by Paul Scully | Apr 16, 2009 | News |
The BBC reports that a Parish Council in Essex has asked that potholes be left unfilled for a while longer in an unusual bid to slow traffic. Representatives of the village of Navestock claim that they are the original traffic calming measure and so want to leave them unfilled for a year.
They seem to have read the first chapter from LibDem Sutton’s book on traffic management where the winter maintenance budget has been cut and speed humps sprout like wrinkles in Nora Batty’s stockings. However they haven’t got to the bit where Conservative Councillor Cliff Carter led the calls for potholes to be tackled and secures £250,000 of funding to tackle the worst ravages of the recent snow and ice.
I seem to remember the pothole theory being tried before somewhere in the South West but have not heard any recent updates where it has been rolled out across the UK with a fanfare so I guess it wasn’t so popular. Not all of the village are in agreement with a local retired police officer saying that ‘it beggars belief’. Essex County Council agree with the copper and are bringing in the tarmac as I write. The potholes may calm the traffic but I doubt if they have the same effect on the drivers.
![Mash The State – Following Sutton Council’s News]()
by Paul Scully | Apr 10, 2009 | News |
The Guardian Technology website covered the launch of a new initiative to improve online communication by Local Authorities across the UK. Sutton resident Adrian Short is behind the project, Mash The State that seeks to get every Council to offer an ‘RSS feed.’ This may sound like a bit of technological jargon, mainly because it is! All it really is though is a simple instruction added to the website which allows other computers to pick up the latest stories from the site.
Something that will take no more than a minute to do, would allow Council news to be broadcast around the area and beyond automatically. Instead, the Council has to rely on people being keen enough to take the trouble to go to the website and scour it for news. Plenty of people these days have one or two sites, that they visit which do the looking for them, aggregating news and information from various sources. The Twitter feed on the top right hand of this blog is doing just that. Adrian runs a community site, Sutton Active which seeks to bring local news together from a number of sources including this blog. Adding a feed is a small thing that is easy to do, will become more important as Web 2.0 continues to develop, and best of all, is free. I’ve asked that Sutton Council should do this. The new-look council website cost £208k, it should be all-singing and all-dancing, never mind a simple tweak like this. Mash The State is looking at all Councils in the UK. Offering your support might encourage other Local Authorities to use the Web better.
by Paul Scully | Apr 9, 2009 | News |
Last week the G20 calmly agreed to spend $1 trillion on trying to bail everyone out of the mess that we are in. Reports suggest that the UK’s debt is set to surpass £2trillion. Somewhere along the way, people become detached from these impossibly large figures. This includes Ministers who bandy them around as tokens rather than people’s hard-earned money. There are ways of illustrating these figures, such as the Conservative’s
“Dad’s Nose, Mum’s Eyes, Gordon Brown’s debt” campaign which calculated that every child born in the UK has £17,000 debt. Even this is difficult to take in. I’ve found a general example to illustrate $1trillion.
$100 is the highest denomination bill issued in the States.
$10,000 is less than 1/2″ thick consisting of one hundred $100 bills.
$1million is represented by this small pile of 100 packets of $10,000.
$100 million starts to look more impressive, fitting on a standard pallet.
$1 billion starts to pique the interest of government ministers.
Finally $1trillion or $1,000,000,000,000. The man can still just be seen at the bottom left of the picture.
by Paul Scully | Apr 8, 2009 | News |
A picture of an ostrich just didn’t cut the mustard when writing about the latest on the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre.
As expected, Sutton’s senior LibDem councillors queued up to sing the praises of the Sutton Life Centre.
It was wonderful to have a library that would be open for longer than the one that it would replace, like the one at the Phoenix Centre in Beddington, without mentioning that many users of that library bemoan the fact that it may be open for longer but it lacks one small thing; books.
It was great that we would have a state of the art centre to teach Junior Citizenship, the silver bullet that would stop our young people getting involved in antisocial behaviour and drugs without recognising that such a course already exists in Sutton at one-third of the proposed charge per pupil.
