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Post by yellowperil on Jun 10, 2018 8:25:09 GMT
Nearing the end now! I have now set myself the task of trying to assess whether any of this activity over a little over two decades was worth anything or no. I intend two separate headings, one about the campaigning role and a separate one about the years actually in office as councillor -just 8 years in my case though I think I will extend that to include Eileen's sixteen years as they are so intertwined. This is where I particularly invite the comments from others which have been promised/threatened for some time.When I think we are beginning to exhaust that there will be two final sets of elections to consider, the 2005 general election and the counties, my final attempt to get elected for anything. You might guess it was unsuccessful!
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jun 10, 2018 9:08:42 GMT
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 10, 2018 10:47:02 GMT
I am puzzled by the above research briefing appearing to show Emma Nicholson as the Lib Dem no 1 and Chris Huhne as the no 2, which would contradict my memory and listings as shown in the demon website- or am I misreading something?
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jun 10, 2018 10:51:57 GMT
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 10, 2018 13:00:59 GMT
Yes that all confirms what I thought but why then does the parliamentary briefing say that Emma was elected at the fourth round and Chris at the 10th and final round? - I can't make any sense of that. Any way, that was the correct source for the breakdown for the votes by parliamentary constituency, so I am adding those for Ashford, to the earlier post where I had intended that data to go- due thanks to Pete Whitehead |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jun 10, 2018 14:53:48 GMT
Yes that all confirms what I thought but why then does the parliamentary briefing say that Emma was elected at the fourth round and Chris at the 10th and final round? - I can't make any sense of that. Any way, that was the correct source for the breakdown for the votes by parliamentary constituency, so I am adding those for Ashford, to the earlier post where I had intended that data to go- due thanks to Pete WhiteheadThe Conservatives topped the poll with 776,370 votes so Daniel Hanna was elected first, their vote then halved to 388,185. UKIP were next with 431,111 so Nigel Farage elected second (their vote then halved to 215,555.5). The next highest vote is then the Conservatives again with 388,185 so Nirj Deva elected 3rd. Then come the Lib Dems with 338,342 so Nicholson elected fourth. And so on |
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 10, 2018 16:23:59 GMT
Yes that all confirms what I thought but why then does the parliamentary briefing say that Emma was elected at the fourth round and Chris at the 10th and final round? - I can't make any sense of that. Any way, that was the correct source for the breakdown for the votes by parliamentary constituency, so I am adding those for Ashford, to the earlier post where I had intended that data to go- due thanks to Pete Whitehead The Conservatives topped the poll with 776,370 votes so Daniel Hanna was elected first, their vote then halved to 388,185. UKIP were next with 431,111 so Nigel Farage elected second (their vote then halved to 215,555.5). The next highest vote is then the Conservatives again with 388,185 so Nirj Deva elected 3rd. Then come the Lib Dems with 338,342 so Nicholson elected fourth. And so on Yes I get all that, but why was it Nicholson elected 4th if Huhne was no 1 on the Lib Dem list ? -that's the puzzlement! |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jun 10, 2018 17:34:21 GMT
Oh I see - I misunderstood. I guess it is just a good old fashioned error
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 10, 2018 18:17:35 GMT
I suppose so - just unexpected sloppiness in a parliamentary research briefing? In a sense it doesn't matter, as once the candidate is over the line nobody cares much about the order in which election happened, and I suppose maybe they were thinking back to 1999 when the first two were indeed the other way round, but even so I would expect better.
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 11, 2018 7:53:48 GMT
Summing up on the campaigning role 1983-2005
For those 22 years I campaigned to get various people, including myself, elected to various roles with varying degrees of success! Mostly that was with the title of campaign manager, sometimes as agent, sometimes with no title at all, but pretty well always doing the same thing with the same methods. A lot of those methods I invented myself, especially early on, but there was a in time a lot of training mostly through ALDC . I found Lembit Opik one of the most effective trainers-if only he had stuck to what he was good at. What was I doing? Well, first of all in many cases, finding candidates- you can't win elections without them, unfortunately. Often that meant first recruiting them to the party, then establishing their suitability as candidates,then training them up in the dark arts. It was then frustrating when having trained them up, got them elected, they then crossed over to another side- as did Malcolm Eke, Carol Brunger and Melvyn Elliff, all of whom finished up in the Ashford Independents. Not to mention serial switchers like Palma Laughton (SDP/LD/Ind/Lab/AI) and Jeremy Adby (Lab/LD/Con). Even then, I like to think I raised the standard of campaigning throughout Ashford as other parties adopted some of the techniques I used - certainly I think AI consciously did, and maybe the Tories under Norman Ayres. Perhaps Labour under Mike Hayes too, though I am certain he would vigorously deny any copying of Lib Dem techniques. But imitation being the sincerest form of flattery....
Next, get ones candidate working. Hopefully one would get one's candidate in place months if not years before having to worry about nominations,although sadly this often didn't happen so this phase didn't happen.But ideally, you would introduce your candidate to the idea of regular newsletters (Focus in the the Lib Dem days, but I was perfecting this long before but looking at my Liberal colleagues Foci from those Alliance days and trying to improve on them, which wasn't always that difficult). In some cases.of course,it was the newsletters that got your new candidate going in the first place, so introducing them to the concept was a doddle. But in other instances the potential candidate was going out into a focus-free desert, so more challenging. I frequently wrote the Focus in the first place and got the candidate to think up bits relevant to their patch, which would be a good test of how well they knew their patch-( I am thinking here mostly of the typical Ashford small one-person wards). Hopefully I would reach a point where the candidate (by now perhaps councillor) would write their own stuff in their own personal style and just submit it to have it checked for spelling, grammar, the odd libel and the other legal niceties like imprint. By this point the really enthusiastic ones needed to be watched carefully or they would be off to the printers with their own copy, having dispensed with any of the above little niceties! George Koowaree, lovely man that he was, could be the worst offender in this respect and was capable of trying to put out stuff which at best was cringeworthy and at worst positively illegal. In cases like this it was the most important job of a campaign manager was to intercept the copy before the printer started work on it. We had a very understanding printer who lived in the middle of a wood in the depths of the countryside between High Halden and Tenterden, so difficult for new candidates to find...
Of course, even for Lib Dems there was more to campaigning than putting out Foci. It was also important to get people out on doorsteps, and actually knocking on doors, not stuffing bits of paper in letterboxes and running away. Always best if it wasn't at election time, but doing resident surveys and the like, and getting people used to the idea that chatting to folk on their doorsteps could be a fun-filled enjoyable pastime- most of the time. And if the would-be candidate had no idea what issues to raise in a Focus leaflet, a resident survey soon gave them lots of ideas.
How successful was all this? If you have looked at Pete's lovely maps in sequence you will have seen the lovely yellow stain spread across the map especially in the rural parishes west of Ashford ( and okay you will also see its retreat once again a few years later). I like to think that a lot of that spread was down to me (hence the yellow peril moniker) and the collapse in part also due to my withdrawal. Hang on, though- if you look at similar maps in sequence over the same years- I have in mind Pete's sequence for Greater London which have recently appeared, or look at the maps on LEAP in sequence for a huge number of districts- and you will of course see a similar yellow flowering and followed all too often by withering and decay. Was there a" yellow peril "crouched in the corner of each of those places? Yes, probably. In other words I was not doing anything unique , I was just the local example of a phenomenon which was if not nationwide, at least very widespread in those years. Some of us have retired or indeed are dead and gone, and only a few managed to leave viable successors to carry on immediately where we left off, and that is the biggest failure. But the best places did manage to carry on continuously and still look much as we did in our best years, whilst others have done a Lazarus act, and I am confident there will be more of those. And in some cases there will be new yellow perils arising where the species was never seen before....
