On the other hand, there were about 40 people there and at least 25 were normal residents of Broadfield. The rest were housing officers from a couple of housing associations, officers from Crawley council, a couple of Sussex Police inspectors, a PCSO, Kenny from the West Sussex youth services, a manager from the CAB, some borough councillors and Adrian from the Crawley News.

It may not sound like much, but its a good turnout for the Broadfield Forum. There were loads of new faces and many will return next time. Before then they might spread the word a bit and the whole thing will start to gain some critical mass.

Part of the reason for the increase in numbers is that the meeting was advertised, by which I mean it was ‘sold’ as a meeting on a specific topic. Previous meetings were just notified in dry, unattractive terms. Modesty prevents me from saying whose idea that was… Another reason for the increase was that one of the councillors took a load of posters/flyers for the meeting and went round putting them through doors. A combination of having a coherent message and some proactive behaviour got some results which can be built on.

I wish I could say it was a Labour councillor, but it was one of the Tories. Again, most of those who turned up were from the Courts and Broadfield North, with few from the Tollgate Hill area. Whether this is because everyone is happy up here in Tollgate Hill or because our area missed out on the leafletting I don’t know. It is not unusual for Tollgate Hill to be ignored. Next time I will have to talk to the Tories and come to some arrangement – if they are going to publicise the meeting elsewhere, I will do this end of town.

Just before the meeting there was an incident where the unluckiest kid in Broadfield rode past the centre on his mini motorbike as Mathew from the council was setting up the room. He rode the machine down the footpath and stopped just round the corner from the fire door to tinker with his bike, at which point one of the police inspectors went out and confiscated the machine.

It was ironic because when the meeting kicked off, the first topic was mini motorbikes and the conversation only rarely got away from them.

Unfortunately the meeting did get a bit heated. I don’t know if the police were expected to come up with a solution on the spot to a problem which has been around for ages, but some of the residents were getting quite frustrated and there was a bit of a lynch-mob mentality. For example, when Inspector Piper was explaining that you can’t chase kids on motorbikes without the risk of them getting killed some old boy piped up with “whats the problem with that then?”

Another couple were fixated with the police putting too many resources into speed cameras instead of chasing motorbikes. I can see their point of view, but I think the statistics will show that even with the so-called draconian speed traps more deaths and injuries are caused by speeding cars than by motorbikes on pavements, however annoying they may be.

It may be that the meeting served a purpose by letting frustrated residents let off some steam and vent some anger directly at the police, although that is not really moving towards a solution.

A few of the people there really do seem to be living in fear, and its depressing to see that happening. Doubly so because one or two particularly obnoxious and aggressive youngsters have probably got these families to regard all youngsters the same way.

Right next to the centre is an enclosed football/basketball courts, where a group of boys were playing football loudly. There were frequent references to them and their behaviour and language, which most people there said they found to be intimidating.

In a poignant moment at the end of the meeting, I slipped out for a quick smoke and was watching the boys play. It was a four-a-side, shirts v. skins game, with a few other boys sitting at the side watching. A bit boisterous, but nowhere near as bad as Holland v. Portugal last week. A chap came out of the meeting and passed me on his way home. He had said nothing in the meeting, but as he passed me he looked at the football game and said to me “they’re only playing. Its only what we would love to do.”

A shame that he felt unable to voice any sort of moderate comment in the meeting itself, but when these things get into an escalating frenzy of Daily Mail headlines it can be hard to find the confidence to come out with a different view. But I have noticed before how it is those who are most likely to describe themselves as ‘the silent majority’ who are more likely to be the dominating influence in smaller, moderated groups, which rapidly turn into witch hunts.

I don’t want to sound negative though. A lot of residents made contacts with the various agencies and with each other during and after the meeting. That is the sort of thing which can lead to improvements in the longer term – if only some way can be found to include some of those perceived to be responsible for antisocial behaviour. If anyone does come up with some scheme to alleviate problems there is now a larger pool pf potential volunteers to help with it.

