Entries Tagged 'Suffolk County Council' ↓

Gavin Maclure is one of the most sensible people in Ipswich politics and I agree with him on most things (although he was a Cameron supporter from the start, nobody’s perfect).  There are few Ipswich politicians, Conservatives included, of whom I can say that.  So I was rather distressed to see a sort of defence of Andrea Hill.  So this is why I think Andrea Hill had to go:

• She was paid too much.  That may not have been her fault, but they could have got a decent chief executive for far less.
• She controlled the councillors rather than the other way round
• This meant that needless and politically toxic arguments over crossing patrols and libraries were allowed to brew, when if councillors were in control they would have been headed off
• These tangental arguments meant that a decent policy, New Directions, where retaining services in budget cuts trumped keeping staff, was scuppered with no clear replacement
• She had a cavalier attitude towards expenses which neither Gavin nor I could get away with in the private sector
• She was far, far, far too close to BT which gave the impression that Customer Services Direct was not monitored adequately
• And she was paid too much, or have I mentioned that before?

A lot of this was also an argument for getting rid of Jeremy Pembroke and a lot of us ignored that for too long because of the man’s fundamental decency.  I’ll take that criticism.  But Andrea needed to go as well.

I’m prepared to defend high salaries, just not in a council.

The Conservative group on the County Council are electing a new leader.  I don’t know any of the three candidates (although I have had some dealings with Guy McGregor).  I don’t really have an opinion on who it should be, but I do have an opinion about what they should do.

Andrea Hill needs to go, by hook or by crook.  The Labour negotiated CSD contract needs to be relooked at.  Cuts should focus on the Unison dues paying middle managers and not crossing patrols, school transport and libraries. 

There is for the first time in a number of years a strong Ipswich delegation among the Conservative County councillors and they could be crucial in setting the tone for the new leadership.  Let’s hope that these concerns are reflected in this election.

Now Jeremy Pembroke has gone why is Andrea Hill still around?

Jeremy Pembroke may have made a fatal mistake in viewing part of his job as protecting over paid public sector paper shufflers at the expense of the public, which is currently the only job of the Labour Party, but he was a decent man and it’s sad to see him go.  It will not be sad to see Andrea Hill go.

Can’t she read the writing on the wall, or is she simply waiting for a massive redundancy payment?  Her political protector is gone, and they can find a good replacement at half the salary – particulary in these straightened times.

I was, briefly, at the library march, with about 150-200 other people.  There were a number of Labour councillors on it, Albert Grant handing out leaflets, John Mowles, doorstep gambling supremo John Cook and Sandy Martin with hair cut.  I did not see any of the three Bridge Ward councillors on the march – although Dame Bryony was apparently at the speeches at the end, which is odd if they are really that exercised about the Maidenhall Library.  So they must have been there.  After all I can’t for the life of me think why a councillor would go all the way down to London to campaign against the cuts where there would coincidentally be great networking opportunities while next week not make it into Ipswich town center where they would see the same old faces.  It’s so illogical that they I simply must have missed them. 

Anyway here are some pictures from my mobile phone, proving why photojournalism is not my calling.

Addition: It was Bill Knowles and not John Mowles that I saw.  John Mowles was not there and I can’t tell you where he was without revealing my source.  Apologies to both for confusing them, they must have been mortified.  Apparently Dame Bryony managed to hold up the Labour Party banner for some of the march and was there for the whole of it and although I saw the whole of the march go past in the narrowest part of town.  However if she says she was holding the Labour Party banner for some of the march she must have been.

The argument is simple.  There are too manyoverpaid civil servants working in local government (two absentee councillors come to mind).  The Tories should be about cutting their numbers, not defending them.

We’ve got to make cuts.  Andrea Hill won’t cut her salary, so we should cut her job.  Pembroke won’t dump Andrea, so he must be dumped.

Jeremy Pembroke is a decent man who is right to try to preserve frontline services by going after middle management in Suffolk, but he’s getting in the way of the message. Dump Andrea or step aside for someone who will.

