Open Government

“The consultation is open, there is an opportunity for people to suggest alternatives. Nothing has been said anywhere at any time that people cannot challenge or provide feedback on issues relating to the back office.”

Oxfordshire County  Council spokesperson in Oxford Mail story on libraries 03 Aug 2011

Be robust - consultation/ involvement must be undertaken in an open and honest way. 

Oxfordshire County  Council guidance, six key principles of consultation

"If people don't know what you're doing, they don't know what you're doing wrong." 

Sir Humphrey Appleby

As part of the consultation OCC have already released data for the salaries for each individual library. Quite a few of the rural libraries because of their size have one staff member.

http://portal.oxfordshire.gov.uk/content/publicnet/council_services/leisure_culture/libraries/consultation/2010_2011_OLS_summary_costs_statistics%20.xls

 Further to this they have released via FOI the full list of libraries and the numbers of staff working at each.

For the back office we have no such breakdown of data, all we have is Management & Professional and service support with the numbers.

I put in a FOI request asking for the salary data, job title and brief description for the above areas of staff spending.  They released the data on the last possible day and  they did send me what I requested.

The next day it took a strange turn when I received this email: 

“On the 12th September we sent a response to your FOI request reference 3323 in connection with the staffing structure for the Library Service.  This was sent in error and may contain some personal data in relation to our staff.  Please could you disregard that response, and a definitive response will be sent to you tomorrow. 

You should not circulate or use the previous response, or any of the salary data contained in it.  Electronic and hard copies should be destroyed. 

I apologise for the inconvience and confirm that a final response will be sent to you as soon as possible.”

I replied immediately and actually rang and left the officer a message, I had already sent the data round to the other friends groups and informed the person all I could do was forward on this email and the rest is up to them.

Then a couple of days later I got this:

“The salary information provided in the spreadsheet is the actual salary of the staff concerned, and this information is deemed to be personal information.  It is normal practice to provide only the scale that a grade attracts, i.e. the minimum and maximum applicable to the grade.  Whilst we don't specifically name the staff, it is our belief that in some cases it would be possible to find the names. 

I will send you the amended response as soon as I have sent you this e-mail. 

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation on this.”

So what they are saying is, it’s fine to release information that allows identification of low paid front line staff, yet for high paid management and back office the salary has to be within grades to protect the staff.

Obviously there has been a lot of back and forth and I have yet to receive a satisfactory response as to the descrepency. This is the guidance from the information commissioner (thanks to @foimonkey) on releasing salaries:

“There is no one rule which can be applied in every case. However, the following guidelines may be useful.

• Salary scales should usually be published as a matter of routine.

• Disclosure should only be to the extent necessary to fulfil a legitimate public interest. This may involve narrowing down advertised scales, for example to the nearest £5000. Only in exceptional circumstances is disclosure of exact pay likely to be justified.

• More senior staff who are responsible for major policy and financial initiatives can expect greater scrutiny of their pay than more junior employees. It will nearly always be unfair to disclose the exact salaries of junior employees.

• There could be factors that weigh in favour of greater disclosure, such as legitimate concerns about corruption or mismanagement, or situations in which senior staff set their own or others’ pay.

• Specific individuals’ concerns should be considered when determining whether the disclosure is justified.”

If it isn’t unfair in their opinion to release exact salaries of junior staff, how can it be unfair in their opinion to not release the senior staff salaries when the ICO stipulates that those on higher salary should expect greater scrutiny? There is also government policy on releasing salaries of staff on over 50K.

Whatever the process is for FOI in Oxfordshire, the first release passed the tests they have in place. Then I suspect someone who wasn’t happy about it intervened against the public interest and in their own interest to try and keep their salary out of the public domain. This is while OCC is happy for library branch staff to have to their salaries on display for the world to see.

OCC have insisted at every stage that they will only deal with individual library groups, if they blame the volume of requests for data I have no sympathy. If the consultation was open and transparent they would have done the following at the very start.

