Sunday – Remembrance Day

Glorious sunshine at Stretford Cenotaph. Moving Ceremony – a few problems with the sound system but that apart, Stretford did itself proud and paid its humble and sombre respect with dignity.

As well as those who lost their lives in conflict, the sermon reminded us of the ongoing tragedy in the Philippines. My thoughts also tuned to my political adversary – Cllr Ken Weston who had sadly died in the week preceding week. Whilst he didn’t represent a Stretford ward, he was no stranger to Gorse Hill. I remember he exasperated the mayoral staff who accompanied him to the Gorse Hill Funday by staying much longer  than scheduled as Trafford’s First Citizen because he was enjoying the day.

Remembering Ken

Monday

Lostock Tenants meeting. Discussed anti social behaviour and Trafford general a+e downgrading.

Meeting of Shadow team re manifesto planning. More important this year. We’re in a position where any loss of Conservative seats could see loss of power for them. That said, Lib Dems are acting as though they’re inclined to prop the Tories up. Think the voters of Timperley and Village ; the two wards where the Lib Dems have any strength will feel betrayed if they do stick with the Tories. But Lib Dems in parliament voting for bedroom tax and Lib Dems locally voting primarily with Tories – getting to the point where their identity as a separate party is becoming an act of self denial.

Tuesday

At Manchester Town Hall for forum of Labour Councillors across the North West sharing best practice.

Wednesday

Scrutiny session in Salford for Councillors across the northwest. Presentation to deliver about Trafford’s approach to scrutiny. We’ve opted for a lightweight agile model of scrutiny, with the aim of only working in those areas where we can make a useful difference. We’re not audit and we’re not the learning resource room.

I believe the model we’ve chosen in Trafford offers the best opportunity to make a difference to delivery of services, but it’s hard work.

Late afternoon meeting of Stretford area Councillors with the Chief Executive and other senior officers over the masterplan consultation. Still a long way to go before we see any fruit. There’s still too many supposedly commercial stakeholders who will not engage in a meaningful way. I’m not sure whether the term predatory capitalist’ applies to these people; it seems that the behaviour is more analogous to a form that thrives on decay.

Evening Full Council

I moved Labour’s motion on the Robin Hood Tax. We tweaked the version doing the rounds. Manchester passed a similar motion.

I’m very much in favour of the Robin Hood Tax. It taxes financial transactions’ at a notional rate. I worry slightly that it’s seen by some nationally as new painless money. Its virtue is that targets speculative actions where money flies about the world many times in the blink of an eye. But it still is taking money out of the economy up to £100bn on some estimates.

I would really like to see that £100bn being used to reduce/extinguish National Insurance which raises a similar amount. The reason is simple national insurance is a tax on employed productive work and it is a tax on jobs. I can make a far stronger case for taxing the speculators than I can for taxing work. In a swoop it would give millions to the NHS as the nation’s largest employer, it would save a substantial amount off Trafford Council’s costs, but more importantly it would put money into the hands of workers and make it more attractive to take on more staff.

The actual tax take would remain similar but with a beneficial effect on the productive end of the economy which we still vitally need.

Anyway, the Tory Party is so wedded to the financiers and hedge-fund bosses that the motion was never going to pass.

Thursday

Meeting of Old Trafford Masterplan project committee with regard to the Shrewsbury Street site.

Friday

Transport for Greater Manchester Committee.

Evening: Lostock Community showcase – brilliant 

Waterpark under threat and campaigning stories.

(more…)

Full Council – a little background

Full council meets once every two months or so. At this time of the year it’s a little more often, because it’s the time of setting budgets. The full council meeting perhaps surprisingly, is not a major part of the councillor’s workload. And for that small mercy I’m thankful.

I don’t want to single out Trafford. Most councillors I meet from other towns tell me similar stories. And if you Google ‘Council Chamber’ and click on images, your screen fills with thumbnails of identikit forums facing a throne upon which the mayor presides from Aberystwyth to York. The lack of variety is striking but Trafford is the place I know.

For anyone that’s not witnessed Trafford’s full council (i.e. nearly everyone I’ve ever met), it’s a mixture of mock ceremony and fake heritage. It’s a bit amateur-dramatics in an endearing sort of way. When we speak we strike heroic or accusing poses. We do have some good speakers on both sides of the chamber but limits of 2 or 3 minutes on speeches make it a difficult discipline to master. It is confrontational and the chamber layout is designed to support that.

