by Paul Scully | Nov 14, 2010 | News |
I am heading out shortly to Belmont to attend the Civic Act of Remembrance and the Remembrance Day Service. Following that I am going to a fundraising lunch for Help for Heroes.
Whenever we reflect on those that have fallen, we cannot help consider the massive waste of life that war brings, not least the two World Wars when families, villages and towns were ripped apart. However, as General Sir David Richards has just said on the Andrew Marr Show, it is important to remember the achievements that our armed forces have made in various conflicts including those still underway. This is not to glorify war, but to rationalise and determine its place in the history of the world.
I have been on the edge of my seat watching and waiting for news of the release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, an inspirational lady who I have written about before and will again. Meanwhile, my uncle has sent me another part of the jigsaw of my family’s history in Burma.
Last year, he found records at the Rangoon Memorial of the death of my great-uncles Patrick and Terence. This year, he has found a poignant memorial placed in The Statesman newspaper in India on 25th June 1945 by my great-grandparents. I will dedicate my silence to them as well as those fallen in Afghanistan.
by Paul Scully | Nov 4, 2010 | News |
At the meeting of the Executive of Sutton Council on Monday, Cllr Graham Tope spoke about the business plan for the controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre. As expected, the business plan was, to quote one Sutton insider, “optimistic”. Bearing in mind this is only to break even, Sutton taxpayers have every reason to remain worried about the burden that they will have to carry to hide the embarrassment of the Liberal Democrat administration.
Cllr Tope explained that “budgeting is not an exact science”, something that will come as news to business people up and down the country who realise that this is the polar opposite of the truth. Homeopathy is not an exact science. Budgeting, however, is a detailed appraisal of the future using case studies, market research, and an assessment of how best to use a certain amount of capital and income. Assumptions can be kept to a bare minimum by taking a pragmatic, not dogmatic view, something that does not come easily to the administration in Sutton.
The original budget for 2010-11 required £131,000 of taxpayers’ money to keep the fledgling Life Centre open. The latest update shows that they will have spent £190,000
over and above this, a whopping 145% over budget. This is largely put down to an ‘underachievement of income’, a euphemism if ever there was one. One-off costs covered the remaining overspend. One of these costs was £40,000 for a website. Apart from the fact that this is an extraordinary amount to be spending in addition to the £208,000 Sutton Council spent on their main site, why is this an overspend? It is not beyond the wit of man to realise that a decent website would be needed to market the Centre. Why was this not included in the original budget? It is oversights like this that show why the Council believes that budgeting is not an exact science. You can’t just put a wet finger in the air before undertaking a massive project like this.
The business plan has more space given over to ‘One Planet Living’ than spreadsheets. There is nothing exact about ‘One Planet Living’ It really doesn’t matter how many planets you need to live on if they are all bankrupt.
Since the original concept came about, the Council won a Government grant of £4million. Following this, the scheme doubled in size to fit this extra money, rather than the sensible approach of keeping this vaguely within reason. The builders were already booked to start digging the day after the council meeting which approved the decision. After even the most intransigent fan of the Centre realised that most schools realised that parents did a better job of teaching their children how to behave and so failed to book places, other activities have been brought into the Centre to justify its existence.
- Ex-offenders will come along to be told not to re offend (could the money have not been used for Job Clubs and drug rehabilitation?)
- Council meetings and other community meetings will take place at the Centre (taking important income away from schools and other community facilities)
- A Life Clinic will be set up (No, I don’t know either?!)
- Some School Governors’ training will be held here (threatening the future of the Glastonbury Centre that has already been saved from imminent closure once)
Nick Clegg opened the centre at an event which was mainly attended by the senior management
of Sutton Council and Liberal Democrat councillors. Half a dozen children from nearby Glenthorne School came along as guinea pigs. It would be interesting to know quite how many thousands of pounds of lost productivity it took to have the great and the good at this corporate backslapping exercise.
The Sutton Life Centre is being held up as an example of the Big Society as part of Sutton Council’s status as a ‘Big Society Vanguard Council’. People are struggling to understand what the Big Society concept actually is and this project pushes that understanding further away from the truth. Big Society should be about people taking back areas from the state to be under their own control. It is about people not buildings. The Sutton Life Centre is anathema to the Big Society, instead standing as a paternalistic, patronising monolith that illustrates the real centralising views of Sutton’s Liberal Democrats; Power coming down from Whitehall is fine, as long as it stops at the Civic Offices, where politicians know best. That is not localism. That is not freeing individuals. That is just bringing the nanny state closer to home.
Have a look and judge for yourself if the £40k website is worth it and the £8.5million (10% of council tax collected in the entire Borough for a year) was well spent
by Paul Scully | Nov 3, 2010 | News |
I’m always really grateful for the support of friends and regular readers in my attempt to keep Sutton residents aware of what is happening in Sutton politics. I am especially glad for the support whilst I try to continue alongside a busy job in Westminster. So thank you to all who voted in the recent Total Politics Blog Awards. Your support helped me to achieve:
Yes, I am aware that I am no longer a councillor! However, since most of the entries were written when I was in office, I think that’s fair enough. Anyway, thank you again for sticking with me whilst posting is slack. It all goes towards helping me rediscover my political mojo. There is plenty left to do in Sutton.
by Paul Scully | Oct 25, 2010 | News |
Recently Sutton Council held an event, ‘The Art of Suburbia’ to reopen the High Street. The funding for the 2 day event was £81,300 of which £36,000 was from the Arts Council, meaning that taxpayers living outside Sutton were helping the Council to indulge itself. The relaunch was not exactly as described with lighting columns left disconnected and lumps of tarmac crudely filling holes left along the pavement. Work was not due to be completed for another week, having run overtime.
