The real story of the council elections is not the advances made by Labour and the slide of the Conservatives and Lib Dems.

It is, or at least should be, the fact that the turnout was so appalling - the lowest, so it is said, for ten years.

Hundreds of councillors have been elected on turnouts of about 30% - meaning two thirds of potential voters simply weren't interested. Hardly a resounding mandate.

In one ward in Maidstone - Parkwood - just 18% of voters turned out. Even in Tunbridge Wells, where you might have thought there would be a greater interest, turnout was around 30%.

You can call it apathy, indifference or disillusionment. But however you describe it, it represents a significant and profound challenge to our politicians who have - on all sides - singularly failed to come up with ways of resolving this long-standing crisis afflicting local government.

Thatcher thought the solution was to hit voters in their pockets via the poll tax - a kind of shock therapy that did indeed get people interested in councils but not quite in the way she intended.

Labour tried implementing cabinet government and executive mayors. The argument was that people would know where the buck stopped and greater accountability would transform the public's appetite for local democracy.

More recently, the coalition has gone for a transparency revolution with equally mixed results. There have been various attempts to make it easier to vote.

All have failed to effect any kind of revolution and appear to have left as many of us as indifferent and disinterested as before. This is not to say people are turned off by politics. They are often engaged in issues that really ought to mean that council elections matter more than Parliamentary ones.

Somehow they don't. Why? Many councillors do an admirable job taking up constituents' interests but I am often struck by how inward looking many are - often seeming to consider that in serving 'the council' by attending lots of meetings, they are somehow serving residents.

Political interests are often elevated above those of constituents, with members fearful of uttering anything that could be perceived as being disloyal to their party or damaging to the image or reputation of the authority - let alone damaging their prospects of preferment and a possible job in the cabinet.

Politically, the result is that every party begins to sound the same.

Despite endless consultations and PR, councils are  still too often seen as doing things to people, rather than with them or for them. They suffer, like national governments, from the perception that they are distant and remote, patrician bureaucracies that ask us to accept implicitly that 'they know best.'

Of course, council elections are seen through the prism of the national political scene. So, we see the line trotted out that the apathy factor is more about discontent with the government of the day than lack of interest in the local council. (I accept the media falls into this trap, too).

Note how defeated local councillors are directing their ire at their national representatives and how the party leaders are rationalising their results by talking about Parliamentary mid-term blues.

But if politicians spent as much time discussing how councils could better connect with residents as they did in a blame game explaining away their electoral losses, perhaps we might get nearer to finding a way of resolving this lack of interest.

The antidote to apathy - worth a watch

EVER since Kent County Council got its fingers singed over the £50m it had invested in three Icelandic banks, it has acted with all the caution of a meerkat emerging from an underground burrow surrounded by hungry predators.

This safety first approach - quite understandable in the circumstances - saw the council opt to invest any money in the Treasury's Debt Management Office, where it has seen a paltry return of 0.25% interest.

But it has begun to make deposits in other banks where the rate of interest paid is marginally better and in recent months, has made several agreements. One is with the RBS where KCC has £35m invested earning 1.25% interest; another is with the Bank of Scotland, where KCC has £27.5m on deposit earning 0.75%.

This is good news in one sense: financial advisers to KCC say that these better rates of interest mean the council is generating an extra £802,500 over a year.

But the degree to which the authority has been scarred by its nasty Icelandic experience was notable at a recent meeting where Conservative backbenchers were clearly alarmed that KCC had begun to make deposits with Santander Bank.

Chief worrier was Cllr Keith Ferrin, who appeared to have forgotten that last year, he complained that KCC ought to be rather more aggressive in its approach to finding better deals than the one on offer from the rather parsimonious HM Treasury. "There's every difference between a bank with a head office in the UK and one in Madrid," he pointed out.

Given the turbulence in the Spanish economy, he argued that KCC ought to take Santander off its approved list. When he was told that the bank was considered a safe bet by KCC's advisors, he made the fair point that KCC had been told exactly the same about Icelandic banks.

