Fine with us

Eurocrats threaten to strike over pay

Eurocrats, threatened with a freeze, are preparing to go on strike

I'm with Daniel on this one: Splendid, please do, might be quite nice for them to have a prolonged strike, interesting to see if anyone actually misses what they do.

Firemen strike, we have a problem.
Teachers strike, we have a problem.
The Police don't strike because it would be a major problem.

Eurocrats may turn out to be their own worse enemies if they strike, surely the wise thing for them to do is to keep quiet and hope nobody notices their (lack of positive) contribution to society. Might even be a good time to re-evaluate just how many (if any) of them we actually need...

You know it's an election year when...

Hull City Council plans to freeze charges for services

Far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth, but you can't help wondering if this headline would have happened if a) the council was still Labour controlled (and therefore didn't need to "bribe" people in reasonably safe Labour parliamentary seats) or b) the Lib Dems weren't throwing an enormous amount of resources at Hull North, one of their target seats. Still, a freeze in the growth of taxation has to be a good start, although of course we still have no idea whether fire and policing will also have a 0% change.

What I want to know is where are the plans to be able to announce a reduction in council tax next year? What about the year after? Where is Carl Minns announcing that he is going to reduce the burden of council tax by looking seriously at each and every department and asking them to justify their budget for the year? Where are the council chiefs coming up with ideas on how to encourage existing local businesses and attract new ones by reducing the burden of regulation and taxation on them?

I'm a localist, someone who believes that powers should be pushed downwards and outwards. Ultimately I want local councils to assume a number of the responsibilities that central government currently has while other powers should be pushed out to the individual to make their own decisions over. A council who can reduce the cost to local people is a council who might just be worthy of being trusted with new powers and they pass existing ones back to the electorate.

Something to get fired up about?

Fire service consults on tax increase

TAXPAYERS in Hull and the East Riding are being asked to put up more money to improve fire safety.

Humberside Fire and Rescue Service is asking the public to pay extra on their council tax bill to help meet rising costs.

On the face of it a fairly uncontentious issue: firemen (by which I include both genders, it pains me to have to say it but otherwise someone will pull me up on it) put their lives on the line every day coming to the rescue of people in fires and road traffic accidents, they deserve to be funded appropriately.

But wait a second, let's look a little closer at why they are asking for the money:

A four per cent rise would cost the taxpayer and extra 25p per month raising £876,000 for the service - which could provide 33,000 home safety checks.

Yes, that's right, it's not about paying firemen or providing extra equipment, it's about doing 33,000 "home safety checks". Well, maybe that's a good thing, helping to reduce the number of domestic fires by checking people's homes (ignoring the obvious concept that maybe people should take responsibility for their own homes). But wait, what does the Humberside Fire & Rescue Service Best Value Performance Summary 2008/09 say about home safety checks?

Our efforts to reduce the number of [accidental fires in dwellings] by undertaking Home Fire Safety Checks and other community safety activities have shown little success.

Does this mean that Humberside Fire & Rescue shouldn't get any more money? Of course not, but it does mean that before agreeing to increases in funding a slightly more convincing justification of where these funds are going to be allocated is required. As everyone else in the public sector and the council tax payers are preparing for a massive belt tightening exercise, can part or all of these increases in spending be be offset by savings within the organisation? Let's hope more details will be forthcoming as park of the consultation process.

And who can blame them...

Tory voters alienated by John Bercow preparing to back UKIP

John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, may struggle to hold his seat as Conservatives angry at outspoken comments by his wife threaten to defect to the UK Independence Party.

Frankly, when presented with the choice between a man who is entirely unambiguous on his feelings about the EU (feelings many Conservative voters will share) and a man who was elected as speaker by Labour and who at times has looked likely to move across the aisle and join them, who do you think they will vote for? Everywhere else, Conservative grass-roots can get behind "their" candidate and help make this an election that the Labour party will never forget. In Buckingham not only is there no official Conservative candidate (by convention), but there's someone standing against the incumbent who Conservatives can feel shares their values and will stand up for what they believe.

