This Week with Brian
Your Local Area
Including just one phrase, Ruth’s legacy, only two months left, going off-script, the tolerant sixties, King Panda, gorilla medicine, on the buses, and then there were four, come the revolution, a community forum, rolling over, for Whitehall’s consumption, parking issues, a wrestling champ, a dangerous bird, a single colour, hear me knocking and Bona Books.
Click on the appropriate buttons to the right to see the local news from your area (updated every Thursday evening).
If there’s anything you’d like to see covered for your area or anything that you’d like to add to something that we’ve covered already, drop me a line at brian@pennypost.org.uk.
Further afield
Imagine if you were judged by your friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances by just a single word or phrase. No nuance, no allowance for circumstances or revised judgements, but just “brilliant”, “fine”, “could do better” or “awful”. I’ve been all of these, often within 24 hours. So, by the way, have you. Then imagine that these definitions will hang around your neck for perhaps as long as 10 years, and that they were written on your forehead so that even people who’d never met you would see them. Pretty awful, eh?
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• Requiring improvement
This is, however, is exactly what the schools’ inspectors Ofsted provided for parents and anyone else who cared to look. Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate were what schools got as their headline. The more subtle CQC methods used to inspect care homes were not considered adequate for those making choices for our children.
The suicide of Ruth Perry in January 2023 as a result of the downgrading of her school brought this into the national spotlight, as did a stand taken against an inspection by the Head of John Rankin School in Newbury. A rather perverse examination of the primary school at Inkpen in the summer of 2022 caused me to have a look at the Ofsted grading system. I was rather shocked by what I discovered.
In an increasingly busy and competitive world, parents are forced to use – and encouraged to trust – league tables of various kinds. Although plenty of nuance was available in the fairly brief Ofsted reports for each school, the headline summaries were the ones parents often relied upon. They could be interpreted as meaning “utterly brilliant in all respects” to “completely crap in every way” and make their choices accordingly.
In reality, if a school was given a low grade – as Inkpen was – it may have been due to one low mark. Depending on what it was, this may or may not test that high with parents – hence the need to read the full report.
Moreover, a low grade will result in extra support and funding to address the particular issues as well as the urgent desire of the school’s management team to do so. This might contrast with an “outstanding” school which has been resting on its laurels and may have become, in any manner of ways, anything but since the last inspection.
This could have been some time ago. Some are more than 10 years old, which is akin to judging a 20-year-old by the same criteria as when they were 10. The dates are displayed but not that prominently. In my view, any that are more than four or five years old are probably worth disregarding entirely.
Perhaps even more dangerous is that there was, and probably still is, no obligation for Ofsted to re-inspect within, say, two terms of a new head taking over. I have four sons and can say from experience that nothing changes the character of a school more quickly than a change at the top. At Inkpen, the inspection was conducted in the last week of a summer term when the old head was about to leave. What use was that? Not much, as even Ofsted agreed: for the school was re-inspected the following year and performed better, albeit still with the dreaded one-phrase grade.
The good news is that, as of earlier this month, these simplistic gradings have been scrapped. This won’t do much to help the grief of Ruth Perry’s friends and family, but does at least provide a kind of legacy for her work. None of us and nothing we are involved with are perfect, but are good, indifferent and bad in different ways, as judged by different criteria, and changing all the time.
One-phrase summaries of schools, as they are of people, are insane, the more so if they were delivered a decade ago. It’s Good – indeed, Outstanding – that they’ve gone. The system was Inadequate and Required Improvement. Now it’s had it. Let’s see if the other shortcomings can be addressed as well.
• Hotting up
The US election seems to be coming to the boil, though there’s still more time left (nearly two months) than is spent in total on a UK election. Everything in the US has to be bigger, I guess. This one feels as if it’s been going on for about two years. Indeed, it has been, although for most of the time with Trump taking aim against someone who’s no longer standing.
To compensate for this, he seems to be trying to pretend that Harris and Biden are pretty much one and the same person. I’m not sure how far they are apart politically, but in other respects it’s rather hard to confuse them.
Trump, however, is no stranger to prodigious leaps of faith and logic. His singular and strangely effective oratorical style depends on repeating things – any things – sufficiently often that he wears people down. Probably about 20% of Americans would believe him if he said that the sun rose in the west or, to pick an example at random, that Covid could be cured by injecting yourself with bleach.
