Phil Taylor

On the actonw3.com website Cllr Mahfouz has responded to criticisms that the council is not doing enough to clean up Horn Lane. He uses council officers’ somewhat misleading bar chart to argue that “PM10 levels have dropped quite considerably in recent years”.

Once you strip out the distraction of what happened some years ago you are left with an essentially flat picture that says that Horn Lane has been hovering around the annual limit value for the protection of human health laid down in EU directive 1999/30/EC of 40ug/m3 for PM10s. Cllr Mahfouz seems to think that this an OK place to be. It isn’t.

Cllr Mahfouz is unwise to be so complacent about this issue. When his boss Cllr Bell had these figures brought to his attention he had the good sense to at least promise to take action. Last Tuesday when the council invited West Acton Residents Association (WARA) to meet with officers and Cllr Bell, he suggested that he would contact Chris Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, who was his boss in a previous life.

By Thursday, at the Overview and Scrutiny meeting called by the Conservative opposition on the council, this promise had developed into an “Air Quality Summit for Horn Lane”. Cllr Mahfouz was at that meeting and would have heard the committee ask that both local councillors and representatives of residents associations be invited to take part. This is potentially a good result for residents, although they will be sceptical as previous meetings with the Environment Agency at Parliament arranged by local MP Angie Bray did not produce obvious progress.

The opposition has successfully used the mechanisms of the council to raise this issue up the administration’s agenda. Cllr Bell seems to be listening. Cllr Mahfouz not so much.

On a site visit checking on progress of the new pool, leisure centre, library & community spaces at #Acton Town Hall £18m #Labour investment

— Julian Bell (@juliangbell) May 23, 2013

Council leader Julian Bell is quick to claim credit for the Acton Town Hall/Acton Baths regeneration project. Maybe he should wait until it is finished? If he doesn’t get it finished by the local elections next 22nd May he will look pretty silly. His predecessor Cllr Jason Stacey got the Northolt Leisure Centre started and open again in January 2010. Interestingly Stacey’s technique was to personally drive the project, and a raft of others, through a forum called the Queen of the Suburbs Board which reviewed progress on this and other projects at regular intervals. Much the same technique that Cllr Stacey used to sort out the cleaning contract.

The commitment to this project was made in the budget setting process of 2010 under Cllr Stacey. £12 million of residents’ funds were allocated to the project. Cllr Bell might usefully explain the increase of budget to £18 million. In typical Labour fashion Bell labels your money and mine as Labour’s. This is why Labour should never be in charge.

It is unfortunate for Cllr Bell and his administration that is hasn’t had more scope for capital spending. Like the previous administration what capital there is has been largely sucked up by schools expansion. That is why he is reduced to claiming the credit for other people’s decisions. The few decisions made by Bell are instructive in themselves. He has prioritised over £10 million of spending on the council’s own offices and £5 million for an economically illiterate car park in Southall whilst he has cut road spending by 40%. More on that later!

This picture shows the patches on the patches on Valetta Road in East Acton. You might think that East Acton would have had some money spent on its roads under the last three years of a Labour administration. After all it has three Labour councillors. The answer is no. Not a single road has been resurfaced in East Acton under three years of Labour.

Two roads have had new footpaths (Maple Avenue and Station Road) but only on one side! The total value of this work is £48,500. So less than £50K in three years. It is the ward that has done second worst after Ealing Common’s big fat zero.

Ealing has spent £12 million on its roads in the last three years so on average you might expect East Acton to get £522K. East Acton has had less than one tenth (9%) of its share of Labour’s much reduced spend on roads.

Over the course of the next week or so I am going to take a look at what the Labour administration is doing about fixing up our dilapidated roads. It has allocated £12 million over the last three years to spend on Ealing’s roads (the year before, 2010/11, the budget was set by the outgoing Conservative administration).

I will take a look at the big picture but first I thought that it would be useful to go through some of the wards that have come off worst.

The absolute worst is Ealing Common. As one of 23 wards it might expect on average to get £522K out of the £12 million. It has had absolutely nothing. No road or pavement in Ealing Common ward has been resurfaced in Ealing Common ward for 3 years.

On Thursday night the council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee met to discuss the issue of pollution in Horn Lane. The Labour transport and environment spokesman, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, and a couple of the Labour committee members seemed to think that this was not a good use of their time but ten local residents turned up and three of them spoke very well about the poor air quality of their neighbourhood.

Coincidentally on Thursday King’s College London announced:

On Wednesday 15th May 2013, the monitoring site on Horn Lane, Acton became the first location in London to breach the National Air Quality Strategy (NAQS) Objective for PM10 for the year. The NAQS objective allows a daily mean PM10 concentration of 50 ug m-3 on not more than 35 days per year. Provisional measurements indicate that PM10 on Horn Lane has been above this threshold for 36 days during 2013.

The meeting heard from Cllr Mahfouz that in spite of his pique the council was proposing an Air Quality Summit for Horn Lane that brings together the council, the Environment Agency and Transport for London. This was a new idea. One not heard at cabinet on 23rd April. One not heard when Cllr Bell arranged for West Acton Residents’ Association to meet officers on 14th May. I think we can assume that the combination of the call in and residents concerns have galvanised Cllr Bell into action. He has been in contact with his old boss Chris Smith, who is now chairman of the Environment Agency. Good.

