Bank Holiday weekend I spent at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival; some goof folk, some good politics. Fell into conversation with the man on the next pitch from near High Wycombe – he had visited Leeds to look at our recycling system. Impressed that I was involved in setting it up when a Labour councillor, talked about the sorting at the Material Recycling Facility, the rest of the system, the public meetings when wheelie bins were introduced.
I knew that questions had been asked about my time as a Labour councillor, and realised that I had said little. I do not find it easy to talk about myself, I have been impressed by the ease with which claims are made by others so have settled down to set out some things.
I was elected to Leeds City Council for the old Whinmoor ward in 1990 – an election affected by the Poll Tax issue – with a majority as I recall of about four and a half thousand. Leeds has big wards, at the time the biggest had over 26 000 electors, mine was only about 15 000. I was re-elected in 1994 and 1998, and did not stand again in 2002 – I could no longer defend Labour policy.
Leeds also had a Labour group sympathetic to what would now be called ‘green’ issues, and with these I quickly became associated.
Here are the first things that popped into my head – but in twelve years as a councillor there were more, not only on the wider stage but in the daily work in the ward.
- I persuaded the Labour Group to oppose having an incinerator, and not to allow Leeds waste to go for incineration – a decision that survived my leaving the council for a while. As Chair of West Yorkshire Waste Management I even managed to shut the old Huddersfield incinerator for a while.
- A Purchasing & Energy panel was established with me as the first chair: for three consecutive years savings on the energy budget meant that the council tax could be held steady; we introduced a Green Purchasing policy, used as a model by the government; we smuggled in a policy that in the refurbishment of any council property it had to use less energy than before.
- While councillor responsible for the Peace & Emergency Planning Unit we set up a liaison group to ‘monitor’ the US spy station at Menwith Hill, provided funding for ‘Nukewatch’ and other groups including Children of Chernobyl, were involved in establishing Mayors for Peace, and provided significant support for Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA’s).
- I was chair of UK NFLA’s for four years, speaking at the Hague Peace Conference, in Goteborg at a meting on nuclear power, in Salzburg about establishing a European NFLA, as well as on a speaking tour of Japan; we established the links with Ireland that established joint working on nuclear issues, and our arguments were the ones used in refusing the NIREX application for deep disposal of nuclear waste; in Wales we helped oppose the application for disposal of nuclear waste in the old MoD site at Trecwn
- My ward had 14 tower blocks, and after a fire in the lobby of one, and reading about tower block fires elsewhere (the concern was over the space between wall and cladding acting as a flue – rather than with inflammable cladding) I set up a Fire safety in tower blocks working group that led to fire safety checks on all the tower blocks in the city, with hundreds of thousands spent on improvements.
It has to be recognised that I was able to do much of this as a member of the ruling group on the council, and with the advantage of the old committee system, but it was in general a positive contribution.