Week 22 2012 31.5.2012

Tendring Topic.......on Line

Recycling

           Tendring Council has a major problem in attempting to reconcile a sceptical public to a recyclable refuse collection scheme that was introduced after little if any consultation and is proving to be almost unbelievably unpopular. For week after week the correspondence pages of the weekly Clacton Gazette and its sister weekly the Frinton and Walton Gazette have been filled with letters overwhelmingly critical of the new scheme.  This correspondence has overflowed into the corresponding pages of the daily Gazette, which covers the Colchester area as well as the Tendring District.

            When the scheme was first introduced, my own principal criticism was of the fact that no lid had been provided for the red plastic boxes intended for the reception of paper and cardboard for recycling.  I pointed out that rain falling while the filled boxes awaited collection would reduce the contents to a soggy mess, while high winds would be likely to scatter the contents far and wide.  I understand that that particular defect is to be remedied and that we will all receive lids (costing the council £1 per lid!) for those red boxes.  

            I fear that it is a concession that may prove to be too little and too late. Our existing green boxes (that we have been using for all recyclables), are now to be used only for plastic bottles (please remove caps and stoppers before putting in box!) and metal cans of all kind.  All other plastics, including those that have been collected for recycling in the past, are now to be put into the black plastic sacks for unrecyclable refuse destined for land-fill. The red and green boxes have to be put out for collection on alternate weeks, and we have been issued with a chart showing which week for each colour box.  In the past, if we had more recyclable material than would go into our green box, we were able to put it in a white or transparent plastic bag and put it on top of the filled green box for collection.  That is no longer possible.  Any overflow has to go into landfill.

We also now have two extra smaller green plastic boxes with hinged lids for kitchen and food waste.  This is a service said to have been introduced by popular demand – well, I didn’t demand it, neither did anyone I know!   The smaller box or ‘caddy’ is to be kept in the kitchen to be emptied when full into the larger one kept outside.  This has to be put out every week, with the black plastic bag and either the red or the green box, by the property boundary for collection.   I do try to co-operate.  Every week on the appropriate day my kitchen waste (in my case mostly tea bags, egg shells, banana skins and a few lettuce leaves), and either my green or my red box, and my black bag of unrecyclable waste, are ready for collection.  I find though that at age 91, I just can’t carry them to the boundary of my property. I know that the Council would arrange for them to be collected from by my back door if asked but, as the collectors arrive in my street shortly after 7.00 am, that would mean leaving my side gate open all night; something that I am not inclined to do.  However, I am very fortunate in having a neighbour who is prepared to take my boxes and black plastic sack out for me, and bring the empties back again.  Others are not so lucky!       Complying with the Council’s instructions and putting out the appropriate boxes on the right day is a bit complicated and time-consuming, but it can be done.  The scheme could work if sufficient householders were prepared to co-operate.  My observations suggest that this isn’t happening.

            There have always been some, probably a minority, of householders who have failed to support the Council’s recycling efforts.  They have put out several filled black plastic sacks every week but never a green box with recyclable waste.  I believe that minority has now expanded into a considerable majority.  Driving, in my mobility scooter up and down part of my road before and after collection, left me feeling that out of some 40 households, only ten or a dozen were fully co-operating with the Council's scheme.

          I can’t imagine how members of the Council will attempt to remedy the situation when they meet in emergency session to consider it. Attempt to bluff it out, hoping like Mr Micawber that ‘something will turn up’? Revert to the old system?  Abandon the food waste scheme and replace it with a glass collection that at least wouldn’t need a special vehicle?  One thing that they really must strive to do is regain the trust and confidence of the public, because without public support any voluntary recyclables collection scheme is doomed to failure.  The stick? The carrot?  I am not at all sure that either is available for use.  I await developments – and our next local government election – with interest!  

A Little Ray of Sunshine!

          In the midst of a double page in the Gazette for 25^th May, filled with the problems of Tendring’s Refuse and Recyclables collection scheme, is a picture of broadly smiling Councillor Nick Turner, Tendring Council's 'cabinet minister' for Public Health, with the announcement that the ‘new scheme will save taxpayers more than £450,000 a year as well as increasing recycling rates by approximately 5 percent in the first year of operation’.  He adds that, ’80 percent of residents are recycling’ and, ‘The new service is still being rolled out in some parts of the district but we are extremely pleased with the results so far and I thank everyone who is taking part.  Tendring Council is collecting, on average, ten tonnes of food waste per round each week from the eight rounds.  If this continues, the council will far exceed its estimate of 2,600 tonnes a year’.

