Tag: Swindon

I’ve no idea what an appropriate level of expenditure on public relations (PR) is for a council. Having looked at the figures from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, I can see that the level of expenditure by Swindon Borough Council on PR (over £1.4M) seems comparable with other councils of similar size: by whatever statistic is used, Swindon Borough Council’s level of PR expenditure is mid-ranking. That doesn’t mean it’s acceptable though. Nor is the council spokesman’s attempt to defend the 15% increase from last year acceptable.

Swindon Borough Council is a major employer which provides a vast range of services to more than 180,000 people. Residents expect us to give information about the services which are available to them, and the help we can provide.

Well, yes, I wouldn’t disagree with any of that, but the council does much the same now as it did a year ago, so why spend so much more telling us about it?

While we are always reviewing our costs and finding ways of doing things for less, there is still a cost.

Spending 15% more is not what many would described as ‘doing things for less’.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance suggestion that most of this is unnecessary nonsense, and shows either a complete lack of understanding about the work of local government, or it’s deliberately misleading.

Err, no. It is consistent with the council’s own figures.

recruitment cost £410,865, promotions cost £391,865, statutory public notices £44,075 and other services, including the council’s communication department, cost £619,507.

Only the recruitment costs and statutory notices seem essential. Promotions and the less than informative ‘other services’ could well contain numerous pointless or overly glossy publications.

The only thing that seems to be deliberately misleading here is the council’s defence of its own publicity.

The oddest thing about the visit by Mr Brown to a Swindon school was the claim by the school’s headteacher that the visit was non-political.

I would like to point out that the Prime Minister’s visit to Isambard this morning was not a political event but was a celebration of our new school, attended by politicians of all parties.

Really? The attendance of politicians from all sides doesn’t stop an event from being ‘a political event’ and on the school’s own website evidence of politicians from other nests is distinctly absent. If Ms Mattey still believes this was not a political event, then she should take a look at the spin about the visit on the red nest’s website.

Labour’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and the Schools Minister, Jim Knight, are visiting Swindon to open a new secondary school and celebrate the transformation underway in schools across the country as a result of Labour’s investment in education.

Clearly, that’s not political in much the same way that water’s not wet. Isambard Community School is a Private Finance Initiative school so there has been no ‘Labour investment’: this school is being paid for, by us, on credit. Admittedly, that’s just a tiny fraction of the £70 bn the current government has run-up.

Mr Brown may only have been at the school for a little over half an hour — he didn’t stay long last time — but hopefully that was long enough for the pupils at the school to recognise when they’re being used for political gain. Perhaps one day their headteacher might recognise this too.

I’ve been looking at the new maps of reported crime on Wiltshire Constabulary’s website. What have I learnt? I’ve been reminded of the public sector’s inability to produce good interactive sites — the only way to get the maps to show different statistics is to repeatedly toggle their display on and off, and navigation is painfully slow — but have learnt very little about crime levels.

I’m left wondering just what the statistics cover. For example, there is, according to the maps, very little violent crime in Swindon Town Centre, so does that mean that the drunken violence in Fleet Street that is so often reported in the press is not significant, or is in some other category? There’s nothing on the Wiltshire police website that explains, and the explanation on the Home Office website is less than helpful. Then there’s the matter of how much reported crime actually gets recorded….

It may not have cost much (though given the record of public sector computing projects, I doubt that) but I’d rather the time and money wasted on producing these uninformative maps was spent on actual policing.

Old and new

New and rotten

In a similar way that I did for last year, I’ve trawled through the record of meeting attendance for Swindon Borough Councillors during 2008. Taking an entry in the attendance page of ‘Present’ or ‘In attendance’ as meaning they were there, and any other entry as meaning that they should have been there but weren’t, I get some interesting results. Note that I have considered all meetings for which councillor attendance is listed on the council’s website, except for one committee. That exception is the Wiltshire & Swindon Joint Police Committee for which there is no attendance record for most meetings and, for the couple where there are, the record does not appear to be reliable.

At the moment, the information for five meetings is not available. This will be added when the information becomes available and if appropriate the figures and lists below will be updated.

In terms of attendance rates, the top five councillors of 2008 were:

• Ms Tomlinson: 31 meetings out of 31 – 100%
• Mr Tomlinson: 19 meetings out of 19 – 100%
• Mr Parry: 16 meetings out of 16 – 100%
• Mr Montaut: 9 meetings out of 9 – 100%
• Mr Cherry: 9 meetings out of 9 – 100%

Two councillors that stood down in May, Mr Lister and Mr Barnes, also attained a 100% record in 2008, tho’ for only three meetings. Another 10 councillors attended over 90% of the meetings they are recorded against.

The councillors with the worst attendance rates in 2008 (60% or less) were:

• Mr Edwards: 18 meetings out of 30 – 60%
• Mr Baker: 12 meetings out of 20 – 60%
• Ms Duff: 13 meetings out of 22 – 59%
• Ms Martin: 7 meetings out of 13 – 54%
• Mr Sharp: 2 meetings out of 4 – 50%
• Mr Wiltshire: 10 meetings out of 27 – 37%
• Mr James: 2 meetings out of 8 – 25%
• Mr Thompson: 0 meetings out of 3 – 0%

Of these, Messrs James, Sharp and Thompson are no longer councillors. Of those that are still councillors, Mr Wiltshire’s record stands out as being particularly poor.

The overall attendance rate in 2008 (80%) was slightly better than in 2007 (77%). Full details of all the Swindon Borough Councillors’ 2008 meeting attendances are available in the archive.

Update, 17 January 2009: The figures above have now been updated. Attendance records for two meetings remain unavailable.

