Cllr. Gavin Ayling

Adur’s results are in

The bottom line is that the Conservatives retained all their seats and with the postal votes counted it’s a reasonable turn-out and satisfying majorities in every ward.

Congratulations to the successful candidates and thanks to the electorate for not subjecting us to nuisance politics.

The numbers in Worthing are similarly reassuring with the Conservatives picking up one seat and the Lib Dems retaining their tally.

Obviously I’m delighted about the results so far for the Conservatives but we’re yet to see how Adur’s results come in — I’m not counting too many chickens.

That said, I’m sure that Debbie Kennard has won Buckingham Ward in Shoreham. Based on our canvas data, though, there was an interesting stat I’d like to share.

Unfortunately Debbie wasn’t able to canvas the whole area due to a combination of factors including getting less help from people like me! Apologies Deb if you’re reading this.

But of the two-thirds of homes that were canvassed, over 20% turn-out was experienced, while the third that was not canvassed only showed a 10% turn-out. And our canvas records show that the turn-out was slightly higher among Conservative pledged voters who were canvassed than ‘Againsts’.

So this is a lesson to us all. Canvassing definitely helps increase turn-out!

What a wonderfully varied week this past one has been when it comes to local politics.

On Monday I attended a party committee which concerns itself with the organisation at a very local level of the party machine. The people who do all the work to support the three of us at that meeting who are elected by the general public (two District Councillors – Debbie Kennard and myself – and the County Councillor – Clive Williams).

Tuesday was a Council committee meeting of the Housing and Central Services committee. And an entirely frustrating rubber-stamping exercise it was. All of the decisions we had to make were no-brainers: Increase Council home rents because the government’s slapping us with a negative subsidy or (you’ll love this) burn our reserves and increase them by even more next year? I think you’ll agree there’s no choice.

And the same was true of all the other agenda items – we had a choice but it was a non-choice.

But the variance came into play tonight with two of Adur District’s and Worthing Borough’s joint committees meeting one after the other. At these meetings we discussed the budget for the shared services (the refuse and recycling collection service and the joint management structure) as well as a report on coastal erosion.

The first item was great news. The Councils have saved, already, £67,000 through being able to buy fewer vehicles because of shared efficiency and we effectively did not have to pay for the new bins because of savings due to economies of scale in the procurement process as well. We have also saved £32,000 in the nine months to the end of the financial year that the service has been running just because of the increased quantities of recycling that are now being collected!

But I cannot be all positive. There was something much more important that came out of this evening’s meetings. The first meeting was of the Joint Overview and Scrutiny Committee and the Worthing Liberal Democrat members did not have a single negative comment to make about the services or the savings. They did, momentarily, suggest that Worthing’s Council tax payers are being subsidised by Adur (which isn’t true), but they could not see anything wrong with the savings etc. being made.

It didn’t stop them making a fuss though. And when it came to voting on the recommendation before them, they decided to abstain even though they did not disagree with the recommendation and, as I say, could not find anything negative to say at all.

As a result of this experience I want to make a plea to the residents of Adur and Worthing who may be reading this: Please don’t vote Lib Dem in May – if they win seats the members elected will just be a nuisance and if they win one of the Councils they won’t do a better job because they cannot see anything being done that they would do differently!

Vote Conservative at the local elections in May 2008 and ensure that your Councils continue to run smoothly and efficiently despite the government’s obsession with attempting to run the country’s Councils remotely.

Last night the Policy and Strategy Committee of Adur District Council (ADC) had to make some tough funding decisions.

If you find your favourite project has been dropped or had its funding cut, write to the Prime Minister and copy in your local Councillor and explain that the burdens on Council Tax in the south of England imposed by central government are making life unreasonably difficult for Councils, for tax payers and for those who rely on assistance from the local Council.

The minutes of the meeting will show which projects did not make the cut and which projects have had their funding modified (reduced). In the meantime, you can see the choices we had to make in Annex 2 (the last page) of Agenda Item 5 of the meeting on 4 December 2007: Policy and Strategy reports and minutes

I don’t doubt Tim’s seat is safe: he’s been a brilliant MP to almost everyone who has contacted them and, when he disagrees, he tells you so and why.