Sometimes, even I am startled at the detachment of the LibDem administration. The Executive meeting on Monday when this was discussed was one such time. The Life Centre might just work. The 40,000 children that need to come to provide most of the income may arrive by the coachload. People may be chasing each other up the climbing wall to get their turn. Starbucks may start sending their trainee Baristas to the Sutton Life Centre to get experience as cappucino follows moccachino out of the cafe door. Kevin Costner built a baseball field in his farm when told by ghostly voices in ‘Field of Dreams’, “build it and they will come”. He built it, they came, but it was just a film. You cannot play fast and loose with public money. It is not appropriate to say that because we have got £4million from a national grant, we need to bend over backwards to match it at a time of financial turmoil, moving money away from education, adult social services and reserves to fill the gap.
If the project falls short of its income target by 20%, the Council will have to find £95,000 each year to keep the place open. The conditions of the grant mean that if the Council sell the building or change its use in the next twenty years, we may need to pay the £4million back. Councillors always have to balance risk. We are still £5.5million light after taking a Treasury management risk in lending the money to an Icelandic bank. This is a risk too far at the wrong time. The business plan is fanciful at best. In order to find 40,000 children to turn up to pay for the building, a massive proportion of children from South East England will have to come.
According to figures contained in the business plan, there are an average of 33,900 children in each year group in schools within the target area of a 1 hour drive of Sutton. The centre is aimed at Years 6 and 8 meaning a total target market of 67,800. The centre needs 40,000 children to come which is 59% market penetration. In order to do this, the plan only allows for a paltry marketing budget of £5000 and £1300 stationery. This does not stack up well amongst organisations with a touch more experience and know-how as this list showing their percentage of their respective markets shows.
- Starbucks 16%
- Tesco 30%
- Barack Obama 53%
- BBC Radio 54%
- Apple iPod 70%
- Microsoft Windows 88%
Since, the Sutton Life Centre is pitching comfortably above the most popular man on the planet, the assumptions surely need at least a cursory second glance from someone independant and with something approaching a business brain. The G20 won’t be swooping down to the Holiday Inn working how to bail us out if things go awry. Let’s get it right now.
At least the Executive have had the good sense to bring the decision to a meeting of the Full Council before we did. We had our form ready to call-in the decision but it was not needed as the LibDem councillors realised that pushing this through would be one step too far.
The Full Council meeting is on Monday 27th April starting at 7pm. It is held in the Civic Offices, St Nicholas Way, Sutton, SM1 1EA. You are most welcome to come along and see where your money is going. If you use Facebook, you can add your voice by joining the group Unaffordable: Shelve the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre! and just as importantly, please invite all of your friends to do so. If 3003 people can want Wizard man to switch the Christmas lights on in Sutton, I really hope that a few people are moved enough to try to save a few million quid of taxpayers’ money. The message needs to be sent loud and clear: the public purse, filled with taxpayers’ cash, should not be the plaything of politicians.
by Paul Scully | Apr 8, 2009 | News |
Back in 2006, I posted about a speech that I made in Council when we sought to protect our back gardens from in-fill development. Figures show that around that time some 41% of brownfield development in Sutton was in fact on gardens. I don’t have the up to date figures.
Yesterday in Westminster, Shadow Housing Spokesman Grant Shapps MP unveiled the Conservative Green Paper “Strong Foundations: Building Homes and Communities.” A Green Paper is basically a statement of intent by a political party detailing the outlines of policies that it will introduce. There were some interesting proposals for social housing which I will endeavour to cover later but I was glad to see that the party have reaffirmed that they will tackle the issue of garden-grabbing head on.
“We will also reverse the classification of gardens as brownfield land and allow councils to prevent over-development of neighbourhoods and stop ‘garden
grabbing’.”
Brownfield land was meant to be land that had been built on previously that was surplus to requirements, no longer fit for purpose or not as efficiently used as it might be. Including gardens in this definition dramatically changed the makeup of towns and cities. It certainly has in parts of Sutton where streets of reasonably sized family homes have given way to flats.We know that demand for housing in the area is great. As usual, it is getting to that balance which is important. It should be for local people to decide where that point is rather than a crude one size fits all policy from the centre.
The BBC reports that a Parish Council in Essex has asked that potholes be left unfilled for a while longer in an unusual bid to slow traffic. Representatives of the village of Navestock claim that they are the original traffic calming measure and so want to leave them unfilled for a year.
