Author: johnredwood

My first memories of the impact of the war as a pre school child growing up in Canterbury were of a  bomb site. The city had been badly damaged in a Baedeker raid. By the time I was born  the shopping centre area by the Eastgate had been completely rebuilt. It was only one day when my mother walked me past a large piece of wasteland beyond the city walls that I asked about it. Why full of weeds, and why were there remains of low brick walls?  My mother was reluctant to answer, told me it was a bomb site and wanted to change the topic. Understanding nothing I asked more and got out of her that some people were so nasty they blew buildings up , dropping bombs out of aircraft. As I tried again a worse truth was half peeking out. These people were so nasty they blew them up with people still inside them. I could not fathom why anyone would want to do that. A fear gripped me. Could it happen now?

As I went to primary school grown ups would share a bit more with me about the war that had dominated their young adult lives for five long years. They were still talking to each other about it as they sought to digest what had happened to them.  I was shown the ration books they had to rely on, told of the shortages and the limited meals.

My grandparents and father grew food in their gardens as if still part of Dig for victory. They would say careless talk costs lives. Waste not, want not was a favourite phrase, encouraging thrift and careful use of limited resources. My grandmother still had her black out sheets that were used to stop the light at the wartime window. My father told of his evacuee experiences  being sent to Stafford from Ramsgate and  how he enlisted in the navy as soon as he could. My mother showed me photos of herself as a young woman in Wren’s uniform.

When I did my junior school local history project I heard how the great cathedral had been saved from  the fire bombs and saw the work still going on to restore all the precious medieval glass.

( for more childhood memories see What do boys want?)

On day 1 the Leader and Executive Councillors should impose a staff freeze on all new external recruitment excepting teachers and qualified medical personnel. Officers should have to make a case to appoint from outside based on shortage of crucial skills. Councillors  also need to ban all new external contracts for bought in services without prior Councillor approval to avoid the easiest way around the freeze.

They should ask each Head of department to draw up a list of posts that can be removed or merged, to implement as people leave employment. Employees will be told that as most recruitment is from within they have enhanced chances of promotion. There will be no redundancies without staff agreement.

The Leader should require each Executive Councillor to produce a schedule of functions/ activities they wish to end within three weeks, and timetables and staffing plans to exit them within two months.

There should be a review of all grants and payments to outside bodies in the first month with a view to reductions.

There should be a value for money audit of the Council identifying scope to boost productivity, raise quality and lower costs in delivering main services.

DOGE has not been a success. Elon Musk proposed $2 trillion off spending before the election. He scaled that back to $1 trillion on getting the job, The DOGE website claims $160 bn so far but most people think that is a big exaggeration.

It is true federal spending has gone down a bit. For four months there has been no money or military aid sent to Ukraine, after a lot in the last 3 months of President Biden. As it appears President Trump cannot create a peace it looks as if military spend on Ukraine will be reinstated.  There have been cuts to overseas aid and there could be more to come. The UK Labour government has already identified this as an easy  target for big cuts.

In practice cutting  overheads, redirecting staff away from woke projects and getting staff into the office more all require strong Cabinet level leadership backed up by senior officials who buy into the aims and undertake the detailed implementation. It takes more than a few Elon Musk interviews and speeches, more than highlighting a few particularly silly items of spend in a so called audit.

In the case of a UK Council it will take the Leader of the Council and the Executive Councillors to set out what needs changing. They need to get buy in from the senior permanent staff, and need to persuade most of  their employees that this is the way to go. Making threatening general statements about job losses makes the task more difficult.It puts  the staff offside and more determined to resist.  Dealing in generalities about cutting DEI or net zero work needs to be backed up by numbers, plans and budgets and agreed line by line in each individual Council.

I will in a later blog talk more about how I with JohnHatch launched the idea of value for money audits in the public sector. Just sending in a regular additional auditor will not help much. To get gains the specialist needs to be part auditor part management adviser. The questions of a regular audit, what was spent, how was it categorised, was it properly incurred spending  do not get you a more efficient organisation. You need to ask how could I do that better and cheaper? Do I need to do that at all?

The strategic question of what does a Council no longer need to do should  have been answered by the political parties in the election. A new Leader and ruling group needs to say at their first meeting  with officers on taking over what they intend  to close down.

