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'Divesting' services, cuts, Libraries, New Strategic direction, Suffolk County Council, Woodbridge, Your councillor

Suffolk’s Library ‘consultation’ – and Woodbridge

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I have just written  to the officers and Portfolio-holder in charge of Suffolk’s libraries to propose that SCC grants an extension for Woodbridge (and potentially many other areas like it)  to the 30 April deadline for the Suffolk Libraries ‘consultation’..   Briefly, I’m suggesting this extension on the following compelling grounds:

  1. An unclear, inconsistent message. It has only recently been made clear by SCC that this supposed Library ‘consultation’ is in reality a seemingly compulsory bidding process (see note 1 below, also Appendix d)
     
  2. Woefully Inadequate financial figures provided to support the consultation document. This is not my personal opinion, but the opinion of the venture capitalist to whom I showed the document   – and who was frankly incredulous (see Note 2 below)
     
  3. Overambitious timescale: the excuse given by SCC for the paucity and poor quality of supporting materials intended to elicit ‘expressions of interest’ in the Library  is the short timescale leading up to the library ‘consultation’ period.

    In reality this Suffolk scheme was announced nationally in early August 2010 giving experienced library staff 5 months to prepare for it before the consultation started.  This is considerably more time than the council is offering to utter library tyros for them to discover whether an ‘expression of interest’ is even possible. This seems an unreasonably ungenerous and compressed timescale for such a complete shift in library provision
     
  4. Inbuilt demographic disadvantage of towns such as Woodbridge. Woodbridge being a small town which punches above its weight, is also a large focal point for a vast geographical area and has a library worthy of being classed a ‘county library’. But with a voting population of around 7500 , the town council precept is very small. The range of possible local volunteers also small.  When this becomes a locality issue, our specific locality is too small  (see Note 3)
     
  5.  Specific disadvantage for Woodbridge: Woodbridge is adjacent to Wilford the geographically huge, bounded-by-the-sea-on-more-than-one-side, libraryless district  that runs eastward from Woodbridge to the sea, southward to the sea at Bawdsey, and northward to just below Aldeburgh. Because Wilford is libraryless, Woodbridge library is the only available option for most Wilford residents. Yet, due to the sad death of its incumbent county councillor,  Wilford has been without a county council representative for the entire duration  of the library consultation/bidding process.  This discriminates against significant locality decisions being made at county council level
     
  6. Imminent change to Town and District council: like many other places in Suffolk, all the local representatives of Woodbridge (apart from me) are up for election or standing down  on 5 May – a week after the consultation finishes. They are thus much less able or motivated  to make an ‘expression of interest’ than the councillors elected on May 6 who will have a 4 year tenure in front of them (see Note 4 below).
     
  7. Limited possibilities of Income Generation. Clearly unhappy that Woodbridge as a whole or in part  has made no ‘expression of interest’ in the library consultation, SCC library officers recently suggested income generation by:  late book fines, room lettings inc out of hours, teaching IT skills, commission charged via a community gallery.  Also suggested were things that have been tried in libraries but that are proven to make less money: DVDs, reading glasses and book tokens.  
    Cannot anyone see how futile this appears, when it is impossible to disambiguate the much larger supporting figures provided? (See Note 2 below)

All these reasons make it hard for a businesslike case to be made for any ‘expression of interest’  in running a library within the timescale Suffolk CC have set out. The people of Woodbridge are likely to be too well-grounded in reality to want to make any proposal under such circumstances. It would seem a great shame that they should be thus deprived of a chance to have a reasoned and factually supported say in how their local library provision is to be altered 

 

 The Supporting Notes can be found here

'Divesting' services, eXplore card, New Strategic direction, Suffolk County Council, Uncategorized, Your councillor

Suffolk Politics and the English Language

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I’ve just come back from Suffolk’s latest full council meeting – the centrepiece of which was a debate on the administration’s  Update to the New Strategic Direction ( click here: its the last document on the list).  Many of the Lib Dem and other opposition members, including myself, laid into this  incomprehensible  piece of bureaucratic gobbledegook.

In return some, but not very many, members of the Conservative majority reproached us for using unkind words. (Oh, and for writing nasty blogs which criticised them.)  They suggested, cynically, that we Lib Dems were being cynical and destructive of  the Administration’s  highminded efforts to listen to the residents of Suffolk. “We want to free the people of Suffolk from the chains of excessive bureaucracy, and give them what they truly want”, they claimed.

They might have convinced me if it weren’t for all those emails I’ve been getting these last months from Suffolk people  facing the prospect of being without buses, without bus passes, without explore cards, school crossing patrols, libraries, care provision, respite provision etc etc. All of whom complained that they HADN’T been listened to, and WEREN’T getting what they wanted.

Other Tory councillors – the  numbers of the disaffected raising daily – were ‘layin low and sayin nuffin’. It didn’t stop them voting with their peers, though.