·         Gave a full explanation (with supporting data)  on what different approaches to savings were considered and discounted

·         Be completely open with their data, spending across the library services. The internal recharges, their PLSS, plus and other user satisfaction data. Also their position on how they compare to all other library services around the UK on cipfa (they do have all this)

·         Release of the galaxy data on usage of residents of other libraries (this didn’t occur to them)

We wouldn’t be in the position where they are probably breaking the information commissioner rules on identifying staff salaries or if they are not doing that then breaking FOI rules trying to cover their own high paid managers.

Libraries who have only one staff member (and there are a few) know what their librarians are being paid.

It has been a battle on every step of the consultation to get OCC to release data. 




p.s 22 of the 54.2 salaries in the first release were higher than the grades. I would hope this is because on has full package costs verses the salary bands. I have asked for clarification....

OCC going against government policy

We have some new stats on the cuts to the library service that gives us a more complete picture of how and where the savings are being made:

These new figures on the savings in back office, RFID (self service) and the mobile libraries were given to the Oxfordshire Save Our Libraries group in a meeting they had with the acting head librarian, the director of social and community services and the cabinet member for safer and stronger communities.

Below in a graph:

The RFID has only been rolled out to nine libraries, the extra savings I presume are coming from rolling it out to the other libraries. It has saved on average of 15% of the staffing budget of the libraries it has been rolled out to so far.

Here's a quote from the David Cameron on cuts:

"Any cabinet minister, if we win the election, who comes to me and says 'here are my plans' and they involve front-line reductions, they'll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again." 

This is a quote from him on the big society:

"This is not about trying to save money, it is about trying to have a bigger, better society." 


I am not political in the sense I follow a particular party anymore but the cabinet cannot wave this through, how can they? 


A quote from Gandalf  who has told me he supports the #savelibraries campaign:


 "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" 

Where OxfordshireCC should be looking to save back office costs

As part of the on-going campaign to save Wychwood library I put in a FOI to Oxfordshire County Council for their CIPFA Submissions. CIPFA (The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) gather data from various public bodies and collate it all together so councils can see how they are doing compared to others. It’s a good idea, the only downside is CIPFA charge for the data if you’re not a public body. Thankfully FOI allows us to see the CIPFA questionnaire that the bodies submit if not the collated data.

I wanted the data for two reasons, to see how the data changes over time for OCC and to compare the OCC data with other authorities.  The data from other bodies I found by chance on a great FOI site called “What do they know”.  Here are my main findings.

Since 2004-2005 the staffing costs for the library service has gone up from 5,298,738 to 5,917,059. During the same period the “professional staff” has gone down from 40.2 to 37.6 and the “all other staff” has gone down from 188.9 to 160.5. The headings are vague but looking at other sources of data from OCC “professional staff” is the management part of the library service and the “all other staff” is the librarians, staff who work in service support and customer service. Obviously numbers have gone down and salaries have gone up. I currently cannot prove the majority of extra salaries have gone on the management. Anecdotally I know the front line librarians haven’t had pay rises enough to account for all the extra salary that has been made available. Both from the increased pot and the extra cash from those that have left in the period. I will be able to prove this soon though. Below is the data that shows this:

 (N.B OCC didn’t fill in the 09/10 cipfa financial bit)

The second part of the CIPFA that I wanted to look at was how OCC compared with other authorities. There is a lot of data to churn through but on issues and income our library service in Oxfordshire actually does quite well compared to others.

Where they do badly though is on other costs. They are completely inefficient compared to others in the CIPFA submissions on capital charges, service support and other expenditure. I had to exclude Worstershire from this one because they haven’t filled out their service support costs. Below is the comparison:

It looks worse when you look at it as a graph:

OCC have a much smaller population to provide libraries for, yet compared to Staffordshire and Notts their service support, capital charges and other expenditure are massive. I’m sure OCC will have plenty of excuses as to why their overheads are so high but if other shire counties with higher populations can do it cheaper then they need to be getting on the phone to them rather than cutting librarians. It shows how inefficient the back office is at OCC.

My initial conclusions on this again reinforce the points I made in my first blog. There is no need to cut the front-line, there are so many potential efficiencies that can be made that would save the more that the 336k their volunteer approach is supposedly going to save. To save you reading the last blog that has all of this here is a brief summary.

For their quantitative analysis they misquote a MLA study to give them five measures to prove what would constitute a core library service that they think would meet the statutory requirements. The factually incorrect sentence is:

This survey emphasises the importance of where people live and work as to whether or not they use a library service.

