Times - Pink Aggregate

The preposterous priority of pink aggregate

By Kent Barker

Walking with my dog along a local bridleway and we got rather a shock.  Where, before, there had been a rutted muddy track, now was a smooth raised path constructed from laid and rolled aggregate. The trouble is it was pink.  Heavens knows where they found pink aggregate or why they decided to use it in this green field in the middle of the countryside. Or indeed why they had decided to ‘repair’ the muddy track in the first place.

            Actually I can guess the answer to that last one:  probably because the end of the financial year approaches and they had some money left in their budget!  The same thing happened this time last year on another local byway.

            Now, I’m not against bridleways or by-ways.  Nor am I against my county council maintaining them.  I’d much rather they didn’t use pink stones, but that’s my personal colour preference.  Others might like pink.  What does concern me, though, is the cost.  Tens of thousands of pounds must have gone into this ‘repair’. The bank, on one side, had been reinforced with wire cages full of rocks. Diggers and bulldozers and rollers must have been employed.  Hundreds of tonnes of this ugly pink stuff had been trucked in.  And for what?  So horses could keep their hooves dry?  OK. Not just for that.  Walkers would be able to keep their boots clean and cyclists their tyres pristine.  It simply wasn’t necessary.

            If they’d asked me what was needed, I’d have said more maintenance of our public footpaths.  On our walks we find collapsed and dangerous stiles, paths overgrown with brambles and cattle who have trampled the land to an impassable quagmire.  A few more reminders to landowners of their responsibilities, and a programme to replace stiles with gates would be of far greater benefit to far more people.

            But even that’s not really the point.  Kent County Council currently needs to save a whopping £81 million.  Year on year central Government grants to local authorities have been slashed.  Jobs have been lost and services cut.  Children’s services are next in line.  Adult provision has already been denuded.

            Out here in the country the elderly really rely on home visits.  It was the only thing that enabled my mother to remain in her house for the last years of her life.  This was vital for her, but also saved huge sums of money on residential care which she would have hated.

            At our last parish council meeting our local Kent County Councillor reported on the cuts.  “We’re looking to make savings by outsourcing further services,” he said.  This is councilspeak for privatisation.  And privatisation is a euphemism for taking services away from public providers like councils and giving them to private companies. And paying less for them.

I don’t necessarily dispute that competition can be beneficial, nor think that public services HAVE to be provided by public providers.

But I just cannot see how giving public service contracts to private ‘for profit’ companies will result in genuine value for money.  You have a pot of cash available to provide a service – say home visits for the elderly.  Then you reduce that pot. Competitive tendering might, just possibly, achieve sufficient savings without services suffering – always assuming that the previous public provider was inefficient.

But then you’ve also got to take the private company’s profit out of that pot. And what you then get is wages forced down – or people paid less than the minimum wage as travel is not properly included in their contract.  And you get them having to ‘clip’ the time they spend with clients. 

And anyway, why should shareholders in private companies profit from provision of PUBLIC services paid for by my taxes? Victorian capitalists wanting money to build railways or canals would seek investors who were taking a genuine risk – for which dividends and profits were the incentive. But there’s next to no risk in a fixed-price contract with a public provider such as a council, and the private company seldom if ever requires venture capital.

There is a way through this.  Only offer contracts for public services to ‘not for profit’ companies.  There are dozens of charities and trusts who can compete with each other and the public provider if they so wish.  But at least all the public money is going into service provision.

There’s another way to save money too.  And that’s to ensure that all council services are genuinely required. Resurfacing several kilometers of bridleway in pink aggregate is not, in my view, much of a priority.  Not nearly as important as care for the elderly.  Oh, but that’s a different budget.  And it’s capital not revenue. And it’s a statutory duty.  All of which may be true, but surely there must be a better way.