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Post by matureleft on Jun 11, 2018 10:13:14 GMT
Summing up on the campaigning role 1983-2005For those 22 years I campaigned to get various people, including myself, elected to various roles with varying degrees of success! Mostly that was with the title of campaign manager, sometimes as agent, sometimes with no title at all, but pretty well always doing the same thing with the same methods. A lot of those methods I invented myself, especially early on, but there was a in time a lot of training mostly through ALDC . I found Lembit Opik one of the most effective trainers-if only he had stuck to what he was good at. What was I doing? Well, first of all in many cases, finding candidates- you can't win elections without them, unfortunately. Often that meant first recruiting them to the party, then establishing their suitability as candidates,then training them up in the dark arts. It was then frustrating when having trained them up, got them elected, they then crossed over to another side- as did Malcolm Eke, Carol Brunger and Melvyn Elliff, all of whom finished up in the Ashford Independents. Not to mention serial switchers like Palma Laughton (SDP/LD/Ind/Lab/AI) and Jeremy Adby (Lab/LD/Con). Even then, I like to think I raised the standard of campaigning throughout Ashford as other parties adopted some of the techniques I used - certainly I think AI consciously did, and maybe the Tories under Norman Ayres. Perhaps Labour under Mike Hayes too, though I am certain he would vigorously deny any copying of Lib Dem techniques. But imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.... Next, get ones candidate working. Hopefully one would get one's candidate in place months if not years before having to worry about nominations,although sadly this often didn't happen so this phase didn't happen.But ideally, you would introduce your candidate to the idea of regular newsletters (Focus in the the Lib Dem days, but I was perfecting this long before but looking at my Liberal colleagues Foci from those Alliance days and trying to improve on them, which wasn't always that difficult). In some cases.of course,it was the newsletters that got your new candidate going in the first place, so introducing them to the concept was a doddle. But in other instances the potential candidate was going out into a focus-free desert, so more challenging. I frequently wrote the Focus in the first place and got the candidate to think up bits relevant to their patch, which would be a good test of how well they knew their patch-( I am thinking here mostly of the typical Ashford small one-person wards). Hopefully I would reach a point where the candidate (by now perhaps councillor) would write their own stuff in their own personal style and just submit it to have it checked for spelling, grammar, the odd libel and the other legal niceties like imprint. By this point the really enthusiastic ones needed to be watched carefully or they would be off to the printers with their own copy, having dispensed with any of the above little niceties! George Koowaree, lovely man that he was, could be the worst offender in this respect and was capable of trying to put out stuff which at best was cringeworthy and at worst positively illegal. In cases like this it was the most important job of a campaign manager was to intercept the copy before the printer started work on it. We had a very understanding printer who lived in the middle of a wood in the depths of the countryside between High Halden and Tenterden, so difficult for new candidates to find... Of course, even for Lib Dems there was more to campaigning than putting out Foci. It was also important to get people out on doorsteps, and actually knocking on doors, not stuffing bits of paper in letterboxes and running away. Always best if it wasn't at election time, but doing resident surveys and the like, and getting people used to the idea that chatting to folk on their doorsteps could be a fun-filled enjoyable pastime- most of the time. And if the would-be candidate had no idea what issues to raise in a Focus leaflet, a resident survey soon gave them lots of ideas. How successful was all this? If you have looked at Pete's lovely maps in sequence you will have seen the lovely yellow stain spread across the map especially in the rural parishes west of Ashford ( and okay you will also see its retreat once again a few years later). I like to think that a lot of that spread was down to me (hence the yellow peril moniker) and the collapse in part also due to my withdrawal. Hang on, though- if you look at similar maps in sequence over the same years- I have in mind Pete's sequence for Greater London which have recently appeared, or look at the maps on LEAP in sequence for a huge number of districts- and you will of course see a similar yellow flowering and followed all too often by withering and decay. Was there a" yellow peril "crouched in the corner of each of those places? Yes, probably. In other words I was not doing anything unique , I was just the local example of a phenomenon which was if not nationwide, at least very widespread in those years. Some of us have retired or indeed are dead and gone, and only a few managed to leave viable successors to carry on immediately where we left off, and that is the biggest failure. But the best places did manage to carry on continuously and still look much as we did in our best years, whilst others have done a Lazarus act, and I am confident there will be more of those. And in some cases there will be new yellow perils arising where the species was never seen before.... Reflecting on my Cambridge years much of this is pretty familiar. The candidate recruitment often seemed chancy in your narrative - picking local community activists often without particularly strong pre-existing ideological identification with the party. In Cambridge, which had a long-established and fairly strong Liberal core, that happened less and with no subsequent defections in my time. The Focus stuff scarcely featured in my ward - it was never targeted. I was told that they did a test survey in the year I first sought re-election and found that my name recognition was already too high to bother. The demographics were anyway tough - the highest pensioner population in the county not just the city, a largely very settled lower-middle class and skilled working class population. However I was involved enough city-wide to see the techniques elsewhere. The organisational frailties were sometimes evident - vigorous campaigns followed within a couple of years by near inertia. This normally linked to the comings and goings of particular people. Again Cambridge had a sufficient pool of Liberal and then Lib Dem activists largely to cover the inevitable progress of individual lives and aspirations.
