A week in the life of a Councillor

Since becoming a Councillor I’ve been meaning to do a blog post like this just to go over some of the things you do on a day-to-day basis as a local Councillor. Not to ‘prove’ that we’re busy and actually do things per se, I think you either trust your Councillor to do the job or you don’t (and vote, or not, accordingly), but just to show the wide range of things you get involved with.

Last week is a fairly typical and wide-ranging week so I thought it would be good to go through it and explain what I was up to!

Monday 11th Feb – Labour Group (Motions)

This is a group meeting of all Labour Councillors. We have one the day before Full Council and also have one a bit before to go over potential motions we may want to put forward for the forthcoming Council meeting.

Here we discuss any issues raised, provide feedback on any draft motions put forward and put ourselves forward to speak if we wish to along with other issues that have come up and need discussion since the last meeting.

12th Feb – Environment Scrutiny (Alternate)

As an alternate, obviously you don’t attend unless requested but you still need to put them in your diary in case a Councillor has to pull out at short notice and you’re needed to fill in. Otherwise a free night is a good night to catch up on casework and also cook dinners to put in the freezer for nights when you’re home late!

13th Feb – Planning, Crag Road Drop-In, Social Care Scrunity (Alternate), Wrose Parish Council, Shipley Labour Branch meeting

A busy day! You often get days like this where you have to work with your ward colleagues to split the meetings between you so you can cover as wide a range of events as possible.

During the day I sat on the Planning Panel, which can last the full day if you have a full agenda. On Planning you act in a quasi-judicial (I think that’s the term) manner. You’re in a semi-legal role and it is not party political. So while the make-up of the panel is always mixed with Councillors from all parties in the area (in this case, Shipley & Keighley) you vote on non-party lines based on the evidence presented to you.

In an odd way this is one of the most influential roles you have as a Councillor, because you’re very aware that your decision will have a direct impact on people, either those who support or have put in the planning application, or those who oppose it. It’s a lot of responsibility!

The Crag Road Drop-In centre runs on Wednesday afternoons so if the Planning Panel finishes early I planned* on heading over to see the people who run it and the people who use it. It gives you a good idea of the issues in your area, let’s people know your name and face so they know they can come to you if they have any issues, and let’s you speak to the people providing the service so you can work together on issues.

Wrose Parish Council is in the evening and clashes with our local Shipley Labour Party Branch meeting, disaster! In these circumstances I chat to my Councillor colleagues in the ward and split the meetings between us based on who has most recently been to either meeting or who has actions outstanding and needs to go again. We have no direct role in the Parish Council but naturally a lot of the issues overlap to a degree and we’re always keen to help out where we can (and vice versa!).

The Branch meeting is a chance to see local members and keep them abreast of what is going on in their area and at the Council and we tend to pop for a pint afterwards for a bit of welcome socialising.

*The snow threw pretty much this entire day off so I didn’t make it to the drop-in sadly and worked from home instead.

14th Feb – Ward Officer meeting

This is an optional meeting we set up to meet with our local Ward Officer to go over the ongoing issues in the area, note progress, tick off completed actions and see what needs to be done to move them on further, as well as look into any new issues that have arisen since our last meeting.

We find these meetings help keep everyone on top of things and working closely with our Ward Officer is invaluable in ensuring we provide the best possible service to our constituents (as cheesy as that sounds!). It also helps the Ward Officer take a cue from us, as the elected representatives for the area, on the direction we’d like to see things being taken if possible, though obviously there is a fair degree of give and take as we try balance the ‘ideal’ situation with the reality on the ground, most often relating to budgets.

It’s Valentine’s Day so we were as quick as we could be so we got home to our loved ones and reminded them we exist!

15th Feb – Nothing!

Friday night is free! A useful time to remind my wife that I do exist and our wedding was not a figment of her imagination.

16th Feb – Speak about being a young Councillor to a Future Candidate’s meeting

I was asked to speak at a Future Candidate’s event on becoming a young councillor, getting into politics and so on. The event was organised to encourage people to consider becoming a councillor so we have a wide range of talented people standing as candidates and becoming councillors over the next few years. There’s not that many of us under 30, let alone under 40 or 50. I think the average age is over 60 these days. l did my level best not to put them off!