Finance cabinet member Cllr John Simmonds emphasised that KCC could take its money out of Santander quickly and there was a distinction between the bank's UK division and the Spanish division. "We've not taken this decision lightly and have had a good deal of advice," he said.

There is a reason why Conservatives are wringing their hands and getting out their worry beads. Many have painful memories of contesting the last county council election against the backdrop of the then unresolved Icelandic saga and recall how it was a genuine doorstep issue with voters.

The last thing they want is to fight next year's elections, where they already face losing seats, against a similar backdrop and having to account for another episode in which public money is at risk because of they got seduced by the attractions of Spain.

There are few people currently oblivious to the current Twitter - storm being whipped up by Samantha Brick and the Daily Mail. If you haven’t a clue what on earth I’m on about

1. Where have you been?

2. I have kindly provided the links for you:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2124246/Samantha-Brick-downsides-looking-pretty-Why-women-hate-beautiful.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2124782/Samantha-Brick-says-backlash-bile-yesterdays-Daily-Mail-proves-shes-right.html

 In fairness to Ms Brick I feel a little bit sorry for her: she’s probably sacrificed a whole lot of female (come to think of it, even male) friendships through her article. There are few people that will trust her intentions now as all are likely to assume that she wishes to get something out of them. So, as I am feeling a little bit of sympathy for her I have decided to write something to counter all the hate mail and threats she has been receiving because, lets face it, whilst she may have gone about it all the wrong way, she has actually (a little inadvertently) done something positive with her article:

1.       Women once more stand united: the return of sisterly solidarity has occurred over the past few days. Unfortunately, Ms Brick, these women are not united with you. No it isn’t out of jealousy: nobody minds if you’re pretty or not I think you’ll find. The fact that you have distinguished yourself as separate from other women and placed yourself as their competitor rather than supporting the advancement of other women is what they are upset about. No woman is going to clap their hands with glee at being told “this is what you’re doing all wrong, and this is what I’m doing so right”. What the women have united against is a common villain I’m afraid and, as per, a woman has been set up to take that place as villain. The only positive to this is that:

2.       The stereotypical portrait of a villain has been altered significantly: evidently you are an empowered woman who doesn’t wish to skirt controversy by being meek and mild (good) however, instigating women criticising other women (bad) is far less admirable. Women have been portrayed as villains for far too long in fairytales and, yes, Samantha, it is indeed time that people stopped portraying the villainess as an ugly old hag with warts on her nose. The unfortunate part about you being the villain of the piece is that people aren’t questioning why you have been allowed to advance your own career goals based upon what you look like: why aren’t these men being held to account?

3.       The Social Media storm created by your article has given other women an opportunity to express themselves and their concerns: bringing women’s issues to the forefront of discussion. What I would like to suggest here is that we all get a little perspective on these women’s issues. If you aren’t aware of it readers there was a very important article posted recently about sixteen year old Amina Filali. If you haven’t seen this article yet, you should click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/03/moroccan-teenager-death-women-rights  Amina was sixteen but experienced a horrific ordeal at the hands of men: she was raped and then ordered by the Moroccan courts to marry her abuser. Amina couldn’t live under these circumstances and took her own life: this is a much more valuable insight into the Women’s Rights Movement as it stands internationally. There has been a reform in Morocco of women’s rights known as Moudawana:

“The moudawana was created to give more rights to women, but it isn’t the answer to all women’s problems” said Jazouani

 Do you see how this transfers to your article Ms Brick? It isn’t just the change in law that needs to take place, Ms Pankhurst only started the ball rolling for us with her cries of “votes for women” the idea, much like with the moudawana, was that women would continue to carry the baton after she was gone. This is about the need for a change in attitudes. The women that have reacted so strongly to your article, you may actually consider, are not suffering from the green eyed monster but are struggling with the inequity of it all. The female rights movement had come an awfully long way in trying to reverse the stereotypes that you not only pander to and endorse but you revel in these stereotypes because you feel a benefit from it. Whilst this is fantastic publicity for debates on female rights obviously you got the rougher end of the deal on this one: your article really did have all the subtlety of, well, a brick in the face. Plus, if you really want to endorse the stereotyping of women, then you’re doing it all wrong: you’re supposed to just sit quietly looking pretty. You made yourself a pawn in the Daily Mail “Women Beware Women” campaign.4.

