Category Archives: Bristol City Council

SEND SPYING: ‘NOT SYSTEMATIC’ MY ARSE

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Hugh Evans
Creepy Hugh Evans, stalker of local mothers, trying to look hard.

Bristol City Council have been insisting via a ridiculous ‘fact-finding’ report authored by their ridiculous head of legal Nancy “Rollercoaster” Rollason that no ‘systematic monitoring’ of SEND parent’s social media ever took place.

Now a video clip, from the summer, briefly comes to light, before disappearing again into the internet shadows, starring one of the council’s ‘weak men’, People Director, Hugh “Cares” Evans. The “brains” behind the hapless surveillance operation, Evans says:

Would you want to read from your partner organisation or colleagues something on social media the like of which we’ve been reading on social media?

Leaving aside why Hugh’s being paid £180k a year to read the general public’s social media, are we to believe Hugh and his SEND manager mates must have been regularly accessing parents social media in a totally unsystematic way?

Or has he been lying through his teeth to a council lawyer?

SLASHER ASHER TAKES CONTROL

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Asher taking the public private

It’s getting murkier and murkier at Stepping Up, Asher “The Slasher” Craig and the Reverend’s scheme to promote more black people into management at the council.

 The council-run project, run by generously remunerated Christine “Wonky” Bamford, paid through a Byzantine tax efficient route involving a procurement firm and a recruitment agency, has been quietly outsourced since March 2022 to Stepping Up Leadership CIC. A new firm that conveniently shares an address with genuine council firm, Bristol Waste.

 The new company has two directors, “Wonky” Bamford and Asher the Slasher. The Slasher, as a member of the cabinet, has, therefore, effectively outsourced a council service to her own company with zero democratic oversight.

Instead, Bristol City Council’s departed Chief Chump, Mike “Billie Jean” Jackson has personally signed off all the arrangements relating to Stepping Up for Slasher since the project’s inception.

Procurement information at the council reveals that Jacko has arranged no framework, no tender, and no competition for Stepping Up’s transfer out of the council “for technical reasons”. Instead, Jacko appears just to have let Slasher grab a council funded project and then procured its services back from her for a fee!

 Since being called out on Twitter over the summer about this personal financial arrangement with council resources, the Slasher has, after calling her critics “Karens”, ceased any ‘significant control’ in the firm for now.

Even so, what a totally bent way for a council, its chief executive and a cabinet member to be carrying on with public assets.

KLU KLUX KULTURE

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Klu Klux
Another meeting of Bristol City Council’s Culture and Creative Industries Senior Leadership Team

You may not have met Genevieve  “Klu Klux” Adkins yet. This dreadful posh type was brought in earlier this year from the University of Birmingham to head up Bristol City Council’s Culture and Creative Industries and destroy our museum service.

On 16 August at a meeting to discuss public programmes in our museums, she told gobsmacked staff, “Black people don’t make or spend money. Why don’t you programme things for white people?”

Then on 26 August, just in case any staff thought they weren’t dealing with a barmy racist, she told another meeting discussing targeting early years audiences, “It’s a shame Bristol has such a large Afro-Caribbean community. Asian families are much more concerned with children’s education and experiences than black families.”

We understand that the council has launched one of its slow and useless investigations into the conduct of this white highly paid senior boss. However, we also understand that, despite a supposed investigation into racism and therefore gross misconduct, Klu Klux Adkins has not been suspended as you might expect.

Paying a posh racist a small fortune to destroy our museum service – not rooting out blatant racism – is obviously the key leadership priority at Bristol City Council.

“THESE ARE WEAK MEN AND I SAY NO”

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“A cowardly power play against a random council estate mum”

SEND spy victim Jen Smith made a statement today to Bristol City Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Management Board. As she finished she looked the council’s new underqualified and over-promoted chief exec, Stephen “Preening” Peacock in the eye, the statement speaks for itself:

Will Peacock manage to get a grip on an issue that his predecessor Mike “Billie Jean” Jackson failed to? Or will our latest Chief Executive chump let the SEND spying issue spiral further out of the control of the council?

Is he just another useless senior council boss: all fat wallet and no morals?

Bristol council hit by housing management strikes over unsustainable workload

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Thursday 20 October 2022

Unite members walk out over terrible working conditions

Around 50 housing officers and team leaders, responsible for managing Bristol council’s 27,000 tenancies, will strike from tomorrow (Friday 21 October) to Monday 24 October over unsustainable workloads.

The workers, members of Unite, the UK’s leading union, are angry that Bristol council is refusing to act even though the extra work is causing high rates of stress and anxiety. They are calling on the council to reduce workloads and allocate additional resources.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “Our members have had enough of the intolerable demands that they are being subjected to. Levels of stress and anxiety have rocketed. 

“The workers are absolutely right to take a stand against these unsustainable workloads and they have Unite’s full backing during these strikes. Bristol council needs to act now.”

The workers have seen a 64 per cent increase in the number of cases involving vulnerable tenants over the last year, which has placed them under enormous strain.

Unite said the council’s senior management have continually failed to accept or even acknowledge this reality and the need for the service to adapt.

Unite regional officer Joseph Murphy said: “Instead of working with front-line housing staff to properly prioritise workloads, the council’s senior managers have failed to act.    

“Bristol council’s housing department is in crisis.  The leadership must reduce workloads and provide the resources necessary for it to function properly.” 

A housing officer, who is remaining anonymous to prevent repercussions from the council, said: “The reduction in services due to austerity has significantly increased our workloads. We feel like support workers sometimes rather than housing officers. We are a broken service with a broken staff.”

ENDS

For media enquires ONLY contact Unite communications officer Ryan Fletcher on 07849 090215.

Email: ryan.fletcher@unitetheunion.org 

Twitter: @unitetheunion Facebook: unitetheunion1 Instagram: unitetheunion

Web: unitetheunion.org

THE HISTORY WOMAN

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carly-heath

Bristol City Council’s night-time economy advisor, Carly “Luther King” Heath, who the council pays a cool £50k to to lobby themselves on behalf of Business West, recently had a stab at some local history.

While trying to promote on Twitter the Reverend Rees’s doomed bargain basement bid to host Eurovision, the self-styled ‘Nighttime Czar’ breezily announced to Eurovision dissenters that “Bristol was built on a can do attitude.”

Er, Bristol was actually built on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Is the nightime guru suggesting getting rich off chattel slavery shows a can-do attitude?

Great to see Carly’s learned the Business West way, hasn’t got a tin ear at all and is perfectly tuned into local race and history issues.

COUNCIL’S ESTATE MANAGEMENT TEAM STRIKE ACTION LATEST

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Senior Unite bureaucrats on manoeuvres with workers’ sellout Slo’ Kev Slocombe as strike date looms over Rees’s bullying culture at City Hall

This just in from Unison Bristol:

Increased pressure on delivery for the Estates Management team (your housing officers) has been coming from the political level. Pressure, in turn, from tenants and associated tenants’ groups has led to a stressed-out team, run-ragged with extra work piled on an already impossible workload.

Impossible targets, a terrible consultation regime and staff not being believed has led to a ballot for strike action supported by both Unite and UNISON.

Yesterday, Unite with a big-wig from Unite head office met with Kevin Slocombe (from the mayor’s office). Management stated in writing that they were representing Unite only and didn’t want anyone else (ie, Unison) coming.

We have, up until this point, maintained a single-status approach when bargaining with the employer so if this alliance is only one-way we will abandon joint-working and go it alone with everything else in the council.

We have already made this decision about joint-working at Bristol Waste (subsequent to this announcement by Unite) but it will take a while to disentangle ourselves at Bristol City Council. Lay stewards from all unions work well together and it will take time and some getting used to.

In the meantime we are arranging a meeting with Kevin and management but without any big-wigs.

We were uneasy joining a meeting with union political officers and politicians – what has politics got to do with management stressing their staff out? – but there you go.

At the moment strike action is tabled for 21 October for both Unite and UNISON unless the members decide to accept whatever comes out of these meetings.

Bristol Branch Unison 13 10 2022

TOM RENHARD: NOTICE

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Renhard-Red-Telephone-Box

It’s been brought to our attention that the Reverend’s cabinet member for Housing Delivery, Tom “Plasticine Man” Renhard doesn’t like to hear mention of daddy, Ian Renhard.

Turns out Plasticine Man, who famously condemned Western Slopes campaigners from Knowle West as “posh NIMBYS“, is no stranger to a luxury middle class lifestyle himself. As daddy was managing director of multinational building firm, Interserve Construction ltd.

Plasticine Man, we’re told, is especially sensitive about this as it appears that daddy funded his son’s education – including a pricey stint in the US – by constructing, among other things, prisons! Some might say ‘how apt’. Renhard senior even lists a number of his former directorships of private prison companies at Companies House.

However, rest assured, this is not something you’ll be reading about in the city’s snooty snorefest community rag, The Bristol Cable, as Plasticine Man’s partner happens to be a director  there!

How convenient for the city’s incompetent Labour administration.

CUTS NEWS

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Rees Ted Talk
Look! Man in a shirt from Top Man doing a Ted talk.

Not much information emerging from the Rev Rees on the scale of cuts in public services he’s proposing over the next year*. Instead the inane egoist seems to be focussing his PR efforts on boasting about how many ‘hits’ his ridiculous Canadian TED Talk is getting on Youtube and his fantasy plan for an underground network in Bristol.

What we do know is that of the £11.7m of savings planned for delivery in 2021/22, only 46% were achieved.Leaving around £5.5m to be brought forward to this year. We also know around £29m of ‘efficiencies’ and ‘transformations’ were announced in this year’s budget. That’s a total of about £34.5m cuts to be made to public services this year then.

But what will be cut? Council documents, carefully hidden from view, have identified “six key areas for service reviews”. They are: property and capital; be more business-like and secure more external resource; improving efficiencies; digital transformation; reducing the need for direct services and, er, redesigning, reducing, or stopping services.

Property appears on these cuts lists every year and delivers nothing; the council being “more businesslike” is a hollow joke and that last time they tried digital transformation it delivered a £30m deficit senior bosses tried to hide from the mayor and public.

It’s therefore likely all the cuts will come from “improving efficiencies”, euphemism for staff cuts; reducing the need for direct services, which means trying to stop the public accessing services they’re entitled to (see SEND) and redesigning, reducing, or stopping services, which means scrapping services altogether.

So the Reverend’s plan is to fire staff, bully council taxpayers into not taking up services and cut anything else that’s not nailed down to save £34.5m

No wonder he wants you to look the other way at his stupid TED Talk.

*Since this article was published Bristol City Council has published a press release acknowledging they may need to make £31.1m next year. What they didn’t mention was an annex to a finance report to cabinet that suggested these cuts might be as much as £87.6m!

BILLIE JEAN TAKES A BOW

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Mike Jackson 2

So it’s farewell, then, to Bristol City Council Chief Exec Mike “Billie Jean” Jackson. He’s off to the London Boroughs of Wandsworth and Richmond upon Thames to become their joint chief exec trousering £300k pa, the largest local authority salary in the country.

And what a legacy he leaves behind. £60m pissed up the wall on Bristol Energy; a £50m overspend on the Colston Hall; censures from the ombudsman for not bothering to reply to correspondence; a SEND service OFSTED say parents have lost trust in and a gobsmacking unlawful spying operation of parents with SEND children. Lucky old London managing to headhunt this useless money wasting fucker.

Before he left, Billie Jean delivered to indifferent staff the benefit of his wisdom. “I’m an economist by training,” he chuntered, “and specialised in economic geography. I started my local government career as an economic development officer in Birmingham. I’m fascinated by places – what makes the character of a place, why some places succeed economically and others struggle. And most importantly, trying to work out how best to improve the life chances of people who live in that place.”

Well, we’re no economists Mike, but we reckon that some places succeed because you spend £100m on a concert hall at the drop of a hat for them while other places that are far poorer get fuck all. If you want to improve the life chances of people who live in that poor place spend the £100m there you thick twat.

‘Place shaper’ my arse.