Weekend – campaigning, coffee mornings, table top sales etc

Although not listed in my diary for this weekend, broadly weekends are interspersed with campaigning, if the time is right, usually via door knocking or leafleting (our Spring leaflet is not too far away now).

Regardless of whether there is campaigning to be done or not, there are usually a handful (or more!) of community events going on over the weekend we either get invited to or decide to gatecrash*.

The other weekend we visited the Surestart centre on a morning for foster carers to say hello to everyone. As a fairly new Councillor it was good for me to introduce myself to the people who volunteer and run the place too.

Last weekend there was a table top sale to raise funds for the Friends of High Crags school and although we had a Labour Group ‘Away Day‘ (at, er, City Hall!) beforehand we managed to get in before it ended and snaffle ourselves some popcorn (as well as say hello to everyone giving up their time to raise money, obviously).

All in all I’d say that was a fairly typical week as a Councillor. There’s Scrutiny committees that I’m not an alternate for, full council meetings, the Shipley Area Committee, which covers devolved responsibilities to the constituency, more Labour Party meetings than you can shake a stick at and plenty of campaigning in between as well.

Some weeks are busier than others, and I’ve not really gone into the time we spend doing casework, which with the help of Blackberries can at least be done in fits and spurts throughout the day, but hopefully that gives you some sense of what we get up to as your elected servants!

*This is irony. We always make sure we get an invite!

The Maiden Speech – the speech you’ve all (not) been waiting for…ahem…

I gave my maiden speech at Full Council tonight on our motion in support of Credit Unions. We agreed to support the Conservative amendment as the only change was for there to be a report on a bi-annual basis to the Executive instead of an annual basis. I was pleased about this as I was keen to get support from across the chamber for the motion.

As it is I believe everyone voted for the amended motion, which is good. Hopefully this can be the start of a real push by the Council to help Bradford District Credit Union expand over the coming years.

You can view the original motion here and the T&A have covered the motion here.

My speech is below, the meeting was recorded, either by Sunrise Radio or BCB, so I’ll try  get a copy and link to it here.

Credit Union Speech

It is appropriate that this Motion is being debated now, as throughout last year there were a number of convictions of illegal loan sharks in Bradford.

A lot of people, and I include myself in that, often think of money lending in terms of high street payday loan companies, as why would people feel the need to resort to illegal loan sharks when there is a lot of loose credit available on the high street?

Yet despite the presence of payday loans, sometimes with only minimal credit checks, people are clearly still using illegal loan sharks. And the people running these illegal lending schemes are not doing so to provide a service, to fill a gap in the financial sector. They’re doing it to take money from the poorest and most vulnerable people in society; they’re sending thugs with dogs to school gates to intimidate parents with their children.

It’s important, then, that wherever possible, action is taken on these issues and I would like to salute the work of Cllr Slater, who has been doing a lot of good work to tackle illegal loan sharking in Bradford.

This motion looks at other ways we can tackle issues of credit, loans and debt.

It isn’t about high street lending, which is an issue that has to be dealt with by central government, but I’m pleased that Labour MPs are leading the campaigns to see interest rates capped on the high street.

This motion is about working with Credit Unions in Bradford to ensure that affordable credit is made as widely available as possible across the district, to meet the demand that is clearly there and do so in a manner that is ethical and responsible both in business practice and in the behaviour it encourages in its members.

Bradford District Credit Union is growing steadily across the district, lending was up 61% in the past year, and membership numbers are expected to grow rapidly over the next few years, but it’s obviously not competing on a level playing field with the high street banks and payday loan companies.

It has various plans it wants to put into practice to better reach out into the communities it believes need access to affordable credit and the aim of this motion is for the Council to see what it can do to help the credit union realise its plans, which I believe will be for the benefit of the entire district.

The financial crisis showed us a series of high street banks over-exposed to debt in the sub-prime mortgage industry and in Bradford we’ve suffered more than most, with the loss of part of Bradford’s business heritage in Bradford & Bingley.

A diversified financial sector would help provide more stability for periods of downturn in the economic cycle, and while the EU looks at competition laws on a larger scale, supporting Credit Unions can help diversify things on a more micro level.

