Category Archives: Bristol City Council

NUTS CUTS

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The £20m of cuts announced by the Reverend Rees for next year mainly seem to confirm that he has now gone totally insane. Among the nutty highlights we’ve spotted so far:

  • An inexplicable £4m cut to the Adult Care budget will appear if HomeChoice prioritise people with adult social care needs on the housing register.
  • A proposal from an unnamed member of the Labour administration to cut trade union facility time by 75 per cent. That means union reps will have no time to represent staff directly affected by cuts from a Labour administration.
  • Lots more cuts are proposed by HRH Helen of Holland overseeing Adult Care. This is despite her failure to deliver £4m of the £6m cuts she proposed last year.
  • Transport guru, “Tweedle” Don Alexander, will attempt to increase council revenue by about £2.5m from Residents Parking Zones (RPZ) and car parking. Tweedle Don has lost about £5.4m in income from these so far this year.
  • Asher “The Slasher” Craig proposes charging a fee to parents who are contacted by her Education Welfare Service about their child’s school attendance. Will she discover parents are suddenly uncontactable?
  • Finance kingpin, Craig “Crapita” Cheney, officially the stupidest man in Bristol, is opening a rooftop bar at the M Shed to make £85k a year.
  • Asher the Slasher is supporting young people by slashing youth services budgets by £400k.
  • Government money for Public Health will be spent on wages for the Reverend’s evangelical pals in his City Office instead. He will also pass a begging bowl around ‘external partners’ to see if they’re up for funding an office full of evangelical loonies at the Counts Louse.
  • Cabinet Pied Piper Nicola “La La” Beech is to deliver pest control in “different ways”.

We’ll let you know as we find more of these inanities over the coming months.

LIES, DAMN LIES & FOI RESPONSES …

This month from the What Do They Know website:

Dear Bristol City Council, I’ve seen evidence that the mayor’s office are using Whatsapp for council business, despite the guidance on doing so.

This information falls under the parameters of the Freedom of Information Act and must be disclosed.

Please provide all Whatsapp messages sent between chief of staff to the Mayor of Bristol as an employee of Bristol City Council and all paid staff of Goram Homes, and directors of Goram Homes. I would like to see all Whatsapp messages for the last two months.

I remind the council that ALL whatsapp messages are subject to the Act whether from Council-owned phones and phone numbers, or personal phones and phone numbers if the business relates to Council.

As I have seen evidence that Whatsapp is being used I don’t expect a reply saying this information isn’t held.

Yours faithfully –

And the response …

Dear –

Freedom of Information Act 2000

This request is being handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Bristol City Council does not hold information falling within the scope of your request.

Your case has been closed as of today’s date.

BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL’S FANTASY PAY WORLD

High pay

It’s that time of year when we have to endure the laughable bullshit that is Bristol City Council’s Pay Policy. A wholly misleading yearly statement on high pay for the council’s useless boss class.

This year we’re invited to admire how the ratio of the lowest paid on a minimum wage to the highest paid, allegedly the Chief Exec (without including his generous pension contribution), has fallen to 8.93:1 from 9.26:1 last year. Conveniently below the council’s arbitrary target  of 10:1.

However – as usual – the maths is faulty. A glance at last year’s Statement of Accounts reveals that the highest paid boss was Juliet Blackburn Consulting Ltd,  Director of Adults Transformation, who trousered a cool £30,932 a month. Or £371,184 a year making a highest to lowest paid pay ratio of, er, 17.7:1.

Other lottery winners courtesy of our council tax include congenital idiot Nikki Beardmore, a Communication & Engagement Director, who had to struggle through the cost of living crisis on around £200k a year, and Alan Layton, Head of Financial Planning, who trousered £240k a year pro rata.

Trebles all round!

THE STATE OF IT

Gissa job

October: and another hectoring ‘State of the City’ lecture delivered from the University of Bristol’s snooty Wills Memorial Building shithouse by the Reverend Rees as he finally nears that door marked ‘for god’s sake go’.

Nothing much new worth reporting really. Relentless boasting; tedious homilies on ‘leadership’; ill-disguised paranoid and embittered ranting at the latest set of perceived enemies; the ego-inflated right wing economic ramblings we’ve suffered for over seven years now; narcissistic claims about his ‘global leadership’ role and a lecture to the rest of the city’s politicians about his ‘corporate concrete will cure climate change’ approach.

He will not be missed by many.

‘WORLD CLASS’: YOUTH ZONE

50/50 BCC STYLE …

Youth Zone proposal
Pink stinks! World class youth zone interior imagined as modernist tart’s boudoir

The cost of a ‘world class’ private sector Youth Zone in south Bristol is rising.

The capital cost of building this large shed for wealthy philanthropists to pose in on open space at Inns Court was originally £8.4m with Bristol City Council paying one half, £4.2m.

Now we learn that the council will be paying a further £3.275m to build the access road and to level the site.

Philanthropic charitable partner, Onside, meanwhile, will only have to pay £600k towards this.

In terms of running the zone, once opened in 2026, the Reverend’s cabinet has now committed £400k of the measly £1m budget for youth services from 2026. Two years after the Labour Party are likely to have lost power in Bristol.

There will be, therefore, 40 per cent less youth provision in an already stretched service elsewhere in the city from 2026.

Youth workers and services not aboard  the Youth Zone gravy train are not impressed.

LOOKING AFTER THEIR OWN?

Merchant Venturers logo


The Bristol Beacon’s establishment bailout continues apace with the Society of Merchant Venturers giving the council’s outsourced money pit a £50k handout in January.

The luvvies did ten times better than most other charities funded by the Venturers. For instance, rape trauma victims got £4.7k; services to help people rebuild their lives following a stroke got £2k and teenagers with learning disabilities got £2k.

Maybe it helps that Bristol Music Trust, handed the Beacon for a pittance by the council, has super-wealthy Merchant Venturer and all-round shit boss, Andrew Nisbet on the board?

SENDS OFF

Spy medium

Richard “Wanksy” Hanks has ‘resigned’ as Bristol’s Director of Education but is officially on ‘sick leave’ for now. Allegedly, Wanksy got a bollocking by the cabinet over SEND just before his ‘resignation’

His replacement, Reena “Dolores” Bhogal-Welsh from the University of Bolton is an interim appointed outside any normal processes.

Sources say she’s “totally out of her depth” and is especially shit-scared of the Bristol Parent Carer Forum. Probably wise. They’ve seen off three of her predecessors in the last three years – Stubby Stubbersfield, Pervy Hurley and now Wanksy.

Also heading for the exit is Head of Education Psychology Vikki Jervis who, seems to have spent most of her work time on Twitter reading parents’ feeds and circulating the material around the council.

Who will be next out the revolving door before independent investigators arrive to look at the SEND spying issue?

PROGRESSIVELY WORSE

Full speed ahead with no one left behind in Bristol’s ‘just transition’ to Net Zero!

Air source heat pump
Air source heat pump: free to a wealthy home!

The council’s applied for a grant of £3.3m to install 200 on trend air source heat pumps in leafy Westbury-on-Trym. A subsidy of £16,500 per Tory household!

Why this pilot has to be run in one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs isn’t very well explained by Labour’s dim Climate Change head honcho Kye “The” Dudd or his increasingly unstable boss, the Reverend.

Instead Rees explained away his loopy heating subsidy to the wealthy by telling bored councillors he was “going to be at the US embassy tomorrow to speak about a just transition”. Guess that’s one way to keep us all warm next winter.

The Greens, potentially the largest party in Bristol after next year’s elections, were also getting wet in the pants at news of Net Zero handouts to the wealthy.

West Bristol’s ridiculous national Green Party leader, Carla “Posh Princess” Denyer gushed that the scheme was a “fabulous solution”.

What the fuck’s wrong with these people?

LIBRARIES GIVE US POWER

So Rees and Labour are wrecking them.

Central library
Bristol Central Library

Here’s what the unions told a recent cabinet meeting:

“Printed newspapers and magazines were cut in all libraries in October 2022; a vacancy freeze has been in operation since August 2022 with no sign of an end.

“Currently there are 35+ vacancies across the city. The loss of hours amounts to 554.5 hours a week across the city.

“The Library service has also had five posts deleted, without any formal process or discussion with unions. Three of these posts are at the Central Library.

“These five posts amount to a loss of 137.5 more hours on top of the vacancy hours listed above. Total hours lost is therefore 592 hours a week. Due to staff shortages the standard of delivery is compromised. This is a disservice to the citizens of Bristol.

“These shortages have led to unplanned closures every day somewhere in the city since the summer.

“The lack of recruitment has also meant flexible working requests are being denied. This includes refusal of flexible retirement. The book/materials fund has been cut twice within a year and no new books have been bought since August 2022. It is unclear what the situation will be like in April 2023.”

Exactly how much does the Labour Party hate our libraries?

NETTING ZEROES: PIPE DREAM

Netting Zeroes (1)

The appearance of a thin City Leap summary business plan for the public is another outing for a proposed ‘Strategic Heat Main’. To run from Avonmouth where UK-wide waste is burned on an industrial scale to Bristol city centre where the shiny new heat networks are being built for the shiny new people.

This pipe dream pipeline run euphemistically on ‘low carbon heat’ is currently touted to cost around £100m out of the £200m or so the private sector may invest in ‘decarbonisation’ in Bristol.

Because the best way to get to net zero is definitely to burn – in working class Avonmouth – shitloads of polluting rubbish imported from London then use the energy to cheaply power a heat network for wealthy folk in the centre.