Wobbling over Wolsey

February 26, 2010 — admin

The purchase of Wolsey Place has attracted a lot of debate in various places, including local Lib Dem blogs and a dismal Facebook group set up by UKIPpers, who have taken a break from blaming everything on Europe.

I’m disappointed that having agreed to it in council, some Lib Dems in Horsell are trying the old “we don’t have to follow the party line” gag just as they did over county hall. No – you don’t have to follow the party line on a Horsell issue such as development in the village or bus service cuts. But this is nothing to do with Horsell specifically and it’s a major financial commitment that the council has signed up to on a cross-party basis. For local activists to now try and wriggle out of their party’s official position on Wolsey Place is opportunistic and disingenuous. If they were so concerned, did they lobby their leadership against cross-party agreement?

For what it’s worth, Horsell West councillor Tony Branagan voted against the purchase but now the matter has been resolved he is committed to defending the council’s position, even though it wasn’t his own. How very easy to abdicate responsibility in the face of hard questions – to me, elected representatives need more fibre than that and Tony has it in spades.

I’d prefer a world where Woking Borough Council was debt-free, as it was six years ago under Jim Armitage. But that isn’t the council we’ve got and only a firesale would restore that position. In the circumstances, the best place to spend the borrowed money is on appreciating assets and generating revenue. So let’s look at Wasteful Woking and see just how inaccurate the UKIP information is.

“Not only do they splash out 68M for Wolsey, they also just announced a 2.5% council tax increase. It’s time to take some control back!”

And just think how much more your council tax would be without £1.5m in revenues next year from Wolsey Place. This is a totally misplaced statement based on the notion that Woking Borough Council itself has written a cheque for £68m.

“It will take the council 50 years to pay back the loan for Wolsey Place, a development that will probably be beyond it’s usab…le life within 20 years. That means a major capital expenditure to either rebuild or upgrade the current site. “Invest to save” is a phrase usually best applied to upgrade work or repairs that will lower future bill and fixed cost base. Not buying a leaky old shopping centre and half occupied office.”

What is wrong with taking 50 years to pay back the loan? People with mortgages usually pay them back over half that and they usually borrow a good deal less than half the money. As time goes on, the value of the repayments will decrease while the rental income keeps pace with inflation ie the value of income over repayments will increase hugely over 50 years. If the centre is sold on, the loan could be paid back or if the site is sold in say 15 years, it will be most likely be worth a great deal more than was paid for it and will cover substantially the amount of the loan outstanding.

Whatever the author’s view of the shopping centre, actually looking at the books (rather than guessing wildly) revealed a sound basis for buying. In addition, there is potential for development in the future, although that’s not something I think would be considered for some time. For the record, floors one to five of Export House are empty, with six to 15 occupied. The internal decor and facilities are very good and I know that because I work on the 14th floor.

Elsewhere, we’ve had concerns about maintenance, unforeseen legislation and all sorts of other things that really scrape the barrel. There are always risks associated with everything – given all the information available, councillors on all sides took the view that this was worth doing.

Finally, there are Lib Dem concerns about the process, about the fact that the deal was done with press and public excluded (Part II). I’m no fan of Part II and as a journalist I fought tooth and nail to find out what was going on “behind closed doors”. But consider this – councillors are elected by the people to take decisions. As residents, we’d no doubt prefer everything to be decided in public but just because the press and public are excluded doesn’t make the process less democratic. These are still the same councillors making the same decisions under the same constitution in the same way that magistrates confer in private rather than open court. And the Lib Dems, who have to a person all been involved in Part II items in the past, know that perfectly well.

In his blog Denzil Coulson claims that the Lib Dems have helped rescue us from a financial disaster this year by backing Wolsey Place. If that makes him happy, so be it - but he is right that the financial outlook for 2010/11 is a lot better because of this purchase. Remember that net of repayments, net of tax, net of maintenance the council will get £1.5m a year from the Wolsey Place purchase – it pays for itself and a lot more besides.

So t’s time that UKIPpers stopped spreading rubbish about the deal that was done for pure electoral gain and that Lib Dems locally had the bottle to agree – as Denzil seems to want to say – that this deal was the very best of the bad job that Woking’s borrowing is.

