Double parking

Mr Wilkes of the Brunel Centre seems to be jumping to conclusions about the effectiveness of dropping the cost of parking around Swindon town centre.

My prediction is that if they were to end this deal shopper footfall at the Brunel would return to 17 per cent down in January…. If the council were to remove these improved tariffs it would cause a wipe-out in January.

Welcome to Mt Molehill, Mr Wilkes. Both Mr Young of Swindon Borough Council and Mr Jackson of inSwindon manage to be rather more circumspect.

I think these statistics underline our strategy, meaning that if you give someone a four-hour ticket for about the same price as an hour long stay, they will spend more time and money in the town centre.

Visually the town centre looks busier this year and certainly people are still coming into town and still purchasing in all of the stores.

And seemingly purchasing more or more expensive items, as on average store revenue is the same as last year.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the drop in parking charges has not been beneficial to business in the town centre, but to claim that putting the charges back up would cause ‘wipe out’ is clearly over-dramatic.

The bare facts.

• In September, the number of shoppers visiting the centre was down 17% from the previous September.
• So far in December the number is down by ‘just’ 10% from the previous December.
• Parking figures for 2008 are not available.
• Since September this year, when the parking charges were cut, the number of people parking in town centre car parks has increased by over 20%.

But there were also things happening between September and December last year, which Mr Wilkes seems to have forgotten. Little things, like two of the UK’s biggest banks almost collapsing. Little things, like Honda announcing that it was going to close its South Marston production lines for several months. So even without the boost from reduced parking charges, it would be reasonable to expect the drop between December 2008 and December 2009 to be less than that between September 2008 — when the economy still had another nosedive to come — and September 2009.

With the council’s finances in a mess, it needs to rely on something better than a retail manager’s dodgy statistics before deciding whether to continue spending our money to keep parking charges down.

Fly-tipping spin

If Mr Palacio of Swindon Borough Council is to be believed, the increase in fly-tipping in Swindon is because his team is doing more to clear it away.

Richard Palacio, Swindon Council’s environmental enforcement manager, said the increased number of reports of flytipping was down to extra resources being deployed by the council to combat the problem.

That’s as logical as the streets and alleyways of central Swindon are clean. The statistics announced by Defra show an increase in enforcement by councils across the country, not just in Swindon, yet there has been an 8% increase in recorded fly-tipping in Swindon, compared with a 9% decrease nationally.

Either Mr Palacio’s team are highly ineffective, or he’s talking rubbish in more ways than one.

No stars

Swindon Borough Council’s latest ‘scores on the doors’ news release has received plenty of publicity. But whilst the complacency of some of those in receipt of a zero star rating is to be deplored, the criticisms of the scoring by some more highly rated* cannot be ignored. The criticism is that the inspection regime is too paper based: an establishment can fail for not filling in the right paperwork, but can pass with poor hygiene if the paperwork is fine.

The information about what contributes to a restaurant’s star rating is rather well buried on Swindon Borough Council’s website. The criteria set-out by the government’s Food Standards Agency for assessing a ‘food business’ are:

• type of food and method of handling;
• method of processing;
• consumers at risk;
• level of current compliance with food hygiene and safety procedures;
• level of current compliance with structure of premises;
• confidence in management and control systems;
• risk of contamination of food.

But of those, the only three that contribute to the ‘score on the door’ are:

• level of current compliance with food hygiene and safety procedures;
• level of current compliance with structure of premises;
• confidence in management and control systems.

Oddly, ‘risk of contamination of food’ — logically the most important to the consumer — does not contribute to the score. Which might explain why the official definition for a zero-star rating is

Serious non-compliances found but no imminent risk to public health.

Until there’s an inspection regime that’s concerned more about food hygiene than it is about correct paperwork, my choice of restaurants will remain undisturbed.

* At which point I would have liked to have linked to their five star rating, but the council’s search result was broken.

A week in surveys

This week seems to have been a week for Swindon to feature in surveys, some local, some national. As always with statistics, the publicity has been misleading.

