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Swindon Borough Council’s Mr Martin is clearly no statistician. His social analysis skills aren’t too hot either. According to Mr Martin, a league table of wards based on levels of outstanding council tax debt will help them to ‘identify areas that may have problems’

The idea of breaking it down into wards is to help us identify areas that may have problems and see what we can do to help.

He does seem to have a few doubts though.

We have to look more carefully at these figures because for example, Abbey Meads is not one of the places with a lot of benefit claimants

Quite. As Mr Martin clearly hasn’t bothered, I’ll do the analysis for him. Here are the figures – and spin – from the Adver.

Abbey Meads comes in at fifth in the league of council tax dodgers – with over £572,000 owed from 904 court orders. The worst area is Central ward, which is £688,000 in the red with 1,390 court orders. Gorse Hill & Pinehurst, Eastcott and Parks are close behind, each owing in excess of £600,000. The most punctual payers evidently live in Ridgeway ward, where just under £44,000 is outstanding from 71 court orders.

Let’s concentrate on just the three wards for which full figures have been given. In the council’s chosen ranking, they are:

• Central — £688,000 from 1,390 court orders
• Abbey Meads — £572,000 from 904 court orders
• Ridgeway — £44,000 from 71 court orders

I can’t find figures for how many taxable properties there are in each ward. The best indicator of ward size I can find is the electorate (i.e. those registered to vote) at the last local elections.

• Central — 7777 electors
• Abbey Meads — 10,713 electors
• Ridgeway — 2464 electors

With the population of Abbey Meads four times as large as that of Ridgeway, any analysis based on totals per ward is going to be heavily skewed in favour of Ridgeway and against Abbey Meads. There are various sums one can do to try to remove that effect.

From that analysis you could say that it’s not the wards with high numbers of benefit claimants that have the problem, but the more affluent ones, as there the amounts owed – the last column in the table – are, on average, much higher.

Of course, if you pick the other columns in the table, the conclusion is different… but not more correct.

The headline on the Adver’s website claims the police were giving safety advice to shoppers… the story says the police weren’t there at all.

The ability to proof-read is a very undervalued skill….

(To see the text in the screenshot clearly, click on the image.)

komadori was amongst an un-select few that met the chief executive and two directors of the New Swindon Company yesterday at their first Local Forum. I’ve posted my recollection of what was said at length elsewhere. Overall, they gave the impression of being sincere in their wish to listen to the local community (even if their comment on how much they value the dialogue is riddled with empty management-speak). They even noted a couple of suggestions made as being good things to do, though these were related to their website rather than the more substantive matters of the regeneration planning itself.

What was most apparent from the meeting — apart from how protracted the regeneration would now be — was that New Swindon Company is an organisation with responsibility but little power. Anything requiring action on the ground seemed to be either in the remit of the developers or Swindon Borough Council.

It was very nice — and informative — to talk, but to make these fora really worthwhile requires Swindon Borough Council and the developers to engage in the discussion too.

When I started investigating the story in the Adver about a failed bid for Highworth to get some regeneration funds from the South West Regional Development Agency, I soon found myself going round in circles. A quick look at the Highworth Community Partnership Group’s website revealed that it’s not really a partnership at all. The steering group seem to be self-appointed. There doesn’t even seem to be a representative from Highworth Town Council, though it is closely linked (the council takes care of the partnership’s finances).

Highworth Community Partnership Group is supported by Wiltshire Market Towns Partnership, which seems to be indistinguishable from the Wiltshire Forum of Community Area Partnerships. The latter is funded by the European Union Social Fund, the South West Regional Development Agency, Wiltshire County Council and what was the Market and Coastal Towns Association of which it is also a member. The Market and Coastal Towns Association is now the South West Market and Coastal Towns Network, which was created by the Market and Coastal Towns Initiative which is — if you believe the spin and have not yet got totally lost in the tangle of bureaucracy —

‘a community-led initiative which helps local people to prepare and implement a plan for the future of their town and surrounding area’.

Allowing the community to lead themselves apparently requires the financial support of not only the South West Regional Development Agency, but also the Government Office for the South West, the South West Regional Assembly, the Countryside Agency (now Natural England), English Heritage, the Housing Corporation (replaced by the Homes and Communities Agency), the South West Network of Rural Community Councils (itself funded by the South West Regional Development Agency and the Government Office for the South West) and Lottery Funds South West.

So, at the end of all that, a group funded by the South West Regional Development Agency via numerous intermediaries has been unsuccessful in obtaining funds from… the South West Regional Development Agency… and have strangled themselves with red tape in the process.

Swindon Borough Council must design their plant pots very precisely. It’s a pity that those delivering a Christmas tree to the magic roundabout didn’t weren’t so careful.

What’s an extra 10 ft of Christmas tree between friends? Enough to convert a good idea into a farce. No doubt the critics of this bit of decoration are sharpening their prose already….

