A Team That Will Work For You – Labour’s local candidates

Labour has chosen its team of candidates to contest the local elections in Brighton and Hove on May 7^th.

I’m proud to be leading such a strong team into the local elections, a team of local residents who will bring knowledge of their neighbourhoods and a wide range of skills and experience to the city council. We have people in our team with proven records in delivering major projects, employment and skills, the NHS, education, voluntary sector organisations and more who will run our city competently if elected on May 7th.

With the General Election on the same day, a vote for your local Labour council candidates will count in each and every one of the city’s 21 wards. Labour is best placed in the vast majority of them to defeat Green and Conservative councillors. We have won the last four elections held in the city, and only Labour can get rid of the Greens.

A list of Labour candidates is here: www.brightonhovelabour.com/our_people

Our candidates reflect our city:

• Half of Labour’s candidates are women
• A quarter are experienced councillors, three-quarters are new to politics
• 10% of Labour’s candidates are drawn from the city’s LGBT community
• There are several candidates in their 20s, and representation from the city’s BAME community.
• Over two thirds of the current Labour councillors are seeking re-election.

Labour launched its local manifesto, “A City That Works For You” last week, pledging to deliver:

• Improved street cleaning, refuse and recycling and an end to Green traffic schemes
• Secure and well paid jobs, more apprenticeships and an end to youth unemployment
• Work to tackle poverty and inequality across the city
• 500 new council homes and measures to help tenants in the private rented sector
• A new secondary school and excellent results for all pupils

Read the full manifesto here:  www.brightonhovelabour.com/a_council_that_works_for_you

Labour is best placed to win, having won the four most recent elections in Brighton and Hove, and leads in the polls:

• May 2012: Police and Crime Commissioner, Labour win with 61% of the vote in the city.
• October 2012: East Brighton by-election, Labour win with 56% of the vote.
• July 2013: Hanover and Elm Grove by-election, Labour win with 40% of the vote, overturning a 1000 vote Green majority.
•  October 2013: citywide opinion poll by ComRes for the BBC puts Labour on 38%, Tories on 25%, Greens on 21%.
• May 2014: European elections, Labour win by 20,000 votes to 18,000 for the Green Party, 15,000 for Tories and 14,000 for UKIP.

Labour was in first or second place in 18 of the 21 wards at the last local elections in 2011, and had near equal support to the Green Party winning 32% of the vote, just 1% less that the Greens and 3% more than the Conservatives.

Vote Labour wherever you are in Brighton, Hove and Portslade on May 7th, for a team that will deliver for you, your family and your neighbourhood, a team that will work for you.

 

 

 

 

 

A Council That Works For You – Labour’s Contract With Brighton and Hove

Today I am launching Labour’s manifesto for Brighton and Hove.

Our city is crying out for change. We need a city council that works, with clear purpose and strong leadership to make sure that basic services residents rely on are delivered.

We need a council that works for you and your neighbourhood, that works for you and your family, that works for you and your business. We need a council that works with the public, private and voluntary sectors to build a better Brighton and Hove together.

We need a council that delivers secure and well paid jobs, new and excellent schools, and many more truly affordable homes.

We need a council that works for every resident in every part of the city, from Portslade to Patcham, Hangleton to Saltdean, Westbourne to Moulsecoomb, not just the city centre.

The Greens have let the city down, and have proven they are not up to the job. No other party is offering the credible and sensible plan that we are setting out in our manifesto today.

Even in these challenging financial times for local councils, there is so much we can do if given the chance, and Labour has a strong and capable team ready to get to work for the city.

Vote us in on May 7th and Labour will deliver a council that works for you.

Labour’s key pledges include:

• Ensuring cleaner streets, better recycling and a reliable refuse collection service.
• Suspending and reviewing the traffic schemes started by the Greens, and returning to a more sensible and better managed approach to transport planning.
• Ending youth unemployment in the city within four years.
• Building at least 500 new council homes by 2019.
• Delivering new rights for tenants and proper regulation of landlords.
• Tackling poverty and inequality through a Fairness Commission.

You can read our full manifesto online here:  A City That Works For You

If you want to help us win in May and deliver this manifesto, visit our website.