Does it allow the main points to be aired?

I don’t know that it does.

Does it serve the public?

Very doubtful.

Should it change?

Most certainly.

Will it change?

Not in the next hundred years!

I thought it was interesting a few years back just as I was elected in 2006 that the Conservatives had such a reaction to their proposal to move the town hall to a new site apparently/allegedly at no cost. There was a real public outcry. The familiar town hall on Talbot Road became a listed building in answer to the threat and battle lines were drawn. However, there was almost no discussion about what 21^st century democracy should look like. There was very little debate about whether a new building was an opportunity to reframe the relationship with voters? Wherever we had a town hall we were going to get a council chamber on the lines of what had preceded it and that exists in every other town hall in this country. It seems people like the tradition.

I think you could call me an iconoclast. The meeting of full council is an affront to local democracy. It serves little purpose other than to inflate the egos of those who sit on the stage.

Anyway, back to last night

Dave Acton spoke very well on the need to maintain a fire service for the whole of Greater Manchester. And Laurence Walsh spoke powerfully on the threat to care standards in contracts to private providers if we didn’t build into those contracts a commitment to good employment practices such as the living wage.

In terms of decisions Council adopted the Council Tax support scheme it has designed to replace the Council Tax Benefit that the Tory Government has abolished. It’s yet another cut affecting the poorest. I hate the idea of devolving benefit design to local authorities. It is a waste of resources to all be redesigning benefits at the same time plus it creates anomalies. This should have stayed with central government.

It’s striking that in this same week the leader of Trafford Council is having to plead with ministers on behalf of all of Greater Manchester for an extra High Speed Rail station at the airport. The Government is delegating things like benefits to councils but when it comes to stations on a strategic line, we have to go begging. The Government is getting so much wrong it’s causing real hardship and delaying the recovery.

Mike Cordingley

These are my views – feel free to comment

Thoughts on the Council Executive Meeting of 30th July
(a long meeting of many parts)

Annual Report from Trafford Community Leisure Trust

Jo Cherrett from the trust gave very upbeat feedback speaking to a summary of the annual report. The trust has performed well over the year. Key achievements were:

• an increase of 10% in attendances,
• Swimming has increased against a national downward trend,
• Active Trafford – the leisure trusts concessionary scheme for the over 65s, disabled, unemployed and other groups achieved a 31% increase in attendances

These are good results. I’d have liked assessment of risks and difficult to exploit opportunities.

In Gorse Hill and the north of Trafford generally, one of the key pressures is the demand on football pitches – indications suggest demand is outstripping supply. Additionally there is often a tension between field users, whether they be dog walkers or those simply enjoying open spaces and the clubs who want to use the space. There could be another flashpoint developing at Lees Field in Davyhulme. We’ve certainly seen our share in Gorse Hill. It’s a challenge to councillors to try to reach a compromise. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don’t.

Due to demand we’re seeing all-weather pitches being adopted more and more. By definition these pitches are taking away some accessible grassed field-space, but they do allow for more participation. Frustratingly, I still don’t see sufficient access to school fields or facilities.

I applaud Stretford High School for pursuing the Stretford Sports Village vision with the leisure trust. I know it’s been controversial, I know there’s still grievance that some of it is on parkland, but I do look forward to seeing it in full swing and being fully utilised by school and community. The challenge now is to get more schools to fully commit to partnering their communities and to get more usage of their sporting facilities.

image: author’s own

Monday

Meeting of member development (see previous post on working together)

Stretford Neighbourhood Forum – A dreadful meeting. The Tories dictate the agenda for these forums and this meeting was so obviously a deceitful device to share some of the blame for their harsh budget proposals. Nothing original in that – what I found really brazen was that they’re only putting certain chosen items into the consultation.

Where was the budget for their lauded Transformation Team?
Nowhere to be seen – not up for discussion.

What happens if volunteers don’t come forward to replace paid staff in libraries, youth services and other areas?
Automated response – not programmed to answer. Please ask another question

As usual, councillors and officers outnumbered the public two to 1 but at the end of the process, we’ll be told how supportive of the budget proposals, the public have been. Deeply depressing.

Wednesday

Met with Trafford’s Corporate Director of Transformation and Resources along with Dave Acton and Barry Brotherton.

