Re-Cycling

Sadly, I'm going to miss the Labour Group discussion tonight, to help inform the plans being developed by Heidi Alexander (Deputy Mayor) to improve on our waste recycling targets. I did send her a suggestion about split street bins - good not just because a lot of litter collected is cans and bottles (assuming not too many kebabs get put in with them); but as a visible reminder to people of our (and their) commitment.

Worse still, I can't go on the Sustainable Development Committee visit to the 'Murf' (Materials Recycling Facility) in Greenwich, next Monday, to find out first-hand that they can indeed magically separate the tins, paper, glass and plastic - if they put it through a big enough mangle.

But I have bought myself a new folding bike from Decathlon!

Relaxation exercise

A rather hectic week, filled mostly with wearing my 'real job' hat, publicising the new national access management federation for education (which we're not supposed to acronym-ise... but I can see some possibilities), and negotiating for the next lot of grants that will keep my team at LSE working on this sort of stuff.

The street surgery in Elsinore Road last Sunday went well; 4 or 5 substantial bits of casework (more than we get at the average monthly drop-in session - just from one street!). One a really complex set of problems, most of which I should pass on to MP Jim Dowd.

Now I've got a bit of time to take it easy, and catch up with various things.

On the streets

Back home from the CFL Conference, slightly inspired by high-level assurances that the Labour Party is indeed becoming more open to free thought. ...and by a fortuitous open bottle of wine found in the Media Centre kitchen at lunchtime by my friend Nick Trier (I'm not recommending that blog at all, but I can't find a definitive website for Nick and he was definitely the Labour candidate for Dorking South in May).

Tomorrow morning we're doing a street surgery session in Elsinore Road. Paul the local Party organiser has rapidly produced us a spot-on leaflet (on Thursday morning), Alan and Paul have delivered it (on Thursday evening), and Susan and I will be knocking on their doors from 10am, helped (I'm assured) by Jim Dowd, and whoever turns up from the branch.

The Labour Party catches on!

I'm at an interesting conference today, and Tom Geldart is now speaking about future methods of e-campaigning. I'm not going to blog what the Labour Party's next tranche of secret techno-weaponry will be; but one of the 'problems' Tom identifies is people's disengagement with 'traditional' party-based politics, and I can't help thinking this means that we (Labour Party elected representatives) should be more free to behave/speak/blog in less partisan ways. I'm all for less control-freakery by political parties, starting with my own - and I still firmly regard Labour as my own!

The Perils of Outsourced IT

I'm not vain enough to expect anyone noticed, but I've been offline (totally, 404, etc) since sometime on Friday. This was because I decided to ditch the over-priced, under-capable web-hosting company I've been using and switch to a new one. I thought I'd manage to do it all in the early hours of Saturday morning, but (following my very polite request to 'take my business elsewhere') they decided to do all the things that disabled access to lewisham.org.uk on their hosts, promptly at 5pm on Friday evening ...and wait until Monday morning (and several emails and a phone call from me) before they did the bit that enabled my new 'chosen business partner' to take over the domain. By which time, of course, I was out for meetings at work, and couldn't do all the other things (that I'd expected to do on Friday night or Saturday) to get things set-up, and back to the point where I can blog again.

So, thanks for not much, Globalgold (no, you're not getting a link!), and I hope lewisham.org.uk will thrive at 123-Reg (which is part of Pipex, which has been around the Internet even longer than I have).

Of course, with just a mere 8Mb ADSL service to my house (at my expense, please note, not the Council-tax-payers of Lewisham!), I don't have much choice but to outsource essential IT services such as web-hosting. Lewisham Council has no such excuse, but nonetheless decided to "outsource it's brain" (my description, when I argued, unsuccessfully, against the Council Leader who was determined to do this in 2000. Their 'chosen business partner' (chosen from a short-list of one) was Fujitsu Services, who have done a magnificent job of proving me right (indeed, a master of understatement) for the past 5 years. I'm pleased that Mayor Steve Bullock has taken the brave decision to dump them, terminating the contract early), and contracting with Sungard Vivista to take over some of it (with some functions coming back in-house).

I sincerely hope my experience isn't a tiny reflection of the Council's... Well, I suppose I could offer to keep the lewisham.gov.uk website up-and-running at lewisham.org.uk ;->

Bending an ear

Had a great meeting early this morning - Robert Massey, Lewisham Cabinet Member for Children & Young People came to visit the School Council at Perrymount (about time the School Council got its' own bit of the school website...), who've been bending my ear about places to play (not enough of them) around the school and where they live. They kept him talking for about an hour in the school library, and there are 2 or 3 places I need to go and have a look at where something might be done. Now, where can we put a skate-park in Perry Vale, that kids will feel safe in, and the noise won't annoy the neighbours too much???

