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Tower Arts Centre Video Winchester

Tower Arts Centre – bad news

Bad news on the Tower last Friday as you can see from the following news report:

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Despite Ken Thornber being forced to wriggle on the issue of rapidly increasing head office costs in Recreation and Heritage (because the Tower is being cut to fund head office costs – not adult social care); despite his officers being forced to admit that the ‘evening programme fund’ proposal is completely half-baked; despite his refusal to even address Alex Hoare’s outstanding speech on how John Tellett and the Tower Arts Centre have nurtured arts in Winchester – and the critical role of artistic direction in a successful arts centre; and despite his failure to address almost any of the points raised by Jan Moring, Ken Thornber decided to go ahead with the paper proposed to him and transfer the Tower to Kings’ School, slash local arts funding, and set up a tiny ‘figleaf fund’ – supposedly to support the evening arts programme in Winchester.

It’s frustrating. It’s infuriating. And it’s tragic to know that so much of the work of John Tellett and his team will come to an end this April.

The ‘Save Tower Arts’ campaign tried everything. I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues tried everything. The Lib Dem controlled Town Forum signed up to put money into the project. We were regularly talking to our local Conservative opposite numbers, asking them to do whatever it took to save the Tower. And we were more than happy for them to take the credit for it, just as long as the Tower was saved as an arts centre.

But it was not to be.

The infuriating thing is that the failure to save the Tower is not due to financial crisis. It’s due to lack of political will and lack of political vision.

The last few months have been a farce. The Conservatives have organised a consultation – and then refused to listen to it. They’ve asked for a report into different options – and then ignored it. They’ve said that they need more details of their preferred option – and then decided to proceed anyway when they don’t got them.

This goes beyond party politics. Ultimately it’s a question of competence and commitment to the arts.

We’re not giving up just yet. There’s a very small chance that we can stop the current proposal. We certainly need to try and improve it. However we can’t deny that last Friday’s decision is a very heavy blow.

Here’s the speech I made at Ken Thornber’s decision day:

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Chris Huhne Nick Clegg Tower Arts Centre

Successful Lib Dem leadership hustings at the Tower Arts Centre

Chris Huhne MP, Martin Tod and Nick Clegg MP at Winchester Leadership meeting

Despite the torrential rain and engineering works on the trains and the relatively short notice, it was standing room only at the Tower on Sunday when Nick and Chris came to Hampshire to ask for local members’ support.

Nick and Chris were on top form – and everyone came out feeling really inspired. Whoever wins, it’s clear we will continue to lead the way on the environment, civil liberties and internationalism, but they also put forward thought-provoking and constructive views on issues like affordable housing and education. They were both so good that I’m not sure that they made it easier for people to choose between them!

Continue reading “Successful Lib Dem leadership hustings at the Tower Arts Centre”
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Tower Arts Centre

Tower is being cut to pay for head office bureaucrats not adult social care

We have only a few days left to save the Tower Arts Centre as an arts centre with a full professional art programme. If Ken Thornber agrees the paper sent to him last week, that spells the end of the Tower as an arts centre.

The problem is straightforward. There just isn’t enough money in the plan to fund a functioning evening programme. A crucial part of the Tower’s identify as an integrated centre for the arts is being removed. The Council’s own consultant’s report made clear that the Tower is efficiently run and that staffing could not be reduced without effectively ending the Tower’s programme. And the staffing and budget for the evening programme are being slashed.

And it gets worse. The plan doesn’t just propose to dramatically reduce spending for an evening programme. It proposes to spread that money across the whole of Winchester.

At this point, we enter the realms of fantasy. The plan for an evening programme is both vague and underfunded. If, as the Consultant’s report made clear, the reduced budget isn’t going to be enough to staff and manage an evening programme at the Tower, it certainly won’t be enough for the whole of Winchester.

70% of local people in the Council’s own telephone poll want to keep the Tower as an Arts Centre – over 450 people attended a public meeting backing the Tower – but they are being ignored. Why did the Conservatives go ahead with the consultation if they won’t take any notice?

Despite what Ken Thornber says, the cuts they propose are not to pay for adult social care. They’re covering consultants and extra staffing hired at the County Council’s headquarters. In the last two years, two ‘head office’ budgets in the County Council’s Recreation and Heritage budget – covering the director’s office and policy development – have increased by nearly £250k. This is more than twice the amount by which the Conservatives propose to cut the Tower’s budget.

The decision to cut the Tower also pre-dates this year’s social care budget problems. At her decision day meeting in July, Conservative Councillor Margaret Snaith said that she had been working on plans to transfer the Tower to King’s School for about a year – before the latest round of cuts to cover the Conservative’s problems in managing the adult social care budget – but after the Conservatives recreation and leisure budget started to show dramatic increases on head office spending.

To put it another way, the Conservatives have been dramatically increasing the amount they pay people to sit in the Castle and write arts policy, while proposing to slash the Tower Arts budget and get rid of people who are actually on the front line delivering the arts to local people.

The last few months have been a farce. The Conservatives have organised a consultation – and then refused to listen to it. They’ve asked for a report into different options – and then ignored it. They’ve said that they need more details of the plan to transfer the Tower to the school – and then decided to proceed anyway when they didn’t get them.

This goes beyond party politics. It’s a question of competence and commitment to the arts.

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Railways South West Trains

Here we go again…

South West Trains have just announced another round of inflation-busting price increases for peak and off-peak travel.

Part of this increase comes as a result of the franchising system – and will disappear off into Central Government coffers. It’s effectively “tax farming” – or a stealth tax on off-peak and peak travellers in the South East. British rail passengers already pay more per mile than most of the rest of Europe. If the government was serious about rail, it would award the franchise to the company offering the lowest fares, not the highest premium.

The second issue is that the whole approach to pricing on the railways is broken. Locally, companies like South West Trains are a monopoly. They’re abusing that monopoly. And the rail regulator isn’t doing anything about it. No price increase has ever been refused by the regulator. We need the regulator to finally start acting in the interest of the rail traveller.

Whether that means replacing the current management or transferring responsibility for pricing regulation to the Office of Fair Trading, I don’t know. But something has to change.

My friend, Ed Davey, has just made a video on the topic, highlighting the problems they’ve been having in London.

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Chandlers Ford Littleton Micheldever Post Office

Taking the post office campaign to Whitehall

Martin Tod, Sandra Gidley MP, Chris Huhne MP and Kelsie Learney campaigning to save Hampshire post offices

The final deadline for submitting responses to the Post Office Closure programme consultation for Hampshire & the Isle of Wight finished on Monday – with detailed responses submitted by ourselves and others for most of the post offices in the local area.

However, all this detailed work mustn’t let us lose sight of the fact that ultimately these closures stem from a Government decision backed by Gordon Brown. The Government decided to close these 2,500 post offices. Post Office Management are just administering a government decision. That’s why I was in Downing Street today with Chris Huhne MP, Sandra Gidley MP and Councillor Kelsie Learney presenting the petitions we collected opposing the closure.

Post Offices are a vital lifeline in our area (and most other areas), especially for pensioners and people who don’t have easy access to transport. In rural areas they are often the last shop in the village.

Incidentally, this was my first time outside Downing Street. I got chatting to one of the police officers there and we agreed that we were surprised how tatty bits of it appeared to be. Perhaps it’s the time I spent marketing washing powder, or perhaps I’ve got fabric on my mind due to the campaign for the Textile Conservation Centre, but I was surprised how discoloured the net curtains looked (I was actually quite surprised that they had net curtains): they looked like they could do with a wash!