Category Archives: Politics

Postings related to elections and general political stuff

Cuts, Local Government, National Politics

Is This Really a Top Priority?

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As a country we are currently facing billions of pounds worth of cuts, cuts in local services and funding, and as part of that thousands of redundancies for staff across the country including one hundred locally, and what does Eric Pickles (@ericpickles) choose to launch a crusade on? Not the damaging effects of widespread cuts to communities across the country, no, he launches a crusade over unnecessary roadsigns, railings and advertising hoardings.

Now admittedly there are quite a few examples, Flickr have a group with a few gems, indeed the BBC has today highlighted a few including one just down the road from us where Wokingham Borough Council Highways department have, rather than replace an out of date sign, just stuck a new, bigger sign in front of the old one. Messy, but I guess it saved a bob or two, and the council is of course under pressure due to the swinging cuts coming down from central government.

There are numerous, serious problems facing this country – should unnecessary road signs really be a top priority for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government?

American Politics

The Mythical Ground Zero Mosque

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There has been quite a bit of a furore of late over plans to “build a mosque at Ground Zero” in New York, the problem being that what’s proposed isn’t a mosque, and it isn’t at Ground Zero – not that that has stopped the American loony right from kicking up a fuss.

Over the past couple of days I’ve come across a couple of good links exploring what is going on. Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) wrote an excellent piece for the Guardian that was published on Monday that is well worth reading, however today thanks to my friend Jonathan (@digitaljonathan) I came across this great clip of Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) talking about the mosque, and what the unfounded opposition to it could mean for the USA – it’s a little long, but very well worth watching.

IT, Public Sector

The Problems With Public Sector IT

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Last night Mike Hadlow (@mikehadlow) posted a great blog about how he thought public sector IT could be fixed, coming from his perspective of a software developer working on public sector projects.

Public sector IT projects in the UK are renowned for overrunning, not working as expected and generally being an expensive drain on resources. Successive governments talk about taking IT projects in hand, but nothing seems to get done, and all the time there are a succession of high profile embarrassments, flops and cancelled projects.

I’ve had some experience working on government IT projects, and also come across people who have worked on them before and swore never again. In particular one contractor I worked with had just come off a large scale project for the NHS.

Like many big contracts it had been outsourced to one of the big corporate IT firms, who had put relatively junior project managers onto the project. They had the project plan, and were timeboxing – the problem being that at the end of each period they would just have the team move onto the next timebox, whether or not the previous one was finished. As this went on, they reported back to the civil servants in Whitehall that the project was proceeding according to plan, but when they reached the end, nothing worked as many of the deliverables for the many preceding timeboxes had been met. My contractor friend, who had many years of experience had tried early on to point out the issue to the project managers, but had basically been sent away as “just a contractor” by the young newly graduated project managers. As I said, after that experience he had sworn never to work on a public sector project again.

My experience was working on some defence projects. One in particular the company I worked for was called in for a second opinion on a system that the Army was purchasing and was being developed by a major defence IT contractor. Basically the project had hit major problems and we were consulting on what had gone wrong. On the Army side a quite senior soldier was running the project, and whilst I have no doubt he would know what to do in a battle, in an IT situation the defence contractor had taken him to the cleaners. Essentially they had got him to agree to a contract that left all the risk, and all the costs with the MoD, they basically paid for time and materials whether or not the fault that was being fixed was a bug in the software, or whatever. Again the company seemed to have put pretty inexperienced incompetent programmers who had made some fundamental programming and design errors, but as a result of the contract, the MoD were paying to fix the lot.

Many of my experiences chime with what Mike has said – the civil servants in charge of IT projects lack basic IT knowledge, and as a result don’t understand and can’t see when things are going wrong. They also rely extensively on outsourcing, something which in a number of private companies I have worked for is something to be avoided.

My experience has been that outsourcing works well if you have a clearly defined specification of what is needed. However in reality the vast majority of custom development projects are a moving target, as a result it needs a group of in house developers who are experienced developers but who also understand the business, working closely with the end users on an iterative basis. Working that way generally produces a system that more closely meets the requirements of the users, but at a lower cost. Mike highlights one such project working in that way that he has worked on that has successfully delivered, but unlike the high profile failures has largely gone unnoticed.

I can thoroughly  recommend reading Mike’s excellent piece, we can only hope that a few politicians read it too!

Housing Policy, Local Government

Shock! Are There Actually Some Wokingham Tories With Integrity?

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During the run up to the recent local elections I swapped a number of e-mails with both Gary Cowan, the sitting Tory councillor, and Steve Bacon, the Liberal Democrat challenger and former local councillor for our ward who had also run against Gary in the 2006 election. It started because I sent both of them an e-mail asking that they could run a campaign with integrity, and not produce a repeat of the last campaign with blatant misrepresentation particularly over housing. Sadly although Steve Bacon gave me an assurance, Gary didn’t, and then proceeded to campaign on a totally mythical and ludicrous assertion that the Liberal Democrats were proposing to put 12,000 houses on the Garrison site (yes that would be houses at a density of central London for those with calculators), and that the Tories were the only option for protecting Arborfield.

In the run up to the election Gary, like most of the other Tory candidates and Wokingham Borough Council itself had been squarely blaming the Labour government for the current housing numbers. One of Gary’s election flyers said the following:

The extra homes in Wokingham’s Core Strategy are required by the Labour government’s national policy and regional housing targets. If a Conservative government is elected they will abolish the high housing targets forced on Wokingham, leaving Wokingham Borough Council free to amend its plans and scale down the targets. If re-elected, as the lead Councillor for planning I would then ensure that our local plan was revised to spare the greenfields of Arborfield.

