Bristol City Council: A Catalogue Of Failures. The Idiot's Guide To Not Running A Council.
Eleven failures. Eleven dates. Every single one checkable. You know, like it does in Bristol. More often nowadays, than not.
[Image: PAUL GILLIS / Reach Plc, via Bristol Live. Analysis: The Almighty Gob — www.thealmightygob.com]
Somewhere in a council building tonight, unread, sits a copy of the Idiot’s Guide to Running a Bath. I alluded to this briefly yesterday. If you recall.
Nobody’s touched it in months. It doesn’t need touching. Running a bath is the one thing in that building nobody’s managed to get wrong. Though, in hindsight. Perhaps with the exception of a former elected Mayor.
Everything else in the building tells a different story.
However, the rest of it has grown.
Next to the guide to running a bath there should be a companion volume. The Idiot’s Guide to Not Running a Council. Nobody’s written it yet. However, going by the eleven entries below, nobody needs to — Bristol’s writing it live, one dated failure at a time, and putting the receipts in its own agenda packs.
Eleven entries. Eleven dates. No estimates, no rounding, no “around about.” Just what happened, when, and who signed off on it.
1. The C3 Housing Judgment — 9 July 2024.
The Regulator of Social Housing handed Bristol City Council its first ever consumer grading. C3. The worst available.
Serious failings. Significant improvement needed. Over 80% of stock condition surveys more than five years out of date, more than 3,000 outstanding fire safety actions, across roughly 26,700 homes.
The regulator’s own phrase: it had no assurance Bristol understood the condition of its own housing stock. A landlord who doesn’t know what it owns. Or, perhaps, someone asleep at the wheel.
Anyway. Twenty months on, the improvement plan doesn’t complete until October 2026. A tenant with a broken smoke detector doesn’t get to wait for the council’s own deadline. Instead. They might just. You know, self-incinerate in their sleep.
“26,700 homes. One regulator. A council that didn’t know the condition of its own housing stock, and said so itself.”
2. The Disability Group That Never Existed — Objection Report, April 2024.
Number 2 encapsulating the entire tale. One might say.
The East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood’s statutory consultation closed with an Objection Report in April 2024. 1,418 responses. More than half objected. Only 427 supported it.
Buried among the objections, and later found missing from the council’s own published summary: a claim that the “Barton Hill Disabilities Group,” cited as consulted in the scheme’s Equality Impact Assessment, conveniently refuses to show up anywhere else.
An independent review by the community organisation Baggator, published June 2025, found no evidence the group had ever existed. Not once. Not anywhere.
They didn’t forget disabled people. They invented one, on paper, so they’d never have to sit in a room with a real one. Like having an imaginary conversation with oneself, perhaps.
3. The 3am Installation — Thursday 13 March 2025.
Police arrived in Barton Hill before dawn. So did private security. So did a drone team.
The street was asleep when they came. Curtains drawn, lights off, nothing moving except the machines sent to do a job nobody wanted seen in daylight.
Contractors had already tried once, in daylight, to finish the East Bristol scheme. Residents blocked them. So the council came back at night, with backup, while the street had no chance to watch.
Councillors in the administration knew about the operation in advance. This wasn’t officers going rogue. This was authorised, at councillor level, on purpose.
Bristol Labour has called for an independent investigation into that night. None has happened yet. They didn’t win the argument. They waited until the street was asleep and skipped it.
Labour appears to have moved on since then. Unsurprisingly, perhaps. Like yesterday’s news.
4. Locked Out Of Their Own Consultation — Ongoing Since 2025.
Bristol Disability Equality Forum’s own director says, on the record, nobody asked the Forum’s opinion on the East Bristol scheme. Not before it went in. Not after.
Two disabled residents inside the zone describe it as an open prison. Cut off from their street, their friends, their independence — in that order, because that’s the order it happened.
The council appears to be making a habit of this now. Or. So it would seem.
WECIL’s access audit arrived after the scheme was already built. Independent expertise, called in to photograph the damage after the council had already done it.
A Word On Whose Fault This Is
While being careful not to entirely put the blame on the ineptitude of the Green party administration, because they will only blame it on Labour before them.
