Touchingly, some of you have chided me for not updating my blog for a while. Apologies, I didn’t realise I had such a loyal readership! Some of you who have received election leaflets from John Baron will have seen my name on the bottom of them and that is because I am acting as Mr Baron’s agent and have, therefore, been preoccupied with his re-election campaign. For this reason, I didn’t get a chance to write up the meeting of Full Council on 16th April.
It was not, for the most part, a particularly lively exchange (though the second half did heat up somewhat). The early part of proceedings was, of course, dominated by the fact that in addition to being the last meeting before the General and Local elections it was also the last meeting of Basildon Council to be presided over by our long-serving Mayor, Cllr Mo Larkin (Con, Pitsea South-East), who is standing down having been Mayor of Basildon since the office was created in 2010 (Councillor Larkin had previously served as Chairman of the Council prior to Basildon receiving Borough status). There were many fulsome tributes paid to Councillor Larkin – or ‘Mayor Mo’, as she’s affectionately known – including by yours truly. You can hear my full tribute to Mo here (my speech is on Agenda Items 1-4, commencing at 55:00) but I will reiterate that Mayor Larkin has been a colourful character in Basildon, to say the least, and is certainly not a party political animal – having sat over the years as a Liberal Democrat, Labour, Independent and, finally, as a Tory. Indeed, Cllr Geoff Williams (Lib-Dem, Nethermayne) mentioned that she originally stood in Billericay as a Liberal under the rather cheeky nom de guerre of ‘Ma Larkin’. But, most of all, Mo will be remembered as a dedicated public servant, who did an incredible amount for the Borough and has raised vast sums for charity during her tenure as Mayor. As the inaugural holder of that office, she has really made the mayoralty something of which Basildon can be proud and I wish her all the very best for the future.
Tributes were also paid to three other retiring councillors, former Labour Group Leader Cllr Nigel Smith (Lab, Lee Chapel North) and Cllrs Jilly Hyde (Con, Laindon Park) and Daniel Munyambu (Ind, Vange). Councillor Hyde has been a great colleague and tributes to her were quite tearful.
After a fairly uneventful Public and Members Question Time, we moved on to the main order of business, which was to receive reports from the chairmen of the Overview & Scrutiny Commission and the Audit & Risk and Join Standards committees – Cllrs David Dadds (Con, Billericay East), Kerry Smith (Ind, Nethermayne) and Stuart Allen (Con, Crouch) respectively.
For some reason, this was an unusually bad-tempered exchange, despite relatively positive reports. Councillor Dadds has a reputation for running O&S in a very ‘business-like’ fashion – with one meeting reputedly lasting less than one minute! – and it has become something of an in-joke. This drew rather churlish criticisms of Councillor Dadds but I have substituted on O&S in the past and the simple fact is that he doesn’t mess about and doesn’t indulge in a lot of unnecessary chatter or allow councillors to waffle just for the sake of it. Nobody can reasonably claim, however, that meetings of the Commission do not serve their function and he never moves on before asking if anyone has anything they wish to add. The fact is that O&S has done some very good work over the last municipal year, not least on the Laindon Centre. Cllr Kerry Smith was enthusiastic in his A&R report about the financial management of the Council (keeping in mind that he is an opposition member) and Councillor Allen was pleased to report there had been no actionable complaints brought before Standards over the last municipal year (ie, by and large we’re all behaving better… or at least we were).
Astonishingly, however, when Councillor Dadds attempted to speak on one of the other reports (he had, after all, presented his own report but was surely as entitled as any member to speak to the others) the UKIP Leader, Cllr Linda Allport-Hodge (UKIP, Langdon Hills), tried to raise a Point of Order to stop him (overruled by the Mayor). Shortly after he sat back down, the Labour Leader, Cllr Byron Taylor (Lab, Vange) moved that the question be put (ie, curtail the debate). I found this pretty deplorable, considering these reports were our main order of business for the evening. Fortunately, that motion was lost on the Mayor’s casting vote and we were able to carry on debating the reports. Councillor Allport-Hodge then attempted to repeat this pointless exercise, interrupting Councillor Allen in the middle of his summing up. This was quite outrageous, not to mention grossly discourteous, and rightly ruled out of order. It was an early indication of Councillor Allport-Hodge’s irritability that evening. All in all though, pretty childish behaviour by all opposition councillors, who clearly just wanted to get to the motions (many of them had, of course, submitted motions for party propaganda purposes in the run-up to the elections). I had a motion on the agenda myself but still found these attempts to run through the reports without properly considering them rather shabby.