 

2014 – a Brighton and Hove Labour year in review

A lot has happened since I wrote my review of 2013. Every year has its ups and downs, and if you are an Albion season ticket holder like me you’ll know what I mean. Yet every time I walk on the Downs, in view of the sea and the city centre, I’m reminded of how lucky we are to live here.

Of course, our location between the sea and the South Downs National Park make building the homes we need very difficult, and being so close to London makes housing increasingly expensive. One of the tough choices we faced this year was on our City Plan; deciding how best to build homes for local families without losing our open spaces. Others involved opposing the Greens 5% council tax increase, their £36 million loan to the i360, and recently their council tax benefit proposals.

One of the highlights of 2014 was May’s European elections. Labour in the city doubled its vote on the last elections in 2009, from nine thousand to over twenty thousand, pushing the Greens into second place and helping to elect our fantastic new MEP Anneliese Dodds. Our positive offer to the electorate and strong local campaigning paid off. Despite topping the poll nationally, UKIP came fourth in Brighton and Hove.

Opinion polls have continued to show Labour in pole position to beat both the Greens and the Tories next May. We are not complacent though, and have worked hard in the past twelve months to put the foundations in place for success at the elections next May.

Over the course of this year I’ve spoken to over fifty key organisations and leaders across the city, whilst colleagues have knocked on thousands of doors from Portslade to Saltdean, the seafront to Patcham. We have put what we learnt into our ten key pledges; our Contract with Brighton and Hove, which will form the foundation of our offer to voters next May.

We have chosen over forty of the fifty four people needed to fight the local elections; a great team to stand alongside our three excellent Parliamentary candidates Purna Sen, Nancy Platts and Peter Kyle.

Together we have campaigned for new rights for tenants in the private sector, for our local firefighters, for new play area facilities, for more local GP surgeries, for a safer city and for an end to violence against women, for a Living Wage, allotments, food banks, payday loans and much more. Throughout the year we have urged the Greens to do better on keeping our streets clean, collecting the city’s refuse and reversing the decline in recycling.

We’ve pledged to set up a Fairness Commission to tackle poverty and inequality in the city during our first year in office. Our team is in place, our priorities are clear, our campaigns are stronger than ever.

2015 will be a very challenging year for Brighton and Hove, but also one of opportunity to put our co-operative values into practice. As our local politics becomes more polarised between the Greens on the left and the Tories and UKIP on the right, and despite the huge financial challenges Brighton and Hove faces, my New Year’s Resolution is to try an offer our city hope for positive change in May.  We will deliver a fairer, better Brighton and Hove.

Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Warren.

Labour’s Contract With Brighton and Hove

This week, along with dozens of councillors, candidates and Labour members, I launched the ten key commitments on which Labour in Brighton and Hove will fight the next election, the ten pledges that we are asking you to support.

This city is crying out for change, desperate for a competent council leadership which will improve the lives of residents across the city in every community. Labour will deliver that change, will set the city council the task of tackling poverty and promoting opportunity for all. If these are values you share, then say you are with us.

In our contract with Brighton and Hove we set out our ambitions, to get the basics right, get the bins collected, push recycling rates up and ensure our streets are clean. To build five hundred new council homes for those waiting for somewhere to live. To build and run a secondary school so that those at primary school now have somewhere to go in three to five years’ time.

If you believe an affordable home should be within reach for every family, if you believe an excellent school is the right of every pupil, then say you are with us.

If you vote Labour next May, in the local and General Elections, you can expect action on real apprenticeships and a fight to eliminate youth unemployment in the city. We will deliver on the major projects the city needs, bringing much needed and long delayed new facilities along with more jobs and more homes. If this is the future you want for the place where you live, then say you are with us.

The financial challenges the council faces are immense, with over £120 million cut from what it has to spend each and every year, and the costs of social care and infrastructure decay increasing rapidly. Despite that a Labour council will not demand more from residents already struggling to meet their living costs so we will not increase council tax or parking fees beyond inflation. Just as the council’s income has fallen, so has yours, and we know you need better pay, not higher bills.

These challenges will require difficult choices and imaginative thinking not just from councillors but from partner organisations and indeed residents, but we will work with you, listen to you, talk to you about how we meet those challenges together. If you want to share in this endeavour, if you believe in our co-operative principles, then say you are with us.

