Hammersmith Hospital Accident and Emergency is an extra three minute away from me by road in a normal vehicle (without blue lights flashing!). I would prefer to take my chances with an extra three minutes rather than re-experience some of my encounters with Ealing Hospital.

Will.

This stuff is complex. I will try to cover some of the points that you raise.

The council’s staff reductions will be really quite modest over the four/five years. This will be achieved by making sure that external grants to the voluntary sector, support for schools and prices charged to residents take the burden of the savings required. I will be keeping an eye on this but the numbers will not change significantly between 2010 and 2015. You can tell this because the numbers are hard to work out and the unions are not complaining! The Labour council really is protecting its own here.

Credit is cheap now and the council is taking advantage of this by maintaining quite a large capital programme. That said the largest part of the capital programme is schools (2/3rds of which is coming from central government as capital grants) where the council has a legal duty to provide.

The bills we pay comprise council tax (from council) plus precept (from GLA). Council bit will be unchanged. The precept will go down 1%. The overall bill will go down by a tiny smidge.

You are quite right that the £50 million budget cut from the government is equivalent to 40% of current CT in Ealing. No-one is trying to suggest that local government isn’t being put under pressure. I would like to see the centre doing more of the heavy lifting that does needs to be done to bring overall spending back into line with income across the public sector.

The freeze grants are real money. Last year the government gave Ealing £3.1 million for 4 years if it froze council tax. This year it is offering £3.1 million for one year. Sure it is limited. It is typical of local government’s hand out mindset that a £15.5 million present is considered to be a problem. Last year no council in the country turned down the freeze grant so I don’t suppose it was that big a deal! This year only a handful will. In reality it would be politically hard to push up council tax so a £3.1 bung makes it pretty easy to leave it alone.

In Ealing council tax only went up 1.9% two years running under the Tories then was frozen for two years. Now it has been frozen for two years running under a Labour council (paid for by the horrid Tory-led Coalition). Council tax has gone down significantly in real terms. Quite right. It needed to after doubling under the Labour. Although the Tories took out £60 million in savings much of this was ploughed back into new “growth” in areas such as street cleaning, re-cycling and policing so the net saving was relatively small and eaten up by inflation, and paying interest on borrowing, etc. This was right for the time as we were esentially moving resources from the back office to frontline services which residents wanted. Now Labour is cutting frontline services rather than fundamentally re-engineering the council.

You have to be a genius to absorb and understand all this. Is there a four page summary?
Looks as though there will not be future staff reductions?

Normal people pay down their long term debts when interest rates are low. Is Ealing doing this? Or are they just relying on inflation, do you think?

Am I right in thinking that the CT will be exactly the same even though Boris is reducing his precept by £3-10?

If the Council today wanted to go back to the expenditure level when Labour came in, do I think that at say £51M more (as it was then) that I would have on band D to pay an extra 40%? See 4.16.3 (Main BS Report) where it says “For every 1% increase in the 2011/12 council tax, an additional £1.27M council tax revenue is raised”.

Sure that can’t be right, but please don’t jump up and down?

I note that when the central Tories withdraw the grant for Council tax perhaps next year, the Senior Council officer who signed the document thinks that will be a financial cliff edge scenario. Perhaps he should tell Labour to discard their blingy thoughts.

3.2.2 Does this mean a shortfall of £6.2M or just £3.1M? Perhaps that’s what Pickles wants?

But what I do query is when you include the savings achieved under your watch plus those under this Labour watch (you exclude the Labour bling luxury items) and Boris reduces his precept, why can I not expect a real decrease in my CT

How does it work over a long period? Can’t surely all just be inflation? If nothing else perhaps you would answer that for us? If you are feeling generous you might answer a few more???

It is very well served by bus. It is well served by having Hanwell station fairly nearby.

I am totally against this hospital being closed. Where services need improvement, tell them to get on with it.

Im surprised Labour still hire her,
the main gripe for voters are councillors who actually do nothing
I beleive she is part of Southall Green ward and that already is in a bad state
many years ago, she was invovled a heated and nasty catfight which was on public display with rnb singer Tasha Tah, her reputation hasnt increased ever since. she shoudl quit, or Cllr Bell should get rid of her..

The hospital is only twenty minutes walk from me – a fast drive in an ambulance or a ten minute bus journey – so I’m definitely against it closing.

I’ve had several invasive procedures there, as well as physio etc and as I mentioned before never had a problem.

“There are some excellent specialist centres and networks already benefitting patients and carers in NW London.”, it would seem to me that Ealing Council in its present Labour manifestation is doing its best to destroy what remains of these specialist networks in Ealing through the closure of the ALbert Dane Centre for the disabled, the LINKS project for the mentally ill, the cutting of respite care beds, and the now suspicious “relocation” of Ealing Carer’s Centre. It seems to me that here is something that the Conservatives in Ealing could really get their teeth into for the next election as a respected manifesto area: the preservation and development of services for patients and carers in Ealing borough.