Employers will now love you. Obviously. Productivity in the work place just went up ten fold. Why? Because the office romance just died Ms Brick and you killed it. No woman is going to want to put herself in your shoes: look at what you have experienced. And no man is now going to run the risk of being “Bricked”: sexism in the workplace will once more come under close scrutiny.

So, to close my argument (for now) and open the floor for discussion I will just say that every woman, every human being wants to be valued on their merits and seen for WHO they are: I want to get a promotion or a job offer because I am the best not simply because I reached a glass ceiling and was prepared to flash a bit of leg. And yes, I am aware that there are plenty of organisations where “looking the part” is essential (do men feel the same pressures of this I wonder?) but why do we need to substantiate this inequity by pandering to it? Why do we have to resign ourselves to living up to someone else’s idealised notion of beauty? Ms Brick, are you of the nature that if you can’t beat them join them? It certainly seems that way. How about, if at first you don’t succeed, try then try again?

If the eyes of the nation weren't exactly turned towards County Hall, as one over-excited Conservative county councillor claimed, Kent County Council's decision to back new grammar school places is an undeniably significant one.

Kent to get 'new' grammar>>>

There was, to be frank, never that much doubt that the plan would receive the backing of the council, given the huge Conservative majority at KCC and especially in view of the wriggle room created by Michael Gove's decsion to allow the expansion of schools to meet demand for places where population growth creates the need.

KCC had been careful to emphasise that it was considering the case on these grounds alone and was not being driven by an ideological zeal to see the return of selection - which the Conservative party has banned.

Nevertheless, the debate at County Hall gave a vivid illustration of just how totemic the issue remains for many in the party. Some county councillors were clearly delighted to have the unexpected chance to actually do something to demonstrate that whatever David Cameron might have said, many believe the cornerstone of the party's education policy ought to be a commitment to restore the 11-plus.

The rhetoric showed the debate had not, for politicians on both sides, really moved on. In fact, I half expected to step out of County Hall to be confronted by people wearing flared trousers and tank tops and billboard posters encouraging me to go to work on an egg.

There was plenty of old-fahioned rhetoric from the Conservative backbenches about how Labour's abolition of the 11-plus had kicked away the ladder of opportunity from the working class and how anyone who dared vote against the plan would be depriving them of that chance - although there was no reference to the fact that these days, in many parts of Kent and especially the west, grammar schools are not really giving many from this 'leg up' because of the intense coaching culture that has evolved.

Cllr Jim Wedgebury (Con) told the meeting how KCC would be opening the floodgates for a host of new grammar schools across the country - fundamentally inaccurate as such expansion can only take place in pre-existing selective areas - but it gives you the sense of feeling that some felt the best thing KCC Conservatives could do would be to organise a march on the citadels of comprehensive areas and tear them down.

His colleague Andrew Bowles, also the leader of Swale council, made a pitch to head the crusade in a speech in which he declared that it was not just Sevenoaks that should have a new grammar but every town the length and breadth of the county - conjuring up images of an army of grammar school freedom fighters marching through the Garden of England with spades and forks, digging the foundations for new schools and handing out pamphlets extolling the virtues of selection.

Labour sought to deflect these attacks by adopting the political ruse of asking for a review of admissions and the 11-plus and suggesting that County Hall Conservatives were engaging in the educational equivalent of tax evasion - a tactic which didn't work out too well.

So, in political terms, there will be ripples from this decision and it certainly will give ballast to the large section of the Conservative party who think Cameron was mistaken at the outset to rule out more grammars. But it does not presage a full-scale restoration of grammars up and down the country whatever county councillors in Kent might believe and hope.

Parents in Sevenoaks mobilised a well-organised campaign which was based around their view that if they lived in a selective area, then it was wrong for their children to have to travel miles away to attend a school and that was entirely reasonable.

I never once heard any of them argue publicly that this was based around a view that selective schools were somehow 'better' and that is to their credit. And to be fair to KCC's cabinet member Cllr Mike Whiting, he has been scrupulous in sticking to the line that this is all about meeting a legitimate demand for places.

But it will be interesting to see how the story unfolds. There are any number of practical hurdles to overcome - the money, the site and the possible challenges that may come from other schools in the area who are concerned they may be adversely affected. One option that is apparently under consideration is for an academy chain to be invited to run the school - something Michael Gove would no doubt find acceptable.

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One interesting thing that came out of yesterday's debate was the news that KCC has asked a group of headteachers to carry out a review of the 11+plus test. The authority is concerned that the the extensive coaching that some children get to take the 11+ has effectively disproved the accepted notion that children cannot be 'taught' to pass it.

And because coaching costs money, the argument that grammars improve social mobility is if not blown out of the water, badly under-mined - especially in view of the heightened competition caused by the emergence of a group of super-selective schools.

ERIC Pickles cannot be faulted for his commitment to greater open government. He has forced councils to do much more in terms of publishing details of how they are spending our money - a long overdue step.

But just how effective has his transparency crusade been? Has his belief that greater transparency would unleash an 'army of armchair auditors' who would scrutinise council accounts and come up with ways of saving the taxpayer money come to fruition?

Mr Pickles asserted last year that the creation of a 'citizen samizdat' had proved a 'triumph.' He told council finance chiefs that the publication of invoices of more than £500 had played an essential role in 'eliminating waste and inefficiency to deliver value for money to the taxpayer.'

If a survey we have done is any indication, Mr Pickles' grand claims do not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, far from sparking the creation of an auditors' army, it seems there has been monumental indifference to the transparency revolution.

We asked councils in Kent a series of questions relating to their monthly publication of invoices above £500 over last year. The questions concerned how many FOI requests they had received for information about individual invoices; how many general inquiries from the public they had received; whether any of these requests had led to a change in policy that may have saved money and finally, how much it had cost them to publish the invoice details over the year.

The request was sent to Kent County Council, Medway Council and the 12 district and borough councils.

Here's a summary:

Councils who received no FOI requests: Medway; Ashford, Swale, Maidstone, Gravesham, Tonbridge and Malling

Councils getting one request: Tunbridge Wells; Thanet; Dover

Councils getting more than one request: Kent county council (5).

Responses to the question about general inquiries about invoices were equally dismal. Several councils said they did not keep records anyway; most others who did either had zero or one. KCC did say that its website had received 3,945 hits.

Perhaps the most telling statistic came in the response to whether councils had changed policy as a result of any scrutiny of their invoices either by the media or the public. Not one council indicated they had.

As to the costs, some councils - contrary to earlier complaints about the expense - said they had not spent anything additionally on complying with the new rules. These included Ashord, Thanet, Medway. KCC said it cost about £120 a month to process the data.

For others, the costs were relatively modest: Tunbridge Wells (£1,300 per year); Gravesham said it had spent £1,500 setting up the system and was spending £320 a month doing it; Swale said it was spending £4,900 to use an outside company to do the work; Maidstone spent £4,000 setting up the system and £50 on staff time each month.

What does this tell us? The answers suggest widespread indifference to the tsunami of information the public now has access to but I do not think it is that simple.

The problem is that the data is produced and presented in a way which makes it impregnable to any meaningful analysis. Visitors to council websites are presented with gargantuan spreadsheets that offer only the most basic of information and crude figures, lacking any context of even explanation.

True, the persistent armchair auditor can sometimes elicit more through FOI requests but it hardly looks like the kind of revolution Pickles had in mind - and is far from the triumph he has claimed it to be.

This is not an argument against the principle of transparency; it is about whether the mechanisms councils have in place are sophisiticated enough to allow the public to properly understand how taxpayers' money is being spent.

If councils are to properly engage the citizen, they will need to do considerably more than publish each month reams and reams of impenetrable spreadsheets.

 £500 invoices.pdf (6.40 mb)

GETTING  value for money is something councils are acutely conscious of, especially now with money in short supply and much greater public interest in, and awareness of, how taxpayers' money is spent.

