Cancelled lunches

I have had to cancel the lunches that I auctioned at the recent fund raiser for the "Angus Nicolson for Councillor/MP/MSP/President/King".

The 14 lunches planned for Tuesday have had to be cancelled, as the Council have unreasonably decided that I am not allowed to use the members dining room, and then charge the cost to all Councillors equally as "Education and Entertainment".

I will be distributing the funds raised from the winning bids to "The Angus Nicolson Charitable Trust" after deduction of unreasonable expenses and after the money has rested in my account for a few years.

Future bids for lunches should be in cash, in brown envelopes, and include a menu and wine list for the restaurant that you plan to take me to.

@asgerd

Thanks :-)

32 people have followed my twitter, but I've not done a single twit yet.

(h/t to anon)

Parking charges

Highland and Islands Airports Ltd are due to introduce parking charges at Stornoway airport very shortly.

I don't have the details of the actual charges, but I am told that the Comhairle's objections/observations have been brushed aside by HIAL, on the grounds that the Comhairle have already introduced parking charges in Percival Square.

More details to follow soon.

Brogan Fuels acquistion by GB Oils

The OFT have now framed their questions and issued an email or letter to many customers of Brogan, which make interesting reading.

The covering message read as follows:

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is currently considering the above acquisition under the merger control provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002. This will enable the OFT to form a view as to whether this merger should be referred to the Competition Commission.

As part of any investigation, the OFT seeks comments from competitors and customers of the merging parties. This is also your opportunity to raise with the OFT any concerns that you may have regarding the merger. I have attached the questions and would very much appreciate a response to my colleagues Dimitrios Sinaniotis and Alistair Love by 17:00 on 10 February 2010.

If you have any questions, please call Dimitrios on 020 7211 8911 or Alistair on 020 7211 8853.

The OFT recognises that respecting the confidentiality of commercially sensitive information provided to the OFT is vital to the effective performance of its merger review functions. The OFT will not therefore publicly disclose any information that you supply to us unless we are required by law to do so.

So if you are interested in commenting on this matter, then you have until Wednesday next week to make your feelings known. Not much time, but I am sure that many people have already worked out what they want to say.

Responses can be emailed to Duncan.Porter@oft.gsi.gov.uk

MacNeil's expenses

With over half the MPs expected to have to repay some expenses, I look forward to the full list of those who were on the fiddle have looted the public purse for private expenditure proved unable to accurately complete an expenses form by themselves.

But what has happened about our MP's travel expenses that were in dispute, and on which he sought guidance after the event (or possibly clarification of an alleged earlier piece of advice)?

I an told (not highly reliably it must be admitted) that they have been refused, as the journey could have been done in a single day, and hence the overnight expenses were unapproved.

I am also told that this decision is being appealed, again, but hopefully we will have clarity in the coming weeks.

Update 9pm: I didn't know that the announcement as coming today, and I was very pleasantly surprised that such a small amount was disallowed. It looks like my information about Mr MacNeil was totally wrong, which I am happy to admit. However, the sheer rottenness of the expenses system has been laid bare and is being (slightly) improved thanks to the enforced openness of the FoI system.

Euphemisms

Health Board employees will no longer be... sacked, given early retirement, not replaced, promoted to another Health Board, junked, pink slipped, made redundant, downsized, deselected, shot at dawn (largely obsolete), disemployed, given an early visit to Al Crae (slang), promoted to the Board, de-swipe-carded or unfriended by the HR section.

The new phrase is: jobs may be “discontinued.”

Beautiful isn't it.

I will return to the underlying financial issues at the Health Board in later posts, but there should be no illusion that to meet the Government's financial targets, there are going to be a lot of discontinues.

Bayhead infill

It is really not a huge surprise that the project is not going ahead, for as the Stornoway Port Authority point out, they have long had serious reservations about the whole concept.

Despite the Port Authority objecting to the planning permission applications, the Council made an funding application to the Government to develop a piece of ground that it doesn't own or control and where the landlord had expressed extreme reservations.

Whilst not professing to understand the precise technicalities, I understand that the reservations where three-fold, and they remain unchanged since they very first made known to me, perhaps 10 years ago.

• There could be an increased risk of flooding without the basin and the Glen River being available to absorb higher tides. Allied to this, if the Glen was in spate, then the restrictions in mouth of the river could cause the water to back-up and flood.
• The impact of wave reflection on the ability to use the harbour needed to be professionally assessed, and the design amended to minimise any such impact.
• The overall impact on the harbour required to be assessed for issues such as changes in sedimentary deposits, and the impact on existing structures.

Now, I don't know about you, but I can see the cost of the assessment of all of these issues being fairly immense; and no public body is going to give approval for a potentially massive development until all of these matters were addressed.

That the Council though otherwise and tried to ram this through as an urgent development almost beggars belief, and demonstrates a complete lack of consultation and involvement with a key partner (sic).

It should not have come as a surprise, as the Council Leader was a Commissioner on the Port Authority for (I think) 6 years, when these potentially insurmountable problems were highlighted.

Rocket range - continued

This is not going to go away, and the unequivocal statements from Mr MacSween need verification, simply because of the implications of what he says.

I have spoken to a number of Lewis/Harris Councillors about their recollection of events. These Councillors are not part of the 'inner circle' but they all confirm that they were unaware of the nature of the review until June 2009. One Councillor said that they were vaguely aware of the Uist Councillors mentioning this and that it might have been raised at one informal meeting, but that at no time was the seriousness of the possible outcome of the review mentioned.

All the Councillors were told by the Chief Executive, after the event, that Mr MacSween had been asked to use his Labour Party contacts to get some feedback, as the Council was getting no feedback from the MP or the MOD. It was due to his ability to connect with the political system that Mr MacSween was asked to be on the Task Force.

All the other matters are either undisputed or a personal take on events.

In summary, it appears that Mr MacSween is accurate in his statements and that Mr MacNeil has sought to mislead the public over the timing and nature of his involvement.

It also appears that the failure of Southern Isles Councillors and the leadership of the Comhairle to bring the seriousness of the matter to the attention of the other Councillors, and the delays in chasing information from the various parties also contributed significantly to the overall mad panic as the announcements rolled out.

The failure of our MP or MSP to address any of the substantive issues or even deny them points directly to the accuracy of what he alleges.

Technical difficulties

We had a systems upgrade in the office, involving a new and improved phone system and minor changes to our wiring configurations. The later for all sorts of reasons that I don't understand.

We were told that this would mean that we had two broadband lines overlapping for some time, before the old one was ceased. Our previous experience when we moved offices and transferred lines, had BT ceasing broadband at our new offices, and installing a new service over the still active old line at the old location; and we were very keen not to have the resulting two-week loss of broadband repeated.

Pledges written in blood were sought from the 'Account Manager', and in due course, we duly had no broadband for most of yesterday, and then discovered that we were being given another new line to replace the existing two lines; with different login credentials that we hadn't received.

It was very late when I got home, but thanks to the Technical Helpdesk we got the email back up and running very late last night.

Today, we are promised that the swap-over of the phone systems will leave us with a line for only a few minutes. I'm not holding my breath.

Thankfully the local staff are excellent, with one of them deciding to move forward the programming of the new phone system from the scheduled next Friday to today, on the reasonable grounds that the new system won't work when they switch it over today without being programmed.

(Updated 3/2/10 to improve the grammar slightly)

I'm flattered.....

I only discovered I was nominated in these awards when I was told that I was a lucky winner!

It is very flattering to be the second best hyperlocal blog in Scotland, and I hope that I give everyone the opportunity to discuss the big issues affecting the islands (and allow them to insult and offend public figures).

Very many thanks to everyone who voted.

My useless politician is better than your useless politican

The claim, reported by Hebrides News, that the Council knew about the plans for reassessing the Range, with the possibility of job losses, is shocking.

Sadly, it is as believable as it is unbelievable, and with a disgraceful inevitability it would appear that culpability for the debacle lies as much with (at least part of) the Council as it does with the MP and MSP.

Although the claim is that all Southern Isles Councillors were notified about the plans at the time poses all sorts of questions But questions must also arise about exactly who in the Council knew about these proposals, what decisions they took, and what did they actually do?

In a seeming desperate dive for the moral low ground, the ferrets are fighting in the sack; and I feel an FoI coming on to separate truth from press release.

It seems undisputed that the Southern Isles Councillors knew and did nothing. Why?

With Councillors basic salaries trebling to £15,000 in May 2007, a certain increased responsibility naturally came with the pay rise, and that means they are going to have to justify their inaction to their communities.

Just what did you do when you were told the news in the Summer of 2007? What exactly were you told (send me a copy of the email/letter, please)? And why did you act surprised when the news became public six months later?

That is what you are going to have to answer on the doorsteps, whether you like it or not.

None of that excuses the failures of MacNeil or Allan, but it puts into context a seeming culture of inability and failure to identify priority issues by our elected representatives.

The Council, meantime, needs to give the public full clarity about its own actions.

And Mr MacSween needs to confirm exactly when he knew about the Qinetiq/MOD plans or he will be tarred with the same brush that he is wielding.

Education policy

It is just me, or did your jaw drop when you read the latest news about Scottish education policy?

The education secretary has admitted he does not expect teacher numbers to return to the level the SNP government inherited from the last administration.

Mr Russell's predecessor Fiona Hyslop pledged three years ago that teacher numbers would remain at 53,000, but since then they have fallen by 2,000.

I find it utterly astonishing that we are promised that Councils will meet the policy objective of reducing numbers of pupils in each class whilst there are huge constraints also applying.

There is much less money to spend on every sector, and education as one of the biggest spenders must face those cuts too, meaning err... more pupils per class.

Rural school closures have been dramatically curtailed by the new legislation introduced by the Government, meaning that there are higher hurdles for Councils to jump to rationalise the school estate. This results in us spending money on half-empty schools, dilapidated buildings and composite classrooms, when the pupils and the education system would be better served by centralising educational provision in newer schools.

Not that every small school must close, but neither must every one stay open.

We face the situation in the islands where we have three primary pupils in a Gaelic medium school at an eye watering cost, whilst a perfectly good new school 30 minutes down the road runs grossly under capacity.

With falling school rolls seeming to be a perpetual feature of the Western Isles, and the change to the Curriculum for Excellence (sic) appearing to have caused more problems than it has solved; with trainee teachers unable to get jobs and with schools unable to afford sufficient teachers for the school cohort, then just where is the delivery of education going?

Education has been poorly served by successive Governments and by the failure of Councils to take difficult decisions (and the understandable refusal of communities to accept closures), and the crunch is now coming. Rationalisation of schools - and hence some teachers and support staff, and perhaps even some Council admin staff - is long overdue to ensure that the remaining school estate and the current and future school pupils are best served by the new structures.

Not that any of this is easy, not in the slightest, but without a coherent policy both nationally and locally then we all face the prospect of wasted money and a poorer legacy for our children and grandchildren.

Done, totally done!

What a year, what a month!

After lodging 400+ UK tax returns and another 50+ foreign tax returns, we were clear of everything by close of business yesterday.

Today was tidying our desks, filing, and dealing with the three people who emailed their tax information and the one walk-in, before filing these returns and closing the doors at 3pm: and off for a glass of wine.

Utterly knackered, it is going to be a quiet couple of days at home to gather our breath and get ready for the next onslaught!

Signing the wrong EDM

Hebrides News are carrying a Labour Party press release about Angus MacNeil signing the wrong Early Day Motion.

MacNeil claims that he signed the right EDM, and that it was a 'clerical error' and that he intended to sign the EDM below.

As you can see, Mr MacNeil signs a lot of EDMs and the one that is the subject of dispute has now disappeared from the list.

Just so you understand the situation, EDMs are pinned to a notice board, and then each MP can append their signature in the space below. They are then typed up and presented to the House.

The 'clerical error' excuse is vaguely similar to the excuse for the cock-up on the expenses front, previously reported here.

The reality is apparently much more mundane. I am told that our MP was tired and emotional after a hard day in the offices and other facilities of the Parliamentary building, and simply signed it without reading carefully.

Incompetence, stupidity or laziness?

I have received an email bundle of FoI requests, which I am still working my way through.

The bundle contains some very damning correspondence relating to the Rocket Range, and appears to depict both the MP and MSP as liars.

But, I'll let you be the judge of that.....

In July 2007, Mr MacNeil received a letter from Lord Drayson about the review, which contains the key phrase:

If all these proposals were taken forward there could be a significant impact on the number of jobs at the range. However, I would stress that, at present, these are no more than proposals.

and later:

I am writing in similar terms to the constituency MSP, Alasdair Allan.

Six months later Mr MacNeil sprung into action, at the request of staff who were hearing rumours about the plans, and arranged a visit to the site.

But look at the terms of the memo that resulted from that meeting.

MacNeil was concerned about "stemming the rumour mill", and then made it very clear just how serious an impact any closure of the facility would have.

And then did nothing, as far as we can tell, except - as requested - to be kept informed.

Of course when the solids hit the fan and the Council set up the Task Force there was a sudden burst of press releases
mock-outrage from MP and MSP, who have repeatedly tried to claim their lack of advance knowledge of the situation.

There was a fourth option that I didn't have space for in the headline, and it appears to me to be the real story of these emails.

I believe that the workers in Uist were to be sacrificed by our MP and MSP to score a party political point, and it was only due to the massive, intensive and successful intervention of the Council that this was avoided.

I'll be posting further on this later today, work permitting.

(Link to pdfs now fixed - thank you for pointing this out)

Lewis Mountain Rescue Team

Unimpeded by the shortage of mountains in the Western Isles, I understand that the proposal for a Mountain Rescue Team is being worked up by all the agencies, primarily on the grounds that if one life is saved then it is justified.

This is the public sector precautionary principle in action.

Whilst no-one in the emergency services is going to publicly criticise such a proposal, there is a certain amount of disbelief at the budget being put aside by the Health Board to pay for this.

With cuts expected across the whole of the public sector, are there better uses of a sum believed to be around to £600,000?

Child poverty

There is perhaps no policy failure of the Labour Government that is more damning than their failure to properly address child poverty throughout the UK.

The policy started with a vague and unattainable* to abolish child poverty (by 2020?) in one of those moments where a sound-bite beats intelligent thought.

Then, in a half-hearted and uncoordinated fashion a series of policies were bolted together in an attempt to create a coherent strategy.

As the pledge wasn't really sincere, the policies were themselves untargetted and the consequences were an inevtiable failure of the policy.

Labour has presided over a dramatic increase in income inequality in the UK, and it seems quite unperturbed by their obsession with the rich and famous. Now there is nothing wrong with supporting economic growth and lauding these who create jobs and national wealth, but where this is augmented by policies that reduce the levels of tax paid by the very richest, whilst penalising the very poorest, then truly have they lost their way.

The effective marginal tax rates in the poorest are very high - up to 70% in some cases, whilst top tax payers face much lower rates, and with the best advice they can reduce these rates to negligible levels.

What we have in the UK is a dramatically stratified society where the extremes are polarising further and where the tax and benefits systems defines the new class structures, and mitigate against movement out of your strata.

Gordon Brown's obsession with micromanagement of policy has blinded him to the big-picture impact, and whilst each step may in itself make sense, the cumulative effect is enormously different.

It will require to be undone and replaced; and the question has got to be just how the Tories will do this without causing further polarisation.

It cannot be done without causing pain as the rules change, but it needs to be done to change society if there is any real desire to reduce child poverty.

* 'Poverty' is a relative measure of income compared to the average. As the income of the poor increases, the average increases and the threshold for stopping being 'poor' increases. You can never abolish poverty, you can only minimise the number of people in that category.

Highland Airways

With the website down, and the BBC reporting an urgent meeting between staff and management it appears that my prediction was right, although I deliberately did not identify the firm.

Phone calls and emails over the weekend updated me on the position, and I am told that the administrators are being appointed this morning, after last minute negotiations over finance stalled.

What will happen to the scheduled flights, and especially the vital hospital shuttle between Benbecula and Stornoway?

I understand that the flights will continue to be run by the administrators in the short-term until the company's situtation is fully understood, but I also understand that the expectation is that the route will be handed to another operator as soon as it practicable.

Sad news, which reduces our choices for travel.

Windfalls and f'ups

Isn't it a wonderful feeling when you realise that you have got a very good deal on a purchase?

Don't you have this frisson of joy when you realise that the goods you ordered from the mainland were never charged on your credit card?

Have you ever had that sphincter-tightening realisation that you have forgotten to issue an invoice, or request payment, and you just know that the customer will never pay your bill?

I am told that there is a collective case of sphincter-loosening at the COU with the realisation that they failed to complete the necessary paperwork and hence failed to issue invoices totalling about £500,000 in the Summer of 2009.

The customer who will not now have to pay for this work is believed to be the Hebridean Housing Partnership.

Negotiations between the parties are understood to have started, but with the Bank of Taxpayer underwriting the COU, what's the urgency?

Contaminated land

If the Council are to buy the lease of site of the former oil depot on North Beach quay, then have they done a full contaminated land survey, and have they provided in full for the costs of cleaning the site, surrounding area and as far down into the ground as any contamination goes?

I really - sincerely - hope so, as reports I have seen indicated the extent and cost of the likely problem on that site were huge.

Just what is the budget for the works, and how much is for clearing the contaminated land?

And later, lets find what it really cost......