The reason I was trying to look up governors is this:  I was reading this story in a local paper about Three Bridges Junior School being put into special measures after getting the lowest possible rating from Ofsted. The latest report gives an overall rating of 4.

It seemed like a very rapid decline, since the previous report in July 2008 was nowhere near as bad – getting either ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’ in every category.  OK, there were no ‘outstandings’ at all but then there were no ‘inadequate’ s either.

While looking at that I noticed that the chair of governors was somebody called Martin Grice and the name Grice rang a bit of a bell because Ryan Grice is a serial BNP candidate in Crawley elections.  It turns out that a Martin Grice from Three Bridges appeared on the BNP membership list that appeared on Wikileaks a couple of years back.

It may just be a coincidence. There may well be two Martin Grices in Three Bridges but it is very difficult to establish one way or the other. The address for the school’s own website does not work: it just gives a ‘Directory listing denied’ error message.  I can’t even see if the chair is a parent governor, staff representative or an appointment by the LEA, or when they first became a governor.

I suppose I could go through every set of council minutes on the WSCC website and maybe get somewhere, but I don’t fancy that, so how can I (and the parents of pupils at the school) know whether there is indeed a BNP member in charge or just somebody with the same name?

West Sussex county council had a ‘revenue spending power’ in 2010-11 of £563.9million.  Next year it will be £560.2million and in 2011-12 it will be £549.4million – £14.5 million less than this year, a reduction of 2.5%

A pittance compared to those (predominantly Labour) councils facing cuts four or five times larger, but still…   Every year as leader of the county council Henry Smith complained that it didn’t get enough support from the government, and now he is in the government the support is even lower.

In fact it is even worse because those are just cash figures that do not take inflation into account.  Assuming inflation of 3% (and it could get higher than that) the spending power in 2012-13 would have had to be £598.2million just to be equivalent to this year, so the real reduction in 2012-13 is more like £48.8million, or 8.7%.

Somehow I can’t see how the removal of nearly£100million over two years will make West Sussex county council better.

Horsham council sees its spending power go from £16.6million this year to £15.8million next year and £14.5million the year after – £2.1million down just in cash terms.  How will they manage?  They won’t be able to afford any more £800k overspends on recycling schemes that’s for sure.

Crawley will have its spending power reduced from £17million this year to £15.6million and then £14million – a reduction of £3million or 17.6% before inflation is taken into account.

What is interesting is that Crawley’s ‘revenue spending power’ is £400k higher than Horsham this year but in two years will be half a million less than Horsham.  Is this a pre-emptive punishment for the voters of Crawley giving the Tories a good kicking in the local elections next year?

I know one thing.  I would not like to be a councillor this year, or next.  A Tory councillor would have to be making cuts in services without the luxury they have enjoyed in recent years of blaming it all on the government.  A Labour councillor could be faced with making cuts, setting an illegal budget or resigning. A Lib Dem councillor will just be looking for a new hobby to fill all that extra free time they will be getting soon.

Here’s the thing though.  Adding up the column on the spreadsheet for reductions, the total reduction in spending power across all councils is about £2.6billion next year and £1.7billion the year after.  A total of £4.3billion.

That figure is dwarfed by the tax which is avoided and evaded by individuals and companies every year.  Just the amount avoided by one single company, Vodafone, would have been enough to avoid any reduction at all in the formula grants for every council in the country for two years!

Philip Green’s tax situation is not exactly transparent, but best estimates are that just the income tax he has personally avoided would have covered the reductions for almost the whole of Greater London next year.

Even George Osborne’s own personal tax avoidance scheme could have covered Horsham’s shortfall easily.

This would be a good time to remember that this Saturday is ‘pay day’ and this is why protesters will be outside Vodafone shops and Philip Green’s shops like Top Shop across the country (nearest organised protest to Crawley is in Brighton).

Those people who go out protesting on Saturday are the real taxpayers’ alliance.  The Tories asked us to embrace the big society and take over failing public services and a growing number of people are deciding that the service they would most like to help is HMRC.

Meanwhile good luck to the local councils in trying to balance those books.

However, since the chief exec had his union involved, at which point the secretary of ALACE was quoted as saying “The way Mark Hammond has been treated by his council is outrageous” it does sound unlikely that everything is amicable.   There has probably been an arrangement, with his diplomacy or silence one of the conditions of pissing a large chunk of our council tax up the wall to compensate him for his mistreatment.

Anyway, the use of the word ‘amicable’ is not the most inaccurate part of the short article on the website: that comes right at the end.

For the full story and reaction see the County Times- out on Thursday.

Somehow I doubt we will be getting the full story.

Maybe not as exciting as the goings on up in Rugby, but still something quite strange is going on.   There is no suggestion that this action of Goldsmiths was an official council decision, or discussed with the leaders of opposition parties, or even other memebrs of the Tory party.   Be interesting to hear the details when they eventually slip out.

As for the byelections, we have two in Crawley.

One is on the borough council, where one of the Tory councillors for Tilgate has decided to resign because he can’t fit in the council work, the day job and the family, and the other is on the county coucil where Henry Smith has finally stood down after being elected to parliament.

I guess Labour should have some chance in Tilgate.  The area always used to be Labour and since the Tories got in there they have had some fairly poor councillors, from what I have heard.  I think the Tories peaked locally a year or two ago, and have been shedding council seats across the country by the hundred so that combined with the poor performance of the Tilgate Tories must help us.

If history is any guide then Maidenbower is a dead cert for the Tories, which is a shame.  It is always a shame when a Tory wins aywhere, of course, but especially so here because of the candidate.  Given the past performance this is about as close to a guaranteed win as you can get in local elections and so a chance for them to get somebody new into local politics.

Instead they have selected somebody who is already a borough councillor.  Not only that, but he is the leader of the council, Bob Lanzer.  Now I quite like Bob, and while the Tilgate Tory whose name escapes me finds it hard to fit being a backbench councillor into his life alongside his day job, Bob seemed to have no trouble fitting in ward matters and being in the shadow executive alongside his job.  Going by the register of interests it looks like he has given up the day job now he is the leader, which would be understandable.

I don’t agree with the direction Bob wants to take the council but I have no doubt in his abilities to take it in those directions, but would county councillor just be a job too many?

As a rule, I don’t like having councillors on both the county and borough council anyway if it can be avoided.  With so few people willing to stand these days apparently it can’t be avoided, but I don’t think it is a good thing for all sorts of reasons that I have blathered on about before.  Usually when it happens the person represents the same area at both levels but in this case Bob would represent Pound Hill & Worth on one authority and Maidenbower on another – so two lots of constituents to deal with.

As leader of the council he will have all sorts of unavoidable meetings with auditors and the like, and visits to the represent Crawley at the LGA.  These things happen during the daytime and can be arranged around council meetings, but the county council does all its business during the day.  I can’t see there not being clashes and when that happens he is likely to prioritise the borough committments – there are enough Tories in county hall that they can afford to have a dozen absent and still win any vote going.

I’m sure Bob would be a good county councillor without the weight of responsibilites of being leader of the borough council, but as it stands I think this is an unwise move.  Unless he is expecting to not be leader of the borough at some point in the not-too-distant future…  perhaps he is anticipating a wipe-out in next year’s borough elections? 

So.. any good?  A few observations.First of all, I prefer the council’s approach because they didn’t mess with the RSS feed.  The County Times changed their RSS feed twice during the changeover.  I think that re-launches are best done in a big-bang manner anyway.

As for the council’s website itself, it looks OK.   It looks a bit busy, but then all council sites do. It comes with the territory.  They all have information on so many different topics and try to cram links to as many of them as possible onto the front page which they sort of have to.  They don’t know what any particular visitor might want and if they are following some sort of rule of thumb about nothing being more than x number of clicks from the front page they are going to have to flood the page with links.

Given the limitations of the job, the site is quite well laid out,  but it is just as quick to find anything out by using the search function, which is pretty effective.   I was able to get to their terse and unedifying press statement about Mark Hammond with one click.

It is not a stunning design, but I have never seen a local council site that is stunning and easy to use.

The County Times has the same problem as the council: it is a local newspaper and there all local newspaper sites look quite similar, partly down to them all being owned by the same few companies who use the same tempalte for all their titles.   Even without that, all newspapers have certain constraints and readers have certain expectations of what they will look like.

The CT site doesn’t look too bad.  It is clearer than the old site and looks prettier – though that is always a subjective matter.

There is plenty wrong with it still, but there are good reasons for the things I don’t like.   For example, too much of the front page content is ‘below the fold’.   One reason for this is the amount of space used by advertising, which I’m guessing is unavoidable given the economics of local papers.   I’m sure the same reason will account for the biggest drawback, which is the lack of content.

All newspaper websites have the same dilemma: put too much on it and there will be no need to buy the paper, put too little on it and it is not worth using.  I don’ t think the County Times have got the balance right yet.  In the printed version of the paper there are all sorts of stories that don’t seem to get anywhere near the website.  The full page about the Hugls’ vitis to Hiroshima last week, for example, or this week’s article about the affordability of homes in the district.

I can see how they do not want to reproduce them in their entirety online, but I think they are missing a trick.  They could put a very short summary online, with a note saying ‘read the full story in this week’s paper’.   I will admit that when the Argus does that it can be very annoying and frustrating, but that is only because I don’t intend to buy a copy, but it might work to generate sales – perhaps more for a weekly paper like the CT than it would on a daily like the Argus.

If you read through the web site you could easily assume that the paper is just full of stories about cars crashing on the A24, thefts from garages and barns and the odd fire, and be unaware of a lot of the content that is more news feature than news.  The newspaper itself isn’t perfect but it is a lot better than you would know from the website.

So, the main verdict must be that the website is a very poor advert for the newspaper.

Putting in some of the extra content, even just as ‘teaser’ articles would fix that.  As a twist, perhaps the full text of articles could go oline at a later date so that the site was useful as an archive resource.  That would make the site useful for all sorts of people, while also serving as a reminder that there is a lot more to the paper than car crashes and rural burglaries.  For an example, the housing development at Broadbridge Heath by Berkeley Homes has been a hot topic in the area for a couple of years, but search the site for “berkeley” and you do not get a single relevent result.

It is the same with the sections for columnists and opinion.  Go to them and the only content is last week’s column by Francis Maude.  Why not all his previous columns?  Why not the countless columns by Henry Smith, Philip Circus and Morwen Millson?

As it happens they are in there somewhere.  Search for “equitable life” and you will get Maude’s column from August 2008 about that topic.  So you can search for older columns, but not find them by browsing.

If looks were everything, I would give the site a qualified thumbs up, but the content and navigation let it down.  Where it matters the site is just as bad as it was before.  I wold be happier if they had left the website alone and modernised the paper edititon, by moving to a more practical format.

With all the decorating I am doing I will admit that it is useful to have some sheets of paper as big as 58cm x 74cm but for all other purposes it is unwieldyand impossible to read easily.  I can think of no good reason to persist with the old broadsheet format that all the daily papers, bar the Telegraph, have ditched.

In other news: the design and content of skuds.org remains as crappy as ever so I am well aware of the glass house from which I am lobbing my bricks, thank you very much.

It is not just me having nothing to say or write about apart from the weather though.   One of the RSS feeds I follow is the Horsham local paper. This is what the feed currently looks like:

1. Snow: school closures Friday – updated
2. Real-life man of snow
3. Snow: school closures Friday
4. Snow: care workers pull out all the stops – audio
5. Snow: county council extra workers drafted in – audio
6. Fallen tree blocks Cowfold road
7. Horsham (Aus) 40 degrees; Horsham (UK) -4 degrees
8. Snow: 1,000 999 calls in 24 hours
9. Snow: Thursday – ice creates major problems; schools closed
10. Horsham recycling and rubbish collections suspended [because of the snow]
11. Snow: county warning to drivers
12. Snow: school closures for Thursday – update
13. Snow: police report no major incidents
14. Snow: Warnham hit by power failure
15. Snow: advice for safer driving
16. Snow: audio – county has enough grit
17. Snow: latest disruption
18. SNOW: pictures of obstacles
19. Snow: more snow at weekend
20. Snow: delays and cancellations to transport
21. Send us your snow photos
22. Snow: schools shut across county
23. Snow: traffic chaos in Horsham district
24. Snow: schools gear up for closures
25. Snow: Gatwick Airport runway closed Tuesday night
26. Snow hits Horsham
27. Snow: police warn motorists
28. County council prepares for the snow
29. Snow: latest Met Office forecast

That’s right – of the last 29 entries, going back to Jan 5th, 28 relate to the weather – unless the Cowfold Road tree fell because of the weight of snow, in which case nothing at all has happened in the whole of Horsham that is not related to the weather!

Ironically, the printed version is due out tomorrow morning and I will probably be unable to get it at my local shops… because of show disrupting the deliveries.

Number 28 amused me.  My first thought was that they must have prepared by panic-buying bread, bog rolls and tinned food for their homes, because the state of the roads in Broadfield doesn’t provide much evidence of anything more practical than that.

The story itself says that “gritters will be working round the clock as part of the effort to keep major A and B road routes open” so presumably Tollgate Hill is not a major B road route, despite being the route lorries use to deliver food to Morrisons and Iceland at the Barton.

It also says that they were “preparing to distribute salt in hippo bags to around 100 key locations for hand spreading.  These will mainly be shopping precincts and hilly areas“.  Obviously, and despite the clue in the name, the Tollgate Hill area is not hilly and our local shopping precinct is not a shopping precinct.   That is a pity because delivering these hippo bags sounds like a really good idea and full marks to WSCC for coming up with it.

Maybe the overall picture for the county is as rosy as it is painted but, yet again, the north of the county is very much the poor relation, and within that area Broadfield seems to get the lowest priority. I am reminded of that line from The Commitments where Jimmy says:

The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.

We should adapt that for Broadfield!

