New 2nd July: Why the Riverside Tax is bad for us all.

I don't make a habit of appearing on the radio. In fact I was quite surprised to get a call from BBC Cambridgeshire asking to do an interview about HDC's proposals for charging in the Riverside and Shady Walk car parks in St Neots and others across the district - and more so when they agreed to meet up in the car park at 7 on a windswept morning. Despite sitting up the night before rehearsing my points, I'm sure I only got a couple out; to the uninitiated, four minutes passes in the blink of an eye when you have a microphone pointing at you, certainly too fast to keep an eye on the crib sheet!

Storm clouds gathering over the Riverside

The story behind the charges is well documented - HDC's budget is completely shot through after years of draining away the reserves it inherited from selling off its council houses, with capping meaning it can never catch up on the income it needs through Council Tax (it would nead a rise of 35% or so to achieve that), so things have to go. They announced that charges would be imposed last autumn; the town councils and residents kicked up a stink (although Conservative councillors in the town have been noticeable by being publicly vociferous but not raising their hands against their leadership when it mattered); then HDC undertook a "consultation exercise" - a waste of money as public feeling was quite clear - and now they have decided to press on regardless. Well, at least they have Official Statistics to show just how much resentment they have created - and I'll put them here when my FOI request gets answered.

Of course, as my interviewer observed, no-one likes paying for something that used to be free - at least at the point of use; there has always been council tax spent on maintenance of the car parks. This one has certainly caught the public imagination, spawning Facebook groups, protest websites and more letters in the papers than I can remember. So why is this such a bad decision? Here - with the benefit of more than four minutes, and with th knowledge gained by taking petition signatures - is what I believe:

• It's harmful to our small businesses. St Neots town centre has a lot of small, independent businesses and not many large chains. Not much economic clout. At the moment they live one day to the next, relying on people who come here especially because they have the freedom to park away from the centre, wander and browse, have a leisurely coffee, without checking the time repeatedly. Take that away and you're effectively handing their business to the one monster who can afford to buy up land and let you use it - Tesco. What disappears is not only jobs, but specialist knowledge and personal service.
• It's harmful to our leisure. The Riverside is a jewel in the town, used by just about every group you can think of. Children in the playparks; dogwalkers; sportspeople and joggers; families out for picnics, an amble round the duckpond, or an ice-cream on a warm afternoon at the Ambience Cafe; music afficionados out to listen to the Sunday concerts - or rather what's left of then now that HDC has cut their funding completely and dumped the work on to St Neots Town Council. It's a very social place where the various groups meet, and in an age where we want to be encouraging everyone to get outside and keep active, putting artificial time limits and costs on achieves the opposite effect.
• It's harmful to our environment - the air that we breathe. St Neots market square already breaches various standards for air quality, the main issue being the almost permanent traffic congestion in the daytime. Free parking in the Riverside and Shady Walk, along with charges for the town centre car parks, means that there's a strong incentive not to get into that congestion. If you want a prime space next to the shops, making shoppers inhale your car's crud, you pay; if you accept a brief walk and avoid the queue you should be rewarded for that virtuous choice. Charging equally for all means we'll see more traffic circling round and around waiting to grab the choicest spots.
• It's harmful to local residents. When charges are introduced, how many people are simply going to drop their car off in somewhere like The Paddock for free?
• For all the downsides, it achieves very little. It's estimated that, once you've taken into account the cost of running the meters, emptying them, fixing vandalism, banking large numbers of coins, enforcement and all, about £20,000 a year will be raised. That is a drop in the ocean of HDC's millions of budget shortfall. It buys the chief exec's services for less than four weeks. It barely even pays the expenses of the Leader of the Council. Consider this - an ordinary District Councillor gets a basic allowance of over £4k, and to receive that cash they need only attend one meeting every six months. You don't need to open a letter, take a phone call, or speak to a member of the public. Some notoriously active DCs are effectively taking home a pay of £400/hour. Perhaps if we asked more of ours exactly what we get for our money...?

On that note, it's about time for an act of defiance. I know it won't change HDC's minds, but - if the charges are introduced, I won't use the Riverside. I'll stick to my bike when I can, or the bus when I can't, even though that may cost me more in the long run. HDC are relying on us to quietly acquiesce, as they usually do (and as we usually do). It's time we said no - you serve us, HDC, not vice versa.

30th June - this week's Full Council

The end of June means one thing - a Special Meeting to approve the accounts for the previous financial year. Well, to be fair, this year two other items have snuck in because of constraints of time; signing off approval for the Saxongate play aera, and signing off alterations to leases so that HDC can set up their One Stop Shop in the Priory Centre. Both sides all in favour so they are pretty much formalities.

However, the accounts have, in recent years, been a rather rancorous affair. Not least because of rather serious long-past errors found last year; but also because some councillors completely miss the point of the meeting, which is to approve the accounts as a correct record of what happened and use it to debate the council's spending plans, and the fact that one caused a lot of ill-feeling by rushing off to the local press to announce quite fatuously that we were "bankrupt". Part of my role is to try to keep order in the ranks, at least on my side of the table, and I don't want them rising to the bait (or worse, throwing the first bit of bait out).

