Tag Archives: Andrea Hill

Council spending, cuts, Lollipop patrols, Suffolk County Council

Suffolk’s Parsimony and Profligacy: Update

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Having blogged a couple of weeks back about the extraordinary spending priorities being displayed by the leaders of Suffolk County Council,   I wasn’t unduly surprised to find another example  hitting  national news via the Daily Mail.

Apparently both our  Chief Executive and our Council Leader have been benefiting from extraordinarily expensive “coaching for change”  (article here) According to a Freedom of Information request the Chief Executive has had 23 sessions  from ex-Chemical Engineer turned senior executive coach  Sol Davidson each one of which cost the Suffolk taxpayer £525 plus VAT.

We do not (yet) have figures for the amount Suffolk taxpayers have spent on Jeremy Pembroke.

I’d like to mention here our Woodbridge lollipop man, Terry King. Mr King has been paid £35 a week by Suffolk County Council for his valued and life-saving services. Now Suffolk says his services are too expensive.   £12,075 would pay for him to continue protecting children in Woodbridge for nearly seven years.

I will not offend your intelligence by pointing out what other equally valuable uses Suffolk residents could put this sum of money to.

The county council line is dismissive.  Spending £12,000 on personal coaching is  ” in line with training normally provided to senior officers” they say  – which suggests that SCC spending priorities are even more skew-whiff  than anyone has realised.

I know nothing about Mr Davidson, beyond what is available via Google  which is principally profile pages. The more recent profiles read:

He now specialises in coaching leaders and their teams in building strategic and operational capacity in the face of increasingly uncertain and unpredictable circumstance

What is interesting for the residents of  Suffolk is that the uncertain and unpredictable circumstances we face are seemingly created by the very people he coached!

What’s all that about?

Update: It was reported in the EADT March 5th, that the total amount paid to Mr Davidson by SCC for his coaching was £27,825 for 53 sessions of between one hour and ninety minutes each. This was to coach the Chief Executive, Andrea Hill, and the corporate management board in ‘teambuilding and working styles’.

 

Cabinet, Council spending, cuts, Lollipop patrols, Suffolk Circle, Suffolk County Council, Uncategorized

Pretzel maths from SCC

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One of the things that is so remarkable about the leadership at Suffolk County Council  is their perverse combination of parsimony and prodigality.

On the parsimony side, they stand up straight, cross their fingers behind their backs  and declare straightfaced that they simply haven’t the money to spend on inessentials like road crossing patrols and libraries.

Yet it was just before Christmas that they spent literally hundreds of thousands of pounds on setting up Suffolk Circle, a membership-based social enterprise that had apparently worked well in Southwark.  (Where, I would suggest,  there is less sense of social cohesion and a greater turnover of population than in Suffolk).

What none of Suffolk’s Cabinet seemed to have asked, of themselves or of anyone else  was “Is this necessary?”

Kathy Pollard’s blog makes clear this is a question that should definitely have been asked:  Suffolk Circle is currently offering services that were already available free in Suffolk!  And, when SCC spent £750,000 on Suffolk Circle, this really means that every man woman and child in Suffolk has been asked to subsidise this social enterprise to the tune of £1. Without consultation. Perhaps they might have decided there were other services they preferred to spend their money on? (Update:  April 2012 we currently believe the  sum spent on Suffolk Circle to be ‘only’ £680,000)

Suffok’s leaders seem genuinely confused about the value of our money, letting it flow through their fingers like water  on inessentials  yet defending core cuts as unavoidable.   “Do as I say not as I do”  is their mantra over and over again.  It’s as if they genuinely cannot tell the difference between right and wrong decisions!

Nine months ago  – just as the cuts began to bite –  our leaders decided to allow the Chief Executive to spend £122,000 of public money (thats sixteen pence from every Suffolk resident)  on unspecified ‘services’  from three consultancy companies : Fields of Learning, Scintillate and DNA.   This decision was voted through at the May 2010 Council meeting, by the Conservative majority  after an earler attempt to to slip the decision through Cabinet without further publicity was called in by the Lib Dems.  We said that this was a grossly inappropriate use of public money at a time of belt-tightening.

Deputy Leader Jane Storey’s response?  “This is a tiny proportion of the county council’s budget!”

I kid you not.  I wrote down these words as they dropped from her mouth.

It is a tragedy that SCC is being run by people who consider £122,000 a small sum of money to spend without further authorisation of disclosure on ‘consultancy’ , £500,000 a sensible amount to ensure closed mouths for former council  employees, £750, 000 a reasonable sum to  set up  ‘pay-for’ friendship groups in a county where  friendship and support groups proliferate and for free – yet think £150,000 a good sum to save by closing the Bury Park and Ride and £174,000 to abolish our School Crossing Patrols.

As many members of Suffolk will remember, one of the above consultants, Bedfordshire-based  Fields of Learning had previously been used by Suffolk County Council – who spent nearly half a million pounds of Suffolk taxpayers money in 2009 on  “neuro-linguistic programming” courses for the deputy leader and her colleagues.  Yet, if you google ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ you will discover it described as one of the 10 most discredited forms of intervention in published research – on a par with ‘equine treatment for eating disorders’ and ‘dolphin assisted therapy’.