The fact that Mrs Farage isn't standing for the Labour party doesn't hurt either...

In defence of high pay

East Yorkshire NHS bosses on rich list

East Yorkshire's hospital trust has been criticised for paying three East Yorkshire hospital bosses salaries in excess of £170,000.

Firstly, for transparency's sake, I should say that I do work for the Trust but these are entirely my own views.

Surely the question shouldn't be "is that a lot of money" but "is that the right amount of money given the job they are doing". Has Stephan Greep saved the tax payer large amounts of money by changing the way the hospital is managed? Is he the right person to be in charge as the hospital has to find additional savings year on year for the foreseeable future? I think he is, I have confidence that he has the vision for lead the Trust is providing excellent value for money, and if he wasn't then he wouldn't be in a job where £187,000 is a reasonable remuneration.

While it has become very fashionable to suggest that paying people large amounts of money is a bad thing, this entirely misses the point. Paying people large amounts of money who aren't worth that much is a problem, and restructuring bankers' bonuses to ensure they are generating money in a slightly more responsible way isn't a bad idea, but simply saying that they shouldn't be paid large sums of money breaks the link between what they are worth and what they are paid. You make the bank £1 billion and I don't think it unfair that you get paid a figure which reflects that value. If you lead a hospital Trust who not too long ago were seriously in the red and now are making annual surpluses, being rewarded to recognise that makes sense. Equally, if you are leading your organisation (or country, I'm looking at you Gordon) towards financial doom, then a P45 and minimal remuneration would seem more appropriate.

Or is that too radical a concept?

Less politics, more science please

Chris Grayling has said the sacking of the Government's chief drug advisor was "inevitable" following his latest ill-judged comments on cannabis reclassification.

I think what he should have said was

Chris Grayling has said the sacking of the Government's chief drug advisor was "inevitable" following their latest ill-judged comments on cannabis reclassification.

I'm a Conservative, I believe in freedom, I believe in personal responsibility and I believe that any government should think very carefully before deciding to reduce people's freedom to make their own decisions. On the issue of drug legislation, science and pragmatism seem to have given way to authoritarianism and dogma, and while this is hardly surprising from the government whose prime purpose seems to be the expansion of state interference in...everything, it is still sad to see.

Sadder to see is that the line being taken by the shadow Home Secretary isn't to slate Labour's actions and defend the practice of making decisions based on good science and what actually makes sense. By effectively siding with Labour on this matter he not only sets a very worrying precedent but also misunderstands the feelings of a lot of grass-roots members of the party who don't think that running government policy "by the red-tops" is the right way to govern.

But hey, the Conservative party is a broad church and there's room for a range of views, as long our policy positions continue to get debated then that can only be a good thing for everyone concerned.

Deprivation

After a recent conversation with a friend, I found myself thinking about deprivation in Hull. Having suggested that Hull had a problem with deprivation, and being disagreed with by my friend who is rightly proud to be from Hull, we started trying to define what exactly we mean by deprivation.

Firstly, deprivation isn't just about money. If throwing money at deprived areas was the solution then Labour would have been far more successful in improving the lives of people in this country than they clearly have been. Labour's core belief seems to be that what we need is a bigger, more powerful government and throwing more money at things and any problem can be bent to their will. What do we end up with at the end of that? A lot of debt and a lot of people whose problems have been ignored because they don't need yet more "investment".

So what else, other than not having enough money, does deprivation mean? One of the most obvious is deprivation of aspiration, something that is pervasive in the education system in this country. If you measure schools by what percentage get 5 A*-Cs, then what a school will focus its energies on is making sure everyone gets 5A*-Cs. I can't blame any school for this focus, they would be crazy to do anything else because we are told that a school with a high percentage of pupils getting 5 A*-Cs is a success and a school with a lower percentage is a failure. But where does aspiration come in? It's a culture of asking for "OK" rather than striving for individual excellence in every pupil. It's rejecting the idea of grammar schools not because they don't work but because they make it harder for other schools to achieve "success" as measured by 5 A*-Cs. If the only schools where students are told "you can do anything", not just in words but by the very ethos of the school, are private schools, then is it any wonder the our leading universities have such trouble with low rate of application from state schools?