The MLA reports don’t support this sentence and they did at one point say it was incorrect and pointed me to the save Doncaster libraries blog. This had the MLA checklist which also doesn’t support the five measures. In a later meeting one of the people who did the QA actually claimed the report did support the measures. Out of the 198 page document they managed to get one page of quotes, mostly from the focus groups. The five measures are not in the conclusions of the MLA report, the MLA checklist, the Wirral report or the public libraries act. They have got it completely wrong on and will be in breach of the public libraries act:

 "It shall be the duty of every library authority to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service for allpersons desiring to make use thereof,"

Because when the libraries close (and they will under this proposal) there will be people too old to travel the 9 miles to Chipping Norton to use the library and OCC will be breaking the law.

There are many other areas they could look to save within the library service itself:

We know they are installing self-service machines across the service at great expense (994,553!) but I don’t think they have looked at the bottom three enough.

They have also said our volunteer costs that show it won’t actually save money may be too high because they can do some of them in-house:

Now I’m sorry but looking at how inefficient they are in service support, capital charges and other costs above if OCC do anything in house it is going to be more expensive rather than cheaper. And if it is cheaper how come they don’t do this anyway for their own staff? On top of the above they are also hiring a 60k a year volunteer co-ordinator, this will cancel out their tiny gains once they have paid off  the costs of training and the 1 million for self service in the first year.

Finally there is the issue of the fact that though out all this OCC haven’t looked at any of the data in their own systems when they made their proposal, the below is the libraries ranked on salary spend and issues with the best performing at the top ranked on the two measures:

The top eleven on this measure of their own data fall into the group having the most funding cut, clearly they haven’t looked at this properly.

The other thing they haven’t looked at is if the existing data supports the whole point of their QA:

 Do people use libraries that are not near where they live? Their whole analysis is working on the assumption that because we have libraries near to where we work and visit and that have good transport links then it doesn’t matter about the local library because we can all use the ones near where we work and study etc.

They can prove or disprove this by looking at the data in their galaxy system but when I put the idea to them it hadn’t even occurred to them. In fact the one of the main guys on the analysis is a sociology student doing two days a week at OCC. What qualifications he has in data analysis or libraries I don’t know. I suspect they were told from above what was required and they delivered it.  Either way they have been negligent in my opinion by not studying the data they have. If a private company was trying to save costs,  would it ignore its own sales and salary data  across its stores when reconfiguring its business. This is what OCC have done.

Councils have a statutory responsibility to be open and transparent when consulting and making decisions, this also includes documenting why other possible courses of action were not proposed instead. Nearly all of the above has come from FOI, they haven’t told us why they haven’t looked into the back office sharing, what they got from the Hillingdon visit nor have they been open with any of the data.  They haven’t even looked at their own data when drawing up their proposals. Clearly the whole thing is a political big society initiative that has no evidence to back it up. The guy who came up with the big society is the same guy who floated the idea of women not having maternity leave to boost the economy.

 It isn’t going to work, they aren’t going to save money and they will be breaking their statutory duties as a council.

p.s I didn't know about http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ when I was doing my FOI requests, I will be doing them through that site in future. I will find a decent method to share all the data online this week. If anyone needs it before then let me know.

Cherry picking after the cherry pickers

Here are some quotes from the future libraries report November 2010. Obviously in Oxfordshire they cherry picked a few responses from the focus groups and a statistical bit to try and back up their five measures nonsense. Here are some other quotes that I have cherry picked from the reports, some are from users some are from the MLA report conclusions itself. I have also put a few graphs at the end. It is worth bearing in mind nowhere in the report does it say the future of libraries is to close them:

“For pensioners [it’s] a question of money. You can’t afford to buy every book you read.” Library
user, older person, rural area.


