Last week Brighton & Hove Greens launched our manifesto. Given that it looks like we’ve gone first, the ‘start your photocopiers‘ line seems apt for the other parties. We’ve already see the other parties pile into Green ideas for example with bike rental and solar panels for council properties. Green Cllr Bill Randall tells me he’s got an old leaflet from over 8 years ago with him calling for a bike rental scheme in the city. I guess there is some chance of debate advancing if after eight years these policies get adopted by the other parties. Shall I hope that in another 8 years they’ll be opposing public service cuts too?

Tories keep saying Greens favour a congestion charge. We don’t, we have no policy for this and they’ll notice that our manifesto makes no mention of such a charge. Will that stop them suggesting it in their speeches and publications? Sadly, I doubt it.

I would say this, but the Green manifesto is full of clear, positive ideas for this city from more affordable housing, to 20mph limits for residential areas to a living wage for council staff. Lots of good stuff, but I want to highlight some particular areas of interest to me.

Democracy & Trust

We want to devolve power and introduce participative budgeting through neighbourhood councils or ward forums. We also want to return the council to the committee system which is more open and democratic than the current ‘strong leader and cabinet’ system imposed on us by the previous Labour government. We also would like to see a ‘one stop shop’ for people to be able to have their say on consultations, policies and services provided by the public sector.

We have a strong commitment to use open data formats and licenses for council information, reports, data and media. We also want to automatically publish Freedom of Information request responses (as long as privacy is not affected), remove restrictive terms on council web services and publish contracts the council signs up to.

Greens are committed to bringing services back in-house, reducing high offer pay and we oppose the move to abolish Sussex Police Authority with a single police commissioner for all of Sussex.

Waste & Recycling

We want to set our sights on becoming a ‘zero waste city’ which, until recently, was a status which brought councils extra funding. The new government’s waste plans are very much in limbo, but perhaps zero waste funding might return. Regardless we believe reducing waste and boosting recycling are the right things to do to save money and protect the environment.

We’re going to push for food waste collection, look to get the council collecting commercial waste and oppose any new landfill or landraise sites in Sussex.

Licensing

We are continuing to work with residents and businesses to find the balance between ‘peace and pleasure’. Being an old town with homes cheek by jowl with pubs and clubs, it’s always going to be difficult. However many businesses are responsive and understanding of the challenges. We want to support them with a responsible licensee scheme akin to the Scores on the Doors initiative for food standards in restaurants. We also want to improve the process for residents and businesses of nearby licensing applications. Where allowed by the law we’d also like to review the license fees charged by the council, as some seem too low and others too high.

Read about this and more in the full manifesto [PDF]

So, as I posted previously, I have been pursuing two reforms on the council: Firstly, that councillor allowances be fairer and meet government guidance, in other words simply adopting the report of the council’s own independent panel on allowances rather than sticking with the old regime. Secondly, given my successful tribunal over the use of YouTube, that councillors no longer be unfairly restricted from their freedom of political expression in reusing public webcast video.

Unfortunately at last night’s Governance Committee the old guard kept things just the way they are. My detailed request on webcasting arrangements was batted away with effectively a non-answer saying that the Tribunal judged me on a previous version of the webcasting protocol. True, but the Tribunal essentially found that a restriction on councillors using the webcast, which didn’t apply to members of the public, would be an unreasonable restriction on councillors’ freedom of political expression. And that is exactly what the new protocol does, it requires councillors to seek written permission to use a clip, when a member of the public under copyright fair dealing rules could do so anyway. I will keep trying on that.

With the Green attempt to implement the Independent Remuneration Panel’s report of March 2010 I’m afraid there was a heavy dose of condescending and patronising remarks from the old guard. Of course they don’t want to change things, that would remove some of the feudal control they have over their groups by handing out posts (with allowances) to folk they want to toe the line. So the Labour and Conservative councillors voted against my amendment seeking to implement the long overdue changes to our systems of allowances.

It’s worth noting that the Panel’s report to the committee last night, an excellent piece of work in its own right, roundly rebutted all the reasons Tory and Labour councillors had used to reject the proposed reforms at last year’s council meetings. It’s a shame the other groups can’t agree to change on this, especially when we have such strong work from our independent panel to lead the way. I can’t say I was surprised by their vote against change though, those two parties have been taking turns running the city like and old club for years and they want to keep it that way.

One more point: Last night’s meeting also briefly discussed the move to individual voter registration. I do have some concerns about the changes planned with this reform, but overall it is a long overdue move which will help improve security. Keep in mind this was a policy passed by the previous Labour government, the timetable has just been brought forward by a year by the new government. So I was surprised to see Labour group leader Cllr Gill Mitchell trying to make something of this with a press release attacking the reform “Labour fears consequences of new electoral system“!