Most of us celebrating VE day this week were born well after the war. We can only imagine the joy and relief that after years of death, injury and privation for our fighting forces,after years of blackouts, bombing raids and the terror of V weapons at home people could at last relax and celebrate the end of fear.

Imagine every night worrying that you might be bombed in your bed and need to rush to the garden shelter. Imagine life on rations as the Germans tried to destroy our food supply to starve civilians to death. Imagine like my mother taking night time turns to mind the roof of an important building  in case of fire bombs. Imagine as a teenage boy thinking about where you would be sent to put your life at risk.

We owe the wartime generations a huge debt. They were prepared to suffer to liberate Europe and the Far East from German and Japanese cruelty and tyranny. They then rightly helped Germany and Japan begin again as democratic law abiding nations, so we might live in peace in a more prosperous world.

We can learn much from those who won the war. They developed crucial new technologies, expanded industry at an incredible pace, farmed far more land to grow more food at home, mined more coal to provide our energy. They helped invent and develop radar, the jet engine, the floating harbour and temporary bridges, better radio communications and much else. They stayed strong allies of the US whose industrial and military might was important to victory.

I will have in my thoughts my Dad who saw action off Norway and in support of our forces in the Med on the cruiser Royalist. I will remember my Mum moving from fire watching in Reading to the Wrens in Portsmouth supplying and supporting naval vessels.

Wokingham’s Liberal Democrat led Council always claims it gets a very low grant from the government and is left to struggle , forcing it to make cuts in spending.

This was not what the independent IFS thought in their review. Looking at the 2022/23 budget figures they concluded that “No local government in England receives more funding to carry out its services relative to needs than Wokingham Borough Council. ” They calculated from comparisons that Wokingham got £261 per head more in grants than its needs.

Core spending power per head  is the highest of all Berkshire Councils apart from Slough, and is up 63% since 2019. So there should be no excuse  for poor services and no reason to claim they are underfunded.

Nor does the Councillor pleading of poverty reflect what the Council does, as it is making large increases in spending, specialising in wasteful projects and unwanted and risky investments in energy and property.

When the former  Leader of the Council Mr Jones said the “government has reduced funding for Wokingham Borough Council by £ 1m” it is difficult to see this figure in the accounts, and it is a very small figure in relation to total spending and total grants.  He also thought social care took up 60% of the Council’s allocation. He seems to have missed out schools and education in its entirety to get to this odd figure.

Wokingham has not filed accounts for 2024/5 yet. The 2023/4 annual figures showed total spending of £427 m , up by £53 m or 12.5% on the previous year. Total grants came to £198.7m or 46% of expenditure. There was an additional £93 m of direct government funding of Academies in the area. Schools at 28% of the budget  or £120 m was the biggest single spending area, with a Schools grant of £90 m. The Council had £84 m of S 106 developer contribution payments at its disposal. It was “investing” £36.5m within a capital programme costing £73 m.

The Lib Dem Councillors should read the accounts and seek to manage the money better. Their public statements imply they either do not understand the large sums they are handling, or wish to suppress wider knowledge of just how much they spend. I will look at how all this money could be better managed in future postings. I have highlighted before the kind of waste they go in for. There was the £5.5m changes to a roundabout, strenuously opposed  by local residents, that entailed painting coloured leaves  all over the road.  There is the “investment” in a solar farm.

Around the country there is a  lack of informed debate about the huge sums Councils control and spend, what they get for all that money and how they could spare the taxpayers some of their large demands upon them.Instead we are told every year there are cuts, when the budgets keep ballooning and the Council tax soars.

It was wrong that so many Council elections were cancelled. It js clear from the elections that were permitted that many people are unhappy with the government and want change.

The Conservatives and Reform combined polled very well, with Reform getting excellent results in the Runcorn by election, several of the  Councils and the Greater Lincs Mayoral race. In a Council like Northumberland where the Conservatives won most seats but Reform were a close second it is important the two parties  come to an agreement to provide good local services and leadership.Reform now has a chance to show what it can achieve where it has strong majorities.

The two parties in Councils need to concentrate on providing good quality core services led by schools and social care. They need to cut overheads, stop the anti driver agendas, stop so called investments in property and energy which have jeopardised some Council’s finances, and get the Council tax down.

