Redland Green: another finance farce

Posted on February 18, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

When you’re at work, have you ever wondered why the receptionist doesn’t order £75,000 of luxury office furniture on a whim and the admin assistant doesn’t decide on a boring Friday afternoon to order a new £2m fleet of Mercedes trucks?

Quite simply it’s because they’re not authorised to do so and if they were to do so, they’d be dismissed pronto for gross misconduct. The documentation in an organisation that usually governs who can spend what amount of money, when and why are the financial standing orders and they are probably the single most important and useful management tool (if you’re in charge of anyway) an organisation has.

Whatever your job – whether you’re a budget holder or not – we’re all working to financial standing orders whether they’re implicit or explicit. Find us a person who doesn’t know how much money they’re allowed to spend on behalf of their employer and we’ll show you an idiot on the way to the dole queue, a convenient fall guy or a dysfunctional organisation headed for bankruptcy and the courts.

There’s a number of reasons why organisations have financial standing orders. First, they provide clear lines of accountability from the bottom to the top of the organisation. Especially in a large organisation, they make it possible for all expenditure to be tightly controlled and carefully monitored. They make staff – particularly if their budgets have also been clearly explained and allocated as well – directly, personally and transparently accountable for the money they’re spending.

Financial standing orders are also the basis of sound financial management. If you have an organisation where your staff spend whatever sum of money they like on whatever they like, you’re not going to have an organisation for very much longer as you are not controlling your expenditure.

Standing orders are also useful tools for preventing fraud, embezzlement, theft and financial malpractice and they are a handy management tool too. Forget all this crap about yearly comprehensive performance assessments, work plans, supervisions and all the other box-ticking exercises beloved of bureaucrats to prove what a grand job they’re doing.

Instead, if you know a widget usually costs £1 and you give your staff permission to spend £500 and instruct them to get 1,000 widgets, you’re soon going to find out who’s doing what.

Since a chimpanzee can pick up a telephone and buy 500 widgets for £500, anyone who comes back with 500 widgets hasn’t done very much have they? And the person who comes back with 300 widgets, £200 of expense claims and a series of excuses about the lack of budget, the quality of the management and how busy they are should probably be shown the door. Then there’s the one who’ll come back with 750 widgets feeling pretty smug until the smartarse (who’s probably an anarchist) shows up with 1,000 widgets and asks you what they should do with the £50 they’ve still got left in their budget.

Financial standing orders also have another function peculiar to democratic organisations. They represent the the democratic will of the people.

For instance, if you’re a Bristol City Councillor responsible for £300m of expenditure and employ thousands of people its pretty much impossible to personally monitor Sharon in accounts expenditure on paper clips. So you don’t. Instead you create a policy that does it for you.

In the same way that elected councillors, say, set a policy to build a road on a cyclepath or build a new museum or employ a load of PCSOs and then council officers implement them, regardless of their personal views on the matter, so councillors set the more mundane, but equally important policies, around how they want their organisation to function.

For instance things like the council’s personnel policies, the daft equalities crap, the sustainability waffle – whether you agree with them or not and whether council officers agree with them or not – are decided by councillors and are therefore the democratic will of the people and need to be implemented in full and to the letter by the city council’s officers. If they do not, they have broken their contacts of employment.

It is not the job of council officers – at any level – to ignore, alter, countermand, override or rewrite these policies at their convenience. These simple facts also apply to the city council’s financial standing orders, which are a policy of the council as much as any other. They are there to be followed by officers and that should be the end of the story.