First there were the May results of Swindon Strategic Economic Partnership’s business survey. This showed that 45% of those surveyed expect an increase in turnover during the next 3 months whilst 24% expect it to fall and 31% expect no change. The Adver translated that into a headline of ‘Business leaders optimistic about recovery’ whilst Swindon Business News managed a rather more restrained ‘Local firms seeing some signs of easing’. With the survey also showing that 47% expect no change in ‘General Business’ — whatever that is — and 68% expecting no change in employment, it’s the headlines that are optimistic, not the business leaders.

The week also saw the publication of a report by the Centre for Cities on youth unemployment. The press seemed keen to portray the report as showing that youth unemployment in Swindon is high. For example, the Telegraph:

Students in Swindon are facing an uncertain future as the one-time boom town takes a beating at the school of hard knocks.

and the Adver:

According to research institute Centre For Cities, the number of unemployed youngsters in Swindon has rocketed from 2.39 per cent in February last year to 7.67 per cent last month – the highest increase in the country.

Now, it’s true that the number of people claiming unemployment benefits in Swindon is now above the national average and that youth unemployment and unemployment in general have risen more quickly in Swindon than elsewhere.

Since the beginning of the recession, Swindon’s claimant count has risen to 5.4 percent – passing the GB average for the first time in 30 years.

But as the report’s own figure 6 shows, youth unemployment is still below the UK average: it may have, in the Adver’s words, rocketed, but it is still below average.

Finally there was a story that people liked living in Swindon but dislike the council.

MOST people like living in Swindon but dislike the local council and feel they have little influence over official decisions. Those are the findings of a major new survey that questioned hundreds of people across the town about their local neighbourhoods and the extent to which they felt able to make their voices heard.

The Place Survey conducted by local councils for the Department of Communities and Local Government does indeed show that 80% of the Swindon population are ‘satisfied with their local area as a place to live’ whilst only 27% believe ‘they can influence decisions in their local area’ and 41% are ‘satisfied with how council runs things’. But the national averages for those are 80%, 29% and 45% respectively. For an example of an unpopular council, try Northampton (only 27% satisfied with the council), for a stubborn one try Gosport (only 20% think they can influence it). So, rather than Swindon Borough Council being singled out by its residents for disdain as the headline would have us believe, their attitude to it is actually rather average.

Just a word

One of the more frustrating aspects of reading reports of proceedings at Swindon Crown Court in the Adver is the double act of Mr Field as judge and Mr Ross as defence lawyer and the incredibly lenient sentences that result. It’s a well known double act, widely commented on, though not in the pages of the Adver where comments are not allowed on their reports of court proceedings. I don’t usually bother to comment on these reports — it would get monotonous — but the comments from Mr Field reported today just beggar belief.

Judge Field quizzed prosecutors at Swindon Crown Court. “Why are these two charged with affray, which has a maximum sentence of three years rather than actual bodily harm which carries a maximum of five years?” he said.

With a comment like that you’d think he was about to hand down a stiff sentence, something close to the maximum he could perhaps? Err… no. Just 36 weeks… suspended, 200 hours unpaid community work and £250 compensation to the victim. That’s more like a single word than a sentence.

Now, I appreciate that the government’s sentencing guidelines don’t help, but with buffoonery like this it’s not surprising that the judiciary is held in such low regard.

Lies, damned lies and tax debt statistics

Swindon Borough Council’s Mr Martin is clearly no statistician. His social analysis skills aren’t too hot either. According to Mr Martin, a league table of wards based on levels of outstanding council tax debt will help them to ‘identify areas that may have problems’

The idea of breaking it down into wards is to help us identify areas that may have problems and see what we can do to help.

He does seem to have a few doubts though.

We have to look more carefully at these figures because for example, Abbey Meads is not one of the places with a lot of benefit claimants

Quite. As Mr Martin clearly hasn’t bothered, I’ll do the analysis for him. Here are the figures – and spin – from the Adver.