I introduced a couple of new techniques myself soon after winning my seat from the Tories. They were both immensely labour-intensive but their adoption effectively shut out opposition over time and steadily increased my own majorities and then those of colleagues when they finally got elected. One would no longer be allowed. I analysed non-voters and identified those with names prevalent among pensioners. I took a couple of days off and visited them, offering to organise a postal vote. They normally said yes. At that time the relevant officer allowed applications on the signature of a councillor. I then took another day off as the votes were delivered and offered to countersign as witness and post the vote. Yes. I always posted opposition votes but of course I had selected initially those who were identified as Labour! All legal then and rightly not now.
One difference in Cambridge was the steady decay of Conservativism at local level (and then in parliamentary elections) compared to your sturdy opponents. We also had annual elections - elections by thirds to the City and an election to a (normally) coterminous County division in the off year. This built stronger organisational resilience for all parties but put the weakest - increasingly the Tories - under constant pressure. Your small-ward period clearly gave easier entry points (assuming that you didn't face a well-established local personality).
The rural element presented a challenge that I only experienced in my later life in Derbyshire. I wasn't seeking a local government seat then but participated in plenty of contests. Localism always appeared much stronger - picking outsider candidates was normally pretty fatal except in landslide years. You got "surprise" results on all sides since local residence and being known counted for much more than in an urban ward. |
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 11, 2018 19:16:08 GMT
Yes the point about the recruitment of potential candidates being chancy is well made and is indeed borne out by our experience, but we were trying to punch way above our weight - for most of the time of this history we were talking of maybe 150 members including those recruits- we may have reached 200 members when we were running the council. We had to take the chance of bringing in new members who showed signs of adhering to our philosophy and turn them from new members into council candidates in a matter of months. We really had no choice but it does also reflect our belief in the sort of community activism which would throw up new activists as issues arose.We also believed in listening to what people had to say and encouraging people to think for themselves- always dangerous if your overriding concern was party discipline! I know we lost a lot of councillors to independents, but on balance I think that was worth it, and even though some councillors might cease to be within the party structures they often took our ideas of how to do things and infected other groups!
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 12, 2018 7:21:13 GMT
Summing up on the councillor roles 1987-2003I am giving those dates and saying "roles "in the plural as I will think about both my role and that of my wife as they are so intertwined so much of the time - my personal role was only the second half of that. What did we achieve as councillors? Was it all worth all that effort? There were different sorts of achievement and I have tried to group them under four headings. First, but by far the least important, was what I will call the social role. Being a councillor involves involvement in civic duties and sharing social roles both with fellow councillors and the general public. I will include within that civic twinning tasks involving our two twin towns. Had either of us accepted the mayorality this role would have assumed far greater significance, but on all occasions it was on offer we both turned it down. Second, there was what I would call the political role. What I have in mind here is the formulation and execution of policy - what went into the manifesto, what was done to see that implemented, what was done to work with other parties to achieve common objectives. This to my mind was very important stuff and what brought us into politics in the first place. I consider scrutiny, which became a more formalised process towards the end of this period, as coming under this heading. Thirdly, the non policy-based work- I am thinking of the quasi-judicial roles of which there were a number I was involved in, but the work of the planning committee particularly- all the important decision making processes where quite specifically you cannot make a political judgement. Fourthly, and rather to my surprise initially, the most significant of all, casework - actually getting things done for individual constituents who were finding it difficult to sort things out. Not all of these can be discussed fully in a forum like this but all can be in general terms and I would like to explore all four a bit so will make a separate post for each to keep the issues apart. |
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 13, 2018 7:57:58 GMT
First, let me get out of the way the social element of being a councillor. Immediately it seems to me you hit an image problem- the idea which has long been a common literary theme, of fat burgesses enjoying themselves , feeding their faces at the taxpayer's expense, and ignoring the needs of the downtrodden masses the are supposed to represent. Okay, that was always a caricature, but with just enough justification to be believable in some cases, and I expect we have all seen instances where there has been just a wee element of that....
That said, there is a real need to socialise within the council, to build friendships, often across political divides, and bringing together in a social context elected representatives, salaried officers and the general public (or at least those members of the GP who can be bothered to show an interest). I suppose most councils will have key social events in the year- a winter civic ball, a summer garden party, etc. I was brought up with these things, having had a Dad who had been twice a Mayor- back in 1958 I had taken Eileen to Yeovil Mayor's Ball as our first big date involving my family, and look where that led... and even before that my sister had dated the Deputy Borough Treasurer at a similar event and he had become my brother-in-law. Events like these often are an expense to be incurred by the councillors, not a freebie, and usually are raising significant money for charitable causes. So at Ashford for the 16 years of being on the council and a bit beyond, this was an important part of our duties. The worst ones were those where you saw little cliques of one particular party all sitting in one corner engaged in political backbiting and ignoring everybody else. And it wasn't always the same party- all parties were like that at some point or other.
There were of course other sort of events. I remember sporting events,like charitable bike rides- including one (started off by Gordon Turner as the Mayor that year) when the peleton crashed and I was the one who failed to get up - I smashed my ankle into pieces and was out of action for some time. Civic church parades. Military events like giving the freedom of the Borough to the local regiment. Cultural events like music festivals and art shows.All sorts of commitments on one's precious time but all part of being a councillor, and though some councillors made the decision to ignore most or even all such events, I always thought they were missing out on something important.
And I specifically wanted to mention the civic twinning events- and it was noticeable that Lib Dems were disproportionately involved in this, and other parties represented by a sprinkling of enthusiasts and whoever happened to be Mayor that year. Ashford has two twin towns, Bad Munstereifel in Germany and Fougeres in Brittany- two absolutely delightful walled towns who must have found Ashford a bit of a let-down but were always too polite to say so.
For some time before we were councillors we had some involvement in the twinning process, but there was always a difference between the twinning activities sponsored by the 3 twinning organisations and civic ones specifically under council control, where council money was available to help sponsor activities (an embarrassingly small amount in our case compared with French and German largesse). Every year there was a civic delegation to the town of that year, so we were hosting the French and German delegations in Ashford every three years, which might mean we had a couple of delegates billeted on us as we had a house large enough to cope with that- preferably French guests as our French was better than our German, though we finished up with German guests at least a couple of times. We fed them some meals although of course there were also a lot of meals taken care of in the programme, and we always had at least one day to entertain our guests privately -depending on what they hadn't done before -trips to Canterbury or to London were often popular. Of course on the other two years in each cycle we were staying in Fougeres or Bad Munstereifel. The rule was that although all trips had to be trilingual in part, normally we all tried to speak the host language whatever that was.
Politically Fougeres was socialist in our day at least, certainly with a strong socialist Maire, in Jacques Faucheux as the overwhelming force- Ashford now has a principal dual carriage road, the one with the International station on it, as Avenue Jacques Faucheux. We have other major roads named after Fougeres and Bad Munstereifel, but no others named after French politicians as far as I know. BM was much further to the right- mainly CDU with quite a strong FDP element- I have spent many a happy hour in the Glockenspiel which is the FDP pub of choice in BM.
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 13, 2018 18:55:09 GMT
Next, and more importantly, the political role, and I particularly stress the active part of that- formulating and implementing policy, rather than reacting to events or to what other people are doing, which is of course what you are doing most of the time when in opposition, and this distinction became more apparent once we were into cabinet government and scrutiny committees- most of our time was spent under the committee system, where at least the theory of the thing was that the committees made the policy as well as scrutinising the results. As mentioned earlier on this thread, we did go into the 4 years of administration with a fairly detailed manifesto to implement, but we were only (just) the senior partner in a coalition administration, and these were the sort of conditions where the committee system would work more or less as it was intended to- i.e. the decisions on policy were often thrashed out in open committee, and especially in Policy & Resources, or even in full council. In my experience when one party had a working majority (and that in Ashford would always have been a Conservative majority) the key decisions were made by the inner party clique and presented to Policy & Resources as a fait accompli - i.e just like Cabinet government, but even less open to scrutiny! But when you had a minority administration or a working coalition, decisions were much more openly arrived at, more democratic, and a lot less predictable.
I have been digging out a 1998 document which attempted to assess how we were doing in terms of implementing our manifesto commitments. It was of course at that stage pretty upbeat, and with twenty years hindsight I would now be a little less so, but it might be worth looking through and revisiting our 8 chapter headings in the manifesto:
1.Action to build a new local democracy. Some of the things we introduced then are so mainstream now it seems amazing that we had to fight to get them through- like public questions, petitioning, and the right to address the planning committee on issues that affected you. A number of forums were established ( eg youth, cycling, allotments) which flourished at the time but allowed to wither away by later administrations.
