The Blogger’s inexorable rise continues with our first mention in the council chamber…
We will, of course, not rest until we have been condemned in the house!
They were actually quite an interesting set of questions from Hopkins, who managed to discover that Labour’s much-publicised claim that the Citizen’s Jury would cost just £45,000 was total bullshit:
When answering questions on the cost of the Citizens Jury previously we were given a figure of £45,000 as the total cost. However further questioning of officers has revealed that this completely missed out officer’s time and internal costs. Was that a legitimate omission given it was said officers average cost was £40 an hour when Councillor Eddy and Councillor Bees were trying to stem the flow of legitimate questions that you had no answers for?
And council leader Helen Holland’s response to a request for details of what the real cost of the jury might be is a real gem:
Requesting that officers spend valuable time detailing actual hours spent on the Citizens Jury process, would not be a valuable use of resource.
Can you come again with that one please Helen? Requesting that officers spend valuable time detailing actual hours spent on their work would not be a valuable use of resources.
We seem to be being told here that our council officers, as a matter of course, are not expected to record or detail in any way the time they spend doing their work! How then do they monitor expenditure at the Council House if they don’t know what anyone’s doing and how long it takes? And how are they monitoring staff performance?
No wonder they’re all unsackable – according to the council boss absolutely basic levels of staff performance management, in defiance of every known principle of mangement, simply do not happen at Bristol City Council. No one knows what the fuck anyone’s actually doing all day because, apparently, it wouldn’t be a valuable use of resources to find out. Honest guv!
Talk about hand your staff an idlers charter to do what they like. Would you run your business like that? Without having a clue what your staff are doing all day? Or whether it was being done competently? Or have any means of finding out? What a fucking joke.
In related news, it’s good to see the Cancer are reading The Blogger regularly. Two days after appearing on here, Tim Kent’s blog get’s a mention today:
On Mr Kent’s Myspace internet blog, he said the gay men were also acting wrongly, and he thought the firefighters’ punishment was harsh.
Interesting set of questions indeed BB: looking at the minutes, I see Cllr Hopkins is now pressing for the abolition of the £15 fee for collecting bulky items he was so vigorously defending when he was the waste supremo under the previous Lib Dem administration….
“Woodsy” suggests that Cllr Hopkins is “pressing for abolition of £15 fee for collecting bulky items”. I can’t find any reference to such an unlikely U turn.
The relevant question posed by Hopkins to Cllr Holland seems to be…
“Q5 Given the huge cost involved and the negligible effect it would have, will you now drop your personal pledge to abolish charges for bulky waste collections?”
To which Holland evasively replied, “A5 There are many ways of revisiting, if appropriate, the current charging arrangements, which are being considered at present.”
I am not sure whether that is a “Yes” or a “No”!
PS. I was challenged at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Thursday to prove that Bristol Blogger had an advance copy of the report!
PPS. It is embarrassing to the Labour and Conservative Groups on the Council that the Citizens Jury has endorsed the existing Liberal Democrat policy on waste (at an undisclosed cost to Bristol tax payers).
Cllr. Rogers: I must have been half asleep when reading the minutes; they are hardly the most edifying reading matter.
As for U-turns by our local elected representatives, including Gary Hopkins, they are hardly unknown, let alone unlikely; I seem to recall he did perform this very manoeuvre some time last year in respect of the closure a swimming pool in or near his ward: whilst in opposition, he was against it and changed his tune when in power.
Blogger please find a way to ban idiot moron councillors from party politicking on your site.
I can cope with their comments (in a begrudgung nod to free speech), but the content of Jon Rogers PPS is tedious fucking shite.
Unfortunately here at The Blogger, we’re entirely committed to free speech and are militantly anti-censorship, so it’s hard to ban anyone. Shit, we even put up with that tedious teacher idiot Jografer on here.
Besides surely any comment from a councillor that isn’t on a stupid leaflet, accompanied with their photo on a local traffic island, that’s shoved through your door is a step forward?
Hmmm, grumble, groan, wriggle-about-a-bit, girmace, grumble. Spose.
But it makes my eyes bleed.