Fortunately, the news is very good. All our big projects came in on time and on (or a small amount under) budget; keeping the staffing levels tight means savings; the general reserves are at their highest level I can remember, well into the "satisfactory" zone the auditors lay down, and I am feeling very confidnt that we won't have to go raiding them as we enter a year with a 3.8% lower council tax rate than last. Yes, I am going to labour that point as it's so rare to hear!

All this means that noone is up for a fight, and a gentle tease apart, business is wound up by 8pm. Even meetings are coming in under their time allocation now.

27th June

It's a hot Sunday afternoon, perfect for sitting around in the shade of a tree, perhaps, and even more so in the shade of the Eaton Socon Cage.

For the confinement of local malefactors (and small children)

There may only be room for two, but when the sun is beating down, a sojourn in a room with no direct light, at maybe 5'C, is quite attractive. What's more, there's a wooden bed and matching leg-irons for added comfort. No, I haven't jumped back a century and a half; to coincide with the Open Gardens being held in aid of the Red Cross (the starting point of the trail being immediately opposite), I'm opening up the Cage for visitors to look around.

The Cage's survival has been rather against the odds - last used for actual criminals in the 1890s, outliving the fire-engine house immediately adjacent, and two lots of redevelopment of the land immediately behind, and for many years in limbo with noone knowing precisely who owned it, it was a personal challenge for me to get the Town Council to adopt this important piece of their heritage and ensure its continuing care on towards its 200th birthday in 2026.

It's obviously a very pleasant antidote to world cup fever, as despite the draw of a game against Germany at 3pm there's a good turnout of people out for a wander amongst some lovely gardens, and about £500 made for a very good cause. Of course we have no need to watch - we just listen to the whelps of agony coming from the Old Sun to estimate just how badly England is doing. By 4pm it's clear I need to scour our family tree to find another country to support. Ireland? Norway, perhaps? Canada? Oh dear, looks like it's on to 2014 for me.

26th June

Tonight the St Neots Sinfonia wrap up their 20th anniversary season with the time-honoured joint concert with the St Neots Choral Society - a charming programme of Rossini (I think I know all his overtures by now, I've certainly played most, and love them all), Mozart's Missa Brevis, Haydn and Mendelssohn. It's only the third time I've been in the audience as patron of the society, and it's given me itchy fingers - so I've made the commitment to play again when the new season starts in the autumn. Hopefully less travel with my job means fewer missed rehearsals!

In my "absence" this year it's been good to see more youngsters joining - I love the fact that my children enjoy being part of making music, even if it's not orchestral; even Emma has suddenly found it quite a relaxing pastime to pick up the elderly, dust-gathering clarinet in the corner and give it a go. Who cares what they play? Unless they plan on a career, it should be all about fun.

23rd June: On yer bike!

It's about half way through National Bike Week and I thought it a good point to look back at the six months since I took the plunge and turned to two wheels. I'd estimate that about 95-98% of working days I ride the eight miles I need - home to the station, Kings Cross to the West End, and back again - and at weekends the occasional run about town, popping down to the corner shop, or round to friends' houses. Perhaps I've been lucky in having particularly benign weather - only one journey was truly rained off - but anyway, here's a quick run down of why I'm a dedicated convert to the cycling cause now:

• The government's Cycle to Work scheme got me a £600 bike and all the trimmings for just £350, which is a great incentive...
• ...and so far I've saved about £400 in public transport fares, so I'm already ahead of the game. And with Boris putting London bus fares up 20% in a year, that gap looks set to grow much wider.
• In that time I've also burned off about 325 calories a day - noit quite enough to see me into a size 14 but it's done wonders for my state of mind and my all-round activity levels.
• No problems parking or breaking bus journeys - on election day, I could ride right up to the door of all 10 polling stations, and complete the grand tour in an hour (or would have done if I hadn't got engaged in conversation about how natty my bike looks, and done a few demos of how easy it is to fold up). And on the way home on a warm Friday afternoon, if I get the early train it's no hassle to stop off for a drink in town with friends and still be back for tea. Likewise, meetings at odd times or places - such as the TCMI Transport group out at Marston Road - don't mean getting the car out.
• I can forever forego the "joys" of the mobile sauna that is the Victoria Line at 6pm.
• I can actually perceive myself as a decently fit individual rather than a bit of a dollop with a big bum.
• People take time out to have a giggle at chat with me. For some reason the neon yellow jacket marks me out as some sort of crusader for two-wheeled rights.

One disadvantage to all this is the lack of decent cycle parking in St Neots. Well done to Waitrose for their very attractive racks combined with planters; more work needed elsewhere if we're to get more people out of their cars. It also makes me appreciate the quality of our road surfaces that much more acutely - in the grand scheme of things Cambs really isn't so bad after all, having experienced the demented roller-coaster rides that make up the major road network in Camden!

