A Year into a Lib Dem Wiltshire Council; Chatting with Ben Reed

It’s a Friday, just polishing off a big boy breakfast at New Society. Got the window seat; I ponder how beautiful Devizes Market Place looks from up here, and how we often take it for granted. There’s Ben Reed, Wiltshire Councillor for Devizes North, waving at me from below; he’s coming up for carrot cake, and to chew the fat over the first year with the Liberal Democrats at the helm of Wiltshire Council…. priorities; not till I’ve finished my sausages!

There was minimal bumps driving here, in comparison to how it has been. The Council are slowly playing catch up with our dilapidated roads, but potholes remains firm on my agenda, because while the main roads are getting TLC, it feels like Devizes is being left out. Despite a lesser public issue visibly, isn’t the spiralling costs of social care more important than potholes, or are the two holistically connected, if these potholes drive us to insanity?! Ben? He starts talking pubs; I’ve made a friend!

Far from being something Ben has researched, “but,” he started, “I think thirteen pubs might be the most of any council division in Wiltshire. It’s nice to have places to stop when you’re out and about delivering and canvassing.” For the record, it was relevant. I was praising the café.

It also served as an introduction to Ben’s enthusiastic bearing on the area he manages, explaining its diversity he continued, “there’s quite a lot of social housing, retirement complexes, and all the businesses. So, quite a lot going on.” 

It is through this enthusiasm I’ll acknowledge while the public are keen to pick easy targets, like potholes, there’s so many other duties to being a Councillor we rarely contemplate.  Ben told me he was due to meet an elderly lady straight after this who lives in Long Street and finds it difficult getting around town. “I’m going to try and work out what her routes are,” he said, “and maybe look at whether there are things I can report on the My Wilts app.” Pausing to consider pedestrians navigating our wobbly pavements might better take their chances on the dodgy roads, I’m determined to turn him to the subject of potholes! Is Devizes being left out?!

“It does feel a bit like that,” Ben agreed. “frankly, it’s going to be a problem for a while because the backlog is huge.” I will, later in our chat, praise Ben for his Councillor Facebook page, where, unlike others, there’s no negativity bashing the opposition, just feelgood posts, but sometimes fact is fact, the previous Conservative Wiltshire Council seriously neglected road repairs, leaving us in this state and passing the buck.

“I’ll try to steer away from being too tribal,” Ben affirmed, “because I don’t think it’s very helpful, but as I understand it, there was quite a bow wave of funding in the last couple of years as the election approached. I don’t know whether there was a realisation that this was a problem, but if you go back further than that, and this isn’t this isn’t particularly a Wiltshire problem, going back to 2010, when the Conservative government first came in, local authority funding across the board was really slashed. And highways were one of the things that councils chose to take the money away from. So there was a period where we fell behind with those preventative jobs. And now we’re chasing our tails. It’s a never-ending problem, and when you get a winter like we’ve just had with so much rain and then that freezes….”

As it being a national issue, I’ve seen better roads in other counties. Yet, we may believe Wiltshire hits the hotlist for the worst roads, probably because we use them regularly. But research suggests Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, and others, long before Wiltshire gets a mention.

I could scrutinise the previous Conservative-led Wiltshire Council until suppertime, and I’m pleased someone else now has a stab at it. But, councillors on the opposition and ex-councillors who lost their seats, are quick to raise issues visible to the public, like the pothole debacle, whereas they would’ve avoided the subject when The Conservatives were in charge.

In considering the often unmentioned tasks, such as social care costs, exampling the Trowbridge car park fiasco, which I talked to Taylor Wright about, I worry there’s too much time taken up with political point scoring, and  the council is far more disputative and argumentative now that the Tories are on the back foot and Reform makes their impact, against all common sense. To summarise, I’m gonna ask Ben how a council is supposed to find solutions to important and pressing countywide problems, when they spend months bickering about a carpark!

 “Yeah,” Ben nods, I’m onto something! “I found probably the least enjoyable element so far has been those council meetings. It’s difficult to see some of the tactics as anything other than obstructive, unfortunately. The way funding is and the way policies get brought forward is the council officers look at our manifesto and make suggestions and then the administration says yes, or, can we tweak this, and quite often the things we end up doing are probably the things, to be completely honest, that the Conservatives would have done if they’d if they’d still been in power, and yet they end up opposing what often are, as far as I can see, the most the most sensible measures, and the carpark is a good example, I think.”

“It’s a strange situation,” Ben justifies the carpark fiasco thus, “having to provide free parking, and this covenant. But you’ll see this week, NCP, the big carpark developer, have gone into administration. So, if they’re not making money on carparks that they can actually charge people to park in, then you can see what a liability a carpark that we’re not allowed to charge for is. And it’s got to be rebuilt. And it’s going to cost us far more now than it would have been to incentivise the developer to knock it down and, you know, build something nice for Trowbridge.”

 I can play “real” journalist, try to gauge Ben for marketable controversy by name-dropping troublesome local political busybodies, but he’s not taking the bait! I’m unconcerned, for that’s never my objective. New to politics, Ben was keen to express he’d never been the opposition, so doesn’t know what it feels like. Though, he comes across as genuine, an earnest and honest guy, tucking into his carrot cake.

