Sutton Council Annual Review and Challenges Ahead - Initial Comments

These documents are likely to be discussed by Strategy Committee in the September and at the October Council Meeting:

Below are some initial comments on some of the key issues. There is lot of material here for the Parties on the Council and not on the Council to consider when looking at the policies the Council should be adopting.


1. Chief Executive's Presentation

a) The Capital Programme
The reduction of this will either require more property disposals or greater prudential borrowing. If there is to be more disposals, whilst accepting there will be a need for some commercial confidentiality there should be more public consultation over what site might be disposed, prior to us getting into the planning process when residents think they face a fait accompli. My general experience is that residents are usually quite reasonable if one involves them early. This will also empower local Councillors and avoid the situation where Lib Dem indecision forcing officers to almost bounce them into a decision.

b) Balances
I was pleased to hear the Chief Executive say we had reached our maximum limit. The £8 million indicated for the General Fund presumably includes the Contingency Fund?

c) Having a Say
The half who do not feel they can influence things is rather high. Instead of asking the same questions every 2 years, perhaps we can in future be a bit more creative with the next MORI poll?

d) Fear of Crime
A very high figure. It would be helfpul to have this broken down and a fuller report circulated to Strategy Committee, the Safer Sutton Partnership and Sutton Police Consultative Group. We need to know if this varies in different Safer Neighbourhood Team Areas so we can identify more of the specific reasons that cause it.

e) Education
The Chief Executive reported that we were third for secondary school results. What he didn't mention was that we are 31st for primary school results. This is because up to half the places in our grammar schools come from places like Purley and Epsom. That is the reality of the current system which simply improves our results through wide catchment areas for grammar schools. I think it is better to focus on improving the near enough comprehensive education system we now have for 86% of secondary pupils and nearly 100% of primary pupils, though key projects such as specialisation, the development of setting rather than streaming and through investment in new buildings such as the £20 million for Stanley Park. Because of our generally good results, there seems to be much less a case in Sutton for Academies or Foundation schools (Glenthorne only seemed to want to become one to see if they could get their hands on our land, but thankfully the Council rejected that). After a few years we can then compare our emjerging system with other boroughs who might head down the Academy/Foundation route to see which system is adding the most value.

f) Autism
I understand from informed sources that this is rising because schools are encouraging more paernts to apply for a Statement of SEN. In the longer run I hope we assess all children in much more depth and develop individual learning plans for all of them. Perhaps that is a target Sutton should aspire to?

g) Adult Social Services
In September we should receive a report on the future of day services for older people anbd people with Learning Disabilities. I hope there will be continued direct provision of older people day care provision and grant funding of voluntary day care. A sensible approach would be:
(i) accessible services, distributed across the borough.
(ii) Early intervention rather than a service led by eligibility criteria which means a resident is only dealt with when their health is already poor, rather than seeking to delay this.
(iii) A mixed economy of provision (ie we provide some of the day centres and also commission or fund the voluntary and private charged sector). This would not prevent our own current direct provision being part of the integrated health and social care and managed at "Arms Length" by any joint structure that emerges from future health and social care integration.
On Learning Disability day care I would support the modernisation and retention of new learning disability services at Hallmead and other sites at North Cheam and Fellowes Road following proper family and public consultation.

h) Recycling
Now we are at 30% are we setting a proper target to achieve 50% at some stage in the future?

i) Car ownership
I don't think the issue is the number of cars as the slide implies, it is more about car usage. The only way to reduce that is to generally improve public tranport and rather than pin all our hopes a decade into the future on Tramlink, we should be looking at ways to improve buis services especially through increased frequency on less reliable routes.

j) Sutton Town Centre
I don't think there is currently a local consensus on the future of Sutton town centre. Some Tory Councillors seem to be in favour of managed decline and they are entitled to make the case for that. My own view is that high growth in the town centre may be one for the few mechanisms we have to help reduce borough inequalities (see below).

k) Inequality
The Chief Excutive reported that Sutton is among the 2% most socially polarised local authorities in England. In other words we have very high levels of inequality. This is not good for local community cohesion and as well as directly impacting on poorer residents in terms of perceived status, does not assist well-off residents well as they are likely to have poorer perceptions of Council services and higher than average fear of crime. In other words everyone loses out from this figure. This is surely a fundamental issue which I will be returning to in much greater detail in the near future.


2. Annual Review Document

a) The closer working with Merton (page 4) is to be welcomed and may help us jointly tackle some of the inequality issues mentioned above.

b) The admission of a lower recycling rate at Kimpton Road centre (page 10) is welcome honesty. I think there should be more space created at the centre, so residents can bring their waste and it can be looked through before it thrown away. This would help maximise the percentage. Currently the site is too cramped to do this sort of thing.


3. Priorities for Change Document

a) The development of area based working (page 13) is vital to respond to the expanded Police presence locally. Hopefully this should lead to develoved budgets.

b) I welcome the member sign-off of business plans (page 17) . This used to be done, but hasn't happend in recent years, so I welcome the restoration of accountability. I also welcome the focus on the 30% of underperforming indicators. I will look at them in detail in a future posting.

c) The annual housing target of 370 (though it is 345 in the presentaion slides) and the 40% (up from 25%) affordable housing target (page 17) is important to help people to get on the housing ladder. It may also tackle some of the inequlaity issues mentioned above.

d) The joint intermediate care stategy (page 18) and care unit at Carshalton War Memorial is welcome, but there really should be a little more honesty that this will may come out of shutting 3 out of 4 Council old people's homes between 2006 and 2009 to in effect part fund it.

I will return to these report in the coming months looking at more detail at certain issues.

More Failure? More Choice?

The posting below briefly covers future challenges facing local government. These arise out of increased expectations over choice of services services creating pressure to expand capacity at a time when there is also a greater public expectation regarding efficiency.

How local government solves these challenges will have a strong impact on the rest of the public sector.


In recent years we have had long debates about the cost of computer systems, most of which have had significant cost-overruns. Personally this is what I would have expected in an area where we were developing new integrated management almost from scratch.

One of the problems is that local Council's as public bodies are rightly seen to hold money in trust on behalf of the public and as a result should be ultra-careful as to how they spend it.

When they get it wrong they then come under criticism. Many times this is from people who might also claim they admire the risk-taking of entrepreneurs in private sector, many of whose failures inevitably reduce the returns of those who may have their money invested in them.

Thus we inevitably see a situation where officers and Councillors seem to have a naturally risk-adverse approach to future plans to avoid public criticism.

What this leads to, is that smaller voluntary groups or social enterprises will not be asked to tender for services as they are seen as too risky! Instead less "risky" larger private contractors are favoured, despite the fact they are just as likely to fail, but when that happen and they are "taken over" we have little control over that.

In order for services to improve we need to accept that there will be failures. The economist Paul Ormerod recently wrote a book about how failure helps drive progress. Members of all political parties have to be mature to recognise this, rather than simply point score out of individual failures, unless there is good reason to suspect that something untoward occurred.

We also need to recognise the future challenge that there is likely to be legislation that allows the public to request extra choice through additional services. In other words consumer choice may be less tolerant of local failure and demand improvement and will risk-adverse local government be flexible enough to respond to this?

In the coming years, there could be debates around how we develop services in the following areas, which may imply some risk of failure in provision to the Council:

a) Waste Management

b) Sports Centres

c) Parks

d) Theatres

In addition we also need to recognise there may also be a need to cater for greater local choice in:

a) Personal budgets in Social Services (an extesnion on from Direct Payments)

b) Which local health facilities people want to use.

c) Improving local Neighbourhoods through a statutory rights to request this.

d) Requesting more Police for an area through a specific local precept.

The logic of the above issues are that local government culture will have to come to terms with more failure and more choice, whichm themselves may come into conflict from time to time!

Unlike some past challenges, this does not call in to question the future of local government. Instead it may requires flexibility and the need for greater risk-taking.

Over the coming months I will cover the above issues in much more detail.

Planning Issues 1 - Planning and the Regulation of Local Capital

IMPORTABT NOTE: This is an intial contribution to the Core Planning Policy Debate and is the start of a number of articles that explores some of the fundamental issues that need to be considered. The ideas set out are purely to encourage discussion and do not constitute any sort of policy approach either from me or any organisations I am associated with.



PLANNING AND THE REGULATION OF LOCAL CAPITAL

When Councillors discuss planning issues they understandably look at how planning policies affect the local area.

Most of this is about design or density.

However in economic terms we know that planning policies also act as a regulatory function in the creation of new capital.

By understandably restricting densities our planning policies inevitably restrict the acquisition of capital by our own local residents.

A good example of this was the Lavender Avenue planning application, where residents who hoped for £60,000 extra on the value of their property were opposed by the Council, who responded to the concerns for residents living nearby the proposal.

For example if a policy was adopted that allowed substantial areas of the borough to increase to at least 4 to 6 stories in height (with even higher heights for town centres) we know that the value of the land with planning permission would increase.

For existing residents their property would be worth more. For potential residents, in theory the price of property might drop, though this might only happen if the same policy occurred in a much wider area, rather than on a borough basis. We can broadly assume these likely outcomes as we know there is a clear demand for property in the borough and a lack of supply. You do not need to be Kate Barker to know that waiting lists and house prices amply demonstrate this.

However we also know that such an approach won't be agreed locally by any of the political parties as such a radical change would almost certainly have a substantially destabilising effect on the local community as well as having substantial environmental impacts.

There are of course social cohesiuon issues too. Any extra capital would be gained by those who already had it, but it would not benefit the 30% of households in the borough who do noy have capital invested in housing. Thus whilst a large majority of households would benefit, it would lead to a widening capital gap between them and a significant minority.

Clearly there will be some basic consensus for incremental change, even if there are differences as to how incremental it should be and the pace of change! In the Core Planning consultation, Council officers set out three options and these are a sensible range to engender a series debate on capital acquisition issues.

Generally the Council develops planning policies that are ostensibly about design and density and do not cover issues to do with the acquisition of capital and its impact on the local economy. Yet however low density we intend to keep the borough, some of our own aspirational residents will seek to push and change that figure and secure more capital for them and their households.

Council Officers in this area also understandably see themselves as professional planners rather than local economists.

Councillors also talk in design and density terms but we also know at least some of them have experience in developer issues as well. Instead of political point scoring in this area, perhaps we should all be a little more open to at least debate these sort of economic issues, prior to coming to an overall policy decision based on the options presented in the Core Planning Policy consultation.

This posting therefore poses the question: in view of the challenges this borough faces over housing demand, population change and suburban sustainability, will the Core Planning Policy debate lead to some work on the issue of planning and distribution of personal capital acquisition through housing, so we are fully aware of the likely impacts in the coming years?

Manifesto Survey - Part 1 - The Lib Dems

NOTE: This item was originally posted on "The Sutton Council Observer" Blog, however it seemed more sensible to report it here, so the second part on the Tory Manifesto could also be posted here in due course. This version is slightly revised from the original.


This is a two part report on the Manifesto's of the two Party's represented in the Council chamber. This posting concerns the Lib Dem manifesto and in Part 2 will cover the Tories.

The 2006 Lib Dem manifesto is a substantial improvement on the 1994, 1998 and 2002 manifesto's which mainly set out what the Lib Dems had done rather than what they would do.
You may be aware I was complimentary towards the latest manifesto at the April Council meeting.

Key points to note are:

1. Develop local residents asociations.
This could be something local ward Councillors are encouraged to develop in their representative role. The Council could set local targets to cover two-thirds of the borough by a Resident Assocation by 2010. The Council could also work with the Police to get groups to double up as Neighbourhood Watch Groups as well as Residents Associations, thus building community cohesion.

2. Devolved Area Budgets.
I hope this receives all-party support and Sutton gets a move on with our own local scheme. My impression is that Corporate Finance Officers are relaxed about this and that the big debate is with Senior Management Team within Environment and Leisure. Once this is developed we could also see Areas then devolving some money to Ward Councillors to recommend spending on within their ward, perhaps consulting with local residents Associations and the local Safer Neighbourhood Team. Surrey County Councillors each get £20,000 a year to spend, why can't we develop something similar.

3. Become a Museum Authority.
If we do this perhaps we could then bring in free admission to the Heritage Centre and thus bring it attendance up to the much better attended, free admission Ecology Centre.

4. A New Theatre for Sutton.
I welcome the commitment to retain the Secombe until a replacement is built in a more prominent place in the High Street. In doing so perhaps we could even develop a Theatre Trust with the Arts Council and local Theatre groups. I note there is no reference to the Charles Cryer Theatre though?

5. Twin with a town in the developing world.
Let's hope we can develop a local consensus on this. Perhaps a number of South West London Council's can jointly twin with a place to maximise the benefits?

6. Campaign for Tramlink.
I suspect the same wording will be in the 2010 and 2014 manifestos!! It would be better to set out a strategy for improving local bus services as this is much more achievable.

7. School Bus Services.
Do we really want to increase the number of outborough pupils in the borough by making their bus journeys more comfortable by increasing the bumber of double deckers coming in from South Croydon!! Does Tom Brake, through his bus campaigns, now seem to support the Greenwich judgement?

8. Policing.
I think now we have 18 Safer Neighbourhood Teams and ward Panels, we should let them get on with it for the next four years. In particular, we should allow each local ward and Area Committee to develop their own local priorities and to share good practice. The substantial expansion of Policing, requires the Council to develop a similar ward based strategy for tackling local quality of life issues, rather than being seen as part of the partnership being unresponsive to local Police initiatives.

9. Hospital Provision.
Lacks any detail on what the Lib Dems would like to see at LCH level let alone the CCH where unlike their MP's they are sitting on the fence. This is a big weakness of the manifesto and lets the local NHS off the hook. I have elsewhere set out a full strategy that goes beyond BHCH. Can we have a debate on that in the absence of any alternative local plan?

10. Children's Centres and Extended Schools.This is very important and I hope gets all-party support. One way to do this is to get local Councillors involved with their local Centre at an early stage.

11. Education Spending.
Rather amusing how the manifesto says the Council has always spent above the minimum set by the government on education, especially when under the Don Brims era, the Council kept trying to reduce the amount spent on education by up to half a million a year. I am glad that in recent years, that this budget policy has been dropped.

12. Older Peoples Day services.
This is an important area and I have set out in a posting on "The Sutton Council Observer Website" some criteria as to how this might be effectively conducted.

13. Upgrading and modernising old peoples homes.
Surely this should be in the singular as having failed to sell them off to London and Quadrant and Hexagon Homes in the mid 1990's the Council looks likely to sell off the Bawtree, Ludlow and Franklin sites for housing in the coming years, leaving them with just Oakleigh to run and the purchasing of places probably at a presumably GP led Carshalton War Memorial Hospital.

14. Extra Care Housing.
The Belsize development is a good idea in principle, but was achieved by misleading existing residents, much to the embarrassment of Councillor Janet Lowne, who had made some perfectly reasonable commitments in 2002. Hopefully lessons will be learned when looking at other old peoples sites, such as the potentially very lucrative sites in Cheam Village and near Carshalton Ponds.

15. Revitalise Sutton Town Centre.
I am not convinced there is any local consensus on this and I think we need more debate on this issue.

16. District Centres.
No reference is made to Rosehill as a District centre. It is a disappointment that we are still £20,000 short from the money obtained from the Rosehill Triangle Section 106 agreement.

17. Planning.
The manifesto is against "overdevelopment" but in favour of Tramlink which inevitably increases local housing density. How will they square this circle?

18. Affordable Housing.
Laudable sentiments but no detail. I hope my suggestion of developing a Sutton Tenant owned Community Land Trust is taken up over the coming years. Then instead of affordable properties being "lost", we get permanent rented housing in sensible mixed developments. We could then have the Sutton Housing Partnership working as an agent on behalf of the Community Land Trust. This is the sort of local policy that should get support from Brown, Cameron and Campbell, so lets get ahead of the game.

Big Decisions 2006-10 - Number 1 - Waste Management Contract

This is the first of a series of articles that looks at some big decisions that need to be made over the lifetime of this Council.

The Council has recently set up a Waste Management SCAG (WAMSCAG) to look at the forthcoming Waste Management Procurement.

As borough contracts come to an end, there is a big decision required as to whether we set up a joint South West London contract with Merton, Croydon and Kingston by 2009.

There are some good reasons for doing this:

1. I suspect this will secure all-party consensus on the Council as it may lead to rather large savings over the 10-15 year period of the contract, which can be used to spend on extra serives or to hold down the Council Tax.

2. Sutton is strongly placed to lead on this as a potential site for the operation is Beddington Lane.

Whilst I think the principle will be readily accepted, the procurement process will throw up some challenges:

1. Will the Council's be able to agree amongst themselves?

2. What will be the management and monitoring arrangements? Will there be a a joint scrutiny body?

3. How will it fit in with the developing London Mayoral role?

4. Will the procurement process be risk-adverse thus ruling out the increasing role of social enterprise. For example the social enterprise ECT which runs Ealing's Waste services has just won the contract for Council's in the Avon (Bristol and surronding) area. Will a commitment be made to encourage social enterprise to apply through the procurement process?

In coming months, I will cover more of the detail of what will be a key issue over the next 3 or so years.

Issue - Big Houses and CO2

The facts:

1. Many Sutton residents pride themselves on their green image and recycle to a high degree. We have a high recycling rate for an urban area at nearly 30%.

2. If we published ward recycling breakdowns we would see that people in larger properties had the highest recycling rates and people in flatted social housing had a much lower recycling rate.

However a British Gas Report published in the Standard on 30 May showed that Sutton was the 6th highest generator of carbon dioxide (the big problem at the heart of climate change and global warming) in London.

More worryingly boroughs like Bromley and Richmond, that are most like the highest recycling areas of the borough of Sutton were in the top 3 worst performers, whilst Camden and Barking and Dagenham (similar to our social housing stock) were the in the top 4 best performers.

In other words if you live in a big house in Cheam you can do a lot of recycling, but your choice of housing may not be helping tackle climate change, whilst ironically people have probably no choice to live in what are low recycling areas are probably our best performers. At some stage when some bright spark wants to penalise them for their low recycling, I will point out this irony.

All this should cause some agonising at dinner parties over the fair-trade South African wine!

This long-term issue is one that we clearly need to debate when we consider the planning options the borough faces.

A Local Care Network for Sutton - An Alternative to BHCH

NOTE: This was originally posted on "The Sutton Council Observer".

Like a lot of people locally, I welcomed the idea of 3 Local Care Hospitals (preferably at St Helier, Wallington and Sutton General - though we know the PCT preferred North Cheam to Sutton General).

I did have one concern at the time and that was the 3 LCH would lead to a substantial reduction in GP surgeries as local services migrated to the LCH.

However, my support for the LCH has waned because:

1. BHCH was always an acute trust led project with the PCT running behind. I never once saw the PCT set out their vision for a LCH.

2. The Government has announced over £700 million for local community hospitals. It makes sense to sort out a local consensus soon and not wait for the failed BHCH project.

3. It makes more sense to develop instead a "Local Care Network" of Acute Trust, PCT and Local Authority sites. This is much more achievable as I set out below.

My alternative proposal is for the following sites and the following providers:

1. Critical Care Hospital at St Helier Hospital with a phased rebuild (run by the Epsom and St Helier Acute Trust).

2. A "Local Care Network" made up of the following sites:

a) The new Robin Hood Lane Clinic (GP led)

b) The Sutton General Local Care Hospital site (Acute Trust led)

c) Priory Clinic/Surgery/Malden Road Health and Leisure Centre (GP/PCT/Local Authority Partnership)

d) St Helier Hospital Local Care Unit - part of the phased rebuild St Helier Hospital (Acuter Trust led with local GPs)

e) Middleton Circle Local Care Unit (PCT/GP and Local Authority Partnership)

f) Walllington Shotfield Local Care Hospital (GP and Local Authority Partnership)

3. Intermediate Care at Carshalton War Memorial Hospital (joint PCT/local authority partnership). I have an issue about flogging off Ludlow Lodge and Franklin House to fund this, but lets at least have a debate.

The above proposals combined with sorting out integration of health and social care and the development of personalised budgets is a big agenda for the 2006-10 period, but I believe the above proposal is more likely to happen than the failed BHCH proposals for the following reasons:

1. A phased rebuild of St Helier has always been the easiest option as it required much less controversy and was less complicated in planning terms. Whilst I would like to see the "St Helier Gherkin" I don't think the money is available for the forseeable future.

2. The Local Care Network comprises 6 buildings which cover all 4 area committees. All the land is currently in NHS and local authority ownership and 3 of the sites (Middleton, Robin Hood and Shotfield) are new build of about to be built. The other 3 sites are large and have space for new build under the £700 million scheme. if the local NHS bids quick enough.

3. I suggest a range of partnerhsip providers which could also include some GP co-operatives and other forms of social enterprise, which should go down well whoever is in government.

In other words, we should get a move on to develop the overall scheme above for this borough.In order to start it off, why doesn't Health Scrutiny kick things off with a scrutiny on "A vision for health care in Sutton by 2010"? This might concentrate minds.

Introduction

There have been national and regional public policy think tanks, but this is the first think tank for a borough.

Sutton is an "excellent" rated borough and I devoted much of the last 4 years into continuing to push for this (especially in social services) despite quite a bit of pessimism along the way.

An "Excellent" borough deserves to be the first to have its own public policy "think tank".

Unlike my other website: "The Sutton Council Observer" this website is not aimed to be represent a single political view.

I hope others with a range of views will contribute to "Policy4Sutton". Unlike organisations like the Sutton Partnership or the Council this website will seek out a wide range of political views and encourage those that disagree with the "received wisdom".

My hope is this is where the local manifesto policies of the future are debated and put to the test.

One of the first points that should be made is that those organisations that seek to sanitise debate will struggle with legitimacy in the long-run. If I were running public sector websites I would be allowing those that disagree with policy to post on them. I will probably do a much longer post on that issue in the future.

I am confident that within the next 5 years this point itself will become the "received wisdom"!