process. I am particularly interested in any Health impact Assessment that is submitted with their application. If I understand the Friends of the Earth Guidance (page 6), there will be such an assessment submitted – although it may be called something else.

The Environment Agency will notify us when the application is accepted and we’ll be able to view details at the Environment Agency Consultations Pages

I have received a reply from the Director of Public Health who has made enquiries of the Health Protection Agency. The reply infers the strong causality between airborne pollution and reduced life expectancy of 6months per newborn baby nationally (Clearly this will be more where particulate pollution is more). Whilst acknowledging that the additional emissions in themselves may not exceed allowable levels the reply does confirm that “any increase in particle concentrations should be assumed to be associated with some effect on health”.

Mike Cordingley

I’ve lived near Trafford General Hospital all my life. The hospital was opened as Park Hospital by Labour’s Aneurin Bevan on July 5 1948 and we can all feel proud of what was set in motion that day – a National Health Service, the first in the world promising universal ‘cradle to grave’ healthcare.

Now, more than 60 years on that is looking more and more like an empty promise. There’s talk of funding shortfalls and the possibility of Trafford Healthcare Trust having to link up with other hospital trusts to make economies. There’s talk of the ‘temporary closure’ of the extremely popular and successful walk-in centre at Trafford General, too. And there’s a very clear threat to other hospital and general health services.

Living close to Trafford General, I’ve always felt safe in the knowledge that if a member of my family fell ill or had an accident there was a hospital on the doorstep where we would receive treatment. It’s a secure feeling, one which I am sure has been shared by many local people. But today I feel that little bit more apprehensive- and I don’t like it.

Nye Bevan described the start of the NHS as giving this country “the moral leadership of the world” and he was right. We judge a society by how we look after one another and how we care for the sick and vulnerable. We all know about the need for cutbacks in public services but in my view the cuts being made to our NHS go far too far – and may cause severe injury not only to individuals but to society as a whole.

The NHS is being made to manage within an overall budget which falls well below inflation, one which will not reflect the increased demand made on hospital services as people, hopefully, live longer.

Our predecessors 60 and more years ago had to fight for a free health service. That right was largely won, but we should never take it for granted. We should never forget the dedication of people – nurses, doctors, police, firefighters and many more – who work unsociable hours to help keep us safe and well. We owe them all a big thank you.

I would also like to wish everyone all the very best for the new year.

Image MikeDaveLaurence.jpg Author’s

I’ve a guilty admission. I do have a lot of time for Liberal Democrats and the old Liberal Party. Apart from my shared support for the Alternative Vote, I would cite:

• Charles Kennedy calling it right on the Iraq War,
• David Steel’s private members bill to give rights to abortion was a huge step forward for women.

Then we have such notables as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge who made a huge contribution to shaping post war Britain as a mixed economy and the Welfare State.

Whilst I disagree with the VAT rise because of its effect on the poorest, I can understand that as minor partners in the Coalition they do have to make compromises. And whilst I view the coalition’s broader approach to the economy and public services as reckless, I do not judge it to be a betrayal of the Liberal heritage.

Whilst it could be considered that worries over the Liberal heritage are none of my business, I’m astounded that the Liberal Democrats are swallowing Andrew Lansley’s reforms of the NHS.

Forcing the new GP Commissioning Consortiums (Replacements for the PCTs) to tender for services is so serious that I consider it to be the most serious threat to the NHS since its inception. As Lib Dem supporting Polly Toynbee in her Guardian article describes;

“For the first time the entire NHS has been put under competition law. The financial and clinical safety of NHS foundation trusts used to be the responsibility of the regulator, Monitor. Now its website proclaims: “The first of Monitor’s three core functions is to promote competition.” That means “enforcing competition law” and “removing anti-competitive behaviour”. Few yet understand the nuclear nature of this. It compels every NHS activity to be privately tendered. If the NHS is the preferred provider, that can be challenged in the courts or referred to the Competition Commission.”

It doesn’t need Polly Toynbee to warn us that global healthcare companies will happily run loss-leader services forcing the closure of NHS services giving themselves a clear field to raise prices when the NHS is gone. This is a recipe for destroying the NHS and it goes against everything that Liberals and Labour have stood for over the last 60 years. I could never imagine that Liberal Democrats would allow this through on their watch. It’s nothing to do with defecit reduction. It’s an idealogical driven assault on the NHS and the Liberals are allowing it to take place in silence.

How are Lib Dems allowing this to happen? I genuinely don’t believe this is something Lib Dems can support. It goes against everything I’ve understood them to stand for over the years. I’d welcome Lib Democrats to explain their position. I’d welcome more their expressions of opposition to this. I am sure that had this been a majority Conservative Government, they’d have been marching with us against these reforms.

How can Lib Dems keep quiet?

“TUC Save our NHS rally Manchester 29.09.2013” by Sheila, CC BY-NC 2.0