Ealing Times is reporting that they just did a Freedom of Information request on tram costs to-date and got a number of £24.5 million out of TfL.
Back in May Councillor Will Brooks got the number “approximately £23 million” out of them. See previous posting. So they have added £1.5 milliion doing what over the summer?
Today I took down a flyposter at the junction on South Ealing Road and Little Ealing Lane. A promoter of a club night at the Townhouse pub in Ealing thinks it is OK to make a mess of our neighbourhood in order to promote his or her business. No you can’t. Calling in at the pub the duty manager informed me that it was the DJ rather than the pub itself. I told her that it is the pub that will lose its licence if they cause a public nuisance.
The same people have been regularly promoting club nights at the Red Room also. The posters on plastic boards tie-wrapped to street furniture have appeared outside Northfield tube and at major junctions in the area (at least as far as I have witnessed).
It should be quite easy to stop this behaviour. I am going to write to the designated premises supervisor at both premises and remind then that their licences can be called in for review by the licensing committee if their businesses cause a public nuisance. More later.
The Telegraph today reports that the state is emplying 3,200 press officers.
This includes 69 in the Metropolitan Police (not-force-but) Service and 25 in Transport for London.
Bank holiday Monday is a strange day to see new policy initiatives floated. Today the Telegraph was reporting on a proposal to charge people for the rubbish they throw away, ostensibly to improve our recycling rates. They are reporting on an IPPR paper which was made available on a Sunday.
This really is the dumbest idea. There is enough fly-tipping in Northfield, Ealing and London without giving people an incentive to chuck rubbish out on the street.
For many people the only council service they actually see happening is rubbish collection. The council takes a couple of grand off them and they get their rubbish taken away. Maybe they will see a street cleaner occasionally. People are already disillusioned with the value for money provided by the council. This is a recipe for mass disengagement with local politics. Once people pay for this service they will soon vote to give the service to a private contractor and tell their council to bog off.
Tonight Darra Singh, our council’s chief executive, was interviewed on Radio 4’s PM programme. He has been appointed as chairman of the government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion. He was harried mightily by Eddie Mair to say something controversial. Although people like Ruth Kelly (not to mention Trevor Phillips, Michael Nazir-Ali and George Alagiah) are rowing back from multiculturalism Darra did a manful job of stonewalling him.
Note picture from Ealing Times website.
I went out with ECT this morning to understand their grading process better. See previous post.
I spent an hour with Jon Sharkey (senior ECT management), Steve Hodges (manages Ealing’s street cleaning) and Robby Kettle (local supervisor). We covered 16 streets.
| Street | Grade |
| Bramley Road | B |
| Airedale Road | B |
| Creighton Road | A/B |
| Temple Road | A/B |
| Weymouth Avenue | A/B |
| Hereford Road | A/B |
| York Road | A |
| Julien Road | A/B |
| Niagara Avenue | A/B |
| Blondin Avenue | A/B |
| Belsize Avenue | C |
| Northcroft Avenue | C |
| Ridley Avenue | B |
| Midhurst Road | C |
| Claygate Road | A/B |
| Graham Avenue | C |
The grading process is pretty uncontroversial and we agreed about what the grades should be. What became clear though is that they grade after cleaning. ECT’s grades are an internal quality control process rather than a process a customer might undertake. This perhaps explains the mismatch between residents’ perception and the grades ECT gives itself. Note though that a 5% failure rate (on Northfield figures November-August) in any manufacturing process would be considered 2/3 orders of magnitude too high.
One issue that came up was cleaning around parked cars. Apparently officers are looking at parking restrictions. This is just mad and residents will hate it. We need to work out how to persuade residents to leave a margin of about a foot when they park on a street cleaning day. This assumes that residents know when their road is due to be cleaned. One of our manifesto pledges was to put signs on all roads indicating when they would be cleaned. One thing is for sure: residents cannot hope to get their roads cleaned properly if they park right up to the kerb on the day their street is cleaned.
Over the weekend the September copy of Livingstone’s £3 million a year Londoner arrived on my doorstep.
Livingstone is at his lying worst with a front page that declares “London’s buses now free for under-18s”. This is true so long as you are still in education. Because this is not a real local newspaper but a piece of political propaganda he does not bother to tell us how much this exercise is costing. It may well be good value for money and we may well think it is a good thing. But, Livingstone does not want us to worry our little heads about the costs of his projects so he refuses to tell us.
Another aspect of his lying is the game he plays with using trams in the plural. There is only one tram in London, the Croydon Tramlink. In his press releases and adverts Livingstone tries to kid us that there are trams across London. The use of buses in the plural is reasonable as you can pretty much get a bus anywhere in London. The use of trams in the plural is just a Livingstone lie.
West London does not want his tram but he hopes that by twisting language like this he will win the argument subliminally. What a creep. If you go to the TfL website they carry on this silly subterfuge with the Trams section of their website.
I have today complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about TfL’s current Oyster campaign which pluralises the Croydon tram.
Mark Nicholson, the Conservative candidate for Ealing Southall at the last election, has been engaging in some extra-curricular activity. As secretary of the Bow Group, a right of centre think tank, he has been looking at the education field and has published a
paper entitled “A for Effort, D for Results” yesterday.
He points out that education spending increased 54% in real terms between 1997 and 2004. That is great but much of it was wasted in excessive public sector inflation because teacher numbers only went up 9% between 1997 and 2006. How depressing. All the time remember that school numbers have been falling.
Worse than this much of the increase has been wasted on the bureaucracy.
It is a shame that our superannuated MP, Piara S Khabra, cannot make the same quality of contribution to public debate. He has not bothered to speak in parliament since November last year and has restricted himself to questions since then.
<img id="image226" height=48 alt=homeonblue.gif src="https://philtaylor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/homeonblue.thumbnail.gif" hspace=8 align="left" This morning the ConservativeHome website ran this story from me highlighting how the London Mayor is spending £100 million on self-promotion.
The same story was picked up by the Standard this afternoon, see below. TfL really can’t help themselves, apparently they are about to spend another £435K on an advert presented by Tube managing director Tim O’Toole. Sounds like masturbation to me. Expensive masturbation too, especially as I bet this figure is just the production cost of the ad. The telly slots will probably cost £1 million. TfL spends £1.5 million per annum to have three full pages 10 times a year in the Londoner. Couldn’t they have used these rather than turning their boss into a media star?
Apparently Richard Barnes mentioned the £78 million figure when he was interviewed on ITV’s London Tonight on Wednesday.
Ealing Times covered the TfL ad waste story today. Follow link. They chose to link it to rising bus fares. Quite right.
Phil Taylor 
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