No doubt there is a hard core of truly antisocial people – not necessarily all kids – but there are a lot on the fringes. They fall in with the trouble-makers because they are made more welcome by them than by the rest of society generally. Every time someone talks about ‘the community’ and ‘ the kids’ as separate groups it makes the problem worse – the kids are part of the community: let them know that and they just may act like it.

The council are now looking for a suitable topic for the next Broadfield Forum. Any ideas? Anyone know from experience what topics are able to generate the most interest? Fly-tipping, vandlasim and grafitti and other streetscene issues? Parking? Travellers? Is it possible to generate a lot of interest around something positive or do we only get motivated to come together by adversity?

There was some good news that the centre had attracted a corporate booking where some company had hired the whole place for a day for a significant fee. Having been a reluctant treasurer for the place for a year or two I know how important that can be to keep the books balanced and allow it to keep the hire charges down for all the regular users.

However, this seems to have gone to gone to the head of the current chair of the centre, our old friend and fabricator Alan Quirk. He was going on about re-naming the halls to make them sound more attractive to corporate clients. The example he gave was to call one of the halls something like ‘the Savoy suite’.

I thought that was bad enough, but he continued by suggesting that the whole centre could do with a new name. I think the implication is that having ‘Broadfield’ in the name is bad for business.

Maybe thats true. Maybe it would be easier to persuade companies to book rooms if the place had a twee name like a new housing development, but the thing is that the whole point of the Broadfield Community Centre is that its, well, the community centre for Broadfield.

I am 100% behind the aspiration to attract the odd lucrative booking to help subsidise the normal operations, but lets not lose sight of the real purpose of it. Since the two Council-run community centres in Broadfield were closed down its now the only one we have. Broadfield still scores highly on all the indices of deprivation, and it is essential that our community centre remains open to all and that everyone is made to feel welcome.

Hearing all this talk of re-branding I just heard echoes of Basil Fawlty and his “no riff-raff” advert for Fawlty Towers.

I could just about live with having the building re-named ‘Broadfield Village Hall’ just for the irony of it, and because its how I think of the place but to my mind it already has the ideal name – Broadfield Youth & Community Centre, and if that is too much of a mouthful then BYCC is already widely used.

The real danger, of course, is that winning the odd large booking and getting the odd extra grant will not enable the centre to expand its work, but will just be seen as an excuse to further reduce the Council’s grant. At the moment Crawley Borough Council is getting a real bargain: its grant to BYCC is a fraction of what it would cost it to run a community centre itself.

I have always felt that having to fight for the grant each year against all the other groups in town was wrong – as the centre is in effect providing a service which the council would have to provide otherwise it should have a guaranteed income, linked to SLAs if necessary. What makes it worse is that council grants are decided on the whims of councillors. I always felt uneasy about that, and kept pushing for a move to a less politicised grants mechanism even when I was a councillor and we were in charge. With the voluntary grants being one of the single largest items on the budget, and BYCC being one of the largest settlements, you do have to wonder how secure that funding really is and worry about the future of BYCC.

Of course the Citizens Advice have even more to worry about, having an even larger grant and being an even easier target. Its something to keep an eye on anyway.

This year’s annual report has an interesting way to demonstrate the good which the CAB does for Crawley, and specifically for Broadfield. Everyone knows it is a good thing, but it is hard to quantify the work which is done. This year’s report makes a stab at that. In the section about the Debt Relief function it says that 75% of all enquiries to the CAB about debt was related to credit debt. In terms of results, the CAB got £607,324 of clients’ debts written off and £168,157 deferred beyond current payment terms.

In Broadfield there is an outreach service in association with Surestart, and in this area alone the CAB helped Broadfield clients make financial gains of £33,261 by making sure people got benefits, tax credits, compensation and grants due to them.

Helping with debt is not the only thing the CAB do: its just the easiest area to quantify the benefits in financial terms. There are also enquiries about relationship issues, discrimination, housing and legal matters.

Crawley CAB spent about £300,000 in the year on all activities, and nearly £800,000 of tangible benefits to Crawley residents can be easily identified, to which can be added the many other less tangible benefits so it looks like a bargain all round.