In this respect, and several others, he inhabits the same looking-glass world as did Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who boasted to Alice that sometimes she believes as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Trump certainly expects his followers to do the same.
In the most recent debate, Harris hit on what might well be a winning strategy: winding him up and so causing him to go off-script and thrash about in a swamp of self-righteous rage. Few things seemed to pique him as much as criticisms of the the nature and attendances of his rallies, about which he’s super-sensitive. I’ve never been to one but they do seem to be long and highly charged, much like those hosted by lifestyle gurus or TV evangelists, both of whom he probably strongly identifies with.
Harris is doubtless playing a bit of a sexist card here: you know what they say about a man with small rallies? Doesn’t bother me. In fact, bring it on; whatever it takes.
• Can’t hardly look
I don’t want to make myself out to be a better person than I am, but systemic persecution, belittling or mistreatment of women evokes a particularly strong reaction in me. I’m from a generation which was brought up in an age of casual sexism (and racism) which I accepted, but then came to see that there were better ways of looking at the world. My parents bucked a major social norm in that my mum (a publisher) went out to work in an office and my dad (a writer) stayed at home. When I mentioned this at school aged about eight, I was briefly tormented for this. So much for the swinging, tolerant sixties.
All this is as nothing compared to what women in Afghanistan are currently going through. I find it hard to read such articles. I am appalled, and almost repulsively impressed, by the way that these badly dressed, over-educated, middle-aged males on a divinely inspired power trip so often manage to call the shots. Of course, it’s all in the Koran, so that makes it OK. If it’s cultural, or religious, then it’s beyond criticism.
The Koran, however, was written in the seventh century and hasn’t had much in the way of updates since. It’s as if we were still being ruled according to laws and customs of King Panda of Mercia, King Eadbald of Kent or King Sigeberht of East Anglia. Would you like that? I don’t know much about these regulations, but they probably got changed for a reason. No such luck for women under the Taliban.
• And finally…
• Here’s some advice for any big pharma companies which want to make sure they get the best possible staff – employ a gorilla. This article on the BBC website describes how their skills at self-medicating by selecting plants with healing properties could give scientists valuable insights into new drugs. That is, if all the rain forests and all the gorillas aren’t wiped out first.
• The Guardian reports that local transport authorities across England will be able to run and control bus services under a Labour overhaul designed to “save vital routes”. Services outside the capital were deregulated in the ’80s, with some powers later being granted to mayoral authorities. The plan is now to enable municipal bus companies to be set up across England. Whether this will be appealing to cash-strapped councils at this moment is another matter.
• Four hopefuls remain in the Conservative leadership election campaign: Badenoch, Tugendhat, Cleverly and Jenrick; the first two sounding like the noises made by the 2.35 from Paddington going across a set of badly maintained points, and the last two like a long-established firm of city lawyers. Perhaps most remarkably, none of them studied PPE at Oxford, or even went to Oxford at all. Only four of the 17 PMs since WW2 can say the same. Mind you, there’s a fair bit of work to be done before any of this quartet might expect to be in Number 10. Baby steps on this, the first being the final result in November.
• The latest (1632) Private Eye takes a look on p8 at one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time: how some of Johnson and Sunak’s political hangers-on managed to get seats in the Lords. Age is, of course, just a number, but what got Lord Gnome’s goat is less the fact that they’re all in their early to mid thirties as the fact that, apart from writing speeches and doing SPAD stuff in Number 10, none of them would merit more than the odd footnote in any history of the time. It’s thus perplexing why they were honoured. One of them, Charlotte Owen, doesn’t seem clear either: “You simply get an email,” she’s quoted as saying. “No one really expects such a thing.” Come the revolution, of course, this system might change…
Across the area
• Parking problems
West Berkshire Council is currently conducting a consultation into off-street car-parking charges which closes on 13 September: so not long. You can find more details here.
As mentioned previously, the matter has excited considerable attention in Hungerford where it was discussed at length at the meeting of the Town Council (HTC) on 2 September. The main problem is that HTC maintains (and many, including me, agree) that the significance of the earlier consultations, particularly with regard to the matter of 24/7 charging, were not brought to its attention at the time. HTC is a well-organised and effective institution and one with a good track record at standing up to organisations, including WBC. It’s inconceivable that it would not have responded robustly at the time had it known about it. It has certainly done so now.
