SHORT SHORTS

Thought I would just catch up on a few stories for purpose of updating Joe Public on all matters local national and international.

EALING COMEDY

Regular readers will be aware of the ongoing teething problems with Northampton Borough Councils's (and DDC's) 14 year contract with Enterprise Services to provide Refuse Collection, Grass Cutting and Street Sweeping Services across Northampton and Daventry. Well the so called "teething problems" are still causing much pain to all concerned and are quickly turning into a a very nasty and prolonged toothache.

With Enterprise now it is suggested losing somewhere between £40,000 and £60,000 a week on the contract they have cut back even further on their workforce numbers, leading to more collections being missed, more grass left uncut and even less streets swept. The problems which we were told initially by the administration at NBC were little more than hiccups have now led to the Council having to look at fining the contractor £250,000 in penalties for not delivering on the service contract.

My contacts at Westbridge tell me it can only get worse in the coming months but meanwhile Northampton's woes with Enterprise as a contractor have now reached the ears of other elected members on Tory controlled Ealing Council  in West London, who are very keen not to fall into the same trap as the Borough having just engaged Enterprise, 4 months ago on a similar 15 year contract!   Enterprise took over the service from previous contractor May Gurney on April 1 2012, after it was awarded the £300 million 15-year collection contract in July 2011


Under the deal Enterprise was meant to operate a kerbside sort system for the collection of dry recyclables and food waste but following familiar  ‘teething problems’ it had to move to a commingled system to work through the backlog of missed collections. All sounding very familiar?

It now seems that after 4 months of missed collections and what letsrecycle.com called a "Fiasco in Ealing" Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, portfolio holder for transport and environment is under pressure from the opposition to resign his post over the services failures. But in an attempt to keep the attack dogs at bay Cllr Mahfouz has come up with a cunning plan, he is sending a crack squad down to see us all here in Northampton as he explains " “What we don’t want is to be a year down the line and then fining them. We are getting the guys to go down to those councils to learn what they did right and wrong.”

I could save Cllr Mahfouz and Ealing Council some money on funding the journey as its very clear what they did wrong, they signed a contract full of holes, put up as a lost leader, at a price no one could ever deliver the service for, they (as in all three political parties) then ignored the two independent members on the Council who warned them that this was bound to happen and banked the savings regardless of the consequences.

What a farce indeed,

ALL SIT DOWN FOR TEAM GB

As the row continues unabashed as to those unused seats at most events for this years London Olympics I was reminded of a conversation some weeks ago on Radio Four when the station was previewing our Gold Medal chances ahead of the Games, and what it all boiled down to was that "Sitting" was what we British do best, not just in watching the varied sporting extravaganzas, but also it seems in competing.

And so it is after an edgy start to the games and a continued wait for team GB's first gold that we must now look to those sat on their back sides to deliver the goods for Blighty. So bring on the brave rowers and the canoeists from Britain's finest public schools. All hail the horsey equestrian set with their jolly jodhpurs and jaunty japes. Cry out loud for the British Cyclists and their two wheeled velodrome heroics.

Britains Gold medal chances it seems rest solely on Britains backsides, on Boats, Bikes and Horses. So how about letting us working class folk also get in on the act? After all it is our games. I suggest the London Olympic Committee therefore immediately introduce more sitting down sports for us to compete in in this years games, we will soon rise up the medal table then.

How about Downhill Soapbox racing? I loved that as a kid, and who's for a go at a Spacehopper marathon! how delightful it would be to see all those large orange or even flag printed spherical objects bouncing up and down along the Mall in unison.

Perhaps even our Lib Dem friends could get involved with qualifiers for Olympic style Fence sitting?

SYRIA LEFT TO SUFFER AS THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY

This blog has a very good history of predicting events local, national and even international, but for once I was hoping that I had judged it all wrong when I said that an all out civil war in Syria was probably inevitable http://tonyclarkeindependent.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/why-syrias-tears-are-wasted-on-west.html but as predicted HM Government it seems values the lives of Syrian Civilians far less than they did Libyan Civilians, there have been no cries this time for military intervention, no NATO proposed safe corridor, no NO FLY ZONE.