These ten commitments will form the foundations of our detailed manifesto next year, and the direction of travel of our Labour administration for the four years of our term of office if elected in May. If you want a positive change from the Greens running the city, if you think the Conservatives have little to offer beyond more cuts and a council that does less and cares less, if you want a council that works with you to build better communities in every part of Brighton and Hove which offers greater opportunities for every resident, then say you are with us.

I’ve signed this contract with the people of Brighton and Hove, and I urge everyone to sign up to it online as well. These are not just our pledges to you, these are goals for our city – goals for the place I have called home all my life – that I want us to commit to together. Say you are with us – sign up on our new website, our Facebook page and on Twitter. Say you are with us, and in two hundred and twenty days’ time elect a Labour council for Brighton and Hove.

Our Contract With Brighton and Hove

Our goals: better jobs, more homes, excellent schools and decent basic services.

Our values: fairness, sustainability and competence.

If you elect Labour councillors at the local elections next May:

•  We will make collecting refuse, increasing recycling and cleaning the streets a top council priority. The Leader and senior councillors will personally oversee work to improve the service.
• We will commit to tackle the city’s housing crisis by building at least 500 council houses by 2019, and securing 40% affordable homes in new housing developments.
• We will consult on introducing a register of landlords to protect tenants in the private rented sector, promote secure tenancies and tackle rip-off fees through a Tenant’s’ Charter.
• We will build a new secondary school to meet the growing need for places across the city, and it will be run by the council under powers restored by a Labour government. We will work to ensure all schools are accountable and offer excellent education.
• We will aim to keep any increases in council tax and parking charges within inflation-level rises, with additional income invested in public services, road safety and transport infrastructure that the city needs and residents want.
• We will establish a Fairness Commission to tackle the growing poverty and inequality in the city, independently chaired, reporting within a year and funded within existing budgets, to set out an action plan for the Labour Administration and partner organisations to implement.
• We will work to support a broad, sustainable and prosperous economy that benefits all parts of the city, with secure jobs paying the Living Wage and action to combat zero-hours contracts. There will be innovative proposals in our manifesto to help small and medium sized businesses in the city.
• We will ensure that major projects that are built in Brighton and Hove offer jobs, homes and new facilities for the city, are affordable, are rigorously scrutinised and are delivered on time with private investment not taxpayer debt.
• We will seek to eliminate youth unemployment in the city within four years, with real apprenticeships and career opportunities for young people.
• We will aim to keep public services local and democratically accountable, with power devolved to communities. Sustainability and Co-operative principles will run through the solutions we develop to meet the funding challenges we face.

 

250 days to go in Brighton and Hove

A Labour council elected in 250 days time will have very clear priorities for Brighton and Hove; to get the basics of local government such as refuse collection right, and to focus on the immediate priorities of the city and it’s residents: jobs, homes, schools and tackling the poverty and inequality that has grown under this Conservative Government.

Our manifesto will be published in the early Spring, but a labour council under my leadership will:

• make cleaning the streets, collecting the rubbish and increasing recycling a corporate priority for the city council. Our refuse and recycling service Cityclean will stay in-house, and management of the service will become the responsibility of the Policy and Resources Committee chaired by the Leader of the Council.
• tackle poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity in the city through a wide-ranging Fairness Commission. Independently chaired and paid for through existing budgets, it will bring together all existing measures and look at what other steps can be taken to tackle low-pay, less secure employment, poor housing and any other factors that limit the opportunities of the more than ten thousand people in Brighton and Hove in poverty, of whom more than four thousand are using food banks to feed their families. In the seventh richest economy in the world and in the richest region in the UK that is a disgrace.
• boost the economy to the benefit of all, not just a few in the city centre, ensure all young people have access to education, training, apprenticeships and employment opportunities no matter what part of the city they live in. We cannot afford to waste their potential.
• seek to address the housing and secondary school places shortfalls that will become crises in the next four years, including looking at regulating landlords and the private rented sector to the benefit of tenants. We will have to face the growing costs of social care and find new and better ways of delivering quality care that we can afford through better procurement and in close co-operation with our trades union partners.
• meet the challenge of adapting to the £100 million in cuts imposed by the Government by working with local voluntary sector, business, community and co-operative sector partners to keep services local, accountable and deliverable where they cannot be kept in-house. We should not, in my view, be spending city council money buying in services from outside the city and losing the value of that spend from the city’s economy. Other Labour authorities, including those in the Co-operative Councils Innovation Network, have developed innovative solutions to cuts in funding. Where there is ageing infrastructure we need to find investment; where there are major projects we need to ensure that decent jobs, affordable homes and real apprenticeships are delivered as part of the package.

