Matthew Jenkins' BlogA blog about Worcester, politics and the environment

Having been elected on 2nd May as the County Councillor for St. Stephen, it has been a busy couple of weeks. There have been presentations from the directors of the various departments, explaining their role and the challenges that they face. There has been regular reference to the goal of cutting £20 million per year from the total council budget.

Due to large cuts in funding from central government, coupled with a lower than average council tax in Worcestershire, there are some important and difficult decisions to be made over the coming years. I hope that I will be able to improve the decisions made and influence the long term direction of the County Council.

I will use this blog to regularly update people, in particular my constituents, of what I’ve been working on. This will be in addition to the regular newsletters that we’ll deliver. I firmly believe that the more we keep people informed of what is happening locally and what the Green Party are doing about it, the greater the understanding there will be of how local politics works.

Following the current scandal about horse meat being found in various beef products, it highlighted an issue that is of concern to me and of many of those of a green persuasion politically. This is less an issue about food safety, or even about criminality, but about the wider issue of how food is currently produced.

The production of food has increasingly become just another big, international business, with long supply chains, involving much outsourcing upon further outsourcing. As a result, the companies that sell the food to us, the supermarkets, have only reassurances from the people that make the food as to what is in it. Yet, those reassurances are only as good as those further down the supply chain.

This vision of modern food production is the antithesis of the green approach. As much as possible, food should be grown and produced locally, keeping jobs in the area, reducing the huge costs, both monetary and environmental, of transportation.

The slow death of the high street is reported regularly. The current food production model is just another way in which this imminent demise is getting closer. Rather than buying our fruit, vegetables, meat, cheese and other foodstuffs locally, we prefer the convenience of getting everything from one place, the supermarket.

The more we can source food locally, grow it ourselves where possible, the better the local community will be. As with much of life, reducing everything, in this case food, merely to economics, we lose sight of the bigger picture of how every choice we make can affect the world that we live in. Taking small steps, such as using your local butcher more often, can, over time, have a significant impact. If we don’t resist the current global, multinational business model of food production and distribution, we may find the consequences hard to swallow.

In November, the County Council is expected to sign a 25-year contract with Mercia Waste Management for a £120 million incinerator at Hartlebury trading estate. As the paper reported recently, there are concerns that the incinerator could end up costing over £1 billion. Less expensive and more environmentally-friendly options for dealing with waste appear not to have been considered. If the County Council decides to sign the contract for the incinerator, it could have a huge impact on services and taxpayers.

I attended a recent (13/09/12) County Council meeting to ask some specific questions concerning the possible costs of the incinerator. They were:

1. What are the total overall costs of the proposed incinerator including financing, life cycle and maintenance costs?
2. What has the council agreed as the affordability envelope?  (I.e., the extra costs that would be taken from other budgets).
3. Has the council risk assessed costs arising from future environmental legislation?

I’m still awaiting their answers.

Following the success of the Paralympics and the impact it has had on how many people view those with disabilities, it is imperative that Worcestershire County Council stops its plans to force disabled people into care homes against their wishes.

The Maximum Expenditure Policy, which has been widely criticised by disability rights groups, will limit the choice of those disabled people who wish to live in their own home if the cost of their care is above that of being looked after in a care home.

The Paralympics has shown that people with disabilities are just as determined as able bodied people to achieve in life. WCC should not be trying to stifle this determination to lead a life in the community by forcing disabled people into institutional care.

A happy Neil Laurenson - Worcester City Councillor

Members of the Green Party, such as myself, are celebrating our first ever electoral success in local elections in Worcester. Neil Laurenson won in the St. Stephen ward of Worcester with nearly 50% of the vote.

It feels great to be part of this success, even if I only played a small part in it. Neil and Louis Stephen (Party Chairman) have put in the hard work in the ward over the past 2 years and they should be congratulated.

It shows that people will vote for a candidate who will work hard for his constituents and for a party who have principles that they stick to.

The latter has been highlighted over the past week, due to our electoral success helping to create a situation where no party had an overall majority. There was immediate pressure on the Green Party, and Neil in particular, to join with either Labour or the Conservatives. However, rather than looking to claim power for ourselves, we attempted to persuade the other parties to open up the City Council Cabinet to all parties. Ideally, we wanted a return to the Council itself having more say in the running of Worcester, rather than just a small number in the Cabinet.

We may not have achieved our desired outcome, as the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives formed a pact short of full coalition, but we are still in a position to influence matters. Indeed, our proposal for opening up the decision-making process to more parties has been picked up by these two (we’ll have to see to what extend, though). Plus, we have demonstrated to the electorate of Worcester that we are a party of principle, rather than one merely eager for power.

Hopefully, this initial success will be a springboard towards further success in Worcester. Watch this space…

A week after the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats formed, I wrote about the possibilities of a new politics, where the two parties would work together for the good of the country and, if successful, then this more cooperative approach would herald a new style of politics.

How wrong I was. The Liberal Democrats seem to have been subsumed into the Conservatives, losing their identity. Consequently, they were punished at the local elections and the AV referendum. Rather than acting as a brake on the more right-wing aspects of the Conservative Party in power, the Liberal Democrats have allowed the Conservatives to propose reforms to the NHS and other areas that ideologically beyond anything stated in their manifesto.

The Conservatives have used the coalition claim that they came together for the good of the country, to push forward their own ideological programme. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats have not felt able to criticise anything that the Conservatives have proposed.

The official opposition, the Labour Party, have their own problems, under a new leader still finding his feet. Plus, they are struggling to criticise many of the coalition’s proposals, such as university tuition fees, because ideologically they agree with many of them, e.g., tuition fees, internal market in the NHS, etc.

Thank goodness there is Caroline Lucas making a stand, plus campaigning groups such as 38 Degrees.