Somerset this week: 22 March
This week we have prosecution envy in South Somerset, a Taunton candidate forgets fixed term parliaments, potholes everywhere, new candidates in Glastonbury and an unknown soldier, known once more...
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Somerset this week: 22 March
Election now please
Gideon Amos is calling for a General Election now. The LibDem candidate for Taunton and Wellington constituency is anxious to have a third tilt at winning the seat. And after having been defeated by a considerable margin in both the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, things are looking up for him.
As Somerset Confidential® reported on 4 March (you can read the article here) polling group Electoral Calculus reckon he is going to win. In fact they suggest that he is heading for a landslide with a predicted 37% of the vote to Ms Pow’s 27.5%
No surprise then to hear Mr Amos calling for a General Election now. He says: “People are desperate for a new start for the country after so many broken promises, economic chaos, and continuing turmoil. Instead, the Conservatives in Parliament are gripping on to the last vestiges of influence by the tips of their fingers, locking people out of the change that’s needed.”
He is so keen to give momentum to his call to arms that former LibDem MP for Taunton, Jeremy Browne is organising a fund-raising dinner for him later today and joining him tomorrow from 10.30am in Creech St Michael village hall.
And we should not begrudge Mr Amos his desire to get going.
Excepting only one thing. Had we still got a Fixed Term Parliament, calling for an early election would not be possible. For the government of the day would be obliged to limp on until the fifth anniversary of being elected.
Which would mean whether Mr Amos liked it or not, he would have to wait until December to have the election called and in all likelihood until January 2025 for the election itself.
The Fixed Term Parliament Act of 2011 was introduced to the House of Commons by Nick Clegg
Why do we mention this? Well simply for this reason. The Fixed Term Parliament Act of 2011 was introduced to the House of Commons by LibDem Leader, Nick Clegg. It was very much a LibDem thing having been in their manifesto for the 2010 General Election.
Introducing his Bill to the Commons he explained: “by setting the date that Parliament will [be] dissolve[d], our Prime Minister is giving up the right to pick and choose the date of the next general election—that's a true first in British politics.”
Whilst the coalition government voted it in, the idea of Fixed Term Parliaments was not in the Conservative manifesto at all for 2010. And indeed it was the Conservative Government that abolished the Act in 2022.
Today the LibDems are desperately trying to wipe the memory of the 2010-2015 coalition government from the collective memory of the UK electorate. And indeed quite a few of their candidates can legitimately claim to have had no part in that.
Which makes it rather surprising that Mr Amos is, whilst calling for an election at a time that would have been impossible under the LibDem sponsored Act of Parliament, soliciting support from Jeremy Browne, a Minister in the Coalition Government and prominent LibDem from Nick Cleggs front bench.
No doubt Mr Amos will be expressing his gratitude to the Conservatives for repealing The Fixed Term Parliament Act and giving him the freedom to call for an early election.
Needless to say we have put these points to the LibDem team for Taunton and Wellington, but as of the date of publication of this edition, the response has been a deafening silence.
Northumberland does it differently
Last month Northumberland Police were called in to investigate how significant redundancy payments were made to six employees of Northumberland County Council. The six pay-offs totalled more than £1m and were done without proper authorisation of councillors.
The council has said the payoffs were unlawful but not illegal. By which the council means that they believe the payments would have been lawful had they gone through the proper processes.
Following reviews by the Monitoring Officer and the Chief Financial Officer, a file has been passed to the Police. Northumberland Police are reported to have confirmed that their investigation has commenced.
Compare and contrast that with the performance of South Somerset District Council (SSDC) in September 2022. SSDC had given a senior employee a £109,000 payoff. Not that SSDC disclosed the matter to their tax payers. It only came to light when the auditors discovered it and finding it to be a significant failing, forced the council to make a public disclosure of the fact.
In their report they noted: “we have concerns that:
there was a lack of due process,
insufficient records were maintained to evidence how the agreement was reached
that the agreement does not reflect value for money”
That all sounds bad enough. But there is, as some of you may recall, much more. The auditors could find no record of any formal sign off of the process or that the pay off complied with either Financial Regulations or the Constitution.
Worse it appears that neither the s151 officer (the Chief Financial Officer) nor the Monitoring Officer were informed.
A furious Council Leader Val Keitch insisted that neither she, nor any of the councillors had been consulted and they knew nothing about it.
At an Audit Committee Meeting in September 2022 The Leveller provided the only journalist in attendance. The Editor of the Leveller asked a series of questions of the new Chief Executive Jane Portman.
This enabled the paper to break the story of what had happened.