So it’s fairly extraordinary when you read the auditor’s report into the Redland Green School £6m overspend to find the following:

10.8 … This is not in accordance with the financial regulations …

10.9 … Given the amounts were over £75,000, in most cases, this would require the procurement regulations to be applied. They were not …

10.10 … Subcontractors were then appointed based on the tender returns. These appointments were not formally approved by the Council [as per the financial regulations] …

10.11 Our concern about the above process is the lack of formal approval by the Council [as per the financial regulations] …

10.12 … the process was not in accordance with the financial regulations …

[10.14 The financial regulations state that “Projects will be the subject of consultation with the relevant Executive Member prior to commencement.” …]

10.17 We have not seen evidence of approval of the commencement of the project from the relevant Executive Member …

10.20 … a process should have been established to require the Consultant to seek formal approval for cost overruns [as per the financial regulations] …

10.21 There was no formal system within the Council for recording and approving these changes [as per the financial regulations] …

10.22 … There was also no formal process in place for the approval and recording of decisions [as per the financial regulations] …

10.26 … We conclude that the Council’s Financial Regulations, in place at the time of the project, were not complied with …

10.27 … Education may not have complied with the financial regulations requirement to provide a report of the full cost position to Cabinet on a quarterly basis …

It’s even more extraordinary when you find out that the person fully involved and right at the centre of running and agreeing – time and again – this complete lack of process in financial management was the Director of Central Services, the council’s chief of finance Carew Reynell.

And it’s even more extraordinary that Reynell – handsomely paid over £100k a year and who personally drew up the council’s financial regulations, recommended them to councillors to adopt and is personally responsible for monitoring that they are used correctly across the council – has taken it upon himself to ignore them.

And it is totally beyond belief that he’s presented us, the council tax payer – with a £6m bill for this conduct.

This is not just a serious failure of management from Reynell either, it’s also a complete abrogation of the democratic process. Perhaps he thinks because he earns £100k a year and has the term ‘director’ in his job title the law and the rules don’t apply to him and he doesn’t have to do what he’s told by us?

Reynell, ignorant, incompetent, arrogant and anti-democratic in equal measure, has form for this kind of behaviour too. Can it be only three years ago that financial consultant Captain Haddock delivered his report into the financial crisis in social services, which cost us £18m?

This was the expensive report that had to carefully explain that budget holders in social services should monitor their budgets on spreadsheets. An idea clearly beyond finance guru Reynell who didn’t seem to know about this most simple of financial management tools let alone ensure it was implemented.

Now we’re back here again with another expensive report. And its complex conclusion that nobody could ever have thought of?

“We would recommend that, for future projects, the Financial Regulations are complied with in respect of reporting to Cabinet”

This is fucking ridiculous. This incompetent arsehole has now cost the city £24m (that we know of) through his inability to implement the simplest of financial processes and procedures. And he’s still in post taking home £2,000 of our money every week?

He should resign immediately. And if he won’t resign, our councillors need to clearly assert themselves, protect our hard earned cash, show that their policies and our democracy cannot be overridden whenever an officer feels like it and sack the bastard.

But will our piss weak, powerless councillor cowards do that? Will they fuck. Just wait for the excuses …

Posted in Bristol, Education, Local government | Tagged , | There are 16 comments

Redland Green School:auditor's report

Posted on February 17, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

The auditors report into the £6m Redland Green School overspend has been published (pdf).

James Barlow has done an excellent in-depth analysis on his blog but the meat on bones of this report can be found in section 10 – Compliance with the Council’s Financial Regulations and other procedures.

It’s not pleasant reading at all if you’re bothered about the proper management of public money and council finance boss Carew Reynell ought to be, at the very least,  clearing his desk this morning …

The Blogger will be reporting further on this soon.

Posted in Bristol, Education, Local government | Tagged | There are no comments yet

EXCLUSIVE: Bradshaw exposes himself!

Posted on February 17, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Naked man

… As Sustrans reject fig leaf role

More bad news for Labour’s transport boss Mark Bradshaw as his desperate attempts to control the fallout from revelations that he intends to turn the Bristol and Bath Railway Path in to a road for buses collapse even further in to predictable chaos.

On the evening of the first public meeting of the fledgling Save the Railway Path campaign group, coward Bradshaw – who was too scared to attend the meeting and explain himself – instead released an open letter to the national cycling charity Sustrans, inviting them to join the planning group for his inane scheme.