19th June

It's an ordinary Saturday morning and the to-do list seems as long as ever, the garden still needs weeding, the study is awash with paperwork, this site hasn't been updated for a while... and motivation is hard to maintain when at times you feel you're not making good progress on anything in particular. One reason I almost never work from home is that it helps me to separate work and home life so that they don't intrude into each other - but the downside is that the good feeling from solving a difficult technical problem doesn't hang around too long when confronted by seven years' worth of minutes gathering dust and elders that need digging out!

A remarkably simple idea, then, is at Habitforge. The idea is simple; you say what you want to achieve, and they cajole you each day to record your progress. The theory is that what you do daily for 21 consecutive days becomes an effortless habit. Each morning my email arrives with a clock ticking away the days - each failure resets it to 0 - and the thought that I can prove to myself that I can actually sort out the things I dislike about myself (plus, increasingly, the frustration at "losing" a lot of hard work!) provides the motivation to get it all the way round to 21. Funnily enough, having a computer nag me is better than a human - it's completely neutral, and there's no temptation to ignore the nagging on the grounds that the nagger is getting at you or is indulging in "you always do that" - style hyperbole (which, of course, my human naggers always do).

So yes, I bite my nails, but the clock on that one is up to 14. Yes, I neglect my diary, that's on 1 this morning (and I'm going to fill in boring days with past highlights to make it a daily thing). If I win one campaign, I'll start another, and see how far I go.

16th June

It's been a long General Election campaign, then the start of the new civic year, then a cathartic spring-clean of the study. I can't believe how quickly time has gone. Normal service will be resumed... after a bit of a reorganisation at the weekend.

12th June: Me, an artist? (coughs)

I didn't imagine that I'd ever be writing that, having been a complete failure at school... but that's not really the point of today's post.

I've been involved with work behind the scenes for the Community Cafe Listeners Project, which is a community group training people to become volunteer befrienders and listeners. Already 20-strong, the project is growing and exploring more ways to get poeple involved with each other, providing opportunities for people to meet in informal, relaxed situations. And today is launch day!

There's plenty of activity in town as it's also the Folk Festival, so we are sharing the Market Square with folk dancers and vegan cake-sellers (yum!) - and all morning our resident artist Suzi Gutierrez is getting everyone who comes by to contribute to a growing community wallpaper. Including a councillor (see picture) who thinks she can't draw for toffee. Suzi is remarkably disarming, though, and I'm not the only one who, with a bit of confidence-building talk and a box of colours in front of me, has a go. Of course the point is it doesn't have to be a fantastic work of art, it's all about building the community through shared experience. And there's plenty more planned for the summer.

I think my handiwork is best described as surrealist... probably best to stick with maintaining the Cafe's website!

19th April: The car parks again

If I wrote a piece like this, I'd be inundated with mail about my partisan-ship. So here is an independent view of the car park charges saga. Enjoy.

5th April: Not something you see too often

That's right, a negative number on our council tax bill. And not just a token effort, a healthy -3.8%. If there's one label you can't pin on me it's the tax-and-spend perjorative. Not that taxing and spending is intrinsically bad; it's what you spend it on that counts. and if you've spent it on all the things that matter and still have a bit left over, it's only right to give the leftovers back.

Spot the odd one out (click to enlarge)

And where that comes from is the whole approach to budgeting that many councillors appear to use. Here's the normal scheme of things:

• Work out how much of an increase you think you can get away with.
• Work out what you're already committed to.
• If you have some left over, whoopee. Think of some vote-winning projects to use up the spare.
• If not, then hide head in sand and hope that either your reserves hold out or the next council takes the flak instead. (A strategy used by Conservative HDC in recent years, with the £6.1M deficit about to bite very soon.)

On a smaller level, it leads to the phenomenon of creating non-roles out of nowhere. You need your widgets polishing? Don't ask whether an existing department can stretch a bit and take on the task. Create the post of Widget Polishing Officer instead. Sounds facetious? Well, go down your council's website and ask how many positions are real and how many appear to be titles created to fill a single perceived need. It's carts before horses. The order of things should be, what do we want to achieve, how many people and resources do we need to do it, how do we organise them to do it effectively?

So, back to the budget. If you've followed my argument so far, you'll be thinking:

• Work out what you're committed to.
• Work out what you really want to get done, over and above that.
• If you haven't got enough money to do it, then work out what you really, really want to get done.
• If you have any left over, resist the temptation to push up the reserves much higher than you need to keep everything running smoothly. You know your successors will see it as a goldmine to be spent like it's going out of fashion. And in any case, in my opinion it's of dubious morality to take money off people only to stash it in the bank. Either give them something for it, or don't take it in the first place.

So, if there's one result I am proud of from my year as Leader, it's getting the town a budget which both costs less than last year, and looks after all the things we consider essential to the health of the community - our community centres, our play areas, our allotments and cemeteries, increasing our grants to voluntary and artistic groups. The coming Civic year will be a tough challenge to repeat that.

Back to March 2010