But it is interesting that Emily Benn will stand against him at the next election (BBC).

Emily’s blog and Tim’s website

Maybe I’m age prejudiced, but I now know what I didn’t know at seventeen and, frankly, I wouldn’t want seventeen-year-old me to represent anyone. Won’t Emily feel the same in eleven years?

And won’t she be too young if we have a snap-election? Is Emily to dictate Mr Brown’s decision!?

The PCT proposes that Worthing or Chichester’s hospital loses its Accident and Emergency and related facilities. It also proposes that Haywards Heath’s hospital be closed.

Our MP, rightly, asked the Parliamentary Undersecretary for Health Services whether she thought this was fair. Tim said:

Last week, the Worthing Herald reported that Worthing’s accident and emergency department had 1,258 admissions. That equates to 65,500 people visiting every year. Under reconfiguration proposals—not scare stories—the PCT proposes to close that accident and emergency department, and it expects people to join the car park that is the A27 and go to either Chichester or Brighton. How many of those people does the Minister believe are timewasters who do not actually need an accident and emergency department in the hospital of the largest town in Sussex?

They say ‘honourable’ but they cannot mean this response from Ann Keen (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Health Services), Department of Health):

The hon. Gentleman raises an important issue on accident and emergency services, but how could I possibly know who was attending the accident and emergency department without looking at the figures? I would expect the local management and the local PCT to do that, and I would expect the local MP to conduct a responsible consultation to ensure that patient care is delivered appropriately in accident and emergency department. That is why reconfiguration of the health service can be good for patients, as I am sure he would agree.

That was taken from They Work For You.

Support KWASH

Oh, and why on God’s green Earth would you vote Labour and live near here?

First, a warning. Adur Council’s telephones stopped working at 4pm this evening. While this is rectified, it is my duty to give you the out of hours Duty Supervisor’s number: 07713 889 128.

Last night’s meeting

Second, at last night’s meeting some more things were said that I didn’t really cover in my post because I was a bit of a hurry. As I’ve said many times recently, one of the items under discussion was key to a merger of services with Worthing and the accompanying savings in salaries which we must find because of the Labour Government’s swingeing cuts to grants and increases in demands on local Councils.

Members of the public are so infrequently in attendance that it is necessary to mention them when they are. Last night former-Councillor Peter Berry was in attendance. He had some questions to ask about the merger and, I quote, said that the Councils were “creating a staff surplus by reorganising the workload”. This, apparently, was supposed to be a negative criticism of the Councils plans whereas, in fact, it was a ringing endorsement of our policy. As a service organisation (as all Councils are) salaries and staff costs are the vast majority of our funding need. So to create staff surpluses is to create savings. To say that we are doing that by reorganising the workload is to say that we are creating efficiencies.

Many people criticise the NHS and other government bodies for ‘having too many chiefs and not enough Indians’; how wonderful then, that I can report that our Council is doing exactly what that adage criticises: reducing the number of managers by sharing managers between the two authorities! It’s really gratifying and a genuine good news story.

SEERA

In my last post I criticised the now dying SEERA for claiming that SEEDA was an unelected quango and I celebrated our Prime Minister’s decision to erase Regional Assemblies.

But I was, not unusually, being naively optimistic. SEERA is, for its faults, at least partially democratic in that some of its membership is Councillors from across the Region. SEERA, because of that, was becoming a thorn in the side of the central government and was likely to refuse to accept the house-building proposals that Gordon Brown recently announced. This would have been [in a fake posh voice] damned inconvenient, what! So in an act of sheer arrogance he decided to give it to the South East England Development Agency instead and close the troublesome assembly which was more and more likely to try to embarass him.

Far from being a positive step for democracy in England it is yet another attack on the democratic will of the people in this area who overwhelmingly do not support the ruling party. As the Tories came to regret using Scotland as a test bed, Labour will hopefully regret pushing the English — and especially those of us in the south — around.

Tonight’s Policy and Strategy Committee…

… was great, what more need be said? Well, actually, it would be nice to have some members of the public at the next one!

If you don’t like your Council tax rises, if you wonder how that hair-brained plan came to fruition, if you watch Newsnight or Question Time (or both!), if you enjoy debate or if you care about your local community then come along. It is really entertaining (normally) and it gives a real insight into how and why decisions are made.