“The job of the library should be to continually endeavour to get young people there - nothing can
compare to holding a book – it’s about getting young people and children reading.” Non-user, older
person, rural area


“Bean counters don’t understand the real value of a library. For people who live in villages on their
own, [visiting the library] is like an outing.” Library user, rural area


“I’m flabbergasted at the range of things you can do there.” Non-user, older person, rural area


“The library is essential to community – it adds cohesion to the village.” Library user, older person,
rural area


“As pubs and post offices close the library is the last throw of the dice.” Library user, older person,
rural area


“I reckon a lot is being creamed off at the top and it’s not getting to delivery, to the library
assistants”. Non-user, older person, rural area


“You would have to know any profits are going back into the library and not being swallowed up by
the council.” Library user, rural area




"Emerging evidence suggests that back office mergers alone may save 5 to 10 per cent whilst full service merger across a number of councils could achieve savings in the order 10 to 25 per cent depending on the number of councils involved, locality (rural or urban) and current practice."


The graphs:

How important are libraries to users:

Using volunteers is going to stuff the things people are most satisfied about with their libraries:

What would encourage visits:

If you are having trouble sleeping the the link to all parts of the MLA reports is below, I will add quotes and graphs to this from other sources when I find stuff. I am currently trying to discover what the public library service standards benchmarks (PLSS) were replaced with, supposedly it is the "National Library Benchmarks" but I cannot find them anywhere, if anyone knows please add a comment or tweet me (@rubymalvolio).

MLA reports:

http://research.mla.gov.uk/evidence/view-publication.php?dm=nrm&pubid=1161

The now defunct PLSS stats:

http://research.mla.gov.uk/evidence/view-publication.php?dm=nrm&pubid=1161

Flawed consultation and why volunteers won't work

Oxfordshire county council are currently going through a consultation on their proposal for the library service.  The proposal is based on their Quantitative Analysis based on research on the following five measures:

Where people,

• Live
• Work
• Study
• Shop
• Public Transport Accessibility

Using various different datasets from other public bodies, most of which we are not allowed to see because they are under “commercial license” they have scored each library and then given an aggregate score.  They used half a mile around each for their scoring. Obviously this method is clearly going to be biased against rural areas, over 66% of the half mile circle around Wychwood library is fields. Most of Milton Under Wychwood is ignored as is all the surrounding Wychwood villages and schools that use the library. The city libraries are nearly all surrounded by housing, shops, schools and have good public transport in comparison to rural Oxfordshire. To back up this bias against rural libraries, only one library in their city group of libraries has fallen out of the fully funded bracket. OCC say there isn’t a bias and that the measures are fair. Lots of the other library groups are unhappy about this, including me. What I was interested in though was how they came to the conclusion that the measures used were the correct ones.

To back up the five measures their quantitative analysis has this paragraph:

In deciding this, we looked at what people said they wanted from their

library service – focusing particularly on a large-scale survey carried

out by the MLA in November of 2010. This survey emphasises the

importance of where people live and work as to whether or not they use a library service. (Emphasis added)

This is a 198 page series of quantitative and qualitative reports written by the museums and libraries archive council (MLA).  We read thought these documents and couldn’t find anywhere that emphasised their premise. When the Wychwoods group gave our presentation to OCC at the library I put this point to them and the acting chief librarian told us there was a mistake and they would look into the apparent misquoting of their source for the premise. A few days later I had a email saying this was what they used to come up with their five measures:

http://savedoncasterlibraries.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/comprehensive-and-efficient

It turns out to be a link to the save Doncaster libraries blog, which in turn links to a FOI request the save Doncaster libraries group put into the MLA. 

This was guidance given to Doncaster by the MLA on what should be taken into account when making changes to the library service.

All very odd.

I then asked her for the guidance OCC had received directly from the MLA as some of the points were Doncaster specific, I got this reply:

The checklist I have given you was the one issued to Doncaster but I used it to refer you to the relevance of live, work etc. from MLA’s perspective and that therefore those measures are valid.

I have searched the MLA site, the OCC site and also googled for another copy of this guidance. If it was something that was issued to all councils considering changes to the library service it would pop up elsewhere, it doesn’t.

Resorting to the tedious and time consuming FOI request method I asked OCC and the MLA what email, meeting notes or other correspondence they had between the two bodies on the consultation and any advice given. I received the following response from OCC:

I am writing to inform you that having searched our records and consulted with the appropriate officers the information requested is not held by Oxfordshire County Council.