These aims are in line with my values, with Labour values of fairness, of supporting those in poverty, of promoting opportunity for all, of making our city and all of our communities a better place to live. Much of this will need the support of a Labour Government elected on the same day. If you share those values and goals then work with us, join us and support our campaign to win in 2015.

www.labour.org.uk/join

http://www.facebook.com/BrightonHoveLabour

 

The priorities on our doorstep

At the final Brighton and Hove City Council meeting before the summer break, the Green Party brought a motion to council on the TTIP Trade Tariffs deal between the EU and the US. Now it is no doubt an important issue, and one that Labour MEPs are campaigning on in the European Parliament to ensure the deal does not inadvertently pave the way for further NHS privatisation. I’d argue that the European Parliament, not our city council chamber, is the place to debate international trade deals.

It is an incident which goes to the heart of the Green agenda and their priorities. They are always the first to pick up on the latest campaign, trending on the blogs and campaign group websites, or taking up column inches in The Guardian. It’s work that is admirable for a protest organisation, but not for a political party serving all residents and every neighbourhood in the city of Brighton and Hove.

Collecting donations for food banks in the city with Cllr Emma Daniel and Brighton Kemptown Parliamentary Candidate Nancy Platts.

Our priorities as Labour lie closer to home. As Fiona Twycross writes, we want to eliminate hunger in our city, a relatively prosperous one in the seventh richest nation in the world, yet it is a city where eleven thousand people live in poverty, where three and a half thousand people are using one of 22 food banks in a city of 270,000 people. Appallingly, 20% of children in the city are judged to be living in poverty, in my ward that figure rises to 45%, and as a city council we regard that as “on target”. I don’t. Our target must be zero.

Our Fairness Commission won’t just look at enforcing the Minimum Wage, promoting the Living Wage, ending youth unemployment, creating new jobs and reducing the housing waiting list. It will seek to create good, secure and well paid careers to ensure everyone reaches their maximum potential, it will seek to ensure access to affordable decent housing, it will seek to eliminate poverty and hunger in every estate, every high rise and every family in Brighton and Hove.

I’ve said I won’t make promises I can’t keep as Leader of a Group aiming to take control of the council next May, but I will set out bold and ambitious goals for a Labour council to strive for. The Greens can campaign on their transatlantic trade tariff deals, Labour priorities are here in the city, on our doorstep, with our neighbours who need our help.

 

Towards a Co-operative Council In Brighton and Hove

In May the Labour Group on Brighton and Hove reaffirmed its formal status as a “Labour and Co-operative Group”, and to building in to our manifesto for next May the co-operative principles of self-help, social responsibility and equality.

We have pledged to establish, as one of the first acts of a newly elected Labour and Co-operative Council, a Fairness Commission to tackle poverty and financial exclusion, boost opportunity and equality, and bring together the work that is being done across the city to improve the life chances of over eleven thousand of our neighbours in the city.

We will seek to win back the trust of voters lost by the Greens, ensure our basic services are delivered well, and face up to the huge challenges they have put off in their attempts to hold their fractious Party together.

Our greatest challenge comes from the cuts to the city council’s funding; over £100 million across a four year period. Those are not one-off cuts that can be met from reserves, but year-on-year reductions in our budget for local services. These are cuts on an unprecedented scale, ones that cannot be offset by increases in fees and charges, new business rates or increases in council tax.

Such significant cuts to the city council’s funding will demand, unavoidably, a radical rethink of what the council does and how it does it. There is no doubt the decisions we will have to make – the Greens having deferred them – will be hard. The council will increasingly be a partner in the delivery of services, a regulator, a connector more than a provider.