Posted in Economy, Woking Borough Council, elections. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . No Comments »

Denzil’s bin posting

November 26, 2009 — admin
I haven't got a picture of a Woking bin, this one's from Peterborough

I haven't got a picture of a Woking bin, this one's from Peterborough

I saw Denzil Coulson after the executive in Brewery Road Car Park while I was chatting with the News and Mail’s excellent reporter Beth Woodger. He stopped to make some chat and it was good to exchange words after a few little storms in teacups over blog posts etc. He’s standing as the Lib Dem candidate in North East Hampshire, where he’ll be canvassing the leafy streets of Fleet trying to nab James Arbuthnot’s 12,500 majority away.

You’d have to be pretty optimistic to believe he’ll do it but it takes guts to slog away at the other side’s safe seats and it’s fighters like Denzil who keep politics interesting. While I wouldn’t like to think we’ll lose a seat like North East Hants, I’m sure Denzil will give a good account of himself and I’m pleased he’s standing for Goldsworth West again – we might not agree on much but he’s strong member and the council needs that on all sides.

Following our discussion, he walked off and looking at his website for the first time since the Queen’s Speech, I now realise why. He’s gone and posted a cheeky little piece about the rise in cost of the green bins for April 2010, claiming that it is about raising money rather than keeping the environment clean. Well, it’s only going up £2  for most people from £35 to £37, which isn’t exactly extortionate and from £15 to £20 for a second bin.

Denzil’s point is that concessionary charges are going up from £20 to £25 for the first bin and £10 to £15 for the second, which works out at a higher percentage than non-concessions. But obviously if you calculate it in percentage terms, you will get a higher percentage the lower the starting base – that’s just the way numbers work.

I don’t think it’s a big secret that the point of the new scheme is both environmental ie it will help more carbon-efficient collection and prevent 400,000 plastic bags going to landfill and budgetary ie it embraces the principle that residents who use the service should contribute to it rather than the cost being spread to everyone through council tax.

One of the beauties of the new waste scheme is that it introduces a small slice of free market economics into the service. It’s basic pricing theory – if the council charges too much for bins, people simply won’t take up the service and the council will be forced to reduce the price. If however take-up is huge and the council doesn’t test price elasticity at a higher level, it has done taxpayers – including those on lower incomes - a disservice by not attaining Best Value.

So if concessionary households are struggling to find the extra £5 a year, that is something that the market will tell us and I am sure will be examined further.

Posted in Environment, Other blogs, Woking Borough Council. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

Polls apart

October 20, 2009 — admin

Both the Ipsos/MORI and ICM pollsters have the Conservative lead back to a pretty decisive 17 points, which is fairly well exactly where we were before the conferences began. The good news for DC is that the Conservative figures of 43% and 44% are where he needs to be for a serious majority – 45% would be ideal. The bad news for him is that the big set-piece Conservative conference, which always follows last, hasn’t permanently impacted in a positive way.

On the other hand, you can say that maintaining a 17-point lead is hard enough, let alone extending it. In response to Denzil Coulson’s questions, I did some research (albeit brief) into how the polls might act in May 2010 based on previous elections and the polls seven months before the polling day.

It showed that the Labour votes usually goes down, the Liberal Democrat vote normally goes up and the Conservative vote stays about the same. If you did that to the current figures, you’d get Con 44%, Lab 24% and Lib 22%. Type that into Electoral Calculus and you get a Conservative majority of 154. From hung Parliament to Tory landslide – now there’s a though to warm a chilly October night.

Of course it depends on where those votes are cast – as usual around 50,000 votes in key marginals will decide the actual result. But that’s the fun!

Posted in David Cameron, Polling, Roll on 2010. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »

On tightening polls

October 11, 2009 — simonashall
Will it be a closer race as the election approaches?

Will it be a closer race as the election approaches?

Cllr Denzil Coulson responded to my post on the seventeen-point post-DC speech poll lead with a Tweet that a 45% Conservative poll rating at the next election was “very unlikely”. Lo and behold, another poll put the Conservatives on precisely 45%, which I duly tweeted for his attention.

