Oxfordshire’s Highways Officers go off to luxury hotel at your expense

It is possible that your view of the officers of Oxfordshire Highways differs from mine. You may think of them as intelligent, cultured people, selflessly dedicated to bringing you public services of the highest quality, and acutely conscious of the need to contain public expenditure by focusing only on those things which matter to ensure the safety and convenience of Oxfordshire’s businesses and individuals. If I think otherwise, it is probably because I have lived here for a long time and seen generations of very stupid people pouring public money down the drain in schemes apparently designed to screw up the traffic flow, to make the city of Oxford as ugly and as unattractive as possible, and to ensure that there is always work for them to do.

Let me see if I can convert you to my point of view in a way which jumps over the legitimate debate as to how much of the road mending is either necessary or competently executed.

It is 2011. Nearly a year has passed since Gordon Brown was ejected, his 13 years of trashing the economy coinciding with a worldwide recession. His commitment to improving public services amounted to little more than throwing money at them, as if the mere spending were enough. An expansion of the role of government included a mass of new roles and regulation, most of them quite unnecessary, requiring the recruitment of additional staff. The number of publicly-employed people rose from 5.2 million to 6.1 million in 13 years, increasing the wage bill by 29% to £157.7 billion. In the decade after Labour’s election, town hall spending rose by 53% in real terms to £164 billion per year. Few discernible benefits resulted, beyond Labour’s re-election at the hands of those grateful for the largesse and willing to suspend belief in the normal forces of economics in return for the barrow-loads of money which kept on coming their way.

Go and play in the traffic: a short play set in the offices of Oxfordshire Highways

We are in the offices of Oxfordshire County Highways. Chief Deputy Assistant Director (Works, Signs and Railings) Wayne Notbright is alone in the office with his Sub-Deputy Assistant Director, Darren Dymm. All the other officers are out, either attending at one of the many sets of road works around Oxford and the county or at an EDDSHiT (Equalities, Discrimination and Diversity, Safety & Health in Transport) course at a stately home in the countryside.

Dymm: Wossa librey Whine?

Notbright: It’s a libr-ery, Darren, not librey. And it’s not “wossa”, it’s “what is a”. And my name is Wayne.  It’s a place with loads of books and things in it. Posh people go there, and old people and kids. My mum used to take me in there, when it was raining like. I think people can take books out without paying.  What makes you ask about lib-reries?

Dymm: My mum’s friend said it’s all my fault they’re closing them down. Why’s it my fault Whine, Wayne?

Notbright: All them bloody bankers have lost all our money so the county is closing lots of things down if they’re not really necessary.

Dymm: They won’t close us down will they?

Notbright: Nah. We’re necessary. We got to do all them works down the Iffley Road, so they can’t close us down.

Dymm: My mum’s friend’s a banker. I’ll tell her it’s all her fault. She’s a counter-clerk.

Notbright: I don’t think it’s those sort of bankers who lost all our money.

Dymm: Well, she works at the branch where the county’s account is, so if the county’s lost all its money it could have been her.

Notbright: It’s the government’s fault. It’s because of the cuts. Bloody Tories. There was always plenty of money to spend when Labour was in, so where’s it all gone now?

Dymm: Perhaps there was no money left because Gordon Brown spent it all.

Notbright: Don’t go there Darren, just keep off it mate, or your lib-rery lady’ll have your guts – and mine and the boss’s. We’ve had a good run, haven’t we? Botley Road, Abingdon Road, High Street, Cowley Road, all that stuff we did in Headington, them fancy lights at the A34 roundabout. Looks good on your CV doesn’t it? “Sub-Deputy Assistant Director responsible for spending bloody millions”. Just don’t ask where the money came from.

Oxfordshire Highways fills in a hole in the road at Headington

The highways people are still frigging around at Headington, I see, polishing the roads, gold-plating the pavements and filling the junction with the poles, posts, bollards, signs, islands and the other clutter which they so love. It is hard to see that the project will do anything to improve the traffic-flow, but it will have kept a lot of people in work and, more importantly, used up some of the budget. Next year’s budget will be based on what they spend this year, so they need a few big projects.

The most puzzling part of the whole exercise was the filling in of the well-used pedestrian subway which  allowed people to cross the road without impeding the traffic. Impeding traffic is what highways officers do best, of course, and there is now an extra set of lights to replace the subway. If other junctions are anything to go by, the lights will be phased with others to maximise the number of times a motorist has to stop and start. I am never sure whether this is deliberate perversity or just stupidity, but it does not do much to cut pollution.