• Community forum
From the comfort of my study, I watched the latest WBC Community Forum on the subject of planning on 10 September. I use the word “watched” in its precise form as there were times when I couldn’t hear the questions being asked. It was like walking into the kitchen and finding your partner laughing hysterically on the phone to a friend but without any idea what remarks had prompted it.
Not, it must be said, that there was a great deal of laughter. The planning system doesn’t tend to produce that unless (as I do) you find dark humour, ironies, logical paradoxes, Alice-in-Wonderland nonsense and surprising examples of the law of unintended consequences to your taste. Rather, it was concerned with the following three areas:
- Update on local and national planning changes;
- West Berkshire’s online and digital planning services;
- Environmental planning considerations.
The first of these had clearly be hastily bolted on quite recently as, when the event was planned, the general election was still undecided and the Planning Inspector had not produced his report. It stuck to these points and pretty much kept to its timetable. I think such events are worthwhile and I congratulate WBC for having organised it. The comms issue could do with being improved, though.
The problem with all such events is that while the organisers want them to appeal to those who know little of the subject, most of those participating tend to know quite a lot. There were several questions that couldn’t be answered because of being too technical or specific, and others where there was more passion expressed than the event could easily absorb. All such events have this tension and it was handled pretty well. In a sense, this perfectly describes the whole problem with planning: the subject is so dull that you generally don’t think about it at all but, if something unwelcome is happening near you, you can’t think about anything else.
Without going into too much commentary, the main subjects covered were:
- WBC’s reaction to the demands from the Planning Inspector about the local plan. It was suggested that the Council should have pushed back more, but WBC’s Head of Place said this would have been to court disaster in the form of Whitehall intervention.
- Work on the new local plan will need to start almost at once lest the government’s higher housing figures be applied immediately.
- The changes to the draft local plan will, WBC said, need to be addressed first: the next issue will be to see where the new dwellings will come from. Consultation will take place.
- The term “vibrant villages” was mentioned and the idea will presumably form part of this exercise.
- Thatcham and Newbury are the main identified growth areas, because there is “much infrastructure” already in place there. (I wonder what residents of Thatcham will think of that assertion.)
- Questions were asked about sewage overflows and the extent to which these can be regarded as planning considerations.
- WBC is making some major improvements to its planning portal, some of which are live now, and all of which should be within the next year or so.
- Also in development is a better way of reporting planning breaches (though without any news of an increase in enforcement officers to investigate these).
- Nutrient neutrality regulations will apply retrospectively regarding any applications granted before they were introduced, but where relevant conditions had not then been discharged.
- Funds are available for strategic mitigation of the nutrient neutrality requirements, though there was no discussion about the fact that making the planning system responsible for this assumed that every new development would cause pollution; which would not be the case if the water companies did their job properly.
- In any further consultations on the local plan, respondents are advised to concentrate on specific proposals and ensure that there’s a tight body of evidence provided.
- The questions from the evening would be answered to the individuals who had posed them and – as I understand it – on the WBC website, via a link I’ll add when I’ve received it.
• An inspector calls
The community forum (see above) covered the question of the Planning Inspector’s letter to WBC in July. The main point was that he asked that about 800 more homes be added to the draft local plan as, due to delays, it needed to be extended to 2041. He gave WBC a very tight deadline for responding. The Council took the request to be an instruction and considered that any prevarication would immediately lead to WBC having its planning powers removed. It therefore plucked four possible sites off the shelf and offered them to him.
Many feel that it wasn’t necessary for WBC to roll over in this way. One response could have been to request more time to consider the implications and perhaps to consult: we were, after all, talking about a change of direction for the plan. I understand that no such request was made.
It would also have been possible, as I suggested before, to request a shorter timescale for the plan to avoid changing the housing numbers. In Tunbridge Wells, the Inspector himself suggested reducing it from 15 years to ten to deal with a similar delay. It would thus have been quite in order for WBC to have proposed this (I presume it was aware of this precedent).
Moreover, does Whitehall really want to take over WBC’s planning powers? This is not a step to be taken lightly. WBC is not a badly-performing council. It has a current plan which hasn’t expired, has a draft plan under examination, has accepted the Minister’s demand that this draft plan not be withdrawn, has a good record at meeting housing targets and has a 5.8 year housing-land supply figure. This surely represents a bank of goodwill which could have been drawn upon.