Nobody is pretending that more mutuals would have stopped the financial crisis, although the Co-Operative Party do get carried away sometimes,but a wider set of services in the financial sector can only be a good thing, both for the national economy and for Bradford’s economy.

As a nation, we also need to save more. Personal debt has gone up hugely over the last decade, and the shift taking place now as people pay off debt and build savings is a long and painful process. The new auto-enrolment pension scheme was a policy started by the last Labour government and I’m pleased to see kept on and implemented by the Coalition, which just goes to show that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

But we need more ways to encourage people to save for their future. As a nation we’re living longer, healthier lives and this has implications for public spending that will last far longer than the coalition’s ‘age of austerity for those earning less than £150,000 a year’.

Bradford Credit Union asks that all members pay a minimum amount into their savings account each month, to encourage a savings culture so people can build a small nest egg for themselves over time. Credit Unions are also backed by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme giving the same security as a bank or a building society.

Their plans including budgeting accounts to help people manage their finances better, new loan products targeting specific needs of consumers, done in conjunction with housing associations.

This is the sort of responsible finance we could do with more of, and not just in Bradford.

Now, this isn’t to suggest that people don’t bear personal responsibility for the decisions they make in their lives. They do. But sometimes people make mistakes and I believe people should have the opportunity to rectify that mistake.

Yet if someone becomes trapped in a cycle of debt, paying exorbitant interest rates beyond their ability to pay back, then that person is denied the opportunity to help work their way out of debt, which is why I believe credit unions offer a more responsible financial option for people in Bradford than many of the existing options available to them, particularly so when people still feel the need to turn to illegal loan sharks.

The draining of money from low income and poverty-stricken areas through payday lending and loan sharks creates a vicious cycle whereby money, often technically provided by the taxpayer through the benefits system, could actually end up providing profit to lenders as people are constantly using their benefits to pay back on loan repayments.

Thought of like that, it’s arguably a ‘taxpayer subsidy’ to the financial sector in a much worse and more immoral way than the necessary recapitalisation that took place a few years ago.

This in turn makes regeneration of these areas more difficult as people’s income is spent paying interest on debt rather than supporting the local economy.

What Bradford can do, and I believe should do, is support credit unions within the district in trying to provide affordable credit to as many people who need it as possible, and that’s why we’re supporting the Tory amendment to this motion to encourage the council to seek ways to do this, with support from across the council chamber.

Thank you.

So Cameron reckons he’s never broken the law? When was the last time he practised his long bow skills?

At this week’s PMQs, Prime Minister David Cameron responded to a question about fox hunting by confidently declaring that he had ‘never’ broken the law and the only red pests he went after now were ones in the Commons.

Given how politicians are so famously unwilling to give a straight answer to anything it was interesting to hear the Prime Minister so comfortable in insisting that he has never broken the law.

After all, can any of us truly be confident that we haven’t broken the law, even a teensy bit?

How many of us strapping males over the age of 14 can honestly say that we spend two hours or more a week on our longbow practice, for instance? Perhaps a lenient judge would consider playing Angry Birds a suitable substitute.

And who hasn’t eaten a mince pie on Christmas Day, despite it being outlawed by Oliver Cromwell? Perhaps one of Cameron’s country supper dining buddies could shed some light on the topic.

In London it is illegal to beat a doormat after 8am but you cannot turn on the television without seeing Cameron flout this law in front of a horrified nation. Yet every time, the doormat gets back up, reiterates its support for the Coalition and expresses a desire to remain as Deputy Prime Minister for years to come.

Of course, some or all of the laws described above may actually be urban myths, perpetuated by the press to be reeled out in their annual silly season stories. Still, don’t tell George Monbiot, as he’ll probably use some of them when he next tries to arrest Tony Blair.

While his longbow practice may not be of interest to the police, given Cameron’s recent travails it looks like they’ll do anything to get at him and his government and after all, it is public knowledge that he used to, to use a political term, ‘have a private life’ while at Eton and his membership of a club that prided itself of causing criminal damage at restaurants before running away has been well documented.

So perhaps our current Prime Minister should adopt a little caution when talking about law breaking or else maybe the police will be knocking at his door. LOL.