The Mayor produced a press release today confirming the rise in the precept for next year. In over 500 words his press people cannot actually bear to admit that the rise will be 13.3% at a time when inflation is only 2%. They try to make it sound like a small rise by talking in terms of 65p per week. All these 65ps add up though. The Mayor’s total spending next year will be £3 billion.
Month: Feb 2006
Labour Council Leader, Leonora Thomson, proposes to spend £457,000 next year on Around Ealing telling us how great the Council is. Since it went monthly in January, by happy coincidence the run up to local elections in May, the two last issues have carried prominent articles penned by Thomson lauding the Council’s achievements in getting a 3 star rating from the Audit Commission.
The Audit Commission is the Government’s standards setting body and it is this Labour council’s fixation with pleasing central government and the Audit Commission rather than pleasing its residents that led to last year’s expensive fiasco in the courts that cost us £350,000. The Council would do well to stop telling us about the Audit Commission’s CPA and to focus on service delivery. But as Thomson raises the issue let us look at it in more detail.
The Council’s press release on the subject does not link to the actual scorecard produced by the Audit Commission. The reason for this is that their assessment is a lot more mixed than the Council would like us to be aware of. Some of the quotes that did not make it into the Council’s press release were: “some performance indicators do not compare well with other councils nationally” and “the Council needs to develop a more overarching value for money culture”.
It is worth pointing out that 68% of councils achieved 3 or 4 stars so this is very much a prizes for all system. You have to be really quite crap to be marked down by this new system.
The scorecard comprises 10 different measures that are essentially on a four point scale from Excellent, Good, Adequate to Poor.
The main point here is that whilst Ealing is only improving adequately over 70% of councils assessed had a “Direction of Travel” that was improving strongly or improving well. More importantly maybe for Ealing residents three main front line service functions: environment, housing and adult social care, and the Council’s overall ability to manage its finances are merely adequate. In none of the 10 areas is the council excellent.
So although Thomson is wasting our time and money telling us how great the Council is she is in fact presiding over mediocrity, as warranted by the Audit Commission.
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Coucil tax rises take shape
The Evening Standard today reports that the London Mayor will be increasing his charge on us by 13.3% in April. For me this means that the Mayor’s charge will be £481.02 next year. In 1999/2000, the year before the Mayor came into being, I was charged £129.07 for the Met and £45.95 for the London Fire Brigade. So the Mayor’s charge has gone up 2.75 times in seven years. Does this mean 2.75 times more police? No.
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Nappies – let’s not go there
The Independent today picked up on a story being pushed by the Local Government Association. They are suggesting that more councils copy Three Rivers District Council in Hertfordshire and give parents £80 towards laundering reusable nappies rather than filling up landfill with disposables. All sounds very nice in theory; £80 is not huge amounts of cash to give to young parents and landfill costs will be reduced. In practice it sounds like an extra activity that councils do not need, it sounds like more forms to fill in, more officers to process the forms, etc. Leave it!
I am relieved to find that this brilliant suggestion comes from the Labour councillor from Dudley who leads the LGA Environment Board.
I naively thought that I might hand deliver a letter to Borough Commander, Collette Paul, this afternoon. I am keen to chase her up and find out what is happening to these Safer Neighbourhood teams that are being widely advertised but don’t seem to be here yet. There was another full page in last week’s Gazette.
How silly of me! There is no letterbox at the Police station. No opportunity to communicate with the Police there. Clearly they think that broadcasting ads is all they need to do to keep us sweet. I thought about waiting to hand the letter in to the desk officer. There was already a queue of six in front of me at 13:45pm today. I did not fancy waiting for an hour or so in the very unpleasant waiting area before being allowed behind the security doors. I went off to the Post Office and put a stamp on the envelope – much quicker. Clearly Commander Paul would rather keep her parking place in front of the station rather then using the space for a reception suite that allows more than one desk officer at a time to deal with the public.
The Evening Standard is keeping up its campaigning on rail station safety. It talks about a 38% rise in violent assaults at stations over the last five years. Ealing Broadway is listed in the Worst 20 mainline stations. Luckily it is only 18th with 60 violent crimes last year. Still that is 60 of our neighbours with their heads kicked in.
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Dirty Ealing
This morning the Gazette covered the full council meeting on Tuesday and its discussion of how dirty Ealing is. Most of the discussion was driven by Audit Commission figures and in particular Best Value Performance Indicators (or BVPIs in the jargon – central government targets to you and me).
In 2003/4 Ealing was the dirtiest borough in London. In spite of being the 9th highest spender at £27.41 per head it had the worst BVPI 199 (Relevant land with significant/heavy littering) score. This figure is easy to pull out from the performance indicators link on the Audit Commission’s home page.
More recent data for 2004/5 is harder to find, see spreadsheet published on 16th January. This shows that Ealing was 4/5th equal worst on BVPI 199 last year. You might call this improvement but you would not call it Queen of the Suburbs.
See also Ealing Times story.
The first thing that struck me reading the Ealing & Acton Gazette this morning was that the Mayor must have shares in it. Three full page ads from the Mayor’s empire:
- Hands up if you want lower emissions, London’s new transport tax being promoted by TfL. There is a consultation running until 24th April. Go to site and tell them that new lorries will reduce emissions anyway over time. The scheme will cost us £78 million
- Spot the difference, another Safer Neighbourhoods ad from the Met that ignores that Ealing only has 8 out of 23 teams
- Great family discounts, TfL trying to persuade us all to use Oyster cards
He likes to spend the money twice over as he already spends £3 million a year telling us all the same stuff in the Londoner.
I notice this evening that the Ealing page of the Safer Neighbourhoods portion of the Met website has bee updated. Instead of showing that there are only 8 teams in place there is now a list of the 23 wards in Ealing. Unfortunately 15 out of 23 wards are “Team not yet in place”. I guess you might call this progress. At least they are showing intent. Only 10 weeks to go before they have to be in place to meet Ken’s commitment.
In a discussion of wealth redistribution Simon Hughes on Question Time tonight passionately told us how people in his constituency work on the minimum wage for companies that give people £100,000 bonuses and £1 million pay offs. Sounds like Ealing Council to me.
Phil Taylor 