‘We need to find a way of drawing people to Grantham’ says South Kesteven District Council deputy leader Ashley Baxter
We continue our focus on members of the new cabinet at South Kesteven District Council with Councillor Ashley Baxter, deputy leader and portfolio holder for finance and economic development.
Coun Baxter, an Independent, first won his seat on the district council in 2015, representing the ward of Market and West Deeping.
The 54-year-old is originally from King’s Lynn and is an environmental consultant.
After leaving Nottingham Trent University, he became a recycling officer in Nottingham and later worked for Nottingham City Council in charge of the energy and sustainability team. He went on to work for the Energy Saving Trust and a private consultancy, before going freelance.
Here, he answers questions on the future, Grantham as a tourist destination and the local economy.
It has only been a few months since the local elections and a new-look council came into being, but how have things changed in that time?
It’s calmer. I have more responsibility, but I am able to access information and I am able to explain myself. I feel like I am being listened to and I hope the Conservatives and opposition coalition feel engaged and don’t feel frozen out, like we did for all that time. We achieve a lot more through cooperation and a collaborative approach than we do by hoarding all the power to ourselves and trying to achieve things by stealth.
I want to be proud of what the council does and what I do as a cabinet member, and therefore it should be rare that I need to keep things quiet. Obviously there will be times when, for commercial or personal reasons, I cannot release information, but as a general rule I think people should know what’s happening at the council in order that they can engage with the whole process. You get better results for everybody.
I think that people are getting used to the new reality. The Conservatives are beginning to get the hang of constructive opposition and the administration are getting the hang of having control and the authority to get stuff done.
When we were first elected, I am sure there were a lot of raised eyebrows on all sides. But I think the trust is developing between us all and I include the opposition. I am sure the Conservatives would have wanted to paint us as a ragged band of maverick individuals, but I think we are proving that we can work together in ways that work towards the common good.
Obviously within any organisation or party, you have got to manage individuals and you have got some personal agendas and you’ve got some people with outlying views. People don’t agree with each other all the time.
I think the brief with the previous administration was that they tried to present their entire group as on the same page on every issue all the time. That’s ridiculous. I would rather have a frank exchange of views in public so that people can see how we reach the resolutions that we reach.
When you were in opposition you were forthright in your views. Do you think you have to work differently now you are part of the ruling coalition?
In opposition I desperately wanted to hold the administration to account in terms of the decisions they made and the way they made them. A big thing was transparency.
When I first went into local government, I thought it was going to be about righting wrongs and enabling people to access better housing and better waste services and improving the district and so on. But we spent a lot of time just getting the administration to put things on the public record that should have been there in the first place and getting the council to be transparent.
Certainly, I have to work in a different way now, but I am encouraged some of the new Independents and the existing Independents on the majority side are still challenging reports in public and challenging decisions and asking questions, which is what I would expect them to do.
I think the change for me is the cabinet role. I am now presenting ideas for discussion so by the time they reach the chamber I have had my input and my chance to influence what comes before the council, but that doesn’t mean I have always made my mind up when an issue is presented to the council.
In the previous administration, you got the impression that the decision had already been made before it even arrived at the overview and scrutiny committee. This administration is genuinely looking for constructive criticism and open and robust argument in order that decisions are sound and have at least been discussed by councillors, rather than just being pushed through because one party has got a particular majority. Looking back, when the old administration did push through matters of policy, it didn’t do them any favours because so many of them went disastrously wrong.
What does your portfolio as cabinet member for finance and economic development entail?
In terms of finance, it is ensuring that the council spends its money in ways which are efficient and effective. It doesn’t mean cutting everything back to the bone. We want to use public money in the best way, not necessarily in the cheapest way, but that’s against the backdrop of 13 years of Conservative austerity.
So yes, we have some tough decisions to make in order to keep services moving and also we want to deliver what we have promised. A good example is housing. For a long time the council had promised to improve housing and to build or acquire more council housing but their record has been abject failure. So over the next four years we want to make sure that we are getting new stock on to our housing register so that people have got places to live.
You don’t have to buy a newspaper today to know that rents are going up and mortgages are going up and people’s housing situation is generally going to get worse. So everything we can do as a council to mitigate that is necessary. So having lots of ideas and projects is no substitute for actually building houses and keeping the houses that we have got in good repair.