So what has Libya got that Syria hasn't ? Sympathy? Willpower? Oil? I explained the best I could in my last blog that the rebel army (or armies) in Syria are a diverse, complicated and split force who will probably not be able to wrestle power from the regime no matter how much they believe in their cause, and as a result the blood letting will continue unchecked. Meanwhile William Hague pops up on our screens every few days to tell us how awful it all is and how wicked Bashir Hassad is whilst saying nothing about who may replace him in any successful uprising, and also doing nothing to protect the civilian's caught up in this horrific bloody struggle for Syria's future.

The country's uprising has been played out constantly on the internet website YouTube, but while the brutal images of death remain the same, images of the armed opposition groups as also predicted are ever changing. Some groups now openly say they are affiliated with al-Qaeda, fly its flags, and say they now have training camps inside the country. Phil Rees, filmmaker and author of 'Dining with Terrorists', told Al Jazeera that for Al Qaeda, Syria is "an attractive place to come now." Who is Al Qaeda? Someone coming from Libya who helped overthrow [Muammar] Gaddafi? During Libya, they were considered to be freedom fighters and the British government supported them. Now they travel to Syria where they feel a jihad going on,"

I am sure that if the charge against the British Government of double standards being applied to different countries and different peoples has not already been made clear, then their current silence and inaction on Syria can only make it ever more translucent.

RECYCLED EXCUSES AND BUCK PASSING WONT DELIVER THE SERVICES

My blog below, highlighting the current plight of staff employed at Enterprise Managed Services (the councils outside environment services contractor) and the impact that this failing privatisation is having on our local services at least is seems stirred some people into action. Ex Independent Cllr Malcolm Mildren and myself of course could be forgiven for saying we told you so, given our single handed attempts last year to prevent NBC from signing such an obviously flawed contract, but the Chronicle and Echo and it now seems the opposition groups at the Guildhall are both belatedly waking up to the story. I am bound to say that it's a pity it has took them so long and that all three parties on the Council would have served the public better by airing their concerns with ourselves last year rather than offering slavish support to the deal and now belatedly deciding that we may just have had a point all the way along.

And so "serious questions" we are told will now be asked?, but is this a solution to the growing problem or simply a way to bide time, will they now accept that the contract is non deliverable or hold out in the hope of rescuing a few red faces by letting the contract limp on? And what will that do to protect local services already failing through a bungled and undeliverable contract? After all the Portfolio Holder responsible for the contract Cllr Jon Caswell (Con) tells us that it has nothing to do with the Council and that these are all issues for Enterprise to sort out!

Well as always, let me tell you my blog readers first, including many Cllrs who I know read the blog to catch up on the news their own Council won't reveal to them, just how bad matters have really become.

First of all it seems (unbelievably) that EMS have now decided that they miscounted the number of properties in Northampton that needed their bins collected when they first quoted for the contract (whose fault is that?) and now they want an additional £800,000 a year more from the local Council Tax payer than they originally quoted for these services alone (next we will no doubt hear that the grass is growing much quicker than anticpiated and that people are throwing far too much rubbish on the streets). This £800,000 they no doubt hope will go towards the £2.5m loss estimated by some as EMS's first years operational loss.

Secondly, on job losses (despite assurances to the contrary at the time) it seems as if the majority of 50+  staff shown the door at Westbridge in the last 12 months have come from the original Council staff who were TUPE'd across from both Councils (TUPE stands for Transfer of Undertakings, and the Protection of Employees, and is a way of protecting staff post any buy out or transfer of contracts) and these "redundancies" are not just limited to the front line, as middle managers are just as expensive in EMS's eyes as workers. Certainly both Waste Managers who transferred from Northampton Borough and Daventry District Councils have now gone, meaning all their local knowledge and expertise has gone with them!. Meanwhile replacement agency staff are still being employed on "daily" basis at Westbridge with workers turning up at 6am with their lunch boxes to hopefully be "hand picked" and told at 7am which of them have secured a days work. The rest are sent home with the Dickension term "No work today" ringing in their ears.

