"It’s all too easy to lose touch with the people" he had said. "I’m going to be using this blog to reach out to local people and engage with you" he had said. So we started to engage by making useful comments. These were published online. This was very useful so everyone could gain from each other's thoughts. It didn't last long though! He soon closed down the comment facility. I kept a note of my comment on Cllr Pervez's first blog and I reproduce it below. The shame though is the loss then and the continued loss of other people's input.
So alas, Cllr Pervez's blog is yet another arm of the mighty Labour spin machine and Labour continue to fail to listen!
As for his promise to "also be engaging in more online debates; building on the success of past web chats and holding twitter Q&A sessions", have there been any that I've missed or how do I find out about them?
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My comment is below:
I agree with Pervez... on this comment
anyway "it’s all too easy to lose touch with the people".
But surely to goodness he can't have missed that people don't want
many millions squandered moving the civic centre back to Hanley
again. Pervez, if you personally read this, take note! I'll tell
you what will happen with all this 'listening' he says he will do,
because he's done it before and it will be the same as what is done
right across the Labour party, their standard mantra will be that we
need it explained better to us. They won't accept what we really
want, they will insist they know better, they are doing it for our
good and we should be so very grateful for them. Pervez may start
talking down to us like he did to Ann James at a council meeting,
saying it doesn't matter about the money because it's just a loan and
he can't possibly know how much it will really cost because he
doesn't know the interest rate. If he truly believes this is a valid
point, which he seemed to at the time, it is very scary. When you're
strapped for cash you don't rush out and buy something new if the old
one is suitable do you? Would you really take out a loan if you
didn't have to? I wouldn't. He doesn't have to take out the loan
because we already have a perfectly good civic centre in Stoke. And
if you must take out a loan you wouldn't do it without some inkling
of what the interest was going to be and be pretty certain you could
afford the repayments and have a plan as to how to pay them. I
wouldn't take out this loan and I don't want my taxes used paying
interest to banks. I don't have a problem with the concept of
taxation, I don't mind paying tax, but I don't want it squandered,
I'd rather pay it to provide good services.
Onto my next topic, schools. Education
is so vitally important for the young people of the city. But under
BSF, the previous Labour government's BSF, the council planned to
provide fewer high school places then their own figures projected!
This really made me wonder how numerate
people in the council actually are. The current problem is our
primary schools are full to bursting. Pervez, you really cannot let
these developers keep building more and more housing without building
more schools as well. I started to wonder about the council's pupil
projections and how they are worked out. They used to be published
on the council's website but more recently not, I had to resort to
FOI to get them.
This is a general point and not just
about schools. With all this talk about transparency, the council is
actually becoming less open, with less on the web and forever having
to resort to FOI. It's not easy just to ask a simple question and
get a straightforward answer either. What you get back is no end of
flannel. If I were a conspiracy theorist I might think that the
council don't actually like the public being interested in what goes
on or scrutinising what is being done. Hence it publishes less in
the public domain and deploys super waffle missiles in response to
genuine questions.
I tried a public question, just to
understand the pupil projections, not necessarily to argue with them.
Poor cabinet member for education at
the time Alan Dutton struggled with the concept of an algorithm but
at least he set up a meeting for me with officers, so I was hopeful
for a time. Much flannel was deployed at the meeting though and I
was told there wasn't a specific formula used to calculate expected
pupil losses between years 2 and 3 and 6 and 7. Now someone
somewhere must know how they have calculated these numbers but it
seems I'm doomed not to be told. It was disappointing that I was
told that the council is not obliged to publish these projections, so
it doesn't. But it has them and if we the public are interested, why
isn't it nice and open and publish them rather than insisting on FOI.
I was also told there were updated figures on what I had. Of course
I would be delighted to receive these but again I expect it would
ludicrously need FOI to extract them. I was given some hope though
by the suggestion that I could be sent specific reasons for
particular numbers that appear anomalous. You would expect when
producing your projected figures that if you have one year a certain
number of pupils across the city say in year 7, that the simplest
zeroth order approximation would be that you could expect that same
number of pupils to be in year 8 the following year. Of course this
won't be totally accurate because amongst a variety of reasons,
pupils may move in or out of the city, so a first or higher order
approximation could be made. But, with the exception of the year 2
to 3 and 6 to 7 transitions, it looked like the zeroth order
approximation had been made, for 55 out of the 61 such transitions
anyway. But the other 6 I hoped I would be sent specific reasons for
as suggested. I wasn't. So I asked about this in another public
question.
New cabinet member for education Shaun
Pender, same old flannel.
Pervez, could we please have more
transparency, more information, more answers? Engaging with the
public always seems such a pretense. When we are genuinely interested we forever seem to
encounter a brick wall.
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