Pigs might fly – chasing twigs in a helicopter

An Oxford Mail story Police scramble helicopter over “stolen” twigs has been picked up by the BBC. Put briefly, a family collected some fallen twigs whilst walking in woodland, and a “heated confrontation” took place when a warden told them to leave them where they found them. When they got home, they found that Sergeant Thick and PC Plank had scrambled a helicopter  and followed in hot pursuit (picture them running across the grass from the mess to where their plane is warmed up and ready for battle with civilisation’s enemies). The Oxford Mail reports that “four officers in two cars were also sent and found no offences had been committed”.  It apparently costs £350 to use a helicopter in this way. One can only guess at the cost of four officers in two cars.

There are several elements here, but let us begin by making it clear that I do not particularly approve of people carting off armfuls of wood from nature reserves, that I am glad to know that we still have the occasional warden to look after places like this, and that I have some sympathy in general with under-resourced police forces.

That sympathy, however, speedily evaporates when you read stories like this and, indeed, almost the worst aspect of it is the fact that Thick and Plank have undermined any case which their superiors might have made in support of claims for extra funding or as excuses for failure to deal with real crime. Even if you ignore the £350 spent on the helicopter, one assumes that four officers in two cars could have been doing something useful whilst they were instead investigating the loss of a few twigs.

Trusting the motorist to think in Oxford

An article by Charles Clover in the Sunday Times on 1 August was headed Putting hazards back on the road improves traffic. Its theme was the encouraging trend, at least by some highways authorities, towards removing the traffic lights, railings and other obstructions with which highways officers purport to minimise risk in urban streets. Recent developments include returning streets to two-way traffic and removing unnecessary obstructions.

Clover says this:

Motorists caught at traffic lights itch to floor their right foot. If you take away the channelling and, where possible, traffic lights, and introduce risk by making it clear that pedestrians and cyclists share space, motorists instantly behave better. Risk is good. And the paradox is that when you lower speeds, journey times improve because there are fewer stop-starts.

I have written before about the chances of this catching on in Oxford (see Traffic lights dawn on Keith Mitchell amongst other articles). It seems unlikely, somehow. There is more to it than the fact that these tiresome little people are risk-averse and see the lights and barriers as essential for protecting us from ourselves, with its paradoxical outcome that your thinking about road safety is being done for you by people whose judgement you would not trust about anything else.

£450,000 Botley Road traffic lights not so smart

I wrote recently about the “smart” traffic lights recently installed at the Botley Road junction with the A34 to the west of Oxford (see Highways Agency spends £450,000 to screw up Botley Road traffic). The gist of that post was that, aside from the fact that the lights had made the traffic-flow worse rather than better, no-one should be spending money of that order on roadworks or, indeed, any money not absolutely necessary for road safety. This, like so much else, is not something highways people find it easy to understand.

I had reason to come past the allegedly “smart” lights three times last week in the middle of the night, when no other traffic was around. Each time, we approached lights at red and got right up to them before they were “smart” enough to recognise our presence. That meant we had to slow right down and then accelerate, which is exactly the opposite of the accepted advice on fuel economy and emissions.

I suppose that if you are a highways officer, everything seems smart to you. I suppose also that if you have just blown £450,000 on some unnecessary road works at a time when schools are having their budgets cut, you might grope around for a word like “smart” to justify the waste. On the evidence of my journeys, the new lights are no smarter than the people who installed them.

Home

Liverpool sets Oxford an example on council officer pay

The BBC reported yesterday that a number of senior officers at Liverpool City Council have permanently waived their bonuses, worth 10% of salary. This follows the recent surrender of their 15% performance related pay by the seven-member executive team.

Here in little Oxford, meanwhile, senior executives at the city council have pocketed enormous pay rises to add to their already extravagant salaries. The city council’s chief executive, Peter Sloman, had an increase of 11.6% to £141,031 (the Prime Minister earns £142,500). A couple of other senior officers, Mel Barrett and Tim Sadler, are now paid £109,080, after increases of 28% and 15.45% respectively.

This has led to an unprecedented unanimity between all sort s of people with whom I usually disagree more or less on principle – the local branch of Unison, the Labour MP for Oxford East, and the Green Party – who have made common cause against the increases. You can find many of their comments here.

The most entertaining spectacle, however, is that of Oxford City Council’s Labour councillors defending the increases and voting them through despite a formal challenge from other parties. Council Leader Bob Price says that the increases “reflected the market rate for the jobs and had been agreed following independent advice”.  That sturdy man of the left, John Tanner, supported the increases with a comment about paying peanuts and getting monkeys.

Highways Agency spends £450,000 to screw up Botley Road traffic

The news article which is my source puts it slightly more politely than I do – New traffic lights divide opinion is the heading to an article about the allegedly “smart” traffic lights at the Botley Road interchange with the A34. You and I would say that spending sums of this order illustrates perfectly the unreal world of the public services. If we have to cut frontline services now, it is because people like this have been spending enormous sums of money on non-essential frolics. It keeps their budgets up and does wonders for their self-esteem and their CVs. It has brought us to the edge of national bankruptcy. As one of the comments on the news page says:

I have no idea whether the lights have made things better or worse, but at a time when cuts are so deep that we will have to close schools, is this really a priority? We managed pretty well without! Something terribly wrong here.

