Construction of Wigan’s Grand Arcade is well under way. If you drive past the site you’ll appreciate the scale of the development. It runs from Standishgate down to the Riverway bypass.

The website says that Wigan is ideally situated for such a development:

Management Horizons Europe say:‘Highly populated catchment area – total of 1,052,000 residents.

Total annual retail expenditure (all product categories) £2.8 billion (Ex.VAT).Grand Arcade will increase Wigan’s market size by 43% and it’s Core Catchment market share (it’s principal trading area) from 35% to 46%’.

Data Source: Managment Horizons Europe

There are other similar figures, and it all sounds very familiar. The Skelmersdale Vision process came up with similar figures for catchment areas – arguing that Skem could be a sub-regional centre, but some – not all – of the proposals were based on shopping.

The vision will be out soon and I hope that it isn’t based on shopping alone. Such a scheme would need lots of private money to help construct a new town centre, and if there are bigger, better places nearby, any scheme for Skem probably won’t get off the ground.

South Holland Borough Council Chief Exec, Terry Huggins, has started an excellent blog which can be read here. On the Council website it says:

As part of the Government sponsored programme ‘e-democracy’ Terry has agreed to keep a web log or ‘blog’. This is a day-to-day diary of what Terry is doing and gives some interesting insight on what is going on in Local Government both locally and nationally.

Our Chief Exec, Bill Taylor, writes a weekly newsletter and within the past few weeks started a video cast on the West Lancs website. I’ve written to him suggesting that he follow Terry Huggins example and write a blog and a podcast. With my techie hat on, I think it would be a lot more useful if his thoughts could be syndicated using XML… with my local resident / councillor hat on, I think the ability for local citizens to comment on his various posts would provide an excellent forum for ideas and feedback.

David Miliband has said that it is up to Councils to come up with their preferred options for local government. In West Lancashire we can look forward to a difficult debate on what is best for the different areas of the district.

When the boundaries were considered last time there was a backlash against the possibility of the district being split between Sefton and Wigan. This led to the “out of lancs, no thanks” campaign amongst others. Labour had two preferred options, a South Lancashire authority taking in West Lancs, South Ribble, Preston and Chorley; and the split. There were strong arguments for the split – in particular Skelmersdale moving into an area that had more urban experience, rather than the current setup where the council is more interested in the rural areas and market towns.

The likelihood is that the Tories will run a strong “hands off west lancs” campaign, calling for the District to be a unitary authority in it’s own right, and ignore a lot of the good that the government is saying about devolution down to communities and stronger, more strategic, authorities.

How can such a short-termist view be countered? First, we’re not stuck with the boundary committee’s proposals this time, which gives us a clean sheet to come up with something much better for the people of West Lancs. Secondly, whatever we come up with must improve service delivery, accountability and local leadership – and it has to be easy to demonstrate the advantages. Finally, we must then go out and win the arguments.

We had a training session last week about overview and scrutiny – this is the process by which councillors are able to (a) scrutinise what the cabinet is doing and (b) work together to inform and suggest direction for the council. Of course, locally it doesn’t work, despite a wonderful document “Overview and Scrutiny works in West Lancashire” which was passed around to us all – just in case we thought otherwise.

There are many problems with the system in West Lancs, but it can be summarised as follows: there is absolutely no trust between the two groups. Despite the best intentions of many people to make O&S work locally, it has to be built on an element of trust. Without that, the system breaks down into a slanging match between the two groups and nothing gets done.

Currently, we have three committees: Overview and Scrutiny, Internal Review and External Review. The external review committee is considered to be the least important of the committees and hence we, the opposition, are allowed to chair it. It looks at issues within the district which the council doesn’t deal with. Internal review looks at internal council issues and the O&S committee looks at the work of the cabinet.

With the political balance in the committee, the O&S committee virtually always agrees with the cabinet. One time, there were more labour than conservative councillors at the meeting and so we sent back a decision to be reconsidered (which is all the committee can do) – cabinet ignored O&S and continued as normal.

