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Councillor Terry Cutmore  "Hailwood"
9 Highcliff Crescent
Ashingdon
Essex
SS4 3HN

Second Part of Interview with Councillor Terry Cutmore (15th December 2010)

In the first half of the interview we covered general matters of the operating of the District Council. In this second part of the Interview we will go on to see Terry’s personal and political background, some further workings of the Council, and issues he believes will be significant in the coming days.  

RL:  Terry, can I ask what you background is?
Personal Background
Terry: I was in banking, international banking, and I’m retired from that now. I left it at fifty two and this is my job now. I did have a job with Eon over in Rayleigh, just part-time, and that was just four hours a day, five days a week. I quite enjoyed that, the interaction with the public; it taught me a lot about public relations, but it’s such a shame that that’s gone. It was a real asset to the community and it was very good at what it did.

RL:  So how many hours do you have to put in for this each week?
Job Commitment
Terry: One good thing about this role is that whatever you do, no two days are ever the same. That’s why I have to keep a very careful diary of the things I do. It does vary but I would say, if you include the reading I have to do,  probably getting 30 to 40 e-mails a day, correspondence as well, there’s stuff I do for my own Ward, there’s Party stuff to do, I’ve got meetings to go to, and a lot of them are antisocial hours in the evening – I’ve got as meeting every night this week except for Friday, and that’s quite normal for me – it’s probably between forty and forty five hours on average. It does vary; for instance over the Christmas period I will be catching up with reading and correspondence. You can have very busy periods and very quiet periods but you’re never really out of it. The phone goes all the time.

RL:  So why do you do it?
Political History
Terry: Well, I started out as a Parish Councillor many years ago in Ashingdon, probably in the mid 80’s. I was always interested in the community and I got interested in the Conservative Party and the Association side rather than the member side, and it just grew from that. I stood for a couple of seats – failed twice. I think it was 1997 I went for West Hawkwell and lost to John Dixon, and 1998 I went for East Hawkwell and lost to Heather Glynn and then in 1999 went for Ashingdon where I live, and managed to win.  They actually made me Conservative Deputy Group Leader in 2000. When we took over the administration in 2002 Peter Webster was actually the group leader then, and it was two years later that I actually took over as Group leader and have been leader since then, and so I think I’m now the longest serving leader. I’ve seen a lot of changes, boundary commission changes, we’ve now got the largest majority in the County with 32 of the 39 seats so we must be doing something right. I say this every year but it’s an interesting time in politics and there’s always something going on.


RL:  I would have thought this was a particularly fraught time in the face of the economic climate.
Terry: Well it is but obviously I’ve got the machinery to help me. We’re lay members, if you like, as far as the council is concerned and I think when you have a cabinet system as opposed to a system when you just have committees, you’re very much more into what is actually working.
Cabinet versus Committee Systems
In the old days with the committee system, you used to have a meeting and the members would sit down and it would be a theatre style meeting and the officers would be up on the dais with the Chairman and Vice-Chairman. The Chairman would control the meeting but of course the votes would come from the floor so the people from the floor were actually controlling what was voted on and the officers would do the presentation and know about it and take it forward whereas the Chairman would just run the meeting. Now we have a cabinet system which is completely different where you are meeting one to one, possibly with two officers and you are telling them what you think you should do and you’re actually getting information and when we have our cabinet meetings, the old style we used to do it was always the officers who led on these things, now it is the members because they are so into what is going on, and I think that is helpful to help us get where we are.
Training Councillors
We were presented with an award last night because we have the Charter for Member Development which is all about training members and I think we’re the first one is Essex to achieve this Charter and Robert Gordon who is the leader of Hertfordshire County Council actually came down and presented us with the award last night.

RL:  A comment about the future or future trends?
Collaboration between Councils
Terry: It’s very interesting. I think the collaboration between various councils is something that is clearly significant,  as far as our back-office stuff is concerned, and I was surprised how much, when you look into the figures, we work with other councils and other public institutions, and I think that is the thing coming more in the future. When you look at local government, we’re the elected members who, when you actually look at what is delivered locally, as far as budgets are concerned, I think we control about 5% of the actual budget that is spent in your area. I think that is a wrong thing so I look forward to things like the Localism Bill where we get involved in more with such things as the PCTs which will become GP clusters.
We have things now like the Local Strategic Partnership which brings together those things, and which I actually chair locally, where instead of working in silos we’re actually working together in dealing with what we actually deliver in the community, dealing with things like health and equalities.
Health, Inequalities & Life Expectancy
It’s interesting, I saw some work done by PKF Health and Equalities who did a map and showed railways
stations and it was the difference in life expectancy between the various railway stations. Some of these you can go one stop and there is six years difference in average life expectancy, and for low figures a lot of it is down to poverty. It is such inequalities, although we don’t have them so much in Rochford, I think in the future councils have got to look for and work with other agencies to make sure we don’t continue that.  
Crime Levels  & Policing
We work very well with what was our Crime and Disorder Partnership, which is now our Community Safety Partnership. With crime, as far as Rochford is concerned, we are one of the safest areas in the country now, and so that has worked very well. I have concerns about that because there was talk about cutbacks in policing.  What they won’t cut back is where they have to concentrate their forces  and cut back where they don’t and we’re one of the areas where they don’t, so are we going to even see a policeman? Some of the neighbourhood policing that has been going on has been extremely good indeed. I still think there is a way forward on that in efficiencies that can be made. I think policemen only spend about 22% of their time being out there and I’d like to see a lot of that change and there are moves afoot to do that. They are very much more visible now, which is interesting which is something I brought forward ten years ago. At night with their dark uniforms you couldn’t see them, but now you can’t miss them. It’s that sort of thing, and the health agenda and very much County works with them on the social side.
Joint Commissioning
They are talking about joint commissioning of certain things where the do the same things. We’ve actually done some work around families, problem families if you like, with our colleagues at Castle Point through our local Strategic Partnerships and looked at things around multi-users, and often it tends to be around families. We had, for instance, one old people’s home where they had forty calls for an ambulance in a month. They looked into that and it turns out that most of the staff were foreign nationals who didn’t speak very good English. If anyone had a fall or had a problem they didn’t do anything, they just called up the ambulance straight away. Every time somebody gets in an ambulance it costs something like £240 and as soon as they get them through the door of A&E it’s another £90 so that’s about £350 every time that happens. Now for falls, rather than an ambulance, they have a car that goes and sorts that out with a paramedic and they can then make the decision there and then. That’s just one instance. Very often where you have families involved, if you are putting resources in there, you can have twelve different agencies that can be called in on some of these families and you can have six or seven or them calling within a week, and they haven’t been sharing information, so the way ahead is all about sharing that information, not working in isolation. One of the problems here has been data protection because some of them haven’t been allowed to share information, and so we’ve been trying to put this to our MPs as well, and we’ve done some work around that, and it’s been put forward by Essex on a national basis and I’m quite pleased about that because there’s been some good work done.                        

RL:  You sound like you are very fulfilled here?
Terry: I think so. We try our best. There are some times when you wonder what are you doing this for, because you don’t always get thanked, but then other things come along and you think, we made a difference!  And that’s what it is about really. We say M.A.D. – making a difference, but we’re mad about Rochford because we want to make a difference.

RL:  Well Terry, thank you very much for sharing so widely on so many of these things. It’s been an education. Thank you again

To return to Part ONE of this interview, please CLICK HERE