Bad advice

It’s a long time since the jokers at the Swindon Community Safety Partnership have given us anything to laugh about, but now they’re back to their old habits. A bit of advice I was given many years ago — not by the Swindon Community Safety Partnership — was that one should always be cautious about using a mobile phone in a public place, particularly so in those locations, such as the entertainment zone of a town centre, where the risk of theft is high. Alas, it seems that the Swindon Community Safety Partnership may be about to encourage behaviour that’ll lead to a wave of mobile phone thefts. The partnership is going to send messages via bluetooth to clubbers’ mobile phones, giving them safety advice.

Bluetooth is a great, cost-effective way to reach lots of people with relevant bite-size community safety messages…. [I]t will be used selectively to support key awareness campaigns… and people can opt to decline messages, although we’d urge them to pick up the free advice.

I wonder if that advice will include ‘Keep you mobile phone out of sight when in an unsafe crowded area.’

From lollipops to messaging, the record of the Swindon Community Safety Partnership in dealing with Friday night revellers is consistently daft.

Replacing the New Swindon Company

With all the fuss and angst over Swindon Borough Council’s budget plans for next financial year, another item on this Wednesday’s council cabinet meeting agenda has been overlooked.

The council executive’s proposals for replacing the New Swindon Company is damning with its mild praise. First, the mild praise.

Since the company’s formation TNSC has helped to stimulate regeneration and investment in Swindon’s central area. TNSC has put together exciting development packages that have stimulated considerable interest in Swindon’s regeneration plans. The company’s most notable success has been in attracting Muse as the developer for the Union Square scheme.

Claiming success before anything has conrete has happened is premature, to say the least. Even if this could be claimed as a success, ‘only’ is a more accurate term than ‘most notable’. One odd thing is that the proposals say funding — if only for the coming year — is unchanged.

Recognising the current economic challenges and the importance of an effective response, SBC aims to continue with its existing level of funding of £250k per annum plus the financing of the transferred economic development team and related project budgets.

Yet the budget proposals show a reduction of £147k. With contradictions like that, it’s no wonder that the council’s finances are in a bad way.

The reasons given for replacing the company read as a thinly-veiled catalogue of failure.

An opportunity to engage with private investors in a way not seen before

So the New Swindon Company failed in attracting private investors….

Deployment of limited resources for maximum impact and for best value

And wasted our money….

The requirement for town centre regeneration to link in a more integrated way with plans for the rest of the Borough to ensure Swindon’s existing communities benefit from regeneration and growth

And ignored the communities it was meant to benefit. And the replacement, borough-wide company, how will that engage with the community? Apparently, not all. The council’s vision for the new company is for it to be the poodle of the council, seemingly with no direct involvement with the community at all.

Missed connections

Swindon Borough Council’s Connecting People Connecting Places programme — CP2 for short — appears to have a blog. I say ‘appears’ because the week old Connecting Swindon blog has received no publicity and is devoid of links from official sources. The only link I can find is that the Swindon Borough Council twitter account follows the Connecting Swindon blog’s twitter feed. With that level of publicity the blog is, for the moment, largely speaking to nobody.

Lack of publicity is not the only weak point of the Connecting Swindon blog. The latest posting is on events in the Town Centre cluster.

We will be continuing this form of local engagement over the next couple of weeks in the Eastcott area with an event at Groundwell Rd on Tuesday 10th November and in the central ward area later in the evening in the Manchester Road area followed by an event on Farringdon Road on Friday 13th November in the afternoon.

The next couple of weeks? They must be fans of time travel, as that was posted on 26th November. And this is the only publicity these events have received: they are not even mentioned on the cluster’s official page.

With poor publicity like this, one could be forgiven for thinking that the council does not really want to know the opinions of the community. If you read the job description for a cluster lead you may well be convinced that is so. The ‘people’ barely get a mention.

Work hand in hand with ward members to establish the framework for neighbourhood area forums including governance, membership and forward agendas.

So that’s zero community involvement in setting the local agenda.

The overall strategic vision and priorities are set by the local authorities and partners through the Community Strategy and the Local Area Agreement and other plans such as the Children and Young People’s Plan. The Neighbourhood Area Agreement will have a range of themes cascaded from those two documents, that the area forum will monitor and explore to achieve local community priorities.

Welcome to top-down planning. Far from being a meaningful conversation, CP2 appears to be a monologue.

Degenerating regeneration whitewash

It has been announced that the New Swindon Company is to be replaced by a new company tasked with doing… well, almost exactly the same as the New Swindon Company was. This smacks of an attempt to hide failure that’s no more likely to succeed than renaming of Windscale nuclear plant as Sellafield did. According to Swindon Borough Council’s Mr Jones,

The new company will be responsible for the integrated plans for economic development, growth and regeneration.

Hmm… that’s so different from the purpose of the New Swindon Company.

The New Swindon Company was formed in 2002 to stimulate investment and co-ordinate plans for revitalisation of the town centre as a key component to achieving sustainable economic growth.

What’s not so clear from the announcement is how this new bureaucracy will be funded. The New Swindon Company was funded by tax payers through three routes: Swindon Borough Council, the South West Regional Development Agency and the Homes and Communities Agency. Funding from the last two does not seem to be guaranteed. Mr Jones hopes the new bureaucracy will obtain more funding from the private sector. Whether local people wish their town’s regeneration to be lead by an organisation dominated by developers is a question he seems not to have pondered.

As usual, at the conference where this piece of deckchair shuffling was announced, Mr Bluh was in full head-in-the-sand mode.

I find it the most exciting place I’ve ever lived in. We must not pick up the negative side but keep positive. I feel certain we will come out of the recession on the right side. We certainly have got the product here and it is our job to sell it.

Blind, unquestioning optimism has never been a virtue. A decade of demolition and degeneration has not changed that.

Disconnecting People, Disconnecting Places

Yesterday I went to Swindon Borough Council’s central area Connecting People Connecting Places event in Wharf Green and the Parade. It was, to be generous, a waste of time.

Connecting People Connecting Places is Swindon Borough Council’s take on the government’s Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power policy. The alleged aim is to get people more interested in local government by taking power — not that there’s much left with all the centralisation and target setting by the current government — from local councils and giving it to groups of local people. Naturally, the thought that a better approach might be to take power from central and regional government and give it to local councils never crossed their mind.

With that poor and illogical reasoning behind its creation, Connecting People Connecting Places is never likely to do well. But the council and most councillors clearly aren’t trying hard either. Today’s event in the town centre had very little advanced publicity: just a page on the Swindon strategic partnership website and a news item on the Council’s website since last Thursday. The ‘cluster chair’ seemed quite unapologetic when this was lack of publicity was highlighted on the TalkSwindon forum. But given how poor the event was, I’m almost ashamed to have tried to publicise the event myself.

What was promised sounded fairly impressive.

Ward members will be on hand between 11am and 2pm at both locations with officers from Swindon Borough Council, the Local Neighbourhood Policing Team, Wiltshire Fire & Rescue Service and other volunteers to hear residents’ opinions.

There was no missing the police presence: it seemed as though every member of central Swindon’s police teams was on hand, particularly at Wharf Green. Anyone would think they’d nothing better to do, such as controlling crime. The fire service was also at Wharf Green and inSwindon in the Parade. Less visible were the ward councillors. I saw just two, both dressed in anonymous suits with nothing to identify them as councillors. In fact there was virtually nothing to identify this as a council event at all. It was more a ‘meet the police’ event than a ‘connect with your council’ event.

Council officers will use people’s favourite places in the centre of Swindon to create a virtual Google map. The map will also be used to chart areas where there are problems.

I saw paper maps and post-it notes.

In principle, using different approaches to engage with residents in sensible; but not when it’s as poorly thought out and executed as this was.

Picture this… eventually

Last September, I commented on plans to set-up a central control room to monitor CCTV footage from the town centre that was acknowledged as being of questionable value. Almost a year later, and Swindon’s lollipop fans, the Swindon Community Safety Partnership, are once again talking about setting up a central CCTV control room, plus at least five more cameras to add to the forty already in existence in the town centre.

For someone who’s a volunteer policeman, Mr Palusinski, head of the Safety Partnership, has an almost criminal disregard for evidence.

The new system won’t be a case of Big Brother watching you – it is to tackle issues of crime and disorder in the town while making residents and shoppers feel safe.

Err… regardless of what it’s being used for, unless the control centre is left empty and unused, it will be a case for the big-brother state watching.

These area may be parts of the town that are heavily affected by violent crime, graffiti or purse dippings and aren’t covered by sufficient surveillance.

So that’s CCTV being used to monitor the crimes that the evidence shows it’s least effective in tackling (i.e. anything other than theft from cars in car parks).

The amount of money that will be spent on updating the network will be far outweighed by the savings that will be made by having one central control room instead of having to communicate with several different agencies.

Given that the Safety Partnership’s own report acknowledged that 80% of CCTV footage is of questionable value, it seems to me that the money spent updating the network will be a waste of money.

I’ve been monitoring the ‘initiatives’ of the Swindon Community Safety Partnership for over eighteen months now. I’ve yet to see anything that suggests their naïve leadership are doing anything other than wasting Swindon taxpayers’ money.

Update, Monday, 24 August 2009: To reinforce my point, an internal police report has found that of London’s more than a million CCTV cameras, only 1 in 1000 contributes to solving a crime each year. So Swindon’s cameras are likely to be useful less than once every 20 years.

A gullible partnership

The naïvety of the Swindon Community Safety Partnership continues to amaze. This week the Partnership’s leader, Mr Palusinki, is claiming that invisible marking of property reduces burglary by over 85%.

Effective property marking has reduced burglaries in other areas by up to 85 percent. Goods are less attractive to thieves if they can be easily identified.

Mr Palusinki is guilty of believing the manufacturer’s advertising material. The evidence on which those claims are based is weak.

An area containing approximately 500 homes was identified as being suitable for a pilot test to allow Police to assess the effectiveness of forensic property marking which is based on the principles of human DNA…. Within the ‘hot-spot’, 95% of the properties used the forensic marking ‘kits’, which included a large number of repeat victims, to mark their property. Signage, posters and window stickers were then used to deter criminals from operating in the area as well as significant media coverage…. The pilot was a huge success, with an incredible 85% reduction in domestic burglary, 60% reduction in theft from vehicles, and 50% reduction in theft of vehicles.

So in reality, it wasn’t the marking of property that caused the reduction in burglaries, it was the publicity that accompanied it that had the effect.

Mr Palusinki, it seems, is an advertiser’s dream customer.

Nanny state has plans for your free time

It’s a couple of days since I read this now, but it still annoys me.

It is estimated that 38.3 per cent of Swindon residents are engaged in arts and the Government has set the town a target of reaching 41.3 per cent by March 2011.

Why? What I and any other person in Swindon, or anywhere else, do in their free time should be no business of the state. Provided what I do is legal, I don’t expect the state and its bureaucracies to be setting targets for what I should do for enjoyment.

A bureaucrat in search of a purpose

If you’re a bureaucrat in charge of one of Swindon’s numerous partnerships, what would be the best way to justify your cost to the local taxpayers? Do something worthwhile perhaps? On second thoughts perhaps not. Do something worthless instead and write a piece in the Adver, claiming that everything in Swindon is within your remit. That’s the approach of the head of the Swindon Cultural Partnership.

What does the ‘C word’ actually mean?… As far as the Government is concerned, culture means just about anything that isn’t working or sleeping…. So, yes. According to that broad definition of culture, anything goes…. Culture may be all the things that the government say it is, but it is something else too. It is us.

If culture is ‘us’, then we don’t need this bureaucracy to tell us what culture in Swindon is.

Not-so-black Saturday

If there’s one thing you can rely on from the Swindon Community Safety Bureaucracy Partnership, it’s stupidity. The economy’s nose-dived, bookings for Christmas parties are heavily down, yet Mr Palusinski from the Bureaucracy Partnership is not sure why yesterday evening seemed to be just like any other Saturday night.

Considering that some people in the national press were calling it black Saturday, it was relatively calm in the town centre. I am not sure why the numbers were so average but they were.

A quick search reveals that just about the only person referring to yesterday as Black Saturday is Mr Palusinski.

Whether the message we are putting out there is being heeded by revellers, or whether it is the current financial drought that is resulting in people drinking less, I am not sure.

Hint: it’s the economy, stupid.

I consider the operation a success.

I consider the operation a waste of the public’s money.

Now you see the police… now you don’t

The headline on the Adver’s website claims the police were giving safety advice to shoppers… the story says the police weren’t there at all.

The ability to proof-read is a very undervalued skill….

(To see the text in the screenshot clearly, click on the image.)

A partnership of partnerships of partnerships of….

When I started investigating the story in the Adver about a failed bid for Highworth to get some regeneration funds from the South West Regional Development Agency, I soon found myself going round in circles. A quick look at the Highworth Community Partnership Group’s website revealed that it’s not really a partnership at all. The steering group seem to be self-appointed. There doesn’t even seem to be a representative from Highworth Town Council, though it is closely linked (the council takes care of the partnership’s finances).

Highworth Community Partnership Group is supported by Wiltshire Market Towns Partnership, which seems to be indistinguishable from the Wiltshire Forum of Community Area Partnerships. The latter is funded by the European Union Social Fund, the South West Regional Development Agency, Wiltshire County Council and what was the Market and Coastal Towns Association of which it is also a member. The Market and Coastal Towns Association is now the South West Market and Coastal Towns Network, which was created by the Market and Coastal Towns Initiative which is — if you believe the spin and have not yet got totally lost in the tangle of bureaucracy —

‘a community-led initiative which helps local people to prepare and implement a plan for the future of their town and surrounding area’.

Allowing the community to lead themselves apparently requires the financial support of not only the South West Regional Development Agency, but also the Government Office for the South West, the South West Regional Assembly, the Countryside Agency (now Natural England), English Heritage, the Housing Corporation (replaced by the Homes and Communities Agency), the South West Network of Rural Community Councils (itself funded by the South West Regional Development Agency and the Government Office for the South West) and Lottery Funds South West.

So, at the end of all that, a group funded by the South West Regional Development Agency via numerous intermediaries has been unsuccessful in obtaining funds from… the South West Regional Development Agency… and have strangled themselves with red tape in the process.

Making a bureaucracy out of representation

I’ve previously written about the Swindon Local Involvement Network (though the information on the council’s website is more informative than their new website). Swindon LINk is now progressing… to a fully fledged bureaucracy. The administrators appointed by the council to support the group are currently trying to recruit a ‘Start Up Group’. The principle task of the group during its six-month existence? To set-up another group.

Tasks of the Start up Group

• To plan the setting up of the LINk Steering group
• To agree a development and engagement policy for LINk membership
• To develop and agree a work program for the LINk
• To develop a terms of reference for the theme based working groups
• To agree expense policy
• To develop the relevant policies for Swindon LINk
• To agree a complaints policy

All that for a group with a mailing list of just over forty people. And note the mention not just of a steering group, but of talking shops working groups too. This little group seems set on creating a web of committees more akin to a government department than to small players in the provision of local health services.

If they really want to match their name and involve local people, rather less talk and more action would be a better approach: skip the Start Up Group and get straight to work.

Picture this

It seems strange that, when police and public are becoming increasingly paranoid about anyone with a camera in any urban location that’s not a tourist trap, 24/7 CCTV surveillance is regarded as essential in protecting Swindon from terrorists. A consultants report for Swindon Community Safety Partnership — the organisation that brought us lollipops as a remedy to drunken brawls — has raised concerns about the uncoordinated approach to CCTV. A report to the next cabinet meeting of Swindon Borough Council concludes

The Town Centre systems that exist are not currently monitored 24/7. The effect of this is that there is no pro-active CCTV cover at peak times. Similarly, if a major incident occurred in the Town Centre, coordination of the existing systems to monitor the incident and response is likely to be difficult.

Hmm… and permanently monitored CCTV would solve that? To quote another part of the same report,

Government’s national CCTV strategy identifies that an estimated 80% of data from CCTV is of questionable quality.

So the report is recommending investing in a central control room, to monitor at all hours CCTV footage that is acknowledged to be of questionable value. It makes as much sense as hiring a conductor for an orchestra where all the instruments are out of tune. It’ll look impressive and coordinated, but the overall result will be barely distinguishable from the chaos that went before.

Swindon LINk

Yesterday I attended the inaugural meeting of the Swindon Local Involvement Network (LINk), which has been created to monitor and comment on public-funded health and adult social care in Swindon. It has limited powers: just the right to ask questions of NHS services and the council’s scrutiny committee and to insist they answer within a set time.

The meeting was an odd affair. I had signed up in response to a flier enclosed with my annual Council Tax bill. Until yesterday I knew nothing of the history behind its creation. LINks replace, though with a wider remit, Patient and Public Involvement Forums, which had been created then abolished by the government in the space of five years. All but three of those that turned up to the inaugural meeting — a grand total of thirteen — had been members of those forums, several with fairly blunt axes to grind about the re-organisation. Others seemed almost as interested in setting-up a complicated committee structure and what the procedure would be for their travel and subsistence claims than they were in health and social services. Almost all were retired: apart from the officers from Swindon Borough Council and Voluntary Action Swindon there in support, I was the youngest person. Hardly a representative group. There is a target for 2000 people to be involved. So far, only thirty have expressed an interest. It has a long way to go.