As one of the country's larger authorities, contract procurement is inevitably big business at County Hall. An astonishing £850m is spent on contracting services and goods each year.

Which means companies will know there is potentially lucrative business to be had from KCC, which in turn benefits from such competition and can often use its size and economies of scale to get good deals on behalf of the taxpayer by being able to drive prices down.

However, as we report today, there is not always competition for some of these contracts. The county council has awarded at least £4.2m of business in the last two years without putting the business out to tender.

It has taken a while for KCC to provide us with these details - initially claiming that there was no central registry which recorded the occasions when contracts were awarded without tender and therefore it didn't hold the information we had sought.

(That was changed when we pointed out that the council's own rules stated that where this happened, the details should be recorded and filed.)

There are often good reasons why contracts are awarded without being put out to tender but as KCC itself says, they should be the exception rather than the rule.

What is particularly striking to me about the list is the number that were related to social care and health services, where councils are increasingly reliant on the independent sector. The issue here is that many of these are statutory requirements; if the council hadn't awarded a contract, it presumably would have been in breach of its legislative obligations to continue providing the service.

You can read our coverage of this in this latest Kent Messenger. And here is the full list of contracts and KCC's explanation: 

KCC CONTRACTS.pdf (2.21 mb)

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I blogged recently about a curious FOI response from KCC.

As well as providing us with information about the costs of drawing up an environmental report into the proposed Operation Stack lorry park off the M20, it included a comment criticising our earlier press coverage of the issue.

It now appears the criticism was inserted at the behest of the county council leader Paul Carter.

In its response to a follow up query we made, the council has replied:

I was soaking up the sun in the Eastern Desert last week when the scale of the impact of Britain's summer of discontent became clear.

Earlier in the day my wife and I had watched the BBC World Service showing the scenes in Croydon, Tottenham and various other London locations a couple of days before we were due to fly home.

Now Egyptians from our hotel were concerned that we were about to return to "lawless Britain" risking life and limb. It was, for them, a matter of major concern.

Never mind that in Cairo and elsewhere that thousands of Egyptians have been forcefully demonstrating against the old Mubarak regime and the replacement arrmy government.

Nor that Coptic (Christian) churches were regularly being bombed and burned by militants.

All are symptoms of Northern Hemisphere 2011.

Watching from 2,500 miles away, it appeared to us there was little action by the police. It bore a striking resemblance to that which greeted the Egyptians when they decided to end the Mubarak regime.

The holidaymakers were more concerned about relaxing than rioting.

What strikes me as different is that this time there were incidents in dozens of places.

And politicians seemed to have their own ways of explaining it.

To the BNP it was race riots.

To David Cameron and the Lib Dems it was a sign of a sick society.

To Labour it was - well, something with which to beat the Tory smoothies with their featherduster of vitriol.

To the police it was an opportunity to demonstrate that cuts in funding were having a detrimental impact.

To the public? - well, it was a chance to voice their own preferences (and in some cases to misbehave).

Of course for the courts it was an opportunity to demonstrate they are not under the thumb of the politicians - just give 'em back the power to use the birch.

Now I have returned home, and having seen that across our green and pleasant land trouble seems to have broken out everywhere ranging from Manchester and Liverpool through the Midlands to London's destruction and the bonfires in Rainham, it was somewhat unsurprising to this scribe.

Every 15 years or so there is some sort of misbehaviour in Britain. Tottenham, Handsworth, Merseyside .... the list goes on.

Regrettably, it will go on in future years.

Hose reels, evictions, arming the police, bussing them into London from South Wales to provide mobs of bobbies on every corner, kicking the police authorities because in a few months there were be elected police commissioners  ....

It's largely playing to the gallery.

What is needed is firmness, fairness and fast action when problems break out.

There is one lesson that can be learned from August 2011's thefts, firebombings and destruction.: leave them alone for a few hours and the mobs will always get the upper hand.

***

The last thing I thought when we visited El Gouna was that we would be constantly reminded of the Member of Parliament for Gillingham and Rainham.

But it was impossible to escape Mr Chishti - or at least echoes of him.