And what about the services themselves? Well we can all see that ourselves clearly by the uncut grass, unswept pavements and uncollected rubbish littering our streets. But to give you a clearer insight, I can "exclusively" (before the local press and politicians tell you they knew this anyway, and repeat it without naming the source) reveal that not only have the number of total refuse rounds been cut, but that all of the emergency and spare vehicles have all now been off hired to save money. This is despite the loan of £750,000 given to EMS by the council last year for new vehicles and site improvements. So now the service is being delivered in the main with an ageing fleet of trucks which are constantly breaking down mid round. And if EMS underestimated the number of homes to collect from, then how are they now collecting it with less lorries and staff than they first started with

And this causes another problem, the refuse contract rounds are now 9.5 hours long (far too long in my view for continued manual work) and the drivers all have to work to a legal limit of  9 hours driving in any one day (4.5hrs +  4.5hrs with a 45 minute break in between) or a maximum of 10 hours on two out of any 5 days if they work with an additional 45 minute  break over a 11.5 hour day. What this means to anyone with even a basic rudimentary knowledge of HGV driving regulations is that if for any reason a lorry breaks down, or the round is delayed, then there are no back up vehicles to replace any of those out of action and the drivers cannot even legally drive their wagons back to the depot without them breaking the law. The above vehicle break downs and round delays it seems are the real reason that rubbish is now left uncollected on the street at the end of every day as drivers are running out of driving time and there are no additional drivers or wagons at Westbridge to relieve them.

Meanwhile as intimated in my last post I can confirm that the Main Recycling Facility at Westbridge has all but closed its doors and rumours abound that Enterprise have plans to knock it down, and also the promised refurbishment of the current recycling facility at Daventry to begin to handle food waste has now been cancelled due to EMS saying they now have no money to afford to implement it.

It doesn't look good, in fact it's a shambles, EMS can't afford to deliver the service for the price they quoted, NBC can't afford to re tender or take the service back in house as they have "banked" the saving from their wider cuts programme, and services are deteriorating by the minute. But don't worry, we are all in this together!

SIMPLY A MATTER OF BINS AND BUGS - TOPICAL SHORTS (3)

There was a time in Local Government when if you had 10 Councillors in a room then you were sure to get a least 15 different opinions. Then somewhere during the mid 1990s all opinions blurred into first of all three camps (Tory/Lab/LibDem) and then into just one, not a Coalition but it seems at local level a Coatrition.

For this reason as an Independent I often found it nearly impossible to promote new ideas or even question the status quo at Council meetings and when I and other Independent colleagues did so our points of view were dismissed by all parties as scaremongering or trouble making we were left out on a limb, our concerns dismissed as negativity, and our comments often ignored in the press.

So thank god for the blogosphere, here we can say as we please within reason, and be judged on not just the opinion we express but also on whether or not we called it right at the time.

Today in the third of my topical shorts we revisit two earlier blogs from the past to give you an update as to how close we called it at the time:

WHAT A LOAD OF OLD RUBBISH

Most of you will remember my posts on "Enterprise Managed Services" the new company that took over all of the Borough Councils refuse, cleansing and groundworks contracts in a 14 year deal. Praise came from all round the Council chamber from the big three, and in my last post on this subject I reminded readers that even Labour's Leader at the time Lee Mason commented that she didn't care who collected her bins as long as they didn't change colour! The Lib Dems agreed the deal, the Tory's trumpeted it as their own when they came to power, even going as far as to hold a re signing photo opportunity for the agreement.

Only two Cllrs at the time, myself and Malcolm Mildren spoke out, We challenged the figures, said that Enterprise had put in a loss leader as a bid and could not afford to deliver the service at anywhere near the price set. We questioned the long term security of the staff who would be transferred, and warned that 14 years was along long time if they made a mistake. We urged the Council to make its own changes to the in house delivery in order to keep control of the service. And we were ignored.

The warning signs were there, at the time Enterprise told the Council that it couldn't raise the funds itself externally to buy new vehicles to run the new contract and asked the Council to lend them the money to do so! Again Malcolm and myself tried to promote caution but our comments were relegated to the wheelie bin

So Enterprise started the contract, to begin with we had the usual teething problems, and as a result some changes were made, some at times seemed to have an effect, but only over time would we be able to judge the outcome.

