It makes a pleasant change to find ourselves in agreement
with a Boston Borough councillor – but ironically only, as it happens, because
he is being critical of the system.
***
In an e-mail addressed to Planning Committee Chairman David
Brown, and copied to all other councillors, the Chief Executive and his deputy,
planning officers and Worst Street’s development manager, Councillor Barrie Pierpoint
– a founder of the Bostonian Independents Group – says: “Following the Planning
Committee meeting on Tuesday 21st August I am writing to complain of
the long-winded process now adopted for running such a meeting.
“Firstly, the day is far too long. We had two hours for
lunch, which is a waste of time – lunch was provided and some people did not
bother with it as they went home. I thought we were trying to save money, not
waste it! I noticed that at 2pm, just before we went back into the meeting
there was still food left over – which no doubt would be eaten by the staff or
thrown away.
“The planning officer who gave a presentation in respect to
the Middlegate Road, Frampton development on behalf of Larkfleet Homes – both
in my opinion and of others on the Committee – spent far too much time selling
the developer site, explaining the types of properties, showing us 24
photographs of different designs of properties, went into far too much detail
and spent nearly 45 minutes speaking when he could have presented it within 20
minutes. I find that totally unacceptable and if committee members have read
their papers, they would have known all that anyway.
“Did we pay the officer by the hour to present this report?
“Did we pay the officer by the hour to present this report?
“Speaking with other committee members, they were also
complaining about the length of the planning committee meetings – a full day
could quite easily be turned into half a day, starting at 9.30am and finishing
by at least 1.30pm with a small 15 minute break in the middle.
“Is it necessary for planning committee members to be
constantly reading the planning acts out and quoting them verbatim? That's the officers'
job – not ours.
“Since returning to the planning committee, my personal
opinion is that the meeting needs to be tighter, more concentrated, with more
focus and less unnecessary waffle and wastes of valuable time.
“I certainly will not spend a whole day on a planning committee
that can be run, operated and managed in my view within a matter of five hours,
which I have proved can be done if all the timewasting is removed.
“I am against feeding councillors – we need to be saving
money and not wasting it.
Site visits can be arranged at least a day or two before – again
we had an hour and a half for that purpose, we all arrived back at the Council
meeting for 10am and the meeting did not start until 10.30am. We wasted two and
a half hours of valuable time.
“In my line of business time is money, and we are also tying
up too many officers' time to be wasted – whose time is also money.
“We also need to think about the poor public sitting there
for hours on end, wondering what they have let themselves in for.”
***
Councillor Pierpoint’s case is a difficult one to dismiss.
By an interesting co-incidence, the meeting he condemned was
the subject of a blow-by-blow account tweeted by a local democracy reporter on the Lincolnshire Reporter
website.
If anyone remains sceptic about councillor Pierpoint’s take
on the meeting, they only need to read the reporter’s account to have their
minds changed.
***
We were quite amazed at the way the meeting progressed and
the attitudes of some of the councillors taking part – which clearly showed
them to be out of touch with the modern day and sufficiently arrogant to
believe that their opinions were the right ones and that no other arguments
should be brooked.
***
As far as the issue of feeding councillors is concerned, we
are in full agreement with Councillor Pierpoint.
There are 13 members of the planning committee, and the last
time we looked Worst Street was spending about £6.50 on the cost of a ‘finger
buffet.’
Something with the grander title of ‘lunch’ might well work
out nearer a tenner – and we are sure that the largessewas not extended to
councillors alone.
Not only that, but the taxman may be interested in taking
his cut if this is deemed a benefit in kind – especially if it is a monthly
occurrence.
So what would be our guess at the cost? Say £150?
And why a two-hour
break when everyone is already assembled?
***
To make matters worse, the recent recommendations of the Independent
Remuneration Panel – which doled out allowances left, right and
centre – approved an award of £4,400 for
the Chairman of the Planning Committee … a rise of £2,384 a year ... and a
doubling of the Vice-Chairman’s allowance from £1,100 to £2,200.
The panel also felt there should be recognition for other
planning committee members as they had to undertake specific regular training
to be able to sit on the committee and were expected to attend monthly meetings
that had recently been extended to all day sessions due to the number of applications
coming through the system.
The panel considered it essential to ensure that these members
were not financially penalised by the time commitment and that responsibility
attached to the role should be recognised.
It recommended a brand new allowance of £600 a year per
member – that’s £50 per meeting … and
brings the total cost of the mere existence of the committee to almost £14,000
a year.
And now we’re feeding them as well
***
However, the cost of a soggy flan crumbles into
insignificance when compared with Worst Street’s slapdash attitude towards
collecting its debts.
A recent Freedom of Information request disclosed that
councils in Greater Lincolnshire have waved goodbye to almost £30 million of
uncollected debt over the past five years.
The debts include rent arrears; housing benefit
overpayments, business rates and council tax – and they can be written off for
reasons such as insolvency, death and the authority being unable to trace the
debtor.
Between them, the seven district councils in Lincolnshire
and the unitary authorities of North and North East Lincolnshire wrote off £29,778,849 between 2013 and 2018.
The figures – compiled by the Lincolnshire Reporter – showed that the top three authorities to write off debt were South Kesteven
District Council with £3,704,785, Boston Borough Council on £3,513,602 and the
City of Lincoln Council with £3,351,924.
What’s especially worrying about this is that Boston is the
smallest district in financial terms, yet managed to write off almost the
greatest debt figure.
Each year it has written off an average of £702,720 – more
than the entire town centre budget of £655,000, or more than twice the £342,630
amount allocated for spending on tourism, arts, culture and heritage.
It represents the full council tax, which includes the
charges made by Clownty Hall and Lincolnshire Police, on more than 600
properties every year … almost 2½% of the total.
***
Whilst most of the nine authorities questioned offered something
by way of explanation – and even the occasional apology – Worst Street was less
willing to accept any responsibility, saying that any comparisons between debt
write-offs with other authorities needed to bear in mind the number of
properties within an area.
***
It took the Taxpayers’ Alliance to point out that taxes were
likely to increase as councils dropped debts from their books.
The organisation’s James Price, was quoted as saying: “The
reality of writing off debt means that those taxpayers who do play by the rules
will be forced to pay more, even more than they otherwise would, because their
council isn’t collecting what they should be.
“If people or businesses can’t afford to pay their tax
bills, that suggests that their taxes are far too high and the council should
adjust their spending accordingly.
“Those residents who have paid their taxes will be forgiven
for being upset that these councils are also likely increasing council tax
again next year.”
***
Are we alone in thinking that using the side of a dustcart
as an easel for a piece of artwork to commemorate the end of the First World
War is neither the best nor the most respectful of ideas?
The £360 graphic – pictured here on the council’s website WorstWeb – was funded by the Boston Town Area Committee –
which on this occasion fully lived up to the nickname we have bestowed by it …
BTAC-ky.
Apparently, some members of the committee had concerns about
the idea, feeling that putting the murals on a dustcart – sorry, a refuse freighter – was not an
appropriate or sensitive way to commemorate the end of the war and pay tribute
to those who had sacrificed their lives.
According to the minutes: “There was a suggestion that
another council vehicle would be preferable and another that a much bigger
commemoration should be planned, for example at the war memorial, and involve the
migrant communities.
“Other members considered that using a refuse freighter was
a very good idea as these vehicles went to every street so the murals would be
highly visible and seen by more people.”
It was also claimed during the debate, that the scheme had
the full backing of the
Royal British Legion and Poppy Appeal both nationally
and locally.
***
Four years ago, BTAC underwrote the £5,000 cost of a granite
obelisk to mark the start of the war after
a tackily organised public appeal attracted just a few hundred quid.
But in a single bound we have gone from a permanent and
timeless memorial to a piece of Blue Peter-style sticky-backed plastic, which
will last a few months if we’re lucky.
Not for the first time, it seems almost as if Worst Street’s
short attention span has found it wanting.
And surely, the end of that terrible conflict merits a more
significant memorial than the start?
***
If nothing else, could Worst Street not have stumped up £750
for one of the 6ft aluminium and Perspex Tommy
silhouettes that have been purchased by cities around the world, to be displayed at
war memorial sites?
Yet surprisingly, when the former head of the Army Lord
Dannatt personally wrote to 433 local authority leaders asking them to support
the There But Not There campaign, a mere160
councils agreed to buy one of the silhouettes to display with many making
“pitiful excuses” as to why there didn't want to.
Clearly Worst Street must have been among them – always assuming the council
bothered to reply.
***
The wasting of money was at the heart of one of two national
newspaper stories to feature Boston in the past few days.
An investigation by the
Mail on Sunday discovered that 3.6 million patients who do not exist are
registered with GPs’surgeries and that despite a crackdown launched three
years ago on so-called ‘ghost patients’ numbers have risen at a rate of almost
6,000 a week.
The report said that doctors in England receive an average
of £151 a year for each patient on their books, whether they see them or not.
The report claimed that the notional cost of phantom
patients was almost £550 million – enough to hire 28,000 new nurses, 10,000 new
doctors, or provide free parking at every NHS hospital in England for three
years.
According to the report, Boston has 10% more people
registered than there are people – which based on our 2014 population estimate
means an extra 6,645 people.
At an average of £151 per ‘patient,’ this is slightly more
than £1,000,000.
Think how much good use that money could be put to on local
health services – it might mean make or break for the Pilgrim for example.
***
In another national report, a Sunday Times investigation found more than 7,000 traditional
neighbourhood police officers, have been reassigned to other duties or left jobs altogether since March 2015.
The number of police community support officers (PCSOs) also
fell by 18% over the same period to just over 10,000.
Meanwhile, officers assigned to back-office and
administrative roles have multiplied by a quarter in three years, despite
ministers’ pledges to protect “frontline” policing.
The study placed Lincoln shire Police fifth from bottom in
the league table of forces with the fewest ‘front line’ officers.
This showed that there was one neighbourhood police officer
to every 10,887 people – taking the number of police officers per 100,000
people to a meagre 9.2%
We reckon that it won’t be long before the Leporidae family are better served than Homo Sapiens given the number of officers and equipment such as drones and four-wheel
drive vehicles dedicated to trapping hare coursers.
***
Not for the first time Worst Street has been riding
piggyback on other peoples’ success to try to make it look better.
Beneath the headline GCSE
results continue the celebrations at Boston College we were told:
“Following last week's 100% A-level pass rate, the celebrations continue at
Boston College with this year's GCSE results exceeding the national average.
“These results showcase the hard work and dedication
displayed by the students to gain those all-important grades they did not
achieve within secondary education, which now enables them to take the next
step within their education.”
It rambled on with a couple of success stories and a quote
from the vice-principal before this mysterious addition …
“Clive Gibbon, Boston Borough Council's economic development
manager said: “It's fantastic, once again within a week to celebrate great
results from students at Boston College. It certainly reflects the hard work
the students and lecturers are putting in rising to the challenge of a more
rigorous and demanding GCSE standard.”
Indeed it does – but what does this have to do with Boston
Borough Council and its economic development manager, may we ask?
***
Our recent piece about the promotion of visitbostonuk.com
drew an interesting response from Councillor Claire Rylott, Boston’s portfolio holder
for tourism, arts, culture and heritage.
She e-mailed to say: “After sitting on many volunteering
groups I was hearing the same problem, we had many groups in the town holding
events but they were struggling to advertise them free.
“As we know, to advertise in local publications is rather expensive.
“So last year I championed the Visit Boston website, hopefully to encourage more tourists to the
town and enable people to be more aware of what is happening in the town.
“What I aim to do in the coming months is hopefully to sit
this on a Visit Lincolnshire platform
together with others in our county so our hits to the site continue to
increase, and people become more aware of this site.
“It is there to be used – hence the advertising of it near
the park.
“We have many fantastic volunteering groups in the town who
definitely needed more support regarding advertising the great events that are
organised.
“Being a farmer and a councillor it intrigued me that a
comment was made about my favourite car park! I think everyone needs a hobby in
life; you’re correct, mine is golf. In the last 17 days my car has been parked
in my favourite car park once. Work both as a farmer and a councillor takes
priority over any hobby I choose to have.
“ I’m not quite sure what I do in my private life has to do
with being a councillor, unless of course if it takes priority over meetings.
Not sure anyone works 24/7 but I may be wrong.
“I enjoy your weekly blog, sometimes your information is
correct but not always, but it is interesting reading.
“Keep up the good work.”
***
Sooner than we expected comes the news that St Botolph’s
footbridge it to be given a much-needed clean up. The bridge will be closed on
Monday 17th September, with pedestrians redirected via Emery Lane,
Town Bridge and Church Street.
County Councillor Richard Davies, Executive Member for
Highways, said: “Over the last few years, we’ve seen green algae start to
spread across the bridge, so we’re going in to clean it off.
“This is something we have been planning for some time … “
Contrast that with a comment from Clownty Hall just a new
weeks ago, which said: “Our structures team have already discussed this with
Boston Borough Council and are planning to clean it this summer, but it is a low priority.
“Additionally, and in addition to planned works, they are
having a run of things falling down/getting knocked down which are taking
priority.”
There’s also the matter of how time is perceived.
The bridge opened in February 2014 – yet Councillor Davies
says that the mould has been spreading over “the last few years” … which would make it almost as soon as it
opened.
It seems to us that the work should have been done a lot
earlier than this, and that now would be a good time to paint the bridge green
to obscure the regrowth in another “few years.”
***
Local MP Matt Warman was at the centre of a mini political
mystery last week after the political blog Left
Foot Forward identified him as “controversial” member of the Leave Means Leave group, saying: “Matt
Warman originally campaigned for remain during the 2016 referendum. His
constituency, however, had the highest Leave vote from all of Britain, with
nearly 75% of people supporting Brexit.”
An accompanying list of Leave
Means Leave supporters pictured Mr Warman alongside another politician with
one-time county connections – Andrea Jenkyns … once a Boston county councillor,
who won a Westminster seat for the Tories from Ed Balls, and who is now a leading poster girl for Brexit.
However, a look at the Leave Means Leave page finds Mr
Warman conspicuous by his absence, and the slot next to Ms Jenkyns occupied by
Simon Clark MP.
Mr Warman told Boston
Eye: “While I fully support a Brexit that respects the result of the
referendum, I do not believe Leave Means
Leave’s current approach offers the best chance of securing that, and
therefore asked for my name to be removed from their list of supporters.”
***
When we mentioned the planning committee earlier, something
else interesting caught our eye.
Councillors were given updates about appeals – and heard
that four have been made recently.
One was withdrawn, two allowed and one dismissed.
Worst Street has previous for refusing plans that succeed on
appeal. And let’s not forget that every lost appeal costs the taxpayers money.
A fifty per-cent unsuccessful appeal rate suggests that a
little more time should be spent on the pros and cons of an application.
Avoiding a rush to judgement could say us taxpayers
thousands.
For a monent, we thought about publishing this story beneath the headline ‘Boston Borough Council loses appeal’ – but of course you knew that already.
***
Finally, we noticed this interesting sounding display
recently …
But what a shame that we need to travel to Woodhall Spa to
see an exhibition by a Boston group.
What’s the matter with Central Park?
***
You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com
E– mails will be treated in
confidence and published anonymously if requested.
Our former blog is archived at:
http://bostoneyelincolnshire.blogspot.com
We are on Twitter – visit @eye_boston
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