Labour should not try to win any more seats on Liverpool council
Labour now has 63 councillors out of the 90 available seats on Liverpool council.
It is conceivable that the party could have more than 70 councillors after next May.
I'm going to suggest something rather odd here - that the Labour party should not actually try that hard to win any extra seats next year.
However, even if they did little campaigning they will take seats off the Liberal Democrats because of their unpopularity.
Some in the Labour party already think it has been too quick to accept defectors. To be fair to Cllr Hinnigan she says she will not seek re-election in May and that she could simply no longer remain a Lib Dem.
The truth is Labour does not need defectors to swell its numbers. Now the party has two thirds of the seats it realistically does not need any more.
Yet there are many talented and enthusiastic members of the local Labour party keen to become councillors.
The more councillors a party has the harder it is to keep discipline. For one thing there are not enough jobs to keep people sweet. The cabinet only has 10 councillors on it.
Sure there are select committees and outside appointments, but the reality is that there are already not enough positions. Adding more councillors to the mix will exacerbate that problem.
Look at the problems Roberto Mancini is having at Manchester City trying to keep all his players happy. How long will it be before a Labour councillor has a Carlos Tevez moment?
9 Comments
Leave a comment
Dale Street Associates
David Bartlett
City editor of the Post and Echo covering politics, regeneration, and urban affairs.
Read My Posts »
You've obviously given this a lot of thought. So how do you see it working out? Joe Anderson says "ease off, guys. Let those Lib Dems keep a few seats". Hard-working Labour candidates do as they're told. Instead of canvassing their socks off, and getting voters to oppose the Coalition's policies, they urge their supporters to vote for Lib Dems. When voters express some incredulity at this turn of events, Labour candidates explain that they'd prefer to lose, otherwise Labour will have too many councillors. Meanwhile Keaveney, Clucas, Clein, and Christ knows who else lie back content in the knowledge that Labour is doing all the work for them. Then, come next May, Labour wins no new seats in Liverpool. A deeply grateful Keaveney and a mightily relieved Clucas publicly thank Joe Anderson & his colleagues for working hard to ensure they didn't win any more seats. Down in Westminster, Nick Clegg thanks the Liverpool Labour Party for helping Lib Dems retain their seats in the city. And David Bartlett, political editor of the Daily Post & Echo, writes a story describing how the result represents a major turning point for Labour, now a Party that campaigns to lose. All seems pretty reasonable to me. Time to run the idea past Joe Anderson. Good luck with that.
Rather than get more. I think in the case of Joe Anderson we have one too many already.
Get this and you could not make it up.
We have the contract for David McElhinney’s LDL up for renewal and what does Joe do. He appoints David McElhinney to be in charge of the council on a temporary basis. David McElhinney then removes all the senior managers from the city and replaces them with people he knows.
Then surprise, surprise David McElhinney (council) then renews the contract with David McElhinney ( LDL ).
So people don’t think is somehow dodgy, Joe gets Cherrie Blair the QC to (eventually) say that this is an ok thing to do . Only thing is he told her that the contract renewal was going to be done and dusted long before David McElhinney takes up the job when the negotiations were done when he was heading up the council.
So job done and David McElhinney goes back to his LDL job but decides to stay on at the council as well as a member of the senior management team. One of his jobs is to head up the Freedom of Information Team so if anyone has any questions about any councils dodgy dealings with LDL you get to ask David McEllhinney and he will tell you right.
Some of this gets out and Joe says ‘Find me who leaked’ and ‘No one talk to the press’.
People will say it could only happen in Liverpool and while past councils may have made you feel embarrassed to say you are from Liverpool, this is the first time I would feel ashamed.
Voted Labour last time but would I vote Labour again with Joe at the helm – not for all the nine bob notes in the city.
what a strange article- can only assume Mr B that you want to bring up PR again or introduce some sort of quota
The Lib dems are the masters of their own desruction and it isnt solely Liverpool where they are losing votes and after yesterday councillors.
so please put the potty plans away and let us the good people decide how few Lib dems we want next may
ex labour voter, in their response to this FOI request about McElhinney, the Council are now saying that he never stopped being a member of the Senior Management Team
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/has_david_mcelhinney_been_appoin#comment-21769.
Not what they said a few months ago. And we all thought he was running LDL for BT, and our Management Team were running the council.... for us taxpayers. Still, it explains very clearly why no-one could ever get any proper information out of them, and why they don't have to attend meetings with councillors to explain themselves.
The man from BT clearly said no - and that was the end of that.
As for Joe Anderson, I cannot understand why he doesn't realise that this is not going to go away without a lot more explanation.
