Plymouth 2012

You must be thinking I’m avoiding the wards where my predictions fell very wide of the mark. Fear not, everything in good time. For now, I can feel pretty pleased with myself because I get 2/2 for my prediction for Plymouth ward. Not that it’s a truly insightful prediction – I said at the time that “Plymouth will keep its Conservative councillors for ever”. Congratulations, then, to Conservative incumbents Maureen Kelly-Owen and Clive Williams.

And here are the results in their historical context.

Fascinating! The Conservative vote in Plymouth only dropped by 29%. Compared with the total collapse in Cornerswell, something significant appears to have affected the fate of the candidates in the two wards. Readers of this blog will know that I have a particularly low opinion of Dorothy Turner and John Fraser – could it be that publicity surrounding their unconscionable negligence had the effect of depressing their vote further? We’ll have to wait and see what happened to the Conservative vote elsewhere in Penarth before coming to any conclusions.

There was a 23% increase in the Labour vote, substantially higher than that registered by the Labour candidates in Cornerswell but still a wide margin short of victory.

And for Plaid, I’m going to look at it in the same way as I did in Cornerswell, which is that their vote reduced by 46%, rather than increased by 8%. This is a substantially worse result than the Cornerswell candidates achieved. Again, I’ll need to examine results in other Penarth wards before coming to any conclusions.

For both Labour and Plaid, their energies appear to be best expended elsewhere rather than in this unassailably blue ward. But of course Plymouth and Stanwell are going to be combined in time for the next election, so that really shakes things up. I’ll discuss what that means for our hopefuls in about four and a half years’ time. But I’ll be returning to the proposed new boundaries much sooner than that because there are important points of democratic principle at stake.

And for interest, the Lib Dem candidate polled just 28% of the 2004 candidate. That might indicate the perils of not standing candidates on a regular basis, or it may just be a reflection of the chronically poor UK poll ratings being enjoyed by the Lib Dems recently. I know where my money’s sitting.

Only Sully registered a higher turnout than Plymouth. Who said turnout was related to social status?! A total of 1,868 people voted from the total permissible of 4,570. That’s a 41% turnout. And it’s not going to take much maths to sort out most of the candidates here because Maureen Kelly Owen and Clive Williams were neck-and-neck, receiving the blessing of slap bang 50% of voters apiece. So even in a good election for Labour, the Conservatives would still have taken this seat under just about any voting system you care to mention. Now I’m feeling statistically supported in my confidence of the safety of this ward to the Conservatives.

Labour’s Tracey Alexander got the nod from 32% of voters, which means that the party’s Philip Rapier (29%) leaked votes to the Lib Dem candidate David Ellis who himself picked up just 8%. He’ll be buying Philip a pint next time they’re in the Labour Club I expect. Those leaky votes don’t appear to have ended up with either of the Plaid candidates Sandra Clubb and Marc Jones who, like the Conservatives, were inseparable – each with the support of 11% of voters.

This brings me to a point of passing interest. I mentioned the ‘alphabet effect’ in a previous post. Well, Plymouth is the only ward where people with surnames earlier in the alphabet didn’t get a voting bonus as a result, with this being the case for both the Conservatives and Plaid. Could it be that every person voting Plaid and Conservative voted for both candidates from the chosen party? While I’m willing to consider this for Plaid, with 202 voters, it’s much less likely with 939 voters because the likelihood of deviations in voting patterns increases as the number of voters increases. It’s difficult to explain in any other terms because the numbers are so neat. But then there’s no reason that random chance shouldn’t result in an identical tally for these parties’ candidates. Given the results from 2008, I’m going to suggest that these results are coincidental and that the Conservatives and Plaid haven’t yet found a way of getting every voter to vote exclusively for their party.

On to turnout. I’m going to make the same assumptions about non-voters for Plymouth as I did for Cornerswell. So we’re knocking 10% off the electoral roll to give 4,113 potential voters. Subtracting the 1,868 who bothered to vote gives 2,245 electors who found other things to trouble them than the 5 minutes it takes to put a few crosses in boxes to determine the future of local services in the Vale until 2017.

So in order to top the poll in Plymouth our independent candidate would need to garner just 42% of the non-voters. Again, that’s assuming that not one current voter would be persuaded from the other parties and into the arms of the alternative. This is important to bear in mind, because of course each vote coming from the incumbents counts as double for any other candidate – one more for them and one less to beat the incumbent.