Dante MUST have reserved a circle of hell specially for those who lack the courage of their convictions!

I didn’t bother explaining why the Admin’s take on libraries is wrong, their take on transport is wrong, their take on the explore card is wrong . I have said all this before to much jeering from these highminded listeners to the people of Suffolk. Instead, I concentrated on how they were hiding behind incomprehensibility. I said:

I have endeavoured to read this document,  I have really really tried. And I’m good at reading: I have an MA from Oxford (English Language and Literature). Last year I worked on the great Oxford Historical Thesaurus – which covers all the meanings of all the words that have been used in English over the last thousand years.

I have even managed to read and enjoy the collected works of Walter Scott!

I would suggest that if there is meaning to be taken from a piece of writing I am the very person to take it.  However –

THIS piece of (for want of a better word) writing,  has done what Walter Scott, Beowulf , even John Milton, couldn’t do. It has defeated me utterly.

I can only conclude that the reason no meaning can be extracted from this piece is because there is no meaning to be extracted.

Is this accidental? Is this deliberate? Who can tell? As George Orwell puts it “what looks like an unclear expression of a clear thought might actually be a perfectly clear expression of an unclear thought.”

However, from reading this, one thing does become crystal clear. Either you don’t know what you want to do, or you don’t want to tell us.  Come on,  Cllr Pembroke can you give us your plan in words people can understand, so we identify clearly what action IS being recommended!

Cllr Noble attempted a comeback by trying to explain that the NSD WAS rather a ‘complex’ idea.  (The implication being that maybe it was a little bit too complex for lesser minds to comprehend in all its glory.)

Cllr Noble: complex and unclear are two very different words:

  • Complex implies that something has many separate aspects, which are necessary but difficult to understand;
  • Unclear denotes a muddle!

Complex or unclear? Gentle reader, I invite you to click on the link above, read the ‘Action Recommended’ section on the first page and judge  for yourself.

'Divesting' services, Council reports, Council spending, cuts, eXplore card, Fire services, Helping the community, Libraries, Lollipop patrols, New Strategic direction, Pedestrians and Walkers, Roads, Schools, Suffolk County Council, Uncategorized, Woodbridge

Woodbridge Town Council Report March 2011

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This month’s report deals with the legitimisation of  various appalling cuts by the administration (who at the same time are letting money flow through their fingers on such essential front line services as extremely expensive consultants training them to ‘listen’ (hah!) and ‘gagging’ payments – £520,000 last year alone) to stop the mouths of ex-staff members

SCC  2011-12 Budget

The end of February saw Suffolk County Council’s  final budget setting meeting. Here the budget of cuts, already approved by the Cabinet, was voted through by the Conservatives on the County Council.  The cuts will affect many people in rural and urban areas throughout the county.  I strongly opposed, in particular,  decisions taken to reduce vital frontline services, including the scrapping of school crossing patrols, local buses and the eXplore card.

At the meeting my group put forward an amendment to the budget which would have saved many frontline services.

I feel that the people of Woodbridge NEEDc to k now what there WERE fully-costed options to these cuts, although the Conservatives would have us believe there were none.

We believed it would be possible to provide funding for all these services if we looked at savings from the centre of the organisation and used a small proportion of the £108m which the council holds in reserves.  Our amendment would have saved the following services:

  • Libraries
  • Youth Clubs /Youth provision
  • Subsidies to public transport services for Sundays, evenings and Bank Holidays
  • Park and Ride Service from the Bury Road, Ipswich site
  • Funding for the eXplore student card, which gives half price travel on buses up to age 19
  • School Crossing Patrol Service
  • Retain all Household Waste Recycling Centres, instead of reducing them from 18 to 11
  • Continue checking lorries to see if they are overloaded.
  • Stop the divestment of the Fire Control Function to Huntingdon
  • Keep Felixstowe as a Day Crewed fire station, instead of reducing it to retained
  • Retain full time crewing of the Ipswich Aerial Appliance

By using these funds;

  • Re-open Bury Road Park and Ride by reviewing revenue streams for Park and Ride to increase income, including from concessionary fares, creating a cost neutral service
  • Reduction in Road Maintenance Revenue Budget – not affecting emergency repairs
  • Business Mileage reduction of 10% – saving nearly £1m a year
  • Reduction of hours, to enable the continuation of all Household Waste sites
  • Reduction of one Director and 2 Assistant Director posts
  • Reduction of 2 Cabinet posts
  • Reduce back office staff in Fire Service & review the number of appliances attending incidents (at present, for example, they send 5 appliances to a cat up a tree)
  • Reduce External Room Hire by 30%
  • Felixstowe Fire Station to 5 day weekday manning
  • Use of Service reserves
  • Reduce Corporate Contingency reserve
  • Reduce Management of Change reserve

