Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Dear Resident,

The questions you ask and the points you make bring into question the lessons I have learned after many years in voluntary and public service. Through the service organisations to which I have belonged since I was at university, I had what I thought was a good idea of just how much misery there was within this town. Much of it was self-inflicted, some of it was due to lack of education, some of it due to nurture and some of it was due to bad luck. The list is almost infinite. Whatever the reasons, my friends and I in the voluntary organisations tried our hardest to alleviate these problems as best we could.

However, it was not until I was elected to Southend Council in 1990 that I realised the enormity of the problem and just how powerless the voluntary sector was unless it combined with the far greater resources of the local council. At that time I decided that the only effective long term answer to the social problems which have beset this town for the past thirty years was full employment and decent wages. Because of the political and economic views that I have developed over many years I believe that this can only come from a healthy economy driven by the private sector. The recycling of taxpayers’ money does not contribute to economic growth directly but what it can do is create the conditions for the private sector to thrive and create a virtuous circle of investment, growth, high wages and low unemployment.

For many years Southend has had the highest unemployment and the two most deprived wards in the Eastern Region. One of the few advantages that regional government has had is that whilst it does little to create wealth, it does produce a lot of comparative statistics of which these are but two. One of the problems which comes up time and time again is the inadequacy of our transport infrastructure which is a disincentive to business investors and this is why we have to invest in our road system.

This cannot be done overnight and will take a number of years as we deal with the physical pinch points of which everyone is aware. We have to deal with this by applying for government money and to get that money we have to deal with it at a technical level. The order we do it is not dreamed up by councillors but by traffic engineers whose views are respected, accepted and scrutinised by government. We rely heavily on such specialist engineers with their computer modelling to devise solutions to our traffic problems. Once again, they are not dreamed up by councillors whose duty is to decide upon policy and not to try and second guess professionals in their particular specialities – but they are given a good grilling.

This brings me to the traffic alterations at Victoria Circus (to be called Victoria Square). I am astonished that you consider the roundabout there to be successful because whenever I go there is it pretty chaotic, but my or anyone else’s subjective experience is not what matters. It is the traffic flow and non flow figures in which government is interested and your opinion or mine is of little importance in getting the necessary resources. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

The same applies to Progress Road and Cuckoo Corner. Once these have been dealt with and after all the complaints about disruption, there will be others such as Kent Elms and further work will be needed at The Bell. All trees that have to go are currently being replaced three fold although the established policy is that they should be replaced two fold.

I have lived in this town all my life (70 years last week) and never have there been so many trees as we currently have and are currently planting. All trees have a limited life span depending on the species involved and will get old, diseased or die and this has to be anticipated. We have to accept this and change the landscape occasionally to build a townscape for future generations to enjoy.

I now come to the airport issue which has created such a furore. As I set out in my opening comments, I believe that the social wellbeing of the town’s residents should come at the forefront of all our deliberations because we are in severe danger of becoming a deprived area. I am surprised that so many residents do not appear to have appreciated the potential of the airport to create high employment and wages.

The airport has been a divisive issue across the town. If the application is not approved then Southend could lose a massive investment in the local economy, including thousands of jobs that are so badly needed. Conversely, many residents had concerns about the proposed runway extension, particularly in terms of noise, pollution and transport. Councillors carefully studied the airport runway application and extensive professional officers’ reports, and the vast majority voting on the issue reached the conclusion that the concerns about noise, pollution and transport were unfounded.

Also they knew that with a vote in favour of the development, Southend Council could secure an agreement that allows it to impose restrictions on noise levels, direction of take-off and landings, plus limited night flights. If the development had been rejected by Southend Council and accepted by the government following an appeal by Stobarts, none of these safeguards would have been in place and the airport would have had a free hand to develop its business in any way it wished without any controls over all those issues that are so important to residents.

Unlike the Lib Dems, Conservatives and Labour did not try to seize the airport issue for political reasons, and then let down residents anyway by ignoring the non pre-determination rules which prohibited them from taking a view until after they had read all the documents and literature on the subject and then debated the issues. The Lib Dems were trapped by the absurd uninformed statements they made in the early stages before the negotiations and found it politically expedient to continue with their scaremongering afterwards. Having broken all the rules about pre-determination they then had the gall to claim that the whole council should have been able to make the decision. This topic needs further clarification.

When I was Leader of the Council it was possible for three individual members of the Development Control Committee to demand reference up to full council for decision. Thus the decision over St. Laurence Church was made by the full council. Soon after I retired the government brought in a regulation that all members of the Development Control Committee should receive special training before they could be allowed to make planning decisions. No one argues with that. However, after I retired the Conservative administration also had to deal with another problem of which the public are generally unaware.

While I was there it had become increasingly the case that three or four non-Conservative councillors were referring minor local ward issues up to full council for decision in order to get publicity in the press for doing so. This meant that under th0se new rules the entire Council would have to have the necessary training in order to make decisions on issues in which they had little interest. There were also considerable costs in the large number referred which made councillor’s travel costs shrivel into insignificance.

My own view is that all the council should be trained but that applications should only be referred to full council by a majority vote of the Development Control Committee rather than just three members. The administration at the time decided to abolish the reference up to council which I consider a retrograde step and will try to get it changed if elected. It is right that major issues such as the airport should be debated publicly and members of the public should be able to see just how well or badly their representatives perform. It might lead to some of the really bad performers getting replaced - which is no bad thing. However, because of the non pre-determination rules any member who offered his opinion publicly before the council meeting at which the application is to be discussed would be unable to take part or vote in the debate. The way the Lib Dems acted on the airport application would have precluded most of them and they would doubtless have screamed loudly about the democratic deficit and how they were being gagged.

You talk about cutting members’ allowances as if they are all comfortably off but most people would agree that it should not just be the well off people in society that are our elected representatives. Most people would also agree that if you have to pay out money in order to do your job, then you ought to be reimbursed for it. It is a myth that the £8,000 p/a paid to every member is for nothing. Every member spends many hours each week reading reports and attending meetings. When I was Leader of the Council albeit five years ago, I normally worked a 50  hour week for about £18,000 p/a whilst an active member without special responsibilities would have worked about 15 hours depending on his or her efforts.

I did not take expenses for local trips because the money was fairly insignificant for me but if I travelled to Birmingham or Manchester on behalf of the Council I claimed the expenses for doing so. Those Southend Conservative councillors who are in a comfortable financial situation where they do not need to claim any local travel expenses, do not claim them because they feel that is the right thing to do, but councillors of any colour or none should not be disadvantaged for doing so. There are no huge financial rewards in being a Southend councillor – just the satisfaction of working for the town you love. Would you stop those who are not so financially well off from representing you?  I don’t think so!

Without publishing at enormous cost a large monthly digest of council matters which the vast majority would not read, we do have an enormous problem in publicising our ideas for the future. We have to deal with the sometimes capricious directives of central government and the fact that we cannot set budgets sufficiently far ahead. The Council never know what our income from government is likely to be. This means that whilst we can plan for some years between ourselves, such plans are movable feasts and to make firm public proposals based on them would make us a hostages to fortune. That is very bad politics and we would be accused of breaking promises.

I know I have not covered every point but I hope you will agree that I have made a reasonable effort. Much of what I have written here will be put on my website but it will be edited to maintain your privacy and identity.

 The final approval for Southend Airport’s development now rests with the Secretary of State to decide. Apparently, if it is not published within the next two weeks and an election is announced for the 6^th May, we will not get the result until after that election.

Kind regards,

Howard Briggs