In the last couple of issues of Boston Eye, we have examined the reluctance within Boston Borough Council to engage with taxpayers and connect with them in a helpful and meaningful way.

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In the last blog for example we criticised Worst Street’s attitude which relies on the internet as its messenger-in-chief – more often than not with poor or non-existent results.

Despite this, the council has decided to do away with its Viewpoint Panel – which has been on the go for donkey’s years.

According to Worst Street: “The Viewpoint Panel is a group of residents who 'Have Their Say' and make an important contribution to improving services …

“ … We ask for your views and let you know the results and what decisions resulted from the consultation.”

But not anymore.

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A letter has gone out to members telling them: “ … the Council has decided to dissolve its Viewpoint Panel. We have been reviewing all the personal information we hold as a Council in light of the data protection legislation coming into force on 25^th May 2018.

“We have weighed the benefits of having a dedicated consultation panel against the privacy impact of holding personal details and we have looked at the alternative methods of informing you about consultation.

“We have concluded that it is not necessary for us to hold your personal information so we will be removing all of your details from our records in relation to consultation.

“We would like to thank you for your valued contribution to Boston Borough Council's consultation and we would welcome your continued involvement in the future.

“We do not need to hold your personal information for this to happen.

“You can find all of our current consultation on our website …by following our Facebook page … and on Twitter.

“You can get hard copies of our consultation from main reception or by ringing and asking for the transformation team.

“We advertise our consultation in the local newspapers. If you feel that there are other methods that we should use then please do let us know.

”Again I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your valued time and contribution.”

Thank you and goodnight.

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What this boils down to is that Worst Street has used the arrival of the EU General Data Protection Regulation as an excuse to stop consulting people in a way that has worked well for years.

Many users of the internet will have received e-mails in recent weeks telling them about GDPR and informing them of a change in their privacy notices to take this into account – which is all that is needed.

Trust Worst Street to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Now, instead of real people at the sharp end of a consultation, the council has moved further to distance itself from the real world.

There’s a surprise. 

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Yet another example of how poor the reliance that Worst Street places in the internet as its way to communicate also emerged in the last few days.

An item on WorstWeb – the borough council’s website – headlined “Flower show plan wilts” declared: “Sorry to say that ideas for a Boston flower show have not bloomed. Not enough exhibitors have come forward to make the show, planned for Sunday, June 3^rd viable, so organisers at Boston Borough Council have had to cancel the event.”

This was very much a last minute announcement for something that was to have been held yesterday, with the closing date for competition entries set for 28^th May.

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As we couldn’t remember ever hearing about this impending event, we looked around further, and discovered that it was billed as a BTAC-ky production …

We still couldn’t recall it, and a trawl through the BTAC agendas and minutes for the past several months left us none the wiser.

So we asked a couple of  BTAC members – and they’d never heard of it either.

When asked about publicity for the event, a spokesman for the council told the Boston sub-Standard the event had previously been advertised on the visitboston.co.uk website and organisers had been contacting horticultural professionals “directly prior” to the decision to cancel – i.e. at the eleventh hour.

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All this sounds par for the course for Boston Borough Council.

Think up an event; keep it to yourself for as long as possible, then panic at the last moment before cancelling it.

Were Worst Street not involved, it would be unthinkable that it would not be possible to organise a successful flower show in this part of the county.

We were reminded of a passage from the Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy by the late lamented Douglas Adams

It could have been written with Worst Street in mind, couldn’t it?

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Talking of BTAC-ky, we note that the chairmanship of the committee has passed from Conservative Councillor Nigel Welton to UKIP Councillor Sue Ransome

For around half his term in office Councillor Welton was a Labour councillor, but changed horses and was almost immediately welcomed into the cabinet at the beginning of the year – taking on the town centre portfolio to complement running BTAC-ky

Council leader Michael Cooper said at the time: "This realigns the portfolios and makes them, easier to manage. It made sense for Councillor Welton, as chairman of the Boston Town Area Committee (BTAC) to take on responsibility for the town centre."

Why is that we don’t think it will make similar sense in the case of a UKIP councillor?

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Back to Worst Street and its obsession with electronic communication.

A recent “digital strategy” document published for consideration declared: “in this digital age where most everything (sic) can be purchased online and delivered within hours, it is not difficult to make most of our services accessible online. Indeed, many other organisations have already done so.

“However, the size of Boston Borough Council – and the associated numbers of transactions – brings with it a number of considerations …”

It went on to look at a number of topics and consider the attendant risks attached.

The document says that some customers will only ever expect face-to-face or telephone interaction with the council, and says that “there can be little or no savings from online services if traditional channels are maintained as-is.”

Under the heading “customer aspiration” the report says that some customers expect to interact with the council as if it were an online bank or retail site, adding: “The complexity of some council services is such that it is extremely difficult to make the interaction as simple as online shopping.”

