The Bristol Blogger

With the plan to turn the Bristol and Bath Cycle Path into a bus route formally announced, it looks likely local politicians will be readying themselves to play the infamous south Bristol ring road gambit.

This is an extraordinary technique developed over recent years where local councillors and politicos manage to point in two opposing directions at the same time.

Both Labour Leader Helen Holland and her transport boss Mark Bradshaw, you may recall, loudly opposed the south Bristol ring road during the local elections last year. This hasn’t, however, prevented either of them - now they’re in power - continuing with the preparation work needed to build the road.

At the last Full Council Meeting Bradshaw was even straight-batting Lib Dem questions (pdf) about the road claiming he knew no details of the public consultation he’s personally responsible for running this summer. Neither was he forthcoming on the funding required for the road from council taxpayers or the timetable the city council might be working to for the project.

Hardly the robust approach you might expect from someone supposed to be implacably opposed to building the road. Particularly when they’re the person doing the very job that could stop it going ahead if they wanted.

A similarly strange condition afflicted the Lib Dems when they were in power until May last year. They too continued to secretively engage in the preparatory work necessary for this road building project but now that they’re in opposition they are noisily opposing the project instead.

This bizarre attitude towards major transport projects in the city is already surfacing from the Labour Party over the Bristol and Bath Cycle Path. Labour’s Bristol West Parliamentary candidate, Paul Smith, announced on this blog on Saturday his intention to attend the meeting opposing the rapid transit plan for the cycle path organised by the Bristol Cycling Campaign.

Smith correctly says, “Public transport should displace cars and not cyclists and pedestrians - I can’t imagine that Bristolians will ever let this happen - see you at Cornubia.”

Smith is, of course, in the same party as Mark Bradshaw who - courtesy of his boss Helen Holland, Tory boss Bunter Eddy and Lib Dem leader Stevie “the Pudding Basin” Comer - has already signed up to the plan, featured in their West of England Strategic Partnership’s (WESP) Our Future Transport (pdf) document sent off to the government in the autumn.

Confused? You will be …

Did ya hear the one about the local political party that returns three MPs to Westminster and has run the city council for most of the last 30 years but doesn’t present any public accounts?

You have now. It’s Bristol’s confusing Labour Party. This party, that dominates political life in this city, appears to provide no coherent financial information whatsoever to the electorate on how it might be operating its finances.

Since 2001 political parties have been required to present financial information to the Electoral Commission on any section of their party (”accounting units” in the jargon) that has an income of over £25,000pa.

So what d’ya know? None of the 43(!!!) sections of Bristol’s Labour Party handling cash that we’ve so far discovered has ever had an income of over £25,000pa since 2001! Fancy that.

This state of affairs should stretch your credulity a little when you consider the party, in this period, has fought two general elections, six local elections and a Euro election in 2004 plus of course it has had to administrate itself, run a network of constituency parties, ward parties and quite a few city-wide party groupings plus maintain regular contact with the electorate.

You might find it especially extraordinary that Labour’s Bristol West Constituency Party, in a marginal constituency where tough and expensive election campaigns on behalf of its former-MP Valerie Davey have been fought, has never, apparently, exceeded this limit.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that our local Labour Party’s funding and financial arrangements are so opaque, complex and impenetrably interlinked that they make no sense at all?

A brief look at Bristol Labour’s local election expenditure this year reveals that their funds are spent through a sprawling, incomprehensible and confused network of organisations - all unincorporated associations no doubt! - labeling themselves in various ways as ‘the Labour Party’.

This network starts at the ward level where we find each of the city’s 35 wards has a local Labour group spending money at election times. Then you find more Labour organisations operating at citywide level. So far we’ve discovered ‘the Bristol Labour Party’; ‘the Bristol Labour Group; ‘the Labour Group of Bristol City Council’ and ‘the Bristol Local Government Committee’ all apparently engaged in some form of fundraising and party political spending activity.

There’s also, of course, Constituency Labour Parties for Bristol North West, Bristol South, Bristol East and Bristol West. Again, they’re all spending on elections and are possibly in receipt of donations and fundraising income. Grafted on to these constituency parties - somehow - are also the well-resourced and staffed MPs’ constituency offices where appropriate.

As if this network weren’t confusing enough, you then find that these different organisations appear to be cross-subsidising each other. At the last local elections Labour candidates were generally funded by a combination of their ward level group, their local constituency party and ‘The Bristol Labour Party’. All these groups individually were therefore conveniently spending less than the Electoral Commission’s £25k limit in a year.

