The second Northfield ward forum is due on Thursday at 7.30pm. The venue this time is the Mount Carmel Primary School on Little Ealing Lane.
The notes from the last session are here. All newsletters, agendas, etc are here. The venue last time was the Log Cabin, which was a bit small, hence the upgrade.
As well as your three councillors Sgt Greg Fox and PC Jav Khan from the Northfield Safer Neighbourhood Team will attend.
On Saturday I heard from one of our Safer Neighbourhood Team constables, Jav Khan, that they are moving into the new Ealing Common & Northfield ward base on South Ealing Road, just south of Little Ealing Lane, on Tuesday 6th January. It has a reception area and interview room where the public can meet their teams and report issues to them. Apparently the public areas will not be in use for a while due to staffing issues but it is good to hear that our team will be nearer and will hopefully be able to spend more time on station as a result.
The Northfield Safer Neighbourhood Team is a great asset to our community. If you have information that could help this team do their job or you have ongoing nuisance type problems call them on 07879 888989. Their role is to proactively tackle relatively low-level nuisance crime, such as graffiti, car crime, burglary, street robbery, etc. Hence they won’t necessarily answer the phone immediately having been up all night trying to catch a burglar they are after. If there is something live happening then call 999.
Today the papers are reporting on Eric Pickles’ plans for reform of local government, see FT, Times, Guardian and Evening Standard. Pickles is the Shadow Communities Secretary. A lot of the reporting has talked about town hall “fat cats”, ie highly paid council staff, in particular chief execs.
The reported comments from the LGA in the Times really need challenging, namely:
The Local Government Association argues that its chief executives are paid modestly compared with private and public organisations with comparable turnovers and staffing levels. Paul Coen, the head of the association, has pointed out that a chief executive at a big council could earn on average more than twice as much in a public or private organisation of a similar size.
It seems (see The Red Box blog in the Times) that Coen is on the way out. No wonder as he is really talking crap here.
As capable as many local authority chief execs are they don’t have to create and sell stuff. They just work out their costs, find out what the government grant will be and ask council tax payers for the difference. Ideally they will be of a mind to keep those costs under control. Sure you want good people doing this but you don’t need the really expensive, talented people who can create and sell.
You shouldn’t compare council chief execs to corporate chief execs. More properly you might compare them to operations directors of equivalent sized commercial organisations in very mature industries where there is little or no growth.
I don’t always agree with the TaxPayer’s Alliance but their Town Hall Rich List published in March is a useful read. It put Ealing’s own Darra Singh at number 7 in the country.
Yesterday the Telegraph did a piece on Labour’s proposals to charge people more if they happen to live somewhere nice. No doubt Northfield and many parts of Ealing will have high ratings in Labour’s scheme of “value significant codes”.
Simon Heffer in the Telegraph today fulminates:
The Brown Terror, having wrecked the economy, now proposes to wreck it further by penalising those who already make the biggest contribution, and ensuring they contribute even more. That is what socialism is all about, and why socialist countries are inevitably economic failures. If you tax successful people until their pips are squeaking, they tend to clear off to be successful elsewhere, and stop paying our taxes altogether.
This is just another example of a process that has been accelerating throughout the last 11 years.
With the 45% tax rate and this new nice neighbourhood tax Labour are nakedly plotting to raise taxes on the middle classes, something they have been wary of doing up until now. They have massively increased taxes but not nakedly. They have done it stealthily, by inches. Please note Conservatives the way to undo Labour’s damage is by inches too.
What Labour have also consistently done hitherto is to target “deprived” groups for extra help, whether it is spending more on bad schools, spending Lottery money in deprived areas, giving more money to inefficient Labour councils or targeting health resources at unhealthy people to “reduce health inequalities”.
In many ways this seems laudable but at some point the better off just decide to stop being forced to be so generous. They work out how to avoid taxes or they simply leave the country. In Britain today you can give up almost half your income in taxes, pay two grand in council tax and still not get a school that pushes your child academically, get hold of basic healthcare quickly and conveniently and enjoy a high quality public realm. If we fail to meet the basic aspirations of those paying the bills something will change.
It is one thing to expect wealthier people to contribute more. It is quite another if you then give a disproportionate share of the proceeds to people who can’t or won’t contribute.
In Britain today too much public money is diverted to people who make poor choices all of their lives; people who consistently choose not to get educated, not to work, not to stay with their partners, not to look after their own children and not to look after themselves. No amount of cash can undo these poor choices and often the money provides perverse incentives to keep making poor choices.
I am staying with my in-laws who come from Marietta, Georgia, some 20 miles north west of Atlanta. This morning we met up with my brother-in-law and enjoyed a typical American diner breakfast experience complete with endless refills of bad coffee.
We were within sight of Marietta’s most important local landmark, the Big Chicken. The beak goes up and down and the eyes roll around about every five seconds. There is even a gift shop. KFC have tried to get them to modify the logo, they are ashamed of the word “Fried” in their old brand name. Unfortunately for them fried is a food group to Southerners and the locals just would stand for having their landmark tampered with. In the south they cook their Thanksgiving turkeys by deep frying them.