It was bad enough when the LibDems appeared so utterly supine about tackling this - but it was their idea to start with, so it was regrettable and spineless, but understandable.
What's Labour's excuse??
For refreshing the contract based on the "recommendation" of an Ernst & Young report that cannot have taken longer than 2 weeks to put together (and they are refusing to tell anyone just what E&Y were asked to do, what info they were given).
For appointing Ged Fitzgerald to the board of LDL and the board of the Arena. Along with Phil Halsall, who until paid off with a whopping payoff presided over Liverpool's finances when they were officially the worst in the country, and who is now Chief Exec of Lancashire County Council. Wanted his financial expertise, did they?
The Arena is a private company that is wholly owned by Liverpool City Council, which receives services from LDL (and praises it fulsomely, in public). But it doesn't actually pay LDL for these services. Just BT, or whatever subsidiary it put these transactions through.
Explanations??
I just popped on to read the blogs from the Conservative Party conference – in the hope of seeing a response to #catgate – and came upon the above posts and comments.
“Tax payer” is quite right to suggest that there is a forum for the public to ask questions of this nature, although I would suggest they are posed with a bit less commentary and a bit more focus. That is the Finance and Resources Select Committee, that I chair, and which is a scrutiny committee of Liverpool City Council and holds the Deputy Leader (who has the finance and resources brief on the cabinet) to account. Last month the Leader and the Chief Executive also came in to talk about how the budget process will be run this financial year.
We also have a scrutiny panel for LDL which is chaired by Cllr Andrew Makinson and which last met to consider the refreshed contract a few months ago.
If you have proper questions that you can frame without prejudice, the select committee would be the place to do it. If you wish to take this route then you need to email your questions to the committee clerk, Danny Clare in good time before the next meeting.
I do my best to secure answers for people, and to ensure that the committee behaves in a transparent and accountable manner although commercially sensitive material is usually considered in camera. If we cannot answer something for such reasons then we will be able to explain that at the time, but if information ought reasonably to be forthcoming then I will do my best to ensure that it is.
Louise,
You're a breath of fresh air. I don't think you're being sufficiently energetic with regard to the whole LDL scandal - and it is a scandal - but the very fact that you are willing to communicate with the rest of us marks you out as unusual.
We're about to have a relatively public debate on how the council can save £90 million pa. At a time when we understand the council to be paying £23 million pa more than it needs to, because of the LDL contract. These facts alone don't make for a scandal. What is scandalous is the remarkable decision to have the same person acting as chief exec for customer and supplier at the time of the contract renegotiation.
You're clearly an intelligent and principled person. I accept your point that questions need to be balanced, non-prejudicial and unemotive. Some of the heat you can detect on this topic arises because we're all being kept in the dark. Please take a look at 'whatdotheyknow.com' and see how evasive the council's responses have been to some very reasonable questions.
Louise,
While I thoroughly agree with just about everything John Q has written, I would like to spell out the reason for emotional, unbalanced and possibly prejudicial postings like mine.
I’m not political – but I do care about accountability and transparency – governance, in other words. And we appear to have truly appalling governance. So far as LDL is concerned, no select committee or scrutiny committee appears able to ever get the information they need to do their job. There’s a blatant example of this below.
If, as John Q suggests, you look at the answers given by the council to questions about the LDL contract over the last couple of years (and I am only referring to those on whatdoyouknow.com – but I imagine there will have been others), then the only possible conclusion you can reach is that the people who actually handle FOI requests, like, apparently, most councillors, believe, of their own initiative, or as instructed, that everything and anything to do with LDL is outside their remit. And that they cannot access information about it anyway – possibly because the council itself is not able to provide explanations because it doesn’t know the answers to the entirely legitimate and reasonable questions that people ask.
For instance, Julian Todd submitted a request on 5 October 2009 asking to see “ a list of all investigations... into the operation of Liverpool Direct...”, including a document entitled “Liverpool Direct Limited: Review” which had been discussed at a Corporate Services Select Committee meeting the week before, and referring to a quarter of a million pound investigation of the LDL contract by external consultants reported in the Echo on 2 October.
The response to this, on 21 December 2009, stated that 1) the KPMG report was not an investigation of LDL, and 2) that “Liverpool City Council has not commissioned out any investigations into LDL operations or business and contracts”.