A cynic might say that the purpose of such a ludicrously complex network of groups - all sharing the same members - is to avoid financial declarations to the Electoral Commission and the public. So much for Labour’s “transparent and open” regime in Bristol then.

Indeed, if there’s anyone out there looking to launder some money you should try joining the local Labour Party and get yourself a position as a Treasurer or Secretary on one of these 43 separate organisations they’re running. How the hell could they properly monitor what you were up to?

Anyone with any idea how Bristol Labour’s finances actually work is welcome to get in touch.

Note: the beginning of our search into Labour’s election expenditure this year reveals that the Bristol North West Constituency Labour Party, the recipient of a generous £10k donation from ‘the Bristol Labour Group’, spent no money at all on these elections. We continue to dig . . .

Peter Hammond and the Labour Party’s promise at the last local election was to keep the city’s home care service “in-house”. We might have understood from this there would be no more privatisation of Bristol city council’s home care service under a Labour council. An idea that Bristol Labour’s union friends were keen to put to their home care staff members in writing:

We have established the need for a Council to commit to its inhouse service, for the leadership of the council to commit to deliver services directly and respect its own workforce and the unique contribution we make to the communities of this City.

This looks to be in tatters tonight. Green councillor Charlie Bolton reports on his blog:

It appears that the proposals being worked on [for the home care service under Hammond's supervision] did not include ‘not privatising home care’ as a key driver. I specifically asked this, and that was the answer I got.

Officers were also, again, unable to say what proportion of Home Care will be privatised as a result of these proposals.

This is not what Labour promised the electorate and is not what the unions told their members in May is it? The promise then was apparently not to privatise any more of the home care service. Why has this changed?

Now papers have theoretically appeared for a meeting on 20 November of the Care and Communities Scrutiny Commission, a meeting where elected councillors (and the public) can scrutinise the decisions of the relevant executive member - Peter Hammond. And this is what we find:

13. HOME CARE PROJECT: FINANCIAL ANALYSIS

Time limit for this item - 20 minutes
- deferred. Questions will be taken at the meeting.

(Report of the Director of Adult Community Care)

Normally there’d be a link from this item so that the public and councillors can access - what should be - public papers. Not this time. Hammond’s proposals on home care have been deliberately “deferred”, which seems to mean that nobody is able to see the extremely sensitive and controversial financial details of Hammond’s proposals for the future of the home care service.

Instead he - or rather the fall girl, head of social services, Annie Hudson - will take questions from councillors on the day. Although they will have no idea, in advance, what these financial proposals for the future of Bristol’s home care service are. This makes the job of properly scrutinising them difficult, if not impossible.

Hammond’s actions are an unusual interpretation of Helen Holland’s promise that “transparency in decision-making was absolutely paramount” for her new council back in May. Indeed Hammond’s process rather resembles a complete abrogation of the city’s democratic processes. What is in this report? And why won’t he let anyone see it in advance?

As we always knew they would have to, the Labour party look set to break clear promises that won them power in May. Although the suspicion is Hammond will attempt to fall-back on his non-committal statements in the council chamber back in May when he shamelessly dodged direct questions on his intentions for home care:

Instead of a simple commitment to keep the home care service in-house as they have appeared to promise, we were treated to vague, nice-sounding empty promises about home care:

“We will get it on a firm footing”; “there will be a level of stability”; “there will be a proper solution”; “it will be viable, workable, cost effective and fit for purpose”; “we will work with users, families, carers and the workforce”; “we will take a position on home care”.
The Bristol Blogger, It’s the Holland and Hammond show! May 22 2007

Whether Hammond gets away with his crude efforts at wordplay is down to Bunter Eddy’s benign and becalmed Conservative group, who we thought put this Labour minority administration in in May in order to keep the rest of the home care service “in-house”. Eddy and the rest of his party, if they really give a toss about the city’s electorate and the council’s home care workers, should be calling for a vote of no confidence if Hammond backslides on this. But will they?

And where this leaves Alun Beynon, the T&G bureaucrat who tirelessly sold his members the idea that Hammond and Labour were the solution to the threatened home care privatisation, is another mystery. The fact he also got his T&G members to directly campaign for his son - now Labour Councillor Sean Beynon - at the local elections on the basis that he would be saving home care - and their jobs - from privatisation begins to look even more dodgy now than it did then.

The Beynon’s are nothing short of a disgrace to the Labour movement.

Bristol City Council is looking for urgent savings in this year’s budget of up to £2 million. It is overspending on waste services (£1.5m), care for the elderly (£1.5m), taxi services for special needs youngsters (£400,000) and concessionary bus fares (£500,000).
“City Council’s urgent hunt for £2m”, Bristol Evening Cancer, 2 November 2007

The facts are: if you want to keep home care in-house then something else will have to be cut. We need to know what that is now. It’s no good taking spending decisions now and then trying to find the money in 6 months. We’ve been there before.
“There are going to be some stark choices ahead”, The Bristol Blogger, 17 May 2007

Having less-than-adroitly reneged on one set of ridiculous and uncosted election promises - around waste collection - through the use of a so-called citizen’s jury, a process handily managed by a Labour-friendly organisation in exchange for a fat fee, Helen Holland’s Labour administration can now begin to start reneging on their next ludicrous and uncosted election promise.

This is of course the entirely undeliverable guarantee they made not to privatise any more of the city’s home care service. After a six month silence from social services supremo Peter Hammond - who was presumably hoping we’d all forget about his daft promises in that amount of time - this last week has suddenly seen a mild flurry of activity-like noises around the home care issue.

Specifically, a document has been released, apparently by social services director Annie Hudson, outlining proposals from something called the ‘Home Care Stakeholder Working Group’.

They have basically made five proposals:

1. That a short term assessment and reablement service be established to deliver care for up to 6 weeks with approximately 70 in-house staff. The argument being that intensive reablement immediately after discharge from hospital or crisis can substantially improve independence (and therefore need for care) in the longer term.
2. That approximately 300 staff in the HCBU (Home Care Business Unit) should then aim to deliver approximately 6500 hours of service per week. In order to achieve this the HCBU will have to make extensive business efficiencies and aim to have only 15% non contact time.
3. That the HCBU should only take packages of care which are at least 5 hours in duration per week. And it’s worth noting that the HCBU would not be the sole provider of these types of packages either but rather they’d be a market partner along with the independent sector.
4. That the HCBU develops an area of growth, above the 6500 hours, delivering VSH (Very Sheltered Housing) care and support.
5. That domestic only services (i.e. Shopping, cleaning and laundry) should be provided elsewhere and not by the HCBU.

Excellent eh? But what the hell does it all mean? Well, remembering that sage advice of Woodward and Bernstein let’s “follow the money”.

And here’s what Ms Hudson’s report says elsewhere:

13. The Home Care Futures Project Board chaired by the Director is carefully considering and costing these proposals in order to assess their viability, and impact of the wider care market

14. . . . The financial implications of the proposals made by the Home Care Stakeholder Working Group are currently being evaluated.

It is not possible at this stage to provide specific details of the HR implications

What’s happened then, during this last six months of silence, is that idiot Hammond has set up two committees - the ‘Home Care Stakeholder Working Group’ and the ‘The Home Care Futures Project Board’ - despite telling the Cancer:

“I can also state clearly there will not be a select committee to oversee the progress of home care as I feel that would hold things up.”

Presumably his theory being that two committees with the name changed are faster than one then? And in this time idiot Hammond has managed to convert his series of uncosted election promises into a series of uncosted aspirations instead!

Brilliant work Peter. Any idea when we might get a proper costed policy? And how much are you overspending by in the meantime?

Thank you to BristleKRS and Shawn for having a crack at the recycling press release competition.

Although I’m sorry to have to inform you that unfortunately it wasn’t a real competition at all. It was in fact a rhetorical device to draw attention to the council’s recent citizen’s jury on waste and the fact that they appear to have decided to introduce a charge - for the first time - for the collection of extra waste, which the council’s press release then attempted to disguise.

If it is the case that waste collection charges are to be introduced then the Rubicon truly has been crossed on this issue and expect, over the next few years, further charges for waste collection - on top of your council tax - to be slyly introduced at every opportunity.

What the jury has certainly not backed are Bristol Labour Party’s election promises. On a number of leaflets they published during this year’s election they promised a return to weekly rubbish collections, to scrap charges for bulky waste collections and to introduce special arrangements for inner-city areas.

They certainly did not mention anywhere anything about charging for waste collection. Strange that.

The Blogger has now taken delivery of the draft report of the citizen’s jury. Look out for further posts on this issue throughout next week.