Few complaints about Oxfordshire road chippings – yet

It seems that few people have complained about the piles of loose chippings with which Oxfordshire County Council’s Highways Department have resurfaced many of the roads in Oxford and the county. That is what a council spokesman says, anyway, according to this article in thisisoxfordshire.

That may be because some of the victims, like one known to us, are still undergoing hospital treatment to have the stones removed from their legs, where they lie deeply buried after a skid on the loose surface. The John Radcliffe Hospital has apparently seen several such injuries. I do not approve of ambulance-chasing lawyers, but there should be work for them as the pain subsides and thoughts turn to compensation.

Revival of Oxford Inciter and Oxford Agenda Blogs

I am thinking of reviving my Oxford Inciter and Oxford Agenda blogs. This post appears on both of them. Both ran for several months until a couple of years ago when my day job became all-consuming.

The day job involves electronic disclosure or e-Disclosure of documents (electronic discovery, or e-discovery in every common law jurisdiction save England & Wales). My role is to educate and inform judges, lawyers, clients and suppliers about the law, the practice and the technology involved in e-discovery, and in marketing the ideas and services to others. The primary medium for this is a blog for the e-Disclosure Information Project, whose 250 or so posts in 2009 sometimes generated several thousand words per week. There is more than enough to write about on that subject, and optional things fell by the wayside. In addition to work in the UK, I spend about a month each year at conferences abroad. These trips simultaneously gave me a wider range of subjects to write about and less time to do so. It seems worth having a go at reviving the non-work blogs.

The subjects which I used to air in them – dishonest politicians, the creeping power of civil servants, the expensive stupidity of local government officers and the incompetence of railway companies – have worked their way into my e-Disclosure writing. This is not a drawback – I like comparisons and parallels, and my readers seem to appreciate the leavening of the rather dry legal and technical subject-matter with examples pulled from other areas of everyday life. There is, nevertheless, plenty to write about which cannot be turned to didactic purposes in my work blog and, besides, it is refreshing for the brain to cover other things from time to time.

Oxford has not banned Christmas – just made it sound like that

Oxford City Council has announced that the winter holiday known for 2,000 years or so as “Christmas” is officially to be celebrated in the city as a “Winter Light Festival”.

The aim, of course, is to be “inclusive” and to talk up “diversity”, all those soft, warm, meaningless terms which stupid white people use when they want to show their concern for people of other colours and faiths.

Tanner talks rubbish again in Oxford

Gordon Brown’s big Labour conference speech was described simultaneously (and by the same people) as absolutely awful and the best he has ever made. A group of viewers were given devices which allowed them to record their reactions to the speech phrase by phrase. The clearest adverse reactions were to the passages in which Brown attacked his rivals and enemies, both those within his party and outside it.

To non-politicians, this is obvious. People react best to positive messages, and if you can only convey your own position by running down other people, you betray the weakness of your own arguments. The only exception to this is when the attacks are extremely clever and preferably witty – Vince Cable’s “Stalin to Mr Bean” attack won reactions which were entirely positive except to its target. For the most part, political attacks are dull bludgeons not witty stilettos, and damage the giver at least as much as the subject of the attack.

This is emphasised if you move down from the big beasts of the political jungle to the worms and creepy-crawlies of local politics. John Tanner of Oxford’s ruling Labour Group is a good example. He has the same clunky, leaden style as Gordon Brown, the same commitment to a socialism which benefits no-one, and was once quoted as saying that everything he says or does is political, which must have made his love-life truly scintillating. Unlike Gordon Brown, he lacks a brain – most old-style socialists have chips on their shoulders over some perceived deprivation of their childhood, and where most recall the holes in their shoes or the bread-and-dripping for tea, Tanner seems to have been driven by his lack of any thinking apparatus.

Three traffic wardens for one car

I watched a pack of traffic wardens surround a car in Market Street, Oxford this afternoon. I guess only one gets the bonus and perhaps they had all raced to get there, the fastest getting to do the job while the others stood around and chatted.

Or perhaps it really does take three of them – one to do the reedin, one for the ritin and one to operate the camera, with the reward money divvied up between them.

Leaving the dealers to deal in peace

In a previous post, A different view of graftti, I took issue with Martin Jennings’ appreciation of the grafitti on Aristotle Lane railway bridge. I found no beauty in it and saw it as both a complement to the more official forms of aesthetic vandalism visible from the bridge and as a symptom of the neglect endemic in Oxford. I ended by suggesting that worse things than grafitti flourished when the causes and the visible evidence of the grafitti were untouched.