As we know, a Tory led government was elected on May 6th, and they duly abolished housing targets, therefore it was a bit of a surprise to most people in Wokingham to find that despite pressure from our local MP, who of course had been around on the doorstep backing the cut housing numbers message, and highlighting the same thing in his blog after the election, and the well known opposition of the vast majority of local residents to large scale housing developments, the local council seemed to be suggesting that numbers wouldn’t be cut significantly as they had already adopted their core strategy. This is even more peculiar considering that they, like many other councils had received this letter in August 2009 highlighting that an incoming Tory government would abolish regional spatial strategies and urging councils not to adopt core strategies – Wokingham Borough adopted their strategy in January 2010, four months before the current Tory government was elected and abolished housing targets.

Were the local Tories telling any old lies on their election material to win votes and never had any intention to cut housing? Did they not expect a Tory win at the General Election? Or are they just total muppets with no clue what they were doing when they adopted the strategy? I really don’t know, suffice to say back in June it really did start to look like Wokingham was doomed to go under a swathe of concrete and large scale housing development. I may not agree with John Redwood (@johnredwood) on many things, indeed I’m probably diametrically opposite to his position on some things, but at least he’s being consistent on this – he was elected on abolishing housing targets, his party has done that, and it’s the local council that is dragging and threatening to U-turn.

Roll forward to this week, and the headline on the Wokingham Times is “War breaks out over Wokingham housing targets”. The article again highlights the calls from residents to cut the numbers, and the intransigence from council leader David Lee who is unwilling to commit to reduce the target. Paul Gallagher, chair of the Emmbrook Residents Association highlights one possible reason – the new government still requires houses, so has switched from the Labour stick to a Tory carrot – Grant Shapps (@grantshapps) saying a couple of weeks back that “those councils who go for growth by providing planning permission now will reap the rewards” – so Paul is quite clear that the council, who regularly moaned about lack of funding almost as often as they moaned about Labour housing targets, would carry on with the unpopular targets to fill their coffers.

However, all is not lost, as the headline implied, the governing group on the council is not united. A number of local councillors have come out and said that if it comes to a vote over retaining the existing numbers, or cutting them, they would go for a cut. However there are suggestions from some of the Tories that they are worried that it will never come to a vote – the ten person executive, only one of whom has come out to say they are opposed to retaining the current numbers (and you guessed it, it isn’t Gary Cowan, despite his promise to protect the green fields of Arborfield), would take the vote alone without consulting the other 33 Tory councillors.

So are there some Wokingham Tories with integrity? Lets be fair, if you’d been saying for years that the numbers were too high, and being imposed by the Labour government, anyone with integrity could not do anything else but vote to cut the numbers could they?

Education

Five Things You Would Have Seen Today

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Today was A-Level results day, so during the day on TV and in the media you probably saw this:

  1. A carefully selected “representative cross section” of students, pre-checked to ensure they get good results of course, to open their A-Level Results live on TV.
  2. Newspapers and newspaper web sites with lots of pictures of carefully selected groups of girls leaping excitedly having got their A-Level results – hey look here are loads and loads of them.
  3. Pundits saying that A-Levels are easier than they were in the past, heightened this year by the arrival of the new A* grade because too many people are now getting A grades.
  4. Politicians highlighting that the results are a triumph for their policies better educating our children, or alternatively an indication of the failure of the other lots policies and a fall in standards.
  5. Lots of advice on what to do if you didn’t get your grades and have to go through clearing.

I probably should have written this list yesterday, because the whole results day routine is depressingly familiar. The media do the same thing every year – in fact they do the same thing on almost every Thursday in August every year as the different exam results come out on different weeks. This year was amusing by the appearance of the Sexy A-Levels blog, which highlights that unlike the TV channels who have to show a representative cross-section of students – so you get a mixture of boys and girls, a couple from an ethnic minority and so on – the impression that you get from the newspapers is that most A-Level students are overwhelmingly white, young and pretty girls.

This year the annual “A-Levels have got easier” discussion was boosted by the arrival of the new A* grade which was needed to distinguish the increasing numbers of students getting an A grade – certainly if you look at the graph of percentage of students awarded an A grade on the graph on this BBC News story the growth is striking, even compared to when I took my A-Levels back in 1991. Having said that, the difficult thing about any comparison like that is the effect it has on the young people today. There may be more people getting the top grade, but they still have to work hard to achieve those grades, so it is important to try to have the debate without denigrating their achievement. Having said that, not least from the point of view of people who have to distinguish between applicants, whether that be for university or job applications, there needs to be more delineation. The A* grade helps, but it does seem a bit like adding an extra large to a range of sizes, whilst simultaneously making all the other sizes slightly smaller.

All of that aside, I know some young people who have achieved the grades they needed, and are now excitedly looking towards starting at university in the autumn, many congratulations to them. I also know a few who missed out on what they needed, and are even now trying to work out what to do, and going through the stress of clearing, to them commiseration’s, but don’t feel downhearted – I also know plenty of people who had similar results, and whilst it seemed like the end of the world at the time, came through it, and in a number of cases said it was probably a good thing in the long run, taking them places that they weren’t expecting. Whatever happened, good results or not so good, it is a big change for everybody, and I’d just like to wish everybody who got their results today good luck for the future.