Phil Taylor

Sahota’s campaign ignores the rules again

Phil — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:15:07 +0000

The campaign to get Onkar Sahota elected as an Assembly Member has been previously criticised by Mark Wallace for misusing public resources (in this case Parliament). Wallace reprinted an e-mail regarding a Sahota fundraiser sent by Virendra Sharma MP’s researcher Julian Bell who used his work e-mail address. As Bell works part-time as Sharma’s researcher in Parliament it was an official parliament.uk e-mail address he used. This might be judged a relatively minor offence but it demonstrates a contempt for the niceties on the part Bell.

Yesterday I went to the Town Hall to check the nomination papers of the candidates that took part in the election for the Ealing & Hillingdon GLA seat. I found more misbehaviour by Labour.

Ealing councillor Yoel Gordon acted as the agent for Onkar Sahota’s campaign. Again we see the casual contempt for the rules. He has used his council e-mail address for his own party’s political business. He is simply not allowed to do this.

Sahota himself spent a lot of time earlier this year jamming himself into official photographs, again breaking rules about misusing public resources for campaigning. Labour politicians in Ealing think that public resources are theirs to use as they like.

Rubbish Ealing fiasco

Phil — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:41:38 +0000

Last night’s extraordinary council meeting ended up being not very illuminating. Labour apologised and agreed that the new waste contract in Ealing was a fiasco but would not go as far as to accept that it was a disaster. I will settle for fiasco.

The man in charge, who called himself “a solutions person”, is Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, the portfolio holder for Environment and Transport. He said: “I reiterate our unreserved apology”. A more direct form of words such as “I am sorry” might have made him sound a little more contrite but contrition isn’t his thing. Mahfouz does smirky and huffy rather better. When it emerged during the debate that Mahfouz had known in advance that the contractor did not have the required vehicles in place at the start of the contract his response to opposition incredulity and questions as to why this information was not passed on was “You didn’t ask”.

After Labour’s library foul up, where the leader had to step in and do the job of the portfolio holder, again it has been council leader Julian Bell who has had to take the lead with this “fiasco”. In his speech Bell claimed that “Today’s missed collections were very few” and that the service was “essentially back to normal”. Although he claimed to have checked the stats he failed to give any hard numbers. He made reference, as did most of the Labour speakers to £85 million of cuts. Labour’s get out of jail free card played again.

The other line that Labour tried was that the new waste contractor was really quite good and had done a good job for other authorities. Both Cllrs Mahfouz and Daniel Crawford tried this line. I would like to see them try this with residents. A few of the Labour councillors tried to suggest that the extra meeting was a waste of public money. Cllr Johnson, Labour’s finance lead, said that the cost of the meeting could have been spent on remedial action. I reckon that giving Labour and the administration a good roasting on this subject is the most effective remedial action an opposition can take. Incidentally a couple of Enterprise managers had to sit through the whole event so that probably justifies the cost of the exercise right there.

In spite of repeated questioning neither Cllrs Bell nor Mahfouz could give any clarity about how early they escalated the rubbish Ealing fiasco to the Chief Executive of Enterprise. They claimed to have had lots of meetings but the lack of names and dates was telling. We heard a lot of slightly quaint stories from Bell and Mahfouz about their cycling around the Borough on their bikes over Easter and having daily meetings exhorting the Enterprise line managers who screwed up in April to do better. The word ineffective comes to mind.

Labour was determined that no real facts would emerge and the Labour chief whip pretty much taunted us that no facts would emerge. The Tory spokesman on environment, Cllr Tony Young, had been chasing for recycling and waste stats for a week since month end and been refused. I myself asked about the amount of dry-recycling diverted to the famous MRF in Kent and was also refused. An officer told me:

The figures will require validation by the Council in terms of audit trail and cross referencing with Enterprise weighbridge out records.

This is nonsense of course. We overheard when we visited the site a week earlier that for three out of four weeks in April 500 Tonnes Ealing dry-recycling has been processed by the site. In a normal month Ealing collects 1,200 Tonnes so around 55%, over half, of the hard work put in by residents to separate their waste has been wasted in April with no end in sight – only today I saw my carefully separated re-cycling chucked in the back of a garbage truck. Six weeks of wasted effort.

Labour tried to deny these figures but they all come from officers. Labour are trying to hide the embarrassing truth. When the numbers do finally emerge the administration will have to explain their glib assertions. “Back to normal”. No. I fear that we have achieved a rather worse new normal.

This Rubbish Council

Phil — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:40:37 +0000

This Conservative group press release was published today:

At a special Full Council Meeting (May 8), called by the Conservatives, they demanded the return of a first class waste and collection service for the people of the Borough and called no confidence in the Labour Council’s ability to deliver it

Councillor David Millican, Conservative Group Leader said:

Labour apologised but took no responsibility for the inexcusable service

Boris wins but Barnes loses

Phil — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:17:44 +0000

Commiserations to ex-GLA member for Ealing and Hillingdon, Richard Barnes who lost his seat this afternoon to Labour’s Onkar Sahota. There were 3,110 votes in it or 1.9%.

Mayor Boris Johnson had a much better time of it in Ealing & Hillingdon beating Ken Livingstone by 12,215 votes or 7.5%.

Boris outperformed his party by 12.1% and even Richard outperformed by 3.4%.

Ealing & Hillingdon results here and here.

Vote Blue Alien

Phil — Thu, 03 May 2012 06:48:52 +0000

The Labour campaign (it stopped being the Ken Livingstone campaign a couple of weeks ago when Labour realised that Livingstone was a liability to his own campaign) has been awful. They have made promises they can’t keep and failed to apologise for Livingstone’s epic £220K tax evasion whilst he has been out of office. Labour’s last poster just about sums up everything that is wrong about Labour and Livingstone. Negative, dishonest and wrong.

Boris Johnson is a leader for all Londoners, improving the transport system, keeping us safe and costing us all less. He does it with a smile on his face and a real connection to London and its people. Boris is a mayor for everyone. I do hope that you will vote for him.

The polls opened already at 7am this morning. I hope that you will vote for Boris for Mayor, Richard Barnes for the Ealing & Hillingdon GLA seat and for the Tories in party list vote. If you are voting for Boris you don’t need to worry about the second vote in the mayoral election – just leave it blank (it only comes into play if you vote for someone who won’t be in the top two, eg if you vote Green + Livingstone or LibDem + Johnson).

The polls stay open to 10pm. If you haven’t posted your postal vote you can complete it and deliver to any polling station. You don’t need your orange polling card – just turn up and they will look you up. If you tell the party tellers at the polling station what your number is then you won’t be bugged by party workers ringing your bell at 9pm asking if you have have voted. There is nothing sinister about it – they are just trying to get out their vote.

Livingstone’s great big bus fare lie

Phil — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:13:03 +0000

A major plank of Livingstone’s election platform is that “A single bus fare is now up 50%”, see page 19 of London Elects “The Candidates” publication.

The recent history of TfL fares is provided by the Londonist blog. The bus fare that Livingstone is referring to is the Oyster PAYG (peak) tabulated below.

It was £1 for three years until Livingstone lowered to 90p it in the run up to the 2008 London election. This was not enough to get him re-elected but it does provide a basis for Livingstone’s statistical nonsense. When Livingstone was in power he raised bus fares by 43% from 70p to £1. His later 10p cut was totally unaffordable. At the time he made this decision the subsidy for bus journeys was already 33p per journey.

Of course Boris Johnson had to raise bus fares when he came into power. You can guarantee that Livingstone would have done too (he had previous after all). It would be much fairer to claim that Johnson raised fares from £1 to £1.35 or 35%. Not only was Livingstone’s rise bigger than Johnson’s it was earlier. Livingstone is relying on you having a short memory. Don’t buy it.

Labour fares nonsense

Phil — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:47:05 +0000

Last night I had a bit of a debate on Twitter with Labour councillor Hitesh Tailor on the subject of public transport fares although Tailor’s debating technique is limited to spewing out one-sided, unreferenced factoids.

Transport for London’s (TfL’s) fares have been running ahead of inflation ever since it was set up and Boris Johnson has only made small in-roads into TfL’s costs but he has made better progress with this than Ken Livingstone ever did. The Channel 4 programme on the Tube in February was evidence that Johnson has demanded more for less from the Tube system taking out 800 staff. Frankly no-one was ever going to seriously tackle TfL’s costs (and its labour force) in the run up to the Olympics, least of all Livingstone. Johnson has talked about automating tubes in the future – a change that will have to be forced through in the face of extreme opposition from the railway unions that are supporting Livingstone.

Livingstone has been using Fares Fair as a weapon since 1981, 31 years, so he knows it works. We know though that he lied twice before about cutting fares.

MANIFESTO PROMISE: “I will freeze tube fares in real terms for four years” (Ken Livingstone, Ken 4 London, 2000, p. 8).

PROMISE BROKEN: In January 2004 – before the election – cash fares on the Tube rose by up to 25 per cent. Travelcards also increased. Livingstone himself admits in his recent memoirs: ‘I decided to increase the fares before the [2004] election’ (TfL, Board Papers: Agenda Item 5, 29 October 2003; Ken Livingstone, You can’t say that, October 2011).

MANIFESTO PROMISE: “I will freeze bus fares for four years” (Ken Livingstone, Ken 4 London, 2000, p. 8).

PROMISE BROKEN: In January 2004, the single bus fare outside central London was increased from 70p to £1 a rise of 43 per cent. The weekly bus pass for those travelling outside central London rose from £7.50 to £9.50, an increase of 26.6 per cent. For those travelling in central London it rose by 11.7 per cent, from £8.50 to £9.50 (TfL Press Release, New Year, New Fares, 2 January 2004).

Livingstone is not the right person to tackle the unions and work practices on the Tube which is the only long term way of lowering fares. If Johnson wants to be seen as a credible national politician in the future he needs to demonstrate that he can reform public transport in London and stop the fares spiral. Livingstone hasn’t a chance. Johnson just might.

Unison baulks at council’s £1.5 million terms and conditions saving

Phil — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:06:05 +0000

It is interesting to see the Unison union pushing back hard on the council’s ever so modest proposals to shave £1.5 million off staff costs by renegotiating staff terms and conditions, see Ealing & Acton Gazette.

Ealing’s terms and conditions really are very generous. Staff do 35 hour weeks. New starters get 27 days holiday which goes up to 30 days after 5 years and 33 days after ten. The chief officers get 33 days on day one. In the 2009/10 financial year non-school staff alone earned £1.8 million in overtime, anti-social hours and special responsibility allowances. The difference between these Ts and Cs and the kind of Ts and Cs enjoyed by the bulk of the workers paying council tax in Ealing is worth about 10% of the £130 million pay bill, not the 1% the council is going for.

It is true to say that local government workers are in the 3rd year of a pay freeze. This is a real hardship but many in the private sector have endured pay cuts or extended periods of stagnant wages since 2008 and are still working significantly longer hours than Ealing council’s staff.

In spite of the pay freeze and “400 posts” Mary Lancaster of Unison refers to the council pay bill has been creeping up due to upwards regrading of groups of staff during re-organisations. More on this another day.

It is worth noting that school leaders on the Ealing Schools Forum feel so comfortable with their finances that they opted out of this negotiation for their support staff (teachers are on separate national Ts and Cs) so they will continue to enjoy the terms and conditions described above.

Rather strangely the leader of the council, Julian Bell, has taken personal charge of these negotiations himself. This is a terrible decision. He takes on too much himself as his cabinet is so weak. He really could have left the initial negotiations to his senior officers. If he doesn’t achieve this very modest saving he will be in big trouble. Asking staff to give up £1.5 million of the £85 million savings the council is seeking isn’t exactly ambitious.