One of the advantages of having an up-to-date local plan and land-supply is that it avoids what’s known as development by appeal, where application refusals are likely to be overturned by the inspector if the applicant can claim that the need exists and there’s no policy to prevent the application. The proposers of these four sites must have been surprised and overjoyed to see them back on the table. Although better ones almost certainly exist, the fact that they’ve been offered to the Inspector would, I imagine, give grounds for an appeal if they were then withdrawn; exactly the opposite of the non-litigious approach that a local plan is meant to accomplish.
There’s also a final irony. The Lib Dem administration (for good reasons) wanted to withdraw the local plan submitted by the Conservatives in March 2023 but was prevented from doing so. The delay means that it’s being considered now. If it had proceded as planned, it would probably now have been adopted, perhaps with only 1,500 homes in NE Thatcham and certainly without these extra four sites. I still think the Lib Dems were right to be concerned about what they inherited. It’s unfortunate that the results might be even more unwelcome.
The NE Thatcham site was introduced as a result of the Grazeley scheme being killed off by the expansion of the DEPZ zone around AWE Burghfield. Many argued that it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the problem. Exactly the same could be said about the response to the Planning Inspector’s requests. There’s perhaps another irony in that, after all those years of work, the two most significant aspects the local plan will have been arrived as a result of rapid reaction to external circumstances. Many might look at all of this, and the wreckage of any NDP such as Cold Ash’s which has been collateral damage, and wonder if there’s any point in doing a local plan or an NDP at all.
• The clawback
The extraordinary Full Council meeting of West Berkshire Council on 5 September considered the opposition motion of the “Proposal for consideration by Council as detailed in the requisition submitted on the 22 July 2024, signed by the requisite number of Members: this Council calls on the Chairman of Council to write to the Schools Forum to request that they review the decision to claw back West Berkshire schools’ surplus funds to be applied to their budgets for the financial year 2024-25.” You can see the recording of the meeting here. You can read more about the background to the clawback issue here.
The motion was, unsurprisingly, defeated. The debate was remarkable for the fact that the two sides seemed to pay little attention to what the other was saying. The opposition’s points were well made, emotive and logical; the administration’s were more dispassionately focused on the over-arching problem of the special educational needs deficit and the need to do something about it.
You may have read elsewhere that the meeting was an omnishambles and that the WBC’s Leader’s admission that the ongoing review of the situation amounted to a partial climbdown. These judgments are missing the point. The whole business was, from start to finish, played out to convince Whitehall that WBC was trying to do something to resolve a funding mess which the Council had not created, but may yet be financially responsible for. The more WBC could be seen to be helping itself, the better deal it might get when the nightmare of the SEN funding costs are added to the municipal books in the next financial year.
As for the matter of how this was handled, the answer has to be not very well. Spin it how you want, any initiative which involves an explosion of rage from schools, a written statement and a verbal statement from the Leader within a couple of days, a lot of critical press coverage and a red-green-grey-blue alliance for an extraordinary council meeting cannot be regarded as having gone according to plan. Mind you, Whitehall might have noticed some of this, so, perhaps, job done.
Possibly it was haste that caused the problem. Councillor Culver at the meeting echoed the thoughts of many, including me, when she said that she’d been unable to obtain from the portfolio holder any confirmation in the regulations that the bank account in which the money was held was the determining factor in whether the money could be clawed back.
At WBC’s Scrutiny Commission on 17 July (you can watch here from about 1′ 45″), the financial portfolio holder Iain Cottingham said that PTA-raised funds should not be subject to claw-back unless they’d been moved to the school’s general account, in which case they would be. However, at the conclusion of her remarks at the 5 September meeting, Heather Codling said that the sums being clawed back “do not include any PTA or fundraised money via charitable donations, or other parent activity”.
Make your mind up. These are completely different definitions, one based on the location of funds and the other on their provenance. Accounts exist in order to differentiate the latter, even if all the money is in the same bank account. All the schools had had their finances audited by WBC a few months before the advanced clawback was announced. If there was something dreadfully wrong, why was it not highlighted then? If there was any doubt, why was the provenance of the money not established before the announcement in mid July? If the accounts were in good order (which the successful audits suggest they should have been) this should have been a simple job for each school.
“It’s good news that the clawbacks are being reviewed,” Minority Leader David Marsh told me on 12 September. “Credit to Jeff Brooks, the council leader, for taking personal charge of the issue and visiting some of the affected schools in response to objections raised by head teachers, school business managers, governing bodies, and opposition councillors.