We subsequently had a meeting with OCC and one of the team working on the QA is adamant that the Quantitative Analysis premise backs up their five measures. They have produced quotes from the QA but this only amounts to 1 page worth of text mainly from focus group responses. The report runs to 198 pages. It isn’t in the premise of the QA or any of the conclusions but they still stand by it.

So to sum up here are the current facts:

• The OCC QA premise is misquoted and they say the QA is based on evidence from a study that doesn’t back up their analytical method.
• They then say actually that is wrong, here is what we used and sent me a link to a blog that in turn links to a FOI request from another group on guidance to Doncaster.
• They have had no communication themselves with the MLA with regards to this consultation and their analysis.
• Even the guidance given to Doncaster doesn't back up their measures really, they have also not demonstrated they have looked into or followed the other points in the Doncaster guidance.
• They then say actually is does come from the MLA report and they stand by it. Even though it doesn’t back up their premise

The MLA future libraries report is actually quite good, it suggests a lot of good ways of saving money. For example up to 15% of library service costs could be saved by sharing back office costs with other authorities. If applied to OCC this would save almost exactly the 2 million they are trying to save. There are ten authorities in the future library program and only Oxfordshire and Kent are looking at replacing staff with volunteers. Kent haven't made their proposals public yet though.

They have made no mention of this research by the MLA, their consultation and proposal totally ignores it. They will say that you cannot share back office costs in rural areas because of the distances involved. I used to commute from Oxfordshire into Cheltenham for two years, it took 40 minutes. I now commute from one part of Oxfordshire to another (Wychwoods to Abingdon) it takes 50 minutes. That argument doesn’t cut the mustard, especially with the technology for remote working we have today.

Below is a graph of the current staffing costs at OCC, we only got this data because of a FOI request. It didn't form part of the consultation. The cuts are in blue:

All of the cuts proposed by their analysis are to rural libraries with the exception of Old Marston. Nothing in the proposal mentions back office savings, savings in the city libraries or in management or service support (the back office).

We always hope for evidenced based policy from public bodies but it seems we rarely get it. It’s a dangerous mix of the nonsense that is the “Big Society” from the councillors and the officers actively ignoring the alternatives trying to save their own skins.  Below is the costs to the friends group of the CRB checks and the cost to OCC for the various health and safety training they are going to have to provide for the volunteers. 

They are actually going to lose money on this in the first year and won’t see any actual savings until year four, and even those will be minimal. The other costs will reoccur because things like first aid and fire marshal training have to be renewed. I used the sources for the costs that match the certificates for the staff that are on the wall in the library. On the level of volunteers we have a community shop in Ascott and they require 4 part-time staff and 36 volunteers so the numbers of volunteers needed is probably conservative. I also understand that they going to hire a volunteer coordinator on probably around 50-60k a year. They have also said they won't be paying the expenses for the volunteers. I look forward to councillors giving up their allowances in line with this new OCC policy.

Finally, the hard data points they have ignored are issues and salary spend for each library. If you do a score for the best of each working down and then aggregate them you get a score for the most efficient libraries on costs per issue:

The top eleven libraries using this method (they took no account of these numbers in their analysis) are all libraries in the group that is getting its funding cut to a third.

In the meeting we had the other day I accused them of being negligent because they haven’t check the existing data to see if people actually use libraries outside of their home area. It hadn’t even occurred to them. I have asked for the data so I can actually see if people use the local libraries or the library they live/work/shop/study near and see if the flawed premise can even be stood up with real data. The haven't looked at any of the existing data at all, you wouldn't reconfigure any business without looking at how the existing parts of company perform.

OCC have to think again, this isn’t a fair and transparent consultation, the premise and quantitative analysis is flawed, they haven’t done a qualitative analysis to see which libraries are doing a good job and are efficient and which are not. They have no data or evidence to back up the proposals. And crucially it isn’t really going to save them any money, it is going to create a massive bureaucracy to manage all the extra training the volunteers will require by law.  This goes before the cabinet in “late autumn” and will be voted on by ten of seventy four Oxfordshire County Councillors, between them the ten councillors were voted for by 2.4% of the 635500 population.