The payment was made on the sole authority of Alex Parmley who was then the Chief Executive of the council. Ms Portman confirmed that he made the payments without reference to the s151 officer or the monitoring officer, he simply instructed payroll to make the payment.
Mr Parmley, by then safely tucked up in Waitaki District Council in New Zealand, sees the facts rather differently. He told the Otago Times that he did not recognise that amount and did not believe it was accurate.
But with a Police investigation in full swing in Northumberland, it leaves the question hanging in South Somerset. How is it possible that the s151 officer and the Monitoring Officer in SSDC managed not to reach the same conclusion as their equivalents in Northumberland?
It feels wrong that in one part of the country a matter is dealt with by handing a file to the police, yet here in Somerset the same matter is not dealt with at all. No sanction on the individual, no investigation. Instead both appear to have simply thought that there was nothing more to be done. Just tighten up procedures and leave well alone. Both went on to be employed by the new Somerset Unitary Council.
The facts in the Parmley case look, on the face of it, far more damning than they do from what (admittedly very few) facts have been released in Northumberland. And the fact that in SSDC’s case the payment was in the hands of one individual who processed the payment without notifying anyone, consulting anyone or following due process.
Perhaps it is now time for Avon & Somerset Police to investigate the payment under their own initiative.
Known only to God - no longer
A Somerset soldier who died in the First World War has been identified and is to be reburied. Private Albert Wilfred Saunders Culling was the son of Albert and E. Kate Culling, of Castle Street, Keinton Mandeville, Somerset. He died aged just 21 on 26 August 2017.
Private Culling served with the 24th Battalion, London Regiment during the War. On the night of 24 August 1917, the Regiment entered the frontline trenches near Westhoek five miles to the east of the town of Ypres. The action was part of the Third Battle of Ypres also known as the Battle of Passchendaele.
Regimental diary records show several episodes of shelling throughout 25 and 26 August, including a 90 minute artillery bombardment beginning at 23:00 hours on 25 August during which three soldiers were killed and 14 wounded. The three men were buried in a shared field grave until March 1920, by which time any marker which might have recorded their names had been lost. As a consequence, they could not all be identified when they were reburied in the Commonwealth Graves Commission’s Buttes New British Cemetery at Polygon Wood.
Although his remains were not identified at the time, his name was carved onto the Menin Gate, the memorial to those killed or missing in action at the eastern exit of the town of Ypres. The gate is on one of the main roads that led Allied soldiers to the front line.
Now however, more than 100 years later, research has demonstrated that one of the three burials in the field grave was that of Private Culling.
The rededication service for Private Culling’s grave was organised by the Ministry of Defence (MOD)’s Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre and held at the Buttes New British Cemetery on Wednesday morning, 20 March 2024.
Rising tide of debt – and what to do about it
It won’t come as a surprise to our readers to learn that many more people in Somerset are finding the cost-of-living crisis is biting hard. Citizen’s Advice Somerset report that the number of debt issues they helped residents with rose from 2,784 in 2022 to 3,192 in 2023. That’s a 14.6% increase year on year and given the problem of double-digit inflation last year, perhaps that should not surprise us.
They told Somerset Confidential® that the tide of rising numbers in Somerset reflects the national picture where it’s estimated that some 5m people have higher outgoings than income – a negative budget that worsens each month.
The top debt issue in the county continues to be Council Tax where Citizen’s Advice Somerset saw a big increase in the number of people looking for advice. Council Tax accounted for 82% of all the debt issues that Citizen’s Advice helped with in 2023, as compared to 64% in 2022.
One client who was recently helped to become debt free explained the value of the advice on offer: “It has given me hope for a brighter future. I didn’t realise how deep I was in, until I was drowning.”
there were currently 31,664 households being helped by the scheme
It is worth noting that despite its own problems with a rising tide of debt, Somerset Council® has taken the decision to continue to offer support for those with the least resources. This is through the Council Tax Reduction Scheme. The council confirmed to Somerset Confidential® that there were currently 31,664 households being helped by the scheme. That’s out of a total of 270,000 households in the Somerset Council area meaning some 12% of all households are getting help.
The message is, if you are struggling you are not alone. Don’t be too proud to come and ask for help.
Rhoda Cooke, Operations Manager for Citizen’s Advice Somerset says people should not be afraid to talk about their debt problems: “There is help available and there are some basic things you can do now to start putting yourself back in control.
Make a list of all your debts and the details of each: at first it might be a bit overwhelming to see them written down but remember this is the first step in sorting them out.
Prioritise paying rent or mortgage, energy bills and Council Tax.
Not paying these has the most serious consequences.
If you are struggling with debt the check out the Citizen’s Advice website here and search for their guide ‘Start dealing with your debts’. You can also find useful tips on incomings and outgoings in their guides on ‘How to reduce living costs’ and ‘Other ways to increase your income’.
You can access free, independent and confidential advice from Citizen’s Advice Somerset by:
visiting their website www.citizensadvicesomerset.org.uk
or ringing them on their free Adviceline on 0808 278 7842
or visiting one of 16 community access points across the county.
Elections
Yes, there’s a General Election coming and we have talked a lot about that. However, don’t forget that there is also a Police and Crime Commissioner election for Avon & Somerset too. The election takes place on 2 May with the full list of candidates announced on 5 April.
Meanwhile more candidates for the constituencies on our patch have been announced for the General Election. The very first Labour candidate has been chosen and he is Hal Hooberman who will stand in the new Glastonbury & Somerton constituency. Hal was born and raised in the constituency. Announcing his selection the local party said: “He understands local worries about NHS waiting lists, the lack of social and affordable housing, and the need to support our rural economy.”
Former Labour Candidate for the old seat of Somerton & Frome, Sean Dromgoole adds that he worked on his campaign in 2017 and was an exceptional and able member of the team.
Meanwhile the Green Party have also chosen their candidate for Glastonbury and Somerton. It is to be Jon Cousins who is a long serving councillor on Glastonbury Town Council. Glastonbury is unusual in that the town council is controlled by the Green Party with nine councillors out of the total of 16.
Jon was previously Mayor of Glastonbury (not once but four times).
Potholes
It was perhaps inevitable that following talk of elections on the horizon we have a piece about potholes! There must be other pressing matters that voters care about, but somehow potholes always find their way to the top of the agenda.
So we took it upon ourselves to ask a whole bunch of questions about how the council handle potholes, and to be fair we got a much more encouraging response than we expected.
Every year central government tops up local councils pot hole funding but even so there is always a mammoth job to do. We asked Somerset Council how many pot holes they filled in last year. They told us 27,379.
It doesn’t sound like much, although it must take a lot of work at an average of 75 per day. However when compared with the 4,172 miles of road there are in the Somerset Council area it suddenly doesn’t sound like so many.
A scroll down local feeds on Twitter (or X if you musk) will always find some good pothole stories, ones that weren’t done next to ones that were and ones abandoned for years. We even had a piece in Somerset Confidential® about a road that went to only one house (that of a councillor) seemingly had the whole surface re-laid!
All that said, there is a surprising amount of due diligence behind the way pothole repairs are handled. Somerset Council told us that a pothole that is 2 feet square and 6 inches deep would cost around £70 to repair. However that doesn’t include traffic management costs which might be two men with “stop/go” signs and barriers around the work, or it might be traffic lights. That could potentially double the work cost.
a pothole that is 2 feet square and 6 inches deep would cost around £70 to repair
What surprised us was the degree of record keeping behind pothole repairs. The council’s spokesperson told us that when they identify a pothole for repair they are also able to tell when it was last repaired: “All potholes that are identified for repair are recorded with a date and time.”
On a pothole repair there is no guarantee period as such but contractors still have to be accountable for their work: “if a repair fails within a reasonable time period then the contractor will undertake remedial repairs at their cost.”
The biggest problem with the cost of pothole repairs is the inability of the council to co-ordinate repairs with roads being dug up by public and private utility companies. For instance we were told that seven potholes were repaired on Langport High Street between the Parrett and The Hill in the year to March 2024.
But last summer several of those will have been dug up again when the whole central portion of the High Street was dug up for drainage work.
You might have hoped that the various utility companies could have their work scheduled. Instead of being allowed to do it pretty much when they like and often at quite short notice.
Most of the road closure notices we see are not for urgent repairs. If roadworks and the resurfacing that follows them were properly scheduled, the council might perhaps minimise the number of pothole repairs they need to undertake across the year.
Which would at least save money, something the cash strapped authority desperately needs to do.
Independently minded
Another by-election for Yeovil Town Council and another turn up for the books. Town Council by-elections do not always bring the voters out en masse. So to have just under a thousand votes cast is really good news.
Yeovil Town Council has been a LibDem stronghold for many years and having councillors who are not LibDems, is relatively rare. Yeovil has 24 town councillors and most are Libdems with one lone Conservative but of late Independent councillors have been getting a look in.
Tareth Casey was the first, winning one of the Westlands seats 18 months ago. Then in December Adrian Wilkes joined him, winning in Abbey Manor South.
Last night Ruth White joined them becoming the third Independent to win a seat on the council.
The result was as follows:
482 Ruth White (Yeovil Independents)
335 Justice Jimba (Lib Dem)
123 Terry Ledlie (Labour)
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