Crawley Borough Council’s Chief Executive, Michael Coughlin addressed the AGM and I briefly discussed the report with him afterwards. He was as impressed by it as I am, and I would not be surprised to see some of the contents used to support some of the borough council’s social policies in the future.

It is always difficult to manage social policies. You cannot always tell if they are successful and it can be hard to defend spending on social matters when no returns can be identified. The council commissioned a report from the University of Sussex several years ago which has been a great help in this area, but this CAB report could contain an interesting extra plank to support the sort of expenditure which is open to accusations of left-wing do-goodery. If CBC is getting at least £770,000 of relief to its population from only £116,000 of grant aid, it could be considered to be money well spent.

Its true that I have been easing out of the few formal commitments I had, like being treasurer at the community centre and a trustee at the CAB, but that just means I can get involved in all sorts of things on a more ad hoc basis. I may even start going to council meetings as a civilian and enjoy the fun of asking questions at public question time and joining in with the general barracking at planning meetings.

This week I had the CAB board meeting on Tuesday night (with some follow-up work feeding back to the council), the Broadfield conference on Tuesday evening, followed by the police authority public meeting, and the Labour party constituency meeting on Thursday night. Tonight there is an election celebration party at the Labour club, and on Monday I may go along to the development control committee meeting.

The CAB I have already written about, although the Broadfield conference did give me the opportunity to follow up some of the issues with the council’s chief exec.

Community Conference

I was going to write all about the community conference, but I found a report here which, while not complete is adequate for the basic facts.

For me it was not particularly educational as most of the issues were ones I used to be involved in myself, but I had a chance to express my opinions in the form of stickers. My one lapse into irreverence was that there was a poster asking “how can we improve our local environment?” and I added a post-it on which I had written “Vote Labour”.  As an ordinary member of the public I can do that sort of thing.

Unfortunately we turned up just too late for the controversial stuff. Somebody (I think it was Alan Quirk’s son) had set up a laptop near the entrance which had a rolling slideshow on it. The slides were stuff like a big photo of Marcella Head with the caption “Marcella Head. Your Conservative Councillor” and pictures from the council’s recent clean-up day up at Carman walk with titles saying it was a Conservative team doing the work.

Understandably, the Labour councillors kicked off about this and made them remove the computer. As far as I am concerned its just another example of the Tories trying to use council events for personal party political gain. The clean-up photos apparently showed quite clearly that there were CBC vehicles and staff, and yet it was billed as the “Broadfield Conservative Team”. I still cannot work out whether our local Tories are devious and machiavellian or just rank amateurs and terribly naive. Fortunately for them, the computer was Richard Quirk’s personal laptop. Had it been a council computer being used for party political gain there would have been very good grounds for involving the Standards Board.

I was quite surprised to find how many people at the event were people I know. I had forgotten just how many different people I must have met and worked with over four years, but this was a good chance to catch up with some of them.

One such person is Mr Earl, who was along for the police meeting, but also does loads of other voluntary stuff. He used to be (and still is) an independent member of the council’s standards committee, which I sat on, so we had a chat about that. I tend to get a bit anal retentive about the code of conduct – I always used to declare everything that there was any doubt about, I had been on the training and tried to keep up with the latest advice. Maybe that’s why I get so wound up by our Tories’ behaviour, because I used to stick not only to the rules but to the spirit of the rules and expect everyone else to as well.

That is also why being out of office is such a liberating experience for me. If I have a lack of respect for particular members and officers I am free to express it. I can even bring the authority into disrepute if I want to, without sanction, but best of all I can express myself properly and if I think one of my councillors is a lying, racist twat I can call him that.

The most amusing point of the day was when Jayne was talking with a reporter from the Observer. She was not one I had seen before, and seemed to be OK. She was very surprised when Jayne mentioned that she felt the Observer was hostile towards the council and the Labour party and tried to insist that the paper is neutral. She really did seem surprised that anyone could perceive the paper as biased.