Never really anything more than a cynical attempt by Bradshaw to get the charity on board and provide a fig leaf of environmental credibility as cover for his madcap scheme to concrete over the last few bits of inner-city East Bristol his Labour Party missed in the 60s and 70s, Sustrans have obviously seen Bradshaw coming and rejected his offer out of hand.

In a letter to Bradshaw (pdf) published on their website they tell him in some pretty plain language:

Immediately abandon the plan for the proposed BRT route on the Bristol and Bath Railway Path. Your predecessors may have been asking the wrong question by seeking a public transport route that would least inconvenience road users. Perhaps they should have been asking how we bring about the beginnings of a truly sustainable and integrated transport network fit for purpose in a 21st century city with all the challenges the next four decades are going to bring.

Oh dear no fig leaf for Bradshaw then, which leaves him looking rather exposed and his chances of getting a greenwash strategy in place for his BRT scheme look well and truly scuppered.

What now then for Bradshaw? Perhaps he should get his pair of council officer supporters – Kate Hartas and Roger Livingston – phoning around Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the WWF to see if any of them are interested in sitting on a soppy committee to help him pretend to the general public that his madcap scheme is not a complete and utter social and environmental disaster waiting to happen.

Posted in Bristol, Developments, Environment, Labour Party, Local government, Transport, WESP | Tagged , , | There are 7 comments

Who's paying for Pigfucker's party then?

Posted on February 17, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Rumour reaches the Blogger that outgoing waste-of-space Chief Exec Pigfucker Gurney is having a leaving party and personal invitations are on the way to the select few of well remunerated brown-nosers and civic dignitaries right now.

Strangely the Blogger hasn’t received an invitation, which is probably a good thing because we’d only turn up to kick Pigfucker in the knackers and tell him he’s a wanker anyway.

The party, we learn, is on the 14 March 2008 at the Council House and includes free food and drink for all the guests.

So who the fuck’s paying for all this then? Better not be coming out of our council tax. With £140k a year at his disposal, the least Pigfucker could do is buy his own drinks.

Posted in Bristol, Local government | Tagged | There is 1 comment

Railway path spinwatch

Posted on February 16, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Absolut Bullshit

Labour transport boss Bradshaw and his press spokeswoman Kate Hartas – who seems to flit from working for the city council to the West of England Partnership and back again on a regular basis without ever troubling the truth a great deal in either role – were quoted in the Cancer on Thursday.

And this week’s line to take on the railway path, it appears, is that nothing has been decided and there are plenty of other options still available. Here’s what the pair actually said:

“Mark Bradshaw, Bristol City Council’s executive member for transport, said: “These plans are only one of several options and are in a relatively early stage.”

“Kate Hartas, spokeswoman for the WEP, said: “The West of England Partnership is considering a range of options for a rapid transit route in east Bristol”

Well that’s a relief then. Officially it looks like there’s a long way to go yet and a range of other route options for BRT are still on the table. Alas not. As the next day the West of England Partnership published a glossy leaflet – dated February 2008 – which clearly tells us:

GBSTS identified four corridors for BRT and these have been assessed in comprehensive studies … From these studies, a route from Ashton Vale to Emerson’s Green has been selected as the most appropriate option for the next line of the network.

In other words these “options” Bradshaw and Hartas are talking up have already been considered and the clearly stated and published position of the West of England Partnership is:

From Temple Meads the route would run alongside the Bristol to Bath cycle path with stations serving densely populated residential centres including Lawrence Hill, Fishponds, Staple Hill and Emerson’s Green

What’s going on here? Why have we had two entirely contradictory statements, apparently from the same organisation, within less than 24 hours?

While we expect no better of Bradshaw, another in a long line of Bristol Labour deadbeats who’ll come out with any old bollocks for short term political gain, the issue of Ms Hartas is, however, of more concern.