The current system promotes old-fashioned adverserial local politics. I don’t mind that too much, except it does nothing for Skelmersdale since all the decisions tend to go against the Labour (ie. Skem) councillors. Without changing the way O&S works, we will do nothing for the people in Skem.

External review works quite well. There have been a couple of reports since the process started, most recently on the healthy schools initiative in West Lancs. The committee has gone out to schools in the area and to other councils to see what’s being done elsewhere. This is how Overview and Scrutiny should really work. Unfortunately it’s limited to the one forum where the final report doesn’t make that much difference.

The challenge is to make O&S work so that it achieves what it’s supposed to. The whole process is supposed to be “member led” but in reality it responds to the cabinet’s agenda. Instead, the existing arbitrary boundaries between internal / external and O&S should be lost. Keep the O&S committee, but make it a management committee setting the agenda for O&S work through the year and reviewing the forward plan. Then choose some specfic issues that councillors should investigate through the year and set up the structures to reflect the scrutiny.

If the management committee was able to respond to issues as and when they came up – such as the alternate weekly collections, when it was first being considered by the cabinet, then it could set up working groups or commissions to investigate how they would work and perhaps even make suggestions to make it better. In the wheelie bin case, the committee could have investigated what the problems are in the different parts of the district and perhaps pre-empted some of the difficulties now faced.

We’ll know if O&S is really bedded into the council structure when the budget process is properly considered through O&S instead of just at the council meeting. That day must surely come, and hopefully it’ll be sooner rather than later.

Nothing particularly new for 2006, the main issues have been on and off the agenda for the past couple of years:

• uncertainty over west lancs as a viable authority in it’s own right
• the structure of the local health provision
• Skelmersdale town centre investment

Things are coming to a head in the near future, and I expect that we’ll know what’s happening over the next six months.

The expected white paper on local government reorganisation is likely to be published in the next six months. We are told that it will be published in the summer, but there is talk that it will come sooner. It seems that everyone I speak to has a different idea of what will happen, but there seems to be consensus that Districts are too small to be viable.

By October the changes to the local PCT’s will be known and will already be being implemented. There is also the review of liverpool health trusts which also has the Southport and Ormskirk hospital trust in it’s sights. Hopefully, neither set of changes will hit us too hard in West Lancashire, both being changes at the management level. A new PCT merged with South Ribble, Chorley and Preston keeps the local identity without being lost to a massive single Lancashire authority. With the Liverpool health trusts, the main problem with the Ormskirk and Southport hospitals is that they find it difficult to find clinical staff who want to work out here. Also, as technology improves there is more remote diagnosis where the specialists don’t have to be in the same hospital as the patient – patients have to travel less and specialists get to do more consultations.

Following the consultations over the Skelmersdale vision for the town centre, the council and other partners are applying for money to invest and try to turn it into a reality. These applications have been sent in, but even if we get the money, it will be a while before work starts. Investment to improve the town centre is something that will have to continue for years – an established town centre needs to grow and can’t just be dropped onto the site of an older, failing, town centre.

The New Local Government Network (NLGN) has recently published this report about city regions.

The NLGN have a nack of being one step ahead with local government issues and they seem to have done it again – quietly beavering away over the past 12 months with their commission, and publishing it just at the moment that local government reorganisation becomes a live issue once more.

In my opinion, local government reform is the only way that Skelmersdale will reach its full potential. The current two-tier setup with the county council and the district council is cumbersome. It also makes it difficult with regeneration as to who is driving the process. Sometimes it is the county, as with Skelmersdale Partnerships, sometimes it’s the district, with the Skelmersdale Vision. A single authority, bringing a single strategic view, a sense of direction and clear accountability is needed for the town.

The NLGN report talks about city regions: how they have worked in other countries, and a model of how they could work in the UK. Not replacing existing authorities, but bringing them together to form a strategic alliance with delegated powers and funding – making it possible to move forward on city region-wide strategic initiatives such as transport, or helping the local economy.