The last ever Ealing Times plopped on to my mat this morning. I think that this is a great shame. The Ealing Times has been making hay over the last few weeks with parking stories but I still think it is a matter of regret that we have lost one of our two local papers. I feel that both local papers often get stories factually wrong and they almost always add a dash of hyperbole to jazz them up. They do though play an important role locally in holding local bodies to account.
The front page of today’s Ealing Times highlights how the NHS in Ealing is going to lose £26 million. To be precise the body that spends money on our behalf, the Primary Care Trust, will have £26 million less to build health centres, provide new services, etc. I predicted in January last year that we wouldn’t get any money back that we lent to the Minister of Health and now we find we are being asked to lend more.
Sorry about the lack of blogging this week. The baby has been ill so I have been a fulltime father rather the usual part-time role.
Once or twice a year I get an e-mail from someone trying to get in touch with the darts player Phil “The Power” Taylor. Such an e-mail arrived from a 17 year old yesterday.
i am a greatest fan of u and i have u as a poster on my wall. i like to play darts i have scord 180 6 times this year. your just amazing at your darts getting 9 darters and 180’s and your avarage is alway above 100. you mostly beat people in a match. you pratice very hard.
i practic 1 to 2 hours a day. my highest check out was 124 and my lowest check out was 42. in the future i would like to be u on the tv and winning losts of money in the tornaments that u win. i watch your show (phi taylors new kids on the oche) and i was wonding where is that played. cause i am interestd in playing with other people my age.
I read this and wonder how well we are equipping our kids for work and whether our education system really is good enough. I don’t think so if this young man’s writing skills are anything to go by. So much for “Education, education, education”.
Yesterday the Ealing Times really went over the top with their front page headline: “Ealing Council could be investigated by police for fraud“. Ealing Times is about to be closed down by their owners and will not be published after Christmas so maybe journalist Alex Hayes just doesn’t care anymore.
Ealing Council has always believed its yellow box junctions across T junctions to be legal and that is the legal advice we have had every time we asked the question. Legal matters are not always black and white whatever journalists and opposition councillors like to make out.
When we started losing some PATAS appeals on these junctions we asked ourselves how we should resolve it as PATAS cannot make general judgements - it can only rule on individual cases. We might have decided to go to judicial review. This would have been expensive and we do not think that going to law at this level is what council tax payers want us to spend their money on. We decided to get the opinion of the Department for Transport (DfT). This request was made “without prejudice”. In other words we have always maintained and still maintain that these junctions are legal.
Once the DfT had disagreed with us we felt that as these box junctions were controversial we should remove them. We also felt that we should refund those fined up from when we first heard from the DfT that it disagreed with our own legal advice. We could easily have taken the view that these were always legal so we would not refund anyone. We chose what we thought was a fair and reasonable position.
To illustrate how grey these issues are let me quote from a PATAS case (No. 2080453909). The adjudicator, Anthony Engel, said on 4th September 2008 of a case concerning the South Road/Cambridge Road junction:
I, myself, am inclined to the view that a local authority is entitled to use a Box conforming with Diagram 1043 at a T-junction (ie a full width box junction) - as otherwise, the local authority is unable to prevent traffic stopping on the far side of a T-junction and it seems to be that a local authority ought to have the power to do so.
However, I am not so firm in my view that I am prepared to depart from the decisions made by the Chief Adjudicator (and other Adjudicators).
Accordingly, after some hesitation, I follow the decision referred to and I allow this appeal.
So it seems that Engel agreed with our own legal advice but found against the council in any case. You might say: “So what?”, but Engel didn’t have to make this point as late as this September. He could have kept quiet knowing how controversial this case has already become, but clearly he felt there was justice in our case which should be acknowledged. This case is not black and white and both the Ealing Times and Cllr Mahfouz are simply wrong to suggest that it is.
According the Manchester Evening News:
THE PEOPLE have spoken – and Greater Manchester will NOT be getting a congestion charge.
Voters have overwhelmingly rejected the scheme by a majority of almost four to one in a region-wide referendum.
The ‘No’ vote won a clear majority in all ten local authority areas and delivered a crushing blow to the plan to invest billions of pounds in the region’s public transport infrastructure.
Across all ten boroughs a total of 812,815 (78.8 per cent) voted ‘no’, while just 218,860 (21.2 per cent) voted ‘yes’ to the proposals.
This constitutes a total humilation for those trying to promote the scheme. Shockingly the local public transport monopoly called GMPTE, who are a public body and who transparently have an interest, tried to use public money (£230K provided by DfT) to promote a yes vote until they were stopped from airing their TV ad by Ofcom, see here.
The BBC in its coverage can’t quite admit the extent to which the proles have rejected the mindset that it promotes so assiduously. As a result in their coverage they simply ignored the fact that 80% of people voted no and wittered on about the turnout, see here.
Update: The BBC changed this page at 14:04pm today to include the voter numbers and to reorder the quotes.