As always much of the local election debate was about things Councils do not control. Labour and Lib Dem candidates usually avoided talking about local bad management, waste of money, high taxes and excessive borrowings.

When the Chancellor went to China to promote the  UK and UK exports she associated herself with just £600 m of deals. That would have been a poor result for a junior trade Minister. It is under 0.03% of GDP.

As the Chancellor tells us an improved EU trade deal could boost growth, their main idea to promote UK dairy products with a revised SPS agreement is seeking to boost something that at best could add less than the China deals. It seems she has no idea of significant figures.

When it comes to spending she is good at underestimating the huge costs of the large public sector and the impact  of inflation busting wage settlements without productivity growth. Her willingness to borrow £15 bn more than  planned  in her first year makes a nonsense of her lectures on prudence. It makes  the mean cut in pensioner fuel payments more difficult to defend. The OBR were out by £15 bn within a month of their forecast. So why does the Chancellor trust them and  believe their five year forecast. Last year’s deficit came in £65 bn higher than the OBR forecast of it a year ago!

A growth strategy will not be boosted by the kind of giveaway EU reset she has in mind, nor by giving away the Chagos with a dowry, nor by doubling down self harming net zero policies.

The government is wrong to consider locking us into EU SPS rules. The EU when we were in it designed rules to keep out better value safe food from our previous supply sources in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Argentina. It used regulations and tariffs to limit imports.

At the same time it rolled out policies to disadvantage UK farms and get us more dependent on EU imports. They refused to give us sufficient milk quota , forcing us to buy value added products like yoghurt from the continental countries who  were granted bigger  quotas. They used disease in UK cattle to have a long and comprehensive ban on UK beef. They gave grants  to get the UK to rip out orchards so we could import more continental fruit.

The current argument is about SPS regulations. The EU insists under its Sanitary and Phytosanitary rules that all meat and dairy export consignments into the EU require a new vet certificate to say the animals were in good health. This is an added cost and slows things down. Previously it was sufficient to run compliant animal husbandry and to notify immediately if a farm had an animal health problem. The UK can of course insist on similar controls to those the EU imposes . If we did so the EU would be more interested in reducing the burden.

Uk exports of meat, cheese and butter to the EU have always been modest. We import three times as much food and drink from the EU as we export  to them. It would be wrong to give away our ability to shape our own food safety rules and import from places other than the EU where the product is better value.

Tony Blair is right to say the transition to net zero will prove too dear and too unpopular  with the public. He failed to point out that the policies to  import gas instead of using our own, to get people to buy battery cars and recharge them from gas generated electricity, and to close down our energy using factories to import instead all mean more world CO 2.

These policies deindustrialise the UK. They make consumers poorer paying all the green levies, carbon taxes and windfall taxes taxes. They divert massive amount of capital to replacing perfectly  good energy assets. They mean a big rise in state debt and interest charges taxpayers have to pay as government spends on carbon capture, increased grid and renewables.

There needs to be drastic and urgent change of policy. Will the PM move Mr Miliband out of his current job and get on with reversing the taxes,  subsidies, high energy prices , bans and import based strategies which are doing such harm?

His supporters are delighted illegal migrants are down 95% across the Mexican border in March compared to last year thanks to his tough actions on entry and returns. They like his ditching net zero policies and going for more cheaper energy. They like the attack on DEI and the decision that the Federal government thinks there are two genders, male and female. They like the attack on wasteful spending and excessive bureaucracy by DOGE.

His critics dislike all of the above. They think the US should be kinder to migrants, and argue they are needed to take lower paid jobs. They believe in the need to get CO 2 down and think the US should do more not less. They are scandalised by the attack on DEI and bureaucracy and are seeking help from the courts.

The President promised peace but so far this has eluded him in Gaza and Ukraine. He seems to have moved on from Gaza in frustration with the failure to release the hostages by Hamas. He tilted to Putin to get him into peace talks but is now cross about lack of progress and is criticising Putin. People are divided over whether he can achieve a peace in either place, with plenty of criticisms from both sides as he seeks to find common ground.

The tariffs policy has alarmed markets. They worry  that high tariffs will in the shorter term raise US inflation, only to slow growth thereafter and leave people worse off. Some think it could come right by the President doing a series of trade deals with major trade partners to get barriers down. Others think the President wants higher tariffs to boost US investment in capacity and to bring in government revenue.

What do you think?