As a local government officer she works for us, not the Labour Party, and is required to tell us the truth, not the convenient Labour Party political line of the day. How is it that as the West of England Partnership’s spokeswoman she can openly contradict, on the record in the local press, the organisation’s own clear written position?

Either she doesn’t know the position – which makes her incompetent – or she’s deliberately lying on behalf of politicians – which makes her mendacious.

We have our eye on you Ms Hartas …

Posted in Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Developments, Environment, Labour Party, Local government, Media, Transport, WESP | Tagged , , | There are 13 comments

Waffle watch

Posted on February 16, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

“We are all constantly striving to achieve clarity in all communications.”
Helen Holland, Bristol Evening Post, 16 February 2008

By reviewing the Corporate Plan at the same time as the review of the Bristol Partnership’s Sustainable Community Strategy (please see Appendix 1 to this report) we can ensure that we are influencing that strategy and that there is good alignment between the longer term vision or the city and the actions we are going to take in the next three years. This will place us in a stronger position in the negotiations we are now entering into for the new Local Area Agreement (LAA) One of the criticisms of the Round 3 LAA was that the national agenda over dominated the choice of targets. We are determined this time that the LAA will better reflect our priorities and that it will be what it is meant to be: a delivery plan for the Sustainable Community Strategy.
Helen Holland, State of the City Debate (pdf), 15 January 2008

Posted in Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Labour Party, Local government | Tagged | There are 6 comments

BRT: "A gigantic pile of steaming dung"

Posted on February 15, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

By Bluebaldee (Originally posted as a comment)

The link to the BRT Project Board documents is very useful and uncovers a number of interesting facts about BRT.

The overarching fact that I’ve discovered is that BRT in general is actually a gigantic pile of steaming dung.

I’ll elaborate. The proposed Emerson’s Green to Bristol City Centre BRT line (called J2 in the feasibility study) has the lowest “modal shift” (the number of people who will be persuaded out of their cars and onto BRT buses) of all the proposed routes. It’s also the second most expensive at a whopping £50 million plus.

So the Einsteins at the West of England Partnership have plumped for the route that will have the lowest impact on congestion with the added bonus of being hideously expensive. And they haven’t anticipated the public opposition to destroying the Railway Path.

Well done girls and boys.

In addition, the second leg of the route from the City Centre to Ashton Vale will have to cross the Portishead freight line. The CONsultant’s report states that this could raise a major deliverability issue (in fact the “highest risk”) as Network Rail will kick up a stink. This line will also use the Ashton Avenue Rail Bridge and part of the disused railway line, which would form part of the potential Portishead passenger line.

All of the above has massive ramifications for the campaign to open a rail passenger service from Portishead to Bristol. If the BRT line is built, the frieght line can never be used as a passenger line. The frequency of passenger services could never be acommodated with the BRT line crossing the heavy rail tracks. Also the hoped-for rail passenger line wouldn’t be able to use Ashton Avenue Bridge.

So basically if this BRT line gets the go ahead you can kiss goodbye to any hope for a Bristol to Portishead passenger rail service. Permanently.

Other gems hidden in the depths of this document include the possibility of running a two-lane busway across College Green, up Whiteladies Rd and across The Downs (Cribbs to Centre route).

Also FOSBR will love the idea of tearing up the Severn Beach Line to run another BRT route out to Avonmouth. And I’m sure that the good citizens of Bishopston will welcome the proposal to run a two lane busway along Gloucester Rd.

To be fair to the CONsultants, Steer Davies Gleave, they did state that use of the Bristol to Bath Railway Path “could become contentious” but the clever people at the WEP have chosen to ignore this.

After carefully studying the BRT proposals I’ve decided that the whole scheme is utter bollocks and would benfit immeasurably from being thrown into the River Frome (they also want to further concrete this river over) and forgotten about.