Finally, we reached the motions and, as this was the third time I had submitted it, my motion on solar farms in the Green Belt was first up. I have been attempting to have this motion debated at Full Council since the end of the last year but we have never hit the guillotine before reaching it. Constituents of mine will be aware that my motion was prompted by planning permission being granted last November for a 26.4 hectare solar array on Green Belt land off Outwood Farm Road in Billericay East. You can hear my motion and the subsequent debate here (Agenda Item 8).
Sadly, it turned into rather a bitter affair, as the Planning Committee had recently refused permission for a new multimillion-pound health centre in Wickford, which has been a running source of contention between the Tory administration and UKIP for some time. The vote on the Committee followed party lines and there was a great deal of ill-feeling surrounding it and, unfortunately, the two issues became conflated and led to a rather ugly exchange. Councillor Allport-Hodge chuntered and heckled from a sedentary position, as she had done throughout the meeting (objectionably switching on her microphone to do so). Cllr Kerry Smith was supportive of my motion – conveniently forgetting that when he was UKIP Leader he had supported the decision and defended the actions of his erstwhile UKIP colleagues on the Planning Committee) but, nonetheless, God loves a sinner come unto his understanding. He did then enter into a rather fruitless exchange with the Labour Group over the ugliness of solar farms and whether or not global warming is “a con”, which I felt produced rather more heat than light on both sides. Cllr Adele Brown (Lab, Fryerns), who never actually speaks a word at Full Council, indulged in her usual practice of rudely barracking the Mayor from the side-lines, importuning her. There was a great deal of ill-tempered bickering flying around the chamber (and even some in the public gallery), which was certainly not my intention and, regrettably, the point about the precedent set by the solar farm decision and whether or not green technologies ought to trump normal Green Belt considerations was rather obscured. Cllr Aidan McGurran (Lab, Pitsea South-East) accused me of “blatant electioneering”, which is odd considering I am not up for re-election and I had submitted my motion three times at Full Council, so the proximity of the local elections was merely a consequence of our not having reached it on two previous occasions.
The irony of Councillor McGurran’s indignation was, I have to say, made all the more pointed by the fact he had a motion of his own on the agenda immediately after mine, which he had also submitted at least twice, and which was a pretty manifest piece of Labour propaganda, followed by two similar motions from his near-neighbour, Cllr Gavin Callaghan (Lab, Pitsea North-West), and several from Councillors Allport-Hodge and Mark Ellis (UKIP, Laindon Park). This may explain why Councillor Allport-Hodge chose, rather embarrassingly, to throw an expletive at me whilst I was summing up the debate (it was four-letter word beginning with ‘T’ but I’m afraid it wasn’t ‘Tory’). I tried to rise above it and move on but she was angrily denounced by my ward colleague, Councillor Dadds, and also by Cllr Stephen Hillier (Con, Langdon Hills) and then, somewhat awkwardly, by two of her own members – Cllr David Harrison (UKIP, Wickford Park) and Deputy Mayor Cllr Nigel Le Gresley (UKIP, Wickford Castledon), who both stood up to publicly “disassociate” themselves with their leader’s ‘unparliamentary language’. Councillor Allport-Hodge apologised, though it is fair to say that it did not exactly brim with sincerity.
So that brought the meeting to a dramatic climax and, put to the vote, my motion was lost but largely because I fear my colleagues’ ill-tempers meant it was not heard on its full merits.