The Labour leadership on the York Council have today announced a further raft of cuts to public services in the City.
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Alternatives to the proposals will be published by the Liberal Democrats later in the month
Over 100 protestors assembled last week to oppose the renewal of a lap dancing clubs licence in York.
The club operator Andrew Whitney – who stood unsuccessfully for the Conservatives in the Heworth Ward by election in 2009 – said that failure to renew the license would result in 40 lap dancers losing their jobs.
Most of the protesters were friends and relatives of the dancers. They claimed that the girls were being politically harassed during their work stints, and that this amounted to a cruel and unusual punishment.
One visitor to the club was Ann “the knife” Mac (not her real name) who was auditioning following losing her North Yorkshire job.
On leaving the club after her interview she commented , “ What relevance my views on the Common Agricultural Policy have for this job I’m not sure. However it makes a change from endless discussions about the impact that Bulgarian sheep imports are having on the Thirsk economy”.
Anther dancer Pneumatic Nell (her real name), revealed what went on in the club.
“ I first realised the club was different when, shortly after starting a dance for a customer, Andy came up to me and asked me to sign a petition which sought an immediate referendum on EC membership”.
“On another occasion Andy shouted out “Keynes is dead”. I though he meant that my customer had had a heart attack but it turned out he just wanted to emphasise the importance of monetary policy to the UK economy”.
“ I’m now planning to have what the Leader of the Council calls a community conversation.
After the dance, I’ll ask him what he intends to do to clean up York politics”
The national furore about a Labour peer being ousted – at the end of her term of office – from a role as head of OFSTED is likely to produce a “pots and kettles” response in York.
As reported a few months ago, the Chair of York Labour party was appointed to an influential local QUANGO last year.
Indeed the York Labour Party has a long history of trying to pack public bodies – including school governorships and NHS committees – with its supporters.
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Meanwhile when public service vacancies are advertised, there remains a suspicion that the process is window dressing.
We reported in December that a (volunteer) Chair for a new company which will “promote York” was being sought. The post was advertised over the holiday period – more or less guaranteeing a poor response.
The Council has now announced that the present Chair of Visit York has been appointed to the post.
The Council have failed to reveal how many applications there were for the position.
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Some taxpayers are now questioning the involvement that some York Council officials may have in shadowy “networking” organisations. In this case it is not the ubiquitous Freemasons, but rather, supposedly, educational organisations like “NESTA” and “Common Purpose”.
NESTA is run by the former head of policy in the Blair government. It is a charity ostensibly committed to developing technology based approaches to what they term “civic coding”. They recently recruited a couple of millionaire business people to become Trustees.
Common Purpose provides leadership training courses. It raised some eyebrows when implying that durable strategies, “leading beyond authority”, could be implemented at local and national government level which transcended periods of democratic political change.
Both organisations have an elitist feel
Personalities associated with Common Purpose have been actively associated with the campaign for press freedom, perhaps explaining why media interest remains detached.
Of course, such bodies are nothing new. During the last Labour government they tended to flourish in the public sector. That their operators have now apparently moved into the private and charitable sectors means that they may still be regarded as an income sinecure.
As always, participation by public sector officials in outside organisations, should be judged on how much value the average person in the street might expect to derive from them.
If public expenditure is involved, then such benefits need to be quantified publicly and subject to independent scrutiny.
Despite claims to the contrary, a Freedom of Information request has revealed that the York Council has not apparently asked local bus operators to publish service reliability statistics.
The claims were made by politicians in 2012 as they tried to justify only publishing an annual reliability figure (which later turned out to be a one day sample).
The annual figure published on the DpT web site suggests that 1 in 5 buses in York are more than 5 minutes late.
In 2013, the Council claimed that a data sharing agreement (which has now been published) prevented them from revealing figures which would tell passengers what reliability levels were being achieved.
Rail users have had access to such information for over a decade.
More recently the Council has admitted that it does get these figures on a regular basis but aggregation would have to be done “manually” and to do so would be prohibitively expensive.
The Council claims that its data is supplied through a system supplied by Vix Acis.
This company publicly claims that their Horizon web based system does provide “management with the ability to mine historical data for service improvement and reporting against key performance indicators”.
So the suspicion remains that, for some reason, both the bus companies and the Council are desperate to hide just how reliable bus services in the City actually are.
Our view is that (at least) each month the number of buses running on time (within 5 minutes of the published timetable) on each route should be published on the web.
