The Difference between a Labour and Conservative Run Authority

You will recall that I posted yesterday on my trial and tribulations on trying to make a call to Thurrock Council to enquire about a mysterious local road closure, this is what I said in an email to the Councillor responsible for Highways;

While you may not be directly responsible for the telephone system or it's operators you may like to enquire, on my behalf, as to why Thurrock residents are ignored and treated to such an abomination of a service. Is it an unspoken directive from the ruling party in power that if residents can't get through and make enquiries/ complaint then we (the Council) can't register those enquiries/ complaints? It then stands to reason that they will not form part of any figures for comparison on official statistics on such enquiries/ complaints being made, or is it that I am again being far to cynical? Or is it just a question of:
a) poor performance by operators,
b) not enough operators to deal with the quantity of calls
c) not enough departmental employees to deal with the quantity of calls
d) lack of interest by council employees dealing with members of the public's enquiries/ complaints*

*The last one is based on the fact that when I did get through on the 652 652 number the FIRST time I selected option 3 for Highways. I waited 11 minutes and eventually the call was answered by, it sounded like Tracey, but when I asked the woman to repeat her name (I do like to make a note of the name of the person I am speaking to) the call was cut off!

I called again ignoring all the options and after 7 minutes the call was answered by an operator. I explained that I had previously called, that I had selected option 3 for highways, that eventually the call was answered and that when I asked for confirmation of the name of the person I was speaking to, the call was disconnected! The operator apologised and stated that she would put me through, that she understood all departments were experiencing heavy call volumes (See, b), c) and d) above !) but that she would remain on the line until my call was answered.

You've guessed what's coming now haven't you? Yes, I waited in silence for almost 5 minutes and then I heard the click, signalling that the call had been disconnected. Just what on earth is going on in Grays that makes the Council and it's staff so unhelpful to it's residents?

Now this is what happened today when I happened to phone Basildon District Council, who are a few miles along the road:

I wanted to Speak to Environmental Health, guess what;

The call was answered on the first ring, I asked for the dept and the lady operator thanked me for calling, put me through and lo and behold, the call was picked up immediately by a nice helpful young chap, who thanked me for calling after listening to what I had to say, informing me that an EHO would get back to me tomorrow!

It might only be a few miles along the road, but they are galaxies apart in their response to callers – Thurrock could do well to emulate this approach, Oh! And BTW I did make enquiries and found that the operators and other staff were employees of the Council and not some faceless company earning millions?

Is it, that Thurrock are Labour controlled and have outsourced, it seems, all of their resources to a Faceless International Company who go by the name of Vertex and who get over £400 million pounds of Thurrock taxpayers money for providing such an appalling service and who are providing (presumably previously direct employees of the Council)such an appalling service to callers to Thurrock Council, while the Conservative controlled Council in Basildon still employs staff directly?

On the question of Vertex, my blog is reproduced by a local web based paper and yesterdays blog was picked up by them and this is what the editor said in response to my comments on Thurrock employees:

 EdMay 29, 2012 - 9:55 pmI doubt you spoke to any Thurrock Council employee – probably one of the Vertex employees?
In 2005 Vertex won a £427 million contract to run the following council services:-
•Administration services
•Business accounting and financial services
•Customer services
•Engineering and transportation
•Facilities
•Human resources
•ICT and e-Government
•Payroll services
•Procurement and property services
•Revenues services
So the person answering the phone will be a Vertex employee and the repairs to the bridge will be handled via Vertex who will probably sub contract the work out.

I have to confess I was ignorant of this companies existence until I saw this and popped over to their web site, you can visit it here .  Now before you visit, if you are from Thurrock and have ever tried to call  the Council, I don't want you laughing at them (otherwise you will cry) when you look at the site, because under the heading of: Public & Citizen Services it states, Making it easier for citizens to interact with government.


Well, there you have it fellow Thurrock residents VERTEX are making it easier for us to interact with our local Government, what do you think, are they?

I should also say that there is a link on the same page to a 'Thurrock Council Case Study' I assumed that I was going to be directed to a page telling me how wonderful Vertex are and what a magnificent job they are doing in 'our' service, for the paltry sum in excess of £400 million pounds that they are getting, but alas we get 'PAGE NOT FOUND' I wonder why that is?

Council builds Purpose Built Disabled Homes - What are we doing for our Service Personnel?