2. Planning and Promoting Ashford, We appointed a new Economic Development Officer who did some important work but that was always politically a difficult area and the Conservatives scrapped the office as a money-saving venture as soon as they got back. Developing the local plan, which also came under this heading, did have all party support in this council( opposition was to come from the new AI party in the next council) and indeed I was to be appointed to chair the Local Plan committee for the first two years of the next, Conservative led, Council. Was I the fall guy to shield the Tories from some flak? Anyway, these were expansionist times and sometimes when promoting the development of the Borough we were pushing at an open door. Problem was to keep it environmentally friendly and sustainable.A lot of developments in this erawere associated with the rapid expansion of the town , such as the International Station and the Outlet shopping centre which I discussed earlier.
3. Action on the Environment largely under Eileen was therefore very important and a lot of the work here was very community- led through the LA21 Community Forum and various community Round Tables coming out of it . The work on the Farmer's Markets,( undone by the next Tory administration but now reinstated) the work on council owned land especially Hothfield Common and Ashford Warren (hugely transformative and still ongoing and expanding) was an important part of this , but so was the community based environmental critique of all the council's work.
4.Action on Transport. Transport in most aspects was of course a county function and not part of the Borough Council remit, although even there a proactive Borough could exert influence on the County on this and many other matters. Roads inside Ashford town were" ours" though and we could and did press for some new roads , not something generally we would favour, but a few short links were needed , notably the Barracks Link Road (now called Templer Road and such a vital bit of the road network it's difficult to realise it wasn't there then). There were schemes for traffic calming including rising bollards ( always causing great controversy). There was a huge development of off-road cycle ways. There was a considerable extension of town centre pedestrianisation. Much of this has changed the shape of Central Ashford-of course similar things were happening in most towns, and it paved the way, if that's the right phrase, for Ashford's controversial shared space roads, which we envisaged but which came much later, much to the derision of J Clarkson et al, but actually hugely successful.
5.Action on the Quality of everyone's Life, had been in part about crime prevention strategies including support for expanding neighbourhood watch and the expansion, maybe slightly surprisingly for a Lib Dem initiative, of CCTV -there were a lot of our local members faced with rising crime and antisocial behaviour in their wards were really keen to find anything that might reduce the problem. Also under this heading came the expansion of the somewhat limited leisure provision- this is where we had faced great pressure to include the promise of a theatre which we had refused to put in because of the potential cost implications. But we did get the Julie Rose athletics stadium, the Bowling centre, the cinema,(twice since enlarged and now a second one on the way) we had started the Create free music festival (still going and getting bigger every year) and began the process which led in course to the St Marys performance centre within the parish church. By and large we achieved all we had promised in this area, and more if you take a rather longer term view.
6..Action on Housing, As I said earlier , Housing became the particular fiefdom of our Labour partners in this administration but they did implement everything that was in our manifesto chapter -mainly about a continuous improvement of the quality of our housing stock ( at that stage if you went round council estates you could always pick out the less well maintained ones as those that had been sold) and bringing tenants representatives onto the Housing Committee. Our particular contribution was in the rural areas where Labour was so less well represented, and particularly pushing through Local Needs schemes- 5 new Local Needs schemes been pushed through between 1995 and 1998 - one of those Egerton in my ward, and Smarden and Pluckley were also begun.
7.Action on Employment. The big new thing was the Eureka Science Park in partnership with Trinity College Cambridge and I have to say this was a bit of a disappointment to me- we a got a lot of new employment but less of the big science projects we were promised. Lots of employment poured in generally but this was I feel more down to the location of Ashford and the general economic situation than to any planning on our part.
8. Paying for it all- Action on Finance and Services. We had realised that we had to keep spending within limits because the Conservatives were clearly going to attack us on that, and fight the next election promising tax cuts- it was a foregone conclusion. At the same time if we had done nothing to improve what went before, for 4 years, in order to stay within Tory spending plans that would have been pointless. So we had our new areas of spending, eschewed any really costly big projects where it would take years to get the money back, and tried to streamline operations wherever possible - shorter reports, allowances cut, departments merged and senior officers made redundant, which at least we kept council tax below the inflation rate. Was it enough?- well no it wasn't and the Tories came back in to power,as we have seen, on a programme of cutting back everything regardless of the effect on services -which is why they have quietly over the years reinstated a lot of our initiatives.
Back in opposition, we were soon grappling with the new system of cabinet government (excluded, therefore) and the scrutiny system which we were learning how to use. I had a while chairing Overview and Scrutiny, and so at one point did Rita Hawes. We were being told that the model was based on HoC select committees, and we tried to use them in that way and I know some of the more thoughtful backbench Tories who were very interested in what we were trying to do, as they were also trying to work out their role in this brave new world. We were trying to develop our community contacts again as we had done while running the show, and trying to look not just at what the council was doing but also the state of the Borough generally, so what the council was not doing. I remember we set up a scrutiny session on the problems of farmers in the Borough and brought in a load of farmers as witnesses - something dear to the hearts of some of the old Tory councillors. But after a while the backbench Tories came to us looking shamefaced and saying they had been told we were exceeding our powers - not told that by the officers, note, but by their cabinet colleagues, so they felt they couldn't co-operate with us.
I have been away from council now so long and I really don't know how cabinet government has worked out but on the whole I think I'm glad to be away from it.
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 14, 2018 20:00:32 GMT
The next councillor role I want to explore is the quasi- judicial one. This is where councillors are acting within a legal framework which specifically excludes making their decisions according to their own ideas or prejudices and definitely not using their party political concerns, but where nevertheless they are making decisions as councillors in office and according to the evidence put before them There are various tribunals where this applies, and I did a number of those, but by far the biggest example was the planning committee.
I was always interested in planning issues and before becoming a councillor used to do college lectures on planning policy so thought I knew my way round planning law but confronting the day-by- day decisions and abiding by the limitations imposed on councillors by planning law was something else. Places on the planning committee were keenly fought for, for various reasons, not least because they were quite lucrative!( Lest anyone think I am suggesting anything else, I merely mean that planning met far more frequently than other committees so the attendance rates were quite good, plus extra allowances for site meetings) . So in the first two years I was generally only attending planning committee meetings when there was a ward issue, but there often was, so I got the opportunity to see how the committee worked in practice. The committee met in the main (hemispherical) council chamber rather than a committee room, and was often packed out with far more people in the public galleries than for full council meetings. I suspect that was the other reason PC places were in demand- the public profile was high. One was more exposed therefore, too, especially as votes were by show of hands , not using the council chamber's electronic voting system.After two years I became a member of the committee and then vice-chair for the rest of my time on the council, so once or twice sitting up on the Mayor's chair on the raised dais, looking down on everybody else -as I was never Mayor, the only times I got to do this! And not very often, as Harold Apps,the regular chair, rarely missed a planning meeting. We discussed Harold on this forum on the RIP thread last year some time. When Harold took the chair I sat down in my usual council chamber seat and spoke from there (breaking the normal convention of the VC sitting up on the dais with chair and officers). When called to speak Harold , bless him, always made a great thing of calling the Vice Chair to speak! The main thing though, was the chance to attend the pre-meets the day before committee met and have the officers try and justify their decisions to us and there were times when it was clear from the start we weren't going to agree. The other lovely thing about planning was the site visit - getting to see all sorts of places you never would get to otherwise. Especially good were the deeply rural ones in some remote corner of the Borough, whether down by the Sussex borders or high on the Downs above Canterbury.
Quite deliberately I have described what it felt like to be on planning and not the planning issues themselves, which as far as I'm concerned remain sub judice, even after all these years.But I think our decisions generally made Ashford a better place and averted some horrors. And there were a few where we lost and we now look back and think well it wasn't so bad after all, was it?
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Post by gwynthegriff on Jun 14, 2018 20:43:08 GMT
The next councillor role I want to explore is the quasi- judicial one. This is where councillors are acting within a legal framework which specifically excludes making their decisions according to their own ideas or prejudices and definitely not using their party political concerns, but where nevertheless they are making decisions as councillors in office and according to the evidence put before them There are various tribunals where this applies, and I did a number of those, but by far the biggest example was the planning committee. tbc Did you ever do Taxi Licensing? I enjoyed it, though it was quite eye-opening! |
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J.G.Harston
Lib Dem
Leave-voting Brexit-supporting Liberal Democrat
Posts: 14,771 
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Post by J.G.Harston on Jun 15, 2018 0:19:00 GMT
The next councillor role I want to explore is the quasi- judicial one. ... and I did a number of those, but by far the biggest example was the planning committee. Did you ever do Taxi Licensing? I enjoyed it, though it was quite eye-opening! I did Taxi Licensing (and premises, etc.). I enjoyed it a lot more than Planning, mainly because we kicked everybody out and deliberated behind closed doors so it was impossible for panel members to speak to the gallery. On Sheffield was also had Benefits Review and Schools Admissions (, Transfers and Transport). Benefits has since been abolished and I understand that most other councils don't have Schools Admissions, it's all done by officers. |
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 15, 2018 1:09:01 GMT
I never did the taxi one myself but yes I gathered it could be quite a "fun" one. I have only just started the q-j role post and of course I will not even now discuss actual issues from inside any of them.
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Post by matureleft on Jun 15, 2018 7:34:45 GMT
The next councillor role I want to explore is the quasi- judicial one. This is where councillors are acting within a legal framework which specifically excludes making their decisions according to their own ideas or prejudices and definitely not using their party political concerns, but where nevertheless they are making decisions as councillors in office and according to the evidence put before them There are various tribunals where this applies, and I did a number of those, but by far the biggest example was the planning committee. I was always interested in planning issues and before becoming a councillor used to do college lectures on planning policy so thought I knew my way round planning law but confronting the day-by- day decisions and abiding by the limitations imposed on councillors by planning law was something else. Places on the planning committee were keenly fought for, for various reasons, not least because they were quite lucrative!( Lest anyone think I am suggesting anything else, I merely mean that planning met far more frequently than other committees so the attendance rates were quite good, plus extra allowances for site meetings) . So in the first two years I was generally only attending planning committee meetings when there was a ward issue, but there often was, so I got the opportunity to see how the committee worked in practice. The committee met in the main (hemispherical) council chamber rather than a committee room, and was often packed out with far more people in the public galleries than for full council meetings. I suspect that was the other reason PC places were in demand- the public profile was high. One was more exposed therefore, too, especially as votes were by show of hands , not using the council chamber's electronic voting system.After two years I became a member of the committee and then vice-chair for the rest of my time on the council, so once or twice sitting up on the Mayor's chair on the raised dais, looking down on everybody else -as I was never Mayor, the only times I got to do this! And not very often, as Harold Apps,the regular chair, rarely missed a planning meeting. We discussed Harold on this forum on the RIP thread last year some time. When Harold took the chair I sat down in my usual council chamber seat and spoke from there (breaking the normal convention of the VC sitting up on the dais with chair and officers). When called to speak Harold , bless him, always made a great thing of calling the Vice Chair to speak! The main thing though, was the chance to attend the pre-meets the day before committee met and have the officers try and justify their decisions to us and there were times when it was clear from the start we weren't going to agree. The other lovely thing about planning was the site visit - getting to see all sorts of places you never would get to otherwise. Especially good were the deeply rural ones in some remote corner of the Borough, whether down by the Sussex borders or high on the Downs above Canterbury. Quite deliberately I have described what it felt like to be on planning and not the planning issues themselves, which as far as I'm concerned remain sub judice, even after all these years.But I think our decisions generally made Ashford a better place and averted some horrors. And there were a few where we lost and we now look back and think well it wasn't so bad after all, was it? An area of the council that I quite deliberately avoided. That was partly for practical reasons - I worked full time even when holding leading positions in the council. The planning committee met frequently and, if you did it properly, also involved site visits. Even my very tolerant private sector employer (and for half my 12 years on the council I was a senior manager) would have blanched. However there were two other reasons. The explicitly non-political aspect ran counter to my purpose. And finally, perhaps unusually for a Labour councillor, I personally disliked regulatory activity like this - licensing and control simply didn't fit my personal make-up. I wanted to create things, solve problems and free people. That's not saying that I wanted to stop the activity entirely. I looked in policy terms to reduce the burdens but I recognised some control had to be exercised - just not by me! We had a row over taxi licensing when the local taxi owners demanded the council control numbers rigidly when the Tory government permitted a loosening. The officer wheeze, supported by my regulatory enthusiasts, was to commission a survey to determine precisely the number of cabs we needed in Cambridge. Against my objections they did that and then used the resulting number. The licences the council granted had become business assets traded by the drivers. I saw no reason to perpetuate that. But I picked my battles.... |
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