13 November - Blue sky thinking
Attending council meetings is not my favourite activity but I dragged myself to
yesterday’s General Purposes Committee meeting because the subject matter was far
too important to miss. The Committee was set to approve - or not - the Conservative’s ward
proposals to the Boundary Commission (BC). Oh, who am I trying to kid with the not
word? A Conservative party proposal was to be considered by a committee with
a Conservative majority. The result could only go one way.
The importance of the decision cannot be over emphasised. It will affect the
number of Bexley councillors and has the potential to change the colour of the council.
When the parliamentary boundaries were up for discussion four years ago, the local Tories’ proposals were
blatant gerrymandering. It proved to be of no
consequence but only because the traitorous LibDems backtracked from their coalition
agreement with the Conservatives.
So important was the decision last night that joining me in the public gallery was leader
Teresa O’Neill (Obsolescent Boundaries Excised), cabinet members Don Massey and Philip Read and councillors
Geraldine Lucia-Hennis and Joe Pollard. Joe graciously acknowledged my presence,
the others pretended I wasn’t there. No other residents were there either.
Among the other people who weren’t there was all the Labour and UKIP councillors
apart from the two and one respectively who are committee members. If nothing
else it gives the impression they are not really interested.
The Committee is chaired by relative newcomer Cafer Munur whose approach to the
job tends towards the informal and laid back. Almost a homely chat about politics
with his mates while watching the football and sinking a few beers. There is
no beer but he is not at all bad as a referee. Whatever his technique it works quite well.
The picture above hides all the Tories apart from councillor Hurt in the right foreground. Behind him
were councillors Rob Leitch, Linda Bailey, Sharon Massey and
well hidden
from the lens, vice-chairman Nigel Betts.
If you take a close interest in the existing ward boundaries you may come to the
conclusion they are not particularly clever. Where I am, near Lesnes Abbey, the
ward extends north across the railway line towards Thamesmead and southwards up the hill
through the woods towards the Woolwich Road and Brampton. I regard neither direction as being part of my
home patch. However if I walk east or west I cross the ward boundary within
little more than five minutes.
The centre of Welling is hopelessly divided. You can be in four different wards
just by crossing the road. It’s not the best way of building a community.
Further to the south, wards straddle the A2. All rather silly.
The new plan is heavily biased towards natural and man made boundaries. The three cross
borough railway lines, the A2 trunk road and the almost straight line marked out
by Crook Log, Broadway, Albion Road and Watling Street.
Being parochial again, I regard my home territory as running from the borough boundary in Wilton Road
through to the Asda store flanking Picardy Manorway. To the north the railway is
an obvious barrier and to the south the uninhabited escarpment which marks the edge of the
Thames’ floodplain forms a natural barrier. And that more or less marks the
proposed ward boundary too. Nice.
As far as I can see other wards are similarly logical but there are bound to be
anomalies here and there. For example the new Brampton ward excludes more of
Brampton Road than it includes.
To keep the BC happy each councillor has to have a similar
number of electors to represent so it won’t always be possible to have a perfect
community based ward and as I understand it, that is where the UKIP proposals
fell down. The plan under discussion yesterday evening must have taken a great
deal of thought and senior officer time and UKIP simply doesn’t have the
resources to emulate that. It may explain
the leader’s
mocking praise at the council meeting.
One of many things that makes setting boundaries difficult is that the numerical
target of similar ward populations is a moving one. The
21,500 homes planned for
Bexley is going to upset a few apple carts but apparently the BC will only take into account those with planning permission, so that
is relatively few. Bexley council has assumed that the number of electors will
rise from its present total of 179,439 to 189,189 by 2021.
One reason for Bexley council being keen on community based wards is that the
BC rates them very highly. Instead of adjusting ward
boundaries to justify three councillors it would much rather that the number of
councillors is adjusted to suit a community. This has led to Belvedere, or at
least the part of it centred on the Nuxley Road shopping area, being defined as
a small self-contained community to be represented by one councillor.
But enough of the generalities, what did the committee members have to say?
First Mr. Nick Hollier the Human Resources manager related what had happened hitherto.
The council had unanimously decided that 45 was a reasonable number of
councillors and the BC had been persuaded to agree.
The BC had encouraged members of the public and political parties to submit
their ideas directly to it. Mr. Hollier said that UKIP and the Conservatives
shared their ideas with council officers but Labour had decided not to do so, a
decision which allowed the Conservatives to make merry later in the meeting.
The definitive proposals must reach the BC by next Monday.
The first councillor to speak was Sharon Massey who said she was pleased to see
that her ward, Danson, would no longer be like a big doughnut with the park in
the middle. The new boundary will be Danson Road.
Councillor Rob Leitch was also very pleased to see “natural boundaries
restored”. “Common sense had been brought back into boundaries.” The proposals
are “extremely good”. Councillor Nigel Betts said “the division of long roads
into three pieces was absolutely barmy but that has all been ironed out now”.
Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) thanked the officers for the great deal of time they
had spent on answering his questions but he was concerned about the electoral
numbers. “There are a number of developments which we somehow missed and in my
ward there are whole blocks in Belvedere Park where we are lucky if there is 5%
registration and some are zero and elsewhere some have been counted twice.” (†)
Daniel found it “bizarre that GLA and Bexley led” housing schemes do not appear
in their own housing assessment projections. Similar anomalies, he said,
appeared with Peabody Housing funded schemes.
Councillor Francis is a great technician when it comes to dissecting council policy but the
Conservatives were not in a mood to backtrack. The chairman said that the
methodology had been discussed at the first Working Group and “there was a
strict timescale and we needed to draw a line in the sand and the figures are
predictions and not an exact science”.
Councillor Francis repeated that, for example, “the housing zone in Thamesmead
are very large numbers.” “What would it do for the [electoral] variance?”
Mr. Hollier said his “figure of 189,189 had taken account of those things already”.
Councillor Leitch said the proposals were “an absolute best fit that tick the
boxes set out by the boundaries commission. It is a very well thought through
proposal”. It seemed to be a fair summary that could have brought the meeting to
an end but his colleagues had other ideas.
Councillor Linda Bailey said “it would have been nice to have seen the Labour
proposals. We have no idea of their proposals and it is a bit rich, for, you
know, to be critical on that”. She “couldn’t see what the problem was”.
Councillor Sharon Massey however could “understand what councillor Francis is
saying but we are going to have to agree to differ is the way forward on this.
There had been nothing to stop him putting his figures forward. If you think you
have something else which will have an effect you have a duty to bring it to
this committee and not just report it to the boundaries commission”.
Councillor Chris Beazley (UKIP) thought the road he lived in in Welling had been
carved into three and his community was divided. He provided several reasons for
so thinking but councillor Leitch provided counter-arguments. The chairman
interrupted by saying it was an issue that should have been debated at the Working Group.
Councillor Francis returned to the subject of electoral equality but rapidly
moved on to the remaining trunk roads that will still be crossed by ward
boundaries. One was North Cray Road and the other the A2016 in Erith. He also
thought that using the Bexleyheath railway line as a boundary was “quite
ridiculous in some cases” and reeled off a list of easy crossing points. He
wasn’t happy about dividing the roads that climbed the escarpment that runs
through Belvedere. Heron Road and New Road got a special mention. Neither was he
happy with Belvedere Village and Picardy being designated single member wards.
It wasn’t difficult to predict some of the answers he would get while voices on all sides
became raised. Hardly anybody lives east of North Cray Road so linking it with
the western side seems to be the sensible course and New Road has a distinct top
and bottom with a large uninhabited gap in the middle.
Cabinet member Don Massey stepped in to give the official answers. Allowing one
two or three member wards had provided much needed flexibility and reducing ward
numbers inevitably led to some new divisions. The east west “railway lines are a
barrier even where there is a number of crossings. Separate communities have
developed on either side”. There are acknowledged issues with the escarpment in
the north of the borough. “It restricts actual movement. It’s a barrier”.
Councillor Massey said only 300 people live to the east of North Cray Road.
He was “not in general in favour of one member wards but the community grouped
around the Belvedere triangle was a natural one”.
The cabinet member’s defence of the Conservative proposals were both
comprehensive and convincing. Councillor Betts said the proposals “were the best
compromise there is”, which is probably a very fair assessment “and I think we should go with it”.
Councillor Rob Leitch agreed but added “there is nothing else on the table”.
Turning the screw on Labour he said “it is easy to criticise when you don’t contribute”.
Councillor Francis made his point about future proofing the numbers again, or robustness as
he called it. He believed there was “a deliberate attempt to split the
community” around Belvedere and suggested it was “political expediency”.
Next he criticised the names of some of the wards a few of which referred to
places or historical facts which fell outside the ward bearing their names.
Voices became raised again. Some of the comments smacked of nit picking. What’s in a name?
As councillor Betts said, the BC has previously not objected to late name changes.
Councillor Sharon Massey said she had been studying the map of councillor Beazley’s
address and decided she was sympathetic to his concerns but felt “every ward
would have some sort of anomaly like that”. She was however “disappointed with
Labour tonight”. “If ward names bother you so much you could have come up with
alternatives [before] and discussed it”. It seemed to be a reasonable point.
She then very sarcastically said that Labour’s submission to the boundaries
commission would be six words. “We don’t like the council’s proposal.” Labour was “lazy”.
Sharon Massey can be a sharp tongued woman and it could be heard again in her tone of
voice as she said “I know you find it hard to imagine but we have seriously
tried to do it on what is the right thing for the borough” and on the face of
it, sharp tongued or not, it would be difficult to disagree,
The last time there was a ward submission to the BC she said, it was the Labour
proposal that was adopted and not the Conservatives’ “and we have won the
elections ever since so we are obviously not very good at drawing up the right
things to get us the right vote if that is what you think is the hidden agenda”.
There was no logic to it but it sounded good at the time.
This was not Labour’s finest hour and the proposal went to the vote. For some
unaccountable reason UKIP voted with Labour prompting yet more sarcasm from
Sharon Massey. For good measure she told Daniel Francis to grow up. Don’t expect
dignified decorum from a councillor more
at home in strip clubs.
Maps of the council’s boundaries proposal are
contained within the Agenda. Far too large and numerous to be shown here.
† some of the quotations related above were extracted from much longer speeches but for convenience have been
compressed into one or two sentences.