            Isn’t that heartening news?  I wonder what all those bitter letters of complaint were about, why the council is going to the trouble and expense of getting and delivering lids to the red boxes, and is holding a special council meeting to discuss the problem.  ’80 percent of residents are recycling?’ It is clear that Councillor Turner doesn’t live in the same road as me.   I am beginning to wonder if he lives on the same planet!

The Art of Parenting

          I think that Prime Minister David Cameron was probably right when he suggested that ‘bad parenting’ played a part in the creation of those riots last summer  (though I believe, nothing like as large a part as poverty and long-term unemployment).  I have reservations though about the suggestion that parenting classes for expectant and new mums and dads will solve the problem.  They’ll be useful, of course.  Goodness knows some young mums and dads need them badly. I fear though that it may well be those who refuse to attend them! I doubt in any case if they’ll play a significant part in preventing future antisocial behaviour, vandalism and truancy.  Only time will tell.

Ipswich’s Public Health Department where I worked from 1937 to 1939.  The photo was taken some twenty years ago when most of the Health Department’s functions had been taken over by the NHS. The building remained unchanged.        

There is, of course, nothing new in teaching expectant mums and dads about parenting young children and steering them through the first few perilous years of their lives. Before World War II Ipswich’s Public Health Department, where I was a very junior employee from 1937 till 1939, housed a Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic and a School Clinic as well as Sanitary Inspectors (they’re now called Environmental Health Officers) Health Visitors, district nurses, school nurses and midwives.   Both of those clinics were presided over by a doctor experienced in that particular field of medicine, while the whole organisation was headed by the Medical Officer of Health, another highly qualified and widely experienced doctor.  

            The Maternity and Child Welfare Clinic looked after expectant mums and young children below school age, advising and helping.   The Midwives visited the expectant mums in their own homes giving advice and support on a one-to-one basis. In those days most births took place in the mother’s own home.  After the baby’s birth and the immediate post-natal period, the Health Visitor took over, visiting regular and keeping an eye on the progress of the child and the competence of the young mum. 

The joy of parenthood.  My wife Heather, with our firstborn son in 1953.         

Although by 1953, when my first son was born, the NHS – not the local authority – was responsible for all those functions, the situation was not greatly different.  My wife, who had opted to have her baby at home (this was by then less common than it had been) received regular visits from the midwife before, during and for a week or so after, the birth.  Then the Health Visitor took over but she soon came to the conclusion that we were unlikely to prove to be ‘problem parents’.  One local government service that was available – when the UK was still struggling with debt incurred in World War II but which the country ‘just can’t afford’ now – was that of a ‘home help’.  Because of my wife’s medical history (she had had pulmonary and laryngeal TB and had survived crippling major surgery) she was accorded, free of charge, a home help, a friendly lady who came to us once a week to help with the household chores.  My wife and I didn’t go to parenting classes but, looking at my two sons today and remembering their childhood and adolescence, I think that we must have been reasonably competent parents.

            In any case, I don’t believe that the kind of parental neglect that leads to antisocial behaviour and, in extreme cases, to riots, does have its roots in those early days that are the subject of parenting classes.  It is much more socially important during the child’s and adolescent’s schooldays.   Those are the years when the absence of a loving and caring parents at home to welcome, support and generally take an interest in them really can affect their whole future.

            During my schooldays in the 1920s and 1930s my Mum was always at home when I returned from school, always eager to find out what I had been doing and to encourage me to get on with my homework.  If I went out in the evening she wanted to know where I was off to and with whom.  It never occurred to me not to tell her!  I always came home lunchtime (though we called it dinner time!) and so did my Dad.  Our meals were family meals.  I had a three mile cycle ride home from my secondary school, but we did have a two-hour mid-day break and, although there were cheap school meals available, I preferred my Mum’s cooking.

            So did my sons!  They too, came home to dinner every day and I was fortunate in always being employed near enough to my home to make it possible for me to come home too.  My wife never worked outside the home after we were married.  This was partly because of her frail physical condition but also because she found home-making and bringing up a family a satisfying full-time occupation.

