Those who search through piles of rubbish in the hope of finding something of value

The slightly misleading title is according to wiki what scrutiny actually means: Scrutiny (French: scrutin; Late Latin: scrutinium; from scrutari, meaning "those who search through piles of rubbish in the hope of finding something of value,") Which I think is quite apt considering some policies that come from government at both local and national level. What has been clear to me quite recently during the libraries fight and watching the various select committees is that politicians are incapable of following the rules and putting tribal politics to one side and actually scrutinising policies and departments on evidence. I don't think it applies to all of them of course, there are some very strong committees in Westminster which are chair by independently minded back benches who are unafraid of upsetting their own governments and whips. I think though although the committee system in parliament and scrutiny at local level is a improvement at what has gone before I think improvements are needed. I had jury duty last year and spent a week mainly just sat about waiting to be called, I did get to sit on a case for the last two days which was a very interesting experience. Why can we not have citizen involvement in the democratic process in a similar vein? I would imagine it isn't beyond the wit of government both locally and nationally to arrange "scrutiny service." It would of course still need a professional chairman and deputy, this could be a civil servant and politician but this should only be to run the meetings and answer the questions of the lay members of the committee. They should be the ones doing the actual line by line scrutiny and making sure what has been proposed and that it stacks up. Currently what we have is committees at local level where the bulk of the members are from the party that holds power, in Westminster from what I have seen the committees appear to be a bit more independent but watching how partisan some members of the DCMS committee are I feel they cannot be trusted to be impartial. The system will of course bang on about the cost, considering how much departments like defense waste every year on very, very poor procurement I think it will more than pay for itself. If its good enough for law, its good enough for government.

Lies damn lies and statistics

Because of the sad death of a Councillor Roger Belson over Christmas, Oxfordshire County Council held a by-election for the vacant division of Watlington in the South of the county. The division was held by the Tory candidate Caroline Newton. Although the share of the total votes for the Conservatives was only down by about 4%, the actual drop in votes was very dramatic. There were 1720 votes for the party in 2009 but only 865 in this by-election. The turnout was very poor, only 24% of those eligible to vote compared with 54% in 2009. I don't know if this is a common trend for by-elections but the fact that most of the voters stayed away and the vast majority of them were Tory doesn't bode well for the party next year. The Greens didn't put up a candidate this time but UKIP did. UKIP got 110 votes, obviously this helped bring the numbers down for the Tories. What I decided to do with the data "just for fun" as Peter Snow would say is apply the percentage changes to the three main parties to the other divisions in Oxfordshire. Only having a small sample and the numerous other variables that can come into play means it is only a very rough estimate but if the trend for the Tory voters did hold out until 2013 and similar happened in their other safe divisions then the Tories could be in trouble next year.

Here is the divisions as of 2009:

And then the projected divisions for 2013:

On this extrapolation the Tories would a two seat majority over the other parties. Of course this is based only on tweaking the numbers for the three main parties. If Labour and the Lib Dems put in a strong performance in most of the seats  then it could get end up looking a lot worse. I personally think the Tories have more to fear from the UKIP candidates as they can split their vote in the places were they're not really safe like Kennington and the Abingdon East and North divisions. The boundaries are being redrawn soon so we end up with less county councillors, not sure if this is in time for next year but this could also have unforeseen consequences. 

I hope the Tory group are having a long, hard look at themselves before the next election. Reading the reports in the newspapers about my favourite "oik assessor" Keith Mitchell (thanks to @daddyofbob for that one!) taking decisions on his own, announcing them to the media and expecting the group to back him, have done I think massive damage to the parties standing. Having also witnessed the "scrutiny" process first hand thanks to the pointless, vote killing library cuts, this is something that I believe also needs sorting. They are supposed to be independent and non-political, I personally don't think they are and they just follow the party line.  I have been searching the committee papers and have yet to find a single instance where the actually didn't approve something put to them and forced cabinet to look at something again. If true it means ideas and evidence are not being tested and it can only lead to bad decisions and policies being waved through. We see plenty of evidence of this in the Oxford Mail.

The time has come for the Tories to start listening to voters and not take them for granted in their rural seats as they have done for the past ten decade. And some proper, evidence based policies with real consultation that engages the voters with proper independent scrutiny. If they don't they could end up watching a coalition of Labour and Lib Dems running the County Council until 2017. Democracy demands it.

P.S I normally put up a link to the data. I'm not this time because I had to painstakingly cut and paste the results from annoying web pages on the OCC site because the council has thus far not put up the data in a actual data format! If anyone wants the data though just ask nicely and I will send it.

P.P.S here is a link to the Oik Assessors site with more info on the new county councillor, who unlike a lot of politicians has actual experience in the real world

http://www.krmcbe.co.uk/political_blog.htm

 

Who gets to be in charge of the red telephone?

I have been scratching my brains as to why there is so little information on the newly created police commissioners, especially since the elections are in November which is a lot closer than you think.  Nobody as far as I know has stepped up for the Thames Valley vacancy. I thought it might be the outgoing leader of OCC but Keith has ruled himself out.  It is a hugely important job, The Thames Valley police authority covers Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire which between them have a combined population of around 2.2 million and the force has 8065 employees. The candidate will be on a salary of around 80k and I presume will have a four year term of office. 


