Tendring Topics……on Line
An Easter Message – from Network Rail
The Government, so it is said, is urging us to get out of our cars (no, not me personally; I haven’t got one!) and onto public transport. By so doing we’ll be easing traffic congestion on the roads, reducing petrol consumption and doing our bit to ‘save the planet’.
Occasions in the year when large numbers of us are inclined to travel at the same time, are our public holidays. We don’t have as many as most of our fellow Europeans. Perhaps because of that, we tend to make the most of them – to get away from our town or suburban homes, see friends or relatives and perhaps visit the sea or the countryside.
Two of these holidays are really special – Christmas and Easter. For one thing, both have more than one day of holiday. Both are major Christian Festivals though sadly the ‘Christian’ dimension is now only a minority interest. At Christmas time families of every faith and of none like to get together – and families are much more far-flung than once they were. Easter is the first holiday of the spring. It is a time to get out into the country and enjoy nature as it wakes from its winter sleep, or perhaps to visit the seaside for the first time in the year.
It might have been thought that our railways would have seized the opportunities these universal breaks present. It was, after all, the railways that first made travel possible for ordinary people. I am sure that there was a time when that was precisely what the railways did. In the past the LNER (remember them? The London and North-Eastern Railway) put on extra trains into London and other big cities at Christmas to facilitate family reunions, and provided ‘special offer’ excursion trains at Easter, Whitsun and the August Bank Holiday to take passengers on day trips or for the weekend to holiday resorts like Clacton, Frinton and Walton. I have lived in Clacton long enough to remember crowded trains pulling into Clacton Station on Saturdays, and the local children with their home-made barrows supplementing their pocket money by transporting holiday-makers’ luggage to their boarding houses or perhaps to Butlins Holiday Camp.
Is that what Network Rail and the various railway companies created by privatisation, do today? Not a bit of it. The closure of Liverpool Street Station from Christmas Eve till after the New Year has become as much part of Christmas as Santa Claus, roast turkey and Christmas crackers. We count ourselves lucky if ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ the closure doesn’t extend days into the New Year.
This year the coming of Easter was welcomed in the Daily Gazette with the headline Easter closures and strike threat spell rail chaos. ‘Work to replace overhead power lines between Liverpool Street and Romford on Easter weekend will cause disruption across the whole of Essex’. There is also a strike threat over plans by Network Rail to axe up to 1,500 jobs and change working practices! Private enterprise and ‘throwing the railway service out to healthy competition’ has certainly made a difference!
We can look forward to the usual Bank Holiday chaos as special buses replacing disrupted rail services join the thousands of motorists taking to the roads over the East Holiday.
Remember the slogan 'Let the train, take the strain?' Perhaps it’s time to add 'But the road must carry the load!'
Essex County Council – an unwieldy and extravagant giant
I have just received my Council Tax Bill for the coming year. I expect that everyone resident in the Tendring District will get theirs during the next day or two. I really can’t complain. I pay my Council Tax by direct debit, in ten instalments. During the next financial year, after the first payment the remaining nine will be just £1 more each month than I have been paying during 2008/2009.
I note that of my total annual charge of £1123.66, Essex County Council gets £845.25, Tendring District Council £105.38, Special Expenses (I’ve no idea what that means) £18.61, the Essex Fire Authority £51.66 and the Essex Police Authority £102.76. On the whole I think that we get value for money from Tendring’s share and I don’t complain about the needs of the Fire and Police Authorities.
I do question the County Council’s £845.25 though – nearly three times as much as the sum of the requirements of the other authorities. I heard Lord Hanningfield, the County Council’s former leader, claim (as he was leaving court where he had been charged with fiddling his expenses) that he had given 40 years of his life to the public service and had saved the County Council ‘millions of pounds’.
If that claim is anywhere near the truth it makes one wonder what the County’s cash demands would have been like without his Lordship’s hand on the tiller!
A ‘Freedom of Information’ request by The Daily Gazette has produced some interesting statistics about the County Council’s staffing and expenditure over the past few years. I knew, of course, that Essex County Council was a gargantuan organisation and, I suppose, the biggest employer in the county. I was nevertheless surprised to learn that in 2005/2006 they employed no less than 38,589 staff either full-time or part-time. The majority of these were in the field of education but there were still 11,669 non-school staff. By 2008/2009 though, the total number had fallen to 37,764 and non-school staff to 10,0069.
You may think this kind of downsizing explains the millions of pounds Lord Hanningfield claims that he and his colleagues have saved. You would be wrong. During the same period, total spending on staff – in schools, at the County Hall and in other offices – rose from £880 million to £997 million.
But that is not the end of the story.
In addition to paying almost a billion pounds to their own employees, the County Council also paid £25.3 million to outside ‘consultants’ last year. This compares with the £14.4 million that they had paid out in this way in 2005/2006.
There are, of course, occasions when any local authority may have to spend a few thousand, perhaps a few tens of thousands, on outside consultants with the expertise to deal with one-off problems beyond the capacity of its own staff. With an authority the size and population of Essex, I suppose that the reasonable expenditure on such expertise might run to a few hundred thousands.
But £25 million spent in a year by an authority that is already spending almost a billion a year on the wages and salaries its own staff? I’d have thought that the £14.4 million paid to consultants in 2005/2006 was well over the top. I’m lost for words (which doesn’t often happen!) to describe last year’s £25 million!
The County Council has clearly become a huge, unwieldy and extravagant tier of administration that should be dismembered and replaced by smaller more local local authorities. I wish Colchester’s MP, Bob Russell, every success in his campaign to secure unitary status for Colchester. I’d like to see similar campaigns in the Tendring District and every other district and borough council in our county.
A Thought for the Thoughtless
In last week’s blog I mentioned motorists who park their cars over dropped kerbs or partly on footpaths, as being among the problems faced by mobility scooterists and by those who push prams or wheelchairs. Scarcely had I posted it on the web when I learned of Brightlingsea’s Considerate Parking Initiative that appears to be dealing with that particular problem. What’s more it is doing so without the kind of heavy-handed officiousness that can be guaranteed to create resentment and antagonism.
Recognising that those who park badly do so from thoughtlessness rather than from malice, drivers of badly parked vehicles are given written notice that they are causing a problem. Ian Taylor, a Tendring Council parking services official involved with the scheme, is quoted in the Clacton Gazette as saying, ‘We are specifically looking at anti-social parking, which doesn’t necessarily contravene any regulations but annoys and upsets people………We want drivers to stop and think about where they are leaving their vehicles and what effect it can have on those around them’.
It especially targets parking in front of dropped kerbs, at junctions and on pavements and grass verges. Street wardens and some council officers issue the notices. These may be followed up by a visit to the offender’s home. Photos are also taken so that persistent offenders can be identified. The scheme has worked in Brightlingsea and is to be introduced in Harwich and Manningtree next month. I hope that the needs of Clacton haven’t been overlooked!
At the risk of seeming preachy, I cannot do other than to point out that the real answer to this, as it is to so many other problems arising from human behaviour, lies in advice given some two thousand years ago, when road transport consisted largely of ox-carts, pack horses, and chariots: ‘Treat other people as you would like them to treat you
How much indignation and anger would be averted if all of us – motorists, cyclists, mobility scooterists and pedestrians always tried to obey that rule.
There are Six of them – and all of them are Great!
I was an ‘only child’, with neither brother nor sister. However an unexpected blessing resulting from my sixty-year long marriage to Heather was the acquisition of a sister-in-law, a fine nephew, and four lovely nieces – all much kinder and nicer to me than a mere ‘uncle-by-marriage’ has any right to expect.
They in their turn have given me five great-nieces and a great-nephew in whom I take pride and interest – and whose birthdays I make every effort never to forget!
Here they are – all together to celebrate two important ones.
Nicola (‘Nikki’) first on the left, had just celebrated her 18th birthday and her cousin Catherine (‘Cat’), fourth from the left, her 16th. Clinging to Nikki is her five year old cousin Rosie. Between Rosie and Cat, is Cat’s twelve year old brother Adam. On the right of the picture, Rosie’s seven-year-old sister Millie is in the arms of Nikki’s sister Tania. Tania, of whom we’re all very proud, is a second year medical student. It astonishes me to realize that she will be twenty-one later this year. It seems such a little while ago that her Mum and Dad brought her to Clacton as a tiny baby to introduce Heather and I to our very first great niece!
They are five great nieces and a great nephew!
An Easter Message – from Network Rail
The Government, so it is said, is urging us to get out of our cars (no, not me personally; I haven’t got one!) and onto public transport. By so doing we’ll be easing traffic congestion on the roads, reducing petrol consumption and doing our bit to ‘save the planet’.
Occasions in the year when large numbers of us are inclined to travel at the same time, are our public holidays. We don’t have as many as most of our fellow Europeans. Perhaps because of that, we tend to make the most of them – to get away from our town or suburban homes, see friends or relatives and perhaps visit the sea or the countryside.
Two of these holidays are really special – Christmas and Easter. For one thing, both have more than one day of holiday. Both are major Christian Festivals though sadly the ‘Christian’ dimension is now only a minority interest. At Christmas time families of every faith and of none like to get together – and families are much more far-flung than once they were. Easter is the first holiday of the spring. It is a time to get out into the country and enjoy nature as it wakes from its winter sleep, or perhaps to visit the seaside for the first time in the year.
It might have been thought that our railways would have seized the opportunities these universal breaks present. It was, after all, the railways that first made travel possible for ordinary people. I am sure that there was a time when that was precisely what the railways did. In the past the LNER (remember them? The London and North-Eastern Railway) put on extra trains into London and other big cities at Christmas to facilitate family reunions, and provided ‘special offer’ excursion trains at Easter, Whitsun and the August Bank Holiday to take passengers on day trips or for the weekend to holiday resorts like Clacton, Frinton and Walton. I have lived in Clacton long enough to remember crowded trains pulling into Clacton Station on Saturdays, and the local children with their home-made barrows supplementing their pocket money by transporting holiday-makers’ luggage to their boarding houses or perhaps to Butlins Holiday Camp.
Is that what Network Rail and the various railway companies created by privatisation, do today? Not a bit of it. The closure of Liverpool Street Station from Christmas Eve till after the New Year has become as much part of Christmas as Santa Claus, roast turkey and Christmas crackers. We count ourselves lucky if ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ the closure doesn’t extend days into the New Year.
This year the coming of Easter was welcomed in the Daily Gazette with the headline Easter closures and strike threat spell rail chaos. ‘Work to replace overhead power lines between Liverpool Street and Romford on Easter weekend will cause disruption across the whole of Essex’. There is also a strike threat over plans by Network Rail to axe up to 1,500 jobs and change working practices! Private enterprise and ‘throwing the railway service out to healthy competition’ has certainly made a difference!
We can look forward to the usual Bank Holiday chaos as special buses replacing disrupted rail services join the thousands of motorists taking to the roads over the East Holiday.
Remember the slogan 'Let the train, take the strain?' Perhaps it’s time to add 'But the road must carry the load!'
Essex County Council – an unwieldy and extravagant giant
I have just received my Council Tax Bill for the coming year. I expect that everyone resident in the Tendring District will get theirs during the next day or two. I really can’t complain. I pay my Council Tax by direct debit, in ten instalments. During the next financial year, after the first payment the remaining nine will be just £1 more each month than I have been paying during 2008/2009.
I note that of my total annual charge of £1123.66, Essex County Council gets £845.25, Tendring District Council £105.38, Special Expenses (I’ve no idea what that means) £18.61, the Essex Fire Authority £51.66 and the Essex Police Authority £102.76. On the whole I think that we get value for money from Tendring’s share and I don’t complain about the needs of the Fire and Police Authorities.
I do question the County Council’s £845.25 though – nearly three times as much as the sum of the requirements of the other authorities. I heard Lord Hanningfield, the County Council’s former leader, claim (as he was leaving court where he had been charged with fiddling his expenses) that he had given 40 years of his life to the public service and had saved the County Council ‘millions of pounds’.
If that claim is anywhere near the truth it makes one wonder what the County’s cash demands would have been like without his Lordship’s hand on the tiller!
A ‘Freedom of Information’ request by The Daily Gazette has produced some interesting statistics about the County Council’s staffing and expenditure over the past few years. I knew, of course, that Essex County Council was a gargantuan organisation and, I suppose, the biggest employer in the county. I was nevertheless surprised to learn that in 2005/2006 they employed no less than 38,589 staff either full-time or part-time. The majority of these were in the field of education but there were still 11,669 non-school staff. By 2008/2009 though, the total number had fallen to 37,764 and non-school staff to 10,0069.