            Nowadays that seems to be unthinkable.  Women ‘liberated from the kitchen sink’ are enslaved by the cash till, the restaurant kitchen or the shop or factory floor. During pregnancy they remain at work till the last minute and resume work directly they can find an affordable child minding service. Many children say goodbye to their parents soon after 8.00 am and don’t see them again till 6.00 pm or later. As a result many couples may be better off financially than either my parents or my wife and I ever were.  They may be able to get ‘their feet on the home ownership ladder’, have a second car in the garage and take an annual holiday on the shores of the Caribbean or the Mediterranean.  But they cannot give their developing children the care and attention that they (and the society into which they will grow up) need.  It is a form of child neglect that results in gang culture, antisocial behaviour, teenage pregnancies and petty crime. I don’t believe that parenting classes, however good, can ever compensate for a parent who isn’t there when needed. 

  

Week 7 15.02.11

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Another trip through Space and Time!

A few weeks ago I published in this column some photographs taken in North Africa in 1942 that had transported me in mind and memory across a continent and an ocean to the Egyptian/Libyan border area of nearly seventy years ago! There was a picture of one of the 6in howitzers with which I had served as a gunner in action – and also semi-submerged in a flooded gun-pit after a tropical storm. There was a group picture of a gun-crew which could have been – but wasn’t – the one of which I had been a member.

I have now received from the same source a picture that I am finding even more evocative. It is again a photograph of a gun-crew standing round the ‘trail’ of a 6in howitzer during the winter (despite the sunshine we all have jackets on!) of 1941/’42. This time though it really is the gun crew of which I was a member. It was nearly seventy years ago and I have, and have always had, a bad memory or faces. However I can recognise and name five (including myself) of those on the picture. Sgt. Peter Harris and Lance Sgt. ‘Busty’ Taylor are the first two on the left. Fifth from the left is Lance Bombardier Alfie Bloomfield, sadly destined to die of diphtheria in a POW Camp in Benghazi later that year. I am the one, seventh from the left, wearing a woolly hat. Behind me, to the left of me in the picture, is a Gunner Fletcher who, in his early thirties, was some ten years older than most of us, while at the very end is Dick Pulford, former manager of a seed store in Woodbridge, with whom I shared a ‘bivvy-tent’

On the picture, though I can’t positively identify him, must also be Jim Palmer, a former Ipswich milkman. He and I remained together while prisoners of war and arrived back together in Ipswich on 18th May 1945, ten days after VE Day. It was my twenty-fourth birthday!

Also there, must be ‘Ferret’ Hawes, a fisherman from Orford. He and I were good mates. I have a picture of myself with him in a rickshaw in Durban, where we enjoyed a brief ‘shore leave’ on our outward voyage to Egypt in August 1941.

‘Ferret’ Hawes (left) and myself in Durban. The rickshaw man never pulled that rickshaw. He just stood around smoking (you can see a fag between the fingers of his left hand) until British soldiers came along wanting to be photographed with him. There must have been hundreds of similar photos taken!

I can’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ either the time I spent in the army or as a prisoner of war. Both though were experiences that, looking back over my life, I am glad to have had.


Prophetic Topics

A month or so ago, when I learned that the Government, were ‘taking on’ the bankers whose activities triggered the current financial crisis, who had been rescued from bankruptcy with millions of pounds of our money and who were once again proposing to hand themselves astronomical salaries and bonuses, I suggested in this blog that it was a conflict between the representatives of the British people and the High Priests of Mammon. Furthermore I predicted that whatever smooth words and phrases might be used to make a defeat sound like a victory, it would ultimately be Mammon’s servants who would come out on top.

And so, it has proved – including the attempt to make defeat sound like a victory. What was the outcome of weeks of negotiation? The top moneylenders (that is what bankers actually do isn’t it?) will still get their million pound salaries and their million pound-plus bonuses, but they have promised to make a few billion pounds more available for loans to businesses, and there’s to be more ‘transparency’ about the salaries and bonuses that are paid. Making a few billion pounds available for loans doesn’t mean that more loans will actually be made. The bankers will still be able to withhold funds from those businesses that are not considered to be ‘a good risk’. It is they who will do the ‘considering’, and they who will set the interest rates and terms of repayment. As for transparency, I don’t particularly want to know who gets those multi-million salaries and bonuses. I don’t think that anyone should get them.

