Council leader: Why I’m leaving

HIS favourite saying ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’ could not be more fitting as Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council’s leader prepares to step down from the Town Hall.

Councillor Dennis Harvey’s surprise retirement announcement has not only been felt across the borough, but by the Labour group nationally as he holds the title of the longest-serving Labour leader in the country, clocking up 31 years of service.

It was a decision, Cllr Harvey told the Telegraph, that he has only recently contemplated: “There has to be a time when you give up. I didn’t want to carry on until I dropped,” he said.

“I always said that the day that I couldn’t run up the Town Hall steps two at a time then that should be the time for me to go, I can still do it, but I am out of breath when I get to the top!,” the Camp Hill ward representative joked.

“I am 67 and I thought it was time that I did something for myself.”

He will stand down in May to coincide with the local elections and will bring to an end a career in local politics that started when he was just 22.

But his association with the Labour Party has been since his childhood. His hometown of Barnsley was traditionally Labour.

“As a child, I came from a mining family and a mining town, no one stood as Conservative, in fact I never met one Conservative there.”

He recalls when he was just nine-years-old: “I went to pick up the newspaper which had a front page about Harold Macmillan and the headline saying ‘We’ve never had it so good’ and I remember my mum saying ‘well he might have never had it so good, but we certainly aren’t’”

He joined the Labour Party and continued his association when he moved down to the area to study in Coventry and he chose to live in a flat with fellow students in Nuneaton.

“I could drive and the other’s couldn’t so we decided to live in Nuneaton rather than Coventry,” he said.

This marked the start of what would be a forty-year long love affair with the borough, a place he has called home ever since.

He got involved in Nuneaton Labour party and in 1973, when a new shadow authority for Nuneaton and Bedworth was being formed before Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council was officially created in 1974, he was encouraged to become a councillor.

So, he says at the age of 22 he stood in what was the old St Mary’s ward which covered Green Lane all the way down to the Ritz:

“I was encouraged by a former borough councillor, Elijah Lloyd, to stand and there turned out to be no election as the seat as I was unopposed, that wasn’t anything new back then,” he explained.

He went on to hold several positions, including chair of leisure and even contemplated standing to become the town’s MP but it was a pupil at Higham Lane, where he taught for 28 years, who changed his mind.

“We had been doing a lesson on caves and I remember he came into school and he had a paper mache cave he had made, he was only 12, he was so enthusiastic with what he had made and I remember I thought ‘I will never get this sort of satisfaction from politics’ and I withdrew my name.”

This twist of fate led to him becoming leader – and he has not looked back since. He recalls his first major project as leader – installing new shelters at Nuneaton Bus Station. “We used to have ‘concrete coffins,’ which were so dark with little lights inside and I remember going to visit other authorities to look at their shelters and that’s when we decided on the clear shelters, with a large light, so that no-one could reach it, and it would shed light onto all of the shelters,” he said.

One of his biggest high points came during the Margaret Thatcher reign as Prime Minister: “During the Thatcher years we won every seat during one election, there were 42 labour councillors and just three Conservatives, I will always remember that.”

The buzz of the council chamber is something he will miss and he puts his famed quick-thinking retorts down to his time as a teacher: “When you are reaching a group of 15-year-olds, you have to think on your feet pretty quickly, so I think it comes from that,” he said.

When he does retire in May, he plans on travelling: “When I was younger I wanted to visit every country in the world, so far I have done 27, but I had to put it on hold becoming leader.

“I like going to Roanne, I feel at home there, it is very similar in terms of Nuneaton but I love Nuneaton and Bedworth, 1 have spent the majority of my life here.”

But there are still things he would like to achieve during his final six months as leader: “I would like to be able to announce a town centre development in Upper Abbey Street, there are things happening in the background that I cannot discuss at the minute because of commercial sensitivity.”

He also has the difficult task of balancing his final budget in February and admits this time around it has been the hardest yet: “Recently we have had to make some redundancies, we have always tried to keep services and jobs,” he said.

“I want to thank the people of Camp Hill for re-electing me and putting their trust in me, and the people of Nuneaton and Bedworth, as well as members of my own party. I have a saying, my mother used to say it, ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’ and I suppose that’s what I will be doing when I leave, starting the rest of my life.”