Merlin Betts
This article is part of a series. Find the previous article here, and overview here. Photo by Ben Guerin on Unsplash.
In 2019 the ONS did a survey on deprivation across the UK. Hastings is the 14th most income-deprived area in the country. The closest to that in East Sussex is Eastbourne at 91st. Every other area in East Sussex is well above the 100 mark. More broadly we’re the 13th most deprived area in the UK when you’re looking across all 11 indices (maybe read categories) of deprivation. In other words, that’s the data saying that East Sussex as a whole has little experience to share with Hastings, which appears to have unique and extreme problems separate to other urban authorities in the county.
In the world of local government we’ve got East Sussex County Council (ESCC) directly above us – it has most of the money, it’s responsible for a number of key services that HBC isn’t, like education, transport, social care, waste disposal (but not collection). It has a 5% council tax cap where we have 3%, and can bargain for more under exceptional circumstances. Given how different Hastings is to the rest of Sussex, we should be bringing these things in house.
Britain has form for making ‘unitary authorities’, where smaller councils like HBC are eaten up by bigger councils like ESCC. But it also has form for giving boroughs like us (at least 26 of them) that same unitary authority, taking a share of power away from the bigger district and county councils. Usually the boroughs are larger than 100,000 people, I’ll admit. So we might be looking at a Hastings and Rother borough rather than a purely Hastings one, and that’ll lead to all sorts of difficult politics, but still, you’d hope, a more localised and relevant treatment than what ESCC gives us.
The Conservative leader on HBC, Andy Patmore, wants us to get eaten up by ESCC. But that won’t fix anything. ESCC already regularly shows it doesn’t care about us. I mean have you seen the roads lately? Have you been in the infamous Harold Road pothole? Had its mugshot in the Observer I tell you! In Patmore’s own ward, he was photographed next to a whistling sinkhole on Pevensey Road, demanding that something be done about it. I live round there. After a long wait with the hole apparently filled, but part of the road still blocked off, you can now see the new sinkhole that’s fallen through close to or on top of the old one. And meanwhile you can wander over that pock-marked stretch of tarmac and hope it won’t collapse on you, waiting for weathering and freeze-thaw to wreck it further. I bet you can tell very similar stories all over town, though I haven’t seen many actual sinkholes about. That’s ESCC ‘looking after us’.
There’s a transport consultation going on at ESCC right now by the way. They want you to have your say, and there’s nothing to stop you complaining.
Side note: that Pevensey Road sinkhole I mentioned is very probably above the rail tunnel between Warrior Sq and West St Leonards. I’m no engineer, but I know tunnels tend to create an instability in the ground above them – moves around a bit more, less stable. I saw a private waterworks crew operating on the new hole the other day, two vans and a truck – a work team. We’ve had various leaks on that part of the road over the years. Adding it all up: could it be that the pitiful state of our water infrastructure has claimed another victim by undermining the roads above our rail tunnels? I smell a future article in the works… or maybe that’s just the drains frothing off again.
Back to this unitary matter. Deputy Council Leader Maya Evans actually wrote about it (while rightly bemoaning the state of our transport infrastructure) in the Jan 6th Observer, “From crater sized pot-holes and cracked paving slabs, to the infrequent and unreliable bus service and the near non-existent cycling network; everyone from the car user to the walker has a terrible time traversing our town… Many residents feel detached from East Sussex, with more in common with Hartlepool rather than Heathfield; probably one of the key arguments for having a unitary authority with all taxes raised in Hastings staying within the town and spent on local services”.
If you’re a green and annoyed at CO2 emissions or that our waste isn’t properly disposed of – we could bring that in house and take care of it. If you’re a parent in Ore who’s unhappy that your school library’s closed, we could have a word. Want the buses to run on time? Well maybe if the people paying for them are the people using them, they will start to run on time.
I tend to mention increased taxes as a potentially good thing (so did Maya), and people might not like that. I can understand if you don’t like paying council tax and don’t see where it goes. But if you were paying it all to Hastings (and only Hastings) for things you could see functioning around town, services tailored to help you… would you still say “tax bad”? Maybe. I prefer a voluntary contributions system myself, but again, sometimes you have to take what little good you can. How about “tax fairly practical under the circumstances?” rather than just “bad”?
Assuming you like the way I and maybe the Hastings Independents are thinking here, I’ve gotta warn you: the vicious swine in Westminster probably won’t release authority to us without some serious imbalance in their favour. With Rother being the district that it is, we’d have some chance of that combination working, maybe more so if we somehow get a Labour MP in next election (and Labour win overall) but also, maybe not.
Labour don’t like the rebellion occurring in their steadfastly loyal Hastings Borough Council that seems to have sacrificed so much (under Kier’s broader administration of the party) for so little. The Starmer squad don’t have much empathy for anyone that isn’t blindly obedient. And anyway, Helena Dollimore. Would you vote for her, Tory reader? Is Kier Starmer’s new Tory party close enough to what you like and trust to meet with electoral success? Because in this constituency, Labour need your votes. Time will tell.
The politics are weird here, I think. If we were a swing seat in this new world that’s fast approaching – would either side want to try and solidify power by granting us a unitary authority that, they’d hope, would be run by them?
I like to think we could bin all this speculation and go for an independent Hastings political organisation boasting cross-party support in the local area. A model that could be exported across Rother, leading us to put a serious case to parliament that we’re ill-represented by ESCC’s shenanigans and are so coherent in our own organisation that they have to give us higher authority. But right now that feels like dreaming. Although… the Hastings Independent group does now exist, and on their website they do call themselves “Hastings Independent Party”.