In West Lancashire we seem to work in a bubble sometimes, the City Region proposals could force us to look over our boundaries to neighbours not necessarily in Lancashire. For example, the A5225 scheme through Wigan would have made a huge impact on the economy in Skelmersdale – there would be a single route from Skelmersdale, through the Wigan Borough and on to the M61 and the North East. However, this hasn’t been discussed in West Lancs and I haven’t seen any reference to it in the local papers. Literally a mile down the road, it has been the subject of great debate.

The problem for West Lancs, however, is that we are stuck between three natural city regions. We have Manchester to the east, Preston to the north and Liverpool to the south. Preston is possibly the most natural ally with the historical links though Lancashire County Council, but we have to recognise that many people in West Lancs travel towards Manchester or Liverpool for work and for shopping. This problem was the cause of the great “split” controversy a couple of years ago, where Skelmersdale was proposed to go into Greater Manchester and Ormskirk into Merseyside. It felt like no-one supported the idea – people wanted to stay in “lancashire”.

The City Regions model also doesn’t cover the unitary status for councils, suggesting that county regions could be created. It feels like an afterthought, and if implemented could end up with little change in the County areas, and perhaps no benefit to a little district like ours.

There is obviously a wider debate taking place about local government, as seen by Miliband’s leaked memo regarding unitaries. The NLGN report is timed perfectly to influence what might happen. I just hope that West Lancs isn’t squeezed out, just because it sits in the middle of three cities.

This report on the public technology website shows that West Lancashire has been getting worse in their processing of planning applications over the past year. We’re one of 27 authorities in the country where the performance is “significantly worse”.

I raised it tonight at Overview and Scrutiny, asking that we should have a report on what council officers were doing to try and resolve the problem.

Sadly, the Tories didn’t want anything to do with it and instead blamed the government, certain councillors and anyone else they could rather than accept that by these measures we’re not doing that well.

These are bread and butter services that the council should be performing well at – particularly given the self-congratulatory mode that the council operates in. They like to say that they’re doing well, and they like to give the impression that they’re doing something about performance management; but when presented with an incontrovertiable measure where they don’t face up and try to resolve it, they look for someone or something to blame and leave it at that.

The results of the stock transfer ballot were published today

Overall Total number of votes for YES: 1984 (43% of valid vote)
Overall Total number of votes for NO: 2678 (57% of valid vote)

Turnout: 61%

This rejection of the proposed stock transfer comes despite the massive amount of money spent by the Council and Arena to try and convince tenants to change landlord. The ‘no’ campaign struggled with very little resources in comparison and yet still managed to get the message out.

It is for the Council to come back with a housing budget that can meet the aspirations of the tenants. We know that it can be done, because the Labour group put forward such a budget at the start of this year. We’ve always argued that the situation in West Lancs is different to other councils because we don’t have the debt that other councils have, for whom stock transfer has meant the debt being cleared.

The campaign locally will hopefully move on to the fourth option which didn’t figure in our campaign locally because we could set a budget without resorting to the extra cash. However, if a fairer way of funding council housing could be introduced, as proposed in the fourth option, then the properties locally could be transformed.

In the meantime, it’s been a good day for tenant participation and for all those who worked hard to get out the “no” message.

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I notice that the defend council housing link above doesn’t work – instead this is a link to the “support4councilhousing” site with the MP’s report on the fourth option.

Typical of the District Council…

This press release is a mean sprited report of the referendum taking place on Thursday.

They’ve tried every trick in the book to try and stop the poll, including writing to John Prescott! Here, they point the finger at one person in Bickerstaffe when for the poll to be called in the first place it needs at least 10 people.

At the full council on the 7th December, the council voted that the next meeting should be held in Ormskirk, despite it having been held there for the past three years. The council put forward a report saying that future meetings should be held at the Ormskirk Civic Centre or other similar venue. Since their argument was that the Civic Centre was the only suitable venue, then it would mean that the meeting would always be held in Ormskirk.

Ian Duffy put forward an amendment to remove this unreasonable proposal, which surprisingly was agreed. So the venues will be debated at the March meeting. Hopefully we’ll see Skelmersdale hosting the 2007 “Council meeting as an assembly” show.

My speech to the council is below…
Continue reading Meeting as an assembly update →