Brum taxis: lottery?

You may have seen the headlines on 11th Jan about the odd criteria being applied to people applying for taxi licenses in the Midlands.

The situation in Birmingham is still unclear: the Council's newsroom website reported the story as part of its Media Watch, but there is no release about it, and we've been asking for a link to their policy on twitter, which they seem to have been ignoring. (Not even a reply saying why they don't want to give it to us). Does this mean the BBC newsroom is overworked, inept, doesn't care or is trying to avoid the issue?

The Council's own site (the newsroom is a separate bit, presumably because the expensive new content management system on the main site doesn't allow them all the functionality they need) just has links to application forms - there's no mention of what criteria will actually be applied. I'd find that a bit weird if I were applying for something ... However, there is a list of prosecutions, which mainly features driving without insurance.

So we'll do some more digging ... I can't believe the Council doesn't understand that people are concerned about this, and that it *might* be a good idea to try and be a bit more transparent? Interestingly, although the Post reported the story, they didn't get a quote off BCC. Is that cos they didn't try, or is the BCC newsroom ignoring them too?

*UPDATE*
The newsroom got back to us after a few days (still no info from the BBC actual). They stated that: "Birmingham City Council Licensing does undertake Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks for all new hackney carriage and private hire driver’s licence applicants. In addition further checks are carried out every three years for the duration of a licence".

Other points were:

• An applicant with a conviction for any sexual offence should normally be refused.
• An applicant with a conviction for a drug related offence should normally be refused. 
• Applicants with driving offences can only have their license reinstated after a period of time equal to the amount of their ban after getting their driving licence back (e.g .if they were banned for 6 months, they can get their taxi licence back 6 months after getting their driving licence back). If the ban was due to drink or drugs, there's a min of 2 years.

Which is reassuring :)

Local issues for the next election

Are you interested in making the next general election a more transparent process? Then you might be interested in the Democracy Club, a network of volunteers to help mySociety and TheStraightChoice ahead of our next big vote.

They want to know what the local issues for the next election are for a variety of areas to help inform their website - so we'd love to hear from you what you think are important decisive topics for the local area.

Here's a possible list to get started:

1. Flooding - is enough being done to protect local residents? Can the various agencies responsible for flooding work together well enough?
2. Green transport - is enough being done to keep public transport low to encourage cars off the roads? (The endlessly increasing bus fares are a personal bugbear of mine. Especially when you have to get on a 47, pay £3.30 for a return and there's someone smoking dope on the top deck at 9AM.)
3. Congestion - why is driving into or through the city centre such a convoluted unmitigated nightmare?
4. Council finances - how can central government help to make BCC more transparent? How can we counter local borkups like BCC spending £2.8 million on a new, broken website and having the head of the scrutiny committee say that local people aren't interested in how the council is run?

And a few yes/no ones:

1. Should South Birmingham PCT be allowed to continue with presumed opt-in to Lorenzo patients record system?
2. Should the redevelopment of the Central Library go ahead? (though I realise it's not in B29).
3. Should we get the Stirchley swimming pool redeveloped?

Perhaps a better question is "Are there any local issues which divide the candidates standing at the next election" - let us know in the comments below, or by using the hashtags #localissues and #b29 on twitter, and we can feed them back to Democracy Club :).

Planning Alerts

just briefly, before a larger post about the flooding and the political wrangles emerging from it:

If you'd like to be alearted via email about B29 planning applications, sign up for free at planningalerts.com.

This site trawls Birmingham City Council webpages - so you don't have to - and indexes planning applications by postcode, so you can sign up to be alerted when anything happens near you.

A wondrous free idea run by volunteers and hosted by mysociety.org; it counteracts the awful slowness with which local authorities are freeing their data by just getting on and writing screenscrapers (basically, bits of code that suck in web pages and sort out the useful data) instead.

Is Birmingham the new Coventry?

An entirely trivial point: looks like the new way to kill off soap characters is to have them move to Birmingham (though not specifically B29 ;)). The BBC have just offloaded the Trumans from EastEnders by relocating them here...

Podnosh, The Knife and Fork, and a new speed camera

This very complimentary snippet on Podnosh today has made me release that it's been a while since my last post.

So then I started to borrow yet more content from Podnosh, like this insightful blog from a newly trained Birmingham bus driver which is well worth a read.

Then I noticed that Birmingham: It's Not Shit has gone through a very worthwhile redesign and come out looking very lovely and shiny in the wash.

And it has an associated flickr group with a recent photo of one of the landmarks of B29, the soon to be disappearing Knife and Fork (left: photo by ellybrown1980).

Still just about surviving (although not still serving unfortunately) but by the gathering of equipment and signs I would imagine that it is sadly just about on its' last legs.

I also couldn't fail to notice tonight that an extra speed camera has appeared on the Pershore Road very recently (not even any marker lines on the road yet), heading out of the city just after the junction with Pebble Mill Road beside the Nature Centre. Just about here.

It didn't slow down my journey to the excellent Jumbo Chinese takeaway though, thankfully.