24 January 2015

Tendring Topics………on line

Keeping things ‘in proportion’

          I am not one of Lord Mendelson’s greatest admirers.  He was one of the creators of New Labour which, to win elections, surrendered the Labour Party’s soul and converted British politics into a pale imitation of the politics of the USA. There is precious little difference between the objectives of the two main parties.   They only differ in how best to achieve them.  In office Tony Blair, Lord Mendelson’s friend and political colleague, continued the process begun by Mrs Thatcher of turning the UK into a Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

            However, I am inclined to be on Lord Mendelson’s side in his current disagreement with Ed Miliband and his shadow Chancellor Ed Balls.   It is, I think, shameful that multi-millionaires in this country are likely to pay a much smaller proportion of their income in taxation than those whose income is so low that they pay no income tax at all, but do have to pay the government every time they buy an object or service that is subject to VAT or purchase something that is subject to customs duty, like a packet of cigarettes or a pint at a pub.  Multi-millionaires also, of course, pay a much smaller proportion of their income in taxation than do those mythical beings who David Cameron always claims he is eager to help – average hardworking wage earners who pay income tax and, of course, the indirect taxes and custom duties that this government prefers

Ed Miliband’s mansion tax may not be intended to be a one-off tax to help the NHS – or any other good cause – out of its current crisis, by taking a few hundred thousand pounds from the bank accounts of the super-wealthy, but that’s how it sounds.  I think that the government should be fair to both the wealthy and the poor by claiming an equal percentage of the gross income of all of us to fund public services.   The obvious way to do this is by means of the income tax system, the only tax that is linked to ability to pay.  I think we should consider it not as an imposition but as a privilege to pay our annual subscription towards the not-inconsiderable benefits of being a British Citizen, or towards our permission to live and work within the UK.  We would then all have an equal stake in the prosperity or economic failure of our country.  We really would be all in this together!

            Income tax is the obvious means that a government could use to level the economic playing field but another way that would help to do this would be – as Lord Mendelson suggests – adding additional tax bands to the Council Tax system.

            Blog readers past the first flush of youth will recall the ‘bad old days’ in which local authorities, County, Borough and District Councils raised part of their income by means of ‘the domestic rates’.  These were an annual charge on each dwelling within the district.  Nobody enjoyed paying them but they were based on the estimated rental value of the property. They therefore had at least a rough relationship to the income of the occupier of the occupier or occupiers

Mrs Thatcher’s government changed all that.  Instead of the rates we were to have a ‘community charge’ (almost instantly rebranded ‘the poll tax’) which taxed each individual equally regardless of whether that individual was a millionaire or a refuse collector.  It took no account whatsoever of ability to pay. The rating system may have been disliked but the poll tax was actually hated.   It was just such a tax that had provoked the medieval ‘peasants revolt’.  In the late twentieth century it produced wide-spread demonstrations, riots and the eventual fall of the Thatcher government.     

The Poll Tax was replaced by the ‘Council Tax’. This is based on the estimated purchase value of the property and therefore makes a pretence of bearing some relationship to the income or wealth of the householder.  Properties are classified as being in one of eight ‘tax bands’, the lowest of which is under £40,000 and the highest £320,000 and above.  A glance will make it clear that those bands are hopelessly out of date.   I suppose for £40,000 you might, just possibly, get some kind of a shack in an area like the Brooklands Estate, Jaywick  just a couple of miles from my home – but that estate has been declared to be the most deprived area in the UK!

At the other end of the tax bands the situation is even more ridiculous.  The highest tax band for Council Tax is £320,000 and above. I agree that in the Clacton area you would get a very nice property for £320,000 – but not in many other parts of the UK

Do you ever watch ‘Escape to the Country’ ­on BBC tv.   Briefly it’s about very fortunate (and often very hard working and gifted) folk who have made a fortune in London, or Manchester or Sheffield or wherever and are now seeking a residence ‘in the country’.  A BBC presenter introduces them to three or four ‘desirable residences’ in the area of their choice.   It’s not a programme I like to watch.   I have spent too much of my professional life trying to help people who are homeless, or overcrowded or living in squalid conditions, to enjoy seeing well-heeled folk looking over a luxurious home and complaining that ‘the view isn’t quite what we’d hoped for’ or ‘the paddock isn’t really big enough for Rosalie (their spoilt brat!) to exercise the pony we’ve given her for her birthday’.

It’s very unusual for one of those very comfortable and very desirable homes ‘in the country’ to change hands for as little as £320,000.   That sum would probably buy a roomy three bedroom home in one of London’s more pleasant suburbs.  That means that an executive officer of a biggish enterprise or a middle-grade civil servant, living in a comfortable but hardly palatial home in Cheam or Twickenham would pay exactly the same Council Tax as the owner of a ‘Downton Abbey’ or similar stately home or family mansion.

There should be at least three higher tax bands, ending at homes valued at £2 million pounds or more, to bring something like fairness to the Council Tax system. The Council Tax bands, like the income tax system, need urgent reconstruction to make sure that those who have done best from our market economy should pay at least as big a proportion of their wealth in tax as those who have been less fortunate.

A trusted ally – or a ‘pariah state’?

In recent months I have been quite proud of the fact that I am a member of the Church of England as well as of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).   I welcomed the Church’s decision to ordain women as Bishops as well as Priests.   I have applauded the Archbishop of Canterbury’s campaign to replace ‘pay day lenders’ with local ‘credit unions’ and his criticism of economic policies that have led to the proliferation of Food Banks throughout the UK.

That enthusiasm suffered a severe blow this (23^rd January) afternoon when I learned that, to comply with government guidelines, the authorities of Westminster Abbey would be flying our national flag at half-mast in mourning for the King of Saudi Arabia.  It suffered a further blow with the news that the Prince of Wales (a future ‘Defender of the Faith’) together with our Prime Minister were to fly to Saudi Arabia to express their condolences.  I suppose that the Prince is aware that any expression of the Faith that he will pledge himself to defend is strictly forbidden in Saudi Arabia and that any Muslim in that country who converts to Christianity is likely to be executed!

Saudi Arabia’s disregard for democracy and human rights makes North Korea seem like a liberal Paradise!  Torture is routinely practised in Saudi gaols and public executions, amputations and floggings are daily occurrences.  The case of a blogger who considered the possibility that Saudi Arabia might become a secular state and who is being publicly flogged with fifty lashes every Friday until, if he survives long enough, he has received a total of 1,000 lashes, has recently made the press headlines.  Women in Saudi-Arabia are said to be much more free than they were a decade or so ago – but they are still forbidden to drive cars or leave their homes without a male escort (husband, father or brother).

Most of those involved in the 9/11 outrages in New York were Saudis.  Saudi Arabia is the home of the noxious fundamentalist Islamic faith that IS (the Islamic State) is trying to impose in Syria and Iraq and that Boko Haram is imposing, even more blood-thirstily, in sub-Saharan Africa. Donations from oil-rich Saudi millionaires financed IS during its early days. They possibly still do so.

Do we really need oil (and arms sales) so badly that we are prepared to befriend a state whose philosophy is the exact opposite of the British values that David Cameron and his colleagues are so eager to propagate?

   

Week 15 2013

Tendring Topics………on Line

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new……’

So declared the dying King Arthur according to Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem The Passing of Arthur.  If there is any historical basis for the Arthurian legend, it is that Arthur was a Romanised Briton struggling to save a remnant of Roman civilisation in a country overrun by Anglo-Saxon barbarians.  Many decades were to pass and much blood shed before our land again became a civilised united kingdom comparable with the Britain of Roman times.

 There was a similar end of an old order and its replacement by the new just a week ago, on 1^st April.  The final nails were being hammered into the coffin of the caring welfare state established by my generation in the wake of World War II.  It was being replaced by a new brutal barbarism, devoted to the service and worship of its false god Mammon, to whom it is determined to sacrifice our poorest and most helpless citizens in the interest of a favoured minority.  It was on 1^st April (and how appropriated that it should have been on April Fools Day!) that the government’s austerity cuts, and the radical reconstruction of the NHS increasingly opening its doors to ‘the private sector’, came into force and the direction in which our country is being led became abundantly clear.

I have little doubt that many years and a great deal of suffering will have to be endured before we return to a Britain comparable with that of Clement Attlee, Harold MacMillan, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, in which Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear for all our citizens were the objectives of all our political leaders no matter how different may have been their means of achieving them.

The Chancellor and his supporters claim that the government’s policies encourage those who work hard to support themselves and their families.  Yet two of the measures that came into force last week will penalise low-paid workers as much as, if not more than, the unemployed.   As a former local authority Housing Manager I find the new ‘bedroom tax’ particularly objectionable. Yes, I know that the government dislikes that designation but I’m afraid they’ll have to learn to live with it just as their predecessors had to live with the ‘poll tax’ that they found equally objectionable and that brought about their downfall.

The bedroom tax clearly labels tenants of ‘social housing’ (Councils and Housing Associations) as second class citizens.  Owner/occupiers can, of course, have as many bedrooms as they like and so can occupiers of publicly owned ‘tied houses’, provided they are posh enough.   Nobody asks how many spare bedrooms there may be at either 9 or 10 Downing Street or at Chequers. It is only Plebs who live in Council Houses who must pay extra – or get out – if they have a spare bedroom to accommodate an occasional guest, or a grown-up son or daughter who sometimes comes home to spend a weekend with  mum and dad.

They have got it all worked out.  Single or widowed, and married or ‘living together’ tenants with no children, need only one bedroom.  If they have one child, two of the same sex, or two of the opposite sex but under ten years old, they need only two bedrooms, and so on.  When I was Clacton’s Housing Manager we used to encourage elderly tenants whose children had left home, to move into smaller accommodation – and many of them did.  We never dreamed of compelling them or of penalising them if they failed to do so. Nor did we ever suggest that they should move into less roomy accommodation until we had such accommodation to offer them.  They may have lived in one of the Council’s houses but it was their home and the (Conservative) Council respected that.

Nowadays those who seek ‘social housing’ are not allowed the privilege of transforming their council houses into ‘their homes’.  Tenancies are all to be ‘short term’ and, unless they are prepared to pay extra for the privilege, they’re just offered minimal shelter from the elements. No, of course the local authority or housing association can’t be expected to have smaller accommodation for those who simply can’t pay that extra ‘bedroom tax’.  ‘They must find that for themselves – or sleep rough as many others have to.  The Salvation Army or some other lot of ‘do gooders’ will make sure that they don’t actually starve – and the weather will surely warm up eventually’.

Another measure that will affect the employed as much as the unemployed relates to Council Tax.  From last Monday thousands of disabled or otherwise disadvantaged house-holders will be liable to pay their full Council Tax for the first time.   This imposition of central government is particularly clever as Councils are permitted to continue any existing rebates provided they can make up the short-fall elsewhere.   Thus it will be local and not central government that gets the blame.

And the wider picture

            Just as the members of the government are penalising the poor for failing to move into non-existent smaller homes, they are penalising the unemployed for failing to take up non-existent jobs.   The cap on benefits and restriction of cost-of-living increases to one percent when inflation is over twice that rate are all justified as helping to break the ‘dependency culture’ and encourage the unemployed to work for their living.   The biggest and best encouragement that the poor can have is for there to be plenty of properly paid work for them to do.  Not until that situation exists is the government or the popular press entitled to denigrate the unemployed as ‘work-shy’. How extraordinary that those who believe that the poor can only be persuaded to work by holding over them the threat of homelessness and starvation, simultaneously believe that the very wealthy can only be persuaded to give of their best by the promise of substantial bribes,  euphemistically referred to as bonuses!

            I am glad to see the Christian Churches in this country united in their support of the poor.  Paul Morrison, public issues policy adviser of the Methodist Church told the BBC in a recent interview that the benefit cuts are a symptom of a popularly held belief that the poor ‘somehow deserve their poverty’.  Christian Churches accused politicians and the news media of promoting six myths about the poor:

They are lazy.   They are addicted to drink or drugs.   They are not really poor.  They cheat the system. They have an easy life.  They were the cause of the deficit.     These are false claims that all Christians have a duty to challenge.

An ‘Old Hand’ for a New Job!

In 1974 the Tendring District Council was newly formed from the amalgamation of Clacton, Frinton and Walton, and Brightlingsea Urban Districts, the Tendring Rural District and the Borough of Harwich.  As the new council’s first Public Relations Officer I soon realized that the councillors from Harwich, of whatever their political allegiance, exercised an authority and an influence well beyond their numbers on the new Council. 

That was nearly forty years ago but it seems probable that the recent victory of John Hawkins in a District Council by-election will continue and strengthen that tradition.   Mr Hawkins had been Chief Executive of the Tendring Council. He retired in 2010 after thirteen years in the Council’s top job.

During his election campaign as the Labour Candidate for the vacancy, he had said that he would use his knowledge and experience of local government within the Tendring District to give Harwich a strong voice on the council.  It was after my own retirement from the Council’s service that John Hawkins was appointed to the post of Chief Executive,  so I have never met him.  I wish him well though and I have little doubt that, now that parliamentary style politics have been introduced into the Council Chamber, his experienced voice will strengthen and hearten ‘the Opposition’.

‘Brain Upgrade’ needed?

Do you have a feeling of apprehension when you go to close down your computer and a notice appears on the screen urging you not to switch off because one or more updates are being installed?  The computer will switch itself off when the process is complete.

        I know that I do, because experience tells me that when I  switch on again, something (who knows what?) won’t be quite the same.  I know that whatever it is will make my computer more secure and/or more efficient.  It may also mean though that I will have to perform a familiar task in a different and unfamiliar way – and, at my age, I just don’t like change!

That’s why this cartoon, forwarded to me by my fifteen-years-younger-than-me sister-in-law, speaks to my condition (as we Quakers say)

           

Week 6 2013

Tendring Topics.......on line

April Fools!

 1^st April is traditionally the day on which we get surprises – many of them unpleasant ones.  Most will disappear though, as with a triumphant cry of ‘April Fool!’ the surprise is revealed to be a hoax.

            Sadly, there will be nothing good humoured or ephemeral about the unpleasant surprise that, for many of us, will be manifest from the first day of April this year*.  This is the day on which the government’s economic measures, designed – so they say – to reducing and ultimately eliminating that deficit about which we hear so much, begin to take effect.  The immediate effect will be to make the poorest and most vulnerable of our fellow countrymen and women even poorer and more disadvantaged than they are at present.

            From that day, there will be no Disability Living Allowance.  This will be replaced by a new allowance payable only to those who can demonstrate being capable of no work whatsoever.   Others will lose the £208 disability living allowance currently paid to them and go instead onto the £112 job seekers allowance payable only for as long as they are actively seeking any work of which they may be capable.

            Then there’s the ‘bedroom tax’ that will mean that families in social housing with a spare bedroom will have the choice of paying extra rent or of moving into smaller accommodation.  The poor are not permitted to have an unused bedroom for the occasional use of adult sons or daughters or other friends or relatives. They’re not really being offered much of a choice because there won’t be smaller accommodation available for them.

            And don’t let us forget that the government is withdrawing from local authorities the funding that made it possible for them to reduce or waive altogether Council Tax on properties occupied by the unemployed or the disabled.  I have just watched on tv an unemployed (but seeking employment) middle-aged woman in Cornwall in tears because she says that she is already living frugally to the very limit of her meagre income.  ‘How am I going to find the money for Council Tax;  by giving up heating….or eating?’

            But, of course, we don’t have to go to Cornwall to find examples of extreme hardship.   In Tendring, because benefits for the elderly have been ring-fenced and our district has a very high proportion of old people, the withdrawal of this funding will mean a loss to the Council of two million pounds!  The Clacton Gazette carries a report of a sixty-year old who has worked all his life but is now full-time carer to his stroke-stricken and disabled wife.  They have been exempt for Council Tax but have been told that they will now be expected to pay the full amount.  How are they to find it?   They are just one couple among thousands suffering similarly nationwide.

            In this instance the Government has been particularly clever/cunning (delete as preferred).  Local authorities don’t have to withdraw this subsidy on unemployed and disabled liability for Council Tax.  They needn’t do so if they can raise the money involved in other ways – by such means as cutting libraries or sports centre services, reducing the frequency of collection of refuse and recyclables, or postponing the repair of highways and footpaths.  This will cause antagonism between the working population and the unemployed and disabled, both of which groups will resent the exemption of us oldies from these austerity measures. And it will be local government, not national government that has to make the final decision.  Thus it will be ‘That lot in the Town Hall’ not ‘them in Westminster’ who will get the blame.

            Just to add insult to injury, 1^st April will also be the date on which the seriously wealthy – those with incomes in excess of £150,000 a year - will have their higher rate of income tax reduced!  We’re all in this together?  Now that is an April Fool hoax!

*I have just learned that our water and sewerage charges (from the privatised water companies) are to go up by an average of £13 per annum from April. This will mean nothing to the lucky minority who will be having their income tax reduced at the same time.  It won't mean very much to me.  But there are those for whom it will be the final straw that breaks the camel's back 

‘Making sick people sicker’

            A few weeks ago there was condemnation from both sides of the House of Commons of the way in which thousands of sick and disabled people had had their benefit axed after the private company Atos, that the government has employed to ‘weed out slackers and scroungers’, had wrongly found fit to work.   There had been a number of deaths, including suicides, by people who had been assessed as fit for work following what was described as ‘a demeaning process that was making sick people sicker’.

            Private Eye, a publication that probes deeply where others walk hastily by, has learned that, despite these revelations, the government has tabled amendments to the employment and support allowance legislation which academics and campaigners say will lead to even greater suffering by the genuinely ill. 

 Private Eye reports that:  ‘Plans include withdrawing benefit if an assessor decides that a claimant’s ability to work could be improved by aids, such as guide dogs, walking sticks or prosthetic limbs – whether or not the claimant has access to them or can use them. Atos assessors already have the power to carry out an ‘imaginary wheelchair test’ by which they decide that a person could work if they used a wheelchair – even if they do not have one.  Under the changes, due to take place without public debate, people will also lose benefit if the assessor decides that adjustments could be made for them in the workplace – whether or not those changes have been made.’

            MP Tom Greatrex is reported as saying, ‘The fact that people can be assessed as fit for work on the basis of an imaginary guide dog, without taking account of the availability of guide dogs and the time taken to train both dogs and users, highlights just how far the Department of Work and Pensions seems to be prepared to go to find people fit for work without the support they need to make work a reality’.

            All of the above reminds me that my blue ‘disabled parking’ badge (that I use infrequently and only when my sons or a friend give me a lift) expires in July.  I shall have to apply for it to be renewed. Previously they were prepared to take the word of my doctor that, to use today’s new-speak, my mobility was strictly limited. I understand that there are new, more stringent, eligibility criteria nowadays. I may have to appear before government employed assessors. I certainly don’t look forward to parading my disability before those who are employed to try to catch me out   I really can’t walk safely, even the shortest distance, without a stick – and I’m much happier when I have a companion to take my other arm, or there is some furniture or perhaps a railing, with which I can steady myself.  I hope that will satisfy the assessors.  If I have to be even worse than that to qualify for a blue badge there would really be no point in my having one – because there would be no way I could walk from the parked car to the shop, cinema or church that would have been my destination.

A Dubious Triumph

          Both my sons were pupils at Clacton County High School in the 1960s and early ‘70s.   One went on to Cambridge and graduated with a good degree.  The other decided not to seek university admission but to leave school at 16, take a job and study for a professional qualification in his spare time.  He did so very effectively, taking the two parts of the Institute of Housing’s examination for professional Housing Managers and passing both at his first attempt.  Both my sons have had satisfying and socially valuable working careers.

            Consequently I have always held Clacton County High School in warm regard and was delighted when, referring to the CCHS, the Clacton Gazette carried the headline Valuable triumph – School among the country’s top performers.

            Reading on however, I discovered that the CCHS wasn’t in the top flight of schools for its GCSE or ‘A’ level results but had achieved one of the highest ‘value added’ scores in the country.  Very creditable, of course, but it may say almost as much about the abysmal ignorance of some of the pupils when they came to the CCHS aged eleven as it does about the standard of education that they later achieved.

            The Gazette published ‘league tables’ showing the actual exam results of ten north-east Essex educational establishments.  No-one would expect Clacton’s Comprehensive Schools’ results to equal those of selective schools like Colchester Royal Grammar School and Colchester County High School for Girls – but it was disappointing to see them at the very bottom of the list!   Right at the bottom was Clacton Coastal Academy, formed by the amalgamation of Bishop’s Gate College and Colbayns High School.   Only 36 percent of their students taking GCSE’s achieved 5 A* to C Grades at GCSE or their equivalent, including English and Maths.  Next above them was the Clacton County High School with just 51 percent.

            Needless to say the Head-teachers of both schools cite the controversial changes in the marking of GCSE English exam papers during the year in explanation – but these changes surely affected Colne Community School, Brightlingsea (72 percent) and Tendring Technology College, Frinton (69 percent) as much as they did the Clacton Schools.

            It is certainly an achievement to have raised the standard of children of low achievement at primary school – but if this result was achieved by neglecting the encouragement and support of high flyers, and there must surely be some of these (as there were in 1970 when Clacton County High School sent no less than four of its sixth formers to Cambridge) it was a somewhat hollow triumph.

week 12/10

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!

Week 11.09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Yet another Supermarket




I would have thought that Clacton was pretty well served with Supermarkets. There is what is now Sainsbury’s in the High Street, Morrison’s in the Waterglade Business Park off Old Road and Lidl just a few hundred yards away from Morrison’s, extending between Old Road and St. Osyth Road. Further from the centre is the Co-op Fiveways Supermarket at the end of Oxford Road, and Somerfield’s in North Road, Great Clacton. Further out still is the new Tesco off the Little Clacton bypass and another Morrison’s on the edge of the village.

Now it seems likely that we shall have an Aldi Supermarket on what is currently the outdoor market site off the landward end of Pier Avenue. Aldi have purchased the site and will be submitting their plans to the council shortly. Reported remarks by influential councillors suggest that their application will be successful. In the current economic climate I have little doubt that any financial investment in the town is likely to be welcomed. Clacton's present out-door market, off Old Road

I am less surprised at the advent of another supermarket than at its proposed position. Is there really customer demand for another similar retailer within a few hundred yards of both Morrisons and Lidl? It doesn’t seem likely, but who can tell? No doubt ‘market forces’ (the economic equivalent of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest') will decide that for us. I don’t really share the fears of a correspondent to the Clacton Gazette that yet another town centre supermarket will strike a deathblow to small traders in the area. That deathblow has already been struck. The only independent traders left are those whose activities are outside the supermarkets’ range, and ‘convenience stores’ surviving on the custom of those unable or unwilling to make more than a very short journey to purchase their household needs.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago (to me at any rate!) that Clacton’s only supermarket was what now seems to have been that ridiculously small Tesco store in Station Road. It didn’t even have car-parking facilities!

Existing market traders seem resigned to losing their site to Aldi. Apparently sales have slumped in recent months and they are looking for another site. A possible solution both to that problem, and to the problem of a huge gap in Clacton’s town centre, was suggested by my former colleague Bob Young in the readers’ letters page of the Clacton Gazette of 26th February. He pointed out that at the same time that market traders were looking for a new venue for their market, Woolworths, in Clacton’s busiest holiday and shopping area, was looking for a new occupier. Why not use the Woolworth site as an indoor market?

The more that I think about it, the more attractive the idea becomes. It would be an ideal situation, within easy walking distance of the pier and the busiest part of the beach. It is on a bus route and there is access from both Pier Avenue and West Avenue. Many pedestrians would be inclined to use it as a short cut from one highway to the other and would have the opportunity to look at the stalls as they did so. Holiday makers and day trippers driven from the beach by a sudden (and we hope brief) shower, would find it a convenient spot to take shelter and, once again, would find the stalls of interest. It would be ‘something different’ in the centre of our town.

The only disadvantage that I can see about the idea is that the site wouldn’t be suitable for the car-boot sales that also currently take place on the market site. I think though that an alternative suitable site could be found for these and they are, in any case, of less importance than the market.


Essex jobs for Essex Men and Women?

A few weeks ago Lord Hanningfield, Essex County Council’s leader, was telling us about his determination that all County Council contracts should go to Essex firms. While I questioned the legality of this I could not do other than applaud his Lordship’s intentions.

He must surely have had a change of heart though. Essex County Council would now, it seems, be quite happy to award contracts for running virtually all its local government services (for a period of eight years and for up to £5.4 billion) not only to non-Essex firms but to non-British ones!

Lord Hanningfied is reported to have pursued this idea while chatting to representatives of the Mumbai based Tata Group when he visited India last year ‘on a trade mission’*. Tata was one of the companies short-listed for those council contracts but they have since been eliminated. Among others still on the list though is New York based IBM, London based Trillium, and Vertex from near Liverpool.



The winners of the contracts are to be announced at a full council meeting on April 21st; a pity the announcement can’t be brought forward a few weeks. 1st April might have been a more appropriate date!

UNISON (of which, thanks to the lifetime NALGO membership given me by my colleagues on retirement, I am a life member) is campaigning against this privatisation and is considering litigation to stop it. They point out the Audit Commission’s finding that between 60 and 70 percent of similar outsourcing processes end in failure. Remember what happened when an enormous American enterprise was entrusted with the relatively straightforward task of marking GCSE exam papers. Remember too the all-too-recent failure of the privately owned Banks and Financial Institutions in a field in which private enterprise might have been expected to have reigned supreme

I have just received my Council Tax Demand from Tendring District Council. The total annual charge for my modest bungalow is £1,103.67. I pay by direct debit and my monthly payments (for ten months of the year) will go up by about £2, not a shattering amount The £105.48 of this that goes to Tendring District Council, I pay willingly, as I do the much smaller amounts that go to the Essex Fire and Police Authorities.



I wish that I could feel equally confident about the prudent spending of the much larger sum of £829.50 of my money that is entrusted to the care of Lord Hanningfield and his colleagues at Chelmsford.

* in its commendable attempts to economise on the spending of our money has the County Council considered limiting its members' jaunts overseas?

Donkeys to return to Clacton’s seafront!

Donkey rides on the sands and motor-boat trips ‘round the bay. are as traditional to the English seaside holiday as Punch and Judy shows. We used to have all three in Clacton.

I think that motorboat trips from Clacton beach (remember the ‘Viking Saga’?) were discontinued sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s, and donkey rides on the greensward near Butlins ended in the early 1990s when Mrs Norah Cleghorn, owner of the donkeys retired after having provided a much-loved service for over 40 years.

I doubt if it will be long after the completion of our off-shore wind farm that some enterprising Clactonian will reintroduce motor boat trips ‘round the wind farm’ from one or other of Clacton’s beaches, or perhaps from the pier. As for donkey rides, it is hoped that these will be reinstated this coming season.

Mrs Jayne Johns of Rayleigh owns four very sociable donkeys. Tendring Council have given her a licence to operate rides from Martello Beach, again quite near the former site of Butlins Holiday Camp, and now one of Clacton-on-Sea’s most popular beaches. She hopes to bring her donkeys from Rayleigh every Sunday from 5th April (that’s the Sunday before Easter), and more often than that during the school holidays. The charge will be £2 a ride that I think most people will consider to be pretty reasonable.

I have a distinct memory of at least one of my two sons having a ride on one of Mrs Cleghorn’s donkeys in their 1950s’ infancy but I have searched in vain through my very considerable collection of old photographs for a pictorial record of the event. The best that I have been able to come up with is this picture of a little girl, about seven years old, astride not a donkey but a pony and on the sands, not of Clacton-on-Sea but of Dovercourt. The photo dates from 1930 or ’31. The little girl was Heather Gilbert of Manor Park, spending the summer holiday with her Dovercourt cousins. She was destined, some fifteen years later, to become Heather Hall!

Take a closer look at the snap-shot and you’ll see that seven year old Heather isn’t wearing any kind of protective headgear or clothing, or indeed anything at all, even on her feet, except for what was known in those long-ago days as ‘a bathing costume’. What is more, there is neither a safety harness nor a responsible adult holding the pony’s bridle in case it should suddenly buck, rear or bolt.

What carefree, unrestrained, and adventurous lives we children enjoyed in the 1920s and ‘30s! Perhaps in those days there were dreadful accidents that could have been avoided. Perhaps little children were molested, abducted and murdered. I can only say that I never heard of any.

I wish Mrs Johns every success with her venture and very much hope that today’s obsession with ‘Health and Safety’ won’t take all the fun out of donkey riding.