politics | Steve Woods

Tidy BS5 in the council chamber: the Mayor responds

07/08/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics

Bristol Mayor George Ferguson
Following my submission of a statement to last month’s full council meeting (posts passim), at which Hannah Crudgington’s video statement on fly-tipping received a standing ovation from Labour councillors, I’ve now received a written reply to my statement from Bristol’s elected Mayor, George Ferguson. Even though I had no opportunity to present my statement verbally to councillors due to the incompetent and thoroughly dreadful chairing of the full council meeting by Lord Mayor Clare Campion-Smith, all those submitting statements were promised a written response.

The response to my written statement has now been received and is reproduced in full below for the information and amusement of passing readers.

Dear Mr Woods,

Thank you for summiting [sic] your statement to Full Council in regards [sic] to the fly-tipping and litter issues you are currently experiencing in Easton.

Easton has historically been an area where greater resources have been needed, and this is still the case today: the Council provides more resources for this area to remove waste and litter than in most other parts of the city. The introduction of communal bins seems to have improved the situation in Easton; prior to their introduction there was more widespread fly tipping [sic] throughout the area. In some cases, however, this measure has led to fly-tipping occurring around the bins, as it has been observed in other parts of the city, from Clifton to St Pauls. The communal bin areas are proactively patrolled by our contractor, who responds to fly-tip and street cleansing reports made through Customer Services or submitted on webforms throughout Bristol. Training has been provided to our contractor’s operatives to search waste for evidence of its potential source & evidence is passed to Streetscene Enforcement Team to investigate.

We require the support of the public to help us identify offenders and would encourage all residents and visitors to Bristol to report incidents of fly-tipping they observe to Bristol City Council as soon as possible. To take enforcement action against offending individuals or businesses requires evidence and the more information we receive, the more likely we can build a case and target them. Recruitment is currently underway to return the Streetscene Enforcement Team to a full complement of 6 officers. This will allow for the officers to concentrate their activities within smaller areas and allow for more proactive work and operations. For instance, all businesses on Stapleton Road are currently in the process of being visited to check that they have relevant commercial waste contracts and make them aware that we are searching for evidence of commercial waste being deposited in the domestic communal bins. The Streetscene Enforcement Team continues to explore new ways of working with partners, both within the Council and local community, to target environmental crime and support improvements to the local environment. For this reason, we appreciate your efforts in working with us to achieve a cleaner Easton, and thank you for your patience while we effect the necessary improvements.

Yours sincerely,

(signed)

George Ferguson CBE
Mayor of Bristol

What strikes me about the response – apart from its occasionally abysmal English usage – is firstly its emollient, placatory tone: to begin with, it commiserates with me for the “fly-tipping and litter issues you are currently experiencing in Easton“. It’s not just now that I’m experiencing those so-called issues; I’ve watched the area get filthier for the last 4 decades!

Secondly, the response manages to duck a couple of major points, namely the disparity between the number of enforcement officers compared with the Council’s excessively large press, PR and communications staff (posts passim), as well as the response (if any) of council officers and Assistant Mayor Daniella Radice to ideas from elsewhere around the UK and world for combating fly-tipping (these have probably been kicked into the long grass by both the Assistant Mayor and officers under time-honoured “not invented here” rules. Ed.).

As the response was unsatisfactory, I shall be attempting to make another statement to full council in September and will draw the Mayor’s attention to the shortcomings in the response.

Finally, Hannah Crudgington received a reply to her video statement that was almost identical to mine. Isn’t it good to know that IT skills down the Counts Louse have reached the cut and paste level? 😉
Tidy BS5 in the council chamber

21/07/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

Today there’s a full meeting of the elected members of Bristol City Council at 6 pm.

Each council meeting has a slot of 30 minutes allotted to statements from members of the public to raise concerns.

This evening’s meeting will be treated to 2 statements by Tidy BS5 campaigners, namely Hannah Crudgington and your ‘umble scribe.

In addition, Hannah will be screening a video of one minute duration to the assembled councillors and officers.

Hannah will also be making a statement to councillors after her video. This statement reads as follows:

I have made my home and set up my business in Easton of the last 12 years or so.

It is extremely sad to report that after an initial improvement and vibrancy, the last five years have seen a huge deterioration and this is largely due to ill thought decisions by people without practical experience of the area at grass roots level.

Bristol City Council has been made well aware of the issues of waste in BS5 and yet the problems are getting worse. In the last year, it has gone from fly tipping and litter to fly-tipping, litter and a horrendous stench. So it is no longer an annoyance or inconvenience but more a health hazard.

So what is Bristol City Council doing to resolve this, what are your time scales and finally would you put up with this?

My statement will be:

It is with a sense of profound despair and regret that I’ve watched the problem of litter and fly-tipping in the Easton area over the past few decades.