This issue of a higher turnout in wealthier wards is one that’s exercising my mind a fair bit. I had assumed that turnout would be higher in more competitive wards but – as we’ll see with St. Augustine’s in the next post – that hasn’t been borne out by the facts. I must confess that’s slightly disappointing. I’d wanted the evidence to help support my preconception that a good level of competition between candidates and parties is healthy for democracy. After all, that was supposed to be one of the reasons in favour of the single transferable vote they use in Scottish council elections. Could it be that that’s not necessarily the case – at least, in local authority terms here in Penarth? Unfortunately we’re not going to find out turnout figures in Scotland until September to be able to test them against Wales’ figures. But then, I haven’t been able to find figures for all-Wales turnout anywhere online. Perhaps I’ll have to have a go myself!

Let’s have a look at turnout throughout the Vale. Just two wards reported turnout of greater than 50%. And while Dinas Powys has some areas that are slightly less than exclusive, Peterston-super-Ely could hardly be described as struggling. Coming in higher than 45% were Cowbridge and Llandow/Ewenny. At the other end of the scale, five wards had a very low turnout – less than 35%: Buttrills, Court, Gibbonsdown, Stanwell and finally Cadoc, which only just scraped above 30%. Gibbonsdown and Court comprise a Communities First area, Buttrills is Barry town centre, Cadoc is largely Cadoxton, and Stanwell, well, I need to have a closer look to see if it’s Penarth’s poorest ward, but on first glimpse this is an outlier. The rest of the results though seem consistent with people in higher social classes being more likely to vote than those in lower social classes. This has further implications for the local boundary shake-up – as if there wasn’t enough in the mix already.

As far as I can tell, there’s no ward-based income or well-being measurement that can usefully tell us which are definitively the poorest wards in the Vale. Please point me in the right direction if I’m mistaken: penartharbyd[a]gmail.com. I’ve come across this website which gives some idea of ward-level crime, which in itself is an indicator of deprivation. Unfortunately, it seems to think that Plymouth ward, Penarth, is the same ward as Plymouth ward, Merthyr Tudful, so it’s not terribly helpful. And the results are month-by-month and therefore much more subject to statistical vagaries than if they did a helpful annual summary. They do give 12 months’ worth of figures so theoretically you could compile a year’s results to make it more statistically robust but believe it or not I’ve got better things to do with my time.

Like starting work on “St. Augustine’s 2012”.

The Count

No, not this one.

Cornerswell

• Rhiannon Birch – Labour – 796 – ELECTED
• Peter King – Labour – 698 – ELECTED
• John Fraser – Conservative – 376
• Dorothy Turner – Conservative – 350
• Luke James – Plaid – 308
• Osian Lewis – Plaid – 282
• Damian Chick – Lib Dem – 64

Plymouth

• Maureen Kelly Owen – Conservative – 939 – ELECTED
• Clive Williams – Conservative – 939 – ELECTED
• Tracey Alexander – Labour – 598
• Philip Rapier – Labour – 547
• Sandra Clubb – Plaid – 202
• Marc Jones – Plaid – 202
• David Ellis – Lib Dem – 153

St. Augustine’s

• Lis Burnett – Labour – 887 – ELECTED
• Gwyn Roberts – Labour – 781 – ELECTED
• Paul Church – Conservative – 622
• Sophie Williams – Conservative – 615
• Anthony Slaughter – Green – 280
• Niclas ap Glyn – Plaid – 217
• David Wilton – Plaid – 193

Stanwell

• Janice Birch – Labour – 666 – ELECTED
• Mark Wilson – Labour – 651 – ELECTED
• Ken Lloyd – Conservative – 309
• Christopher Williams – Conservative – 294
• Adrian Roper – Plaid – 152

Sully

• Bob Penrose – Independent – 876 – ELECTED
• Kevin Mahoney – UKIP – 633 – ELECTED
• Sarah Sharpe – Conservative – 464
• Anthony Ernest – Conservative – 342
• Paula Hardy – Labour – 330
• Carolyn Mirza-Davies – Plaid – 148

Total roll-call of councillors:

Labour – 6

Conservative – 2

Independent – 1

UKIP – 1

 

also

Llandough

• Kate Edmunds – Labour – 374 – ELECTED
• Ben Gray – Conservative – 178
• Steven Thomas – Plaid – 74

Predictions for 3 May 2012

Well, there are just two weeks to go until the election, so it’s about time for my predictions for who’ll be popping the champagne corks on the morning of 4 May.