This is what you get when you employ CONsultants from London (Steer Davies Gleave, 28-32 Upper Ground, London, SE1 9PD ,Tel 020 7919 8500 – in case you wondered) who haven’t got a fucking clue about Bristol and Bristolians to do your work for you and then blithely agree to the first crackpot idea they come up with, eh Mr Bradshaw?

Get rid of the whole sorry discredited First-driven BRT idea and get this shitty Government to invest in our chronically underfunded and criminally underused urban rail network.

Posted in Bristol, CONsultants, Developments, Local government, Transport, WESP | Tagged , | There are 3 comments

A public service post on behalf of the Bristol Conservative Party

Posted on February 15, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

Confusion, consternation and plain anger tonight across the leafy suburbs of Bristol as the news comes in that the Bristol and South Gloucestershire Conservative Association’s events listing website is down.

Fear not. As part of the Bristol Blogger’s political inclusion remit we are happy to list those forthcoming Conservative events in full:

Stoke Bishop Tea Club
Monday February 18 2008
Stoke Bishop Village Hall
Guest Speaker: Mr Mike Brayley of the Rotary Club of Nailsea and Backwell
Contact: Noreen Billingham

Bunter Eddy’s Pie Club
Thursday March 16, 6.00pm
The Grand Lodge of the Church of the Latter Day Tories, Headley Park, Bristol.
Bunter’s monster monthly pie scoffing social. This month features a world exclusive with the official unveiling of the latest Pieminister pie aimed firmly at the mass frozen foods market – “The Bunter” (it’s full of shit!)
Guest Speaker: Major General Sir Bernard J Rufton Bufton Tufton, Esquire (Retd), MA (cantab), MBE (Hons), CBE, M.Phil, BBC, CBGB, OMG, HTML, WTF, LSD will talk at great length on “Me and my gollies”
Booking advised.

The James Barlow Lectures
Cabot District Girl Guide Hut, Westbury on Trym
The Chairman of Bristol West Constituency Conservative Party and leading local Conservative thinker presents an exclusive set of policy-related lectures. Not to be missed!

1 March 2008: Are a team of 200 Chinese coolies with rickshaws the solution to Bristol’s transport problems?

15 March 2008: The European Council of Ministers: they eat babies

22 March 2008: Is taxation the real cause of global warming?

These lectures are all FREE and are funded by SWRDA’s Sustainable Futures Policy Fund for the Promotion of Community Involvement in partnership with Bristol City Council’s Equality for All Diversity Challenge Fund and the Home Office’s Social Cohesion Quality Award Scheme for Inclusive Communities.

Annual Dennis Thatcher Memorial Golfing Day
Thursday 23 March 2008
Early start as usual. This year’s gin breakfast will be kindly hosted by Sid and Doris Bonkers in their garden shed, Sea Mills.
Golf clubs optional bring your own Gin!

Conservative Future’s Nazi Theme Ball featuring the Big Prize Herman Goering Look-a-like Contest
Friday March 21 2008
The Bristol University Vomitorium
£10 a ticket
Authentic costumes and top notch Nazi regalia available to rent at very reasonable rates. Contact Dennis Burn c/o Society of Merchant Venturers

Ordinary Dave’s Let’s Make the World a Greener Place Bristol to Bath Charity Cycle Ride
Sunday 16 March 2008
Join your fellow local Conservatives and help make the world a better place by cycling from Bristol to Bath.
For further details and the exact meeting place, please call Barbara Lewis at the end of next week when she hopes to have found out where the Bristol and Bath Railway Path actually is.

(That’s enough Bristol Conservative Events, Ed)

Posted in Bristol, Conservatives, Politics | | There are 9 comments

Is the News Bunny reversing the ferret?

Posted on February 14, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

News BunnyHere’s the latest example of the kind of leadership found at the top of our city’s most influential institutions these days …

You might remember that the Evening Cancer, the newspaper Mike “News Bunny” Norton is supposed to be in charge of, couldn’t move fast enough to support the plans to build a rapid transit bus route on the railway path back on 1 February.

