Why public trust in Brighton and Hove City Council has collapsed

A pity that neither the piece, nor the comments above identify Cllr Peltzer-Dunn’s noble role in the leadership of the cross-party + local residents powerful ‘Allies for Democracy’ campaign which successfully trounced New Labour’s inexcusable referendum for an Elected Mayor dictatorship!

So successfully, in fact, that however the figures are looked at the proposal was so resoundingly defeated that we must hope it never returns to waste our time and taxpayers money!

Very sadly however is that Councillor Peltzer-Dunn does not seem to get anywhere near the awful truth that, by a wide variety of well-honed artifice, it has become largely the reality that it’s a small clique of Council Officers, in the Town Hall (whose salaries are paid from our taxes!), who de facto ‘control’ our City!

Some of the more apparent ways they do this is by submitting incomplete and inadequate Reports to Committees for decision (with the lightly-veiled threat that time is now pressing, and/or that so much had been spent on officers working-up the proposals that it’d be wasteful for the Committee to reject them!).

Then there’s other officer tactics, such as simply not doing what a Committee has ordered to be done (as in the current Rise contract debacle)!

Then there’s the ‘Soft Power’ tactic of excessively flattering newly-arrived Councillors, and providing them with many kinds of little tit-bits, such as insider gossip and invites to conferences and seminars etc not readily available to other Councillors – all with the usually-successful aim of ‘capturing’ that Councillor’s allegiance to the Town Hall line (often to then gain support for officer’s money-wasting ‘Vanity Projects’, designed to boost an officer’s CV to facilitate a move to a better-paid job in a larger council!).

A greater sadness related to the above scenario is that Councillor Peltzer-Dunn is a highly-intelligent professional person (a RICS Chartered Surveyor), with many previous years of valuable experience as an Elected Member of the former Hove Borough Council.

And the relevance of that fact is that Hove Borough was probably among the best-run Council’s in England.

For the principal reason that it’s senior officers were qualified professionals, who worked to the high standards of their various Chartered Institutions (thus with little or no bowing to satisfy any party-political interference).

In those halcyon days it was easy to say that:
‘The only problems in Hove are a few major ones’, whilst the general day-to-day services for Hove residents were of a high standard, and economical too!

So prudent indeed that, at merger-time with Brighton on 1 April 1997, Hove residents paid no Council Tax for that year, due to the financial reserves accrued by their prudent and professional Borough officers (who were then paid-off with massive ‘Golden Goodbyes’ – apparently because New Labour feared they’d be too professional to toe any party-political line, so Labour recruited compliant alternatives, from London New Labour strongholds, such as Lewisham Council etc.

And oh yes, the few ‘Major Problems’ of HBC?

Well, perhaps the inexcusable political (Conservative) interfering by the Sainsbury family with the Hangleton Link project.

Whereby it still ends at Old Shoreham Road, instead of continuing in a shallow culvert, under what was once all Borough-owned land, to join the A259 coast road at Shoreham Harbour. And the project ended up costing Hove taxpayers more than budgeted!

And an earlier ‘Major Problem’ was HBC’s failure to protect the magnificent Edwardian villas at the west side of Grand Avenue – whereby we now have banal blocks of (expensive!) multi-storey flats that will probably continue to blight the Conservation Area neighbourhood for decades to come!

And how to fix our current Brighton & Hove City Council?

Simply for Councillors, of all parties, to recognise that the Town Hall officers are paid (by taxpayers!) to serve and not to rule.

And then for Councillors to shut-down the 40 or so cosy little secret ‘Members Working Parties’, and to conduct such activity openly in a much smaller number of the kind of Sub-committees we used to have for detailed work.

And now the ‘Work’ word has fallen there seems to be a clear need for Councillors to work 2 to 3 times harder in public to actually run our City Council in an efficient non party-political way (whereby Town Hall officers correctly do what our elected representatives have decided needs to be done), and which will mean more Committee meetings needing to be held to really get to grips with the business of the day, and to do so in good time.

And if some of our current Councillors do not feel able to carry-out such an onerous democratic duty (for which they get paid from £14k pa upwards) perhaps its time for them to vacate their seats in favour of more capable candidates?

We can but hope, and vote!