Is it all falling apart?
The signs proclaim Sandwell “A Great Place, with Great People and Great Prospects”.
A fourth ingredient Great Performance has been quietly dropped not only because it does not fit the signs, it does not fit the situation; nor Sandwell socialist council’s administrative or service performance.
But as any Sandwell council spokesman would point out; that’s three out of four and look at the prospects. Sandwell council mouthpieces are always keen to cover deficiencies by promising jam tomorrow when the bread presented today is mouldy.
Unfortunately when Sandwell council tops any table, the list is of the worst. It always ends up at the bottom of those measuring achievement.
Here’s a ten point guide to the council’s recent progress administratively and in service provision.
In Sandwell you are more likely to have your personal data kept by the council stolen or leaked to third parties than in any other place but one in the country. In the three years to April 2014 this happened 187 times in Sandwell. In Dudley there were 3 incidents in the same period.
In 2014/2015 Sandwell was top of the league among local councils for complaints of council maladministration by its residents to the local government Ombudsman. With an average of over two complaints for every week of the year, 118 in total, Sandwell council beat all the other 9 councils in the Black Country and Staffordshire. The Ombudsman found the vast majority of complaints against Sandwell merited. Neighbouring Walsall was subject to less than half the complaints in Sandwell.
Guilty of “mismanagement and misconduct” was how the Charity Commission judged Sandwell council for failing over an 18 month period to file proper accounts for a charity it administers in Smethwick. The Commission categorised this as a “breach of legal duties” and the reasons given for the failure ”not a legitimate excuse”
Big brother is watching you in Sandwell. The council has 706 CCTV cameras trained on us, over 3 times the number used in Wolverhampton (208) and almost 8 times the number used in Dudley (90). Many might think this makes Sandwell safer but in 2014/15 there was a suspect arrested for only just over 2% of the incidents recorded by the Sandwell cameras (119 arrests out of 4,400 incidents)
Can’t pay, won’t pay, welcome to Sandwell. Cash strapped council fails to collect rent and rates.
In June 2015, 11,677 tenants were in arrears with their council house rent with a staggering £3million owed (3 times the amount owing in Wolverhampton and twice that in Dudley) Usually our local Paul Daniels, finance chief Cllr Steve Eling would have attributed this to “cuts” but he was silenced by the council’s inflation busting 4.5% council house rent rise in April 2015.
On top of this, £2.2million was owed by council tax payers. Steve could explain this; “Some people merely forgot to pay or pay late” So it’s not just local Labour councillors who suffer convenient amnesia.
It’s clean, it’s fresh and it isn’t Sandwell. In the last three years there have been over 12,000 reported incidents of fly tipping in the borough and the problem appears to be growing. Last year saw 3830 instances and cost £236,000 to clean up. An aid to fly tipping is the number of derelict buildings and patches of waste ground, often council owned, in the borough. But in some areas, public green spaces are routinely neglected by the council and become dumps. Despite the prevalence of the problem, not a single offender has been prosecuted in Sandwell in the last three years. Sounds like a job for Sherlock.
- A careless employer, Sandwell council spends approximately £100,000 yearly paying employee compensation claims. £100,000 is also the annual salary offered for the newly created post of Director of Business and Commercial Transformation whose job is …to cut costs.
8.Cutting the cost of care.
When Sandwell budgets are framed, cuts are usually borne by the vulnerable. So Sandwell pays home carers £12.17 per hour well short of the recommended national minimum of £15.74 and ranking in the lowest 25% of authorities in the country. Low pricing risks insufficient resources and training and threatens care standards for the frail and disabled. But Sandwell was the council which attempted to tax disability benefit in calculating housing benefit and needed a judge to say it was illegal.
9.. Vulnerable kids neglected. The Ofsted report on Sandwell’s Childrens’ Service which is responsible for protecting abused and at risk children was damning, branding the service inadequate. The council’s response was to deny those findings then to reduce the budget for that service by £7.16 million. Cllr. (Smoke and Mirrors) Eling said he did not expect the service to suffer because its bosses had saved money that had previously been wasted. Why Cllr. Eling had allowed the waste in the first place, he did not explain.
10.Education, education, education.
An Ofsted report in December 2015 found only 53% of Sandwell’s secondary schools to be good or outstanding, a rating which put Sandwell in the bottom 20 out of 150 local authorities. Children supremo, gum chewing Cllr Simon Hackett consoled us with “it is good to see that our children in Sandwell continue to get a good start in our primary schools”
Unfortunately, another report, published this month shows that one in five children leaving Sandwell primary schools failed to reach the required standard in reading, writing or maths, the essential competencies required for progression in education. Now tell us about secondary schools Cllr Hackett.
The people are great, so’s the place. But the people of Sandwell deserve more than they are getting in terms of service delivery and effectiveness. Too many times have they been promised great prospects. Too many times the promises have been unfulfilled.