“While many … concerns may be valid to the individuals, we have to look at the wider picture. If we are serious about developing a better public transport system for Bristol then we have to accept that it comes at a cost,” the newspaper thundered.

Until, that is, they eventually noticed the major public outcry, the huge petition on the council’s website; the reams of angry letters arriving at the paper every day and finally their own poll where it turned out over 94% of their readers were actually against the scheme.

So what does the big brave News Bunny do next as realisation of this disastrous cock-up dawns? Why he blames everything on his deputy, Rob Stokes, of course!

Over the last few days rumours, quite transparently emanating from Norton himself, have been circulating that the leader in question was nothing whatsoever to do with him. Instead we’re being told the paper’s editorials are also written by News Bunny Norton’s deputies and sometimes even the subs so – get this! – editorial consistency won’t necessarily be there!

How brilliant is that? Our city’s newspaper of record, despite having what’s supposed to be an editor, apparently has no clear editorial line on major issues affecting the city and there’s apparently no communication going on at senior management level. Instead, it seems, various staff just write whatever takes their fancy in editorials.

What are we going to be told next? That the Cancer’s news room cleaner wrote the offending piece? Readers can, however, rest assured there’s no such editorial confusion here at Blogger HQ where even the fucking cat’s aware it’s a stupid idea

Norton meanwhile, presumably in attempt to shore up his shredded credibility on this issue, is now also putting it about that he’s personally decided to run the railway path story from “a different angle”.

So this week we’ve already had a ludicrous report marked EXCLUSIVE claiming that a rare breed of glow worms on the path might mean conservationists can put an end to the scheme.

This is utter bollocks of course. No sane and rational person – which is pretty much everyone in the city who doesn’t occupy a private office at either the Council House or the Lubianka – is going to attempt to stop a major multi-million pound public transport scheme on the basis that it might disturb a small colony of glow worms are they?

Besides, had the Cancer researched the matter a little further, they might have discovered that the West of England Partnership’s BRT Project Board has already done some research on nature conservation issues with regards to the railway path and declared in their big boy builder way that “there are no showstoppers”.

Norton further continued his embarrassing climbdown today with another article finally admitting his own poll found almost 95% of his readers against the plan and quoting key railway path activist Steve Meek at length.

What Norton’s up to here is what’s known as the “reverse ferret”. A term credited to former Sun editor and sick genius Kelvin Mackenzie – the man, who by a strange twist of fate later went on to invent the News Bunny.

Mackenzie, in possibly one of the most sensible pieces of advice ever handed out in human history, used to tell his political team the way to deal with politicians was to “shove a ferret up their arse”.

A strategy, that while generally commendable, could go disasterously wrong in the hands of Sun hacks and end up with that famously “hands-off” owner Murdoch getting personally involved, the odd writ arriving or even the occasional injunction being served.

At this point Mackenzie would enter his newsroom and run around shouting “reverse ferret” while hacks would urgently perform the required Orwellian-style rewrite of the paper’s entire position.

Posted in Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Environment, Journalism, Media, Transport, WESP | Tagged , , | There are 3 comments

Railway path: sits vac!

Posted on February 14, 2008 by The Bristol Blogger

It’s time for people to stop talking and start working if they want to save the railway path.

The campaign is currently looking for someone to design a logo and produce other graphics for their website. If you’ve got the skills and can spare a few hours, now’s the time to step forward. Remember if you don’t do it, who the hell will?

They’re also looking for people with some knowledge of press and PR. Again, if you can spare a few hours to help them maintain their news-setting agenda and get loads more coverage, then come forward and do your bit.

If you’re interested in either of these tasks then contact the Bristol Blogger at bristol_citizens@yahoo.co.uk and we’ll forward your emails on to the campaign.

Posted in Activism, Bristol, Environment, Transport | Tagged | There are 2 comments