Update, 15 February 2009: The records are now complete. The full data is available in comma delimited text (csv), OpenOffice and Excel format files.

komadori has been lucky enough to attend two works Christmas meals this year: one at The Old Bank Brasserie and one at Fletchers Restaurant.

Venues are rarely at their best when preparing food for Christmas parties, with the large numbers to be served resulting in something more akin to mass production than quality cuisine. This was definitely the case at The Old Bank. The ‘Cream of Carrot and Coriander Soup with a hint of ginger and garnished with garlic croutons’ tasted more like cream of cardboard, with the ginger and garlic indiscernible. For the main course, the turkey had been cooked into submission — it was stodgy and lacked texture. And whilst the stodgy meat was plentiful, the serving of vegetables was miserly. Worst of all was the ‘Rich Baileys bread and butter pudding, mixed with toasted almonds, cooked until golden brown and served with vanilla ice cream’. Well, yes it was cooked until golden brown and it was served with vanilla ice cream. There were also a few bits of almond. But it was neither rich, nor matching the description of ‘bread and butter pudding’. As the photograph shows, it was little more than a single slice of toast. At over £30 for three courses (excluding drinks), I expected far better.

In contrast, Fletchers provided a reasonable meal at a much more reasonable price (£18.50). Pork, apple & Calvados pate with toast starter was fine if unremarkable. For the main course, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, vegetables and roast potatoes was tasty though not overly tender. However, the meal ended on a high with ‘Chocolate Box Shortbread base topped with an indulgent Belgium chocolate mousse with a cream caramel centre’. That chocolate mousse was exquisite.

If there’s one thing you can rely on from the Swindon Community Safety Bureaucracy Partnership, it’s stupidity. The economy’s nose-dived, bookings for Christmas parties are heavily down, yet Mr Palusinski from the Bureaucracy Partnership is not sure why yesterday evening seemed to be just like any other Saturday night.

Considering that some people in the national press were calling it black Saturday, it was relatively calm in the town centre. I am not sure why the numbers were so average but they were.

A quick search reveals that just about the only person referring to yesterday as Black Saturday is Mr Palusinski.

Whether the message we are putting out there is being heeded by revellers, or whether it is the current financial drought that is resulting in people drinking less, I am not sure.

Hint: it’s the economy, stupid.

I consider the operation a success.

I consider the operation a waste of the public’s money.

Reading through the political ya–boo–ery over the University of the West of England’s plans (such as they are) for a campus in Swindon, the argument — when it isn’t descending into petty jibes — seems to be not just about whether there should be a university in Swindon, but about what sort of town Swindon should be.

Mr Buckland’s concern that the plans are sketchy is reasonable enough. His point that “Great Universities don’t just appear, they evolve.” is also worth remembering amidst the University of the West of England’s hype for its plans. It’s disappointing, though wholly in character, that in response the government’s representative in South Swindon, Ms Snelgrove feels the need to go for a cheap political jibe about Mr Buckland not being a local (though coming from Wokingham, she’s clearly not a local herself).

Where Mr Buckland’s argument goes astray, in my view, is in his attempts to defend, repeatedly, Mr Tomlinson’s view that having a larger student population in Swindon is a bad thing. Yes there will be an impact on the availability of low-cost housing, but his arguments go beyond that.

Having lived in a small city (Swansea) with a large student population, I well know the often baleful effects that too much student housing can have on a neighbourhood. Noise, rubbish and a deserted feeling during holidays cause real problems for long standing local residents…. I can tell you that local residents had their lives made a misery by noise, rubbish and poorly maintained homes of multiple occupation in their midst. If that’s what you want for Swindon, then be honest about it.

That’s not what anybody would want. It’s not what a university initially targeting the local market and adult learners is likely to produce. And as Mr Buckland admits, his comparisons exaggerate the problems Swindon could face.

Swansea now has two Universities and over 20,000 students, so actually the comparison is misleading.

So don’t make the comparison!

Any large employer that develops — regardless of whether it’s a university, car manufacturer, insurance company, or railway works — changes the nature of the population in the surrounding area. The changes are rarely welcome. Communities are never static, changing with the circumstances that surround them. If the politicians want a university, which it seems that they all, except for Mr Tomlinson, they have to accept the changes — bad as well as good — that may bring.

I’ll end this rather rambling piece with a quote from Mr Leakey

Swindon has always been a town built and expanded simply because of it’s one great asset and draw over the years – work. That’s the main reason most of the people of this town have come here since the railway works started the ball rolling back in the 1840s. It’s not and never has been a centre for high class shopping, culture, history or any of the other things many other towns and cities have to offer…. It’s an honest to goodness practical and working town, Swindon should stick to doing what Swindon always has and still does best – employment.

If there is to be a university in Swindon, let it be one focused clearly on supporting Swindon’s wider employment potential, rather than its own wellbeing and the more esoteric aspects of learning.

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.

It really is time that Mr Montaut remembered that he is a councillor for Central ward and should be representing the interests of the people that live there. Not for the first time, central Swindon’s clown councillor seems to be putting political interests before those of his ward. Given the choice of putting a Christmas tree on the Magic Roundabout, or putting it somewhere else, Mr Montaut prefers the somewhere else option.

There are other parts of the town that could benefit from something like this and I think the money would be better spent in those areas.

With representatives like this, who needs enemies? Mr Montaut also seems to know some giant football hooligans.

There is also the possible problems you could have with the sad minority of people who go to football matches to cause trouble – it could be seen as a trophy to opposing fans.

It’d take a rather substantially built hooligan to carry away a 49 ft tree as a trophy… but apparently in Monty’s fantasy world, anything is possible.