Call for Pembroke not to stand as Chairman of Suffolk CC

Cllr Jeremy Pembroke

As well as libraries the meeting of Suffolk County Council today will appoint Deborah Cadman as its new CEO or "Head of Paid Service" as local government jargon calls the post. Pretty much the whole county of Suffolk will be hoping that this finally draws a line under the Andrea Hill debacle that took up much of 2011.

But there does seem to be one loose end left. Jeremy Pembroke. The former Leader of the County Council who "retired early" earlier this year and who's judgement in both appointing and supporting Andrea Hill continues to be questioned. He has now gone back to the Tory backbenches and announced he intends to retire from the Council at the next elections in May 2013 and that would be that except for the fact he looks likely to be elected as Chairman of the Council in May 2012.

He is currently the Vice-Chairman, having been elected to this post as some kind of "consolation prize" for stepping down as Leader. Convention has it that the Vice-Chairman is elected as Chairman for the next municipal year. So we can expect Pembroke to be Chairman of Suffolk CC from May 2012.

Ipswich Spy comments on this today:

Whilst Suffolk County Council hopes that the appointment of Ms Cadman will end the questions about Mrs Hill, it remains true that many of the Conservative councillors running the council failed to ask the right questions. The Vice Chairman, and likely Chairman next year, is the former leader Jeremy Pembroke, and many remain incensed that he has been rewarded for his role in appointing this woman. 

Ipswich Spy believes that Cllr Pembroke should do the decent thing and announce that he will not accept the nomination as Chairman of the Council if offered it. He should not be rewarded with this coveted and respected office because of his role in what will become known as the “Scandal of THAT woman”.

I agree and think it would be in the best interests of the people of Suffolk and of all the political parties for us to be able to draw a line today under this issue today. The only way to do this completely is for Jeremy Pembroke to announce he won't stand as Chairman next year.

Library Decision expected to be rubber stamped by Suffolk County Council

Tomorrow libraries are back on the agenda again at Suffolk County Council when the full county council debate the Cabinet proposals on the future of the county's libraries. The result is pretty much a foregone conclusion and the County Council are expected to rubber stamp the decision to set up an Industrial and Provident Society to run the County's libraries.

The County Council are putting a positive spin on their proposals and they certainly seem more willing to engage than say Gloucestershire where the relationship between the Council and campaigners has completely broken down but there remain concerns, the Rosehill Readers campaign have issued the following press release today:

Whilst Rosehill Readers are delighted that all branch libraries in Suffolk are remaining open, we remain doubtful over the level of service that they will be able to offer, and wonder if Suffolk County Council appreciate that ‘books and buildings’ do not constitute a library service. 

SCC is asking its councillors to support a high risk business model for our library service. The Industrial and Provident Society model has never been used to run a library service before, with SCC admitting that there is a high risk of failure, saying that it will take the service back “in house” if the experiment fails. 

In addition, SCC says that library funding is guaranteed for 2 years only. We would like to know what happens after that and wonder whether the County Council is setting up the library service to fail. If SCC wanted it to survive, we think it would be recommending a safer, low risk business model such as the “in house” model. 

SCC seems to think that high risk is a good thing. Members of the public think otherwise. We would like to have a library service that is guaranteed for the next 10 -15 years, not a library service that survives for 2 years and then fails with some libraries being brought back “in house” and other libraries being forced to close. 

Rosehill Readers will be asking questions at the SCC meeting on 15/12/11 and will continue our campaign for a free, universal and accessible, high quality and professional, publicly owned and managed service for all of Suffolk’s individuals and communities.

Call me a cynic but personally I see the libraries as safe until May 2013 - the next County Council elections. After that date I am less sure.

I would also agree with Rosehill Readers that the IPS model seems an undue risk. Many of us have tried to engage the County in a constructive debate about the IPS model but not really got anywhere. Strange then that Cllr Judy Terry was quoted back in October in a Press Release saying:

“The model we’ve developed will put Suffolk’s library service on a strong and sustainable footing for the future. It’s fully costed on the basis of keeping the full library network open. 

“We want to free the library service from unnecessary council bureaucracy so that it can thrive and move with the times. Giving people a genuine say over how their library is run is also important and this model does exactly that.

Not sure we have seen people having a "genuine say" over how things are run and indeed it appears that the initial Directors of the IPS will be chosen by the County Council rather than elected by local libraries.

So libraries remain a concern and whilst we may not have seen the mass closures originally feared an already poorly funded service is being cut back yet more over the coming years - by some 30% - and this must mean the service will get worse.

Breckland Free School to be run for profit by Swedish company

Matthew Hancock MP with the SABRES Mascot

SABRES education trust (which stands for Save Breckland School) announced yesterday that "International English Schools" had won the contract to run Breckland Free School. The BBC report that IES UK is owned by a profit making Swedish company.

The contract is worth £21m over the next 10 years. Of that money clearly some of it will be taken in both profits and overheads (such as executive salaries) for the Swedish company rather than being spent on the education of Brandon's children.

This is the largest so far of such contracts which appear to be the DfE's preferred way of running schools. It appears to leave the trustees and Governors of the school more as contract managers than actually directly involved in the management of the school. I have visions from my experiences of other outsourced services of high extra charges. Who knows maybe for extra chalk needed in a particular lesson...

What is strange is this is the outcome of the clear desire of local parents to "save" Breckland Middle School which is a community school run in the usual way.

I can understand the desire of parents to do this (although I do not personally support the retention of middle schools). But the question is have they done this at all? The Breckland Free School will take a completely different age group 11-16 rather than 9-13 and only two school years (Year 7 and 8) will be retained.

And for all the school is pitched as a parent and community-led venture it remains to be seen what role parents actually have in running the school. My strong feeling is they will have less say than they currently do in the running of Breckland Middle School.

I don't live in Brandon so this is maybe easy to say but I would rather my children got on a bus to school each day than send them to a school run to make a profit by a Swedish company. It just doesn't seem right. But as parent and proposer Alicia Rickards-Ottevanger says:

"It was this route or nothing,"

But what this really shows is that concerns expressed by a number of people, myself included, that free schools are leading to a "marketisation" of education are real. For those of us that think that education is something special and opening a school is not the same as a supermarket yesterday was a sad day.