Sussex Police Authority Public Meeting

I had been to one of these meetings before, at the Friary. The routine is that there are presentations from the police authority, the council’s community safety officer and the police and then the public get to ask questions.

I think we asked some tough but fair questions, and got answers which were less evasive than in the past. There were the usual comments about how we never see beat policemen around, and how travellers are seen to get different treatment.

At the end I tried asking a bit of a cheeky question: “How far does partnership go?” The police had shown maps which demonstrated that the Broadfield shops are a hot spot of just about every type of crime and anti-social behaviour, and had commented on how the design of the canopies there and the general demeanour of the place encouraged such behaviour and made it hard to police. However at last week’s meeting we had the civil engineer from the Barton management company telling how little money is available for the upkeep of the area (just enough to keep it swept and replace blown bulbs. Maybe repainted. Nothing for serious improvements.) So the question was, if improvements to the buildings would reduce crime more than anything else, would the police or one of the councils or the PCT or whoever pay for those works for the general good, even though its not their responsibility.

The answer was more or less what you would expect, but one senior copper had a word afterwards and said that their might be some funding from some government scheme or other which will be available for this sort of thing. Maybe there is a small light at the end of this tunnel after all, and I can make sure the Labour party puts pressure on whoever receives this funding so they realise the Broadfield shops should be a high priority for it.

Crawley Labour party general committee

Being a vice chair of the party I was naturally ecstatic to find that the chair had turned up so I could sit at the back. She was a bit nervous as it was the first GC meeting since she became chair, but I think she did well. OK, so she upset a few people, but that happens. The rows were breaking out when the chair tried to cut someone short when they were talking to a motion, but going well away from the point, and I think it’s a good thing that we are trying to keep to the point. The chap was getting away from the issue, but then all the previous speakers had as well in my opinion.

It got a little bit nasty, but I reckon the chair handled it fairly well, and I’m very glad it wasn’t me who had to deal with it.

The general post mortem on the elections also got a bit fractious, and Jayne managed to upset a few people, but thats OK – there are some long-standing issues which maybe need to be spoken about openly and Jayne is a great one for speaking her mind!

The worst moment came when Laura Moffatt made a really very good speech. It was just the sort of rousing speech to make a suitable climax to a meeting, and then I got called to speak immediately afterwards. Talk about a tough act to follow!

Now all thats out of the way, the only thing left this week is the celebration party tonight at the Labour club.

I was going to make it my last meeting, but I think I might hang on a little bit. I was appointed there by the borough council to represent them, but I wrote to the Chief Executive last month, strongly suggesting that I be replaced by councillors, for various reasons. From what I can make out, the council has only nominated one person so far and still has a vacancy, so I might hang on for a while until they nominate a second person.

If I want to I can remain on the board for another two years, even if the council don’t want me there. Something to do with the articles of association or something – I may be registered at Companies House as a director of a PLC, but that doesn’t mean I understand any of it!

The thing is that the CAB have some issues with accommodation and will be lobbying the borough council to help them. They need someone there at meetings to remind them that the county council has some obligations too, maybe more so than the borough. At the moment the funding for the CAB is 20% county and 80% borough, and I think that is the wrong way round. I feel that the county are shirking their responsibilities and the borough have made up the difference. Historically this was acceptable when the borough was rich, but right now the county can afford to help more than the borough can.

Anyway, it was a long and tedious meeting, which got hung up on a couple of matters. One to do with the apportionment of expenditure on the accounts and one on the constitution. Both conversations went on way longer than they should have done and reminded me of one reason why I want to drop this responsibility. The meeting should have been over before 9:30 but went on beyond 10:00pm.

One amusing aspect of the bureau is that it is the 50th anniversary of its opening this year, and one of the events is to be a party in October. I was supposed to be on the working group which is sorting out arrangements, but I can never get to meetings – they are either held in Cuckfield or during the day. In my absence they have arranged to hire the Conservative club for the do.

