Week 47 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Taking a Sledgehammer (if not a Pile-driver!) to crack a nut!

   Last week, a headline of the local Daily Gazette read ‘Use too many black bags and you risk a visit from the recycling snoopers’.  

            In fact there’s no such risk just yet, but the Gazette reports that, ‘From early next year, waste collectors in Colchester will begin using a new hi-tech computer system to log how much waste is left out for them.  Householders repeatedly caught leaving out too much trash in black sacks will get a visit from council wardens to ‘educate’ them on recycling.  Those wardens will go through the household’s black sacks and explain which items could be recycled instead of going into landfill.

            ‘The hope is’, Matthew Young, Head of Waste Services, says, ‘that we educate people and, collectively, the amount of waste going to landfill is cut massively’.

            I applaud Colchester Council’s aims but I can’t help feeling that they could have achieved their objectives much more easily without all the hi-tech computer activities, without having to rummage through other people’s refuse, and without kindergarten style lessons to householders on what can and cannot be recycled.  All of that seems to me like using the latest third-millennium technology plus the techniques of a seedy ‘private eye’ to teach grandmothers how to suck eggs!

            I don’t suppose that the residents of Colchester Borough are markedly different from those of our own neighbouring Tendring District and, in particular, my own town of Clacton-on-Sea.  Driving, cycling or, in my case, mobility-scootering round Clacton’s residential streets on refuse and salvage collection day will reveal a number of households where the Council’s requirements are fulfilled to the letter.  On the boundary of the property will be a black sack containing non-recyclable land-fill waste and a smallish green plastic box with food waste for recycling. These are collected weekly.  There will also be either a larger green plastic box containing plastic bottles and metal food cans, or a red box containing cardboard and paper waste.  These are collected on alternate weeks. Each householder has been supplied with a chart showing which box is to be put out on each particular week.

            There will be a number of properties where there isn’t a red or a green box, either large or small, in sight.  There will though be up to as many as half a dozen filled black plastic bags put out for collection for landfill.  These are the homes of those who don’t co-operate with the council’s scheme, have never done so, and probably have no intention of ever doing so.  It doesn’t take hi-tech equipment to discover them and there really is no point in opening any of those back plastic bags and pointing out which items could have been put out for recycling.  The vast majority of non-co-operating householders know perfectly well what can and what cannot be recycled.  They simply won’t, or perhaps can’t, sort them out, put them in the appropriate box and take them to the boundary of their property on collection day.  It’s far simpler and easier just to put everything in black plastic bags. If the council supplies only one bag for each week, they can buy some more from the nearest supermarket.  They’re not expensive.

            An official should call on each one of those householders and find out why they are not co-operating with the council’s salvage collection scheme.  Some may have a perfectly valid reason.  Sorting out what is salvageable and what isn’t, putting it into the appropriate container and taking the correct filled containers to the property boundary each week will be beyond the capabilities of many elderly or frail people – and our Essex Sunshine Coast has a great number of these.  I am one of them!  By the time I have got the plastic sack and appropriate boxes ready for collection, I am exhausted and incapable of conveying them the few dozen yards to the end of my drive-way. A kind neighbour does so for me.  Not every one is so fortunate.

            Others may find that holding down a job, looking after a home and perhaps bringing up several children, leaves them with neither the time nor the energy to undertake an extra task.  Sorting out the refuse and salvage and taking it to the property boundary would, in their case, be the final straw that would break the camel’s back!  The Council may be able to help some of them by, for instance, arranging for the refuse to be collected from outside the back door instead of the front gate.

            It is those who could co-operate but choose not to on whom local councils should concentrate their efforts, first by persuasion and, if that fails, by rewarding those who co-operate and penalising the others.  Now that, despite talk about empowering local communities, local authorities have become little more than agents of central government, their ability either ‘to wield the stick or offer the carrot’ is probably extremely limited.  Nevertheless, that path – rather than by the hi-tech plus patronising educational efforts being attempted in Colchester – is the only one that can hope to bring the proportion of recyclables to that of land-fill to an acceptable level.

Another ‘Time Traveller’ finds himself in trouble!

          I sometimes feel that I am a kind of Time Traveller, a cheap ‘economy version’ of Dr. Who.  I am a mid-twentieth century man, with mid-twentieth century attitudes and a mid-twentieth century vocabulary, who finds himself in the twenty-first century and sometimes gets into trouble as a result.  As L.P. Hartley says in the first sentence of his novel The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’.