Abbey Meads comes in at fifth in the league of council tax dodgers – with over £572,000 owed from 904 court orders. The worst area is Central ward, which is £688,000 in the red with 1,390 court orders. Gorse Hill & Pinehurst, Eastcott and Parks are close behind, each owing in excess of £600,000. The most punctual payers evidently live in Ridgeway ward, where just under £44,000 is outstanding from 71 court orders.

Let’s concentrate on just the three wards for which full figures have been given. In the council’s chosen ranking, they are:

• Central — £688,000 from 1,390 court orders
• Abbey Meads — £572,000 from 904 court orders
• Ridgeway — £44,000 from 71 court orders

I can’t find figures for how many taxable properties there are in each ward. The best indicator of ward size I can find is the electorate (i.e. those registered to vote) at the last local elections.

• Central — 7777 electors
• Abbey Meads — 10,713 electors
• Ridgeway — 2464 electors

With the population of Abbey Meads four times as large as that of Ridgeway, any analysis based on totals per ward is going to be heavily skewed in favour of Ridgeway and against Abbey Meads. There are various sums one can do to try to remove that effect.

Ward	Debt per elector	Court orders per 1000 electors	Debt per court order
Abbey Meads	£53	84	£632
Central	£88	178	£494
Ridgeway	£17	28	£619

From that analysis you could say that it’s not the wards with high numbers of benefit claimants that have the problem, but the more affluent ones, as there the amounts owed – the last column in the table – are, on average, much higher.

Of course, if you pick the other columns in the table, the conclusion is different… but not more correct.

Never happy

There’s no pleasing some people. Take Mr Montaut for example. First he complains that a Christmas tree in the Magic Roundabout might be too distracting to drivers. Now that the tree’s in place, he’s complaining that it’s too dull!

Still, if nothing else he’s given us yet another montyism*:

I was disappointed, but not in a negative way.

*Montyism n Statement that is so illogical and contradictory as to be humorous.

Under-used

Under-used. That is the description Mr Perkins has given to Merton Fields.

The area had been leased to the parish council, which had resulted in it being underused…. The borough is showing leadership in putting to use this under-used resource to provide more sports and leisure facilities.

Mr Perkins, the councillor that brought us legalised graffiti in the town centre, seems to struggle with the concept of parkland and open-space as much as he does with the concept of art. For open-space — something the council’s own plans acknowledge is very limited in Swindon — to have the benefits that it is perceived to bring to communities, it has to be not very intensely used. Open-space that is too well used ceases to be open-space and becomes a crowded space!

It’s pants!

I don’t wish to denigrate the efforts of the Swindon Real Nappy Network. (I’ll quite happily denigrate the Adver’s ability to get a web address right though: swindonrealnappynetwork.org.uk, as published in the Adver, won’t get you very far.) I’m old enough to have been in nappies before disposable nappies were commonplace, and my parents were sufficiently thrifty that once my sibling and I were beyond the nappy-wearing phase they cut them up and re-used them as face flannels. So I have nothing against their objectives. I’m just rather puzzled by the logic — if you can call it that — behind their support for the proposals from Swindon Borough Council and Wiltshire Wildlife Trust for a publicly funded nappy laundry service.

Disposable nappies are filled with a chemical gel that draws the moisture in to it. But it also draws all the good moisture away. At a time when parents are so keen on organic food for their children it seems madness to be putting chemicals so close to a very sensitive area.

Good moisture? Do they think there’s good water and evil water? And if they’re so concerned about the use of chemicals, does that mean that this laundry service will not use any chemicals? No detergents, no disinfectants, just nappies returned after a thorough rinse in pure water? I suspect not.

Empty housing contradictions

Having seen all the fuss in the local paper about the number of empty houses in Swindon, I had a look at the enforcement action a charity was suggesting that the council should use to get the houses occupied. The first thing I noticed was that the charity, the Empty Homes Agency, seems rather closely linked to government. I also see that despite claiming in the pages of the Adver that compulsory purchase orders and Empty Dwelling Management Orders should be used by the council in Swindon to reduce the number of empty houses, its own CEO on his blog admits they’d have little impact. In fact, it’s one of several stories on the blog suggesting that the powers it promotes aren’t much use… not least because councils seem to be amongst the worst offenders when it comes to leaving houses empty.