Graffiti is actually worse as a symptom of neglect than the unemptied bins, the weed-filled gutters and the blocked drains. They merely indicate that nobody in authority bothers – councillors do not believe that their re-election will turn on such things, and local authority officers do not, for the most part, care about very much beyond their pay and pensions and whether the equalities and discrimination handbooks are up to date.

A different view of grafitti

I was about to publish one of my periodic comments on the prevalence of graffiti in my part of North Oxford and at the failure by both Oxford City Council and the police to do anything either to prevent it or to clear it up.

My most recent post was in April (see Oxford graffiti gets worse) and concerned, as before, the track leading to Port Meadow and the bridge across the railway. I was then (and remained) angry that the dullards of Oxford City Council had boasted of a project to clear graffiti quickly but had in fact merely sprayed paint over some of, thus permanently ruining decent brickwork and providing the yobbos with a blank canvas. I suggested that they just left it alone until someone more active, caring and competent took over the job.

My update post has been pre-empted by a comment from a reader which to not be ignored even if I do not agree with what he says. His comment (published, unusually for me, in full) is as follows:

Keeping up the road works in Oxford

An article on my Oxford Agenda site called Speed cameras and statistical ignorance had as its twin targets the use of false statistics to justify restrictions on the roads, and the fact that highways officers are good examples of high-spending bureaucrats who plough on with wholly unnecessary road works while the rest of us tighten our belts.

Living in Oxfordshire, I do not have to look far for examples of both. I cite the panic-struck rush to put barriers down Oxford’s Eastern By Pass following an accident which was patently caused by the misjudgement and stupidity of a woman who was jailed for it. I might have added the enormous sums lashed out on the Cowley Road following a bus-cyclist accident which again had an obvious cause unconnected with the road layout. That one had also the use of retrospective statistics as to the percentage drop in accidents which, on examination, derived from a sample too small to mean anything and devoid of any analysis as to the origins of such accidents as there were – this being the point of the speed camera study which my article is about.

Lib Dems against prohibition

My article Lib Dems succeed in pushing at 20mph open door included a passage on how the different political parties feel entitled to interfere in every aspect of our lives. I said of Oxford’s Lib Dems and local councillor Alan Armitage that “the Lib Dems want to be your nanny, with grim busybodies like Armitage convinced that he knows better than you what is right and good for you”.

That draws a comment from someone who says he is proposing to get a gang together to start a group called “Lib Dems Against Prohibition” with the side comment that it would have been called “bansturbation” but that would have taken too much explanation.

Lib Dems succeed in pushing at 20mph open door

The latest edition of the Oxford Lib Dems circular proudly boasts of their success in persuading Oxfordshire County Council to agree unanimously to impose a 20 mph limit on all non-arterial residential roads in Oxford. The screaming headline “Lib Dems win on 20 limits” and the breathless account of the victory might give the impression that startling flights of oratory and skilful negotiation were needed. In fact, agreement to the measure has long been inevitable. What is more important – and deeply depressing – is why this should be so.

Stiff penalties will enforce eco-town viability

A comment comes in about the transport aspects of eco-towns covered in my post of last night Weston-Otmoor Flintgrad will be Commuterville. It suggests that the fine for driving out of Flintgrad at peak times could be as high as £200.

That seems consistent with the general approach likely to be taken by a government which thinks that heavy-handed authoritarianism is the way to go. My theme yesterday was that we are in fact unlikely to see the transport benefits – the incentives – which the developer is offering. They are out of the developer’s hands anyway, and any scheme which depends on a Labour government honouring its commitments, on the competence of Network Rail, and on the abilities of the transport officers of Oxfordshire County Council, is doomed to failure.

Weston-Otmoor Flintgrad will be Commuterville

The eco-towns, or Flintgrads as they are known after the not-very-bright single-issue fanatic Caroline Flint who is promoting them, are flawed in concept and far from eco. Weston Otmoor, near Oxford, has more flaws than most. We have seen New Labour’s bad faith in this region before and take no comfort either from Flint’s promise to adhere to the planning process or from our estimate of her ability to hold the developers to their promises.

A report commissioned by the Government to challenge the developers of the so-called “eco-towns” has applauded the “developed transport strategy” on which the plans are based, but foresees that Weston Otmoor, the development close to Oxford, will simply become a dormitory town. Their report says

The transport strategy is potentially transformational and uses tram-train, free travel and demand management for car-use. As residents may simply take the tram to the park-and-ride and drive to either London or Birmingham, how will the town be stopped from becoming Commuterville?

All sorts of questions arise here, not least how a group including a fashion designer and a couple of television presenters can purport to have anything useful to say on the subject, particularly as they do not appear to have spoken to anyone opposed to the Weston-Otmoor scheme.