Fancy that! Ameresco, Bristol City Council’s US corporate partner in the City Leap joint venture – the world’s most expensive public works contract – doesn’t recognise trade unions!
Top due diligence there for a £10m outlay from our over-promoted posh twit Tory-boy council Chief Exec, Stephen “Preening” Peacock and his hopeless clean energy team.
What a bunch of arseholes.
While hanging around looking for a job in Dubai at COP 2023, the global climate talking shop, the Reverend Rees got a gig on a panel at the UK Climate Action Forum & Dinner.
Rees was billed as a ‘UK climate leader’ along with another familiar face who got to deliver a speech. Please step forward the one and only Nicola “Lady Gaga” Yates!
This is the former Chief Exec at Bristol City Council who was rather unceremoniously ‘disappeared’ from Bristol with a generous £200k handout after running up a mystery £30m deficit in the council’s accounts in the lead-up to the mayoral elections back in 2016.
Is it a requirement of a ‘UK climate leader’ that they have a history of failure and being shown the door?
The electorate, of course, sent the Reverend packing last year. Scrapping the post of mayor after an abysmal performance pissing our money up the wall.
Is there some fail Bristol, become a ‘UK climate leader’ rule?
The Reverend Rees told long-suffering journalists daft enough to attend his stillborn ‘CITY OFFICE’ launch last month that he planned to tackle “inequalities within leadership roles” by changing the people who are awarded the top jobs.
“This will mean having leaders from HARTCLIFFE and AVONMOUTH as well as Clifton”, he assured an audience invited and organised by his old, white, highly paid, Cambridge educated right hand man and personally appointed “leader”, council Chief Exec, Stephen “OAP” Hughes from, er, Birmingham.
Who thinks Hughes could even find Hartcliffe on a map?
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 Concrete Queen was headhunted by the council’s underperforming Chief Exec Stephen “Captain” Peacock and they are very friendly having worked together at that business-friendly clusterfuck, the SWRDA.
Since starting in May, the Concrete Queen has:
– attempted to ban councillors from calling in planning applications for a committee to consider to “streamline the process”.
– pulled a video of a planning meeting from 9 August where her officers tried to rig the minutes of a previous planning meeting regarding the controversial Broadwalk planning application.
– failed to take action after planning committee chair, Richard ‘Bunter’ Eddy, politically attacked a member of his non-political ‘quasi judicial’ committee in the Nazi Post for voting against an application Bunter voted for.
– lied to councillors at a 7 September planning meeting, claiming alternative sites had been looked at for the cemetery expansion into Yew Tree Farm on south Bristol’s greenbelt
– At the same meeting, she withheld from councillors a report by a contamination officer recommending refusal of the cemetery application.
– Attempted to rip up all SNCI (Site of Nature Conservation Interest) designations in Bristol by claiming they can be built on if the effect is mitigated elsewhere.
How long will the people of Bristol be subjected to this dreadful woman?
The revolving door at WECA, our regional government basketcase, must be about to come off its hinges.
Head of Infrastructure, David Carter; Section 151 Officer Malcolm Coe; dodgy Monitoring Officer Shahzia “Dim” Daya; Head of Transport Jason Humm and Democratic Services boss, Ian Hird all cleared off over last autumn and winter.
Since then another whole new bunch have headed for the door.
Among them are Mina Davies, Head of Comms; Katherine Vowles who was brought in as an interim Head of Infrastructure; Jack Catkoviv: he scarpered before the end of his probation period as the new Head of Democratic Services; Laura Ambler Head of Planning and Housing and, now, new Interim Comms boss Ruth Wilmshurst has decided WECA ain’t really for her.
This news arrives as WECA’s auditors slam the management and governance of the authority after an investigation that found five “significant weaknesses” at the authority. They were especially displeased that the Head of Infrastructure, David Carter’s £59k handout for quitting had put the organisation “at the potential risk of committing to an unlawful payment”.
Auditors say the person responsible for the generous gift, notorious Chief Exec Patricia Greer “was acting in good faith” while potentially breaking the law.
Good faith lawbreaking? That’s some USP.
Despite a promise to let councillors know, after a scrutiny meeting in June, senior council boss Stephen “Weak Man” Peacock has still failed to explain what a payment of £1.2m to Bristol Energy from his City Leap procurement fund was actually for.
The City Leap money was signed over to Bristol Energy by the council’s Section 151 Officer under the heading ‘Innovation Services’ in January 2020. At the precise time the failed council energy reseller had a cashflow crisis.
The Bristolian has obtained a copy of the contract between the city council and Bristol Energy for the £1.2m. It has an appendix where ‘Services Supplied’ should be listed but the page is blank.
To the untrained eye, this £1.2m, paid in an emergency to a collapsing firm, has all the characteristics of a public money ‘bung’ designed to keep a bellyflopping company afloat prior to an election later in the year. An election that, subsequently, never happened due to Covid.
Meanwhile, Weak Man, despite being unable to explain to councillors or the public what he spent £1.2m of public money on, has been promoted and given a pay rise! Now that Chief Exec Billie Jean Jackson has done Bristol a favour and fucked off to London, his interim replacement is … the inexperienced and underqualified Weak Man!
Is Weak Man being rewarded by Rees for bent payments rendered?
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.
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?
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.