Time to ban children from the beach?

No, I’m not being serious… but consider the bit of health & safety lunacy allegedly behind the postponement of the opening of the pool at Highworth Recreation Centre.

The temperature of the pool, which is supposed to be 28 degrees celsius had dropped to 22 degrees overnight. According to Mr Baker children under eight are not allowed to swim in water below 27 degrees for health and safety reasons.

On that basis, children should never be allowed to swim in the sea off Britain’s coasts.

Which way are they going?

Whilst I can see the advantages of doubling the rail line from Swindon to Gloucester (the ‘Stroud Valley Line’ according to locals, or the ‘Golden Valley Line’ according to the operators), I suspect that Ms Girling (a councillor on more councils than is reasonable) may be rather disappointed with the outcome if Gloucestershire County Council’s campaign is successful. She seems to overestimate the area’s commercial attractions.

Without the extra track there is a real danger that the growth in new housing will far outstrip new jobs leading to a slowdown in the local economy, more people commuting out of the area and the inevitable knock-on effect of more congestion.

Err… commuting is a two-way thing, and improving the rail service will make it just as easy to commute out of the area as it will to commute into the area. I suspect that Swindon’s employment might benefit more than the Stroud Valley.

Ms Girling’s comments remind me of those of Sheffield City Council during the 1990s. They were adamant that the opening of the tram line from the city centre to the Meadowhall Centre would revitalise the city, encouraging the thousands that went to Meadowhall for shopping to make the journey to the city centre’s run-down shopping areas. It didn’t. What it did was enable city centre workers to make the trip to Meadowhall within their lunch break, further depleting trade for city centre stores. It took another ten years for the city centre to recover. I suspect this is not the effect that Ms Girling has in mind.

Freezers to replace wheelie bins

Just a week after Swindon Borough Council suggested doubling the number of plastic bags used for throwing away rubbish, we now have an even less efficient suggestion from a local resident: freeze your rubbish, then put it in your wheelie the night before collection. Ms Harris, whose idea this is, seems to be rather proud of her ‘logic’ in coming up with this idea.

I’ve done it ever since I’ve had a wheelie bin and I’ve never had maggots. It was an idea I just came up with myself. My husband says I apply logic to everything and it doesn’t always work, but this does.

It’s such a great idea, I’m thinking of buying an industrial freezer and providing, for a reasonable fee, maggot protection services to my neighbours…. On second thoughts, perhaps not. Let’s examine Ms Harris’ logic.

It’s simple. Instead of throwing away old plastic containers, that you get things like strawberries in, keep them. Put all your scrap foods and bits and bobs from your plate into the container…

That assumes you buy sufficient amounts of overpackaged food to store the scrap food in. It also assumes that the problem waste is sufficiently dry not to leak out of the container.

then put them in the corner of the freezer.

The corner of the freezer? Just how big a freezer is this? Someone cooking meals daily could easily generate more than just a ‘corner’ of waste in one fortnight. Those not doing serious cooking but reheating pre-packaged food are likely to have large amounts of bulky soiled packaging even less suitable for this treatment. And placing waste in proximity to waste: I’m sure the Health & Safety wonks would have a fit about that. Freezing significantly slows the decay process, it doesn’t totally stop it.

Anything frozen will not attract vermin or maggots or anything.

In a fortnight, true, but until it freezes you’ve got waste potentially oozing whatever contamination it already has over food in the freezer.

I’ve done it ever since I’ve had a wheelie bin and I’ve never had maggots.

There’s as much sense to that as there would be to burning all food just to avoid the risk of it being undercooked. Admittedly, the council’s own suggestion of double-wrapping rubbish is not much better.