Farnham Close, 7:30am on 18/12/09

A chap in Hobbs Road is in the local paper complaining about the lack of a gritting bin in his road.  Having had my own simlar experiences discussin grit bins with West Sussex council I have a lot of sympathy for him, but where I have to disagree is when he says it is the steepest road in Crawley.I have never been out measuring such things, but I reackon there are steeper roads and that my own road is one of them.  The picture above is not even of the steepest part of the road.   Compared to Hobbs Road it is a lot narrower with more curves – including a sharp 90-degree turn at the bottom.  With the number of parked cars it can be a nightmare at the best of times, but with compacted snow it is literally impossible.

On Friday I got Jayne to give me a lift to work – I was going on to a xams party afterwards.  When she came back home Jayne could not even get the car back up to our house and had to leave it halfway down the hill.  When it is snowy or icy, or if the forecasts say it is going to be, a lot of residents here leave their cars at the bottom of the hill in preparation.

I’m not saying Hobbs Road doesn’t need some grit, but Farnham Close could probably do with it first.  Or maybe second, because when it comes to steepness, the real winner has to be Kingswood Close.   Forget about cars and people slipping, Kingswood Close is so steep I am surprised the houses don’t slip down it when it snows!

I’ll just have to keep using the thing as an expensive paperweight.

I really can’t see what the problem is.  Ironically the register of interests is one of the least interesting documents around, certainly my own entry in it was extremely uninteresting.  Anybody who looks through it will soon decide it is dull and tedious, but make it ‘secret’ and it looks like there is something to hide.  OK it is not secret – you can make an appointment to view it.  For those of us with jobs and a life it might as well be secret because it is hugely inconvenient to go and view it. It reminds me of the bit in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the council say the demolition plans had been on public display.

The reason given for not making the register of interests more easily available is that “it could be used by criminal and malicious elements”.  Well guess what?   It still can.  A criminal would just have to lie.

The irony is that the person giving all the quotes to the Crawley News to defend the decision is Duncan Crow.  As he is a county councillor as well, all his information is presumably available online at the WSCC website. That seems to have slipped Labour leader Brenda Smith’s mind when she says “I believe in openness and transparency and would have no problem having my declarations of interests on the web”.  They already are as she is also a county councillor.

Crow says that “It’s not about trying to hide anything”.  While that may be true the council is acting like it has something to hide and if you do that then some people will decide that is the case, especially with all the recent publications of information about MPs.  I would have thought it was the councillors’ own interest to make such information as public as possible. Apart from anything else, there must be at least a third of the borough council who are also county councillors so their details are already out there.

The killer quote is “I would question why people have an interest in seeing this information online. What would be the motivation for viewing it?”  After all the focus on greater transparency in public life that the MP expenses scandal stirred up they still don’t get it do they?

I really cannot see any sensible objection to having the council’s register of interests online at all.  In fact, if anybody wants to send me a copy of the contents I will happily publish them online myself!   Really. But only the complete set – not just cherry-picking whatever juicy bits there may be.   And the same goes for Horsham council too.  Either they do not publish their register of interests or they have it tucked away in such an obscure corner of their website that I can’t find it.

I do wonder about one thing though.  If Councillor Crow is so firmly of the opinion that publishing members’ interests online is a bad thing and potentially dangerous, has he made any attempt to stop the county publishing its register?  I don’t know when the county decided to start putting it online, but if he was already a member at that time, did he vote against it?

For an example of how boring the register of interest is look at Duncan Crow’s own entry in the county council register.   It is even more boring than my entry was when I was a councillor – at least I had a job to list on it.  Or is that the sort of malicious comment they are talking about?

I mentioned a surprise in the first paragraph.  The surprise was that two members of the council have declared on the register that they are freemasons.   I really thought that nobody under 60 would bother joining that bunch of weirdos.  The well-known local agitator referred to above has often voiced his opinions about masons in the council and I thought it was too far-fetched.  Call me cynical, but why would anybody do that?

Do they think to themselves: I would like to do something charitable, shall I make out a standing order to Oxfam?  Volunteer at a local charity?  Or shall I join a quasi-religious, semi-secret society, bound by arcane rituals, and with a reputation for casting a malign corrupting influence over the legal system, the police, and other public bodies?  Surely it is not the first choice for anybody who’s only motivation is good works, and yet that is the only aspect that masons ever mention.

I believe you have to be invited to join.  Is the initial approach one where a mason takes you to one side and asks if you want to be involved in a charitable organisation with no personal benefit whatsoever like some sort of  up-market chugger?  Doesn’t seem likely does it?  I will remain deeply suspicious of the organisation. Apart from anything else you apparently have to profess a belief in a supreme being which is odd enough in itself.