A handful of Oxbridge ponces from management consultants Newton Europe have arrived at the Counts Louse to cut £65m from Children’s Services in exchange for £7.5m.
Among the things the overpaid twits will be working on is the time it’s taking the council to provide EHCP plans to SEND children. It’s currently taking the council an average of 51 weeks to supply a plan. The legal requirement is 20 weeks and the council is delivering just three per cent of plans to that timescale.
In late 2023, around 47 per cent of EHCPs were delivered on time. This changed after February 2024 when former Children’s Services boss, Asher “The Slasher” Craig cancelled the council’s £5.5m non-statutory top-up budget that funded SEND children in schools without the need for an EHCP plan.
Without this funding, more children are, predictably, going through the EHCP process. This cut was made as part of a Dept of Education’s (DfE) ‘Delivering Better Value’ (DBV) plan for SEND.
So, who got a £19.5m contract from the DfE to develop the DBV programme? Please step forward, er, Newton Europe, who are now charging us £7.5m to clear up their own shit.
Over £1m of public assets have been quietly transferred to US multinational, Ameresco.
Tucked away in the Statement of Accounts for 2023 – 24 for the City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd joint venture company between Bristol City Council and Ameresco is the following statement:
“During the year, the directors took the decision to transfer the majority of the company’s employees and all of its property, plant and equipment, including its rights-of-use asset and related lease liability, to Ameresco Limited, as it was deemed in the best interests of the company. Ameresco Limited holds a 50% ownership in the company. This has resulted in significant movement in the company’s financials during the year compared to the period ended 31 March 2023.”
“The company’s employees and all of its property, plant and equipment, including its rights-of-use asset and related lease liability’” are valued at over one million pounds in the same accounts.
Section of City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd’s balance sheet revealing a drop in the company assets of £1,145,556
Decisions at the council with a financial value over £500k are major decisions and should be decided by the appropriate committee of elected councillors. In this case, Green leader, “Tory” Tony Dyer’s shambolic Strategy and Resources Committee. Why didn’t this happen?
We’re told, “it was deemed in the best interests of the company” by “directors” to transfer our assets to a US multinational. Who are these directors? According to the council’s draft Statement of Accounts for 2024 – 25 “the Council has two directors on the Board.”
Not accurate. There are no councillors on the board and therefore no democratic oversight whatsoever of the joint venture company. Instead, there is ONE council officer on City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd’s board of directors.
Until September 2024, this was Bristol City Council’s dubious former Chief Exec, Stephen “Preening” Peacock. He’s currently in all sorts of trouble in his new post at WECA after his former close Bristol colleague, the Labour Party’s ‘Slow Kev’ Slocombe, picked up a £150k contract with WECA outside of all known procurement regulations.
In Bristol, Peacock is, perhaps, best known for bunging Bristol Energy £1m from City Leap funds in 2020. The handout happened during a cash flow crisis at the failing council energy company in the lead up to the eventually cancelled 2020 election. The City Leap money was paid to Bristol Energy, allegedly, for “services”.
Number of City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd’s employees halved since transferring to Ameresco. Many of these were former council employees transferred to the joint venture company in 2023 as part of Peacock’s ‘City Leap Deal’.
However, despite repeated requests, Peacock failed to identify what services he had purchased from Bristol Energy for City Leap. While the contract he had drawn up had a blank page where Bristol Energy’s “services” should have been listed.
Since Peacock scarpered to WECA, his role as director of City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd has been taken by John “Fails Upwards” Smith. He’s currently ineffectually poncing around the Counts Louse calling himself Executive Director of the Growth and Regeneration.
Coincidentally, Ameresco, the latest recipient of Peacock’s quiet generosity with public funds and assets, are the company currently paying Bristol’s new Labour Party Lord-a-Leapin’, former mayor, the Reverend Rees, a retainer for his services.
Putting Familes First by cutting the budget by £65m and putting out a cheery self-promoting press release
As plans to hack £65m off the Children’s Social Care budget, called ‘Families First’, were hatched at the Counts Louse with the help of private sector consultants chasing a £7.5m payday, council boss “Tory” Tony Dyer featured in some University of Bristol PR on youth knife crime.
He gushed:“Bristol City Council and One City Partners are committed to working with young people and their families to make sure Bristol is a safe place where everyone can have opportunities to prosper.”
A ‘commitment’ committed to cutting cash to deal with the issue, then?
Bristol Greens celebrate the opportunity to break the promises they made to people
More burning wreckage from a crash landing Green election pledge.
Before last year’s election, the line was that the Greens would cancel, within six months, the lease to the evangelical nutters promoting gay conversion therapy at Eagle House in Knowle West and restore it as a youth centre.
A letter from Green leader “Tory” Tony Dyer now announces that there are no legal grounds for cancelling this lease because, presumably, using a council building for unlawful gay conversion therapy activities is fine? Instead, we get the building back when the lease expires in May 2026.
It then will be demolished and the land sold for housing because the evangelical nutters have broken the lease by not doing repairs on the building and letting it fall into disrepair.
Some sort of consultation on some sort of vague community building idea will happen after the demolition but getting anything in place before 2030 seems unlikely.
Great news for young people in Knowle.
How many pledges have Bristol Green Party broken in a year?
Rehouse Barton House residents – LIE Yew Tree Farm to be protected – LIE Reopen Public Loos – LIE SEND spying investigation – LIE
As we wait with bated breath for signs of the “billion pound” private sector investment from City Leap, an idea that’s already failed re-emerges from the gloom.
Please step forward the ‘Energy as a Service model’ – dredged up from the dying days of Bristol Energy.
It’s, basically, small scale PFI where US multinational Ameresco, will fund heating and energy kit to Bristol City Council and then we fork out a service fee every year in perpetuity to the corporate monopoly for the ‘service’ they’re providing. This ‘service’ being heat, power and light, which could be easily purchased on a competitive open market.
Canford Crematorium is proposed by the council to trial the plan because there is an “opportunity in this to decarbonise the crematorium”.
Eagerly waiting for the outcome of the consultation on plans to scrap two weekly bin collections? Don’t hold your breath.
Any hope that public opinion can prevail and two-weekly collections continue was doomed in February.
Eagle-eyed observers of this year’s budget will have noted that councillors passed a budget in February that proposes cuts of £1 million to black bin collections.
A compromise no-one’s asked for, three weekly bin collections are coming whether you want them or not.
A high profile anti-EBLN activist received a visit from the cops recently …
A Green Party plastic planter with dying plants in the EBLN (The metaphor writes itself)
Cops told the dangerous miscreant that the council had demanded that they pay her visit after she pulled the heads off some dead daffodils in a planter in the middle of the street after cops swarmed her neighborhood at 3.00am in the morning.
Fortunately, the cops seemed uninterested and, posssibly, embarrassed by having to pay the activist a visit over this soppy nonsense.
Idiot Green councillors and they’re terminally stupid officers obviously think cops have nothing better to do than police dead flower crime.
Council plans to close Park Street are backed by a private sector report by the council’s ‘private sector capital partner’, Arcadis – Queens Road, Triangle and Park Street – Economic Benefits Review.
The report claims that the proposal will generate a large 28.5 per cent increase in economic activity for the retail and food sector and a 19.64 per cent increase for the office sector.
Fantastic news until you learn from campaigners that the research Arcadis used to ‘prove’ these economic benefits is derived from US research from the 1960s about pedestrianising shopping malls.
The data is therefore 60 years old and, in three cases, malls were reopened to traffic to stop the economic decline caused by, er, pedestrianisation!
Units at Stafford Yard on Malago Road (part of Bemmy Green development) are going for £1,450 – £1,600/month for 1 – 2 bedroom apartments.
That’s 3 – 4 rooms respectively with a balcony barely large enough to squeeze in a deck chair. Council flats in Withywood and Hartcliffe are better appointed.
Maybe it’ll be worth it when the shopping mall goes up next door with biometric screening and armed security to exclude the riff-raff?
Maybe the unaffordable rents reflect the panoramic views across the city complete with violet sunsets stolen from the locals living in the long shadow of the steel framed fake brick clad block of flats?
One construction worker told The BRISTOLIAN that he can’t afford to live there.
Is that the landlord we can hear laughing all the way to Dubai to sup cocktails with petro chemical giants posing as climate saviours?
Confused councillors have pointlessly delayed the Turbo Island Town Green application for three months on the advice of their clueless legal team.
At a Public Rights of Way and Greens (PROWG) meeting in April the applicants and objectors presented their evidence to the committee and a council lawyer admitted he had no idea how to decide the issue.
Normally, an expert inspector would be appointed by the council to look at the evidence and provide the way forward. Instead the council have decided to take three months out to figure out what the hell to do.
However, it seems unlikely the council’s legal team can produce a recommendation without landing themselves in the hot water of an expensive judicial review. That means they will need to appoint an inspector.
Why didn’t they just do this in April?
SECRET OWNER SHOCKER
The Nazi Post and Bristol 24/7 breathlessly assured us in October that Turbo Island had been sold by owners Wildstone Investments to ‘a mystery buyer’.
This ‘mystery buyer’ was reputed to be Bedminster printing company Out of Hand, a claim vigorously denied by the Nazi Post who won’t identify the actual ‘mystery buyer’ of the land.
This ‘mystery buyer’ mystery becomes more tangled in the bundle of documents for the Turbo Island item at the PROWG in April.
It includes a letter from Merret & Co solicitors who say “we act on behalf of the local freehold owner of the Property” and the council lists Out of Hand as the firm represented by Merret & Co.
Who actually owns the land and why’s it being disguised by local press?
**UPDATE: papers released this week by the council for a PROWG meeting next week have confirmed Out of Hand as the owners of the land.
DEAL OR NO DEAL?
Campaigners for the Town Green, led by the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, are pushing for a deal where the landowner – whoever they are – voluntarily registers the land as a Town Green in exchange for concessions on public access to the site.
Councillors on the PROWG, allegedly concerned about costs being run up, appeared blissfully unaware that a deal could be on the table.
Instead, they opted for the expensive option of funding their own legal team to look at an issue they know nothing about for three months before appointing a barrister as an inspector to decide the issue.
Bizarrely, the council’s PROWG lawyer quoted a cost of at least £1,000 for an inspector.