Though, it would appear the dates don’t leave much room for doubt about the running order of ineptitudes. Tony Dyer was appointed leader of the council on 21 May 2024. Every one of these eleven entries reached its documented failure point — the judgment, the installation, the refusal, the report, brick by brick — after that date, bar one.
The exception is entry two, the fabricated disability consultee, dated April 2024. Even then, several of the eleven trace their origins further back still: the housing stock’s condition, the SAR backlog, the SEND allegations, and Vauxhall Bridge’s original repair decision all predate Green control. Nobody’s claiming otherwise.
What nobody inherited is what happened next. Every judgment, every notice, every refusal, every report landed on this administration’s desk, and stayed there.
It says a lot, I believe, about having all the bright ideas when no previous experience backs it up. Then attempting to implement those bright ideas with heads still stuck firmly in the clouds.
An ideology that abjectly fails.
5. The Vexatious FOI Refusal — Overturned 20 March 2026.
A resident asked the council a plain question: why is this road blocked. The council refused to answer it, calling the question vexatious under Regulation 12(4)(b).
The Information Commissioner’s Office disagreed. Its ruling: the council failed to demonstrate the request was vexatious at all, and had no grounds to refuse it.
A resident asking about a barrier outside their own house gets called unreasonable. A councillor holding a placard in the chamber gets called free expression. One rule for the council’s feelings. Another for a resident’s own front door.
Somewhere in that building, the guide to running a bath hasn’t needed a second edition. Everything else has needed several.
6. The Nighttime Economy Axing — Terminated March 2026, Reinstated 9 May 2026.
Bristol Nights was the council’s own nighttime economy partnership — Bristol Rules, the Women’s Safety Charter, anti-spiking kits in over 260 venues, more than 700 staff trained in safeguarding. It won the 2024 Music Cities Award for Best Night-Time Economy Initiative.
In March 2026, the council terminated it. Carly Heath, the adviser who’d run it since 2021, found out her role was being made redundant through a funding notification. On LinkedIn.
No committee vote. Labour’s Kye Dudd said so outright: if you wanted to end it, it should have gone to committee for a proper decision. It never did.
Tony Dyer called Bristol Nights “brilliant and successful,” in writing, then confirmed it no longer existed. The plan was to hand its work to Public Health. Like the nighttime economy is a symptom, and Public Health the treatment.
More than 100 businesses and organisations signed an open letter demanding it back. On 9 May 2026, an extraordinary committee meeting forced by Labour voted 9–0 to reinstate the role. Even Green councillor Ani Townsend called the original decision the wrong thing to do.
“Bristol Nights was shortlisted for a 2026 global award for the project the council had already killed. The council that axed it sat on the same shortlist as the thing it axed.”
7. The SAR Backlog Enforcement Notice — Issued 27 August 2025.
The Information Commissioner’s Office hit Bristol with a formal enforcement notice. 231 overdue subject access requests. The oldest from January 2022 — three years gone by the time anyone acted.
170 overdue in March 2023. 189 by February 2024. 231 by June 2025. That’s not a backlog shrinking under pressure. That’s a backlog getting worse while the regulator watches.
The ICO’s own words: a poor organisational attitude towards data rights and compliance with the law. Most of that backlog is children’s social care files. Somewhere in it, a parent is still waiting to find out what the council wrote about them.
8. The SEND Spying Report — Published 16 June 2026.
Aileen McColgan KC’s investigation into surveillance of SEND parents’ social media took four years to reach print, from allegations first raised in July 2022.
No widespread, routine or systematic monitoring, the report concluded. It also concluded that evidence-gathering on two Bristol Parent Carer Forum members amounted to or involved surveillance. Both sentences are in the same document.
Three parents, three separate written questions, one identical pasted answer each time — including thanks to the same forum for its “critical oversight of our ever-improving SEND systems.” Ever-improving. Tell that to the child who lost their support three pages after the council congratulated itself.
“Four years to produce a report that says, in one breath, no surveillance happened — and in the next, it did.”
9. The £180m Pack — Agenda Published Ahead Of 9 July 2026
Five “key decisions,” roughly £180m between them, went to the Transport & Connectivity Policy Committee on 9 July 2026. On three of the five, the spending or the liability had already happened before the vote.