The patron of the CAB is our Labour MP, and I assume she will be invited and have to go to the Conservative club. I wonder if they will let her in? If I go I will have to remember to raid the Labour office for loads of Vote Labour stickers to take with me.

Apart from that, it was a quiet weekend really for me. Jayne had the worst of it as she had to get up early on Sunday for work, after we lost an hour’s sleep when the clocks went forward. The worst bit is that, as a home carer, Jayne has to get pensioners up, washed and fed, and none of them seemed to be aware of the start of British Summer Time and she spent the morning being told off for arriving an hour early.

I’m so glad its only a four-day week for me. On Monday night I noticed a film was just starting on TV and decided to see what it was like. Unfortunately it was a good one so I ended up watching it until the end at 01:30 and consequently had very little sleep to set me up nicely for the week. I really felt like just coming home from work and sleeping, but there was a board meeting at the Citizens Advice Bureau at 7:30pm. I am in two minds about continuing with the CAB. They really need to have people representing the council who are still councillors and have all the contacts. On top of that, I do feel a little bit out of place as everyone else is very middle class. I think I shall send an e-mail off to the Chief Exec of the council and stress that he needs to make sure some councillors get nominated this year.

Tuesday was a bad day for another reason, apart from being, in effect, a Monday. I read in the papers that Paul Hester is dead, apparently a suicide. I saw him play with Crowded House a couple of times and he seemed like the sort of person you can’t help but take an immediate liking to. It doesn’t seem right that he could have really been depressive. Maybe its that old ‘tears of a clown’ cliche?

Today has been better. I had a small win on the lottery. At £44 it was some £999,956 less than I would have hoped for, but its a start.

I got to thinking about charity – I had plenty of time to think – and I while its true that most of the board/trustees are well enough off to put £10 or £20 in, there is some good in actually going out and collecting. Some of the people giving money were kids with a few coins their parents gave them, or a pensioner digging 20p out of her purse and for that small outlay they got to feel good about themselves. In my time out on the streets I might have made a couple of dozen people feel that they had done their little bit to help others. And lets be honest, the same must apply to the collectors themselves. Don’t we feel that we have given up a couple of hours in selfless service and thus go home with at least a twinge of self-congratulation?

One thing I did notice is that it does seem to be the people who can least afford to give money away who donate to charities. There were people giving money because they had been helped by the CAB in the past who were giving a couple of pounds by emptying out all their loose change, who would possibly miss that couple of pounds. Meanwhile those who could easily afford to lose a few notes just walk by. Articles in newspapers often mention how the poorer sections of society give proportionately more of their income to charity than the richest, its just a bit shocking when you see it first hand.

Many well-off people do give their time instead of money, of course. Every charity has its quota of the middle classes on its management committee, and I have to admit that most of the voluntary sector would probably collapse without all these Daily Mail readers on board. The question is, if I get paid £20 per hour at work, do I decide that my time is worth £20 per hour so that every hour I spend on voluntary work is like donating that much? It depends what I am doing. If I spent an hour cleaning a charity’s offices then I reckon my time is only worth what it would have cost to hire a cleaner. The charity would have been better off with me donating £20: it could have paid a cleaner £5 per hour and got four hours of cleaning instead of my one.

My attitude to time right now is that I find it more valuable than money, and I am starting to begrudge all the various calls on my time to help out with community centre events or the fair trade campaign or whatever. Its very strange because right now I have a lot of time. At the start of the year I was spending 2, 3, or 4 evneings per week in the Town Hall at meetings, or carrying out official engagements as Deputy Mayor. There was not enough time to get home from work then go out again so I used to stay a bit later at work and go straight from the station to the Town Hall. Now I am not on the Council I get all that free time back again. Not only that, as part of my company’s settlement with the unions our working week has reduced to 35 hours, so I can now leave a little bit earlier. At the same time work has got to be terribly dull so I make sure I leave on time and now get home at the sort of time I was previously leaving work, and have the whole evening free. So why am I reluctant to give up that time? When I was overwhelmed I frequently gave up time if anyone asked for a favour. I just cut back on things like sleep.

I have a theory, although I’m not sure I can articulate it properly. I think that attitudes to time can be compared to attitudes to money. When I was overstretched my time was like the money of someone who had got a car loan to pay off, a mortgage, several credit cards maxed out and an overdraft. You can imagine them blowing £50 on a night out with the justification that if you are £20,000 in debt you might as well be £20,050 in debt. That same person with no debts but no money left for the month might decide not to go out just to avoid going into the red. Thats what I was like with my time. As soon as I had some I realised how much I liked having it to myself. Maybe you have to go without something to realise how much its worth to you?

I wonder if that is why the wealthy don’t give so much, proportionately, to charities? Having got accustomed to their money maybe they want to keep it close and hoard it in much the same way as I am tempted to hoard time? Who knows? Obviously I don’t!

Yesterday I found out that the collection on Saturday raised £180-something, which is more than I expected, and not bad considering eveyone was more worried about their Christmas shopping.

I have to admit that I didn’t feel anyone was muscling in on my area, because until I got the email I didn’t know that I had a portfolio! I think this is symptomatic of the confusion that touched everything about the CAB in June/July. First of all the council put forward two people as their representatives who were no longer councillors, and they did that without telling the people concerned. I had said to the CAB that I was happy to help with fundraising – but I meant that when they were doing a collection at the supermarket or town centre I would turn up and rattle a tin with them. They obviously took that as an offer to hold a portfolio for fundraising and accepted without me even being aware.

This is like how I got involved in politics: I thought I was being asked to be on an interviewing panel for prospective election candidates and accepted, but it turned out I was being asked to be a prospective candidate. Somehow I didn’t know quite how to get out of it politely and decided to stick with it and try to do my best. I’ll do the same with this I think.

Ok, the cameras are always at Waterloo station whenever there is a strike ballot or other bad railway news, but I was momentarily pleased that the Prime Minister was within sight of our humble premises. Then I remembered that he only lives about a mile away anyway, so its not such a big deal.

Still I did bump into our MP at the church service in the evening. I took the opportunity of asking her about being a patron for the Citizens Advice Bureau’s 50th anniversary year. She only lives 4 doors away from us, but with her packed diary and my long-distance commuting I don’t actually see her that often except at just about every local event. (I am sure she has some clones because she really does seem to have the ability to be at every local function yet still have a fairly impressive attendance and voting record at parliament.)

Its not as grand as it sounds however. For a start its an unpaid position. Might look good on the CV though.

Basically, at tonights EGM of the Citizens Advice Bureau we voted to wind up the current operation on Sept 30th and reconstitute on Oct 1st as a limited company. People on the current management committee/trustees will become directors of the new company. Its all down to some arcane reasons to do with governance or compliance or something, and will not affect the way the bureau provides its service or anything.

There have been a lot of changes in the few years I have been involved. At the start the people involved seemed to be nearly all middle-aged or retired women, mostly magistrates. Now there seem to be a lot of men who either work in, or have taken early retirement from banks and large corporations. They have brought with them their familiarity with modern management jargon and practises. Not that I am knocking the ladies. They are probably Tories, but of the old-fashioned church and community type who are not overly concerned with political dogma. They are usually fairly well off but get involved in everything going – WI, school governors, charities, etc. often hosting meetings or small social gatherings in support of various organisations and subtly subsidising the catering costs.

As a working class socialist these should not be my sort of people, and in an ideal world their efforts should not be required, but this is not an ideal world and they keep a lot of communities going. They are also a lot more laid-back about things than the businessmen who are getting involved now. During my four years on the council I met a lot of these middle class local philanthropists at functions and fetes, at AGMs and events and sometimes felt that half the charities in town would collapse without them.

I borrowed a CD from someone at work today by Vybz Kartel. I thought I would see what all the fuss is about with the accusations of homophobic lyrics and everything, but I am none the wiser: I couldn’t make out a word on the whole disc!

Not that I am counting, but… 9 days until the new TV arrives and I can see pictures which are not 80% red.