Council bosses’ Safety Valve SEND bailout from the Department of Education has gone tits-up in less than a year.
The story was that it would eliminate the SEND budget deficit by 2029/30 in exchange for cuts to services. Recent news to the council’s education committee is that the deficit is expected to reach £41.5m by 2030!
Meaning the city ends up with brutal cuts to SEND services and a huge deficit.
Low information officer morons surrounding ‘Tory’ Tony Dyer refused to publish his diary under FoI claiming the minimal effort involved would, er, “affect the efficient conduct of public affairs”!
Who makes this shit up? According to the Information Commissioner (ICO), it’s Bristol City Council Monitoring Officer, “Dumpty” Tim O’Gara. He declared himself a ‘reasonable person’ and signed off this lazy-arsed refusal as a ‘reasonable opinion’.
Alas, the ICO begs to differ and has instructed the council to publish Tory Tony’s diary within 30 working days.
The hapless Green clownshow of pointless secrecy takes another hit.
A mortgage lender to the Bemmy student hell site project, Shawbrook, has been ordered by the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) to repay £100 million fiddled from vulnerable pensioners who unsuspectingly invested in non-existent time-share properties. That figure could exponentially multiply next year following the conclusion of the FCA investigation.
Described as ‘local’ by the Bristol Post, Shawbrook’s HQ is in London and their parent company’s HQs are in New York and Berlin. Luxury holiday resorts in the Canaries, unfamiliar to the majority of Bedminster dwellers, were used to lure elderly investors and steal their money after a life-time of labour.
Not content with the constant pounding of pneumatic jackhammers and drills from dawn ‘til dusk, the chopping down of our trees and the persistent ‘beep-beep’ of vehicles reversing all day. These fuckers robbed our Nans and Granfers to prop up Bristol University.
Imagine this happening in Westbury-On-Trym.
Wealthy environmentalists have an opportunity to save the planet while, er, getting a return on investment!
Bristol City Council, in partnership with Abundance Investment, is launching the “first Bristol Climate Action Investment, offering locals a chance to directly support green initiatives while earning a financial return.”
The first effort “aims to raise up to £1 million [..] to install a range of energy efficiency and renewable technologies at locations such as a children’s respite care home in Lawrence Weston.”
You read that correctly. The wealthy have the opportunity to make cash from disabled children’s respite care.
Where’s the billion quid from the private sector through City Leap to sort this shit out?
In March 2024, Ameresco’s heat network partner for City Leap, Vattenfall, announced they “expect to invest £475 million to grow the Bristol Heat Network, enabling it to provide heat to supply the equivalent of 12,000 homes.”
Now fast forward to this March and, with no sign of much invested, Vattenfall announce, “After the recent sale of Heat Berlin, Vattenfall is now looking into the remainder of its district heating portfolio.”
This includes Bristol’s heat network, sold to Vattenfall by the council at a knockdown “at cost” price in 2023 by the Reverend Rees.
We’re reliably informed private equity interests are now making enquiries about this opportunity to make a fast buck as monopoly providers of heat to customers in Bristol.
Rumours suggest Vattenfall got cold feet when plans for the government to regulate the wild west heat network sector to protect consumers started to emerge. This could result in making a tidy return on any investment tricky.
City Leap? It’s a city loss.
The ascension of the Reverend Rees to the House of Lords will not leave him short of cash and having to rely on just the £361 per day in attendance allowance with travel expenses and subsidised restaurant facilities.
His recently published register of interests to Parliament reveals he also has some other income streams. Including US multinational Ameresco, Inc, who have paid fees to the Reverend’s ‘personal services company’, Three and Two Ltd.
Ameresco was awarded a £1bn contract by Bristol City Council in 2021 on the Reverend’s watch after winning the tender to run his ‘Billion pound City Leap’ net zero nonsense.
Nothing to see here!
Ongoing efforts by Bristol City Council to avoid answering the phone to the public who pay them take a new turn.
The Bristolian hears that later this year the council will launch ‘a major generative AI-enhanced service’, ‘the digital assistant Briz’, in their contact centre.
It says here, “Briz will be taking calls and dealing with lots of customer requests, freeing up advisors to work from home and engage with the public as little as is humanly possible.” [we might have made some of that up, Ed].
Best of luck trying to contact the council in the future.
A long suffering trapped resident in East Bristol writes:
“Reject the South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood now before you fall out with your neighbours!
“This is a warning to the people of south Bristol about their forthcoming Liveable Neighbourhood.
“The Greens and their supporters are vile. They will deliberately divide your community with their ideological roadblocks and then claim – without evidence – it’s OK because more people agree with them than with you.
“Who wants to live like this?”
The Greens have come up with a novel solution to complaints by the posh locals about van dwellers setting up home in and around the Downs.
Council officers cheerily announced in the Nazi Post that they would seeking ‘new support sites’ for van dwellers and that “two meanwhile sites could be turned into areas where van dwellers can stay, perhaps in Knowle West and Hartcliffe”.
A typical west Bristol solution to any problem in the city, then. Dump it in south Bristol.
Plus ça change.