The picture shows a building in Acocks Green called 'The Churchill Club'.

The building is of local historical interest as it dates from the back end of the 19th century and has links to the Arts & Crafts movement. It has also now been locally listed as Grade A, to ensure that planners require sympathetic treatment (this isn't the same as the national listing scheme, unfortunately).

The building is ideally located and ripe for conversion for use as a community facility - something seriously lacking in Acocks Green. That hasn't stopped the City Council declaring it surplus to requirements and putting it up for sale, with the closing date set for the end of April.

There are plans afoot to try and raise the money required to refurbish the building and put it to good use, but it is likely that this will take more than a few weeks.

We're calling on the council to withdraw the property from sale and give the community a chance to develop proposals for the benefit of all.

District Committee

I spent an interesting evening at the District Committee last week. Here, members of the public get to take part in discussions around issues that affect districts (groups of wards). Acocks Green is currently in the Sparkbrook district, alongside Springfield and Sparkbrook wards.

Of particular interest was the District Budget.

Although the overall budget increases from £9.08 million to £9. 28 million, a large chunk of that is taken up with a doubling of the administration budget (although the paperwork prepared for the meeting suggested that the increase was closer to 1000%). The poor council officer thrown to the wolves to present the budget tried his best, but wasn't able to give answers to questions from the floor. I queried the increase in the admininstration budget, but also the slashing of the allocations to school crossing patrols and pest control, which were cut by 22% and 40% respectively. Also under attack was sport and leisure, which took a hammering to the tune of £81,000 or 3.8%, and community development, which lost 5.7% or £21,000.

The council officer had been told that environmental services were reducing their budget because of a reduction in demand. That's curious, because environmental services had submitted a bid to the Ward Advisory Board only a few days before for a sum of around £37,000. This was rejected as a bid by the WAB, because it was felt that pest control should be funded centrally and not through the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund - a decision with which I agreed at the time. Usually, whenever council departments come to WAB for funding for what should be core functions, that means that they've had their budgets cut.

Similarly, the cuts to the school crossing patrol service was made to realign budgets across the city, apparently. I couldn't work out the logic behind that - surely the principle should be to assess the need, then fund that need, not spread the budget across the city. I already know of one crossing patrol that has disappeared in Acocks Green - the one that helps my own children across Fox Hollies Road every morning has been relocated to Spring Road.

That's only the start of it - there's a further quarter of a million in 'efficiency savings' to be made as well. While I'm sure that it is possible to find efficiencies in any organisation, these seem to be more about slashing jobs - cuts are on the way! They even had the nerve to class a £69,000 funding boost from the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund as an 'Efficiency Saving.'

The poor councillors looked quite confused by the whole thing - it seemed as though this was the first time that the Liberal Democrat district chair had seen the budget proposals. After much discussion, it was agreed that the proposals as presented were worthless and the budget was held over until the next meeting. Of course, the Liberal Democrats had already passed the budget through full council on the 28 February, so we're really just waiting to see if the explanations get better.

Normal Service Renewed

Sorry for the lack of postings over the past few weeks - things have been a bit hectic.

Perhaps you have an image that an election campaign is high-powered and well-funded.

I wish.

In Acocks Green, we yearn for a shoestring upon which we can run our campaign. There's only one party in Birmingham backed by a millionaire and it isn't Labour. The reality is that we rely on members to cover our costs and do most of the hard work. This year is remarkable because we have so many volunteering to help - not a huge number and any more volunteers are more than welcome.

At least we're running the campaign locally - the Acocks Green Liberal Democrat campaign is run from Moseley (the home of a surprising number of LD candidates).

Still, that's one of the benefits of having a local candidate committed to and involved with the local community and not Hemming's choice, parachuted into what they consider a safe seat.

The CCTV project in Acocks Green has been a resounding success.

The scheme was launched using funding from the Labour government and saw crime fall by 60% in the first year and by a third in the year after. It has been so successful that other parts of the City are looking to us as an example of how well it can work.

Each high resolution camera is linked by a digital telephone line to a local monitoring centre where the images are recorded 24 hours a day on to a bank of computer hard drives and monitored by a trained security officer. The quality is excellent and the police make regular visits to follow up on reports of crimes and anti-social behaviour in the area covered by the cameras. It has allowed them to gain evidence to identify people in some very serious crimes. The amazing thing is that each camera costs less than £4000 a year to operate, significantly less than other schemes elsewhere in the city.

This sort of security is key to bringing new businesses into the centre of Acocks Green - it is part of the basic infrastructure to support a safe and thriving shopping centre that attracts customers from across the district.

I've spoken to many people in the area who want to see the scheme expanded to cover other areas in the ward that have problems with anti-social behaviour and that's something that I'm backing as a key part of my campaign.

Welcome to my blog.

I'm the Labour candidate for the Acocks Green ward of Birmingham City Council in the elections set for 4 May 2006.

This blog is here to provide extra detail on the campaign and a way for you to contact me with local issues. Comments are more than welcome - the only real ground rules are to avoid libel and abuse.

I'll update the blog regularly to let you know about local issues and try to give you a flavour of what campaigning is like.

Let me know what you think.