The work of Labour councils in the Co-operative Councils Innovation Network mean we are not alone in meeting these challenges, and we are not starting from scratch. Drawing from their examples we are well advanced with our manifesto process, but welcome submissions via ourcity@brightonhovelabour.com or the form below. In the coming week I will be writing to 50 key organisations across the city asking them what they would like to see from a Labour and Co-operative council.

We are also  well advanced in selecting candidates across the city, and their campaigning has already seen results in the May elections where Labour beat the Greens convincingly, coming from 10,000 votes behind to 2,000 votes ahead. We should not be complacent, and we will work to ensure that voters unhappy with the dismal performance of the Greens (recycling continues to fall in figures published this week) choose Labour as the team capable of delivering the progress this city needs.

With positive policies and a forward looking co-operative agenda, we will seek to devolve power to local people, creating fair, collaborative, resilient and democratic communities, where responsibilities and benefits are shared.

Through those positive campaigns and with those strong candidates in our communities we will, by this time next year, make our goal of a co-operative council a reality.

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Could the Green Party collapse in Brighton and Hove lead to a new coalition?

A “lame duck” administration in Brighton and Hove is riven with splits, led by a councillor who has said he won’t fight the next election, and which can’t face up to difficult decisions.

With ten months to go until the local and General Election, things are beginning to look very bad indeed for the Green Party in Brighton and Hove.

In the past few weeks their Leader – the only Green council leader in the UK – has announced he will stand down next May, leaving him and his colleagues open to the accusation of being a US-style “lame duck” administration. This follows three years of attempted coups and public divisions in the Green Group that led to the billboard headline “counsellors being brought in to counsel the councillors”.

With 300 days to go until the end of their term, their major manifesto pledges to recycle 70% of the city’s waste (rates have actually dropped to nearer 25%) and provide 1000 new homes (struggling to deliver even half that total) are looking undeliverable. Crises over school places, house building, social care provision and infrastructure are being put off until after the election.

At their citywide selection meeting last weekend, the Green Party were only able to find enough candidates to fill just under a half of the 54 seats up for grabs at the local elections. Sources close to the Green Party say their members now believe they are only likely to hold between three to eight council seats, down from the 23 they won in 2011. Almost all of the dozen or more seats they could lose would fall to Labour.

Three local opinion polls, one commissioned by the Greens themselves, have put them behind Labour both in terms of the city council and voting in Caroline Lucas’s Brighton Pavilion seat. Bookmakers Ladbrokes now make Labour’s Purna Sen the favorite to take the seat.

The European elections in May saw the Greens pushed into second by Labour, who the Greens beat by a clear ten thousand votes in the previous European elections in 2009. Despite some Labour voters staying at home or voting for the Greens or UKIP, the Labour vote more than doubled. Last July the Greens lost a council seat for the first time to Labour, in a ward they had thought was safe.

Now the Greens have been dealt a serious blow by the furore over one of their councillors calling members of the armed forces “hired killers” on Armed Forces Day, a controversy that has again split the Party, and drawn national media and public condemnation. A petition calling on him to resign has been signed by over two thousand people.

With many now calling for a removal of the “numpties” running the council, it is odd to find that the Greens have friends in the most unexpected of places; the Conservative Party.

When Labour moved a motion of no confidence in the Green Administration, it was Tory councillors who led the attack – on Labour. When Jason Kitcat announced his resignation, it was a Tory councillor who jumped to the letters page to praise him. When the Greens proposed a £36 million taxpayer guaranteed loan to fund a seafront viewing tower, it was the Tories who lined up to support it against huge public opposition. While our seafront needs tens of millions of pounds in urgent repairs, it is the Tories who vote through more vague Green traffic improvement schemes like the £8m one for Valley Gardens approved this week.

The Conservative vote in the city is in decline, as the two published polls have shown (Tory vote down 4-6%). They have no hope of winning control of the council next May, and face an uphill struggle to retain their two highly marginal parliamentary seats where their MPs have under 2% majorities.

What do they gain from any alliance with a Green party in meltdown? With political philosophies poles apart, is the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” what is driving this cosying up between previously sworn enemies? Could we see a Green/Blue “stop Labour” coalition emerge next Spring? A case of vote Green, get Blue, or vice-versa.