Unsurprisingly not one local journalist has taken The Blogger up on his offer to supply them with a copy of the draft report. We can only conclude that either:

1. They already have a copy and we can expect an EXCLUSIVE from them early next week. This is unlikely because these reports are quite hard to come by apparently. The Blogger’s even been contacted by the Bristol’s Lib Dems asking for a copy!
2. They don’t need a copy because they know for sure that the citizen’s jury process was 100% watertight and represents a new dawn for democracy in Bristol. What’s there to criticise?
3. They couldn’t give a toss about original journalism or this city and will just publish whatever the council’s press release says about the citizen’s jury as fact.

But fret not comrades. The Blogger will continue to fearlessly deliver the news others seek only to suppress!

… Until Sunday. Here’s something to ruminate on:

Vote for home care get well-paid Public Arts Officers!

I Write regarding the article on home care campaigners. Well over 150,000 additional hours of extra home care are desperately required in Bristol.

Bristol Evening Post 30 July 2007
_____________________________________________________

Media Guardian 30 July 2007

First we had Helen Holland announcing her new “transparent” city council management culture. Then we had Peter Hammond announcing his secret uncosted non-plan for home care. Now Bristol Labour’s finance - ahem - expert, John Bees is getting in on the act and running the city council by newspaper too.

No doubt in the interests of balance, The Cancer dispensed with the need for a journalist or any kind of commentary or analysis in his particular case and just printed Bees’ peculiar ravings in full, unedited on the letters page.

During his rambling address to the people, or at least that increasing minority of people that still read The Cancer, Bees - after blaming the Lib Dems for everything… Ever! - attempted to explain away his financial management of the city council two years ago when the social services department went into financial meltdown.

“[The Lib Dems] continue to claim there was a £17 million deficit on the council budget when Labour was in charge. In the first place this was a projected overspend, which Labour stopped dead in its tracks, and Labour plugged a much smaller funding gap without any need for a council tax increase,” thundered Bees.

This, I believe, is a reference to Bees’ and his then boss Hammond’s famous fictional budget of 2005. The one where they expressed the dubious opinion that their social services debt was “just” £7.1m. An opinion completely rejected by their own Public Accounts Committee who said the debt was impossible to quantify.

Indeed such bollocks was their opinion, neurotic lightweight Hammond went off sick at the thought of having to present it with a straight face to the full council. Unfortunately Bees appears to have overlooked these nuggets of information during his correspondence to the people.

Neither is he very keen to explain the exact details of how he bravely and selflessly “plugged a much smaller funding gap” in social services. Probably because he doesn’t want to own up to the fact that he - along with Hammond and their then social services boss, Robin Moss - brutally cut services to the elderly and disabled.

Some of us haven’t forgotten Bristol Labour’s FACS (Fair Access to Care Services) stormtroopers charged with making these cuts. Nor have we all forgotten those good old days under Bees’ financial management when every meals-on-wheels application had to be personally considered (and rejected) by social services’ Chief Officer, the useless Bill McKitterick.

That was before, of course, Bees, Hammond, Holland & Co organised a large payment from the crisis hit social services budget for McKitterick to disappear and shut up about their party’s incompetent management of the city’s social services over many years.

The Blogger recalls Bees “plugg[ing] a much smaller funding gap” only too well. On a trip to Hartcliffe in early 2005, The Blogger was introduced to one of Bees’ former social service clients who was forced to personally plug this gap. We shall call him Jack.

Jack had Alzheimers and after a FACS assessment his day care service was removed. Instead he was left in his flat to care for himself and live off microwave meals. When The Blogger asked Jack to switch on his microwave, it took him four attempts to eventually get the dial to set to 38 minutes. When The Blogger asked Jack to turn the dial to five minutes - as he would need for a microwave meal - Jack was unable to do so…

Bees may well believe, somewhere inside his sad little mind, that he heroically stopped the social services budget dead in its tracks. It’s just lucky Jack’s not dead in his tracks too.

Not something that Bees’ and his colleagues on their mission of self-aggrandisement through the local paper are likely to worry themselves too much about now. Although social service users should be very worried indeed…

So where’s Labour’s commitment to “in-house” home care gone then?

Bristol Labour Party’s cheerleaders at The Evening Cancer and the T&G might want to celebrate a popular victory for the people but Peter Hammond’s recent outbursts in The Cancer on the future of home care raise far more questions than they answer.