(There may be a photo of this important summit meeting to come, taken by one of the school staff. But Robert took my advice and didn't get persuaded to pose - unlike one of his predecessors ;->)

I predict a riot, or, back to the Nineties

What I missed last night (because the ALMO board meeting went on a bit) was getting to the Children (etc) Select Committee to hear the item about reorganising Special Needs Education. Perrymount School (where I'm chair of govs) is a mainsteam school, but with quite a few kids who have mobility and medical needs (and a very nice accessible building). Meadowgate (where my wife Jacq is chair of govs) is a Special School, and would be affected radically - but probably in some quite positive ways. Jacq was supposed to be giving evidence to the committee. Several interests to declare there, I guess, if I had been in time.

So... I went downstairs to where the sort-of-parallel public meeting was going on (at the same time as the Select Committee??? - why???), which was packed out (standing room only, really!) with mostly pretty cross parents of kids with special needs, who are not being well-served by our policies and services, whilst at the same time straining our education budgets to bursting point. I certainly didn't envy any of the council officers who'd been put up the front to face this angry mob.

Strangely, I'd just (mostly for nostalgic reasons) unearthed a video copy of the "Town Hall" BBC2 fly-on-the-wall series, filmed in Lewisham in 1991-92, which opens with a not-too-different education-inspired riot - with a not-too-different cast! Spooky! (Not recommended viewing for new councillors of nervous dispositions, and I can't find it online anywhere, but if you insist you can find a partial copy of the series via the LSE Library catalogue.)

"What ahbart moi drains!"

The ALMO ('council' housing management) meeting last night held no big surprises - although it (oops - we!) face a tough job getting most of Lewisham's housing services (including repairs) up to the "two star" standard needed to bag the essential government grant.

As luck would have it, this morning I got a housing case on the phone (the first one - surprising!) - some poor woman with a too-familiar tale of a promised new bathroom, the plumbers coming in early June, dissappearing a week later with bath and basin non-functional, making an appointment to come back and finish the job 4 weeks later, not showing up all that day, then a letter of "we couldn't gain entry, so you're at the back of the queue" (I paraphrase - don't sue me - I'm sure it wraps more words around it than that!). I think, though, that I managed to swiftly catch the right housing officer (one who seems to know the ropes) on the phone, and get something happening.

(Anyone who's been to enough tenants forum meetings will know where the title of this article comes on that agenda)

Remember the ALMO

I've been nominated onto the "ALMO Shadow Board". That sounds a bit sinister until you know it's the Arms Length Management Organisation (for Lewisham social housing), and it has a "shadow board" just until it's fully constituted. Seems like a good way of managing what used to be "council housing" - within the constraints imposed on us by central government (Thatcher's central government originally, to be fair!). I've got a briefing arranged with the interim Director of it today; hope it doesn't turn out like those explanations of "how PFI works" - of which I still haven't got enough PhDs in Economics to get the point!

This evening I have a meeting of the Lewisham Disability Coalition Trustees, which I'm still on as a non-Council representative (and want to stay as such if possible). Cllr Bentley has got the official Council 'seat', and I helped him out the other day with a quick low-down on how LDC works (and some of its' recent history).

Two Clicks Away Can Be OK!

Cllr Andrew Milton (I don't know where he gets the time to keep up several blogs) seems to have got in first with news of Lewisham Council's landmark ruling (;->) about links to "potentially political content". Basically it says that the Council (even on web pages about individual councillors, like these two) can't include anything "political" (find long definition for yourself!); even though what we do as politicians must, I suppose, all be "political" (just as most things an electrician does are probably "electrical"). Even though our pages mention which parties we represent, it's not allowable to include links to the websites of each party.

But it is, since last week, allowable to link to a ("non-political") URL, which in turn includes links to something that might be "political" (such as a councillor's personal homepage or blog which, if we're doing what the voters, presumably, think we're paid for as some of their elected politicians, probably includes "politics"...). Thus "Two clicks away can be OK"!

I think this all makes the Council look a bit silly, and as if it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of information, references and the Web. But assuming our lawyers' interpretations are correct, it's the laws governing Lewisham (and all other local authorities) that are 'an ass'.

Andrew Milton has decided to use his personal blog as an intermediate link to his councillor's blog. Being of a more infrastructural turn of mind, I got the circular and swiftly registered the domains twoclicksaway.org and non-political.org, (£8.99 a year being a small price to pay for a good joke) and thought about the little web-service that I need to run on them, to create a content-free (and definitely politics-free) intermediate page. Then I can offer this to anyone who needs such a 'political firewall' (maybe there's a Chinese market... Hmmm!). Sometimes I wish I could be bothered to make lots of money out of ideas like this - but it seems a lot simpler to just do them on a sort of Open Source basis.