The officers speaking at the meeting were surprised when the committee disagreed with their view that the summit should be for officials only. The committee recommended that representatives of residents and local councillors should be involved too.

A good night for residents I think.

This graph compares the level of PM10 particulate matter in the air on Horn Lane with sites on the Western Avenue and the Hanger Lane Gyratory System since Monday 29th April. It is clear that Horn Lane can be 3, 4 or 5 times more polluted than the busiest of roads in the Borough. This pollution is largely driven by the industrial sites immediately adjacent to Acton Mainline Station.

I raised the Horn Lane pollution issue at cabinet on 23rd April by handing out a similar graph. The minutes of the meeting recorded: “That Cabinet notes the tabled graph showing the PM10 Particulates (hourly means) for Horn Lane”. On 29th April the Conservative opposition on the council “called in” the cabinet decision. This means that the Horn Lane pollution issue will be discussed in detail at a meeting of the council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee at 7.30pm on Thursday 16th May. This meeting is held in public and will allow residents to hear what the council has to say on this matter.

Since the cabinet meeting the leader of the council, Cllr Julian Bell, has invited representatives of West Acton Residents Association and me to meet with officers from the council’s regulatory side and him this afternoon at 5pm. This meeting will be a useful preamble to the public meeting on Thursday.

Cllr Bell was due to meet with Acton, Chiswick and Ealing MP, Angie Bray, on Friday to discuss this issue but he cancelled that meeting and invited her last Friday lunchtime (12.33pm) to come tonight – not really possible if you are an MP on a three line whip (as Julian Bell, part-time Parliamentary researcher for Virendra Sharma, would have known full well). Having raised this issue in Parliament, initiating an adjournment debate, Angie is very unhappy to be so obviously sidelined by Bell.

The message I will be giving Cllr Bell and the council tonight is that residents want to know what the council is going to do when to clean up Horn Lane. The council has been monitoring this pollution for eight years and it is two and a half years since Angie raised it in Parliament.

The council is stirring. If you want it to move faster and to give this matter the priority it deserves come to the Committee Room 3 at the Town Hall at 7.30pm on Thursday.

This week the council has been gold plating the Town Hall steps, well covering them with lovely and expensive York stone, as part of its £2 million project to gold plate the entire Town Hall and create a beautiful new civic quarter where no-one except council officers goes. All this has been done by officer and cabinet decision without any consultation or public debate. Whilst the council keeps repeating its £85 million savings line it can magically find £2 million to create a lovely new civic quarter whilst the rest of us have to put up with wobbly brick pavements and chewing gum in the parts of the town centre where regular people do their shopping.

The total bill is £2.133 million made up of:

- Town Hall refurbishment £750K
- Town Hall windows £143K
- Pavement in front of Town Hall £800K
- Longfield Avenue closure £440K

(See answers to questions 12, 13 and 14 in December.)

The council likes to make out that the Town Hall works were some kind of vital health and safety emergency effort and then you hear that the refurbishment is inline for running for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ (RICS) London region Building Conservation 2013 Award. According to the Gazette:

But pollution and inappropriate past repair from the 1950s meant some of the facade’s architectural features had started to deteriorate.

The latest works sought to repair this damage while retaining many of the original building materials.

Stained glass windows were also restored and historical paint analysis was used to make sure that the redecoration was authentic. If the project wins, it will be automatically entered into the competition to win the RICS Project of the Year 2013.

A specially inscribed paving stone, dedicating the restorations to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, will be permanently placed outside the town hall on May 13.

The council might confirm whether the Town Hall project is a piece of vital health and safety work or a project fit for a queen? It wants to have its cake and eat it on this one. It looks more like the latter to me.

As a part of the council’s £2 million project to gold plate the Town Hall and build a new civic quarter it is rebuilding Longfield Avenue, that is the road that runs between the Town Hall and Perceval House, the council’s main office complex. Longfield Avenue is at the heart of the new civic quarter that the council is building for itself without much fanfare and certainly without any public debate. The picture below was taken in February when some actual work was happening.

According to the council’s press release:

The works will see the section of road on Longfield Avenue between Uxbridge Road and the rear of the Town Hall raised. Both the road and the pavement will remain clearly defined, but the raised surface will create a shared space making it easier for pedestrians to cross. The remainder of the road up to the railway bridge will be resurfaced.

Further improvements include new Yorkstone paving, granite block paving, granite kerbs and general de-cluttering and reorganisation of the street furniture (such as bollards and rubbish bins). New cycle parking will also be installed. The works are part of a wider programme of improvements to Ealing Town Centre.

This is all very lovely but according to the answer to a question that I asked back in December (question 14) it is not cheap, coming in at £440K for a very short stretch of road.

In the same press release it was promised that this work would be finished on 9th March. Two months later and the road is still not open. It reminds one of the Bike Hub that was finished three months late and opened half built just before the Olympics.

To me the work looks finished. I can’t understand why the road isn’t open unless the officers’ vision is a new pedestrianised precinct that allows them to walk between their offices and the new Dicken’s Yard development untroubled by pesky Ealing residents using their own road to actually drive on. Who knows? They don’t seem to want to tell anyone. At a time when there is no cash to resurface the road outside your house or make sure your pavement is flat and safe the council can find another £440K for itself.