The East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood was costed at £1.55m. It had spent £3.2m, heading for £3.5m, before committee even decided whether to keep the scheme at all.
None of the five decisions carried the council’s own Decision Risk Assessment. Appendix D, marked NO, on every single one. Nobody risk-assesses a decision that’s already been made behind their back.
10. Vauxhall Bridge — Approved June 2023, Still Climbing In July 2026.
Cabinet approved the New Cut bridges programme in June 2023. £16m, six bridges. Consultants said demolish Vauxhall Bridge — its condition was too poor to save.
The bridges team chose to repair it instead. £2.0m, they said. By the time the figure reached the 9 July 2026 pack, it stood at £5.46m, with over 80% of the bridge replaced along the way.
Six bridges became nine. Nobody returned to committee until the money had already gone. Call it what it is. They built a new bridge and lied about it on the invoice.
11. The Ramp Refusal — Panel Decision, 18 June 2026.
Janice Moule has lived in her Bedminster council house for 24 years. She now needs a wheelchair to leave it. The NHS says she qualifies for an electric one — once her home is made accessible. Not before.
Three panel meetings weighed her case. She was in none of the rooms. On 18 June 2026, the panel decided: not feasible. Bristol Live asked the council about it on 29 June. As of publication on 2 July, nothing back.
No published risk assessment. No costed breakdown. No named alternative offered in its place. Just a no, handed to a woman who isn’t allowed in the room to ask why. You know. Like it offends their sensibilities.
A Bridge Too Far.
Rough costings (UK, 2026):
Threshold/portable ramp (single low step): £60–£600
Modular aluminium ramp (standard doorstep, semi-permanent, installed): £800–£1,500
Larger modular system (landing, multiple sections, turns): £3,000–£5,000
Full permanent concrete/engineered ramp (structural work, sunken areas, curved path — closer to what Janice’s case would need given the “different levels of pavement” and “sunken area” described): £2,000–£12,000+
Set that against £5.46m for a bridge repair that became a bridge rebuild. A Disabled Facilities Grant of up to £30,000 sits within the council’s own gift to administer. It didn’t need finding. It needed approving.
“£3.46m more appeared for a bridge nobody’s forced to cross than was ever quoted for it. Not one penny moved for the woman locked inside her own house.”
The Three Questions, Asked Of All Eleven.
Is it practical for a council to lose track of £180m in sequencing, while one ramp takes three unminuted meetings to refuse? No.
Is it logical for Appendix D to read NO across five multi-million-pound decisions, while a disabled resident’s own case carries no visible risk assessment either way? No.
What’s the likely outcome, when every scrutiny mechanism available to a resident — FOI, SAR, EqIA, public forum, committee process — has, on this timeline, either failed or been actively resisted? Eleven entries. And still counting.
What The Idiot’s Guide Would Actually Say.
Rule one: spend the money after the vote, not before it. Bristol’s own constitution already says this. It didn’t need writing twice.
Rule two, just as short: when a resident is refused the chance to be in the room deciding her own life, that’s a reason to change the process. Not a reason to proceed without her.
Neither rule needs new legislation. However, eleven dated entries suggest both are apparently harder to follow than they look on paper. Simple, evidently, isn’t the same as easy.
Back To The Bath.
The Idiot’s Guide to Running a Bath stays where it is, uncorrected, because running a bath is the one job in that building nobody’s found a way to get wrong yet.
Running a council, on this timeline, is a different matter. Eleven failures, eleven dates, one thread through every single one: decisions made about people, not with them, and no paper trail left standing when anyone asks why.
Except for. Green. Adjective. As in, having had very little experience of a particular job. Immature. Inexperienced. Raw.
Nobody chose that word for them. The dictionary got there first.
Somebody in that building knows all eleven stories. However, only one of them made this week’s agenda pack.
The other ten are still sitting there, right next to the guide to running a bath.
The Almighty Gob is an independent Bristol accountability and satire publication, written and published by John Langley — former independent Bristol mayoral candidate (2016, 2021), no party allegiance, no press accreditation. Published across X/Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and Muckrack, with the full archive on Substack at thealmightygob.com and cross-posted to Tumblr at thealmightygobalso.
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