I’m basing my predictions on a combination of recent polling at the UK level and the most recent poll that includes Plaid Cymru as a separate entity. I’m looking at what happened in Penarth last time as compared to the 2004 results – in particular, what effect the poll ratings at that time might have had on the results, and forecasting a similar equivalent effect this time.

So at the UK level, in 2004, the average of three polls gave Conservatives 32%, Labour 34.3%, Lib Dem 20.3% and Other 13.3% – a Labour lead of 2.3%. In 2008, the average of four polls put the Conservatives on 40%, Labour 30%, Lib Dem 20% and Other 11% – a 10% lead for the Conservatives.

For 2012, the BBC’s poll of polls indicates that as of 10 April, the Labour lead over the Conservatives in the UK was 9% (42% to 33%). The Lib Dem share of the vote has shrunk to 8% in total. The most recent all-Wales poll indicates that Labour have 47%, Conservatives 20%, Plaid 16% and Lib Dems 7%.

So back to the results. The fascinating thing is that on first glance there’s no consistent pattern across the wards. A 10% Conservative lead over Labour before the 2008 elections translated to the following:

• Cornerswell – Labour vote decreased by 3%, Conservative vote increased by 29%
• Plymouth – Labour vote decreased by 15%, Conservative vote increased by 3%
• St. Augustine’s – Labour vote increased by 2%, Conservative vote increased by 39%, Plaid vote decreased by 8%
• Stanwell – Labour vote decreased by 1%, Conservative vote increased by 30%, Lib Dem vote decreased by 28%
• Sully – Labour vote decreased by 31%, Conservative vote increased by 20%, Independent vote decreased by 31%, Plaid vote increased by 63% (from a very low base)

So with a Conservative opinion poll lead of 10%, the Labour vote held up in highly contested wards but collapsed in Sully and Plymouth (wards where Labour stands no chance even in a good year). Meanwhile, the Conservative vote barely increased in the shoe-in ward of Plymouth but increased by 29% or more in the competitive wards of Cornerswell, St. Augustine’s and Stanwell. Incidentally, this seems to be decent evidence in favour of adopting the alternative vote system for local elections (as they have in Scotland).

So what does that mean for our hopefuls on 3 May? Broadly, I’m expecting the reverse of last election, with a slightly increased Labour vote (considerably higher in Sully and Plymouth) and a substantial decline in the Conservative vote, with one exception in St. Augustine’s where Sophie Williams’ vote will  remain high enough to grab one of the two seats on offer. Plaid’s share of the vote will increase across most wards, but particularly where the historic vote has been low. It’s going to be a miserable night for the Liberal Democrat hopefuls; both of them will record fewer votes than the Green candidate.

• Cornerswell will elect two Labour councillors, Rhiannon Birch and Peter King, despite whispers of an energetic Plaid campaign. Turfing out John Fraser and Dorothy Turner will be a very welcome result for the people of Cogan.
• Plymouth will keep its two Conservative councillors forever. Councillors Maureen Kelly Owen and Clive Williams will retain their seats until they drop.
• St. Augustine’s is the most interesting ward of the lot. It’s got a history of electing candidates from different parties, and that’s going to happen again in 2012. It’s going to be the first ward in living memory to have two women councillors as Councillor Sophie Williams is returned alongside Lis Burnett.
• Stanwell will keep its current Labour Councillors Janice Birch and Mark Wilson. Presumably life will be interesting in the Birch household since Rhiannon lives at the same address as Mark Wilson.
• Sully will also keep its incumbent councillors, Conservatives Anthony Ernest and Sarah Sharpe.

Penarth/Sully will end up with an even split of councillors, 5 apiece for the Conservatives and Labour, which brings us back to the same result as for 2004.  Regardless of what happens elsewhere (and seats will almost certainly change hands in Barry), this result alone means that the Conservative-run administration in the Vale will come to an end on 4 May. We’re looking at a coalition running the Vale of Glamorgan for the next five years.