Since there was so little information and nobody has announced they were running yet I fired off a email to the electoral commission who I'm delighted to say emailed back the next day with some information which I have pasted below:

The Government has not yet confirmed the rules that will apply to standing for election, or campaign spending and donations at the Police and Crime Commissioner elections. The Electoral Commission anticipates that there will be: 

• Rules about who can stand for election and the nomination process
• Limits on spending by individual candidates
• Limits on spending by people and organisations who campaign for or against individual candidates (non-party campaigners), in the run-up to the elections
• Rules about who candidates can accept donations from to support their campaigns in the run-up to the elections
• There may also be rules for political parties and non-party campaigners who support or oppose groups of candidates. 

We will produce guidance for candidates and agents, as soon as we can, currently we are waiting for rules to be finalised and agreed by Parliament. 


The most interesting thing is they don't have the confirmed rules yet. The police reform and social responsibility act received royal assent on the 15 September 2011 so I have no idea why the electoral commission is still waiting on the home office for this. It hardly smacks of great government though.


Having had a quick skim of the bill the role will be elected under the simple majority system, unless there are three or more candidates then the voting switches to supplementary vote which allows a first and second preference vote. All seems a bit odd.


I used to be all for more democratic accountability with elector mayors etc but having watched the antics of Boris and Ken and the frankly dreadful mayor of Doncaster I'm not so sure anymore. The big risk is the police commissioner will be too political and too populist when really for policing a more measured and impartial view should be taken on such things. On the plus side it does mean people will know where the buck stops but we shall see how it pans out. My only experience of commissioners is from The Wire where they are all corrupt or Commissioner Gordon who was useless and relied too much on the dark knight to sort out Gotham. 




Below is a link to the bill if you have insomnia or are like me interested in these sorts of things:


http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/13/pdfs/ukpga_20110013_en.pdf 


A link to the home office page where the person who came up with that orange colour should be sacked:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/police/police-crime-commissioners/

A thing in the indy from a couple of months ago, about the Thames Valley role:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/diary/diary-will-nobody-step-up-and-be-camerons-local-copper-6293709.html

Painting go faster stripes on the titanic

OCC (Oxfordshire County Council) have introduced e-books with a initial spend of £43,560 and a annual cost of £35,598 while cutting 25% out of the library budget partially by withdrawing up to 50% of staff funding rural libraries (and one city).


They are also spending £150,074 (estimate) putting wifi in every one of the libraries.

70 people have written and asked for e-books, anecdotally they say lots of people have asked verbally too.  70 out of 680,000.

The wifi is pointless because there is already decent private provision of wifi by bt-openzone and others in cities. You can go to most places in cities and pick up a wireless signal these days. In rural libraries its even more pointless, people come into the libraries to use the computers. They are hardly going to use their own laptops in the rural libraries when if they own a laptop its almost certain they have broadband at home. Of course for smart phone users we have 3g anyway and I don't go into my library to sit on my smart phone.

They have also started providing audio books as a download service. I don't have costs for this though. 

The technology for the audio books and ebooks is actually quite good and I think in the future it will be good. The problems are:

1. Ebooks wont work on kindle due to licencing issues.
2. The audio books won't work on any smart phone and some ipods because of the drm in use.
3. The choice isn't great in either ebooks or audiobooks.

I remember chatting to the acting chief librarian about ebooks last year and I told her that it was too early to spend money on this because of the licensing issue and the format wars going on between the major players. Obviously the content has to be protected with some sort of DRM (digital rights management) but this clearly fell on deaf ears.

They are cutting 13.5k from our library staffing but in exchange we get:

1. To run it ourselves by managing the volunteers with all the costs involved. (see previous blogs, it doesn't actually save any money)
2. Ebooks nobody wants or that most cannot currently use
3. Audio books that only people with old fashioned mp3 players can use
4. Wifi that is pointless and unnecessary.
5. Self service machines that we don't need in a small rural library

They would saved lots of money if they had put the ebooks/audio books/wifi on the back burner for a few years until things settle down and all the major parties can get their heads together and agree on proper standards, it can them be available to all rather than to select devices. 

This isn't the public sector way though, evidence of effectiveness, demand or need mean nothing. Its new and shiny therefore we must have it now.

Sigh

link to the foi:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/e_books_and_wifi#incoming-257315 

Volunteers, the unlimited big society resource/The big society tax

This post was prompted by a BBC Gloucestershire article that reports because of the cuts to their funding by councils, charities are warning they are going to rely even more on the voluntary sector:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-17021504

65% of the charities surveyed are cutting staff and a third are planning on increasing their use of volunteers. Considering charities are mostly staffed by volunteers already, the question has to be asked, where are all the extra volunteers going to come from?