“I am prepared to be very clear on this issue,” said Hammond, “The proposals for privatisation that were put forward by the Liberal Democrats in March have been stopped. The second stage of the process has also been stopped.”

All well and good. But what next? There’s plenty of warm words and vague promises from Hammond: “What we will be doing is going back and consulting with users and workers and looking at how we can improve the service and increase levels of service. This will be done with the active involvement of the home care workforce and the users”

This is all very nice but he’s failed to provide even a vague outline of what his intentions for the service really are; he’s failed to rule out further privatisation of the service by his own party; he’s failed to commit to an “in-house” service and he’s failed to explain where he intends to get the money from to “improve the service and increase levels of service” in a way compatible with Labour’s election promises.

In something of a first - even for the Bristol Labour Party - Hammond has in fact announced an uncosted non-plan! This type of nonsense might send the imbeciles down at The Cancer - who seem to have given up on analysis and objectivity when it comes to the home care service - and Hammond’s friends at the T&G into raptures but it’s ringing alarm bells among those a little more aware of the financial realities of social service provision under New Labour.

Hammond wandering around the social services department with his notepad and pen having an open-ended discussion with home care staff and users and drawing up a crazed wish-list does not constitute a plan. Neither is it a realistic approach for very long given tight social services budgets generally across the country and particularly in Bristol, still supposedly the subject of a social services financial recovery plan after chaos in the department just two years ago.

So what is the real plan Peter? Are you overspending any budgets while you devise it? And who’s going to pick up the tab?

Last time round it was your day care users…

The first signs of the chaos about to be unleashed by new social services boss Peter Hammond emerged this week after his plan to reconstitute the ‘Adult Social Care Select Committee’ was hastily cancelled via the pages of The Evening Cancer.

The idea to reconvene the select committee to “reconsider” the privatisation of the council’s home care service was, of course, originally proposed by the Lib Dems at the last full council meeting and voted down by Labour, the Tories and the Greens as an inadequate response.

Labour’s plan to steal the Lib Dem policy was first revealed by less-than-impressed Green councillor Charlie Bolton on his blog on Tuesday. The move was then confirmed by new Lib Dem councillor Alex Woodman on Wednesday along with audible howls of Lib Dem derision.

Hammond, perhaps realising that pursuing a Lib Dem proposal he had rubbished just a week earlier may not be the smartest political move, then rushed to The Cancer to issue an immediate denial that he had ever even considered setting up such a committee:

“I can also state clearly there will not be a select committee to oversee the progress of home care as I feel that would hold things up.”

Utter rubbish. A brief look at the city council website reveals that an ‘Adult Social Care Select Committee’ to be chaired by Hammond’s colleague John Bees was set up to be active from 22 May 2007. So it seems Hammond is telling The Cancer politically expedient porkies that the newspaper seems only too happy to print.

In place of this hurriedly cancelled select committee, Hammond told The Cancer, “What we will be doing is going back and consulting with users and workers and looking at how we can improve the service and increase levels of service.”

This is actually quite a revelation. As more informed observers have always suspected, the Labour group, despite election promises to keep homecare “in-house”, don’t actually have a plan of any kind for home care at present beyond uncosted aspirations. Although Hammond has at least now deemed to set out a vague process for obtaining this plan.

Quite how Hammond’s process will differ from a select committee process is not something Hammond’s bothers to mention. Neither is it explored by The Cancer, despite the fact they assigned three journalists the task of copying out Hammond’s press release.

Certainly a select committee would consult with users and workers to look at how the service can improve and increase its levels of service. Indeed, it seems that this already happened at last year’s select committee - again chaired by Hammond’s colleague Bees - that concluded that the service needed to be privatised.

A conclusion later rejected by Bees and Hammond when they realised it may be electorally expedient to obtain the support and cash of their trade union friends and oppose the privatisation plans they had rubber-stamped.

The fact is Hammond’s latest proposal differs from working through a select committee in only one respect. Rather than the results of any consultation being considered by an all-party group, the results will be considered by just Peter Hammond!

This hardly sits well with Hammond’s leader Helen Holland’s recent statement that “transparency in decision-making was absolutely paramount” for her new administration.

So paramount in fact that any decision on home care by her administration will now be made behind closed doors rather than through an open, all-party committee! Brilliant. Very transparent Helen.

Coming soon:

Part Two - What happened to Labour’s commitment to “in-house” home care?

Part Three - The John Bees’ Guide to money

Part Four - Why hasn’t the Parrott squawked in the night?