Labour lying about Ealing Hospital

Phil — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:35:30 +0000

This morning the Ealing Labour councillors were out in force in the rain at Ealing Hospital with Ken Livingstone, Andy Burnham, the Labour health spokesman, and Virendra Sharma, MP for the Southall half of the Ealing Southall constituency. They were no doubt taking a photo to go in a last minute leaflet to go out before May 3rd. Labour know that Livingstone is such a weak candidate that they are trying to make Ealing Hospital into the key election issue – we know that this is all they talk about on the doorstep.

Just to the right of Andy Burnham is Onkar Sahota, Labour’s candidate for the Ealing & Hillingdon GLA seat. He is a GP and the person in this group shot most able to influence the future of Ealing Hospital. His decisions about where to send his patients are what will decide the fate of this hospital through the commissioning process.

The NHS is responding to the requirement to reinvest £20 billion of savings into new services by consolidating higher volume services on fewer specialist centres. This process is being driven and controlled by doctors not politicians and certainly not the London mayor. If you want to know who started the process of taking £20 billion out of health service costs so that it could be reinvested in new services, the so-called Nicholson Challenge, then read here. The answer is of course Andy Burnham when he was Labour’s Health Secretary. I don’t hear Livingstone telling us where he can find a few billion Pounds so that he can subsidise hospital services in London that doctors like Sahota don’t want to send their patients to.

I’ll make two predictions about Ealing Hospital. It won’t close before I reach retirement age and it will be dealing with A&E cases for as long as it is open. In the meantime Labour is telling lies about Ealing Hospital. The sad thing is that it will probably help them cement their core vote. Why should Labour care about frightening people if it will get it a few extra votes?

What is normal?

Phil — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:09:42 +0000

Council leader Julian Bell says that our rubbish and re-cycling service “is now almost back to normal”. He is kidding himself I fear.

We are now into the fourth week of the new service, it started on 1st April. It seems that the initial, obvious, bags-in-the-street failure of the service has been partially overcome. There were 1,061 complaints of missed collections on Monday 2nd and Tuesday 3rd April.

One of the techniques used by the contractor Enterprise to overcome the initial crisis was to abandon kerbside re-cycling for many residents. As we know from this video the council is using two compartment lorries to collect food waste separately from other dry recyclables that are then all crushed together and sent to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). The latest news is that this facility is in Kent – so much for saving the planet then.

The MRF process which takes residents’ carefully sorted rubbish and then mixes it all up and crushes it vastly reduces the value of the waste stream and causes a much higher proportion to be sent to landfill. Apart from the obvious waste it will be hard to convince residents to spend time sorting re-cycling and providing space in their homes when they see it all go in the back of a lorry, see here. In even worse news it seems that this “temporary” measure will continue until June when the contractor finally has all of its new vehicles delivered.

Yesterday alone in Northfield we had two residents complaining about this.

Mr M of Bramley Road:

The recycling collection today in Bramley and Airedale Roads W5 resulted in the contents of the Green Boxes (whether or not sorted by material type) and the White Sacks all being thrown into the back of a refuse lorry together. This made it a waste of time to separate, clean and store these materials in dry conditions during the previous week.

Mr M of Ealing Park Gardens

Well it appears that nothing has changed as again today all the plastics, newspaper, cardboard and bottles put out by us and our neighbours are just thrown together into the dustcart! You suggest in the earlier message that this is a temporary thing with a new contractor, but it seems to me that it is more likely that the contractors have decided they can get away with a hopeless service which comes in on price by employing fewer people and hiring fewer vehicles to do the job. Then if you lump everything together (literally!) there’s profit to be made. This is obviously not a real green, eco-friendly service but a contract being done on the cheap.
I will be forwarding this to my local councillors to investigate further.

The other major continuing failure of the new contract is the ineffectiveness of street cleansing – more on this later.

I fear that we are heading towards a new normal which is worse than the old one.