I know this isn’t within the ward but Ben Gummer has got a real result with Holywells School getting the funding for rebuiliding.

He raised this issue with me yesterday and I congratulated him as is proper.  I also told him that he’d have to do the same for Stoke High School.  It’s a good thing I’ve already  got the Christmas card

Sorry to go on about this but the Customer Service Direct contract is looking more expensive every time it gets revisited.  Just to put it in context the overspend is more than two times this year’s savings.  Some of that overspend may genuinely be extra services that weren’t envisioned at the time that the council signed it, but few people who were not tied to it think it makes up the majority of the overspend.

As Ipswich Spy have proved the remnants of the Suffolk Labour led regime are remarkably complacent about this.  Paraphrasing former senior comrade Julian Swainson, Ipswich Spy said “As our eagle eyed reader from up Norfolk way pointed out, the big problem with the CSD contract is the lack of scrutiny of the contract since 2005.”  Even as partisan sniping that fails, as a Labour opposition would be a crucial part of that scrutiny.

And that’s before pointing out that despite Jeremy Pembroke’s other failings, at least he made sure a County Councillor was named to the board, something that doesn’t seem to have been a priority when the red flag was flying over County Hall.

I was going to upload the Companies House documents I recovered on the Customer Services Direct fiasco, but they’ll take a lot out of the hosting account, so I’ll send them to you if you ask nicely at james@bridgeward.org.uk

You can get other company documents on Customer Services Direct at this address:

http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/f8dfbde3dc2fd06e06f904bd449563bb/wcprodorder?ft=1

…if you feel like crowd sourcing this effort.   It costs £1 per document, although you can get them all for free if you already have the £60 per annum Companies House account.

So Bridge Ward News obtains company records, submits Freedom of Information requests, phones up anyone who’ll talk and cross-references sources – in other words proper investigatory work.  Ipswich Spy take dictation from a senior Labour source.  That’s it.  Pathetic.

Ipswich Spy, or at least one of their authors, seems to have become besotted with the Labour Party and as Ipswich Spy refuse to identify, or even distinguish, their authors then it seems as if the one who takes dictation faster is the one who decides the tone.

Despite Julian Swanson’s complacency about the way in which the Suffolk Labour group set up the CSD contract (something even Ipswich Spy managed to point out) there are a number of issues that have not been answered, such as:

1)  If Bryony Rudkin could not vote on this matter why could she appear in press releases and marketing sections of provider websites talking about how world changing the project was?  How on earth was that within the spirit of the regulations?

2) Why was Suffolk Council unrepresented by a councillor in that first crucial year and a bit of the contract?  This was something that the much smaller Mid Suffolk never allowed to happen.  If Labour and Liberal Democats had won in 2005 would they have continued that abstention for the first half of the contract?

3)  When Customer Services Direct was set up it was predicated on other councils joining in so adding economies of scale, as was clear from Suffolk County Council documents.  Did Suffolk County Council bear most of the cost for this lack of growth, was this seen as a potential problem and were any safeguards built in?

4)  Just how many county councillors are in the “BT family” and how does this permeate through the various groups.  Is the fact that both the Labour leaders of Suffolk County Council were definitely part of the BT culture a cause for alarm?

5)  When Michael Gower said “The contract wasn’t set up properly” is that something that Labour will take any responsibility for?  And when he said that the “original contract … led to ambiguity” does that mean that there may, just may, be something more to this disaster than whether the already overpaid Andrea Hill stayed at two hotels at BT expense.

There has been a skilful media operation to tie the Customer Services Direct disaster wholly to the Tory administration.  The only problem with this narrative is that the contract and the corporate structure of the deal was negotiated by a Labour led administration, and bedded in by that same administration.  Jeremy Pembroke can’t use this defence because he was up to his neck in this as well – and that lack of opposition and scrutiny seems to have been one of the fatal defects in the whole scheme.

Andrew Cann is doing a good job of looking at the current administration of the project but it does mean that someone needs to look at how this was set up.  The picture ain’t pretty, and there’s more to come.