Here are the links to the sources for the data:

The FOI request on spending:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdEwwcWZaZlh6bW42cU1EWUczNnpOTUE&hl=en_US

The OCC quantitative analysis:

http://portal.oxfordshire.gov.uk/content/publicnet/council_services/leisure_culture/libraries/consultation/DataPaper26May.pdf

The data on library salaries and book issues etc.:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdGlKdTVHbHdBRFNLbHo5dWs5amZzdnc&hl=en_US

The Doncaster blog and FOI:

http://savedoncasterlibraries.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/comprehensive-and-efficient

The links to the volunteer spending for training:

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1084426773&r.l1=1073858787&r.l2=1073858914&r.l3=1084607697&r.l4=1084415157&r.s=m&type=RESOURCES

http://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/wps/portal/publicsite/councilservices?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=http://apps.oxfordshire.gov.uk/wps/wcm/connect/occ/internet%2Fcouncil+services%2Ffire+and+public+safety%2Ffire+and+rescue+service%2Ffire+safety+training%2Fcourses%2F1+-+fps+-+f+-+b+-+com+train+-+fire+marshal

http://www.sja.org.uk/sja/training-courses/course-search.aspx

The MLA  report that cites the back office savings that can be achieved in urban and rural libraries:

http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press_releases/2011/~/media/Files/pdf/2011/libraries/future-libraries-report.ashx

House of Spad/why Spads are bad

It seems most of the front benches these days are populated by ministers and their shadows who are former SPAD's (special advisers to departments/ministers).

David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, Douglas Alexander and no doubt many others are all former advisers to other politicians. I would have no problem with this in itself if they had gone off and achieved things in the world outside of politics, but sadly this isn't the case. I'll do a quick google biography of each leader to see what life experience they bring to their politics and policy.

David Cameron:

Eton College and Oxford University, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics and gaining a first class honours degree. After graduating he worked for the Conservative Party Research Department and then as a Special Adviser in government, first to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and then to the Home Secretary. Cameron spent seven years at Carlton, as head of corporate communications, travelling the world with the firm's boss Michael Green, who has described him as "board material".

He went straight in as head of comms at 27 despite having no experience of the communications industry. According to the Guardian he got the job because his girlfriend’s mother Lady Astor was good friends with Michael Green and he started on a salary of £90,000 a year.

He stood for the Stafford seat in 1997 which he lost and then in 2001 he was picked for the safe tory seat of West Oxfordshire, former seat of Douglas Hurd.

Ed Milliband:

London School of Economics, where he obtained a Masters in Economics.

The only non-party thing I can find anywhere is that “Ed worked briefly as a journalist “ but I cannot find out where or for whom. The rest of his career has been within the Labour party as a tea maker, speech writer, and adviser to Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown.  In 2002 he took a 12-month unpaid sabbatical from the Treasury to be a visiting scholar at the Centre for European Studies of Harvard University.

Nick Clegg:

Clegg studied social anthropology at Cambridge, was awarded a scholarship to study for a year at the University of Minnesota. Then worked as an intern under Christopher Hitchens at The Nation, in New York. He then went to Brussels to work for the G24 co-ordination unit, worked for a year at GJW a lobbying group (GJW had at one point lobbied for Libya). He then worked for the European Commision and then as European Union policy adviser and speech writer for Leon Brittan.

From there he was elected as a euro MP for the East Midlands. After that he was part of political lobbying firm GPlus as a fifth partner.

He was selected for the seat of Sheffield Hallam after the previous Lib Dem holder was Richard Allan was given a seat in the Lords. Although it isn’t a safe seat, since 1997 when the Tories lost the seat the Liberal Democrats have always got at least 51% of the vote.

I won’t do biogs of all the other spads mentioned but needless to say none of these people have really had jobs in the real world. If parties did choose their candidates on merit then these people wouldn’t be MP’s as they haven’t actually done anything to prove themselves. Instead we have a system of nepotism and patronage when who you know and not what you know is the most important thing to get ahead.

Thanks to the county voting no on the AV referendum it seems we are stuck with safe seats in this country for the foreseeable future. What we should have in this county is open primaries for candidates. I think it was something Cameron had suggested once before the election in 2010 but nothing has been heard of since. The local people should have a say in who the party puts up for election since we know that the current system means the candidates are chosen by central office and the local party committee, both of which are not elected by local people. In safe seats especially this is wholly undemocratic. 