It’s also the end for our Penarth wards which will dissolve in 2017 when the recommendations of the Local Government Boundary Commission come into effect. We’ll end up with the 4-member super-ward of Penarth South (Plymouth plus Stanwell) and the 5-member Penarth North (Cornerswell, Llandough and St. Augustine’s). Sully will remain stand-alone with two members.

Scores on the Doors

The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, to award marks out of ten for our current crop of councillors. They’re all bidding for your votes for re-election, so this post is particularly important. And once they’re in, they won’t be going anywhere for 5 years. I won’t be commenting on other candidates because there’s a consistent track record of performance that the incumbents have revealed over time that will help voters decide whether or not they deserve the blessing of re-election.

In the spirit of transparency and open-ness, I’m going to lay out in full my scoring criteria.

Initially I’ll award each councillor a score of 5/10. There you go, who said I’m not the generous type? I think it’s fair to give our councillors the benefit of the doubt, too, because most of them go into this politics lark with the genuine intention of making life better for the residents they serve. Perhaps some of them have been in the game too long or have lost track of those worthy aspirations they once had. But let’s save judgement for later.

Communication has always been important in democracy. It’s as true today as it was back then. The ability to get in touch with our elected representatives is important for the electorate – even if we don’t take our politicians up on the offer of making contact. That’s why I find it especially galling that Cllr. Clive Williams has no means of email contact. How does he think people communicate in this day and age? Carrier pigeon? Or is it some evil plot of the Vale of Glamorgan webmaster to discredit him by refusing him – and only him – a VoG email account? Compare his page with that of Cllr. Anthony Ernest who has not one but three twitter accounts for us to follow. Not that the communications officers at the council will be too pleased with him for having taken the ‘@ValeofGlamorgan‘ twitter account, but perhaps they should have been a bit quicker off the mark. And Cllr. Ernest is living proof that twitter is a valuable way of communicating with your constituents whether you’re 18 or 80.

So it’s minus one point for Cllr. Clive Williams who hasn’t moved on from the stone age. And it’s plus one mark for Cllr. Ernest and Cllr. Sophie Williams (who also has an active twitter account @CllrSJCWilliams). If any of our other esteemed representatives has an active twitter account, do let me know for that extra point (and signing up tomorrow doesn’t count!).

Well as far as I can tell, our good councillors haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory over the past while, so I’m afraid that’s it for the bonus points. It’s downhill from here on in. But who’s got furthest to fall?

I’ll subtract one point from any councillor who’s been eagerly pushing through a project to incinerate the black bags from everyone’s houses that will see us all paying increased council tax for the next 25 years, and who cut off any chance of escaping from the decision by signing us up to as much as £3,000,000 in expenses if we pull out from the agreement.

I’ll knock off a point from anyone who voted in favour of one of the most incomprehensible decisions in Vale history to change our recycling system from one that achieves the best environmental outcomes at least cost to one that is illegal under European environmental law and that will have to be reversed to our old system in a few months.

I’m definitely removing a point from those councillors who have blindly let officials pull the wool over their eyes – and opened the council up to a European legal challenge and massive fines – by consistently allowing unlawful pollution loadings for the undeserving residents of Cogan. But on this subject I’ll save my most severe opprobrium for the incumbent Cornerswell councillors. What an unconscionable dereliction of your democratic duty to defend your constituents. I suppose it’s difficult for someone living with the fresh Bristol Channel breeze on their face to empathise with people choking on car fumes. Shame on the pair of you – and the gall of seeking re-election! I hope the hundreds of people reading this blog include large numbers registered in Cornerswell ward. So it’s an additional minus point from these two.

For those of you struggling with your abacus, I’ve done the maths myself. Drumroll, please:

With a fabulous 4 points – Cllr. Sophie Williams (St. Augustine’s, Conservative)

A thrilling 3 points – Cllrs. Janice Birch (Stanwell, Labour) and Anthony Ernest (Sully, Conservative)

A tortuous 2 points – Cllrs. Paul Church (St. Augustine’s, Conservative), Maureen Kelly-Owen (Plymouth, Conservative), Sarah Sharpe (Sully, Conservative), Clive Williams (Plymouth, Conservative) and Mark Wilson (Stanwell, Labour)

An ‘elect at your peril’ 1 point – John Fraser (Cornerswell, Conservative) and Dorothy Turner (Cornerswell, Conservative)

Burn Baby Burn!