Given that Bristol is European Green Capital for 2015, it’s an absolute disgrace that scenes such as those in Hannah Crudgington’s video are a daily occurrence in the inner city.

However, fly-tipping and litter are not just an eyesore; they are a health and safety risk, attract vermin such as rats and gulls, make people feel insecure on the streets and attract anti-social behaviour; residents have observed people urinating on piles of fly-tipped rubbish and using the communal bins installed by the council as a screen for defecating in the streets.

Would you tolerate this in the area where you live? We refuse to.

Concerned residents have been raising these matters with local councillors and council officers for well over one year. Given the glacial pace at which Bristol City Council moves, it has taken that long for streetscene enforcement officers to turn their attentions to Easton and Lawrence Hill. Whilst I appreciate the enforcement officers’ efforts I feel that their presence may be a matter of too little, too late.

Furthermore, the total number of these enforcement officers is very small: there are only 6 of them to cover the whole city, far too few for the size of the city’s problems with litter and fly-tipping, which it must be remembered is not exclusive to the 2 wards in which I and other Tidy BS5 campaigners are working. I regularly receive reports – as I’m sure ward councillors do – of problems with litter and fly-tipping in Ashley, Bedminster, Fishponds, St George, Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston, to name a few more areas of our city blighted by environmental crime.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the city council employs 43 press and PR officers – more than seven times the number of streetscene enforcement officers. This suggests to me that the city council has a warped sense of priorities: it has a real citywide problem with litter, fly-tipping and other environmental crimes; it does not have a problem with weasel words.

Communal bin in Villiers Road, Easton attracting dumped furniture

The one real disappointment is that Bristol’s elected mayor George Ferguson will not be in attendance at the council meeting. Our George has junketed off to Rome, where he has deigned to give the Pope an audience.
ODF 1.2 published as international standard

17/07/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Politics, Tech

The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) Version 1.2, the native file format of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite and many other applications, has been published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC.

ODF defines a technical schema for office documents including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations.

“ODF 1.2 is the native file format of LibreOffice. Today, ODF is the best choice for interoperability, because it is widely adopted by applications and is respected by applications in every area”, says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “ODF makes interoperability a reality and transforms the use of proprietary document formats into a relic of the past. In the future, people will tell stories about incompatible document formats between two releases of proprietary office suites as a bygone problem”.

ODF is developed by the OASIS consortium. The current version of the standard was published in 2011 and then was submitted to ISO/IEC in 2014.

The standard is available in three parts – schema, formula definition and packages – from the repository of Publicly Available Standards as a free download, as follows:

1. Schema
2. Formula Definition
3. Packages

The standard is also available from the OASIS ODF TC website.

ODF 1.2 is supported by all the leading office suites and by a large number of other applications. It has been adopted by the UK Cabinet Office as the reference for all documents exchanged with the UK Government (posts passim) and is currently proposed as the reference standard by the Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité 1.9.9 of the French Government. In addition, ODF 1.2 has been adopted by many European public sector organisations. Furthermore, in Brazil, ODF is part of the electronic government programme – Progranma do Governo Eletrônico (e-PING).
New amenity in Lawrence Hill

06/07/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

Over the weekend a new amenity – either an art installation or a new public convenience – has appeared on the A420 Lawrence Hill in east Bristol.

If the latter, it’s conveniently located next to the site of Lawrence Hill’s original Victorian public lavatories, sadly demolished some years ago by Bristol City Council and the site sold off to developers.

Public convenience or crap art installation?

Continuing with the theme of convenience, if it is a new public lavatory – whether provided at public expense or by the private sector – it will no doubt come as a relief to the thousands of commuters from Kingswood, Hanham and other parts of South Gloucestershire who clog up the A420 inbound on weekday mornings and outbound on weekday evenings respectively.

However, I suspect it is the work of east Bristol’s shadowy network of fly-tippers, in which case it needs reporting to Bristol City Council. 🙂
Bari to migrate 75% of workstations to LibreOffice

03/07/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Bari Today reports that the Municipality of Bari is migrate 75% of its workstations to the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite during the current year.

According to Alessandro Tomasicchio, the councillor with responsibility for technological innovation, “In this way we guarantee the participation of citizens in public sector decision-making.”

In addition, the council is adopting ODF – the standard file format of LibreOffice and other open source office suites – as the standard file format that meets all the authority’s technical requirements.

Management of the project entails various kinds of skills, from the analysis of flows of documents within the council to the management of interactions between users and IT systems. Great attention has been paid to staff training and internal communication, which are regarded as fundamental elements for achieving the local authority’s goal.

After analysing the software solutions available and practical testing, the Innvoation Department decided to adopt the free and open source LibreOffice suite, which is compatible with other proprietary office suites, including MS Office currently used by Bari.