That time is now approaching, and it is approaching at break neck speed. Let me tell you what my contacts down at Westbridge have been telling me over the last few days. First of all it seems as if Enterprise have lost money on the contract (surprise surprise) the figure I was told was that they have lost £2.5m in the first year. As a result of the above 15 staff were made redundant last week, with more to follow, refuse collectors, street cleaners, groundworkers all being cut back. The emergency clean up team who was successful in clearing up the mess made by their own refuse and recycling officers gone. 5 of the shiny new vehicles which Enterprise borrowed money from the Council to purchase gone. The Councils flagship recycling unit at Westbridge Depot? Closed and the staff laid off and the waste now being diverted by road to other recycling centres in the country expanding further the carbon footprint.

None of the above has hit the ears of Cllrs at NBC yet, and there has not been as much as a sausage in the local press, but when your bins are not collected as often, or you wonder where the street sweepers have all gone, or why the grass is three feet tall again. You can say I read about this on a blog from a bloke who the council said was talking rubbish when he warned them that this would happen. Rubbish indeed!

FOUNTAIN OF ALL KNOWLEDGE

The other criticism I receive is that I must be a real anorak at times to know so much about the most inane of subjects. I hold my hand up to this one, when I get my teeth into something I can't let go, and a number of times on this blog and on the Chronicle and Echos website I have warned about the potential dangers of the Council's next to useless fountain on the market square. If you want all the gory details just click here.  http://tonyclarkeindependent.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/dont-go-chasing-waterfalls.html 

What a load of old tosh they said, its perfectly safe. And yet it seems to have been off more than it is on recently, and anyone who missed in the press the ridiculous exchange between the Chron and the Councils leader over why it was currently turned off will be tickled to hear the story which goes something like this:

Local newspaper contacts Council and says "Is the fountain turned off because of the hose pipe ban"?
The Council responds by saying No not at all and  announcing that  "the fountain would remain on throughout the drought as turning it off would not actually make any difference to the town’s water supply". "So why is it off now then said the Chron two days later"? The Council replied with the following gem

"The water feature on Northampton Market Square will be switched off during the hosepipe ban to avoid causing concern to members of the public who might think it’s wasting water, the fountain was constructed to be very environmentally friendly. It‘s full of water which simply recycles itself over and over again. However, it’s hard to spread that message to everyone who will come into town over the summer, so rather than cause concern, we’ve decided to switch the fountain off until the ban is over.”

The above was all from a spokesperson with not one member of the Councils administration willing to be quoted.

So is this really the reason that the fountain runs dry? or is not everything as it should be? You see following my concerns raised with the council about how all that recycling of water in an area where dogs, pigeons and even humans foul cannot be good for little mites running through the mist ingesting all and sundry the council at least promised to carry out regular testing for a whole range of bugs and nasty's  including TVC, E-coli & Coliforms, Pseudomonas, Legionella and of course Cryptosporidium.

For those who missed my earlier posts, my concern was that the above bugs and their spores are to be found where water has come into contact with animal faecal matter.

The Market Square Fountain is open to pigeon fouling, dog fouling and any organisms transported on the shoes of those walking through the area

These spores where present are easily ingested through the air in mist or through the mouth from contaminated water and attack those with low immune defence such as children and those with HIV

The jets in the Market Square Fountain are of course at just the right height to be ingested by small children playing in the fountain

These tests started in Aug 2010 and took place in Aug/Sept 2010 April/May 2011 June/July 2011and again in Sept 2011.

But no testing has taken place since. More worrying is that the last test for Cryptosporidium was way back in Aug 2010 some 20 months ago!

Of course since September 2011 you can count on one hand the number of times the fountain has been working, but surely nothing untoward was found at that time?

After all Cllr Clarke (as I was told by many) was just scaremongering, the fountain is perfectly safe. And the Council surely would have said something to us if there was any public health risk. And if there was anything untoward we would have read about it in the Chron surely? And Councillors would have been made aware and would have considered it a duty to tell us if there was a problem? So it must be safe.