“You and I know that polls tighten during the election campaign”

came the response via Twitter and it’s not an unreasonable one, so I thought I’d look into it, starting in 1992. Back then, polls weren’t as frequent or, as we subsequently came to realise, as accurate as now. But looking seven months out from John Major’s photo-finish election win, ICM/Guardian on 14 September had Con 39, Lab 39 and LD 17. That was the same result in MORI/Times 10 days later. By 12 October, there was a Lab 43, Con 41 LD 12 poll done by ICM/Guardian. I’m not being selective – those are the polls I can find. In the end, the result was Con 42, Labour 34, LD 18. Not much sign of a tightening there – except for one away from the October 12 ICM Labour lead.

In 1997, it is a slightly different story. A November 1 MORI poll has Lab 54, Con 30, LD 12 and a Lab 47, Con 34, LD 15 poll followed the next day by MORI. All other polls in November had Labour above 50 and the Conservatives on around 30. The final result - Lab 43 Con 30 LD 17 – is indeed a tightening of the polls seven months out; but which way are the polls tightening? As in 1992, the move was away from Labour as people who, when questioned, said they would vote Labour stayed at home.

In 2001, four polls in December put Labour on around 46, the Conservatives on 33 and LDs on 15. The actual result – Lab 41, Con 32 and LD 18 – was similarly due to Labour voters staying at home, a lack of enthusiasm for the Conservatives and aggresive Lib Dem campaigning. Yes, a tightening – but a tightening away from Labour. During the last election polls seven months out showed Labour at around 38, the Conservatives on 31 and the Lib Dems on 21. The election result was Lab 35, Con 32 and LD 22 – very close to the polling figures in November.

A few things to note:

1) The Labour vote has always been lower in the election than the average polling figures seven months out, probably due to lower turnout among Labour voters

2) The Conservative vote in polls seven months out since 1992 has been very close to the results on the night

3) The Lib Dem vote has always been higher in elections than polls because they campaign so well

It is also worth stating the obvious – that it depends which polls you look at and where the votes are cast is more important than how many are cast. But the evidence above suggests that Labour’s percentage on the night will be lower than their current polling, that the Lib Dems will do better (just as well given that they are on 16% today)and that the Conservative vote will hold around about where it is now ie the average for the month.

We are, of course, all hostages to fortune and whatever surprises the next seven months may hold. But a quick glance through records shows that the Lib Dems relying on a tighening of polls during an election campaign to produce a hung parliament might be a little misguided. It’s still a possibility if we don’t work hard enough, though.

Posted in Conservatives, Labour, Polling. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »

Not our problem

October 6, 2009 — simonashall

The press release below refers to the decision taken at Woking Borough Council last week to introduce a membership scheme for Woking’s centres for the community. This scheme will allow the council to better tailor the services it provides for users of the centres and offer them priority services – informal consultation ahead of the decision showed that opinion was generally positive towards this idea.

The cost of all this will be just £8 a year – or £4 for those in receipt of concessionary benefits ie those on low incomes in Denzil Coulson’s blog entry. It’s not much – and it doesn’t raise a huge amount of revenue but what it does is support the idea that those who use a service should contribute a small amount to its delivery. The amount charged in this instance not only reflects the ability to pay but also the group being asked to pay.

Contributions such as these will help the council meet budget targets. By opposing this scheme, the Liberal Democrats are voting to make the budget more difficult to balance. They think that subscriptions from the garden waste wheeled bin scheme should be used to offset this scheme instead – totally missing the point that the garden scheme itself, also, has to be offset. In fact, a willful ignorance of how to balance the council budget is beginning to characterise their messaging at the moment, with suggestions of new services and opposing any extra charging to increase revenue.

I’m minded of the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors’s Effective Opposition handbook, which says:

“Oppose all service cuts…no cut is going to be popular and why court the unpopularity that goes with the responsibility of power?”

Why indeed? Well, because unless you can handle the responsibility of power and the unpopularity that comes with it at some point, you’ve no place running a tap, let alone a council. Since the beginning of history, the placing of an extra financial liability on the population – or certain parts of it – has not been popular. But sometimes the responsibility of power has to be shouldered by those with the courage to understand that what is expedient is not always what is necessary.

The Lib Dem bible then goes on to say:

“You are NOT running the council. It’s NOT your problem.”