The choice of LibreOffice, unlike proprietary software, is compliant with the provisions of Article 68 of the [Italian] Digital Administration Code and the Apulia Region‘s law on the adoption and promotion of open source by public sector organisations.

By the end of the current year at least 75% of Bari’s workstations will migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

Antonio Cantatore, head of Bari’s Innovation Department also stated that one reason for switching to LibreOffice would be major savings in the total cost of ownership (TCO). By not having to pay licence fees to Microsoft for the Office package currently installed on 1,700 of Bari’s workstations, the local authority is looking at costs savings €75,000 +VAT.
Bristol has a fly-tipping crisis, not a PR crisis

01/07/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics
Do you know how many press and PR officers are employed by Bristol City Council?

Go on, have a guess!

If you didn’t know, the latest available figure is 43, according to this Press Gazette article from April 2015 on its the Freedom of Information Act request which asked 435 city, borough and district councils across the UK how many people they employ in their communications departments.

Bristol City Council actually has the equal third largest press and PR staff of all local authorities in the UK, a position it shares with Sheffield City Council:
- Manchester City Council: 77
- Leeds City Council: 47
- Bristol City Council: 43
- Sheffield City Council: 43
- Glasgow City Council: 41
Remember that figure of 43. Now try and guess how many ‘streetscene‘ (litter & fly-tipping) enforcement officers Bristol City Council employs. The people that deal with prosecuting the abuse of communal bins by traders (posts passim) and the like.

Fly-tipped trade and other waste in Pennywell Road, Easton, earlier this week

The answer is 6. That’s equivalent to one council enforcement officer for over 71,600 residents.

The answer was revealed in a FoI request I submitted back in November 2014, as per the transcript below.

Kindly disclose the number of streetscene enforcement officers employed by Bristol City Council during all financial years since April 2010 to the present day.

There were seven streetscene enforcement officer [sic] employed between April 2010 and March 2014. From April 2014 until present day there are six.

That’s right! Six enforcement officers for the whole of Bristol. However, there’s enough grot and bad waste management behaviour just in Easton and Lawrence Hill wards alone to keep all 6 of those officers permanently occupied.

Returning to the number of officers per head of population outlined above, Bristol City Council has one press/PR wonk per 1,000 inhabitants.

Anyone would think the local authority was suffering a public relations crisis.
Russia opts for ReactOS as Windows alternative

26/06/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

After the Russian Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov suggested a common approach by the BRICS states – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – to solving the dependency on imported software earlier this year, Russia recently announced a list of possible options, German IT news site heise reports. There is to be a concerted promotion of open source projects as a part of the national programme to ensure economic development. In addition to two Linux distributions developed by Russian companies, the ReactOS project has also been chosen as a Windows alternative worthy of promotion. However, what that actually means remains unclear for the time being. The Russian programme is only envisaging software alternatives being made available within 10 years.

Although the ReactOS project has no announced any major technical progress since the integration of rudimentary support for NTFS, the developers have nevertheless not been inactive: “Over 750 bug reports filed by the community have been processed, resulting in appreciably better software compatibility,” ReactOS developer Colin Finck remarked in a discussion with heise. In particular, the emulation implemented in the last year for executing 16-bit applications (NTVDM) and Java support have been improved.

ReactOS screenshot. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Thus not only can the installation routine of Oracle’s Java Runtime Environment be executed with the current build of ReactOS, but also ancient software such as the FreeGEM desktop or previously barred applications such as Skype. Support for the UDF file system for reading optical data carriers is also new.

Grant showing results

Initial results are also being produced by the student scholarship system which had been selected by Verein ReactOS Deutschland e.V. after a successful funding campaign over the last year on fundraising site Indiegogo. “With the completion of the new Explorers and Shell32 with theme support, which has been rebuilt from the ground up, the system interface works more nimbly and is also more comfortable to use as regards Explorer,” Finck explains. He has now started work on a printer stack which should be ready by December 2015 and could become a component of ReactOS 0.4.0.

No deadline for new release

Although there is no definite deadline for a new release of ReactOS with all new features, the project is nevertheless making automatic daily build versions available for download. The ReactOS developers themselves classify both the daily builds and previous releases as alpha versions which are only recommended for testing.

The ReactOS community is hoping for a further surge in development from the first ReactOS Hackfest, which is taking place in Aachen, Germany from 7th to 12th August 2015. According to the organisers, more than half of the current ReactOS developers have already registered for the event. According to current plans, improving ReactOS’ hardware support and working on the forthcoming version 0.4.0 shall form the focus of the event.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.
Communal bins consultation in BS5

24/06/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

Regular readers of the posts tagged with Tidy BS5 on this blog cannot have failed to notice the extent to which communal bins (also known by some as skip bins. Ed.) have been implicated in fly-tipping around the Easton area.