No, not disco inferno, but certainly a hellish scenario.

The fact that we’re running out of landfill space in Wales should come as no surprise to any of us. For years we’ve been spending too much, often on credit, buying useless junk that until recently would have ended up being tossed in the black bag – out of sight, out of mind.

Things have improved a lot in Wales. In 2001, we recycled (and composted) 7% of waste and by September 2011 we were recycling 46% (45% for the Vale of Glamorgan). But that means that 55% of our waste is still ending up in our black bags. Residents of Penarth, we should be ashamed of ourselves!

Hence the Vale of Glamorgan Council is one of five local authorities in south Wales that have teamed up to finance and operate ‘Prosiect Gwyrdd‘ – a project to find a long-term solution to the problem of our waste mountain. The project is ‘technology neutral’, and apparently considered all the bids on their merits. But when the shortlist of four was unveiled in December 2010, the only options under consideration were incinerators.

I’m no fan of landfill, but it seems to me that there must be better options for dealing with our waste than chucking it into a furnace. Burning loads of plastic and nappies and dog mess isn’t going to make Wales smell any better, and it’s probably not going to be a great homeopathic remedy for Uncle Gwyn’s emphysema.

But as it turns out, there IS a better option. Just across the Severn there’s a Mechanical Biological Treatment plant that’s alive and kicking, and delivering surprisingly good results. Ok, so they’re still burning plastic film (10% of the waste), and about 20% of it ends up in landfill. But there are all sorts of interesting products, including a ‘compost-like output’, ‘refuse derived fuel’ and lots more recycling. What’s more, this project has been delivered on a 9 year contract.

Whoa! Did someone say 9 years?

So why is it that Prosiect Gwyrdd is looking at a 25 year contract? (for those who are interested, it’s tucked away in points 7.9.1 and 10.5.1 of this document). 25 years ago the word recycle didn’t even exist! What do the far-sighted officials at Prosiect Gwyrdd imagine we’ll be doing with our waste in 25 years’ time? Still chucking 55% of it in the trusty black liner? And if this incinerator proposal is anything like some of the others, there’s likely to be a guarantee from the local authorities that we’ll send no less than a certain tonnage of waste to the bonfire of the vanities (a ‘fresh air’ clause) that could see the residents of Penarth paying for an incinerator to sit idle, just like the long-suffering taxpayers of Stoke-on-Trent. That doesn’t sound like value-for-money to me. Where’s the political oversight of these asinine decisions?

Prosiect Gwyrdd came into existence in 2006. All five local authorities wished it into being. And decisions backing the project have been taken time and time again at the Vale of Glamorgan council (Scrutiny 17 July 2007, Cabinet 25 July 2007,  Cabinet 17 December 2008, Scrutiny 27 May 2009, Cabinet 3 June 2009 and Full Council 30 June 2009). This means that it’s a political decision that can be reversed.

So let’s have a look at every Penarth councillor who’s been backing an incinerator for south Wales so we know who not to vote for in May.

Ex- Penarth councillor Nigel Gibbs (Cornerswell, Labour) and current councillors Janice Birch (Stanwell, Labour), Paul Church (St Augustine’s, Conservative), Anthony Ernest (Sully, Conservative), John Fraser (Cornerswell, Conservative), Maureen Kelly-Owen (Plymouth, Conservative), Colin Osborne (Llandough, Conservative), Sarah Sharpe (Sully, Conservative), Dorothy Turner (Cornerswell, Conservative), Clive Williams (Plymouth, Conservative), Sophie Williams (St Augustine’s, Conservative) and Mark Wilson (Stanwell, Labour) make up the sorry contingent. Sadly, as you will probably have worked out, this is in fact the full roll-call of Penarth councillors (including Sully and Llandough).

I’m starting to get an idea now for a very interesting post in April. It’s going to look at all the candidates desperate to serve the residents of Penarth ‘year round, not just at election time’ and give jolly good reasons why certain ones shouldn’t be sent back to Barry Docks. And for those of you who’ve been gaily sending us down the waste road to perdition, you can be fairly certain you’re not on my Christmas card list.

By the way, if you can document an error in my analysis of the situation then please let me know: penartharbyd[at]gmail.com]. I will happily correct any errors.