A Good End to the Working Day

The day after the local press described how one of our local hospitals had lost a mass of patient data Norman Lamb MP revealed the full extent of the problems in the NHS with data as a result of investigations he's been doing. "We already know from the Information Commissioner that the NHS is among the worst offenders for data loss, reporting as many incidents as the entire private sector."
What an indictment! The NHS sees us at our most vulnerable and then loses chunks of our data. And they always reassure us that it doesn't matter - well if it doesn't matter why did they keep it in the first place? And why do they put it on memory sticks and CDs that can drop out of pockets and off desks into bins or worse.
This afternoon was planning committee day. There was nothing in Eaglescliffe ward today but still plenty of tricky and frustrating decision making to do. Why should a developer who's got permission for a good quality design be able to come back and reduce the quality to something that's just about acceptable? Why do developers think that student flats are the new route to riches? The block which was refused permission today not only contravened our new council guidelines by not demonstrating a need for more accommodation but also was a pretty awful design for the area. It looked like boxes - several boxes rather than one monolithic box but boxes nevertheless. Standing nearly opposite Thornaby Town Hall it really did look incongruous. I'd have loved to have seen an interesting building, reflecting the stature and elegance of the Town Hall but what we were offered was chunky and out of place.
At tonight's council meeting there were two really good items which brought out the best side of people.
First we had an item in all the vast array of minutes and reports which come to Council about the return of the Mayoral Chains to Thornaby. Cllr Mick Eddy who is also this year's Town Mayor of Thornaby took the opportunity to thank John Fletcher for his help in arranging that return. Although many others had to be part of the decision it was John who found the way forward when there'd been little or no progress for years. Mick thanked him beautifully and very eloquently on behalf of the people of Thornaby and the Town Council and for once other members of the council were quiet and let him speak.
Almost the last item on the agenda was a motion, proposed by the Mayor, that the council sign up to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights on its 60th anniversary. Alan Lewis spoke of the human rights of the Gurkha soldiers who lived and fought alongside British soldiers but then are denied citizenship if they retired before 1997. Sign the petition or write to your MP - let's get this sorted out once and for all.
After that Suzanne spoke very movingly about the plight of refugees on our doorstep in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees who have fled from abuses of basic rights like the right to live without being persecuted but then are seized in dawn raids and sent to detention centres to await deportation sometimes to countries which are not at all safe for them. Why it's deemed acceptable for children to be woken and bundled away from the only safe home they've known in raids that look just like the raids on suspected crack houses I'll never understand. But it happens and it happens here, under our noses.
So Stockton Council approved the Declaration and maybe, who knows, just one or two people might think twice about walking by on the other side next time.

Tales of Community

This morning Stockton Town Hall was open for anyone to pay a small sum and have a cup of coffee or tea with the Mayor and Mayoress and a tour of the building. This wasn't because the Mayor needed something extra to help with the household bills but to raise funds for his charities for this year - Daisy Chain and Justice First. I took the opportunity to go and have my cuppa but with a secondary motive too. A relative of my husband was Mayor of Thornaby in the early 1950s and as my husband is tracing his family history I had made arrangements to photograph the chain which he would have worn.
The Thornaby chain became part of Stockton's regalia following local government reorganisation and has been worn by the Deputy Mayor of Stockton for some years. There have been people in Thornaby who felt that the chains should have been returned when Thornaby residents voted to have a Town Council several years ago but there have always been reasons why it couldn't happen. This year the Mayor of Stockton-on-Tees (Eaglescliffe councillor John Fletcher) has worked with the Town Mayor of Thornaby (Councillor Mick Eddy) to find a solution and this afternoon the chains were to be handed over formally into the safe-keeping of Thornaby Town Council. Before that happened, with the help of the Stockton Mayor's Attendant, I obtained the photographs for the family history record. Both the Mayor's and the Mayoress' chains have the names inscribed on the backs of the links and now they're recorded for posterity. The chains have gone back now to the community which treasured them for so many years, still part of the Borough's heritage but very much part of the heritage of Thornaby (or South Stockton as it was once known).
I left the Town Hall with my precious photographs and called at a nearby market stall for some veg when I bumped into a former student and friend whom I haven't seen for a few months. Her husband was very keen to tell me that he was voted a Community Champion for his work in Stockton in trying to help the Asian communities in central Stockton. It was lovely to catch up with them and to be able to add my congratulations.
All in all, a day of being reminded of the importance of community in our lives. We ignore it at our peril and it's right that we celebrate the diversity of our communities and the fact that Stockton Borough is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Thornaby Issues

The council day was dominated by a special meeting of Executive Scrutiny committee to hear two requests for call in of Cabinet decisions. This is quite a technical procedure to allow front line councillors to question whether the Cabinet has acted properly in coming to a decision. So it can't change the decision but it can ask cabinet to look again in the hope that it might change. In the past this was difficult because Labour a majority and so not only held every cabinet seat but also most of the committee seats. Now we have a Labour/Tory cabinet so there are two parties looking at whether they should be giving blind support to their members on cabinet!
The two issues being looked at were both Thornaby ones - the closure of Parkview Residential Home and the sale of Thornaby Town Hall. Both are very contentious.
Parkview is the last residential home in SBC hands. It hasn't had as much investment in the past as needed to keep it at the high standard it was originally in building terms. That, we're told, is because the council agreed a policy in 2000 of moving towards Homes for Life - providing aids & adaptations as well as working with the builders of new housing to ensure that people can stay in their own homes until they need nursing care in which case they can go into a nursing home. There's also a "halfway house" known as Extra Care, delivered in partnership with housing associations. This is all very well, but to the people associated with the home at Parkview it feels like betrayal. The question that had to be answered yesterday was "did the cabinet carry out its decision making process after proper consultation, with due regard for human rights and in an open and transparent way?" In the end it was obvious that the real question which couldn't be answered is "can we ever agree on a definition of proper consultation?". The cabinet member (Labour) is strongly of the opinion that everyone was consulted. The senior officers agree - they held lots of meetings with interested people. The interested people disagree - they feel that they were presented with a take it or leave it proposal. The alternative to closure wasn't fully explored and neither officers nor cabinet member had any intention of doing so because it would conflict with the council's policy. Never mind the fact that Homes for Life can't be delivered yet because there isn't the funding to give everyone the adaptations they need and the developers are still building houses as I write which don't have doors wide enough for wheelchairs, don't have electric sockets and switches at an accessible height for all and so on.
At the end of over 2 hours I was left with a very uncomfortable feeling that the process, followed according to the letter of the rules, hadn't really served the people of Thornaby at all well. It was obvious that the cabinet wasn't going to change its mind and I couldn't see any point in referring it back just to prolong the false hopes in the minds of the people.
By the time we'd finished that item we were 5 minutes past the closing time of the meeting and still had the Thornaby Town Hall issue to discuss. Sadly, I had to give my apologies - having foolishly believed the timing given, I'd arranged to take my elderly mother, who'd been ill this week, her lunch and it wouldn't wait any longer. Again, I was later told, after all the arguments were put the voting went against the call in so that decision stands as well. A truly iconic building, in the best sense of the word, which should have had money spent on it years ago has been left to go to wrack and ruin almost. Long before I was on this council the Liberal Democrats, led by Cllr Suzanne Fletcher, proposed not spending as much money on Holy Trinity church in Stockton and using some of it on Thornaby Town Hall. The then Labour administration voted against that and it fell. Sadly, at least one of those Labour members is now a member of Thornaby Independents but seems to have forgotten about the chance to stand up and be counted all those years ago. But such is politics. We all make mistakes from time to time. The art is to learn from them.