The first thing the Swindon LINk has been asked to provide an opinion on is the new ‘GP-led health centre’ to be built in central Swindon. One can only hope that it has become a larger and more representative group before it gives a response.

A partnership of partnerships

It must be confusing at times, working in the local public sector. The interconnections between organisations seem so incestuous at times that I’m surprised that people don’t end up spending much of their time talking to themselves. For example, I read that the Swindon Summer Festival is a partnership of Swindon Borough Council, Swindon Cultural Partnership, inSwindon and the Marriott Hotel. So that’s the council in partnership with two of its own partnerships and a hotel.

If you’re looking for a beacon of efficient organisation… this isn’t it.

Be aware, be very aware

Yet another bright idea from Swindon Community Safety Partnership has been announced today, just a week after their last act of genius. Their latest idea is to give revellers boozing themselves to oblivion on Friday and Saturday nights a pack containing a bottle of water, a lollipop, a personal attack alarm, condoms and flip-flops. This ‘survival kit’ will, if the title of the news item on Swindon Borough Council’s website is to be believed, increase said inebriated revellers’ awareness of the effects of alcohol. According to Mr Lovell,

This project is a demonstration of the holistic approach we take when dealing with the night time economy in Swindon to ensure it is a safe place to enjoy.

I have an alternative suggestion for making the Fleet Street area of Swindon safe. The pubs could, as licensing law requires, stop serving those that are clearly drunk, and the local judiciary could take a more serious approach to those found guilty of drunken violence. Just those two things would be far more effective in making people feel safe than a lollipop and bottle of water ever will.

An unbreakable partnership

It seems that hardly a week passes at the moment without yet another local government partnership crawling into sight.

• Swindon Community Safety Partnership (Swindon Borough Council, Swindon Primary Care Trust, Wiltshire Police, Wiltshire Fire & Rescue Service, Wiltshire Probation Area and Wiltshire Police Authority)

And what has brought them to my attention? Their suggestion, at least ten years after it was introduced in many other towns, that glass in bus shelters could be replaced by clear polycarbonate, to reduce vandalism. It’s nice to see such quick thinking.

Glittering nights

Another announcement from the New Swindon Company… and another beyond-belief artist’s impression, this one for the Promenade development. Street lights have never twinkled so prettily. But for the moment, all we’re getting is a feasibility study, which, given that large parts of the area have already been cleared, seems a little late.

I also see from the announcement that there’s another partnership to add to my list.

• Swindon Cultural Partnership (Swindon Borough Council, the New Swindon Company, local companies and assorted arts quangos)

How many government ‘partnerships’ does one town need?

The answer, apparently, is quite a lot. A quick trawl through the web came up with the list below.

• Swindon Local Area Agreement (Swindon Borough Council, the Government Office for the South West, Swindon Strategic Partnership and other quangos)
• Swindon Strategic Partnership (Swindon Borough Council, parish councils and voluntary groups, with observers from the South West Regional Development Agency and the Government Office for the South West)
• Swindon Strategic Economic Partnership (Swindon Borough Council, the South West Regional Development Agency, the New Swindon Company, Swindon Learning Partnership, other quangos and local companies.)
• New Swindon Company (urban regeneration company owned by Swindon Borough Council, the South West Regional Development Agency and English Partnerships)
• Great Western Community Forest (an unincorporated association of Swindon Borough Council, other local councils and the Forestry Commission)
• inSwindon (town centre management company, set-up by Swindon Borough Council with town-centre companies on the board)
• Swindon Learning Partnership (seemingly not a partnership at all, just an office of Swindon Borough Council but with over 120 ‘members’)

Now, I’m sure some of these do worthwhile work but, looking at that list, it does seem rather incestuous, with partnerships forming further partnerships, all with the added cost of yet another bureaucracy. A bit of digging on these organisations’ websites reveals that they are all a consequence of one or other central government ‘initiative’, wherein getting hold of some extra money for Swindon from central government (or stopping central government taking money away) is dependent on setting up a new quango.

If national government thinks that a way to improve local participation in democracy is to add multiple layers of bureaucracy, then its understanding of democracy is clearly very wrong indeed.