Tag Archives: bristol council

Opinion: What’s a “fair” cut?

By Mark Wright | Published 1st October 2010 - 12:25 pm

What difference does it make having Lib Dems in power? How are Lib Dems actually making cuts “fairer”? One example is what we have done in Bristol, when we reviewed redundancy terms. The statutory redundancy payout is a week’s salary – up to a cap of £380 per week – per year worked. Bristol Council had a much more generous scheme: twice the weekly salary, with no cap.

This sounds great until you look at the effects of this a bit more closely: at the bottom of the officer pay-scale the Bristol scheme was about twice as generous as the statutory …

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Posted in Local government, Op-eds | 10 Comments

Review of Bristol elections calls for widespread changes

By Mark Pack | Published 13th August 2010 - 2:20 pm

Confidence in the administration of elections by Bristol Council was badly shaken this May after a series of problems, including ballot papers found in the wrong place, election results taking 6 hours longer than expected to be declared and numerous phone calls going unanswered. A detailed review of electoral administration was subsequently ordered and it has called for major changes.

The Bristol Evening Post reported,

Apart from more than half of the election phone queries going unanswered, the office for the council’s electoral services department in the Corn Exchange has been described as “woefully inadequate”. One of Ms Dixon’s many recommendations

…

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Posted in Election law | Leave a comment

Stephen Williams condemns Bristol Tories’ attack on anti-homophobia charity

By Stephen Tall | Published 28th August 2009 - 2:30 pm

Pink News has the story:

A Liberal Democrat MP has accused both the Tories on Bristol council and one of the city’s newspapers of misrepresenting a National Lottery grant to a gay group. The Bristol Evening Post ran a story yesterday on Educational Action Challenging Homophobia (EACH). The highly-respected group has been awarded £391,668 by the Big Lottery Fund for a project reaching out to LGBT young people.

EACH said on its website:

“Throughout the next five years this will be spent upon EACH’s ground-breaking project, REACH: supporting lesbian, gay or bisexual young people develop a sense of pride in their identity and help their peers and adults in young people’s settings challenge homophobic bullying.”

The leader of the Conservative group on Bristol City Council, Councillor Richard Eddy, told the paper the grant was “mistaken and misguided” and “an outrageous waste of money.”

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Lib Dems gain control of Bristol Council

By Mark Pack | Published 5th June 2009 - 3:03 am

The first big electoral news is good for the Liberal Democrats: four gains from Labour in Bristol have given the LibDems overall control of the council. Labour won just 2 wards out of 23 on the night, compared with 10 out of 24 in 2007.

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