“No one opposes the principle of clawing back funds that schools do not need to spend: but the way the council went about this, targeting money in the middle of the financial year, was completely wrong, throwing schools’ plans into disarray and placing an unacceptable burden on head teachers and school business managers.”
It’s hard to pretend that this has played out well locally. Nationally, however, all the publicity might have helped WBC’s cause. Heads might be nodding approvingly in SW1: “Here’s a council that’s toughing things out with schools and taking some action itself to solve this problem. Put them down in the green column for ‘better deal’ when we have to put the SEN costs on the balance sheets.” Whether or not WBC manages to claw back any significant funds from this rather muddled exercise is perhaps of less importance.
News from your local councils
Most of the councils in the area we cover are single-tier with one municipal authority. The arrangements in Oxfordshire are different, with a County Council which is sub-divided into six district councils, of which the Vale of White Horse is one. In these two-tier authorities, the county and district have different responsibilities. In all cases, parish and town councils provide the first and most immediately accessible tier of local government.
West Berkshire Council
• Click here to see the latest Residents’ News Bulletin from West Berkshire Council.
• Click here for details of all current consultations being run by West Berkshire Council.
• Click here to sign up to all or any of the wide range of newsletters produced by West Berkshire Council.
• Click here for the latest news from West Berkshire Council.
Vale of White Horse Council
• Click here for details of all current consultations being run by the Vale Council.
• Click here for latest news from the Vale Council.
• Click here for the South and Vale Business Support Newsletter archive (newsletters are generally produced each week).
• Click here to sign up to any of the newsletters produced by the Vale’s parent authority, Oxfordshire County Council.
Wiltshire Council
• Click here for details of all current consultations being run by Wiltshire Council.
• Click here for the latest news from Wiltshire Council.
Swindon Council
• Click here for details of all current consultations being run by Swindon Council.
• Click here for the latest news from Swindon Council.
Parish and town councils
• Please see the News from your local council section in the respective weekly news columns (these also contain a wide range of other news stories and information on activities, events and local appeals and campaigns): Hungerford area; Lambourn Valley; Marlborough area; Newbury area; Thatcham area; Compton and Downlands; Burghfield area; Wantage area.
• Other news
• West Berkshire Council has introduced kerbside collections for household batteries: more details here.
• Subject to approval by the WBC’s Executive, West Berkshire Council will soon be looking to launch a public consultation on its new draft Waste Management Strategy. This is expected to start in late September. More details here.
• Click here for more on West Berkshire’s Annual Public Health report for 2024.
• There’s still time for you to have your say on possible changes to bus services in West Berkshire: the consultation closes on 8 September. Click here for details.
• West Berkshire Council has announced that potholes will now be investigated earlier in their life cycle, if that’s a meaningful term, with the aim of getting more of them fixed.
• Councils from across the South East (including West Berkshire) have come together to create the country’s largest local authority fostering partnership to increase the number of foster carers across the region.
• The animal of the week is this southern cassowary, which has was born in a zoo in Bourton-on-the-Water. It appears that this most un-dangerous of places is home to what has been dubbed the world’s most dangerous bird – incredibly long and sharp claws seem to be the main problem.
• A number of good causes have received valuable support recently: see the various news area sections (links above) for further details.
The quiz, the sketch and the song
• And so we come to the Song of the Week. If you like completely wonderful guitar riffs, as I do, then you have to get up very early in the morning to find anything to match Can You Hear me Knocking by the Stones.
• And so next must be the Comedy Moment of the Week. Homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, which makes it all the more amazing that the Julian and Sandy sketches on Round the Horne were able to be broadcast. I can’t imagine what the censors thought they were listening to. They are to me the gold standard for camp innuendo, a form of humour which is so often very badly done. So, here are Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick in full-on Polari to bring you Bona Books.
• Leading finally to the Quiz Question of the Week. This week’s question is: Between 1977 and 2011, the flag of which country contained only one colour? Last week’s question was: If Abraham Lincoln had decided against a career in politics, what other profession was he well-placed to take up? Wrestling. The 16th President took part in more than 300 matches over a dozen years with only one recorded defeat.
For weekly news sections for Hungerford area; Lambourn Valley; Marlborough area; Newbury area; Thatcham area; Compton and Downlands; Burghfield area; Wantage area please click on the appropriate link.
2 Responses
Quiz answer: Libya
Correct…