What on earth is the Tory leadership  doing spending public money on  such things while insisting  that the rest of us have  to tighten our belts so dreadfully?  Come to that, why do they pay for meeting rooms in Ipswich when Endeavour house echoes with underused space? Why do they get so antsy when we suggest they cut their own  mileage bills by 10%?

Back in November, Colin Noble,  Portfolio holder for Adult and Community Services  disclosed  his difficulties  on his blog when he wrote  “as I get older I realise I know less and less about more and more.”

I think that says it all.

Chinese saying of the day:

朱门 酒 肉 臭， 路 有冻 死 骨 (zhu men jiu rou chou lu you dong si gu)

behind the doors of the rich meat and wine go to waste, while out on the road lie the bones of the frozen

62a and 62b, Buses, cuts, eXplore card, Lollipop patrols, New Strategic direction, Schools, Suffolk Circle, Suffolk County Council, Transport, Uncategorized, Woodbridge, young people, Your councillor

SCC humanitarians? EPIC Fail!

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Ok, I’ll admit it.  I’m depressed.

I know that the  SCC Tory administration are supposed to have hearts as hard and slippery as greasy bullets,  consciences as elastic as support stockings and moral principles as indefensible as the Maginot line (I also know – because they have confessed it  -that they read my blog,  AVIDLY, I hope!).

But it takes a very hard-hearted, very conscienceless and very very unprincipled representative of the people  to support the cutting of all our Suffolk  School Crossing Patrols for the sake of  an annual £174,000.

But they did – speaking their votes  aloud – 40 to our 26.

Because  (I quote) ‘we have to face it – in this country we have simply been living beyond our means – and we can no longer do so!”

Living beyond our means? I should coco  – in the last year alone, these very same prudent guardians have  spent

  • HALF A MILLION POUNDS on gagging orders for departed staff
  • £122,000 for the Chief Executive to spend (at her discretion) on unspecified consultancy with three extraordinarily retiring, unadvertised and otherwise  little-known firms
  • over 3p in every one of our council tax pounds on the salaries of their  senior management  and
  • THREE QUARTERS  OF A MILLION POUNDS on something called Suffolk Circle – which they brought  in to show Suffolk over-50s how to pay to keep themselves busy and be good neighbours to each other.
    (It makes you wonder what kind of neighbours our Tory councillors can be  themselves. Most of us in Suffolk know that neighbourliness comes free in our kindly county. )

I admit to being ill-tempered when posting this.

And with due cause.

I have just spent six interminable hours in the council chamber listening to an almost unbelievable degree of smug complacency from our Tory majority as they justified  their horrible choices.  Complacency  that dismissed such issues as cutting (oh no, suddenly its ‘divesting’ ) the road crossing patrols, abandoning the eXplore card, removing inconvenient buses because the countryside is so big and they’re all right Jack they have CARS, as (again I quote) ‘tosh.’

Woodbridge should be proud of itself. It punched well above its weight:   the deputy head, PTA chair and ex- PTA chair of St. Mary’s plus various parents and councillors  present a petition to Guy Mc Gregor on cutting the School Crossing patrol. Afterwards, no less than three brave Woodbridge souls asked excellent public questions  – again of Guy McGregor  -on cutting the St Mary’s School Crossing patrol, on cutting the eXplore card and on the cancelled buses. They got what could only be described as unhelpful answers.

During the afternoon I spoke four times, forcefully and increasingly desperately.  But the forces of reason (I would say the quiet voice of reason – but I was far from quiet) lost every single point and the conservative budget goes ahead in all its tarnished glory.

So that’s it for SCC’s cheap and effective school crossing patrols, the eXplore card, many of our scheduled buses…  I hope every single councillor who voted for it will feel proud of themselves! And I hope every resident of Suffolk will remember which people  voted for it.

It occurs to me that to some people present this was all just a game, where winning was all (“No, no, they do but jest. Poison in jest“). In case they have got to believing their own rhetoric I will just pass on the words of a Woodbridge constituent who was present :

I stayed for the vote on the first amendment but was so angry I had to leave after that. I was totally appalled at  their attitude and a complete lack of any decent argument for scrapping crossing patrols. I can honestly say I have never been so angry in my life. I had a rant on radio Suffolk when I left the building.

I think the fact that you can keep up your amazing enthusiasm whilst surrounded by a set of people who ( in my 12 year old sons words) would climb over a glass wall to see what’s on the other side, is incredible.

They are arrogant, unyielding and most definitely not representing the people they serve. Unlike you.

Because I believe in the principle that injustice – like justice – should not just be done, but SEEN to be done, I will, when the voting records appear, post a link to the names  of everyone who voted.

Whether with their consciences or not.

Chengyu for the day:

Chengyu for the day:

风 雨 如 晦 (feng yu ru hui)

wind and rain sweeping across a gloomy sky eg: a grim situation