According to Swindon Borough Council’s own figures, each week’s rubbish collection costs less than 75p per household.* Anything that costs more to prevent the maggot infestations is a step backwards in efficiency from the well-known Victorian solution to the problem.†

*Up to 1 tonne of rubbish per household per year with the cost of collection in 2004/05 (in the era of weekly collections) £38.62 per tonne.
†Yes, I know just a minority of households have suffered wheelie bin infestation, but the council’s advise is to everyone, not just the afflicted few.

Lies, damned lies and crime statistics

If you’re reporting a story that does little more than regurgitate some press releases, you’d at least try not to make any errors in what you copied, no? Step forward the Adver which, in publishing a story based on a press release from Wiltshire Criminal Justice Board, has managed to misquote the figures from an Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) press release.

The number of youths cautioned for criminal offences has grown 12 per cent in the last six years. The number convicted of a crime rose by three per cent since 2002.

What the IPPR figures actually stated was that the number of youths cautioned or convicted for criminal offences has grown 12 per cent in the last six years whereas for adults the rise is three per cent.

The Wiltshire Criminal Justice Board’s response to the IPPR report is to claim that the number of youths cautioned or convicted for criminal offences has decreased by 13 per cent in the last two years. In a later press release they go even further.

In the past three years we’ve seen a fall of nearly 40 per cent in the numbers of young people entering the youth justice system.

Well, that’s comforting isn’t it? No mention of detection rates or of the numbers of crimes being reported. As long as convictions are dropping, everything’s fine.

On the basis of the analysis done by the Wiltshire Criminal Justice Board, we’d be far safer if the police were abolished, because then no children would be convicted or cautioned. And regardless of what has happened in the last two years, by the boards own measure, youth crime is 12 per cent higher than six years ago. Just two years of figures are hardly evidence of a downward trend.

Life in Swindon Survey

I’ve received a survey to fill in from Swindon Borough Council, titled ‘Life in Swindon Survey’. If the opening blurb is to be believed, its purpose matches its title.

We would like to hear your views about life in your local area and about issues such as, anti-social behaviour, leisure activities and your health. Your view will help us to plan our future services around residents’s priorities.

The survey itself though has very few questions specifically about ‘Life in Swindon’: only four out of thirty two. Three of these make up the entirety of the ‘Culture & leisure’ and ‘Your feelings about your local community’ sections (one on which attractions have been visited, one on satisfaction with Swindon town centre, and one on problems in the ‘local area’) and the other (on local adult education) is in the ‘Work and skills’ section. The section titled ‘Your community’ is virtually nothing about the community and almost everything about the individual filling in the form, with two questions about individual involvement in voluntary work, another on individual ability to influence decisions and only one on the community (about how well people from different backgrounds get on). Seven of the thirty two questions are standard demographic questions used primarily for classifying respondents. Having filled it in, I feel like I’ve been answering a survey that’s more about me than it is about Swindon or ‘Life in Swindon’.

I can’t help feeling this was a wasted opportunity. Much of the survey seems to be seeking information obtainable from other government agencies. What little’s left was hardly worth the effort — and possibly not the consultants’ fee either. There’s so much more to say on ‘Life in Swindon’ than answers to three questions can tell.

Stagnantly improving

I find it rather puzzling that Mr Small can convert the Audit Commission’s recent ‘comprehensive performance assessment’ that Swindon Borough Council is ‘improving strongly’ into something completely different.

I would also remind Nick Martin of the comments made last week by the chair of the audit commission, who described Swindon as a stagnant authority.

I’ve searched the Commission’s whole report for the word ‘stagnant’ — it’s not used once. If the chair of the Commission spoke these words, they seem not to have been recorded. The only mention I can find of Swindon being a ‘stagnant authority’ is Mr Small’s.

The leader of the red nest seems to have forgotten that, when his group were in charge, the council was, by the Audit Commission’s analysis, one of the worst performing councils in the country.

The only thing that seems stagnant in all of this is Mr Small’s contribution to political debate.

