Martin Vander Weyer
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All this was made vivid at a recent meeting of Helmsley Town Council — no member of which, I hastily interject, has claimed any expenses in living memory. A representative of Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency based in Wakefield, asked to speak: she had come to update us on the ‘Renaissance Market Towns’ programme, which was being ‘refocused’ in such a way that our chances of getting money out of it for local projects had just become slightly worse. At least I think that’s what she said, for she spoke in the special gobbledygook of regional officialdom. Leaving aside the matter of what it cost to have her deliver this message in person instead of sending an email, we were left to contemplate the grotesque folly of the Renaissance initiative, a five-year, seven- digit fountain of cash for consultants that has produced no major benefit to any market town I know, yet seems to have an unstoppable life of its own, wholly disconnected from parallel efforts by local planning and highways departments, which rarely talk to each other anyway. It is only when you wrestle — as I did, over many months — with one of these mad schemes to try to get something out of it for your own community that you realise just how extravagantly incompetent and unjoined-up our local government really is. It wastes billions of council tax and central government funding and it richly deserves a wave of public unrest: if you spot a council candidate before Thursday, pin him to a wall and tell him you don’t give a toss about the contents of your MP’s flat but you’re bloody livid about council tax and you want it cut by 10 per cent. That’s the one line of attack he won’t be expecting.
Prescott’s pinnacle
The only glimmer of hope I can see is that the very pinnacle of Prescottian fantasy, the unelected Yorkshire & Humber regional assembly to which Yorkshire Forward reported, actually voted itself out of existence in March, presumably on the orders of Communities Secretary Hazel Blears, who must surely soon follow it into oblivion. At its last meeting there was still time to debate ‘regional biodiversity strategy’ which ‘has a major role to play in contributing to the development of the Integrated Regional Strategy, as conservation of biodiversity is a core pillar of sustainable development’. That’s good to know, but the bad news is that before adjourning, members also addressed a mystifying chart of the ‘regional governance structure’ which has replaced the assembly with a joint regional board, a ‘strategic leaders’ board — and a box for ‘social, economic and environmental partners’ which isn’t connected to anything. Perhaps that’s where they put citizens like you and me.
More for less
And yet it is entirely possible to deliver better local government for less. Stephen Greenhalgh is the burly Conservative entrepreneur who leads Hammersmith and Fulham council, one of very few authorities in recent times to achieve a reduction in its overall budget. Public sector unions think Greenhalgh is the devil incarnate, but resident satisfaction in his borough has shot up, more than anywhere else in London. ‘The key is to get control of the cash and focus single-mindedly on key priorities,’ he told me. ‘We’re the only council in Britain to have cut council tax three years running [by 3 per cent each year]. We did it by a combination of competitive tendering, debt reduction through selling off unnecessary buildings, and smarter working — using less office space and rationalising customer contact points. Council officers’ powers to spend were curtailed, with spending decisions over £100,000 having to be approved by the council’s cabinet. We froze recruitment and for two years a “vacancy management panel” approved every single new post. Head count dropped by nearly 1,000 over the two years. We created a culture focused on delivering value for money. But the real key is sheer bloody hard work.’
Puddles of iniquity
I had breakfast with the Docklands Business Club last week, and I began my speech to them about green shoots (or not) by declaring how refreshing it was to escape the stench of ruinous greed in Westminster for the fresh air of Canary Wharf, where hard-working financiers go quietly about their task of nurturing the nation’s wealth. How swiftly the public’s anger has swung round to focus on its new target: soon Sir Fred Goodwin will be able not just to slip back to Edinburgh from his foreign hideaway but to stand for parliament on an anti-sleaze ticket. Meanwhile both the rage and the bank holiday weather have been so hot that I fear we must be due for a biblical flood — like the one that struck Helmsley in 2005 after I proposed a controversial new car park beside the river. As a Puritan pamphleteer (quoted by Adam Nicolson in Power and Glory) wrote of just such an expression of divine wrath in the West Country in 1607, perhaps with some ancestor of Totnes MP Sir Anthony Steen in mind: ‘Sinne overflowes our soules: we are covered with the waves of abhomination and uncleanness: we are drowned in the black puddles of iniquity: we swim up to the throates, nay even above the chin in Covetousness.’
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