• The council elections are now almost upon us: click here for information from West Berkshire and here for Vale of White Horse on how these will be conducted. Wiltshire and Swindon will not be holding elections this year. (If you want to know which councils hold elections when – it’s not straightforward – click here.)

• To find out more about what your local candidates (or some of them) have to say on the issues of climate change, bio-diversity loss and recycling, please click here to read a report from West Berkshire Climate Action. The lack of response by the Conservatives is a bit depressing, the more so given their reason for in general not doing so, which is that they’d rather communicate directly with their voters on this point. I’m not convinced this will come up in every conversation, particularly given the ability of politicians of all hues to manipulate any discussion to ground of their own choosing. Why not say what you believe on this?  ‘Conservative’, with or without a capital C, derives from the verb ‘to conserve’ which is described in the Oxford Living Dictionary as ‘to protect (something, especially something of environmental or cultural importance) from harm or destruction.’ A discussion of this idea seems to be what this survey is trying to encourage. In fairness, there are quite a few candidates from other parties who haven’t completed it either. So, get your skates on, guys and girls and tell WBCA what you think. And, if you meet a Conservative candidate, ask them what their view is – that’s what they’ve said they want you to do. 

• This week’s NWN has a report on a discussion at West Berkshire’s Overview and Scrutiny Management Commission earlier this month. The issue here is whether items such as library books can be be regarded as capital expenditure. It’s not on the face of it a particularly important issue but it’s one which could have important consequences in a few years’ time. It appears from the article that the government’s regulations on councils can capitalise have been relaxed: now, anything that has a lifespan of more than a year (three years is more normal in business) can be treated in this way.

The two important points that arise from this are, first, that developer contributions can only be used for capital expenditure; the second is that only part of anything that is capitalised will appear on the books in any one year. The effect is to give councils more money (in accounting terms if not in actual cash) for a few years and thus remove some of the pressure for extra funds from central government. This therefore looks very like something that Whitehall has created for just this purpose. CEO Nick Carter is quoted as saying that, under these new regulations, regarding library books as capital expenditure was ‘within the rules’. Lib Dem leader Lee Dillon said that ‘it’s not within the spirit of the regulations’ and ‘a false economy.’ It seems to me they’re both right. It doesn’t, however, seem particularly prudent.

This also opens up two other points: what should be regarded as capital expenditure and what developer contributions should be spent on. To allow anything with a life for more than a year to be capitalised seems potentially to include a lot of things that are really normal expenditure and so blurs a useful distinction. Having a lot of items which are being depreciated will also add to accounting time and costs and not at any point give a particularly accurate picture of the council’s financial health.

As for developer contributions, these are intended to provide infrastructure to mitigate the impact of development on local communities, which most people would not see as including library books. Developers can also appeal to have some contributions reduced, using viability assessments, if it turns out that an agreed contribution is threatening its profitability. I don’t know if they might have a stronger case if it was felt that their money was being spent on items that had previously been regarded as general expenditure. All in all, it has the look of something that’s been designed to defer a problem for a few years. If the government has said it’s OK it’s hard to say that West Berkshire should not take advantage of it. Whether this will be seen as being a good idea in a few years remains to be seen.

• With the local elections now only a week away, every political party is seeking to claim credit for initiatives which have worked, or could be seen as having done so, and distancing themselves from ones which have not. Plentiful examples of this can be seen in this week’s Newbury Weekly News, particularly in the letters section. One such is from Graham Jones, the Leader of West Berkshire Council, in which he makes a number of claims about the record of the ruling Conservatives over the last four years.

The first is that 22.5% of new homes have been affordable. The council’s target is 35% or 40% (depending on the type of site) but as most of the national home-building programme has effectively been outsourced to private developers it’s perhaps unfair to blame any council for a shortfall. This is slightly better than the 2017-18 figure for England of 21%. His second achievement is ‘the transfer of the library service to the community’. This certainly happened but it’s debatable whether the party can claim credit for that (see the ‘Hungerford Area’ section below for more on this, including the wording used in the leaflet). He goes on to say that 95% of schools are good or outstanding according to Ofsted: the national figure is 89%, although I’ve not been able to discover how West Berkshire’s figures compare with others in the south, which would be a more meaningful  comparison.

He then mentions the new bus station in Newbury: this and the surrounding development has had its share of criticism but the station itself is still very new so perhaps it’s too early to judge. He also adds that recycling rates are ‘high’. They’re certainly quite high: West Berkshire ranks as the 68th best (out of 345) council in England according to Let’s Recycle, better than Wiltshire (144th) but some way behind the Vale of White Horse (8th). He quotes the statement by the auditors on West Berkshire’s budget: this is a standard form of words which is, I believe, applied to the large majority of councils. He also says that West Berkshire is rated as one of the best and happiest places to live in the UK. There seem to be plenty of surveys of this kind but I’m not sure how much they tell us, nor how much credit is as a result due to the ruling party on the council.

• One matter not mentioned by Graham Jones is the London Road Industrial Estate. However, there are two other letters on the subject, one from a Labour candidate and one from a Lib Dem one. 

• There’s also a backlash against Councillor Dominic Boeck’s letter in last week’s paper which claimed that the Conservatives had all ‘local’ candidates whereas the other parties did not. Regardless of what party makes this claim, it seems a completely specious point. For one thing, how do you measure how ‘local’ a candidate is? Is it how long they’ve lived in an area, or how recently they’ve moved there, or how much time they actually spend there, or how engaged they are with local activities? Does working in an area count? Also, being local (however defined) is not in itself proof of effectiveness, honesty or diligence. It’s certainly not something we set much store by when electing our MPs: as this 2013 report from Democratic Audit shows, in this part of the country only about half of the then MPs were born in the part of the country they represent, let alone in their constituency. 

• This article on the BBC website suggests that already more money has been raised for Notre Dame than will be needed for the repairs, perhaps as much as €150m (£130m). This is pretty much the same as West Berkshire’s annual budget although it seems unlikely that and change left over in Paris will end up in Newbury. If the French government is looking for ways of wasting any excess then there’s no better place to send it than the bank account for HS2. According to some estimates this will end up costing £400m a mile, so this £150m from France would build about 600 metres of it. 

• Love it or loathe it, Facebook seems here to stay. Not only has it designed something which has become fundamental to the way about 2.4 billion people communicate but it has also done so by getting people to pay for it not with money but with their personal data. The current outcry about privacy has come far too late: all users are complicit in this transaction and, given the choice, would probably be happy to continue to allow FB’s vast database to continue to accrue information about themselves just as long as some aspects of other peoples’ was made available for them to access. The issue is going to continue to have consequences, of sorts, for the social-media monster. It’s said it will set aside $3bn to cover the possible costs of an investigation into its privacy practices: with an annual turnover of about $56 billion (a vast sum but one that’s still less that the predicted cost of the above-mentioned HS2) this isn’t on the face of it a huge concern for them.   

• If you’re an EU, EEA or Swiss citizen, you and your family can apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK after 30 June 2021, regardless of any deal that the UK government may or may not make with the EU. Click here to see the help that’s available with the application process from West Berkshire Libraries.

• Healthwatch West Berkshire is running two online consultations about the future of healthcare provision in the area. Click here for details. You have until the end of the month to make your views known. 

• The animal of the week is any one you want to pick out the extraordinary array of 4,000 exotic animals rescued by the RSPCA in 2018.

• The letters pages of the Newbury Weekly News this week is mainly given over to election statements and counter-statements, several of which have been covered above. There’s also a picture of a Doberman with a thousand-yard stare which ‘likes chewing on bones’ and ‘dislikes closed doors.’ You have been warned.

• A number of good causes have received valuable support recently, including: The Prospect Hospice in Swindon (thanks to The Inn with the Well in Ogbourne St George); The Hungerford Resource Centre (thanks to the Hungerford Rotary Club); Swings and Smiles (thanks to the National Lottery Community Fund); the Injured Jockeys Fund (thanks to William Dunlop); Great Bedwyn Youth Group (thanks to its recent jumble sale).