As you know, the council has been in special measures with the housing regulator for the last two years or so, and that’s because the houses were not looked after properly. I want to see in the best part of my finance brief that we are spending money where we are supposed to be spending money and not wasting it on projects that are unnecessary.
We have some interesting projects. We spoke about one of them recently, the waste depot in Grantham which we are moving from Alexandra Road to a site close to the A1, we have the customer services centre which we need to approve but as yet we do not know where that is going to go. We have all these projects on the boil, but preparing the budget for next year, deciding where the council tax is to be spent and what our priorities should be, that’s my portfolio.
What are your thoughts on the state of the local economy?
I think that our economy in South Kesteven is undersold. I think we have some gorgeous areas in our district. If we had them in the Cotswolds there would be tourist buses arriving every five minutes.
I don’t think we celebrate how beautiful our areas are. We don’t do enough to show them off. In the same way we are not making the best of our towns either.
Grantham has its challenges. There are a lot of empty shops and I will be looking at ways to improve Grantham Market, because a street market is a way to attract people to Grantham town centre to spend money with other retailers and independent businesses. We don’t want people’s high street spend to average out to the big corporates, we want their money to stay in the district. We want money from Grantham shoppers to stay in Grantham as much as possible and the same goes for the other towns in the district.
As portfolio holder for economic development it’s not just about shops, it’s about visitor attractions, about engineering, the service industries. We have an awful lot going on in the district that nobody knows about.
Do you think Grantham has much potential as a town for tourism?
As I have spent more time in Grantham, particularly since taking on this role, there is an awful lot I am sure even people in Grantham don’t know about Grantham, and for anybody to have thought that putting a statue of Margaret Thatcher would create a new tourist industry is clearly crackers, to think it will transform the local economy.
If you want to make people visit Grantham because of Margaret Thatcher you have got to put something else with it, some interpretation. She was a pivotal personality in the nation’s history and, yes, we should recognise that one of the nation’s longest serving Prime Ministers came from the town. But a statue by itself is not enough. You need to show people what she did to improve the economy, what she did to undermine the communities.
I’m not a fan of Margaret Thatcher but I do know she is on a lot of school syllabuses now. So if my daughter is travelling from Lincs to Warwick Castle to do a history project, then why aren’t people from Warwick coming to Grantham to do their A-level history project? We need to find ways of making it a day out, of drawing people to Grantham and to other parts of the district.
Looking more widely, we are in the early stages of preparing military heritage trails. There is currently one about Arnhem, another about Dambusters heritage and there is some interesting Cold War heritage in the south of the district. Ecclesiastical history is worth exploring because we have 70 parishes, most of them with a church and some are very significant. At Corby Glen we have a church with some of the most significant medieval wall paintings in the country. There are plenty of reasons not just to come to the towns, but also the rural areas in our district.
Are you optimistic for the future?
The situation is so much better than it was before May 5 and I think that even if it had been a Conservative administration with a very slight majority, because it’s such a narrow margin everybody has to work a bit harder. I think possibly for decades the Conservatives have taken everything for granted and have managed to get their own way, and if they could keep their troops in order then they could push through what they liked. It doesn’t make for good government and it doesn’t create respect for ideas from the opposition.
We welcome good ideas from whichever corner of the chamber they appear and we will look at each issue on its merits. We are not making decisions based on personalities, we are making decisions based on the merit of the ideas which are presented.
We know there are some talented councillors there who are wearing blue rosettes. We don’t want them to take four years off because they can’t contribute. Anything but, we want to take ideas from every corner of the chamber.
The other reason for optimism is the number of new councillors. Some of the new councillors, in opposition and especially from Grantham, are a real shot in the arm for the democratic process and for having fresh eyes on what is happening. Previously, I have been in rooms where we have been making decisions about what shall happen in the middle of Grantham and there has not been a Grantham councillor in the room. So people from elsewhere have been making decisions about Grantham. It shouldn’t be only Grantham councillors but there certainly shouldn’t be no Grantham councillors, and the same should go for the Deepings, Bourne and Stamford. We’ve got some thoughtful, inquisitive new councillors ready to challenge. So, yes, I would say I am optimistic.