It would be nice if a similar system could be brought in at local level too. Most of the council seats where I live in rural Oxfordshire never elect a non-Tory. Since the introduction of cabinets in councils democracy is even worse. There are 10 cabinet councillors who in Oxfordshire between them were voted for by 2.4% of the population. They make the decisions despite 97.6% of us never voted for them. It is hardly a shining beacon of democracy we teach to others.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/20/david-cameron-the-pr-years

http://www6.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2011/01/23/is-this-the-age-of-the-spads/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cameron

Keith answers some questions

Thank you for answering, I honestly didn’t think you would so it is appreciated. I find your sketching of my political leanings as a lefty Daily Mail reader interesting, I have no political leanings (other than to distrust politicians and the political process) I believe in things that are proven to work. I think that its probably the pot calling the kettle black considering the amount of people in Oxfordshire who don’t like your style. Hopefully one day the county will have an elected Mayor who is truly accountable, unlike under the current political system where it is a question of who you know rather than what you know. Below are your answers to my questions and at the end my feedback:

I do not know who you are and I do not like your style.  You are not one of my constituents in the Bloxham Electoral Division and I do not owe you a duty of care any more than the other 630,000 residents in Oxfordshire.  You show a mixture of lefty politics with the ravings of the Daily Mail which is an interesting combination and probably the only reason I am replying to your generally impudent questions and accusations.
1	Windrush Court in Abingdon. Does something to do with schools, has a office that never has more than five people in it yet has space for about 35. Rent a smaller office. This is a good question to which I do not  know the answer but be sure I will get it.  I do not believe in maintaining  buildings we do not need.
2	Average 25k a month on non-school taxis for staff and councillors. Use public transport. Sorry - taxis are public transport.  When I go to London for meetings, I use taxis to get from one part of London to another quickly and in comfort.  I have not the slightest intention of getting on a bus or a tube train.  I support others who do the same when time is of the essence.
3	Pay over 50k has gone up, as have the numbers of staff. Doesn’t sound like cuts are being made to me:https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdFNLX2xNV2RYUmYwT0ZlYlF6cmxuTUE&hl=en_US#gid=0 We have cut our senior management ferociously and have worked through each level.  There are far fewer people in the organisation already and still a lot more to go.  I do not accept this statistic as suggesting we are on the wrong track.  We still have a huge business to run.
4	£96k comms director  get rid of the role. Absolutely not.  His post incorporates four previous posts at a considerable saving and there is a real job for him to do in the organisation. With people like you and you are not the only one, we must have an effective means of supporting our work through effective communications.  We are not a tin pot little district council; we are the size of a FTSE250 company.
5	£180,000 on OXONNEWS magazine. Nobody want this, cut it. Already done!
6	£225,0000 a year on mobile phones. There isn’t any mobile numbers on the OCC site. There must be cuts here. No  We are the most rural county in the South East.  Our team includes social workers and social care providers travelling from one town or village to the next.  Our highway engineers and planners need to keep in touch while on site.  Our education support people spend time out on the road and, again, need to work on e-mails and keep in touch.   It is too easy to characterise some costs as unimportant when they are a part of modern management styles and essential.
7	£68,988 on LGA, complete waste of time. Paying for one part of government to lobby another. This demonstrates your total ignorance.  The LGA carries out a huge lobbying exercise on MPs and Peers to seek changes to draft legislation that is frequently plain daft.  Without the LGA, local government will become even more supine in the face of a still too centralising government and civil service.
8	Salary of Chief Exec 184k, other execs in England are actually taking pay cuts, get a shared chief exec with the district councils in Oxfordshire. A number of issues here.  Firstly, to cut my Chief Executive's pay arbitrarily would be an act of constructive dismissal and very expensive.  Secondly, she is worth every penny;  you know what I earn and I have absolutely no hesitation in supporting her salary. Thirdly, we are the size of a FTSE250 company; we employ 22,000 staff; we have responsibility for a billion pound budget an dour actions impact on 630,000 citizens in Oxfordshire.  We are not a piddling little district council, spending £20 million pa and employing 200 or 300 staff.  In any case, you clearly fail to understand the politics of local government because district council leaders would run several miles before getting into bed with a county council.  They are terrified of our scale and strategic role.
9	£115,105 pa on full time union reps . This has to be cut, we shouldn’t be paying for this! I am afraid this also shows your naivety and innocence.  How do you think we are delivering huge cuts and redundancies without disputes and strikes?  Supporting a small trade union unit in this way works hugely to our advantage and to the staff of the council.
10	The savings in the Library consultation would save £371k a year. Cutting the pointless magazine, paid union staff and a little squeeze the other stuff would easily save the front line staffing in the libraries. We have done most of these things.  If I could squeeze anymore money out of back office functions, I would want to put it into social care where the real need lies and not into comfortable middle class libraries where our middle class residents in towns and villages can easily support them and keep them going.  ... and this from the Leader of a Conservative Party allegedly driven to listen to the strident voices of his middle class voters. And that is your lot .....