Top people in the public service (any public service) with a large salary are immediately pilloried for getting ‘more money than the Prime Minister’. Quite right too! But I have never heard of anyone working out how many Prime Ministers could be bought with the total remuneration of the Chief Executive of any major bank?

‘Of all the local councils, in all the Town Halls, of all the counties, towns and districts of the UK………’

(Apologies to the late, but unforgettable, Humphrey Bogart)…our District Council of Tendring has to be the one to pick up the gauntlet that the city of Liverpool tried and found didn’t fit. They have applied for and have accepted the ‘Big Society’ partnership challenge of the Coalition Government.

It seems that Tendring got in on the act at an early stage by including a Big Society fund of £500,000 in this year’s budget and by organising a meeting of all local voluntary bodies (or as many as cared to be represented) at the Jaywick Community Centre on 31st January. I am not sure what, if anything, was decided at that Meeting, but I was interested to learn that the representative of one local charity commented that there had been a recent change in the character of their volunteer helpers. They used, at one time, to be the ‘recently retired’ but were now increasingly younger and from among the unemployed.

The main purpose of‘ ‘The Big Society’ idea seems to me to find unpaid volunteers to do tasks (in parks and gardens, in hospitals and care homes, as gardeners care assistants, circular deliverers and so on) previously performed by paid labour. Success in doing this will certainly ensure an ever-increasing pool of unemployed from which to find suitable volunteers! And, as the government has promised that folk ‘on benefit’ will never be better off than those in employment, the incentive to seek non-existent jobs will remain, and quite a lot of money will be saved!

Meanwhile Tendring has been accorded the government’s highest accolade – description as a ‘can-do council!’ Communities Minister Eric Pickles is quoted as saying, ‘Can-do Councils like Tendring show what can be achieved by local government working tirelessly with and for their communities’. Mr Stock, leader of Tendring Council, said, ‘To be working with the Government in this way is a significant coup for the council and the district. We have shown ourselves to be ahead of the game in coming up with our Big Society fund and it has been recognised on a national level’. He added that he looked forward to further details being revealed.

And so do I!


The New Levellers

Towards the end of our Civil War in the 17th Century there was a movement (it never really did become a political party) called The Levellers. There was even a Levellers Manifesto advocating popular sovereignty, an extension of the suffrage (not, of course, going so far as suggesting that all adult men and women should be allowed to vote!) equality for all before the law, and universal religious tolerance. These very modest aims, which we take for granted today, were too much for either King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell. Levellers were persecuted, thrown into prison and executed. Eventually they disappeared from the scene.

If I were fifty years younger (if only!) I would seriously consider founding – or, more likely, trying unsuccessfully to found - a new Political Party, The New Levellers. Its main objective would be to narrow the currently enormous gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest in our country, which (rather than 'Europe', 'the last Labour Government' or even 'the bankers') surely lies at the root of our current ills. This could be achieved only slowly and over a number of years but I believe that when the benefits began to reveal themselves, the pace of change would accelerate.

Already there are at least tentative moves in the right direction, if only in the public sector. It has been suggested that the highest paid employee of any public body should not earn more than twenty times the lowest paid. I have heard it said that while that might be possible in the public sector it would be quite unacceptable in private enterprise – in stock broking or banking for example.

Why should it be? The current minimum wage is £5.93 an hour. That gives a weekly wage of £237 for a forty-hour week or an annual income of about £12,000. Twenty times that amounts to £240,000 – not far short of a quarter of a million pounds. That is, as they say, more than the salary of the Prime Minister and should surely be more than adequate for anyone’s needs. I certainly don’t think that any public employee should get a higher salary than that and – unless it is considered that gambling on the stock exchange or large-scale money-lending is of greater value to the nation than the duties of the Prime Minister, or of any public servant, I don’t see why incomes higher than that should be tolerated in the private sector either.

I think that levelling should be at both ends of the income spectrum – raising the incomes of the lowest paid and reducing those of the highest. A variety of means could be employed to do this – the minimum wage; a reformed and progressive income tax; more services and industries being carried out by local authorities, by co-operatives and by employee partnerships like John Lewis; splitting up the big banks and giant business corporations to provide real competition.

Progress would be slow but sure. Neither Socialism nor unfettered Capitalism can, in itself, provide a solution. The important thing would be to persuade the general public that greater economic equality would be to everyone’s benefit, and to work towards that objective.

Utopian? Pie-in-the-sky? Revolutionary nonsense? Perhaps, but that is what was said of the objectives of the 17th Century Levellers and of the Chartists two hundred years later. All of those aims have now been achieved!

Week 4.10

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Making the Punishment fit the Crime

I’m not a "Hang ‘em and flog ‘em” man, or even one who believes that long gaol sentences should be the automatic penalty for virtually every major crime. I don’t think that before they set out on their nefarious activities, criminals give a great deal of thought to the penalty they may incur if caught. They are convinced that they’re not going to be caught, so the possible penalty is irrelevant. When the penalty for sheep stealing was hanging, there were still plenty of sheep stolen. And in the days when the punishment for treason was hanging, drawing and quartering, treason was more common than it is today. I think that persuading the potential criminal that he or she stands a less-then-fifty-percent chance of getting away with it would have a far greater deterrent effect than increasing the penalty for those who are caught.

That said, I have every sympathy with Tendring District Council’s indignation
at the fact that a convicted fly-tipper was given a conditional discharge with the payment of £250 costs at Colchester Magistrates Court earlier this month. Twenty-eight year old Rodney Fisher had been spotted in Clacton’s Holbrook Close dumping a carpet from a lorry in the early hours of 29th October last year. A vigilant neighbour noted the lorry’s registration number and informed the Police. Tendring Council decided to prosecute. I’m not surprised that Chris Kitcher, acting head of environmental services, should have been reported as saying, ‘I feel bitterly disappointed over the sentence and feel we have been badly let down’. I’m a former Environmental Health Officer myself (though we were called Public Health Inspectors in my day!) and I would have felt the same.

The maximum penalty for the offence for which Rodney Fisher was convicted is twelve months imprisonment or a fine of £50,000. His only penalty was payment of £250 costs and the knowledge that, if he were again to be convicted of the same offence, he would be more harshly treated. Catching a fly-tipper once is difficult enough. The odds against catching the same offender again for the same offence must be astronomical!

I suppose that the magistrates considered that fly tipping is a pretty trivial offence. It isn’t. Most criminal activity – breaking and entering, or mugging for instance – affects just one person or one household, though of course it may affect the victims very severely. Fly tipping (like litter dropping – its ‘little sister’!) is a crime against the whole community. It disfigures a whole neighbourhood and one act of illegal tipping on a piece of unused land quickly attracts more. Usually too, the whole community has to pay to clear it up.

What is more, fly tipping (unlike litter dropping) is a premeditated crime. No one gets out of bed on an impulse at two o’clock in the morning to load an old carpet, or a mattress, or a rusted water tank onto a car or lorry and take it somewhere where it can be dumped unseen. The time and the destination are carefully chosen in advance.

Bearing those factors in mind, I would have hoped that, having decided that the defendant was guilty, the magistrates would have imposed a penalty that if not causing actual pain, would at least have caused him serious inconvenience. A conditional discharge is not even a metaphorical ‘rap on the knuckles’. It certainly doesn’t encourage those whose job it is to enforce the law.

My new front fence

Here is my new front fence. I am very pleased with it. It is neat, unobtrusive and, I think, vandal-resistant. Perhaps I ought to thank the vandals who, on three successive nights, destroyed the low wall that had marked the front boundary of my home for over half a century. It was old, weather-beaten and nearing the end of its useful life (not unlike me, in fact!) but I shall miss it……and I wish it were still there.

It may seem absurd to feel sentimental about an ageing collection of bricks, but they have been a part of my life for fifty-four years. I was thirty-five and Heather thirty-two when we moved into our home in Dudley Road in 1956. We had two young sons, one three years old and the other under a year. The wall was there as they grew up, as they left home and as they have returned home from time to time as adults with their own wives and families. Subsequently it has become familiar to our now-grown up grand-children. Heather and I saw it every day of our lives and have watched it, like us, show signs of age.

Now the wall has gone – just as the life that Heather and I had together has gone. It is as though yet another chapter of my life has come to an end.


My family in November 1957. We had been married for ten years and had lived in Dudley Road, Clacton, for just over a year. Peter, aged four, is clambering over his Mum while I am holding on to nearly-two-year-old Andy. Like us, the wall seems to be young and unmarked by age and decay!









Essex takes the lead…..again!

Whatever other people may think of Essex County Council, there’s no doubt about it, Essex County Councillors think well of themselves! At the beginning of March they’re to host a national conference of highway authorities to consider how they can improve the way in which they deal with snow and ice.

