16 October (Part 2) - One three hour meeting. A handful of highlights
Whoever it was who designed the new council chamber did a very bad job. It’s
a featureless cavern with no sensible provision for public viewing. Last night’s
People Scrutiny Committee meeting allowed me to intimately scrutinise councillor
Alex Sawyer’s ears but it was close to impossible to actually see anyone
speaking. I was tempted to take a picture of the Sawyer lugs but as he is a
decent sort of bloke by Bexley Tory standards I exercised some restraint. With 40
councillors and invited guests around the table the four members of the public
present - it soon reduced to two - were relegated to an alcove behind the loudspeakers. Not good.
About half of our councillors speak up confidently and present few aural problems, but
there are rather a lot of mumblers. Mick Barnbrook and Elwyn Bryant have given
up on attending scrutiny meetings because they don’t hear enough to make it worthwhile.
Councillor
James Hunt takes a relaxed view of chairmanship which is no bad
thing. He will chivvy speakers along when necessary but, last night at least,
was flexible when speakers strayed a little from the main subject. Neither is he
critical of comments instead of questions and once allowed himself to send a
message to his wife via the webcast. But the downside is a near three hour
meeting. It’s impossible to report every aspect of it, so the following is just
the bits that captured my attention.
Councillor Alan Downing
returned to his theme of why Bexley Primary Schools don’t seem to be pushing
pupils towards passing the Eleven Plus. A high proportion of Grammar School
places are still taken by out of borough children.
One of the council officers - it’s impossible to say who, no name plates were
visible from my position - attempted to prove councillor Downing wrong using one
of those grammar schoolboy formulae that I have long since forgotten that aims
to prove that one equals two. (A division by zero came into it somewhere.)
Another
councillor who consistently speaks up - in every sense of the word, he
doesn’t need a microphone - for residents’ educational needs is councillor Chris Beazley (UKIP) who, quoting information
provided by Bexley council, complained that one of his ward residents lost a
grammar school place because a child from Tottenham scored a point or two higher in the 11+
examination. Desmond Deehan, the headteacher at Townley Grammar school slapped him down by
saying he had no pupils from Tottenham. He didn’t have to do it as rudely as he did surely?
He was addressing a councillor not a recalcitrant teenager.
Councillor Sharon Massey was also concerned about the lack of interest in the
11+ and to my mind spoke a lot of good sense when saying that learning about
tests and how to manage and pass them was a worthwhile life skill. Bexley
schools aren’t doing that.
My own prejudice that school teachers are too often motivated by left wing claptrap was amply confirmed by the teacher who spoke against educational choice.
Chief
Superintendent Peter Ayling is away again so once more we were treated to
the Assistant Borough Commander, Nicola Duffy, gabbling away at high speed,
running out of breath and trailing off into near inaudibility. There was very
little about Romanians this time around.
Apart from a reference to the policeman shot in the hand a week ago in Welling
and the appalling murder in Thamesmead on Tuesday she managed to fill eight
minutes with not a lot.
The medical team were more interesting and obviously pleased with themselves for
opening the new Urgent Care Centre at Erith Hospital at the beginning of this
month. Their efforts (there's been a UCC in Sidcup for some while) have resulted in
local A&E attendances bucking the national trend and actually falling, not that Queen
Elzabeth Hospital’s A&E facility is out of trouble yet as they readily admitted.
The chairman asked the medics how well they were prepared for Ebola and as luck
would have it a lady (Joy Ellery) from Lewisham Hospital had invited herself to
the meeting and you may remember Lewisham Hospital had
an Ebola scare last week.
This is what she said about it but basically the
national newspapers, the Sun in particular, made a mountain out of a molehill.
To summarise; a man from Sierra Leone had a temperature just half a degree up from normal.
He was put in an isolation ward and he and the staff were clad in plastic, masks
gloves etc. and he was allowed a single plastic encased visitor because he had been living with
that person anyway and he was classed low risk. He stayed in his room and within a few hours his tests
came back negative just as the medical staff were expecting. Storm in a teacup.
In
what I am almost certain must have been a staged event, councillor Peter Craske asked about
the
Belvedere Splash Park which is somewhat removed from ‘People’ but cabinet member
Sawyer volunteered to answer Craske’s question and the elasticated chairman was happy to allow it.
Councillor Sawyer just happened to have all the Splash Park documentation in front of him which
was a huge stroke of luck don’t you think, and was therefore able to go into considerable detail
as to why the Splash Park is in trouble. In essence, the filtration system is not up to the job and
bacterial infection has been hard to control. At times low level “e.coli and other nasties” have been
detected and the council spent £47,000 on disinfectant this year to ensure that there was
no danger to the public. Such problems were responsible for most of the
park closures and fixing them properly would cost between £350,000 and half a million.
The Conservatives were keen to blame Labour for the unserviceable filtration
systems but it would have been council officers who advised them. If the system
is no good after only eight years perhaps the manufacturers are culpable.
Whilst not doubting that councillor Sawyer is a loyal part of Teresa O’Neill’s
inner circle, his is not a name that I associate with Bexley council’s lie
machine and I think it is reasonable to assume that there are genuine problems
at the splash park. Alex Sawyer cannot see how it can be preserved given the parlous
state of Bexley’s finances but is willing to listen to any man with a plan. I
don’t see the point of replacing the splash park with yet another playground as
there is already a large well equipped one on the other side of the road.
The Libraries Report was discussed and councillor Joe Ferreira expressed his
concerns but may have failed to fully account for the changing nature of the
library service. Surely it has to move with the times?
The council’s report refers to e-book readers, low cost books from Amazon, the influence
of the internet and the fact that most people these days have their own computer
all of which tend to reduce library use and it’s hard to argue otherwise.
Councillor Downing thought the Library Report was “a well thought out piece of
paper” and not for the first time last night I found myself agreeing with him
though why it is only private enterprise that can run a decent coffee bar at a
profit I have never been quite sure.
With Libraries out of the way there were only five out of 14 agenda items
remaining but the lateness of the hour has a miraculous effect on councillors’
willingness to ask questions so we got through the lot in a mere six minutes.
A subject that got a passing mention was the Adoption and Fostering Services. I
didn’t listen too intently because I was reading the much greater detail
revealed by the Agenda and trying to get my head around the figures.
How is it for example that the People committee is told this…
…but only a day earlier,
Cabinet said something different?
The difference is that the first statement refers to last year and the second to the
first half of this one but the target looks like being well missed and Bexley’s children’s care services
will still be in big trouble.