1. Thanks for looking into it, property rates are not cheap and any savings made are good, OCC has property all over the place and I would have thought this would have been reviewed already.

2. It’s easy to spend money when it isn’t your own, London has a fantastic range of buses and tube stations, you should try them, as should your staff. 25k a month on taxis in any financial climate is shocking. It would not happen in the private sector.

3. The numbers of staff on over 50k have gone up by 5 as has the spend, how exactly you can support the phrase "cut our senior management ferociously" when you own data disputes this is beyond me.

4. The communications role provides the odd quote for the mail and maintains the completely pointless twitter feed. Local authorities shouldn't be using expensive spin doctors.

5.Hurrah! :D

6.Highways engineers and planners are outsourced to Atkins in a £350 million contract, this is spending by OCC staff not them. Mobiles should be given on a business case, I expect a lot of your staff have expensive BlackBerry phones whether they are required or not. In fact do you have one? Should you really be using it to tweet insults at voters?

7. Are the LGA a third chamber in Westminster then? They spent over 27 million on consultants in 2010. They (consultants) are similar to the “ambulance chasing lawyers” you so hate but they prey on public bodies instead. I think the work of the LGA is what Sir Humphrey Appleby would call "useful work" to the minister and “creative inertia” to his civil servant colleagues. I'm sorry but they are an unelected, unaccountable kleptocracy that adds nothing in value to the taxpayers.

8. I wish councillors would stop comparing public sector executives to those in the private sector, it isn't the same thing. She isn't accountable to shareholders, doesn't take the decisions (councillors do that I hope!) and if she makes mistakes the elected officials will take the blame. I have nothing against her personally, she may as you say be fantastic at her job but she is overpaid. You are out of step with your own party leadership on this issue and there are examples councils cutting the salary of the role by 50k (Islington Council for example) because of public pressure.

9.Paying for union employees I think is a throwback from the closed shop, I have little time for unions when their own leaders are on 100k plus salaries and have grace and favour houses for life. What evidence do you have that paying this 115k every year has prevented strike action? Taxpayers should not be funding this. I'm amazed you are happy to pay for it when they are so many areas where this money could be put to better use. The terrible bed blocking issues we have in Oxfordshire for example. The funding settlement is so tight anyway this should really be cut. I find it morally distasteful if I'm honest.

10. I have seen the "if we don't cut libraries we have to cut social care more" line before. Its a very poor argument, I believe in a billion pound budget the choices are not as binary as this. It is emotive political line that I believe has no basis in fact.  I would have thought that the very poor sats results for literacy in Oxfordshire would mean cutting library funding would be the last thing you would want to do.  The study published in November 2010 by the MLA clearly states that libraries are not a middle class resource like museums and the arts, they are used equally by people from all social back rounds. People are really squeezed Keith, we have to work long hours for our money and cannot claim expenses for the commute to work like you can. Most of us are not getting 33k a year you get so we are not as comfortable you are either. Also the costs of volunteering for example CRB checks and other training (health and safety, fire marshal etc.) I understand will have to be funded by the friends groups, in other words we are going to have to pay to volunteer. We had fully funded libraries pre 1997 so I don’t see how you can blame the Labour spending on any of the front line cuts, you never turned down any of the extra finance during the Labour years either.

Thanks again for responding I do really appreciate it, I don’t expect any further response as clearly you have plenty on your plate as there is a lot wrong at OCC that you need to sort.