The communal bin outside 18 Stapleton Road, a regular site for the fly-tipping of trade and other waste

The communal bins were introduced by Bristol City Council along Stapleton Road and in the adjoining some years ago, allegedly in response to a problem with fly-tipping in the area. The council ostensibly carried out a consultation before the bins were installed, but as is usual with Bristol City Council, the consultation was less than perfect, with some streets not being consulted at all; indeed the first my neighbours and I knew of the scheme was when our wheelie bins were all taken away by council contractors in the back of a lorry!

Lots of residents have clearly expressed their feelings about the bins being a magnet for fly-tipping of all kinds – bulky, trade and household waste – hence the present consultation.

The door-knocking itself is being conducted by officers from Bristol City Council, staff from Up Our Street and volunteers from the local community. Your ‘umble scribe has helped to canvass residents on 4 streets about their views. Residents are being asked whether fly-tipping has or hasn’t increased since the introduction of the communal bins, how often they are seen overflowing, what are the reasons for fly-tipping and overflowing, whether they’d like a return to individual wheelie bins and if they have any other suggestions for the council to tackle litter, fly-tipping and general grot in the area.

From my experience of knocking doors and filling in the consultation forms, some of those ideas from residents for dealing with the litter, fly-tipping and the like are very varied and interesting. They vary from actions that the council could take, such as better enforcement of litter and fly-tipping, more education on fly-tipping and litter, as well as better planning controls to deal with the Stapleton Road area’s of proliferation of fast food shops and takeaways, whose customers seem to like leaving the inedible bits of their meals as offerings to the genus loci on their way home. Others these ideas from the doorstep would require action by central government, such as re-introducing a deposit on drinks containers. Other ideas suggested were fining people who refuse to recycle, the removal of the charges for bulky waste collection. Perhaps the most unusual was paying the homeless to collect recyclable off the streets.

The consultation will be concluded by the end of the month and the results will help shape future waste management policy in the BS5 area. So if you live on or around Stapleton Road and someone with a clipboard arrives on your doorstep, s/he or they could be there courtesy of the campaigning of Tidy BS5.
Coming soon: the Greenwash Capital Awards

24/06/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Politics

Awards recognising local people and businesses which support the environment have been launched by the Bristol Post, the rag of that name reports on its website today.

The article continues that the Bristol Post Green Capital Awards will celebrate those people who are making our city a greener, healthier, happier place to live and work.

The article does quote the chairman of Bristol 2015 – a company established by the city council to run this year-long green-tinged public relations exercise – admitting that Green Capital has not reached all parts of Bristol.

That being so, I’d like to see an alternative set of awards that won’t go to the usual suspects amongst Bristol’s great and good and their pet vanity projects. Let’s call them the Greenwash Capital Awards.

Some of these can be awarded already.

For starters, there’s the Green Transport Award, for which there can only be one set of winners, namely the selfish individuals who all drive their vehicles containing just one person into the city from the surrounding areas of South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath & North East Somerset, causing congestion, pollution and getting in the way of local bus services.

Selfish commuters clogging Bristol’s M32 inbound

Then there’s the Green Waste Management Award. This prize should I believe be split between the citizens of Bristol who managed to generate 18% more waste for landfill last year, Bristol City Council, which seems to be labouring under the delusion that exporting what would go to landfill to Sweden for incineration in power stations is a good idea and finally the people – both traders and others – who think that the BS5 postcode area is the natural home for the city’s fly-tipping.

One of the regular but ephemeral arts installations on Stapleton Road; is it critiquing the throwaway society?

How about the Habitat and Biodiversity Destruction Award? There’s a clear winner for this one: the four councils making up the West of England Partnership and their ludicrous transport white elephant, the Metrobus scheme.

Finally, for the time being there’s the Green Waste of Money Award. That goes to all the money wasted to date on so-called ‘arts’ projects as part of Green Capital.

If you can think of any further worthy recipients of a Greenwash Capital Award, please add them in the comments below.
New Zealand MP caught using unparliamentary language by sign language interpreter

30/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

In politics passion often rises to the surface in the rough and tumble of debate; and that’s exactly what happened in the New Zealand parliament in the case of Ron Mark, a member of parliament for the conservative New Zealand First party.

The Mirror reports that Mr Mark became irritated with muttering from across the chamber during a pre-budget question time debate in a tense parliamentary session.

Ron Mark was interrupted by jeering from the Government benches and muttered “shut the f**k up” under his breath.

This went unnoticed by his fellow members, but a sign language interpreter who had been invited to parliament as part of sign language awareness week did hear his outburst and signed it for all to see.

Mr Mark later apologised for his unparliamentary language.

Hat tip: Atlas Translations.

Grant showing results

No deadline for new release

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