How about deprivation of opportunity, where people are expected to do things but never given the chance? The government says "we want as many people in work as possible" and then stacks the odds against them by creating a benefit system which makes more sense not to work than to take a lower paid job. Who can blame people for choosing not to work given that kind of choice! And why have the Labour government not seen this, are we really to believe that nobody might have twigged this fact? Or maybe the answer simpler than that, maybe having a large group of people whose livelihood depends on a government happy to maintain the status quo might be useful when it comes to elections...

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, in so many other ways people have been deprived, and I'm sure in due course. So much of what has gone wrong in this country is about people being deprived of that they should rightfully be given, and the sooner that we have a government who can see that means more than just throwing money at people the better.

Question Time

Typical isn't it, Question Time are coming to Hull next week and it's the one week I'm not around to go, not impressed! Obviously there was no guarantee of getting tickets anyway, but it's still galling not to even have a chance.

Let's just hope there's a decent Conservative contingent there to ask Alan Johnson the tough questions he needs to be able to answer if he's to take over from Gordon...

Very poor PR

Call for probe into council PR contract

A TAXPAYERS' pressure group has called for an inquiry into how a contract was awarded to a private company to run an East Riding Council department.

Hessle public relations and communications company Mercury Design and Marketing Ltd won a contract to manage the authority's in-house communications team in July.

Something about this whole situation just doesn't seem right, and I'm not just talking about the fact that the managing director of this company doesn't exactly have the best track record. Rather than spending £35,000 per year keeping this role in-house, East Riding Council pay £60,000 a year to outsource. Now even allowing for on-costs, which being it's the public sector are not small, I can't see any way that this outsourcing is saving the taxpayer money. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem at all with outsourcing functions which are better handled by private enterprise, but that is strictly on the condition that either the quality of the product is significantly better or it costs less to provide the same service. So what is it, are Mercury Design and Marketing Ltd vital to ERYC's communication with the public, providing a service that the council can't, or is somehow a cheaper alternative because they are replacing the job of several people? Please tell me it's not just a way to abdicate responsibility for communications by passing the buck to an external entity who can take the flak if things go wrong.

Hull on fire

Waste plant 'could burn for days'

A fire at a waste recycling plant in East Yorkshire could burn for up to three days.

No political comment, no complaints about any of it (since I have every faith in the fire service and their professional opinions on how best to manage the fire), just a small observation. If you look at the picture on the BBC story, you will notice a building in the background with a tower. That building is called British Extracting, an abandoned building and part of Hull's rich industrial history. I mention British Extracting only because I have a love for the abandoned and decaying parts of Hull which are so often overlooked by people, and would recommend anyone who hasn't had a chance to spend a few hours wandering around that part of Hull on a quiet Sunday, experiencing first hand the sheer scale of some of these buildings. Have a look at Clarence Mill, the former Rank Hovis building, a building crying out for a sympathetic conversion to make use of this stunning building. If getting out there and wandering isn't your cup of tea, have a look at sites like 28 Days Later and really experience what other people see in these hidden gems.

Total Rubbish

Group's delight at incinerator cash blow

Campaigners are claiming a victory against controversial plans for an incinerator near Hedon, after the development hit funding problems.

It comes after East Riding and Hull City councils announced a bid for private finance initiative (PFI) cash to help pay for the waste-burning facility was no longer being considered.

Now normally I might be tempted to direct my ire at the Not In My Back Yard attitude of people, but honestly I can see why you might object to a waste incinerator (or a new landfill, or anything else collecting together that much waste) being built on your doorstep, especially since I'm guessing there wouldn't be any financial incentive for those who would be most affected. Don't get me wrong, if the scheme is necessary and reasonable measures have been taken to minimise or mitigate negative effects (offering an annual cash payment for those living nearby would seem a nice gesture for instance), then I don't think people should be able to veto a scheme, but in this case I don't think it is necessary.

