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.
The Green administration has bought an end to a legal case against Bristol City Council for spying on SEND parents with a shabby pay-off from council funds.
Costs to the victims of continuing the case against the council for unlawfully spying on them were just too high and could not be covered by Legal Aid.
The big question now is – where’s that SEND spying inquiry the Green Party were so keen on undertaking before they got elected?
Surely they’re not perpetrating a cover-up to protect the likes of SEND spy-in-chief, senior council executive Hugh “Cares” Evans and his fat salary?
Isn’t it time we put an end to handouts to the undeserving rich?
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.
A rumoured council legal letter knocking around claiming they are entitled to spy on us suggests they could be.
As does this comment from a boat dweller at the docks in a public statement to the Harbour Committee in December: “There has also been suspicion of covert surveillance, particularly when accessing services and collecting electricity cards.”
Council bosses’ resistance to an investigation into their surveillance of SEND parents promised years ago begins to make sense …
GINGER NUT JOB BOSSES
The latest revelation in the ongoing scandal of council senior boss nutjobs spying on parents of disabled children moves firmly into the realm of farce.
According to emails in the public domain, deranged council bosses deployed a covert human intelligence asset to spy on and report back on an, er, tea and biscuits carer support group run out of Knowle West!
While offering a commentary on parents’ clothing choices, the email fails to reveal what biscuits these dangerous carers were consuming as they deviously plotted in public to get a better education for their children.
Bristol City Council’s Children’s Services has a deficit of £23m this year, excluding the car crash SEND deficit. Efforts at ‘transformation’ of the service have predictably failed to make the savings touted by bosses and consultants.
According to a recent report to councillors about Home to School Travel, “The Children’s Transformation programme is currently forecasting a delivery of £4m of the £6.2m [savings] target in 24/25.”
Undershooting target by 35 per cent, thanks, are due to corporate consultants PwC who, in 2022, council bosses paid £444k for a secret unpublished report into, er, savings in Home to School Travel.
“Day after day council staff witness the blatant disregard, lawbreaking and contempt with which citizens like myself are treated. It’s hardly surprising that less than half of staff trust senior leaders to act with integrity, and that just over half feel confident using whistleblowing policies without fear of retaliation.”
A parent of a disabled child spied on by council bosses has published, on Twitter/X, a public statement that council Monitoring Officer, ‘L’il’ Tim O’Gara, banned from the council’s last Human Resources Committee meeting.
The statement reveals that the parent has started legal action against the council for their weird and unlawful surveillance of her and her family.
This legal action was the final resort after the council, under the Reverend Rees and, now, the Greens reneged on a promise to set up an independent investigation into their surveillance of residents.
The statement also explains that the council has failed to provide a response to this parent’s formal legal letter in seven months.
The officer accountable for that response is Monitoring Officer ‘L’il’ Tim O’Gara. Never one to let a blatant conflict of interest get in the way, he has enthusiastically banned a statement, highlighting his self-serving negligence, from being heard by a committee of councillors responsible for employing him.
To add insult to injury, the parent further reveals that the Reverend’s appalling cabinet sidekick, Asher “The Slasher” Craig, told a meeting of local community groups that the parent was “hysterical”.
How long before the council denounces her for witchcraft and sets up witch trials with O’Gara as judge?
As a statement bannned by the council’s chief legal officer to cover his own bent arse is unlikely to appear in any other local press, here’s the full statement:
Following Labour’s lead, the Greens have gone some of the way to ditching the long list of expensive and undeliverable promises approach to manifesto writing.
Perfected by their centrist dad mayoral candidate last time round in 2021, Lord Sandy Bufton Tufton of India seemed to promise everything from reopening your local corner shop as boutique vegan food pop-up to sending an ambassador for Bristol to the UN. The Greens, this time, have gone for a stripped down version of the Bufton Tufton list approach.
‘Disappeared’ leader, Emma Edwards – confined to the attic for the duration in case she disturbs anyone from Business West with some dangerous off-message tree hugging hippy shit – has been briefly reanimated and wheeled out for the manifesto’s Foreword written for her by bland copywriters.
“Bristol Green Party has a vision of hope for the city and highly experienced candidates,” she enthusiastically assures us. That’ll be ‘highly experienced candidates’ like their current councillors who don’t understand the basic legal responsibilities of company ownership or the necessity to take action when the council acts unlawfully. There’s a thin line in local politics between ‘highly experienced’ and ‘reckless amateur’ isn’t there?
The main manifesto is divided into ten sections beginning with a ‘Getting the basics right‘ section. Here we’re threatened with that old chestnut “genuine engagement on key Council proposals” and decision-dodging “demographically representative Citizens’ Assemblies.”
“Ensure decisions about community facilities and community asset transfers have a more consistent and transparent process,” also pops up. Meaning community facilities and assets will be transferred to the Greens’ mates rather than Labour’s.
On to transport where, like everyone else, they’re going to improve the buses and – this is their one standout policy – they’ll fund this from a Workplace Parking Levy, if, presumably, Business West lets them?
Other keynote transport policies are the introduction of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, which will “make traffic flow better on main routes”, apparently, and reviving Mayor No More Ferguson’s residents’ parking schemes, now redesigned as high tax revenue earner for the council.
In housing, the headline is to increase the city’s target of affordable homes from the current 600 homes per year to 1,000 per year. As no housing target in the city ever gets reached you wonder what the point of this actually is?
There’s also an odd and unexplained major outsourcing plan sneaked in, to set up an “arms length company to own and rent out council-owned housing”. This, the Greens allege, will create more “genuinely affordable homes” while also, conveniently, achieving the Thatcherite dream of moving social housing out of the council’s hands altogether. An old Lib Dem policy and one to watch.
Under the heading ‘A Great Start in Life’ we get a load of retreads of Labour’s failing Children’s Service policies where costs are going south fast. So they’ll increase special school places; somehow reduce costs of home to school transport and recruit more foster carers as they’ve been doing unsuccessfully for the last ten years.
Despite being a major budgetary pressure, there’s nothing on the subject of the rising costs of private sector out-of-county children’s care placements at all. Neither is there any mention of the Tory ‘Safety Valve’ SEND cuts programme the council is now signed up to for the next five years if it doesn’t get cancelled immediately.
For young people, there’s a vague “aim” with no resource attached to “increase the provision of youth services”. On knife crime it’s equally vague and totally under-resourced. They’ll “work with young people themselves, with the police, schools, youth services and other community organisations.”
On adult care there’s some warm words for staff and social workers and then this, “investigate a council-funded capital grant programme or loan scheme to assist care homes to be more efficient to save money in the long run.”
Are they really proposing to use our money to subsidise private care homes’ profits?
Sections on public health and “a clean city” provide airy lists of stuff “aiming to”; “exploring”; “enhancing”; “joining up” with no firm commitment to anything very much. The language indicating the lack of resources to make any of it happen.
On culture we get that old manifesto money-wasting favourite, “lead a Bristol regional bid to become the UK’s city of culture” along with a vague threat of a raid on the Local Government Pension Scheme to fund pet culture projects.
The final section of the local authority manifesto is on our old corporate friend ‘net zero’. Basically the ‘billion pound’ City Leap is still the only game in town delivering small scale publicly funded insulation, energy and EV projects. But it wouldn’t be a Green manifesto without developing a way to waste money the council hasn’t got on a pointless ‘net zero’ measure. So please step forward “a carbon budget process alongside the annual financial budgeting process.”
The idea here seems to be to employ people to add up the carbon costs of what the council does each year while cutting actual useful public services to the bone. Bravo!
Highly paid consultant blames parents and asylum seekers for huge overspends in SEND
Vanessa Wilson: Interim Director of Racist Scapegoating
Enormous overspends emerging in the council’s SEND budget are not the fault of council bosses squandering money on private sector rip-off artists; spying on parents or paying providers not to deliver SEND services we’ve paid them to deliver.
Turns out, instead, the overspend is the fault of parents and, er asylum seekers. At least, that’s what Vanessa Wilson, a well remunerated management consultant employed on a large undisclosed fee, claimed at a recent council meeting.
“Due to a lack of provision in our area, we’re placing more children in schools out of area. There’s parental choice as well. That’s meant that we’ve seen, in this last year, a doubling in costs of our transport,” she shamelessly explained.
But, as parents are liable for transport costs at a ‘parental choice’ of school, any doubling in transport costs is down to Vanessa’s department’s failures and nothing whatsoever to do with parents.
Vanessa then went after asylum seekers: “We’ve got a large number of children and families coming in who are asylum seekers. We’re seeing an increase in those families where not just the children have complex needs, but also the parents.”
With only 1,500 asylum seekers in Bristol, is it likely this tiny number are responsible for Vanessa’s ballooning costs?
Or is she using them as a convenient scapegoat for her department’s ongoing management failures?
Ridiculous council bosses, marking their own homework again, recently awarded themselves a green ‘RAG’ rating in a report presented to councillors. The report claimed, with a straight face, that they were ‘on track’ for delivering improvements for children with SEND!
Not a view necessarily shared by service users. One, @chopsy, even popped down to a scrutiny committee to tell councillors exactly what she thought about the drivel they were cheerily signing off. Here’s how she concluded:
“Colour your little box in Green and feel all pleased with yourself. But your Send system in Bristol is shambolic. It’s practically a hate crime against the city’s young disabled population. It’s vindictive, unlawful and reacts with spite, actively aiming to harm children and families.”
If that gets a green rating from bosses, what would it take to get a red rating?
Last night the Reverend Rees delivered his final State of the City speech from the University of Bristol’s shithouse Wills Building. Here’s a response:
Marvin, your State of the City speech seems to be a list of things that haven’t been delivered or resolved in your time in office.
Most of the key infrastructure projects that previous Labour council’s failed to invest in remain uninvested in but with a tab left to be picked up by the next administration.
There’s no funded mass transit proposal. It’s stalemated due to a lack of agreement between two bickering Labour Mayors who have prioritised their own personal animosity and egos above the needs of the city and region.
The city continues to have deep divisions along race and class lines despite all the talk about diversity, equity and inclusion and tackling the “issues”. Where are the measurable outcomes showing improvement?
But then you did watch the Colston statue come down and spot a self promotional media opportunity rather than a chance to trigger a real attempt to tackle the city’s long standing divisions.
Congratulations Marvin, you built some homes (the vast majority at market rates with many being bought by private landlords) and yet still managed to miss every housing target you set yourself.
The housing waiting list has increased to 20,000 families. The highest it has ever been, despite officers actively discouraging residents from going on the list “because it’s a waste of time”.
Homelessness remains noticeably present everywhere, except, maybe, in the Bearpit, despite your promise to solve it.
The vast majority of the 14,000 homes with planning permission are not being built and you try to blame a minority opposition party for this failure to deliver.
Still no arena, public or privately funded, anywhere. And tens of millions in public funds sunk into an elitist city centre cultural venue because of a binding legal contract signed on your watch. All while deprived suburbs lose community/cultural facilities.
City Leap has potential but so far isn’t unlocking any private investment and is falling behind its real investment plan, never mind this unsubstantiated £1bn you constantly quote at the press.
Goram Homes also has some potential but your planning delays means it’s falling massively behind schedule.
Bristol Waste is a basketcase with a revolving door board of directors. A direct result of poor corporate oversight. Your political interference in its business planning, meanwhile, has undermined any efforts to reduce costs.
Elsewhere, your council is still complicit in developing SNCIs despite declaring an ‘Ecological Emergency’ and creating plenty of photo-ops of Labour politicians standing in fields saying how important green spaces are.
There’s still no real plan for achieving net zero despite declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’.
Then there’s the poorly implemented CAZ, almost as if it was designed to fail and disrupt.
You are creating only one Liveable Neighbourhood and this is being poorly implemented and poorly consulted on with middle class neighbourhoods getting disproportionate input while poorer neighbourhoods are ignored.
Local CiL projects, especially transport and parks, are not being delivered partly because staff are being taken away to work on “headline grabbing” strategic projects.
The budget gap is currently larger than the Bundred one under Ferguson and there’s still no realistic plan to address it beyond service reduction and selling off council property.
SEND?!?!! Say no more. Your “Deputy” Mayor hasn’t a clue what she is doing just like the chain of useless Labour education leads before her. Our kids and, increasingly, their parents are paying the price of this serial incompetence.
The Dedicated Schools Grant is effectively in special measures and your administration is just crossing it’s fingers and hoping the government doesn’t pull the plug on this ever growing debt.
Basically Marvin, you have left behind a stinking pile of crap and then have the nerve to lecture the councillors who will have to clear up your shit about how the city should be run!!!