There’s a phrase, ‘a week is a long time in politics,’ maybe it’s the opposite for local politics; it’s early days for this new Wiltshire Council and perhaps, optimistically, we need to be patient to see any fruition at base level.

The carpark was only an example, I was more after dirt on the bickering. Issues regarding waste, reducing the bin collections, and Reform’s pathetic failed bid to end net zero were all hitting points for the opposition, that we discussed later in our chat. I suggested we need some education on how to reduce waste, not just waste being collected, to which he agreed.

Disappointed by the reaction from the opposition and that “the petition that’s running doesn’t really go into detail,” Ben was keen to talk bins, and to defend the motion. “Your black bin collections are being reduced from two weekly to three weekly,” Ben said, but expressed, “alongside that, a weekly food waste collection is being introduced. So if you look at a six week period, people will actually be getting more for their money. There will be more collections over the year, just different collections, and hopefully there should be a lot less in the residual waste when the food waste comes out.” Besides, he pointed out, it’s a government requirement, “we have to we have to do it.”

For the opposition it’s a soundbite, easy to highlight your waste collection won’t be as regular under the Lib Dems,  but Ben explained, “it’s just not true. One type of bin collection has been reduced, but you’ve got a new one which is a lot more frequent. Sadly, there is a bit of game playing.”

On the general bickering, “I do find that very energy-sapping,”  Ben replied. “I try and stay away from it as much as I can. I think for the Conservative group, it’s a real change for them. It’s a period of adjustment. They’ve been in charge of Wiltshire Council pretty much from the outset. And I think, well, I hope they’ll find a bit of a friendlier way of conducting themselves. Because opposition is about fair criticism, it’s about scrutiny. They’re perfectly entitled to raise complaints. The roads, you know, it’s difficult to see how we can be criticised too much on those at the moment. Up until last month, we were working on the old Conservative budget. We’ve allocated some additional capital spend for the next few years. Hopefully we can get away from kind of reactive maintenance.”

“January, there were 2,700 pothole repairs, which is a record month ever. It’s an unwanted record, but, I think up to mid-March, they did about 5,000. And there’s normally, I think about 15,000 done a year. That’s quite a lot ahead of schedule. They’ll be concentrating on repairs until June and then hopefully they’ll get to a place where they can look at preventative maintenance. Station Road is a case in point. It’s been due for a proper resurfacing, but you can’t do that while Northgate Street is still closed. So as soon as that’s open, I’ll be pushing for Station Road to have its resurfacing, and they’ll come to Northgate Street later.”

It makes me wonder, that they created a road repair taskforce, if the workers are allowed to think for themselves and bypass the red tape, because that’s what appears to delay the process. You download the app, report one pothole at a time in a road of thousands, which goes through evaluation processes, paperwork, venturing out to spray-paint a square around it, or pop a cone in there. Whereas a taskforce could deal with it immediately. Because I see a repaired stretch of road, and often there’s potholes centimetres after it! Are they restricted to deal with what it says on a piece of paperwork, and not permitted to think, ‘hey, we’ve got a bit of spare tarmac, we could just carry on a wee bit, and cover that trench too?!’

“I’m told that there is a bit of leeway for that,” Ben stressed. “Potholes get prioritised, a defect or a pothole gets categorised. So, if it’s in a particularly dangerous area, or of a particular size or depth, then it gets a P1, and it’s supposed to be repaired within 24 hours. If there’s a crew going around doing those, they probably will ignore some smaller ones and just get the ones on their list ticked off. So that’s probably why that arises. But I think in practice, if there’s a massive priority one pothole and then some quite big ones obviously visible nearby, they probably would repair those before they move on, I’d like to think. But it depends how busy they are and what they’ve got on their list for that day.”

I can’t really argue with that, state of our roads, they must be busy bees!  Ben also suggested technical issues with the MyWilts app needs reviewing, that issues raised by the public can be marked as closed even if the issue hasn’t been resolved. “I don’t think they should be closed until they’re repaired,” he said, “we’ll see what the review of the app comes up with, in terms of improvements.”

It’s not the roads though taking up the budget, annoying as it is to hit a pothole, the bigger picture is knowing vulnerable people are safely cared for. “People often don’t realise that the bulk of our funding, whether that’s from government or from council tax payments, is pretty much spent before we even decide what to do with it. And social care takes up a really big chunk of that. So, children’s and adults, vulnerable people’s services is, I forget the exact percentage, but it’s certainly over 60% of all Wiltshire Council’s expenditure.”

“That’s an ever-increasing chunk,” Ben justified, “which makes it really difficult to find money for other statutory services, like library services are statutory, highways too, obviously. Once you get beyond that, you’re really having to find pennies to do things. Leisure, for instance, is not a statutory service, but Wiltshire’s managed to keep a reasonable number of leisure centres. I think, compared to some local authorities, we’ve done quite well there, building a new leisure centre in Trowbridge, which is coming on very well.”

“But yeah, social care is the headline thing, I think, for councils. And it’s very important to look after people who need help. I’m recently been added to the Children’s Select Committee, which is the main scrutiny committee for all the children’s services. They look at how schools are performing, school attendance, and the leisure and youth services we offer. I’m really enjoying that actually. I don’t have children, so I thought, well, maybe this isn’t the right committee for me. But no, of all the committees I’m on, I think I get most out of that. So yeah, it’s been good.”

We talked for some time on MPs, praising Brian Matthew, and we agreed switching parties, as Danny Kruger recently did in Marlborough should meet with a by-election. But the focus needed shifting back to council level, so I asked Ben what he thought the biggest changes at Wiltshire Council has been, and how transparent they are.

“We certainly want it to feel people are closer to their council,” Ben responded. “They can ask questions and get answers, and then we will be, transparent with people. Yeah, there’s criticism been levelled about, some meetings go into part two, which is confidential business. And, like the carpark, we were accused of doing things behind closed doors. But this is completely standard stuff that happened under the last administration. If there’s commercial sensitive information, then it doesn’t, or personal; if individuals are being spoken about, that isn’t going to be in the public domain. And that’s the same everywhere.”

The opposition play on this, and it reflects badly?

“Well, it does,” Ben agreed. “There’s no reason why people shouldn’t take what they’re reading from them at face value. But to be honest, I wish more people would tune in to the council meetings on YouTube. Because to me, If you watch a bit of that, then it’s pretty clear, to me at least, who’s trying to get things done, and who’s trying to stop things moving forward.”

With public engagement, prior to the meeting, Ben stressed surgeries aren’t popular. I said he shouldn’t take it personally, as they often happen during the working day, and supposed many of us, myself guilty too, prefer to have a whinge on Facebook rather than address the councillors in person!

“Probably, yeah,” he figured.” I want to make sure if someone does want to get in touch with me, they can. So the more channels and opportunities there are for that, the better. And that’s partly on me to go out to events and knock on people’s doors and sort my focused newsletters out three or four times a year. But, it does need someone to make the effort to drop me a line. It can be a phone call, an e-mail, a Facebook message. They can come and see me at a surgery. I am trying to do the surgeries evenings or weekends, so hopefully a bit friendlier times for people.”

“I’ll answer comments on Facebook if I think I sensibly can. Sometimes people make comments, and you can understand why, people let off steam, but maybe they don’t know the full facts of what the issue is. And sometimes it’s complex to explain that. So it’s difficult on a Facebook message.”

And people can take it the wrong way. It’s just words. Herein I raised the Kebab Shop fire as an example, an issue Ben confirmed had been his most pressing, and being such a complex one, has learned not to  “over promise.” He originally said the site will be demolished in February, we’re moving into April. Devizes is a lovely place, but it’s easy to think the town’s in a state, and everything that’s promised is just pie in the sky.

“What would be a worry for a town is if there wasn’t these developments happening,” Ben replied, “if it wasn’t a place where developers wanted to invest and create new facilities and new homes.”

“Devizes, seems to be moving in the right direction, and I know it’s frustrating with the delays, but I think there’s so much light at the end of the tunnel. Northgate Street, the kebab house, there’s been a perfect storm, but it’s really unfortunate in terms of the location, the type of building and the damage that was done, ended up being propped up like it was.”

“Quite apart from the human aspect of it and the loss of business and livelihoods, and the neighbouring properties are both quite badly damaged as well. Hopefully they can get on and get it repaired. And it has dragged. If I’d been able to hire a wrecking ball and pitch up there myself, I would have done it!”

“It was not the easiest thing to inherit. It was six months after the fire that I won the election, and at that stage, I don’t think the owner had worked through all the insurance issues. But eventually the demolition application went in. They were supposed to do it in February, as you say. They hadn’t finalised the partition wall agreement, because they need to make sure when they knock it down that they don’t do more damage to number one and number three. And then the contractor wasn’t available until April. So we are where we are.”

Our chat continued onto Station Road’s resurface and its traffic flow. Ben agreed lessons needed learning between the Highway’s team and Building control team, and he raised other issues, such as the condemned old Royal Oak building.

“They’re converting it into apartments,” he said. “It was a terrible state, but it’s a listed building, so it’s really good to see it getting back into use. Unfortunately, they’re going to need to close half of New Park Street to sort out the water and electricity connections. So, I’ve been talking with the traffic team at Wiltshire Council, about when is a good time; there’s no good time! I think the offer they’ve made to the developer is do it overnight, so there won’t be any closures in the day. So, we’re waiting for that to be scheduled.”

“It’s only a short closure, but what we don’t want is any overlap with Northgate Street still being closed. So, the highways team are always balancing these things against each other.”

It was great to meet and chat with Ben, for there’s many issues which need clarification. Short newspaper articles on a relative single subject cannot provide as much information, and being surgeries aren’t popular and the public tend to need matchsticks to keep their eyes open watching a video of council meetings, it is all too easy to be misinformed about Wiltshire Council! I believe social media posts from the opposition parties should be taken with a pinch of salt, and while criticism is fair game, things are looking positive a year into the newly elected Lib Dem council.

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