Let's look, for just a second, at why an incinerator is even being considered given the pollution it will clearly kick out. Are Hull and East Riding councils considering an incinerator because it's be cleanest way to get rid of rubbish? No. Are they considering it because it's the most cost effective way to get rid of rubbish? No. They're considering it because an artificial price has been placed on the use of Landfill by a European Union directive on reducing waste. A price has to be paid for every ton of rubbish dumped into landfill, and that price is massively increasing which suddenly makes uneconomical and polluting solutions viable. That's the law of unintended consequences, where a generally well meaning person decides the best way to achieve their purpose (reducing the amount of waste we put in landfills) is by imposing a bigger central government control (in this case tax) on it.

So what is the alternative? Well the best way that I can see is to encourage recycling, and the first part of that, having a decent system of recycling bins, is at least starting to get moving. The other part of that, and I know I'm going to make myself a little unpopular by saying this, is encouraging people to make the effort to recycle. And what is the simplest way to do that? Collect general waste less often and recycling more often. If you know that your general waste is going to be picked up fortnightly but your recycling (including the compostable kitchen waste) will be picked up weekly, you might well be motivated to put food waste into the recycling rather than it sitting in the general waste. If you know you need to fit two week's worth of rubbish into one black wheelie bin, you might well put the paper, cans, cardboard, glass and plastics in the appropriate recycling bins than try to force it all into the general waste.

Or is that just too simple?

Magic Thinking

“When I was ten I could fly."

What if the things you believe as a kid are really true?

After so much of me ranting about what everyone is doing wrong, I think it only fair I interject some praise where it's due. On Thursday I went to see "Magic Thinking" by Eamonn Fleming at the Hull Truck Theatre, and the only word I can rightly ascribe to it is "brilliant". One man, on a stage, various odd props around him, but fundamentally just one guy talking to the audience for an hour, a format that's not always easy to do well. The reason it worked so well: because Eamonn Fleming is a man you could listen to for hours, not because he's telling jokes but because he's genuinely interesting and witty. Think your funny, extrovert best mate, the one who everyone just wants to be around, the one whose words everyone hangs on. But with props. Did I laugh so hard it hurt? No. Did I reach the end of it and sit there thinking "Wow, that was brilliant"? Yes, and that for me is the mark of success.

Definitely recommend seeing him if you've ever got the opportunity, you won't regret it.

Maybe Alan Johnson has other things on his mind...

Some Are More Equal Than Others

My friend Sean Dilley, political correspondent for TalkSport reckons Labour have a bit of work to do on equalities issues. Sean is blind and operates with the assistance of a wonderful labrador guide dog called Chipp. Chipp is very popular in the Palace of Westminster.

This morning at the conference he was talking to one of Alan Johnson's special advisers who, mid conversation, walked off leaving Sean talking to thin air. How very rude.

Nice to see Alan Johnson representing the good manners and consideration for others we've come to expect from Labour ministers. Surely it's not that hard to realise that the blind guy is going to have trouble spotting when you've walked away and therefore it's only polite to make your excuses rather than sneaking off!

The wheels of decision making (slowly) turn

Breathing Life into Hull's Fruit Market

More than 150 people attended a fact-finding event staged in a fruit warehouse aimed at promoting the area as a new business quarter.
With long-term regeneration plans for the area currently on hold, new temporary uses for the buildings they will leave behind are now being explored.

So let me get this straight, you have people who want to start developing existing properties right now, who are willing to begin the regeneration process, and instead we're looking at using it as free exhibition space? Wow, it's almost like there's no recession and Hull doesn't need the jobs created by the redevelopment work and the new business opportunities that the Fruit Market site will one day offer (if anyone is ever allowed to get on with developing it!) While it's admirable for people to want a single, grand vision for the redevelopment, it's clear that the scheme could be some time in coming if ever, meanwhile leaving an undeveloped site costing the council money rather than generating it. But hey, as long as someone has a grand vision, that's all that matters I guess!

Wonder why this wasn't the case already...

Cheap drugs to save NHS millions

Health bosses in East Riding have revealed plans to save money by prescribing cheaper, non-branded drugs.

The region's primary care trust (PCT) believes the move will slash £3.5m from its budget.

NHS East Riding of Yorkshire aims to achieve the saving across its 39 GP practices by March next year.

The question I have to ask, and excuse me for being a little dim, is why the PCT weren't already using generics where possible in a bid to save money for the taxpayer. The issue of Statins aside (because I don't claim to have the medical knowledge to comment on the appropriateness of their use), if a generic drug is confirmed to be as effective as the branded one, then what's the point of paying the mark-up simply because the pharmaceutical company used to hold a patent on the drug.

"Ah", you may say, "those nasty cheap generic drugs just aren't as good", well there is a case for double-blind testing if ever I saw it. With finite resources (something that people often forget when saying "everyone should only get the best"), decisions need to be made about what can and can't be afforded by the NHS.

And now, if you will excuse me, I would like to offer a slightly different idea for you to consider. Currently, the government has the monopoly on healthcare, both in terms of supply (NHS) and payment (central government payments to NHS). So if you want to get treatment for something, you go to a doctor (employed by the NHS) and he treats you (by the government supplying the money to him). If you have no money, society says "that's ok, we believe that everyone should have access to healthcare, so we'll pay for it", which I hope is accepted as the right and proper thing for a developed country to do. The government having a role in the supply of resources is clearly a vital part of this equation, but what that role is and where there is a necessity for them to also be effectively the sole supplier of care is more questionable. What about the Singapore system where people have individual healthcare bank accounts which they pay into every month (and which the government will top up for those unable to pay in, for instance those out of work) which can then be spent on whatever healthcare they desire? If the government owned hospital says "we will provide that treatment for £100" then why shouldn't a patient be able to look at other private hospitals who will also offer the service for £100 but which will provide a service more suited to them. What about if the person thinks "actually, I'm willing to pay a little more for that treatment to get my own room for my stay" or "I don't think it's worth £100 paying for some of the extras I won't use, I'll use this private hospital who will do it for £75"? It's cost the government (and therefore the taxpayer) nothing extra to do this, universal free healthcare is still firmly in place, but suddenly the motivation to cut costs isn't coming from above (central government) but from below (patients being able to go elsewhere if the price offered for a treatment isn't competitive with what the market offers). If this all sounds a little far fetched and out there, might I suggest reading "The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain" by Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan, or at the very least the chapter where they discuss how healthcare could be both less costly and provide better results at the same time. Oh, and if you feel tempted to Google for Daniel's name, don't overlook his blog since a lot of the invective directed at him is answered there.

Making them feel a little less "Special"

Police Specials Lose £1500 Annual Payment

VOLUNTEER police officers are set to lose a £1,500 annual payment in a move by chief officers to cut costs across the force.

Currently, the 353 special constables working for Humberside Police are given the "bounty" every year as a goodwill gesture for their services.

The question that nobody seems to be asking is whether the "Specials" have been consulted before this decision was made. If the announcement had been "having discussed this matter with the existing Special Constables, it has been agreed that they will voluntarily forego this payment to help maintain existing levels of front line policing in these financially challenging times" then maybe there wouldn't be such an outcry.

Frankly this is a good example of where an elected "sheriff" (which at least one major party has as one of their policies) would make sense, having someone elected on the mandate of ensuring effective use of resources (£40K cars, police officers, etc) would make those making decisions directly accountable to the public who will be affected by them. But no, that would be asking people how their public services should be run, and we wouldn't want to do too much of that in case they give the wrong answers...

Hello World

For some time I have dismissed political blogging as something done by other people, something done by those with something to say that everyone wants to hear, the Iain Dales and Tory Bears of this world. And then I discovered that it doesn't matter whether you've got your finger on the pulse of Westminster, because talking about local issues and what's going on around you is as important as holding our MPs to account.

So there we are, a local blog for local issues as well as my thoughts on the national political landscape, and if anyone else wants to read it (and slate me if they so wish) then so be it.