Thursday

Gorse Hill Action Group – Really good meeting. There seems a renewed energy to move things forward. Gorse Hill Funday was provisionally set for May 20.

Friday

Transport Committee in the morning. Not been a good week for the Trams with points failures and breakdowns. I thought it sensible to go by tram and fortunately the trams were fine or perhaps unfortunately as I didn’t really experience the problems they’d been in the week. Tram problems are nothing new though but I think the issues that have really infuriated is firstly the regularity, and secondly how the breakdowns were handled.

In the afternoon I had a sneak peak at the parliament channel as I’ve been following the Daylight Saving Bill which aims to give us an extra hour of daylight in the evenings and a later dawn. I’m a supporter. But there are arguments against and they should be listen too. However, what happened on Friday brought parliament into disrepute. I don’t recommend anyone watches all of the video below but it demonstrates the complete farce of the filibuster (talking a bill out – at one point they resorted to readings from the bible). Pathetic

Image

Excellent, albeit rushed, meeting of Member Development Committee on Monday night. The committee takes on a much wider remit than simply – training courses for councillors. At the moment we’re looking at the role of councillors in their community. With huge cuts to the spending power of councils, we’re looking to maximise the potential of the community in terms of what it can provide from within; and its ability to pull in funding from outside.

All the indicators suggest that over many years we haven’t done this well in Trafford. In the last Comprehensive Area Assessment (2010 – the analysis has since been scrapped by the Govt.), we were in the bottom quartile for most of the indicators relating to community involvement:

• Incidence of voluneering – worst 25%
• Involvement in civic participation – below average
• Percentage of residents who feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area – worst 20%
• Environment for a thriving third sector – worst 5%

These are appalling results for Trafford. If anything, the position has worsened since 2010, with the reduction in grants to groups and our third sector. This has led to VCAT (Voluntary and Community Action Trafford) being drained of funding in its role as the support for Trafford’s voluntary sector. So the training, advice, guidance it provides is by no means guaranteed in future. We know that firstly Trafford Housing Trust and latterly Blue Sci have been touted as partners to VCAT for a joint tender, but it’s impossible to ignore the mood music coming from those watching on.

But suddenly, despite this bleak backdrop, community groups and their volunteers are seen by the government as the shining saviours ready to spring into action to maintain services as staff are made redundant. We Labour councillors are opposed to volunteers being used to do the work of paid professional staff, but that’s an issue to be debated at Council later this week when we put forward our motion. The topic being discussed at member development was how councillors can support volunteering and community involvement; and that has to be a worthwhile aspiration. Simply put, it is something we’re not as good at as we should be. And to make matters worse, the council as a whole is abjectly woeful in its approach to this agenda. It’s an object lesson in how not to do it:

• 100 Days in Trafford – we’ll advertise a few things (in a thrown together web calendar) that were mainly going to happen anyway and the community will rush to take part?
• The implied threat that if you don’t volunteer to do this we’ll be forced to make savings elsewhere
• The general disregard for existing community groups and what they’ve been doing
• A lack of appreciation that communities and volunteer groups are not people that can be told ‘stop what you’re doing, we want you to do this (e.g librarians)
• A lack of interest in the motivations for getting involved
• A failure to provide adequate ways to influence the decisions affecting their area
• Neighbourhood forums provided by the council intermittently and tied rigidly to an agenda controlled by the council

As you can tell, I am really disappointed in the way that the Tories have implemented this. I see genuine risks that it will actually deter people from coming forward. But I’m going to acknowledge that Labour has a record that is mixed when it comes to community empowerment. We have been too managerial, too dismissive and too ready to believe we had all the answers. In recognising that fact, and in common with a growing body of people in Labour, (and Conservatives too, it has to be said) I’ve become really interested in the achievements of the London Citizens Movement. I don’t agree with everything they’ve done, but they’ve got an energy. They’ve got a can-do attitude that makes any regular at Trafford’s neighbourhood forums, want to weep in the realisation that engagement in Trafford has never amounted to anything approaching this.

So I think there’s real opportunities for energizing our communities. Councillors can’t do it all, but we can do a little bit to help. And I think we can learn to do things better.

Links

You can read more on London Citizens on their website

 

“break” by Annie Swingen, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It’s not the best picture to underline the citizen’s empowerment message. I wanted to show something more than a neighbourhood clean up. If you can find a public domain photo that shows citizens taking the reins rather the the shovel, that’s the one I want.