(C) Basildon Echo

I noticed this article in the Basildon Echo the other day, sorry I couldn't find an on line link to it, but it also got me thinking about our disabled ex servicemen.  Lets face it since the illegal war in Iraq and our involvement in Afghanistan there are an awful lot of disabled ex soldiers out there and I wondered what we are doing for them?

I have to confess I have never heard or read before of a local authority doing this and the article does not say whether it is for a civilian or an ex-serviceman [who is of course a civilian]. In fact the article goes on to state that it is 20 years since Basildon has built a purpose built house for a disabled tenant! 

Now much has been said in the last year or so about the Armed Forces Covenant  and wasn't it a pity that Tony Blair took us to that illegal war in Iraq without giving one thought to the consequences of dealing with the severely injured and disabled servicemen and their families prior to taking us there, just as he did not give it a serious thought after we started to see injured personnel coming home.  The same can be said for his successor Gordon Brown.  And don't think the Tories with David Cameron would have done much about it either if there had not been a groundswell of revulsion from the general public through publicity of the dire circumstances and lack of facilities that were available to begin with either!

So if you read the comments on the link above for the Covenant you will notice that housing is specifically mentioned and I wonder if that also means that Basildon [only because they are the ones mentioned in the article above] and other local authorities throughout the United Kingdom should be spending more money on building purpose built homes and not just for ex-servicemen?

And of course there is a dilemma in that for cash strapped local authorities as well.  The Covenant is or is to be enshrined in LAW so does that mean that local authorities are and will be obliged to build these purpose built homes? And while they may need to do it by law for ex-servicemen can they opt out of doing it for non ex-servicemen, but, will that then fall foul of human rights laws whereby they are providing a facility for one section of the disabled and not for another.  If they must build them does the money come from central government funds from a special reserve or from MOD budgets?  Who knows!  

Now believe it or not, Ok it is not hard to believe but the Government and the MOD seem to be rather shy in giving out statistics on the number of personnel who have been maimed as a result of our involvement in these wars, hardly surprising of course as they really don't want that information to be readilly available upsetting our delicate sensibilities, but, Ian Cobain of The Guardian posted the following article earlier this year

The number of British troops losing limbs to bomb blasts in Afghanistan in 2010 exceeded that of 2009 by nearly 40%.

Newly published figures from Defence Analytical Services and Advice (Dasa) show that a total of 76 troops suffered what the Ministry of Defencedescribed as "traumatic or surgical amputation" of one or more limbs or parts of a limb up to the end of 2010.

There were 55 such injuries in Afghanistan in 2009 - more than the total figure for the previous three years - with almost half occurring during the final three months of the year.

The Ministry of Defence began making the figures available in February, after previously resisting calls for them to be released. In March theNational Audit Office warned that hospitals treating the wounded from Afghanistan were close to capacity, and said that Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham, which treats amputees, might need to displace civilians to make more room.

 Having said that I have still found it difficult to get an hard numbers but buried at the end of an NAO report is this little statistic:

 522 military personnel were seriously injured on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan between October 2001 and October 2009. Personnel on operations have attended medical facilities 125,000 times for minor injury and illness since 2006 and a further 1,700 times for mental health conditions. The NAO has estimated that the cost of medical care provided as a result of military operations was £71 million in 2008-09.

For the full report see: injury_on_military_operations 


Now the report does not tell us how many of the 522 seriously injured have ended up as disabled personnel, but the figure is probably pretty high and whatever it is, surely they are going to need serious consideration from local authorities as to their continued welfare which not only includes proper housing but ongoing medical treatment from the NHS.  All of this costs and I am not arguing that is should not be paid out but should local communities have to bare the burden of it like we did for the bank collapse?  Once again our government is taking unilateral action without the consent of the majority of the people and then we suffer financially.

As an ex serviceman who, after being shot,was given first class treatment many years ago by Military Medical personnel in Military Hospitals I am appalled at the the way servicemen are treated today but it does not surprise me and I personally believe that The Covenant, enshrined in Law or not is nothing more than an exercise by a bunch of cynical politicians using and promoting it to get them out of a public embarrassment.  It sickens me that so much of what Servicemen receive has to be bought and paid for by charities and I am not knocking the charities, BUT it is not charity they should be relying on it is the morally bankrupt governments who send them there in the first place, in their name, not mine!

So I am all for purpose built homes for the disabled both ex-servicemen and those born with a disability and local authorities should be providing them, but, for servicemen's homes the money should be provided by central government and one way to do this would be to reduce the expenses that MP's are allowed to claim and place this into a social housing fund for disabled Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen.