Joe Salmon, 03 December 2023, Tags:
AS EVER THIS BLOG IS JUST MY OWN THOUGHTS AND NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF ANYBODY OTHER THAN ME AT THE TIME OF WRITING ETC ETC ETC
Firstly apologies, the frequency of this blog is fairly inconsistent, it’s the first thing to get cut when I’m short on time at the weekend.
I’d also like to stress even more so than ever these are just my thoughts, rather than those of the Green Group, because I’m going to be quite frank about my opinions of the budget which we haven’t discussed as a group yet, and where I’m almost certain I’m not in total alignment with the other Greens (certainly me and Kate don’t see eye to eye on the matter yet and my thoughts are not fully formed).
This month has been very frustrating in terms of Adult Health and Social Care overview and scrutiny. We’ve met a couple of times now, and each time actions agreed at the meeting aren’t carried out very effectively. Our forward planning meeting didn’t happen until after our next meeting (meetings are 2 months apart!!) and now the working group which was going to work on pulling together the data we actually need to scrutinise our services hasn’t been set up in good time.
I’m amazed at the level of incompetence that is acceptable as a councillor. I was very disappointed that councillor Canavan didn’t think it was standard practice to keep your colleagues informed about unexpected delays and issues, and to show your working. I expect more of someone who is paid thousands of pounds extra a year to carry out additional duties, and hope after our last meeting we see an improvement.
Similarly following full council meeting I’ve yet to actually see the cost benefit breakdown for moving many council provided services such as car parks and beachfront kiosks to cashless from Mike Cox.
I’m starting to worry this is typical of the council. I don’t believe this is the fault of any individuals working within the council, but simply the inevitable result of decades of underfunding and neglect, and selecting councillors by a politically charged popularity contest in a country where the media is run by corrupting idiot billionaires. I’ve emailed Vikki as leader of the council and Graham as the chief exec as I think it’s almost worse to pretend we’ve got a functioning O&S committee in regards to Adult Health and Social Care than to simply throw our hands up and go “Well obviously we can’t do this as we’ve got naff all money”. I’m still deeply concerned that the committee cannot answer questions like “Which services used by BCP residents are currently not hitting their KPIs” for example.
We’ve had deaths that arguably could have been prevented had the state of our services been better understood at a regional level. Similarly the data that has been presented at times has been little better than anecdotal, for example the work carried out by Health Watch on access to dental care is welcome (https://healthwatchdorset.co.uk/nhs-dentistry-in-dorset-ongoing-crisis/) but really shouldn’t be necessary. The number of patients without access to dentistry across BCP should be known, as should the number of available NHS dentists. Indeed how on earth is somebody meant to find an NHS dentist if the website to find one isn’t even up to date?
We don’t even know how many people there are in the conurbation who don’t have a dentist, and in fact no one knows. FFS.
I am similarly frustrated at so much sensible thinking not being translatable into planning legalese and the knock on impact that has. It is impossible it seems for residents to simply say “No please don’t build another HMO on our street we don’t have the infrastructure to deal with that” and have that heard by planning officers. I understand we need more homes but we don’t need more HMOs. These aren’t homes, they’re places for others to exploit the fact we don’t have enough homes for people to live in.
When I am in a shop, none of the people working in that shop earn enough to buy a house, or qualify for a council house. When I am riding the bus, the driver cannot afford to buy a house and does not qualify for a council house. If my child is sick and I take them to the GP’s surgery no one working there can afford to buy a house or qualifies for a council house bar maybe the GPs. If I go to eat a meal in a restaurant, no one working in the restaurant can afford to buy a house or qualifies for a council house. When my child is learning at school no one teaching them can afford to buy a house or qualifies for a council house. This is insane, just as insane as our inaction on climate change.
I was hoping this budget would address that. I would like to see funds set aside to fund the building of the thousands of more council houses we need. Right, there it is, let’s talk budget. The budget is awful.
Budget 2024/25 | Have Your Say Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (bcpcouncil.gov.uk)
Everything is being cut. EVERYTHING. I’ve discussed the situation with the council’s Chief Finance Officer who made it clear that technically the council is already insolvent. By Feb 2025 BCP Council will be issued a Section 114 notice for bankruptcy for the deficit we already have in funding care and services for SEN children.