In the piece Cllr Mitchell attacks the lack of pilots – when there are pilots scheduled, the lack of additional funding – when there is £104 million of additional funding for this work, and suggests that this could undermine the integrity of our democracy – when ‘ghost’ registrations (the polite way of saying fraudulent entries on the register) have been a major problem especially with postal voting. So not exactly the most apposite comments I’ve seen. It does sum up how Labour will attack anything if they think it will get them something, even if it was their idea in the first place! I’m more than happy to accept that all parties have good ideas sometimes. I’m pleased the government have abolished ID cards, plan to scrap the councillor Standards regime and will introduce individual voter registration. There, I said it!

What an extraordinary meeting last Thursday’s council meeting was… There were no high-stakes votes on budgets, the next Mayor or anything like that. But public questions and declaratory motions draw out some extraordinary outbursts.

If you want to know why the webcast is not available yet, and why the council HQ King’s House is buzzing with gossip, then this Argus report fills in the details!

I mightily enjoyed a public question by Chris Hawtree querying whether our city could become like Hove, North Dakota, USA (population: 2) if we didn’t deal robustly with the cuts. Even the Tories couldn’t keep straight faces as the parallels were drawn by Mr Hawtree.

In written questions I continued to press on open licensing of council data and also raised a question about how the council ensures premises let to clubs really are only used by clubs.

There was some posturing by all parties that night with Labour trumpeting on the Education Maintenance Allowance and School Sports Partnerships, Tories on Housing and Transport and Greens on Post Office closures and the local government settlement. Labour shadow ministers have confirmed that they too would cut local government funds — so if they wouldn’t cut the EMA and Sports Partnerships, what would Labour have cut? Clearly they’re not going to say so they can try to bank political capital on opposing every cut under the sun.

At the least minute Tories backed out of their Transport motion (which was rather silly in the first place) when they realised the opposition parties were going to amend it to bits. Their housing motion unleashed the kind of petty point scoring and ancient history lessons that makes me want to disappear under my seat. Cllr Bob Carden delivered on the EMA what I think was the speech of the night , reflecting on how he had once been unable to send his daughter to college whilst he was laid up at home with a broken leg, unable to work. A personal message, delivered simply and with heart. Cllr Carden doesn’t speak often in full council, but that was a keeper.

I had a go at the administration for failing to open up the budget process, unlike most councils which involve members of all parties in the budget detail from a much earlier stage in the process.

If I recall correctly all motions were passed (apart from the Tory transport one which they withdrew), but let’s hope the webcast comes online so we can watch the best bits!

Councillor allowances in Brighton & Hove has been a long-running issue of contention. For an age they have been deeply unfair. Putting aside whether they are too much or too little, how they are distributed across the parties is due an overhaul.

Responsibility for this work lies with an Independent Remuneration Panel who do very good work. They published a report in March 2010 which essentially sought to fix a lot of the problems with the current setup:

• They sought to make each political group leader’s allowance proportional to the number of seats their group held on the council;
• They wanted to abolish allowances for deputy chairs of committees (who in most cases do very little) especially as this takes us over government guidelines. Regulations suggest that only up to 50% of councillors should be getting allowances. Currently it’s 61% in Brighton & Hove and could be 67% if all available allowances were being taken.
• They also sought to resolve the balance between ‘front-line’ and ‘back-bench’ councillors by increasing the basic allowance by 1% but not increasing allowances for senior roles.
• Finally all of this reform would lower the overall salary bill for councillors by about £18k a year.

Now whilst only two Greens have special allowances, most of the Labour group (I think all but one from memory) and a large number of Tories enjoy such allowances as did the LibDem group (now no longer as Cllr Watkins has become an independent).

So it was disappointing, but unsurprising self-interest, when Tories and Labour voted down the panel’s recommendations last year — after an extraordinarily long delay in actually getting the report onto an agenda to vote on it. It was supposed to be voted on in March 2010 but didn’t actually emerge onto an agenda until October 2010, only for it to fall and the status-quo remain.

Well the Panel have done more good work on best practice, and good on them. They’ve stuck to their guns in seeking to reduce the number of special allowances and so on. Their work is coming to the Governance Committee this Tuesday. But guess what, the recommendation on the report (I assume on advice of the Conservative administration) is to keep the existing scheme of allowances for another year!

I shall be proposing a Green amendment to that, seeking to bring in the Panel’s recommended scheme which will be fairer, help us meet best practice and save £18k a year. Will any other parties dare to challenge the status quo and join us in supporting the amendment…? We shall see!

(I’m still mulling my traditional report of Thursday’s full council meeting. It was, despite a not particularly high-stakes agenda, rather a remarkable evening.)