Whatever happens with the opposition parties, Labour has a strong team in place, and is putting forward policies to tackle poverty, support tenants in the private rented sector and meet the challenges in housing so that residents of Brighton and Hove have a positive choice next May.

 

Labour is putting in place a strong team to lead the city next May

I agree with Mike Holland on at least one point: there is no room for “numpties” at the council.

With a budget reducing by more than £100 million and enormous challenges facing the city in terms of housing, schools, development and poverty, we need people leading the council who are up to the task.

That’s why Labour has brought in people with vast experience in tackling big issues and major projects to run as candidates next May. People like: Martin Perry, who won a decade-long battle to deliver the American Express Community Stadium; Neil Schofield, someone with experience at the highest levels of government; and Tom Bewick, head of an international skills organisation.

Alongside them we have people with vast experience at management level in the third sector, like Karen Barford; in urban planning, with Julie Cattell; and running council services, with Gill Mitchell.

These are people who can identify issues and deliver solutions on time and in budget, and would be part of a Labour council administration getting to grips with the basics like cleaning our streets, and with getting our economy working for everyone.

Our Fairness Commission, announced last week, is about tackling inequality and poverty – not by condemning people to a life on benefits, but getting them into secure, well-paid jobs so they can contribute to a vibrant economy as both employees and consumers.

Along with Labour’s shadow business minister and our three parliamentary candidates, I met recently with local business owners at the Amex to see what Labour can do to help small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in the city. What I heard was a sector keen to grow, but which is restricted, one that sees time as its most vital resource. A Labour council would help them find the space and time to prosper.

I pass along our seafront every day. There is not just a need to clean it up and get the traffic flowing again, but vast potential to unlock – as Andy Parsons correctly identifies. Major projects need to happen – not to satisfy the vanity of politicians, but to deliver the jobs, apprenticeships, tourism, homes and leisure facilities this city desperately needs. A stronger economy delivers more income for the city to support services like social care, stretched by an ageing population.

I don’t agree with reducing the council down to a small board which simply commissions services from the private sector as in cities in the United States.

There is a role for local councillors as community champions, and we need a diverse mix in the council chamber to ensure all parts of our city are represented and heard. No system of government is perfect and an elected mayor is not necessarily an improvement on what we have now.

Whoever runs the city needs to reconnect with residents, with neighbourhoods, and with business, and win back the trust of a population so badly let down by the current incumbents. I’ll make no promises beyond assembling the best team of people I can and doing my very best to restore that trust and engagement if Labour are elected next May.

This article first appeared in the Brighton and Hove Independent.

Why I’m backing action for better pay on July 10th

Many public sector staff will be taking industrial action on July 10th in protest at below-inflation pay rises and cuts to pensions.

With house prices up by nearly 10% a year, energy bills up by almost 40% in three years, and food prices rocketing, cutting pay for hundreds of thousands of people who we all rely on to deliver council, blue light, NHS, school and other services, harms our economy and drives more and more into working poverty.

Meanwhile, pay and bonuses for those in the top 20% continue to rise sharply. And it isn’t just the traditionally low paid who are falling behind; many previously well-paid professions are seeing incomes drop.

The Government says pay increases can’t be afforded, despite their insistence that the UK economy is recovering, yet in reality they are skimming the public sector pay budget to fund infrastructure spending in areas important to the Tory vote next May.

Put simply, if the majority do not have disposable income then they can’t spend it. Our economy cannot survive with a small minority at the top making vast profits and drawing huge salaries that are then taken out of the UK economy; it is unsustainable.

Labour in Brighton and Hove have pledged to set up a one-year Fairness Commission to look at strengthening our local economy, securing better pay and tackling the growing poverty that we are seeing as a result of underemployment, low wages and benefit cuts.

No-one wants strikes and disruption to people’s daily lives, which are hard enough, but there is a limit to what reasonable people can take from a Government that seems hell-bent on increasing inequality in our country to the benefit of a very few at the top.

I’d hope that the Government would see sense and provide councils and other public sector employers with adequate funding so that school staff, care home workers, street cleaners, midwives and firefighters can have a pay rise at least in line with inflation.

Below-inflation rises and pay freezes will only add to our low-wage economy where poverty pay is driving thousands into debt and hardship. If the Government refuse to budge then Labour in the city will back the one-day strike on July 10th.