Archives for March 2011

Local authorities have had a tendency to switch to the language of the commercial world over the past few years.

They tell me it helps local people understand that they are now as efficient as any profit-making business.

Front line services deliver to "customers" rather than old people and vulnerable adults; rubbish tips have become "waste recycling centres" and bin men in more than one Yorkshire local authority are members of the "streetscene team".

For the past decade one of Yorkshire largest cities has seen its 200 primary and senior schools run by an organisation with a much snazzier title that the "Local Education Authority".

But "Education Bradford" was far more than just a re-naming exercise.

It is a commercial company wholly owned by the giant prisons-to-defence outsourcing specialist Serco.

In 2001 the company was chosen to run all support services for Bradford's schools. It followed a horrendous inspection by OFSTED which said the City Council was not up to the task of improving standards.

Education Bradford was given an unbreakable 10 year contract taking state schools out of local authority control for the first time since Victorian times.

At the time both Estelle Morris, the then Education Secretary in the Labour Government, and all the political parties in Bradford agreed that this was a risk worth taking.

At almost the same time other cities across Britain, including Leeds and Hull, were also seen to be failing their children.

Bradford took the most extreme commercial route to tackle the problem.

In Hull an "Education Tsar" was appointed to oversee handling of schools but they remained in council control.

Leeds finished up with an organisation running its school with a similar sounding name to its West Yorkshire neighbour but "Education Leeds" was a very different animal.

It was a "not-for-profit" company jointly owned by both a commercial operator and Leeds City Council.

"Education Bradford" is a full blown profit-seeking company.

Throughout its 10 year tenure the National Union of Teachers and organisations representing the city's head teachers have been asking whether the company is operating for the benefit of pupils or profits.

As Education Bradford enters the last few weeks of its contract there must have been more than a few raised eye-brows when its Director Denise Faulconbridge told me, in an interview I recorded for the Politics Show's regional edition for Yorkshire, that the company has not made a penny profit on the deal.

She was very careful with the way she put it.

She calls it a "break-even" contract.

According to Denise Faulconbridge this is because the company has invested so much in successfully improving schools both at primary and GCSE level.

This comment raised a few eyebrows when broadcast.

It also stretched the incredulity of many people who contacted me on my "TinglePolitics" Twitter account.

The NUT's Bradford organiser Ian Murch claims Bradford has slipped even further down the GCSE national league tables over the past 10 years.

But Education Bradford is resolute in insisting it has improve standards in a cost-effective way and is leaving a legacy from which the city will benefit for many years to come.

Oh, did I mention that the contract will not be renewed?

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The first thing that catches the eye outside the impressive town hall in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham is a big, black iron cannon.

It is no mere decoration. The local iron works of Walker and Co turned them out for 40 years from the 1790s. Most of the guns aboard Nelson's flagship, the Victory, were made by the Rotherham ironworkers.

But the Government of the time had no real idea whether they had enough able-bodied men to use the guns, sail the ships or man the battalions. Information about the size of the UK population was patchy at best.

That is one reason why Britain held its first national Census in 1801.

Over 200 years later these once-every-decade snapshots of the population are still seen as a vital part of the way in which we plan our futures.

The 2011 Census takes place on 27 March and forms should have been delivered to every household in the country by now by the Government's Office of National Statistics.

These days the results are used more for planning whether we have enough schools, roads and other public services than preparing for battle.

Rotherham Council's policy officer Miles Crompton told me there were obvious advantages to local authorities and Government to a UK-wide census where every household has a legal obligation to fill in the form.

But is it how we should be working in the 21st Century?

The cabinet minister in charge, Francis Maude, has already said that 2011 could see the last UK-wide census.

Cost is a major factor. The army of collectors and analysts will create a final bill of almost £1/2bn.

Then there is the way in which the information rapidly goes out of date. Can a survey which takes place just once a decade provide sufficient accuracy?

But it is a controversial issue judging by the flutter of interest in a question I posed on my regular TinglePolitics tweets.

Given the ability of modern digital technology to quickly sift and cross reference data from multiple sources is a single 10-year census now redundant?

Then there is the issue of privacy.

The No2ID campaign believes that the Government's promises of ensuring that personal information will be sealed for a century will be very difficult to keep.

And there is the growing intrusiveness of the questions.

In the past it was simply a list of names, ages and jobs.

Now the form has 32 pages and wants to hear a long list of personal information ranging from ethnicity and religion to whether your civil partner is of the same sex.

The Director of the Census, Glen Watson, tells the Politics Show for Yorkshire that it should take 10 minutes to fill either the traditional paper form or an electronic version online.

He believes most people do not mind.

From the answers of a couple of mature ladies interviewed in the street for the programme he could be right.

"I don't mind answering at all," said one.

"Do you mind answering?" she asked her friend.

"No, I've got nothing to be ashamed about," she replied.

"Unfortunately."

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Nick Clegg at the Lib Dem spring conference

Paul Scriven, the Liberal Democrat running Sheffield City Council, opened his party's Spring Conference in the city by asking whether the party's 3,000 delegates liked the "welcoming committee".

"It took us a bit of organising," he said.

But will it be as easy to humorously shrug off the growing unpopularity of a party which saw an estimated 3,500 protestors outside the security fence surrounding Sheffield's City Hall?

It was a question I posed directly to delegates and on my regular TinglePolitics Twitter messages all the way through the conference.

David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, took a different tack.

On Sunday's Politics Show for Yorkshire he rounded on the protestors as being unrepresentative and containing a large proportion of left wing activists.

He pointed out the numerous banners bearing the Socialist Workers' Party logo: "On the Friday night when we came in it was particularly hostile.

"There was a large contingent from the Socialist Workers' Party and they were calling us Nazis saying that people were going to die as a result of the policies that we are pursuing."

Like him, I also spotted hundreds of the usual fellow travellers from the extreme left in the crowd, but I also met many pensioners and ordinary families with young children who told me they had never been on a protest march in their life.

Some Yorkshire Liberal Democrats were taking a different sort of comfort from the protests. They were quick to point out that the scale of the protesters was far less than the 10,000-strong forecast by police intelligence sources.

"Where are the protestors? Aren't they about 8,200 short?"

This was from Kath Pinnock. She is the leader of the Liberal Democrats on West Yorkshire's Kirklees Council.

I had bumped into her inside the barriers on the steps of the City Hall. Like me she had come out into the sunshine to watch the protest at its height on what had become a sunny Saturday lunchtime in the city centre.

However much cheer the Liberal Democrats took from the smaller crowds and the largely peaceful and good-humoured mood of the protest, it cannot detract from some real worries as they head towards May's crucial local government elections.

The Lib Dems run Hull, York and Sheffield councils at the moment. Will they be in the same position after the elections?

Nick Clegg certainly did his bit. After all, when the Conference was planned 18 months before the event it was meant to be a high-profile boost to his party's local government election campaign.

At every opportunity, including an interview with me and a question-and-answer session with sixth formers at the local Notre Dame Catholic High School, recorded by the Politics Show cameras, he insisted Liberal Democrats were acting in the interests of the country as a whole.

The latest public opinion polls, including one for the Sunday Mirror and Independent on Sunday, published on the eve of the conference cannot have helped his argument.

They show Labour's fortunes up to 40% support; Conservatives have been level pegging in the high 30%s for some time, with the Liberal Democrats floundering at just 11%.

MP David Ward has a simple answer to that.

"I don't look at them. I don't read any papers other than the Bradford Telegraph and Argus and the Yorkshire Post , and certainly not anything on the polls," he told me.

Liberal Democrats must be hoping the electorate are right alongside him in the sandbox.

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Nick Clegg ponders the future for the LibDems

What a difference a year makes.

In Sheffield this week Liberal Democrats will have to make their way through street protestors; deep ranks of police and a six foot high steel security fence to get into their spring conference at the City Hall.

Twelve months ago, for the same event, I strolled through the quiet streets of Birmingham and slipped quietly into the city's International Convention Centre after a cursory security check from the equivalent of the laughing policeman.

In Birmingham I was slotted in to record an interview with Nick Clegg with ease.

In Sheffield requests, in writing, are being considered.

A year ago Liberal Democrats would expect to be in with a shout of winning any Parliamentary by-election.

But then the party could count on the those fed up with Government and looking for an alternative party to give their "protest" vote.

As a party of government Liberal Democrats are rapidly finding that by-elections are a different ball game.

In January Labour surged ahead in Oldham East and Saddleworth.

Last week, Barnsley Central saw the Liberal Democrats humiliated. The party received fewer votes then an unemployed local miner who stood as an independent.

The Lib Dem candidate finished in 6th place and went home without his deposit.

So where is the "I agree with Nick" surge that boosted the party in the days before the General Election?

Nick Clegg's adept handling of the other party leaders in the televised debates made his face recognisable to millions across the country.

But it was a face that made not a single appearance throughout the entire Barnsley Central election campaign.

In fact it did not appear on any of the party literature I saw being handed out in the street either.

It did appear somewhere. It was in the middle of a rather cheeky Labour spoof "wanted" poster.

Spoof poster published by Labour

Yet as Nick Clegg's personal popularity has dimmed the party itself has hardly fallen to bits.

On the whole Liberal Democrats 57 MPs have followed his unwavering support for the speed and depth of the Conservative-led reductions in public spending.

But cracks have appeared.

The biggest opposition came over his U-turn on an election promise not to increase student tuition fees.

Leeds North West MP Greg Mulholland, together with 20 others from his party, trooped into the opposition lobby. A further eight abstained.

David Ward, the new Bradford East MP, has consistently joined a small group of Liberal Democrats voting against Coalition plans to turn more state schools into independently managed Academies.

But the internal opposition seems to be on an issue-by-issue basis rather than the start of a leadership coup.

David Ward told me on an edition of the Politics Show for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in January that despite his voting record he still firmly "agrees with Nick".

The problem is that the public opinion polls seem to show that many tens of thousands of ordinary voters now have a different view of the Liberal Democrats and the party leader from just 10 months ago at the General Election.

So far that has led to relatively little damage.

The party's poor by-election performance has been in traditional Labour seats.

Just a few weeks after the conference the Local Government elections will see Liberal Democrat administrations in Sheffield, Hull and York put under severe pressure.

Few expect all three of these major Yorkshire councils to be in Liberal Democrat hands after the polls in May.

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In the wee small hours of Friday morning the Labour party was able to add another chapter to its long history of success in the South Yorkshire coalfields by sending yet another MP from Barnsley to Westminster.

Labour threw the kitchen sink at the Barnsley Central constituency by-election and it paid off.

It overcame any potential "Illsley effect". The cloud of shame from the town's disgraced former MP Eric Illsley appears to have lifted as far as the party is concerned.

Dan Jarvis, the party's "new start" candidate romped home and even managed to increase the majority.

The 38-year-old is a complete change of character for a seat which has seen locally-born pitmen commanding huge Labour majorities in the South Yorkshire seat since the 1930s.

He resigned his commission in the Parachute Regiment on being selected as the candidate.

What surprised many was the party in second place.

UKIP's Jane Collins was still a long way behind but she had leapfrogged from her party's fifth position at last year's General Election.

It is clearly adding a bit of excitement to the UKIP camp if my Twitter experience is anything to go by.

I published a quick messages on my TinglePolitics Twitter account as soon as the result was announced.

My "Jarvis wins by a mile in Barnsley Central - LibDems lose deposit" was immediately re-Tweeted by UKIP's PR Gawain Towler. He had a not-so-subtle addition.

"UKIP storm to 2nd," he wrote.

Well 2,953 votes, a 12% share of the electorate, is hardly "storming" but it is a great success in town where UKIP has always been an also-ran.

It also makes political history. For the first time UKIP has come second in a Westminster election.

It certainly put the party in great heart for its Spring Conference in Scarborough which is being held just two days after their Barnsley success.

Candidate Jane Collins and her small band of UKIP supporters headed for the seaside via the BBC Leeds studios where she found herself the star attraction.

She recorded interviews for both Look North and the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire edition of the Politics Show.

There were brave smiles from the Coalition partners but it could not hide the disappointment.

The Conservative James Hockney barely clung on to 3rd place. Just a third of the numbers who voted Tory just 10 months before at the 2010 General Election repeated their support in this by-election..

It was a disaster for the LibDems who dropped to sixth place in the poll and hard-working candidate Dominic Carman lost his deposit.

Even he admitted the party had taken "a kicking".

Perhaps it might have helped if the virtually one-man campaign he waged every single day on the streets of Barnsley might have seen at least a glimpse of his party leader Nick Clegg.

Unfortunately for his candidate, the Deputy Prime Minister was far too busy over the three week campaign to pop up from his nearby Sheffield Hallam Constituency.

In the event, as the official record published online by Barnsley Council will now record, the LibDems were overtake from their General Election position by both the BNP and an unemployed former Grimethope miner Tony Devoy who was standing as an Independent.

As the for the far-right British National Party?

For all its boasting and bluster the BNP's support dropped by half.

By-election results
Dan Jarvis (Lab) 14,724
Jane Collins (UKIP) 2,953
James Hockney (C) 1,999
Enis Dalton (BNP) 1,463
Tony Devoy (Ind) 1,266
Dominic Carman (LD) 1,012
Kevin Riddiough (Eng Dem) 544
Howling Laud Hope (Loony) 198
Michael Val Davies (Ind) 60
Lab maj 11,771: Turnout 36.5%

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