These savings would be heavily focused on the use of the ‘management of change’ budget, which was set up for business transformation during the year at the council, and the ‘corporate contingency’ fund, which is there to help manage risk throughout the year.  We believe with the current financial situation this is the best time to use the reserves to ensure communities will continue to receive essential services.  Even Eric Pickles agrees with us. Unfortunately the Suffolk conservatives did not, and the amendment was defeated on the day, with every Conservative voting for the cuts.  You can find all the information regarding the budget at this link

http://apps2.suffolk.gov.uk/cgi-bin/committee_xml.cgi?p=detail&id=1_15073

Libraries Update

The consultation for Libraries is still going ahead, as the County are looking to divest, or close most of of the Libraries around the County.  A meeting between SCC  officials and councillors and Suffolk library activists on 25th February  has brought forward new information (see James Hargraves and Andrew Grant Adamson’s accounts of this meeting which both attended, as supporters of Stradbroke and Debenham libraries individually)

The original classification of the 44 libraries into 15 county libraries, to be protected and divested as a group, and 29 community libraries, which would close if community groups did not take them over, has been effectively abandoned.

Only Ipswich County Library, Bury St Edmonds and probably Lowestoft remain in a core group to be divested. This appears to mean that Chantry (Ipswich), Gainsborough (Ipswich), Beccles, Felixstowe, Hadleigh, Halesworth, Haverhill, Mildenhall, Newmarket, Stowmarket, Sudbury and Woodbridge, join the other 29 seeking community arrangements.

No libraries will be closed without a further consultation. The process of divesting all libraries is expected to take two or three years.

Those who believe libraries should continue to be run as a Suffolk County Council service should write this when filling in the consultation response form.

The consultation began on the 18th of January, and finishes on the 30th of April.  You can find the consultation on the home page of Suffolk County Council under the Consultation heading.   http://www.suffolk.gov.uk

Loss and adverse change to Woodbridge bus services

In addition to the budget cuts as specified above, the County Council has made significant reductions in the levels of subsidy provided to passenger transport, a total of £2.2m, which enable commercial services to operate in non-peak time slots.  This means that some services will cease completely, whereas others will stop operating in the evenings, and on weekends. As I alerted you last meeting, the 61a and b have closed already as ‘non-profit-making’. This was despite representations from me, and reminders to the EME Directorate and portfolio holder that all three tiers of local government in Woodbridge had  told SCC and the operators last year WHY it was non-profit making and suggested a change or route that would make it more so.

The County Council has now released information of all those buses that will now cease or change hours.

The underlying principle of most of the timetable changes has been to remove evening and Sunday services. This of course is not much of an issue  for those who are mobile by other means. It is a tragedy for others. Particularly as the SCC line that these services’will be replaced by demand responsive transport’ does NOT apply as the DRT team confirm they have no interest or intention  in extending the service beyond 7-7 Monday to Saturday. Basically this is a huge loss to people who may have few choices.

I have placed a full list of the cuts and changes elsewhere on this blog (click here for details)

Full information can be found on  http://www.suffolkonboard.com/news/changes_to_public_transport_services_april_2011

Petitioning SCC against cuts

A change in national legislation means that the SCC now has to provide online petitioning for its residents.  This means members of the public are – at last – able to create, and sign electronic  petitions to disapprove a Council decision or bring an issue to their attention.

There are currently a lot of petitions online – all of which relate to recent decisions made by the county.  Once a petition reaches 3,675 signatures, the issue then has to be debated in Full Council. The eXplore card petition  is  proving particularly popular – having got over halfway already. It is an issue particularly close to my heart as losing this card will make a huge difference

a)       to the education and employment prospects of a whole generation of Suffolk’s young people.

b)       to the provision of scheduled bus services

I have recently told that Suffolk County Council is prepared to accept  all the library petitions together as one petition.  This means they have already reached the 3,675 and so hopefully it means this will be brought back to council shortly.

Just to remind you, the epetition site is: http://www.suffolk.gov.uk/News/EPetitions.htm

Ipswich Road: Clarkson Crossing and the Solar-powered 30mph Speed sign

A bit of good news to end with: two of my Quality of Life budget safety projects are now successfully finished:

On Tuesday morning a specially designed commemorative plaque will be unveiled  by Farlingaye students at the new Clarkson Crossing in Ipswich Road (named after Thomas Clarkson, Suffolk’s famous anti-slavery campaigner, and not after Jeremy!). This commemorates the work Farlingaye HS students put into this with Suffolk County Council.

I am delighted to say that the Solar-powered 30mph speed sign I proposed, negotiated and paid for out of my Quality of Life budget is now installed at the bottom of the Ipswich Road hill, just before  the John Grose garage, Sandy Lane and the blind bend.  I hope you have  NOT noticed it, because that means you would have been driving at less than 30mph.