No easy ride on Route 45

I have previously commented on the silliness of some of the obstacles placed in the way of cyclists in Swindon. Today I came across one such obstacle at Taw Hill, on National Cycle Route 45. The route is newly signposted, with the signs indicating that it’s just 13 miles to Cirencester and, for the more energetic, 48 to Gloucester. But with pointless obstacles like the one shown — everyone, including me, cycles round, chewing up the grass — it wouldn’t be the quickest of journeys.

Surely there are more effective ways to slow careless cyclists whilst allowing more careful riders on their way relatively unimpeded.

Wheelification

I arrived home today to find my new wheelie bin waiting for me. Now I’m content enough with the small wheelie bin that, as I requested, I have received. It’s a little difficult to manœuvre around the narrow space between my gate and the front of my house (how I would have managed with a full size bin I’m not sure), but apart from that it’s fine. What annoys me is the nonsense contained in the leaflet that came with it.

Where and when should my bin be left for collection?
Your wheelie bin should be put at a point on your own property that is nearest the public highway,

That’ll be right in by my front door then.

where it is visible and accessible to to the collection crews.

As the bin is about twice the height of my front wall, it should be pretty difficult to miss, though given the record so far of the bin-men emptying my orange recycling boxes, I may need to train it to do a song and dance routine to get them to notice it. As to being accessible, at the moment the binmen hoick a black bag out of my dustbin ove the brick wall, without coming through the gate. WIth the wheelie bin, it is too deep for them to reach in and it will be difficult for them to manœuvre out of my gate.

Why change to a wheelie bin?
It reduces the amount of rubbish that is sent to costly and environmentally-damaging landfill by encouraging recycling

What? Just where did that demonstrable bit of nonsense come from? A wheelie bin does not of itself have any impact on the level of recycling, as anyone who lived (as I did) in a city where wheelie bins were introduced over eighteen years ago, way before doorstep recycling was introduced, would know. In fact, as the standard size wheelie bin is about four times the size of an old fashioned dustbin, if anything it could be said to encourage the throw-away society. By Mr Wren’s own admission, the biggest impact on the level of recycling in Swindon has been the introduction of separate doorstep collection of plastic bottles. The main influences on the level of recycling are making recycling easier by providing separate doorstep collection, and restricting the amount of ‘non-recyclable’ waste that the council will collect. The means by which that ‘non-recyclable’ waste is collected (be it by wheelie bin or for the anointed few by blue bag) is an irrelevance. It is bad enough that the council have foisted this change upon the residents of central Swindon with a sham consultation: it is an insult to the intelligence of the Swindon electorate that councillors and council officers continue to attempt to confuse the two issues of increasing recycling and the method of waste collection.

Finding a home for a centre

It would be easy to dismiss the protests of residents in the Tennyson Street area of central Swindon against a possible new drug user’s drop-in centre as NIMBYism. It is after all logical that the centre be located close to an area with a large number of drug addicts. However the proposed site is, as the residents say, close to a children’s play area which already has a reputation for being a location for drug deals and placing it quite so close to that play area is unlikely to improve the situation. It’s also not as though there aren’t a large number of vacant units nearby (and indeed closer to the centre of the drugs problem), many of them having been empty ever since they were built over a year ago.

Driving lessons

It is difficult sometimes to understand the reasoning of those running consultations for Swindon Borough Council. For the consultation on the North Swindon Transport Strategy, which is actually about transport between North Swindon and the town centre, of the three days Halcrow have selected for exhibitions, the only one at a time when many will be able to attend (i.e. at the weekend) is in North Swindon. The exhibitions in the areas most affected by the proposals (Gorse Hill and West Swindon) were on ‘working’ days. Not that the strategy actually seems to amount to much: the only major proposal is two extend Thamesdown Drive along a line near to the River Ray to a junction with Great Western Way, and the whole strategy is dependent on the government contributing £100 million. Perhaps those stuck in the jams should consider hitching a lift on the back of one of the pigs flying overhead.

Even harder to understand is the Adver’s choice of a photograph of current congestion in South Swindon to illustrate their story.