You may think this kind of downsizing explains the millions of pounds Lord Hanningfield claims that he and his colleagues have saved. You would be wrong. During the same period, total spending on staff – in schools, at the County Hall and in other offices – rose from £880 million to £997 million.
But that is not the end of the story.
In addition to paying almost a billion pounds to their own employees, the County Council also paid £25.3 million to outside ‘consultants’ last year. This compares with the £14.4 million that they had paid out in this way in 2005/2006.
There are, of course, occasions when any local authority may have to spend a few thousand, perhaps a few tens of thousands, on outside consultants with the expertise to deal with one-off problems beyond the capacity of its own staff. With an authority the size and population of Essex, I suppose that the reasonable expenditure on such expertise might run to a few hundred thousands.
But £25 million spent in a year by an authority that is already spending almost a billion a year on the wages and salaries its own staff? I’d have thought that the £14.4 million paid to consultants in 2005/2006 was well over the top. I’m lost for words (which doesn’t often happen!) to describe last year’s £25 million!
The County Council has clearly become a huge, unwieldy and extravagant tier of administration that should be dismembered and replaced by smaller more local local authorities. I wish Colchester’s MP, Bob Russell, every success in his campaign to secure unitary status for Colchester. I’d like to see similar campaigns in the Tendring District and every other district and borough council in our county.
A Thought for the Thoughtless
In last week’s blog I mentioned motorists who park their cars over dropped kerbs or partly on footpaths, as being among the problems faced by mobility scooterists and by those who push prams or wheelchairs. Scarcely had I posted it on the web when I learned of Brightlingsea’s Considerate Parking Initiative that appears to be dealing with that particular problem. What’s more it is doing so without the kind of heavy-handed officiousness that can be guaranteed to create resentment and antagonism.
Recognising that those who park badly do so from thoughtlessness rather than from malice, drivers of badly parked vehicles are given written notice that they are causing a problem. Ian Taylor, a Tendring Council parking services official involved with the scheme, is quoted in the Clacton Gazette as saying, ‘We are specifically looking at anti-social parking, which doesn’t necessarily contravene any regulations but annoys and upsets people………We want drivers to stop and think about where they are leaving their vehicles and what effect it can have on those around them’.
It especially targets parking in front of dropped kerbs, at junctions and on pavements and grass verges. Street wardens and some council officers issue the notices. These may be followed up by a visit to the offender’s home. Photos are also taken so that persistent offenders can be identified. The scheme has worked in Brightlingsea and is to be introduced in Harwich and Manningtree next month. I hope that the needs of Clacton haven’t been overlooked!
At the risk of seeming preachy, I cannot do other than to point out that the real answer to this, as it is to so many other problems arising from human behaviour, lies in advice given some two thousand years ago, when road transport consisted largely of ox-carts, pack horses, and chariots: ‘Treat other people as you would like them to treat you
How much indignation and anger would be averted if all of us – motorists, cyclists, mobility scooterists and pedestrians always tried to obey that rule.
There are Six of them – and all of them are Great!
I was an ‘only child’, with neither brother nor sister. However an unexpected blessing resulting from my sixty-year long marriage to Heather was the acquisition of a sister-in-law, a fine nephew, and four lovely nieces – all much kinder and nicer to me than a mere ‘uncle-by-marriage’ has any right to expect.
They in their turn have given me five great-nieces and a great-nephew in whom I take pride and interest – and whose birthdays I make every effort never to forget!
Here they are – all together to celebrate two important ones.
Nicola (‘Nikki’) first on the left, had just celebrated her 18th birthday and her cousin Catherine (‘Cat’), fourth from the left, her 16th. Clinging to Nikki is her five year old cousin Rosie. Between Rosie and Cat, is Cat’s twelve year old brother Adam. On the right of the picture, Rosie’s seven-year-old sister Millie is in the arms of Nikki’s sister Tania. Tania, of whom we’re all very proud, is a second year medical student. It astonishes me to realize that she will be twenty-one later this year. It seems such a little while ago that her Mum and Dad brought her to Clacton as a tiny baby to introduce Heather and I to our very first great niece!
They are five great nieces and a great nephew!
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