Safe that is until you discover that the test for TVC, E-coli & Coliforms taken on Sept 2nd 2011 was proven as positive!

TOPICAL SHORTS 2

Just an update on a few "what's been happenings" in  downtown Nampton over the last few days and weeks:

ANN FRANK AWARDS

I was humbled on Saturday in receiving an Ann Frank Award from Northampton Youth Forum, the awards recognise young people who have achieved great things and also educators and community activists who have supported young people in their lives. I was delighted to receive the award for my work both as Cllr and MP for supporting young people through my actions and also in my role at NTFC in supporting disabled youngsters and others through sport. I told the young people present at the award presentation at Northampton Carnival that they shouldn't make a habit of giving awards out to politicians as usually it us that cause most of their problems not resolve them. My congratulations also go out to the other recipients including Dostiyo for their work with Asian girls and also my partner in political crime Ann Timson for showing an example to young people through her brave intervention in that infamous smash and grab robbery last year!

IT'S HIM ALRIGHT

An anonymous poster to this site was very upset at the picture of "Dave" (below) looking all glum and suggested that it was certainly not the Prime Minister at all? Well yes it was I am afraid. It was taken after his election defeat in North East Leicestershire in 1997. It also seems that there are a large number of less than flattering shots of the PM doing the rounds, most provided to the press by his ex chums at Bullingdon and beyond. The shot included in this post is just one of many many more that we will need to get used to seeing even if we don't want to believe it is the PM. I think this pic is very "Beckhamesque" as  "Dave" sports a very fashionable male sarong, but somehow footballers seem better able to carry off  this look than politicians can. But at least it shows that the great man is just as capable of making a dick of himself as the rest of us.

SPECIAL AGENT

News reaches me of alleged unfortunate election irregularities by at least 4 successful Cllrs in this May's Borough Council Elections being investigated either internally by their party and/or by Inspector Knacker of Campbell Square. Some of these investigations may be as a result of harmless or  genuine errors, one reported to me by the BNP was not even of the candidates making as NBC show they are just as capable of making gaffs as the parties are. Another it seems involves alleged fraudulent signatures being placed on candidate  nomination forms and if true is far more serious, and of course if found to be proved could inevitably lead to a by election. The most serious accusations though that have come to my ears involves the age old time practice of  "Postal Vote Farming" where candidates sign up willing voters on the doorstep or in their homes and process their postal votes for them when they arrive!! One potential victim told me he told the candidate where to go and said he would cast his own vote at the Polling Station, but the candidate in question it seems still took away his mums, his sisters and his dads votes, his dad's Postal Vote return had only just been filled in and freshly signed that very minute, even though his father wasn't even home at the time! And to think me and John Dickie were reported and questioned by plod for simply leaving an imprint of of a letter in the 2007 election! It would be improper to name the candidates or their parties but I can't help but think that a lot of the above wouldn't have happened if the Party Agent was on the ball, or even present during the election!

STARSHIP ENTERPRISE

There is a certain irony about the fact that only Malcolm Mildren and myself (both now ex NBC  Cllrs) at the time challenged NBC's deal with Enterprise to take over street scene and refuse collection services from the in house team at the Council in what could be a 14 year contract. The Lib Dem's were very proud to be pictured signing the deal and boasting about it to all and sundrie in their election material, The incoming Tory Party also then" resigned" the deal in front of the Chron's cameras to suggest it was in fact all their doing. And yet despite us warning them both on many occasion of problems galore just up the road in Peterborough where the same company were running into difficulties with their Council, no one was willing to listen. The leader of the Labour Party even said at the time that she was happy with the contract as long as the colour of the wheelie bins didn't change and that the garden collections continued. Well now that hiccups are turning into coughs and rubbish still lies waiting for collection and recyclables sorted by householders at source lie mixed together in heaps at the Council yard, we are both waiting to see if the incoming Tory's will eventually  blame the Lib Dem's for signing the deal before the election or if the outgoing Lib Dem's will blame the Tory's for  signing it after?