Readers of the local Daily Gazette have their own views on this forthcoming event. One says ‘I expect this beanfeast will be held in a five-star hotel. With no expenses spared. My preference would be a village hall out in the sticks where, when it snows, it’s not on the gritting route’. Another says that what’s needed is more gritters, more salt and grit stocks, more salt and grit stores around the county, and more yellow bins stocked with grit and salt on locations such as hills – ‘no expensive and time consuming conference required’.

The trouble with that, apparently obvious, solution is that doubling, trebling or whatever the grit and salt stocks would almost certainly be followed by a succession of mild winters – and outrage at Highway Authorities wasting taxpayers’ money on enormous stockpiles ‘that any idiot could see wouldn’t be needed’.

The comment that most appealed to me was from a correspondent with the appropriate pseudonym of OntheBall,Colchester. He, or possibly she, urges, ‘Return the gritting responsibility to Colchester Borough. The whole recent effort by Essex in our area was slipshod and half-hearted. When Colchester had the responsibility, at least the local main road, bus routes and school routes used to be gritted, along with pavements in key areas. I couldn’t agree more. The more local services that can be handed over to local control the better. Then, at the very least, we’d know whom to blame when things went wrong.

Mind you, I think that we are all losing the point. There really isn’t a chance that anything said or decided at that conference will make even the least difference to future snow-clearing operations. It will give Essex County Council the chance to take the lead again – as in running a banking service, opening a branch in China, advertising (at our expense) its apprenticeship scheme on tv, and farming out to private enterprise many of the tasks for which it is responsible. Oh yes, and it’ll give Lord Hanningfield a chance to feature in the local press, and on regional tv - perhaps even to make it to the middle pages of the national tabloids.

In that sense the conference is likely to be a great success. Discussing a crisis in depth is much more fun than actually dealing with it. It’s easier too.


Help for Clacton’s old and disabled

Just before Christmas Tendring Council had an unexpected cash windfall ‘to help support town centre enterprises’. It seemed to me that it might usefully be spent on a last-minute rescue of Clacton’s Shopmobility service which hired out, at cut price rates, mobility scooters to the old and disabled. This, I said, would enable such people to get into the town centre to do their shopping and thus help fulfil the purpose of the grant.

Goodness knows whether the idea was ever considered but, if so, it was rejected and – as was inevitable – Shopmobility closed down on New Year’s Eve. No doubt the Council, or rather its inner ‘cabinet’, decided that those who used the service would manage to do their shopping by other means, or that their friends and neighbours would do it for them. Clacton’s town centre traders would be none the worse off.

They were wrong. Colchester Community Transport and Shopmobility is offering Clacton residents the opportunity to come and shop in Colchester’s town centre. Those who join the scheme will be picked up at their homes and taken to St. Mary’s car park in Colchester where a mobility scooter will be available for their use. The scheme will begin on 2nd February and will be available from 10.00 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays.

It seems a good idea to me. For details phone Sylvie on 01206 570643.

Tendring Council has certainly managed to help town-centre traders ……but it's those in Colchester’s town centre, not Clacton's!

Oh dear!

A former Chairman of Tendring Council arrested in connection with suspected corruption and money laundering. £30,000 seized from his home. Councillors who served between 1990 and 2009 ‘helping the police with their enquiries’! I’m glad that I’m no longer the Council’s Public Relations Officer and that I took early retirement in 1980!

Everyone suspected of a crime is deemed innocent until proved otherwise. It may well be that this whole affair will soon be cleared up and forgotten. I am uncomfortably reminded though of the ending of a poem Executive by the late Sir John Betjeman. In the poem a thrusting young executive explains to an acquaintance how it is that he has possesses an expensive sports car and speed boat:

And how did I acquire them? Well, to tell you about that
And to put you in the picture, I must don my other hat.
I do some mild developing, the kind of thing I need
Is a quiet country market town that’s rather gone to seed.
A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire,
I fix the Planning Officer, the Town Clerk and the Mayor.
And if some preservationist attempts to interfere,
A ‘dangerous structure’ notice from the Borough Engineer
Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way -
The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay.

When I first read that that I was a serving local government officer, with decades of experience. Much as I admired and enjoyed Betjeman’s work I was convinced that that particular poem was rubbish. I still hope that it was - and is!