Mayor for Leeds?

In a couple of days time, the people of Leeds will be able to vote on whether they want a directly elected mayor. To be honest, until quite recently I was not even aware that a referendum was happening. It has not been widely publicised and is not even mentioned on the polling cards. These just refer to changes in the way that Leeds City Council is run.

I was asked a couple of weeks ago if I was in favour of a direcly elected mayor and I thought that for a city like Leeds this would be a good thing. I posted a couple of tweets about this and as a result the Yes Campaign in Leeds got in touch.

Next thing I was on the BBC1 Sunday Politics Show debating the issue and speaking passionately in favour of a mayor for Leeds.

Whilst I cannot speak for any other city where a referendum is taking place, I do believe that a directly elected mayor for Leeds will be a great move forward. Leeds is in the top 100 on the world stage by GDP, is is the 24th most populous city in the European Union and it is classed as a gamma city, in other words a key node in the global economic system. As a result, Leeds needs to hold its own on the world stage, it needs a strategy for growth and investment and it needs to punch above its weight. A directly elected mayor could achieve all of this and more.

Whilst all of the three major national political parties are in favour of elected mayors, all of the local parties are against this. Is this because their cosy coterie of power might be under threat? Is this why they are all keeping so quiet about the issue?

Councillor Jack Scott from Sheffield, with whom I appeared on the Sunday Politics Show, says that a directly elected mayor would be an "elected dictator" and would cost a lot of money. This is the level of the no campaign. Oxymoron and scare mongoring. They have nothing positive to say, they are concerned with maintaining the power base of the elected few who then choose their own leader. They seek to deny the people of a great city like Leeds the say on who runs their affairs.

Other "no" arguments are that one person would have too much power. But the mayor would have to have 40% of the council vote with him and don't we now have a prime minister for as set term? This brings stability and rises above party lines.

Other scare tactics being used are the suggestion that the mayor could appoint "cronies". Again, not true. All members of the mayoral cabinet would have to be elected councillors.

Were anyone in any doubt as to why the old guard should be voted out and a new era of leadership ushered in, then they should look at the behaviour of the leader of Leeds City Council, Keith Wakefield (pictured).

Mr Wakefield (who thinks he is Mr Leeds) is against a directly elected mayor. He is calling for a no vote. He has stated that a mayor would be "undemocratic" and "utter madness". Yet he has also said that is there is a yes vote in Leeds, then he would stand himself.

The people of Leeds should treat this outrageous and duplicitous statement with the contempt it deserves and fight back by coming out of their homes this week in droves to vote yes for a mayor for Leeds.

Fuelled by ignorance

With much of the media this morning seeking to blame the Government for causing a fuel crisis where there wasn't one previously, once again it looks like the Great British Public are unable or unwilling to take any responsibility for themselves. The flames are then fanned by our irresponsible media.

It is true that Downing Street has handled this issue with appalling ignorance and in a blundering and uncoordinated manner. However, it is also clear that a potential strike is at least 11 days off and there is no risk of industrial action over the Easter weekend.

Can we really blame government of whom people take little notice of anyway? Are people so stupid that they blindly follow the media-induced panic propagated by the tabloids? No. There is only one thing that has caused this crisis and that is selfish and ignorant behaviour on the part of individuals.

I wish our great nation would just get a grip and stop blaming everyone else for its problems. Here is some simple advice. If you don't need fuel, don't buy any.

Budget sense on share options

There really are some truly amazing photographs of George Osborne on the web. This one is nearly as good as the one I used when I spotted a hole in the sole if his shoe in Manchester last September.

When the last Government raised the rate of Capital Gains Tax to 28% I was a very vocal critic. The minmimal Entrepreneurs' Relief that followed was a bit of a joke and I remember the Daily Telegraph quoting me at the time as saying, "Thank you Alastair, you've really made my day!".

Fortunately, the Coalition Government saw sense and have raised the limit to a much more meaningful £10m threshold for the lower 10% band to apply, but to me there has always been a problem with this. It is not just the owner of a business who makes it successful and the tax regime has to date only favoured business owners.

I felt that my dedicated staff who have share options should also be able to benefit from this reduced tax rate, but as things stood they would pay 28% and I would only pay 10%. Given that the amounts the high rate would apply to would be generally relatively smaller, this seemed very unfair.

Just after David Cameron came to power, he visited Leeds and I asked him about this issue. He didn't get it and just answered that he thought it was right people should pay tax. I agree with him here, but what I don't agree with is the imbalance and injustice of the two tax rates.

I had another crack at George Osborne in Manchester last September. I am pleased to say that I got a bit further here with George acknowledging the problem and understanding it.

It looks like George has now done something about this, announcing in the Budget that all holders of EMI share options will qualify for Entrepreneurs' Relief.

So George, thank you for listening!

PS. I think the cap on income tax reliefs is going to impact badly on charities, so George, if you are reading this, please exempt gifts to good causes.

Yorkshire Banks

Attending the Yorkshire Mafia Conference in Leeds today was an inspiration. There was a real energy around the event and this combined with some good news for businesses in the Budget led to a general feeling of positivity.

I was part of the Billion Pound Panel. This included a number of key local business leaders: Paul Caplan the owner of Go Outdoors; James Lambert, CEO and Executive Chairman of R&R Ice Cream; Lawrence Tomlinson, Founding Chairman of the LNT Group and Colin Graves, Chairman of Costcutter Supermarkets. According to the Yorkshire Mafia we have combined revenues of more than £1bn. 

We were there to take questions from the audience about their interests and concerns. These ranged from the use of social media to rates of taxation to environmental initiatives. Inevitably the discussion also turned to funding for business and one of the panel had expressed his disbelief at how the banks are currently behaving.

Chairman of the session, the very talented and entertaining Gary Verity, CEO of Welcome to Yorkshire, asked the audience how many of them were happy with the service they received from their bank. Just three people put up their hand. 

I counted over 200 people in the audience. All stakeholders in the local economy and many running local SMEs. 98.5% of them not happy with the service they receive from their bank. 

I would imagine that any other industry with such dire customer satisfaction would be devastated at such a result. Is it possible that banks don't know that there is such a level of dissatisfaction? Are customers too scared to express their real feelings? 

Or is it that they know full well and frankly they are not too bothered about the situation because there is limited competition and for every customer they lose they probably gain another one?

I was shocked by the almost universal extent of this problem but I was not surprised. I could not help thinking that this potentially creates an incredible opportunity for someone to come in and change the game. It can't happen soon enough. 

Are we lacking ambition?

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union has just advised that the UK recycled 24.8% of its municipal waste during 2010. Allowing for waste which was composted the rate increases to 38.8%.

The rest was either incinerated (12.2%) or landfilled. The amount of municipal waste being landfilled was a shocking 49% of the total - or in other words more than we recycled and composted.

The EU Directive target is a 50% recycling rate by 2020 and whilst the Coalition Government thinks that individual councils should not have to comply with this target, overall the UK still has to reach it. The Environmental Services Association believes it will cost £10bn to £20bn to upgrade the UK's waste infrastructure to achieve this. Yet we could do far more with much less using simple systems, common sense and a bit of ambition.

There are already 75 councils in the UK meeting or beating the 50% target. Many of these are using simple kerbside sort methods to achieve their results. Without an investment in MRFs or expensive and energy hungry processing plants high recycling rates are perfectly possible and the proof is there for everyone to see.

Delivering a kerbside sort model with separate food waste collection, home composting and chargable garden waste collection will result is less residual waste. Put in a bit of educational resource and it gets even better. This will not cost billions, most can be achieved using the existing infrastructure.

The material collected in this way will be of a much higher quality and as a consequence will be worth more money. Keeping everything in the UK instead of shipping to India and China will create jobs and opportunities and will keep increasingly scarce raw materials within our shores.

With the recent Defra consulation on recycling targets, the Campaign for Real Recycling victory over Defra's extrapolation of the EU rules and the forthcoming MRF Code of Practice we have a real opportunity to build a better future with more and higher quality recycling in the UK. Alternatively, we can stick at 50%, burn the rest and burn billions in the process. The right way forward requires clarity of vision and a bit more ambition from our politicians.

Too fast for me

Standing on the platform at Stevenage railway station last week, waiting for the train back to Leeds, an announcement advised that the next train at the platform opposite would not be stopping. A few seconds later a train passed through the station at 125 miles per hour.

Some minutes later, the same thing happened at the platform I was standing on. However, this time the train hurtling down the track at 125 miles per hour was probably 3 feet away from me, or less. You could feel the turbulence in the air around - this was truly unnerving and my colleague and I were quite disturbed by this.

I have thought about this quite a bit. So here are a few points to consider. If you come and visit my factory where we injection mould and blow mould plastic products, you will be required to wear specific safety clothing to ensure you are visible and you will not be able to get anywhere near any moving machine parts which are protected by screens, locked panels and the like.

If you go anywhere near a railway line, quite correctly you will be removed by the police and whilst this is going on the trains will not run until you are removed.

You can't go for a walk down the hard shoulder of a motorway because it is dangerous to be close to traffic moving at high speed.

It is right and proper that health and safety should be a priority and the previous statements are proof that this principle is generally being followed.

How then can a train be allowed to travel at 125 miles per hour just inches from members of the public?

Does anyone share my concerns?

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I'm adding some notes having just been at Huntingdon station today. There are four lines. Many trains passed through at speed - all on the central two lines and well away from people. This is sensible and not a problem. I think if there are only two lines through a station it should be forbidden for a train to pass through at anything like the speed they are doing.

To sort or not to sort

Readers may recall that last June I asked the Prime Minister about what he could do to improve the quality of recycled materials collected in the UK, specifically to deal with the issue of material of such a poor standard that it could only be exported to India or China. As I reported at the time, the PM answered a different question about recycling, not the one I had asked him.

So, when Mark Prisk, the Minister for Business & Enterprise came to Leeds a few weeks ago, I asked him the same question. Prisk also answered a different question and told me that he would be working with packaging manufacturers to improve the recyclability of materials not currently collected. All very worthy, but not what I wanted to know.

Rather than letting Mr Prisk off the hook, I wrote to him to explain in more detail. I pointed out the potential for job creation through improving the quality of recycled materials collected and I further pointed out that the recent Waste Review had make all the right noises about this issue but had failed to translate these into policies.

To his credit, Mr Prisk sent my correspondence to Lord Taylor of Holbeach who is the minister responsible for recycling.

Lord Taylor replied in October and a copy of his letter was forwarded to me. This stated that the Government believes that the choice of collection methods is up to individual local authorities and should reflect local circumstances, demographics and customer needs. He went on to explain that collection methods ranged from "fully source separated" to "fully co-mingled" and in the latter case the material would be "separated in a Materials Recycling Facility or MRF".

Whilst the Government has faith in these MRFs being able to provide material of a suitable quality for domestic and export markets he acknowledged improvements could be made. To this end, his department (Defra) would be working with the waste management industry to develop a "MRF code of practice" to promote quality. The code would be voluntary but possibly could be mandatory.

Now to go back to basics. If you collect recyclable materials and sort them at the kerbside you end up with well sorted, high value, high quality material. If you collect in the "co-mingled" method described by the minister, you then have a problem to solve. The MRF is one such solution to that problem.

A voluntary code of practice for MRFs is a bit like a voluntary Christmas dinner for turkeys. The bar will have to be set very low for many MRFs to sign up to it.

But here is where the fun starts. My friends at the Campaign for Real Recycling (CRR) reckon that Defra has incorrectly transposed the European Revised Waste Framework Directive into UK law and that commingling is contrary to the spirit of this legislation. The CRR has been granted a judicial review and Defra believes that it is going to lose this.

As such Defra has announced that it intends to change the wording of the legislation to ensure that "multi bin recycling systems are not imposed on residents", but ensuring quality is maintained. However, either the Directive requires separate collections or it does not and it is difficult to understand how Defra could change the law to make something that is illegal allowable.

So now, all of the vested interests are making a lot of noise. But at the end of the day, the Directive is what it is and poor quality is surely unacceptable. The materials industry is now coming together under the new Resources Association to stand up for quality. The battle lines are being drawn. Government is on the fence.

It will be fascinating to see how this plays out. Daily Mail readers should prepare for the frenzied headlines that will surely follow.