Doing all we can (but don't look to hard)

There's obviously a shortage of news in Bolsover as the latest "In-touch" screams once again that the Council is "doing all it can" to make savings. Including, it seems, recycling their own headlines. Obviously they don't fall into the trap of saying "we are all in this together" because that would mean explaining why they ignored the independent panels advice to cut the Councillor's basic allowances.

I thought I'd test the proof of this particularly pudding by looking at some of the biggest cost items. How much savings have they made in managing Council homes and collecting rubbish? Bear with me the figures may not be appetising but they aren't hard to digest.

Back in 2010/11 before the cuts programme started the cost of managing Council homes was £7.56 per week or £393 per year (I don't think this includes repairs). Now the Council has improved its efficiency the costs have of course gone down??????..... No. Actually they've gone up to £9.17 and for the next two years they are "targeted" to increase to £9.50 then £9.80. That means by 2013/14 the costs will have risen by nearly 30% in 4 years, perhaps now you can see why they had to foist a 9% rent increase onto tenants and seek to blame it on the government.

Perhaps the news on refuse will be better?  After all that investment in new bins and the savings with fortnightly collections. Well indeed as a result of this the costs were targeted to fall by about 4.6% from a target of £49.78 per property in 2010/11 to £47.48 in 2011/12. Oh if only wishes could come true.......In reality I'm afraid the costs in 2010/11 were £46.48 and in 2011/12 they also went up, not down, by 4.3% to £48.50 busting their own target.

Now perhaps we can start to see why they see Morrisons as a guardian angel. Unfortunately by the time they realise it is a mirage the financial hole will be quite a bit deeper and that will affect every resident of Bolsover District which is why it is an issue to Whitwell as much as to Bolsover town.

A plea for sanity

It’s taken a long time but finally Bolsover Council has told the public what it is doing with some of its money at least.

The Council minutes for the 25^th April 2012 have only just become available and state that the overall expenditure requirement for Clowne Campus is £5.884m and the cost of the mini-hub in Bolsover are put at £2.433m making a total of £8.3m if everything goes according to plan. The minutes don’t tell us what they hope to sell Sherwood Lodge to Morrison’s for but with opposition from the public, traders and organisations in the town growing rapidly, they may get a lots less than they think for it. In the meantime they are funding this entire pipe-dream by borrowing money.

 

Can we trust the Council with this mega-deal? Well in all honesty it hasn’t got a good reputation. Last year the External Auditors told the Council that they had “fundamental errors” in reconciling income and expenditure and “Significant governance weakness in contract arrangements”. Even a Council with the very best financial controls would know that in major developments, especially in a Conservation area, can easily have over-runs of 25% or more. On this basis Bolsover DC would need to be getting well over £10M from Sherwood Lodge just to balance the books.

 

The truth is that the whole deal doesn’t stack financially, environmentally, socially or for the economic health of Bolsover. The public of Bolsover want to keep Sherwood Green as a park and the traders of Bolsover certainly don’t want to lose Middle Street car park. Currently Morrison’s haven’t even applied for planning permission for Sherwood Lodge and the prospects of its being granted are rapidly disappearing over the horizon.

 

By failing to consult the pubic properly, the Council has got this badly wrong. It has rushed to the very edge of a financial cliff and is teetering n the brink. There is however still time for them to wake-up smell the coffee and put a stop to the whole calamitous exercise. They can then do what every other Council has done and start the savings exercise by implementing the findings of their own independent panel on member’s remuneration (which would save over £400,000) and then come out of their ivory tower and work with the public to make Bolsover better again.

Cluck, cluck

What happens when a Council, assessed by its own auditors as having had an “inconsistent and unsatisfactory approach to performance management” for several years, tries to cut corners?

We all know that times are tough but when last year I challenged the Labour leadership of Bolsover to accept independent advice and save over £400,000 by reducing their basic allowances I was ignored. Instead they made what they like to call “efficiency savings” by declaring a number of posts in the cleansing, grounds maintenance and housing repairs services redundant. Revealing that Labour Bolsover is similar to Coalition Britain in that whilst we may be “all in this together” some are more “in it” than others.

This year the chickens have come home to roost and residents can see for themselves how “efficient” the Council’s cuts have been. However looking at the length of the Council’s grass at the Jubilee street party in our village however we won’t be able to see any chickens at all. And it’s the same story right across the District of Bolsover. I’m told that one excuse is that it’s rained a lot this year. I think it also rained last year before Bolsover cut its Grounds Maintenance staff.

Long grass is unsightly but other cuts are more dangerous. Just two months ago the Council’s internal auditors looked at the arrangements for ensuring all Council homes with gas appliances have their statutory annual service. They found the service wanting giving it the lowest categorisation of “unsatisfactory” which means it has major risks” requiring “fundamental improvements”. Here’s a flavour of what they found:

“A sample of servicing records for thirty properties was examined. In eleven instances servicing took place over twelve months after the previous service, all were less than a month overdue.  It was explained that the delay in servicing was due to the length of time taken to replace an engineer who left the Council.”

So be warned when they tell you that their “efficiency savings” can cut front-line jobs without affecting services, or that they can make oodles of cash from property deals, if you look up the sky is black with chickens coming over the “horizon” already.

People Power

Residents of Whitwell, Hodthorpe, Belph and Creswell  have another to celebrate this weekend as Alkane have withdrawn their application for an mega anaerobic digester on the edge of the village. 

I don't think anyone who has followed the twists and turns of this sage since the application was submitted nearly two years ago would doubt that the single biggest factor in achieving this brilliant outcome was the campaigning zeal of the public pressure group Whitwell Against Alkane. They have shown that ordinary people running a well organised and mobilised campaign can defeat even the vested interest of a large and wealthy private company. The writing is now on the wall for any Council that does not have public support for its actions. 

Many people said that Whitwell Against Alkane were wasting their time but it can never be a waste of time to stand-up for what you believe in. It now seems that it was Alkane were not only wasting their money but tarnishing the reputation of a technology which can make an important contribution to prevenitng climate chnage if it is deployed in the right place. That is on the farm where the waste is produced not 40 miles away, hopefully Alkane now understand this.

It hasn't gone away

I occasionally wonder what future generations will think of the values and choices of our daily lives when they are coping with the world we will leave them. Whilst we've shut our eyes and ears, global carbon emissions have kept of rising as you can see in the latest report from the International Energy Agency http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/24/co2-iea-idUKL5E8GO6B520120524

Not widely reported in our papers, but like the rat caught in the trap we haven't even noticed the door limiting increases to 2 percent slamming shut. A 6 degree rise seems unimaginable, it is unimaginable, but that is the trajectory we are all now on.

However radical action on cutting carbon no longer seems to be trendy for international, national or even local governments it impairs growth we are told. So the answer to our grandchildren seems to be sorry we knew what we were doing but saving you from the full force of unchecked climate change catastrophe just seemed a little dull so we went shopping instead.

Greenwash anyone?

You have to feel sorry for Bolosver Council’s PR team. Tasked with explaining to staff why the Council is moving to Clowne they recite the mantra that the Council faces cuts, something has to be done, and moving to Clowne is something, so we are going to do it. Never mind the other, easier, “somethings” such as cutting members allowances.

The second line of defence is the wonderland logic that says Sherwood Lodge is too big so the Council is moving to a site that is larger. I’m trying not to be disrespectful to the Council so I have nothing to say about this.

When both these justification fails the PR team get all eco-conscious and say the Council cares so much for the environment that they are moving to a building that is more energy efficient. Given that Bolsover’s current climate change strategy expired last year, their climate change office group has been suspended,  the Cabinet appears to have given up on providing PV panels on council houses and the Council thinks nothing of uprooting a few mature trees to make way for a Morrison’s filling station, this claim seemed to warrant closer inspection.

Fortunately all public sector buildings are required to declare their energy efficiency.  The Council’s current HQ, Sherwood Lodge, was grade G, the lowest grade possible, in 2009. In 2010 it improved so much it just squeezed into grade E, but in 2011 it fell back to grade F. Clowne Campus has two certificates one for the main building and the other for the engineering block. The former is grade C but the later shares the same energy efficiency as Sherwood Lodge, it is grade F, indeed its precise rating is worse that of Sherwood Lodge.

Given that the Council was able to improve from grade G to grade E in just one year it would surely be more environmentally sustainable to have continued to invest in energy efficiency in Sherwood Lodge and let someone else, another college perhaps? use the main site at Clowne.

Follow the money

It used to be said that only three people ever understood how Council housing was funded and one of them was dead. But it matters to tenants, enormously.

One of the "bright ideas" of the last Labour Government was to get Council's to borrow a shed load of money to keep the rents from the Council houses that everyone thought they already owned. In the case of Bolsover the amount needed to be borrowed is some £94M. Unsurprisingly when the coalition took over they rather liked this idea as it raised a big wedge of money so it has already been implemented.

So when Bolsover Council officers drew-up the Housing budget and rent increase in early March they had to guess how much it would cost them to borrow £94M later that month. They took a prudent view and one of the consequences was a huge average increase of over 9% in the rent which was then approved by the Labour controlled Council.

At the April Council meeting I asked them what the difference was between the budgeted cost for borrowing in early March and the actual costs in late March and what the rent increase would have been if they had got the guess right. The answer was that the rent increase could have been 6% instead of 9% as the cost of borrowing had been £1.4M below the budget provision.

The next obvious step is to pay this money back to the tenants it was taken from..........but don't hold your breadth.