Correct – it’s the problem of every resident of the borough that an equitable way is found to ensure a sustainable financial settlement. I’ve been told to read Lib Dem literature and vote for them to find out about another way of financially modelling the council (is this the legendary “fourth way”?). Perhaps that’s true, perhaps not. But I’d rather not vote for any party that takes such a mercenary view of local authority administration – if they’re not in charge, it’s not their problem.

It’s yours instead. And that of those with the task of trying to balance the budget while maintaining a sense of proportion and fairness. Something that is, apparently, conspiciously absent from the Lib Dem handbook at the present time.

Posted in Woking Borough Council, lib dems, politics. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »

View from the conference

September 20, 2009 — simonashall

Cllr Denzil Coulson is at the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth. He and I disagree on some of the finer points but I think his musings are well worth a read!

Posted in Other blogs, lib dems. Tags: , . No Comments »

The Mar-jury is still out…

September 4, 2009 — simonashall

Last night, Conservatives gave a second chance to the Marjorie Richardson Centre by funding it another £10,000 and accepting the excellent business plan that the centre had put together. Mary Painter, a Horseller and Lib Dem activist was very instrumental in that and she deserves praise for the document she helped produce.

Unfortunately, the decision hasn’t stopped sanctimonious sour grapes from Cllr Denzil Coulson, who is trying to claim credit for the Lib Dems for”saving” the centre. Rubbish.

“It is most unfair that community services such as the Marjorie Richardson
Centre have to pay the price for Tory financial mismanagement of the Council to
“plug the £1 million + hole” in council finances.”

he says. That would be the financial black hole that first emerged under the Lib Dems in 2006 /7, then, wouldn’t it? And the one that has been excerbated not by mismanagement but by a lack of funding from government and the effects of the recession?

“Residents and community organisations have already started paying
the price of Tory cuts being applied to fill their financial hole in the council
accounts.”

he continues. Wrong – the finances will be balanced in 2010/11 without recourse to any cuts in front-line services. The community organisations are not services run by the council and don’t receive continuous funding from WBC in most cases. Rejected applications happen every single year and the organisations should be quite capable of finding funds elsewhere – these are not cuts, they are simply a decision not to give a discretionary contribution.

To paint them as cuts is a typical distortion of the truth from the Lib Dems. Although the Lib Dem ranks contain people who are financial professionals, they are clearly choosing to ignore the basic business facts behind the MRC issue.

1) The centre was spending more on management costs than it was earning in sales
2) The centre was relying on Woking Borough Council solely to plug that gap
3) There was no proper business plan in place
4) The number of users is small and declining

Mary Painter and others have produced a good business plan seeking to address all the points above. I have given her credit for that – maybe the LDs would be gracious enough to give the Conservative Executive credit for keeping faith in the centre against the odds listed above.

No? I thought not.

Posted in Community, Lib Dem lies, Woking Borough Council, lib dems. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »

An unholy row

September 3, 2009 — simonashall

Further to my previous post, the executive has made its decision – to refuse the URC, to pass St Mary’s over to county councillor Geoff Marlow for consideration out of his Surrey members’ allowance and to give St Paul’s, Maybury, £30,000.

The executive members I think have made a sensible decision – the URC bid was just nonsense and the St Mary’s one, while worthy, is something the church should be doing anyway and has had 10 years to plan for. St Paul’s is a truly good scheme with great community benefit and probably deserved £50,000.

But some of the scenes in the chamber were a bit unsavoury. The Lib Dems tutting about grants refused and people getting tribal about churches in “their” ward – or even their churches. There is no place in the council chamber for this kind of contemptuous attitude or religious persuasion.

My own feeling is that the council should put a stop to all applications from churches as part of the community grants scheme. All the churches are wealthy enough to be able to fund their own business and the agrandisement of their own facilities.

If we are to consider exceptional schemes that clearly have an overwhelming and valuable community benefit, they should be brought forward separately – with no obligation for them to get to council – as part of delivering the council’s community strategy.

We shouldn’t be in the business of subsidising church efforts to secure future generations of worshippers. That isn’t what the council tax should be used for.

Update 4/4/09: I find myself in agreement with Cllr Denzil Coulson. Just fancy that!

Posted in Community, Other blogs, Woking Borough Council, lib dems. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »