How residents are paying the price for Left-wing ‘pet projects’ in Brighton
When 78-year-old Ann Lawrence thinks back to her childhood in Brighton, she thinks of flowers. “I remember going out with Dad in the car and passing beautiful, pristine flower beds all along Preston Park and the Old Steine [thoroughfare],” she says.
“They were the pride of Brighton. All in season. You used to get wallflowers and pansies in winter, tulips in spring, lupins, and then, in summer, there were flowers like dahlias. All beautiful and colourful.
“Now there’s just this horrible grassy stuff, litter, graffiti and people sleeping in doorways.”
The flower beds disappeared many moons ago, their upkeep deemed too expensive by town hall officials, but the litter, the graffiti and the rough sleepers are a much more recent phenomenon in the seaside resort.
“Brighton is just disgusting now,” says Ann. “It’s dirty, it’s untidy. And despite that, and all the other problems, council tax keeps going up. I pay all these charges and I literally get nothing for them, apart from street lighting.”
When her next council-tax bill arrives, it will have gone up again. Brighton & Hove City Council announced last December that there was a £31 million black hole in its budget and it was preparing to take some “extremely difficult decisions [to] protect essential services”.
The Labour administration has since announced a 4.99 per cent rise in council tax, the maximum increase councils are allowed to impose without holding a referendum, and the largest programme of cuts in the authority’s history, targeting everything from a domestic violence support service to youth groups and a disability advice centre. It is also scrapping two bus routes.
Of course, Brighton is not the only local authority in England to announce it is cutting services and increasing taxes. As The Telegraph’s Councils in Crisis series has reported, a reduction in central government funding during the austerity years coupled with soaring demand for services, especially social care (as the average age of Britain’s population increases), has left scores of councils struggling to balance their budgets.
Since 2020, Birmingham, Nottingham, Slough and four other councils have issued section 114 notices – a declaration that they cannot meet their legal obligation to balance their books and are effectively bankrupt – and a survey published last week by the Local Government Information Unit found that 14 further councils expect to do the same in the next financial year. Yesterday, Nottingham and Birmingham city councils approved vast cuts to plug their respective deficits.
But Alistair McNair, leader of Brighton & Hove’s Conservative Group, says in his city much of the blame lies with the council itself. “The financial challenge we have is due to Labour and Greens misspending,” he says when we meet in the brutalist Hove Town Hall building on a wet Wednesday afternoon.
“The parties have been a virtual coalition since 2010; neither party was able to make any decisions without the other until last year [when Labour swept to a landslide victory in the local elections]. And they have wasted a lot of money on pet projects.”
At the top of residents’ list of grievances, says McNair, is a ban on a weedkiller called glyphosate. Introduced in Brighton – the home of Britain’s only Green MP, Caroline Lucas – in 2019 in an effort to protect bees and other insects, it has resulted in weeds, some up to 2ft tall, colonising the city’s pavements.
This, in turn, has caused widespread damage to paving stones which now need to be replaced, as well as a number of serious injuries to residents (including Brighton’s Mayor, Jackie O’Quinn, last August) who have tripped over on the “rewilded” streets.
“The pavements in the city are terrible,” says McNair. “They look bad. People have been hospitalised. And our population is getting older. I understand why people may be worried about the toxicity of glyphosate and we voted for the ban, but there was no plan for an alternative.”
So bad is the state of the pavements, indeed, that the council is currently spending £50,000 a month on repairs and has a backlog of such work totalling £60 million. “Uncontrolled weed growth is one of the primary causes of damage to our pavements,” Tim Rowkins, chairman of the city’s environment committee, told councillors at last month’s Budget meeting.
I’ll leave it to your imagination what would happen to that [£60 million figure] if we failed to act.”
The council has now scrapped the ban (in the face of Green opposition) and drawn up plans to treat weeds on pavements using a “controlled droplet” method, with the weedkiller sprayed directly on to plants. Previously, glyphosate was sprayed indiscriminately from quad bikes.
But the damage to the pavements – and to the limbs of numerous residents – has been done.
Another “pet project” costing taxpayers dear, says McNair, is a new anti-racism strategy in Brighton’s schools. Since 2021, both primary and secondary school teachers have been receiving training to deliver “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” that endorse Critical Race Theory and “white privilege” – the controversial idea that racism is systemic in a nation’s institutions and all white people, consciously or unconsciously, value white skin colour above black.
Even children as young as seven are said to require re-education as they have learned by that age that white people are “at the top of the hierarchy”.
Parents have complained about the strategy and thousands have signed a petition against it, but the council – the first in Britain to roll out the training – says it is a vital weapon in its fight against inequality.
“I think schools are perfectly capable of dealing with racism on their own,” says McNair, with a furrowed brow. “Critical Race Theory is from America which has very different race relations to Britain.
“I prefer to focus on how we are similar rather than how we’re different; look at what unites us. Seeing everything through the prism of race, which you can’t change, is not helpful, I don’t think. It’s unnecessary and confrontational.”
The council has also been attacked for the money it has spent on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) staff – up from five in 2021 to seven in 2023 – and sending officers on countless training courses to learn about gender identity and LGBTQI rights – the sort of expenditure that the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is expected to brand as “wasteful” in Wednesday’s Budget.
But McNair and his five fellow Tory councillors – who have called on Brighton & Hove to withdraw £104,000 from the anti-racism strategy – are very much in the minority on the council.
“They are cutting services used by the most vulnerable people in our community; the elderly, the disabled, poorer people, women and girls facing violence and domestic abuse. But they won’t contemplate a cut to EDI or anti-racism,” he says in exasperation. “And at the same time they are spending lots of money on things that are not needed.”
The most glaring example of council waste, in the opinion of many residents, is the i360 tower. Five-hundred-and-thirty feet tall and just 13ft wide, the tourist attraction, which transports visitors to its summit inside a doughnut-shaped “pod”, opened in 2016 at a cost of £46 million and has been described as a “monstrous i-sore” and “an ugly intrusion which insults the seafront”.
Almost eight years later, the company that runs the attraction has failed to pay back the £36 million lent to it by the city council during construction, and, in fact, according to documents published last month, is now in debt to Brighton & Hove to the tune of £50 million, due to interest – or about £181 per resident of the city.
The decision to agree the loan cannot be pinned on Labour – it was voted through by the then Green administration, with the support of 13 out of 18 Conservatives. But critics say Labour is currently overseeing its own version of the i360 debacle: a multi-million-pound road scheme that will replace the city’s “Aquarium roundabout” with a T-junction and involve at least 18 months of roadworks.
Independent councillor Bridget Fishleigh has called it “a huge mistake”. “This is exactly the same scenario as the i360,” she says. “Residents pointed out the multiple flaws in the plans but the council pushed on regardless.
“External transport consultants appointed by the council said the scheme would create more congestion and pollution. Many city-centre businesses are already on their knees and cannot afford years of roadworks and gridlock.”
The Conservative group also points to a decision by the council to bring housing repairs in-house, which wasted £10 million, and plans to build two new cycle lanes, in London Road and Old Shoreham Road, that they say nobody wants.
In response, Labour says it has put the city back on a sustainable financial footing by producing a balanced budget and blames its tough programme of savings on cuts in central government funding and seven years of what it calls “Green financial incompetence” during that party’s two terms in power.
Meanwhile, at Ann Lawrence’s block of flats in Hollingbury, high on a hillside in the north of the city, the bin men rarely come, rubbish is piling up and the garage she rents from the council at a cost of £12 a week “leaks like a sieve”.
“I don’t think you could print what I think of the council,” she says. “I talk to them until I’m blue in the face, but nothing ever improves.”