A year later, on 27 September, the LDP leaked the famous 556k report written the previous June, which had taken a year to prepare. Two days later your predecessor as chairman of the finance select committee, Paul Clein, stated that neither he nor the LDL scrutiny committee (or indeed any other council committee) had known anything at all about this massive piece of work. Julian also requested this, on 30 September. He didn’t get it, of course. In the subsequent clarification, Kevin Symm, Senior Information Officer, explained that a report of this nature would not be made available to all councillors but would be reported to relevant decision makers – meaning the executive members responsible for making decisions about LDL and the relevant scrutiny committee members. Except, of course, that in this case not only was it not made available to the select committee – they didn’t even know it was being done.
There are a lot of other examples of the responses about LDL on the site – incoherent and evasive if not downright untruthful. But this example illustrates the problem – and the bypassing of the apparatus of accountability – select committees, scrutiny committtees etc., that has happened in the past.
If, as you rightly state, it is the responsibility of the select committee and the LDL scrutiny committee to hold the leadership to account, then you definitely need to be more energetic. You need to start by acknowledging that there is a legitimate public interest in getting to the bottom of this, and that to date the council – or parts of it – have, for whatever reason, not handled any of this properly. And that everyone appears to think that now the contract has been refreshed its back to business as usual.
The refresh proposal promised additional equity for the council, a non-executive director on the LDL board, more robust scrutiny, and greater transparency.
What progress has been made?
The LDL Scrutiny Panel doesn’t even have any meetings scheduled – let alone an effective work programme.
Have there been any benchmarking reports (they should always have been quarterly – but stopped after a single report)?
What other tools and mechanisms have been developed?
These aren’t questions for members of the public to bring up, they are the nuts and bolts of accountability, and you and your colleagues should be demanding answers. All that appears to have happened is that Ged Fitzgerald joins your colleague Alan Dean on the board – but the third, external director hasn’t been appointed. What about the shares? As for the rest, there has been the odd “report” on operations from LDL – self-serving clap trap about how wonderful they are with very little hard information – and the author of the report did not have to attend the committee to answer questions because of some “protocol” whereby LDL people don’t have to do things like that. Why not? What protocol?
I'd like to see councillors getting proper answers to these kind of questions without being prompted (or berated) by frustrated members of the public like me.
I too would like to applaud Louise. The feeling from the electorate is sometimes one of ‘put your cross there and I will see you in 4 years time’ so dialogue is good.
The position of Joe’s labour group now is similar to the original position of Mike Storey’s Lib Dems. Liverpool Labour group have the city for the next 10 years following Clegg’s actions at national level just as Storey had the city for 10 years following Militant’s time here.
While Mike Storey would like to see himself remembered as the person who brought Capital of Culture to Liverpool, the truth is that, for everyone who remembers him for that, there will be 1 that will remember him for leaving under a cloud following those e-mails and for every one of those there will be 2 who remember him for having his eye off the ball for most of the time and allowing David McElliney’s LDL to (allegedly) rob the city blind..
Reputation in politics is everything and unfortunately one is judged by the company one keeps.
Whatever the skill set of David McElhinney, he should never have been given the role of temporary Chief Exec in Liverpool and, unless there was some absoultely unbreakable reason, the contract should never have been renewed based on past performance and bad publicity.
The continued presence at the top table of the BT salesman is a different matter and that can be changed if there is a will to change it from the Labour group.
With BT being his primary employer, his loyalties will obviously be to his primary employer.
For anyone to believe that what is best for BT will be best for Liverpool would have to be very naïve in the extreme.
If I were a BT salesman sat at the top table and with obvious influence with the new senior management team there what I would be looking to do is what Suffolk tried – a virtual authority with practically everything outsourced.
(To look at BT’s track record and what they offered at another local authority -. Suffolk look at the link below and would a Labour council in Liverpool want that kind of national press ?.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/dec/16/suffolk-council-bt-overspend
)
(Also see Essex council and what they were getting from BT and what they did about it )
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1820820/bt-sue-council-unlawful-contract-termination
)
And to complete dh's list of BT's less successful ventures with local authorities, consider the case of Rotherham, which had a joint venture with BT called RBT (Connect), set up in the wake of LDL, while Ged Fitzgerald was Chief Executive of the Rotherham Council. Even though this one was actually making a profit - see their accounts - they decided to pull the plug two months ago(http://www.rotherhamadvertiser.co.uk/news/89666/council-ditches-200m-bt-comms-deal.aspx), after people started complaining and asking questions in the wake of the rumours about massive overspends at Customer Direct in Suffolk
(http://www.rotherhamadvertiser.co.uk/news/89075/council-stands-by-200m-it-deal.aspx) reported in the Guardian in dh's link above. I linked to this last week in another comment on this blog, but it's worth repeating here, I think.