The headline act ‘Trans Expresse’ (pictured right) were a French troupe of drummers whose piece de resistance was to attach themselves to one of the biggest cranes in London and drum in middair on a giant children’s mobile. This was witnessed by about 250 people on a cold, dark Friday evening. That’ll be £162.50 per person to watch someone hanging around on Sutton High Street, something people can do for free on most days.
On the Saturday, an extraordinary claim by the Council that 25,000 came to see the launch. I’m not sure who counted nor if the people that just came to shop (or even just hang around) were included in that figure. Nonetheless, even allowing for the most rose-tinted of spectacles, this appears optimistic. Those that did come witnessed a giant robot, some giant painting and a giant accident when a lady in a motorised scooter drove off the edge of a raised platform on the new Trinity Square.
Meanwhile the main local paper, the Sutton Guardian, were hugged closely by the Council who made them ‘Official Media Partners’, thus ensuring that the headlines that followed were favourable. Fortunately, the Guardian followed up the next week by asking residents what they thought of the overall expense.
The irony was not lost when reading the launch day programme which explained that one of the groups of performance artists were named “The Bureau of Silly Ideas.” (Too many jokes, too little time so I’ll leave you to add your punchlines.)
by Paul Scully | Aug 29, 2010 | News |
From the Council which gave you £25k totem poles sited opposite a cash-strapped hospital, comes the latest wheeze in how to spray taxpayers’ money around on ‘art’.
The wooden menagerie pictured opposite has been concreted into the pavement on Sutton High Street where there was previously an open space. The metal globe sculpture has been relocated so that people avoiding the wooden fish to go to All Bar One and the Civic Office crash straight into it.
Lest we forget within the apparent benefits for this £3million splurge of your cash was the statement “Wider footways, better road crossings and less clutter will create a people-friendly zone.”
I’m not sure that mocking laughter was the reaction first envisaged by the Lib Dem Council cabinet who approved this project, but that is what appears to be the first reaction of those walking by.
We are still waiting for the ‘green wall’ to be installed on the face of Wilkinsons, which involves a lawn to be laid vertically up the front of the shop. When challenged over such expenditure, the Lib Dem administration claim that the £3million would have just be spent in another borough. That’s just not good enough. Whilst we all reevaluate the services that we receive and our own personal incomes as a result of the massive deficit created over the last few years, it is not acceptable for councillors to spend such amounts on needless projects. How many wooden fish will it take to fill one of the many empty shops on the High Street? How will a grass curtain on the front of one of the busier shops on the High Street help the hot dog seller that is being thrown off the pitch that she has held for the last 15 years? The north end of the High Street will remain largely a ghost town, with the lion’s share of the investment within yards of the Civic Offices. It is a case of out of sight, out of mind for the councillors that have been embolden by their win at the last election leaving them another four years to rack up the bills for Sutton’s taxpayers.
Leaving on a largely positive note, I am glad that another one of the Conservative manifesto commitments was adopted by siting recycling bins next to normal bins along the High Street. It’s just a shame that the brushed metal used makes them look a decade old already.
by Paul Scully | Jul 31, 2010 | News |
The Leader of the Council in Sutton has joined David Cameron on his trip to India to tell people there about his very own white elephant, the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre.
Sutton has been picked as one of four councils to pioneer the Big Society as a Liberal Council, alongside Labour Liverpool and Conservative-run Windsor & Maidenhead and Eden Valley. Sutton have picked four projects to trial
1.give people influence for transport decisions and allowing greater local choice in schemes that suit them
Essentially this is keeping Smarter Travel Sutton going now that the £5million Transport for London funding has been spent.
2.train a new generation of community organisers
In a serendipitous move, a team of ‘young advisers’ will meet in the Sutton Life Centre attracting another revenue stream for the building that still has no meaningful business plan and an uncertain future. Ostensibly this is to help ‘continue’ to allow the Council to consult local residents. Sutton has one of the poorest records in London when residents ask whether they feel if they can influence local decision making. Promotional banners were put up along residential streets telling people that they can influence decisions last year so that the Council could help boost their survey figures and so hit a government target that attracted some funding. So they spent some taxpayers money to get some more taxpayers money. Not the most efficient way to do things.
3.give communities the power to green their neighbourhoods
This will help fund the Hackbridge project, which aspires to make this part of the Borough ‘the greenest place to live in the UK’. This ambitious project has struggled for funding since its inception.
4.give people a greater say in local health provision
The Council is a major commissioner of services from the National Health Service, in particular for Adult Social Care. It is right that health provision should be moved away from the great monoliths of the Primary Care Trusts and closer to local people but I wonder if this move has been superceded by the Government’s plans to scrap Primary Care Trusts, putting the power and decision-making with GPs.
You’ll see a thread with the first three. Sutton’s LibDems are saying that the Big Society has already started in Sutton. I say that they’ve found three projects that were struggling for cash and have latched onto a sugar daddy.
The Big Society is a great concept, that has not been discussed widely enough yet to be understood by many. However, this isn’t it. Handing down power to the Local Authority from central government is just a first stepping stone. Free schools, giving spending decisions to GPs, giving voters the power of recall, these are all examples of handing power back down as close as is possible to where decisions are made and should be the way ahead. Instead, here in Sutton, we’ll see the majority of residents shrug their shoulders at best and continue to rightly complain about why decisions are made about paving the High Street for £3m and putting up the Sutton Life Centre at £8m without them being consulted first. Sutton could and should have been bolder in putting forward ideas. Maybe, and whisper it quietly now, they could have asked residents how they would see the Big Society manifest itself in Sutton?
I am heading out shortly to Belmont to attend the Civic Act of Remembrance and the Remembrance Day Service. Following that I am going to a fundraising lunch for Help for Heroes.