In Oxfordshire, 21 of the 43 libraries are having their staffing cut by various percentages. A conservative estimate of the volunteers required to staff these libraries is around 500. They will of course have the "support" of the council who will train them in health and safety, use of the expensive self service machines (pointless in a small rural library) and they will be treat as a member of staff. There is a rather lengthy 11 page job description, which looks exactly like the paid job but without the wages. OCC have refused at every stage to put a estimate on how many volunteers are required, which is either a lie or they really don't know and this means that have no idea how much of the 313k is really a saving. I think the saving will be nothing looking at the work required by them to implement this and the extra staff in the back office they are hiring.


The main point from the survey in Gloucestershire is if the charities are going to require more and more volunteers then something has to give, the voluntary sector isn't a unlimited resource. It will be inevitable that if people are forced into volunteering to save a statutory library service then their time and skills will be sorely missed by a charity desperately in need of volunteers when their funding has also been cut and are forced to rely more heavily on the big society.


Libraries are a statutory service and the service should be comprehensive and efficient for all that want to use it, forcing volunteers to provide this service to themselves, at a time when volunteers are going to be desperately needed elsewhere is wrong. In forcing the volunteers without a choice to subsidise the statutory service with their time and skills, the big society is nothing more than a new tax. I thought Tories were anti tax?


A quote from Cameron on the Big Societytm


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


Well in forcing a dwindling pool of volunteers to run libraries and in all likelihood starving cash strapped charities of volunteers you are contributing to a worse society and in Oxfordshire's case, without saving any significant money, if any.


And finally, a volunteer isn't a volunteer if they are given no choice. The OED defines a volunteer as:


"a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task"

I don't remember freely offering to provide a statutory service to myself that I have already paid for.

Twitter and external comms

Oxfordshire County Council have finally started to use their twitter account for something other than tweeting pointless (mostly to me anyway) press releases. They have been tweeting about if the gritters are out or not and if icy roads are expected. Since I moan about them all the time I thought a "well done" was in order. I hope this is the start of OCC using twitter properly. It is probably the most powerful communications tool available now and there are so many great ways it can be used to get information to people. Other ideas for them could be:

• Live traffic updates
• School closures
• Live tweeting of council meetings
• Twitter debates on a hashtag with councillors and officers answering questions from the public
• Bus delays

These are just off the top of my head at 11:30 at night, there are probably loads of extra things I haven't thought of and will add more if and when they occur to me. The Oxford mail have stolen a march on them by tweeting about schools that have been closed because of the snow. I don't know if they got this information from the schools directly or from the OxfordshireCC, either way the council should have this information before anyone else.

Not only could they separate out these things with hashtags, they could have separate account for them and people who are interested in traffic can follow and have text alerts whenever the account tweets. It has to be used carefully of course, I wouldn't use it like that if it was the endless stream of other things on the account.

Twitter can be a great thing for improving democracy and getting all the huge amounts of information OCC have to the people that need it. I only hope they and the councillors have the wit to use it.

I hate visio but have do a very quick and simple diagram:

We are cutting ours, go use theirs. They are cutting those as well?

Gloucestershire county council have recently released their latest "exciting"* plans for the library service. I say released, re-released is actually a better phrase since they are almost identical to the plans they put out last time. While this has been going on they have been making very savage cuts to the bookstock spend which is now minuscele compared to the other shire authorities.Not only are they cutting libraries that will close unless volunteers come forward as they have in Oxon, they are actively encouraging their library uses to hop across to the libraries in surrounding counties instead of using their own. The first hint they were doing this was when they released a map showing what was happening to their libraries and I noticed our library was it:

They drew a five mile circle around the libraries of all in neighbouring counties. So according to GCC 30% of the library service from Wychwood and Burford covers the residents of Gloucestershire. But wait, we are being cut too! Burford and Wychwood are having the staffing cut by 50% and the volunteers are going to have to cover this and lots of the other duties of the paid staff. We are also no longer statutory so presumably the 1964 act which states provide a service to those who live, work and study doesn't apply.

I am in no way saying that if OCC do force us to volunteer to cover the staffing cuts we would ever turn people away because they were not from Oxfordshire. But personally, if I have to volunteer for something I have already paid for, and I also have to provide for free to another authority then the other authority has to contribute to our library, I will be billing them for my time.

I have FOI'ed the cipfa and the management and support structure data for Glos. I am going to go through and see how much duplication there is in the back office. The 313k savings (only really about 170k, see previous posts) could be made by sharing two or three of the back office staff with Glos. Glos have around 900k to save (I think) and I'm sure that just sharing a building and with us and ditching the Holton head office would easily make that saving.

Both these authorities are tory, they doubtless all know each other from the endless, expensive jaunts to London pointless LGA** meetings. What are they playing at?

Here is the links:

GCC consultation which has the full map and lots of really useless data:
http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=107166

The article on the officer telling a Glos group to use libraries in other counties:
 bit.ly/w4h4Qg

p.s GCC seems to be experts in Orwellian/Humphrey Appleby double speak. They are even worse than OCC!


*Exciting is political double speak for crap
**LGA-Local government association, a lobbying group that taxpayers pay for so councils can lobby parliament. One part of government lobbies another with taxpayers money. They spent 27 million on consultants in 2010:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdDVSZFdzMWVTRWhlYmFhS21FYW5fUWc&hl=en_US#gid=3