I’m not over-selling it. Really.

No, really.

Tonight’s meeting was fantastically important. So important that even though I’m yet to eat dinner (which I normally eat around 7pm) I’m sat here at the computer telling you what happened.

First, the opposition (actually the lone LibDem cannot officially be called an opposition — but for the sake of clarity) voted for all the proposals which will lead to Worthing and Adur Councils moving toward a single workforce. Adur Council will now work out a basis for moving to a cabinet system of government.

Also, the speech I read and copied below for your information, was well received and you’ll be pleased to know that the Motion was not carried! I’ll take some of the credit for that especially because the Liberal Democrat (apparently not the party of liberalism and freedom) failed to stir even for that.

So all recommendations before tonight’s Council were carried unanimously and Motion 11a lost while Motion 11b (on West Sussex Hospitals) was carried.

My speech in response to the Motion:

Why we should not allow prayer in Adur Council

Councillor Privacy

Religious belief, or the lack of it, is very personal and I believe it should not normally be discussed in this context. One of the problems with public worship as proposed in this Motion is that it may require by implication that a Councillor expose their religious beliefs. A member of the public might arrive during the period set aside for prayers and see their Councillor praying and decide that their Councillor’s religious beliefs worry them or, similarly, find their Councillor not in attendance and decide that they cannot vote for an non-believer.

The reason I mention that now is that this debate could do a similar thing. By standing up now I could be exposing myself either as an immoral man, a godless infidel or a heretical heathen or as a devout follower.

Why should that matter? Surely the voting public have the right to know about their Councillors’ beliefs?

No.

Religion and Politics

Religion and politics do not go together and it is when they do that we are fearful. It is the Islamic AK Party in Turkey who yesterday won the general election which some fear could mean the end of secularism in Turkey. And it is religion in US politics which makes the Republican Party so different from the Conservative Party. I’d like to read a passage written by Fred Halliday on the Open Democracy website on 12 January this year:

From the evangelicals of the United States, to the followers of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, to the Islamists of the middle east, the claim about the benefits of religion is one of the great, and all too little challenged, impostures of our time. For centuries, those aspiring to freedom and democracy, be it in Europe or the middle east, fought to push back the influence of religion on public life. Secularism cannot guarantee freedom, but, against the claims of tradition and superstition, and the uses to which religion is put in modern political life, from California to Kuwait, it is an essential bulwark.

I do know that this country has prayers read in the House of Commons before each sitting of the House and that twenty-six unelected, non-democratically appointed Bishops sit in the House of Lords. Nobody ought to think that is unreservedly a good thing. I accept that this is a Christian country, I do not believe it should manifest itself in politics.

Libertarian

English culture is a subject of much debate recently. With the trend for multiculturalism apparently under attack from the former Home Secretary John Reid, the question about what it means to be English has re-started of late. My input to that debate would be to talk of the most obvious of virtues: the ability to tolerate — without trying to — other people’s beliefs. Some people may say that this Motion is something we should welcome as an effort to reassert the English (or in some cases British) cultural values. But if you agree with what I just said then reasserting English culture would not involve reintroducing prayer, in any religion or denomination, into public offices.

In 1906 Evelyn Hall said “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” although this is often attributed to Voltaire. That should mean it could be argued, that I could sit out of these prayers and feel warm inside that the libertarian cause was living on. But this is the exact opposite of the case. Using the Council Chamber, or the Council building, for non-Council activities is an abuse of power. I dare say any number of alternative pre-meeting activities would not be considered and this is as personal as any of those.

I like to think of myself as an open minded person. We’ve all read articles in the tabloid press written by a homophobe that start “I have gay friends but…” But I’m going to use that excuse anyway: I have Christian and Hindu friends and Muslim relatives but I don’t believe religion has any relevance to the Council’s proceedings.

Summary

In summary the reasons for refusing this Motion are:
• That it is a violation of each Councillor’s privacy;
• that it is an irrelevant and dangerous melding of Church and State;
• that it does not merit support under libertarian values; and
• that it is a misuse of tax payer’s facilities.