Dealing with customer dissatisfaction the document recognises that changing customer habits can be a difficult and lengthy process.

“Customers may be unhappy if their preferred service request process is changed with no obvious benefit to the customer.”

Furthermore, it is recognised that some of the services provided are very complex and require several interactions before fulfilment and that as a result, some services might be better provided face to face so the customer outcome can be managed by “an experienced human being.”

And finally, Worst Street says that the borough’s multilingual customer base makes designing online services significantly more complex and increases costs and risks.

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Reading between the lines of this document tells us that taxpayers who prefer the status quo can stick their heads up a bear’s bum; that it will all be an uphill struggle, but at the end of the day … it doesn’t matter what the punters think so long as Worst Street makes savings – unless that proves so difficult that the council simply won’t bother, and resort to using people once again.

Somehow, we don’t see the outcome of all this ending up as a giant step  forward for Worst Street taxpayers – particularly as the council handles this sort of thing to badly.

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As Boston Borough Council has noted, we are now a multilingual community, and we are sure that we are not alone when – on many days when we stroll the town we hear English being spoken as the exception rather than the rule.

Not only that, but whereas once upon a time the speakers were mostly all young men of working age– they now range from toddlers and their mothers to grandparents and sometimes even older … the complete generational gamut.

So we suppose that it should have come as no surprise to read reports in a number of national newspapers which showed that Boston is the most changed place in Britain between 2007 and 2017, with the town's population of people born overseas soaring from three per cent to 29 per cent.

The figures were released by the government’s Office for National Statistics – and whilst they made headlines in a number of national newspapers – including the Daily Mail, in which the above chart appeared, the story did not seem to be of any interest to our local media.

We suspect that this is because they have been brainwashed into believing that publishing such stuff is somehow racist.

In fact it provides an argument as to why areas such as Boston deserve special attention – such as the recent grant of £1.39m from the government’s Controlling Migration Fund.

We have been told that this will be used on a programme of projects “aimed at bringing people together through sport, events and community assets, extending the availability of advice services, tackling rogue landlords and anti-social behaviour, strengthening community leadership and whole community volunteering opportunity (sic) and supporting the development of English language skills.”

Quite what change or “control” this will bring about is uncertain – and again, the organisations involved with the council are the usual members of the great and the good, many of whom are long on talk and short on action.

We’re talking the likes of  “Boston College, Boston More in Common, Bringing Learning into Communities (BLIC), Citizens Advice Mid Lincolnshire (CAML), Lincolnshire Community and Voluntary Service (LCVS), Lincolnshire Police,

Royal Voluntary Service (RVS), St Botolph’s Parish Church and Taylor ITex

Community Interest Company (CIC.)”

There’s also an allocation of £10,000 set aside to help fund Christmas lights in Boston.

What has gone unremarked is that the 3% - 29% population change is not redistribution – it is a 26% addition to the population, with all the pressures that accompany such a huge change.

Useful though £1.39 million might be, it is a drop in the ocean.

Better to face up to that now rather than letting a bunch of largely well-intentioned but unspectacular amateurs organise games of ping pong and the like – when what we need is millions spending on improvements to education  facilities, the NHS locally, and housing provision just for starters.

The borough had a total population of 66,900, at the ONS mid-2015 estimate, while the town itself had a population of 35,124 at the 2001 census.

How things stood in 2007 isn’t known – but it seems safe to conclude that the bulk of the 20,000 or so newcomers have integrated themselves  smoothly into this new look Boston, and share as the native population view when it comes to the need for schools rather than sports, and health and housing  rather than endless talking shops.

We need now to approach Boston’s problems as Boston’s problems and not as Old Boston v New Boston including inward migration. 

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After something of a rollercoaster ride in office, there was a happy ending for last year’s mayor, Councillor Brian Rush, when he and his wife Jayne attended a Buckingham Palace garden party last Friday – a traditional visit enjoyed by the outgoing first citizen.

“What a great it was for Jayne and I to get to go to the palace, amongst dignitaries from all over Britain and indeed from around the world,” Councillor Rush told Boston Eye.

“I cannot believe how lucky we were, to have been within touching distance not only of our wonderful monarch, as well as maybe the King in waiting, Prince William.

“Whilst we both were in awe of those around us, it nevertheless was a great privilege to have been there to represent the Borough of Boston.

“This was the icing on  the cake after what was for us a glorious and very successful year.

“Thank you to the fantastic people of Boston.”

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And finally, we were pleased to see that BBC Look North has again decided to acknowledge Boston’s existence on its weather maps.

The map on the left was the one we featured a couple of weeks ago, whilst the one beside it was screened last week.

  

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Our former blog is archived at: http://bostoneyelincolnshire.blogspot.com  

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