            It seems that I am not alone. Tendring Councillor Michael Talbot, the respected leader of the Independent Group on Tendring District Council (although I think several decades younger than me) appears to be a fellow time-traveller. He has got himself into serious trouble by using a phrase that was common enough in the time of my youth, and presumably in his, but is totally taboo in 2012

In a public meeting Mr Talbot used the phrase ‘the n……….in the woodpile’ and thus provoked shock and horror among his fellow councillors and some council officials.  He realized at once that what he had said was unacceptable and apologised to the Meeting, saying ‘It’s an old-fashioned term and I put it down to my age that I used it at all.  I understand that it has caused offence and apologise to all members of the Council for this slip on my part’.

The Daily Gazette explains that the offensive phrase was a figure of speech meaning, ‘a fact of importance that is not disclosed’.  It in fact a phrase that had its origins in the USA and has the wider meaning of an unexpected and usually unpleasant surprise concealed among otherwise harmless or beneficial material. It is similar in meaning to ‘the fly in the ointment’ or ‘the spanner in the works’. I can well understand that it is a phrase that would cause deep offence to black people, but in the 1920s and ‘30s many of us had never met or even seen a black person (I never had until I joined the army) so we used the phrase casually, totally unaware of its offensive and hurtful potential.

Following his immediate verbal apology Mr Talbot sent an email to his fellow-councillors apologising even more profusely for having used ‘what is a quite unacceptable expression regarded as being racist, in the conduct of a public meeting’.

It seems that these apologies were not really enough for Council Leader Neil Stock who had chaired the Meeting.  Calling for Mr Talbot to resign his leadership of the Independent Group he declared that the use of the phrase had left him ‘genuinely stunned’ and said that after the Meeting a Senior Council Officer had remarked that if Tendring had been a London Borough the use of the phrase ‘would not simply have been a matter for the conduct committee, it would have resulted in a full-scale police investigation’. If that is so then we certainly do need Commissioners to make sure that Police get their priorities right!   It seems that, as in my day, there are always a few officials eager to tell influential councillors what they think they would like to hear!

I suppose that Mr Stock’s professed shock and horror couldn’t have had anything to do with Mr Talbot’s earlier criticism of the oafish behaviour of the council’s finance supremo Councillor Peter Halliday whom Neil Stock is supporting as Council Leader when he leaves that post shortly?

‘In days of old, when knights were bold……

            The bad, bold barons of those days could – and did – get away with murder!   Things are different now but one local life-baron does seem to have got away very lightly with some pretty reprehensible activities.

            I have been strongly critical of Lord Hanningfield ever since I started to write Tendring Topics….on line, four years ago.  He was then political leader of the Essex County Council.  I thought that he was pompous, self-important, publicity seeking, always ready to accept graciously any praise accorded to the county council, while hurriedly passing on to someone else any criticism of any of its services, such as – for instance – its failing child protection service. He was always floating brilliant ground-breaking ideas that made headlines in the press but were either wildly expensive, ineffective or unwanted.

            There was the wonderful Essex Bank, for instance, that was going to offer quick and easy finance to Essex businesses.  It turned out to be less helpful than the ordinary commercial banks and was clearly unwanted.  There was the Essex County Council branch office in mainland China that was going to bring vast export orders to Essex firms.   Whatever happened to that, I wonder?  There was the ‘Essex jobs for Essex men and women’ campaign, urging potential employers to employ local staff.  That was followed by the Essex County Council, at Lord Hanningfield’s initiative, outsourcing its IT services to an international enterprise. Its HQ was not only not in Essex but not in the UK!  Members of The County Council’s existing IT staff lost their jobs. Then there was the conference he called of other highway authorities (Essex leads the way!) on combating the effects of hard winters.   The following winter Essex was the very first highway authority to run out of grit and salt!

            It was obvious to me too, that he had a taste for international travel at the tax-payers’ expense.  There was an event in Harwich, Massachusetts to which our Harwich Town Council sent representatives (at economy travel and accommodation rates!).   The County Council, quite unnecessarily, also sent a delegation, headed by Lord Hanningfield.  Its purpose was to encourage businesses in the USA to buy from Essex firms.   They did not travel by the cheapest means and use the most economical accommodation.  Did they bring back any orders?  I never heard of any.  He made similar journeys to China (for the Olympics!), Hong Kong, India, and the West Indies.  All of course were at our expense.

            All this time Lord Hanningfield was attending the House of Lords as a member, and it was in this capacity that Nemesis caught up with him!  In May, 2011 he was prosecuted and found guilty of fiddling his House of Lords expenses to the extent of £14,000 (it was subsequently discovered to be much more than that!) and was sentenced to nine months in gaol.   It was a light sentence and for reasons that have never been made clear, he served only a small part of it.   Shortly after discharge he was re-arrested on suspicion of fiddling his County Council expenses too and released under police bail.  Just last week we learned that no further action was to be taken by the police because of ‘lack of evidence’.  This did mean that all the evidence supplied by Essex County Council was returned to them.  They promptly published details of purchases made on Lord Hanningdale’s corporate credit card, and paid for by the county council, during the last five years of his Lordship’s nine year reign as Leader of the County Council.

            During those five years he spent £286,938 on that credit card – on flights round the world, on luxury hotels and on hospitality in the House of Lords and elsewhere. It was also revealed that the County Council employs three chauffeurs working up to 97 hours a week.   They were often employed to convey the peer to and from his home to the House of Lords!   There was, it appears, no firm policy on the proper use of the chauffeurs and it is difficult, if not impossible, to work out which travel expenses were allowable – and which were not.

            Lord Hanningfield was not the only guilty one.  Senior officers and fellow-councillors must certainly have known of his profligacy – and done nothing about it.  Others took advantage of his generous hospitality (at our expense!).  They must surely bear a share of the guilt.

            I’m not surprised that the present leader of the County Council now wants closure on the past and concentration on the present and future!

           

         

   

  

           

           

           

              

           

  

Week 5.09

Tendring Topics……on Line

The Harwich Society.....Forty Years on!

It is difficult for me to realize that the Harwich Society, surely one of the most active and prestigious organisations of its kind in East Anglia, is only forty years old. I am sure that the handful of enthusiasts who launched the Society at a public meeting in the town on 7th February 1969 didn’t, in their wildest dreams, imagine that four decades later their fledgling society would have over a thousand members, many living far from Harwich, and would have a record of solid achievement upon which the present membership fully intends to build.
A few yards from the waterfront is the home of Christopher Jones, Master of 'The Mayflower' on which the Pilgrim Fathers of the USA sailed across the Atlantic

The photos on this page were taken by me in the 1980s. I was then writing a number of articles for the New England Senior Citizen (‘on your trip to England don’t fail to visit Harwich, home of the Mayflower’ and so on) thus giving a tiny boost to our tourist trade and putting a few welcome dollars into my bank account!

At that time the Harwich Society had been in existence little more than a decade but was already making its presence strongly felt. An article in the current issue of Highlight, the Society's quarterly journal, refers to a photograph in a 1976 issue of the Harwich and Dovercourt Standard depicting ‘the Electric Palace looking forlorn and dilapidated. The entrance is boarded up, the plasterwork disintegrating’. The Palace was, in fact, threatened with demolition but, thanks largely to the efforts of the Harwich Society, the Electric Palace, one of England’s oldest purpose-built cinemas, was saved, restored to its former glory and is still a valuable centre of entertainment in the town. My photo shows the then-recently-restored cinema.

This mural, the first of its kind, depicting something of Harwich’s history, had been sponsored by the Harwich Society and painted by the pupils of Harwich School.

Another major project that by the 1980s was well under way was the restoration of Harwich’s Redoubt, a fort constructed to defend Harwich Harbour from Napoleonic invasion in the first decade of the 19th century. It is now one of the town’s most valued assets and the venue of an annual Spring Bank Holiday fête that year after year helps to meet the cost of its upkeep. Heather (formerly Heather Gilbert), my late wife, had a family interest in Harwich and in the restoration of the Redoubt. Her grandfather had been one of the crew of the ill-fated SS Berlin. Its loss at the Hook of Holland in February 1907, left her grandmother a widow with three orphaned children one of whom was the twelve year old boy destined to be Heather’s father. Heather’s cousin Roger Gilbert was a keen member of the small group of Redoubt Volunteers who undertook the mammoth task of clearing the dry moat of nearly two centuries-worth of discarded rubbish!

A brief history of Harwich, also in the current issue of Highlight explains why it is that historic Harwich doesn’t get a mention in William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book, while its apparently-more-modern sister town of Dovercourt does.

It appears that the outlet to the sea of the rivers Orwell and Stour used to be further north than it now is and was roughly where Felixstowe Pier stands today. The rivers broke through to the sea on their present course at the beginning of the twelfth century and a few decades later the importance of the settlement of Herewyk strategically situated on a promontory on the southern side of the newly formed estuary was realized. It developed into the Borough and Port of Harwich, which was to play an important role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the settlement of North America, the Dutch wars, the Napoleonic wars and two world wars.
Harwich's unique treadwheel crane, originally used for loading and unloading cargoes. The crane is owned by the Tendring District Council but the Harwich Society keeps a watchful eye on it and informs the Council when the crane needs maintenance or other attention

Developments in Clacton

I have to admit that when I first heard that the disused former insurance offices on the western side of Clacton’s Jackson Road were to be converted into a Travelodge Hotel and a number of flats, I was sceptical. During the half century that I have lived in the town I have seen hotel after hotel along the seafront converted into apartments. Why on earth should a new hotel, away from the sea front, succeed where they had failed?

However, when I mentioned the development to members of my family, all of whom are much more accustomed to staying in hotels than I am, I was told that it would very likely prove to be a success. What Clacton needed, they assured me, was an up-to-the-minute hotel (not a late Victorian one more or less adapted to modern needs) that offered reasonably priced short stay accommodation. Travelodge, and most of them seemed to have stayed in a Travelodge Hotel at one time or another, was just what the town needed.

As for its location? It isn't very far from the busiest part of the sea front and, if it were hoping to attract customers all the year round and not just at the summer season, there might be a positive advantage in being near the town centre but a little way back from the sea front.

It may be that with the falling value of the pound making holidays abroad ever more expensive, Clacton-on-Sea will see something of a revival this year if only the weather is kind. If so, the new Travelodge Hotel should be able to profit from it. Work is already in hand as you can see in this picture taken last week. The contractors hope to have it completed and ready for occupation in time for the 2009 holiday season.

An even more ambitious plan, which it is hoped will come into fruition by the spring of next year is the proposal by Primero Management to demolish the Comfort Inn on Clacton’s Marine Parade West and replace it with a 61 room hotel, a roof-top restaurant and other facilities. These would include a sixteen-lane bowling alley, basement parking spaces and children’s party suites.

The proposed bowling alley has sparked protests from existing owners of amusement facilities in the town who in 2003 had been granted planning permission for the provision of a nine-lane bowling alley in Clacton’s Pier Pavilion. The new development would, they say, undermine their plans for the future and they are urging to Council to refuse planning permission.

However, they have done nothing to further their plans for five years. Primero, on the other hand, is proposing to start work on their project in May of this year and to have the new hotel and its ancillaries open and ready for use in March 2010. The Council if they are wise will remember that, ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!’ and grant Primero their planning permission.

Congratulations!

I think that we residents of the Tendring District (well, most of us anyway) are entitled to feel pretty pleased with ourselves about the efforts that we have made to separate our recyclable refuse from our landfill waste and to put them out separately for collection each week. We produce the least landfill waste per head of any district or borough council in Essex and we come only sixteenth from the top in the whole of England! The national average for the year 2007/2008 was 450 kilogrammes per head. The very lowest was Hyndburn in Lancashire with 300 kgs while we in Tendring come fairly closely behind with 330 kgs per head.

I said that most rather than all of us should be feeling pleased with ourselves because a stroll down any residential road on collection day will find some houses with several black bags filled with landfill waste put out for the refuse collectors, but no sign of a Council-supplied green box or any other container filled with recyclables.

I think that the Council needs to make a note of these addresses and write to, or call on, the occupiers to stress the importance of recycling and to try to persuade them to mend their ways. If friendly persuasion doesn’t do the trick I think that, in fairness to the rest of us, the Council should see what coercive measures may be available to them.

A Town Hall Bank?

On Radio 4’s Moneybox programme last Saturday (24th January) there was discussion of the problems of perfectly sound businesses that now find themselves unable to obtain the credit that they need from their usual commercial Bank. Should Local Authorities take over some of the responsibilities of these Banks in fields where they are clearly failing? Both Essex County Council and Birmingham Council are, it seems, eager to pioneer Town Hall (or County Hall) banking.

Essex County Council’s leader Lord Hanningfield, never one to hide his light under a bushel, was very keen on the idea. There were, he said, many businesses within our county which were failing simply because commercial banks were unwilling to advance loans that in the past they would have offered without hesitation. The County Council could and would step in and save them.

I am sure that they could and think it quite possible that they will. Regular readers of Tendring Topics…..on line will know that I am usually strongly in favour of public services being carried out by public enterprise rather than by private firms motivated by market forces and the profit motive. Also, of course, local authorities are better able than nationally owned commercial banks to assess the local financial climate and the credibility of a local firm.

However, our County Council is the one that early last year sent some of its members on an expensive jaunt to the USA to help drum up orders for Essex firms. How many orders, I wonder, came to Essex as a result? It is the same council that is causing outrage in Colchester about its proposal to close two schools and spread their pupils among the others. It is also the council that recently put virtually the whole of its services out to private tender, sold off its old people’s care homes, and received a report on the quality of its child care provision ranking it not much higher than that of the now notorious Haringey! None of which inspires me with a great deal of confidence.

Essex County Council also receives and spends the greater part of the money that I, and all other Tendring householders, pay in Council tax. Tendring District Council is often strongly criticised in the correspondence columns of the Clacton Gazette. On the whole though, I’d feel happier trusting my money to their care than to that of their counterparts at County Hall in Chelmsford.

I hope that local authority banking is tried out, and proves to be a great success, in Birmingham!