It was all caused by two Pakistani buses that had joined a small fleet of Egyptian saloons to provide the public transport around the holiday resort.

Flamboyant in the extreme, the buses had rockets on their roofs, mirrors on the inside coving and numerous images of plants, stars and symbols.

Why was Mr Chishti constantly brought to mind?

Because both buses had been built in Karachi by a bodybuilder named G N Chishti.

One thing I have to concede was that they were considerably more comfortable than the locally-built buses. They had upholstered seats. The locals had wooden slats...

THERE may be some who think Michael Gove has extracted revenge on Kent County Council for its temerity in taking the government to court over the cancellation of secondary school re-building projects.

They are wrong. It is true that KCC may not be, as Eric Pickles might say, the best of chums with the DfE but the government was never likely to revisit its original decision to scrap the BSF scheme and agree to the redevelopment plans for Thanet and Gravesham schools. How could it, after Gove was so critical of the previous government's programme and its costly bureaucracy?

KCC took a risk over its Judicial Review but on balance, it was a risk that has - notwithstanding the decision by Michael Gove - had some dividends. The legal costs and the contractual liabilities incurred by KCC look like being fully recovered, which is good news for the taxpayer.

And the government cannot now be unaware of the plight of those schools in Kent that urgently need redeveloping. 

What matters now is whether they will qualify for help under the new 'low cost' PFI scheme being proposed by the DfE. £500m sounds like a lot of money but less so when you consider that every education authority in the country will be pitching for a share of.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

Two Kent backbenchers were involved in yesterday's dramatic hacking hearings. Folkestone and Hythe MP Damian Collins was on the media select committee and was among the more effective inquisitors, particularly in his line of questioning towards Rebekah Brooks - her answers underlined the view that the main fault was one of senior editors and managers not really having a grip on what was going on and being kept out of the loop.

He didn't quite get to the point of asking explicitly how it was that editors and managers satisfied themselves of the sources (and methods) used to get various scoops but did extract from Brooks an acknowledgement that it was - as the MP put it - incredible that information about the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was passed to Surrey police without, apparently, anyone sharing that fact with anyone in an executive position at NI.

Rochester and Strood MP Mark Reckless has blogged here about his line of questioning at the home affairs select committee.

ARE KCC’s chauffeur driven cars value for money and cost-effective, as the authority’s deputy leader Alex King argues?

In one sense, you could say that the £65,000 bill - met by taxpayers - is relatively modest in the context of KCC’s yearly revenue budget of about £1.2billion.

How KCC's chauffeur-driven cars cost the taxpayer £65k>>>

Cllr King - one of the more signficant user of the cars - makes a fair point that Kent is a large county and for people like himself and leader Paul Carter, with busy schedules and diaries, getting to different appointments during a single day might be tricky on public transport. And it is equally true that the authority has not exactly splashed out on a fleet of gleaming limos - it has three Volvos that are six years old and a Volvo estate that is 14 years old.

He also says councillors and officers can make use of the time to catch up on work. True enough but you can do that on a train, too.
However, the real test of whether the taxpayer gets value for money cannot be answered on the figures KCC has chosen to release. Unless we know what the cars were used for and why they were used in place of public transport, the judgement cannot be made.

KCC says that would be too much work. The same argument was made before all authorities were required to sign up to the government’s transparency crusade.

Council taxpayers are entitled to know not just the costs of what the council is up to but the value. Indeed, this was exactly what KCC said was to be the underlying pricniple of its own transparency programme launched a year ago.
The publication of these figures tell part of a story but only part. As things stand, they inevitably raise more questions than they answer.

As I've said before, data is all well and good but it is not the same thing as contextualised information. A commitment to transparency is commendable and KCC has made some steps in the right direction.

But it can - and should - go further if it wants to convince taxpayers that spending £65,000 on chauffeur-driven cars genuinely are value for money.

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One intriguing part of the report setting out the details of the costs is the disclosure that the cars have been used for "high status VIPs" on occasions deemed appropriate by the council's managing director. Sadly, the report does not detail who these VIPS might have been (assuming there were some) but the question has been aSKED.