I’ve always been clear, since the my first pay cheque, that taxation is a one way thing. I either pay more tax or less tax, but it’s always me paying the government, not the other way round. That’s not the way Ms Snelgrove likes to spin things.

Last week the Pre-Budget Report announced a one year cut in VAT of 2.5% and the Government will give a payment to every basic rate taxpayer of £145 (up from £120 this year).

If the government’s representative in South Swindon thinks I’m going to be grateful to her for being allowed to keep a little more of my own money, whilst at the same time her government is running up massive debts that will cost me much more in tax later, and is insisting that banks cut the interest they pay on savings, then she’s very much mistaken.

I’ve no idea how Mr Wills thinks pollsters earn their living, but apparently it’s not from running surveys. In what is becoming an annual argument over free travel for pensioners, he seems to think that Swindon Borough Council can obtain a survey for nothing.

In these difficult economic times I am not asking the council to spend more money but only to conduct a survey to see whether passengers can get what they are asking for without any extra burden on the taxpayer.

Surveys cost money… unless you want something that’s so poor as to not be worth the effort. It also doesn’t take much thought to work out that, if some pensioners are currently paying to travel before 9.30 am — which the comments in the Adver report show they are — then giving them free travel will cost the taxpayer money.

Whether or not the extra cost’s as much as the £230,000 claimed by Mr Bluh is another matter. That figure corresponds to roughly 2700 extra pensioners travelling in the extra half hour each week.

With the current financial problems caused by far too many people — including Mr Brown’s government — borrowing far more than they can afford, you might think that the government’s representative in South Swindon, Ms Snelgrove, would recommend a little caution with how the council spends our money. No, she wants Swindon Borough Council to join the throwing-money-at-bad-debts party.

We all have to make sure that people are helped so I think that Swindon Council should be looking at its capital reserves and seeing if it can do something even if it is a one-off. Clever accountants can do clever things.

Leaving aside the banality of that last sentence, Ms Snelgrove seems not to have noticed that it’s clever accountants that weren’t quite as clever as they thought that got us into this mess. But then, Ms Snelgrove has never been one to allow reality or the needs of Swindon to get in the way of her spouting her party’s latest spin… which she is doing in abundance.

Government is not sitting back and doing nothing, it has cut VAT to put cash into more people’s pockets and there are a number of measures that the Government is carrying out to help hard-working families.

Ah, how generous of the government to allow us to keep a bit more of our own money, not that 2½p in the pound (or 0p in the pound on essentials like food) is going to make much of a difference when many retailers are already discounting prices heavily. And as the government’s intending to take this and much more back later in far higher taxes, this is really nothing more than an electoral gimmick, trying to bribe people — using their own money — into keeping Mr Brown and his fellow economic incompetents in power.

We are living in extraordinary times and we all need to be thinking about what action we could be taking and it is not just central Government that should be acting.

The only action I’m thinking of taking is voting for a party that doesn’t lie about ‘An end to boom and bust’, doesn’t lie in order to take the country to war, and is rather more careful what it does with our money.

Is so nice to know that, when a group of local people — taxi drivers in this case — suggest brightening up Swindon by putting a Christmas tree in the centre of the Magic Roundabout, Swindon’s clown-councillor, Mr Montaut is ready with the baa-humbug spirit of Christmas.

I have been saying for years that something more needs to be done with the Magic Roundabout – it is a landmark for Swindon but people are disappointed when they see it. But this is not the right way to do it – a Christmas tree could be a danger to drivers.

Only if it’s illuminated like a Las Vegas casino, Mr Montaut.

If the Tories do manage to put it up it’ll be the only piece of cheer we’ll get from them this year.

And the red nest has done what for Swindon during the last year? Aah, I remember… nothing. If a tree is such a dangerous idea, what alternatives has Mr Montaut got to offer?

I have suggested some form of tower, or maybe a statue. Considering it is so close to the football club we could have something representing great players from the past – I think Don Rogers kicking a football would be a good symbol for the town.

And they’d be less distracting than a tree?

Let’s hope Mr Montaut never ventures in a car out to the country. With all those trees around to distract him, he’d find it hard to stay on the road.

A lot can happen in ten years. Economies can rise and fall, companies can appear and pass from existence. Today’s much publicised deal between just about every property bureaucracy in the region (the South West Regional Development Agency, English Partnerships, Swindon Borough Council and the New Swindon Company) and Muse Developments for the Union Square development is definitely very good news in the current economic climate. But with a ten year timescale, a lot could change — including the plans themselves — and the white hoardings that adorn much of the north-east side of the town centre will be with us for a long time yet. And it’s a pity that in the announcements the developers had to be so predictable.

It is an economically important town and as such should have a vibrant legible town centre with walkable streets, providing new opportunities for business and local people.

Vibrant, the developers’ favourite bit of meaningless jargon.