This is the first year that I will be going into an election as a Councillor, and the few weeks have been incredibly busy as we try to get everything dealt with before the election is officially called. In addition to all the usual work in the ward, trying to help out in other wards around the city, and preparing an election campaign, we have had the Council Budget meeting, plus various meetings about District Budgets. A group of us went to Portsmouth to look at their Highways PFI for a Transportation Scrutiny - a very interesting day, but 7 hours on a coach is not the best way to spend a Friday.

I believe our next visit with Transportation will be a trip on the No 11 bus to look at the showcase scheme - given the general antipathy towards buses and bus users from the Tories and Lib Dems, it seems unlikely that any of the other showcase schemes will be started anytime soon. We did manage to get a call-in on a decision on the Tyburn Road bus lanes (though only because one of the Tory Councillors failed to show up to the meeting, and one of the Lib Dems had a crisis of conscience and voted with us) but to no avail. Bizarrely the report on this issue states that cars 'lane hopping' between the inside and middle lanes would be a safety issue, but apparently if HGVs were to do this there are no safety concerns. So that's all right then.

I was interested to read the new report by Anne Power about Birmingham's housing. As Political Hack has pointed out, the Cabinet Member might wish to ignore the report, but it does highlight that community based housing organisations can work, and should be considered as real options. There are numerous groups across Birmingham doing Section 16 work to look at local management models, in addition to the Pathfinder projects in Hodge Hill and Northfield, but Birmingham has fallen behind in taking devolution and neighbourhood management of housing forward, and we have yet to hear any proposals on improving the service.