My primary concern is that in this environment there is no possibility of taking the urgent action required on mitigating the impact of climate change we’re going to encounter over the next few years, or achieving net zero in time to avoid a literal climate apocalypse where the majority of the planet ceases to be able to support human life. On this count at least the feedback from the CFO wasn’t quite so grim, and they advised me to contact the officer responsible for that work, to see if they felt they were not getting the funding they needed.
Given that we cannot build school crossings or put in speed cameras quickly enough to outpace the rate at which the needs for new ones are identified or fund the building of new council houses on the scale required to address the housing crisis I am sceptical about the response I’ll get.
When talking to them I was reminded of the insane position taken up by Councillor Beesley, who genuinely seems to be the living embodiment of Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22. This is the position of prioritising legal and financial considerations above practical or moral ones.
I think the reason the only work place I’ve ever really thrived in was urgent care is that in urgent care you just don’t do stupid. You can’t, people who do just don’t survive. You cannot make half hearted excuses for mistakes, point to policy or whatnot to explain your actions, and you have always to have acted based on the reality of the situation. You cannot say to someone with a dying parent who needs a GP to come out and administer morphine that unfortunately they are in the frustrating position of having a GP’s surgery in Hampshire while living in Dorset so need to wait for the Hampshire OOH to get an OOH GP to come and administer morphine while you have that resource in Dorset free, and know Hampshire have explained their own OOH GP will take hours. Common sense rules supreme still in urgent care.
Common sense does not rule supreme in local government. The way to set a budget for council services is to figure out how much everything costs to deliver, and then to figure out how to fund that. This is not what we have done. We have started out from a position of “how much money do we have”, and then “what can we do with that money”. Finally after thinking of this at no point have we critically examined the outcome of that process and considered if this proposal is practical in anyway, and never has the idea been entertained that maybe what we’re looking to do isn’t possible within the existing system, and that we may have to totally overhaul things to make things work.
This isn’t how you run a business. If you sit down, come up with your financial plan and realise the business cannot function, you don’t turn up to work as normal the next day. You begin winding the business down and starting again with something else, or you draw up a working financial plan.
This isn’t how you run any organisation successfully, and I feel the current budget is planning to fail.
The only reason BCP council was not bankrupted immediately by the massive cuts imposed by government (for example in 2010 the amount of un-ringfenced central government BCP council would have received (if it had existed) was £106 million; in 2023 it is £6 million) was because the previous administration opted to burn through our reserves. It’s an indictment of our political system that councillors unable to understand or accept this fact have been consistently elected, with Councillor Phil Broadhead the shining example of this.
The council currently barely provides the services that it was originally designed to fulfil. Street cleaning and public amenities are barely functioning. Library hours have been cut and cut. Parks are in a state of disrepair. Graffiti and street repairs take an age. Homeless people have barely any recourse to support. Parents of children with additional needs and disabilities have to fight tooth and nail just to be recognised by the system. The care provided to older people is a disgrace.
The right thing to do in such circumstances in my opinion is to honestly say that the budget cannot be made to balance. That the funding simply isn’t there (we’ll be doing this anyhow in 2025 as things stand). We should draw up a budget that if properly funded would provide the council services we deserve, including the transformation work to remove the parasitic drag created by using third party contractors constantly through a broken tender system which facilitates corruption and cronyism as we can see being exposed regularly at Audit & Governance Committee meetings.
I’m told if we do this, we’ll be put at the mercy of ‘commissioners’ who will come in and decide how council funding is spent instead. My response to this is the same response to I’ve always had to the threat of bullying and punishment unless I do something stupid or immoral, which is to say ‘No’ and not comply. We should reach out to other local authorities in the same position to determine a proper strategy to approach this situation and tackle this institutional bullying from central government. I’d be lying if I said I had some kind of brilliant comprehensive plan on what do to here, but passing the budget as proposed would be doing something stupid, and you just shouldn’t do stupid things.
We are seeing the destruction of our democracy, our economy and our ecosystem by a zombie government unwilling to tackle the problems we face and we must resist it. We cannot be complicit in the destruction of our society by pretending the budget that is currently proposed is anything other than a path to ecological and economic destruction.
I’m a revolutionary at heart, and I won’t support any budget which doesn’t not address the urgency of our ecological situation or provide the services we are entitled to based on the taxation of our labour. I cannot believe anybody else can do otherwise with a clean conscience. We must develop an alternative approach, even if this cannot be done within the existing system, and instead take on the hard problem of challenging and reforming that system.
Those who say it can’t be done shouldn’t get in the way of those already doing it.
