Richard Barnes, the London Assembly Member for Ealing and Hillingdon, was interviewed on the Anyone But Ken blog today.
Richard has put his name forward as a candidate to be the Conservative’s candidate for London Mayor. Understandably he has been relatively low key about this due to the extension of the selection process.
ConservativeHome picked up on my TfL story at 7pm tonight having got it from the GLA Assembly Members who seem quite happy to comment on it without acknowledging where it came from.
Richard Barnes, our local AM for Ealing and Hillingdon, put out a statement on this stuff today which is where CH got it from. He got it from me (see previous post)
Today I got a response from the Met regarding their advertising spending and the role that the Londoner plays in it. I am grateful to Des Stout in public affairs for laying the picture out so clearly.
It appears that the Met spent £2.1 million overall of which £250K was given to the Mayor for the Londoner.
Of this relatively small budget it is worrying to see that almost a quarter was devoted to a fairly blatantly political campaign. In January the London Mayor announced an acceleration of the Safer Neighbourhoods programme to coincide with the pan-London local election in May. The Met spent £485K in February and March to promote this commitment (which was unmet in many areas including Northfield). Every Labour campaign leaflet I saw referred to these teams. What is more the figure is considerably more than the £300K figure quoted to me Commander Hitchcock over a month after I asked him for it back in early February.
Since I found out that the Mayor paid for the Londoner by taxing the “GLA family” (see previous post) I have been chasing the poor old family to explain why this spending is not prominently explained in their own annual reports. I have had the first of three responses from TfL today.
I challenged them to explain their spending on advertising and how giving £1.5 million to the Mayor for the Londoner fitted into that. In their last set of published figures TfL said that they only spent £5.2 million on publicity. Their letter says that the real figure is £78 million. It appears that their voluntary declaration of publicity spending is designed to deceive rather than to inform.
I have passed the correspondence on to Richard Barnes, the Assembly Member for Ealing and Hillingdon.
ECT, our street cleaning contractor in Ealing, have today kindly sent me a summary of their assessments in Northfield since the start of November last year until yesterday.
On the face of it everything seems rosy. They have done around 900 assessments. About 1/3 are grade A and most of the rest are grade B with a small minority of assessments worse than grade B. When a street is assessed as being worse than grade B it gets special priority.
These grades were set by the Environmental Protection Act 1990. You can see photos of what they mean in practice at the DEFRA site.
I do think that there is some kidology going on here. The grades are very demanding. If this report said 1/3 of streets were grade B and 2/3 were worse we might think that this was a fair assessment.
Ealing council’s Director of Street Environment, Joe Tavernier, says: “Each street in the borough, and therefore every street in Northfield Ward, is scheduled to be cleaned at least once a week. The busiest thoroughfares in the borough are actually scheduled to be cleaned several times a day. Street cleansing frequency therefore varies from several times a day to, at least, once a week. In all instances the output standard is defined as the Environmental Protection Act 1990 (EPA) grade A. This translates as free from litter.”
He may have convinced himself but he has not convinced me.
I have requested that ECT takes me out when they do their assessments so that I can get a feel for whether they are being objective.
<img id="image229" height=200 align="left" alt="LSCP Ad.jpg" src="https://philtaylor.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/LSCP%20Ad.jpg" Back in March I blogged about the London Safety Camera Partnership. I was chasing them to find out how much they were spending on their then current advertising campaign that was trying to convince young males that speeding would have consequences, eg losing your licence, costing you money, losing your job. They spent £800K on the campaign. In responding to my request for information they let on that they were actually doing research to find out the effectiveness of this spend. A suitable case for follow up I thought.
It took me three e-mails and a phone call and a further e-mail to get a response. I wrote on 20th June, 4th July, and 24th July and finally I called them on 7th August. They have sent me a copy of the research today. The date on the report was 23rd May so it was not as if it wasn’t in their hands. The conclusion of the report was:
“Attitudes towards speeding, speed cameras and the consequences of speeding have not changed but we would not expect to see a change this quickly.”
In other words if you spend £800K on ads you will have no effect. Maybe if you spend many millions over a long period you will!
No wonder it took 7 weeks for them to fess up.
This being councillor downtime, with a blissful let up in the deluge of paper coming through my letterbox, it is an opportunity to catch up with some of the issues on my To Do list.
Back in June your three Northfield councillors did a tour with our excellent Safer Neighbourhood Sergeant (see previous post). As we walked past South Ealing tube he mentioned that one of his issues is cab drivers urinating in the area. Although there is one of those automated public loos opposite the tube station it is very rarely in working order. The real problem though is London Underground. Apparently their rental contract with the minicab company does not allow even fulltime office staff to use the station’s staff loos, let alone the minicab drivers.
This is just wrong. The relevant legislation is the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992. Regulation 20, Sanitary conveniences, states: “Suitable and sufficient sanitary conveniences shall be provided at readily accessible places.” LUL may well say that this is the minicab company’s obligation not LUL’s. In that case it should board up these premises as no business could reasonably be expected to fulfil this obligation without access to the station’s loos. LUL cannot have it both ways, ie income from rental but no obligation to provide loos.
There is no reason why the drivers should not be able to use the loos. TfL licences these people and they judge them safe enough to drive young women home late at night. Surely they are safe enough to be able to use the staff loos at tube stations?
The London Mayor can be PC and inclusive when he is making other people jump through hoops but not when it appears that LUL staff are standing in the way of joined up public transport, reducing public nuisance and providing decent working conditions to minicab drivers.
I have written to Tim O’Toole, Managing Director, London Underground Limited, today to get his response to this issue.
Jeremy Clarkson has some sensible things (and some not) to say about being London Mayor in the Sunday Times today.
His platform is:
Sounds good to me.
The Conservatives delayed their London mayor selection process yesterday and put up an announcement on their website. I failed to find it the first couple of times I looked because it was listed way down the page under “Other news”. The Evening Standard and others are reporting that the delay will be six months but the announcement does not include a figure.
I am disappointed by the delay and the way it was announced at the last minute. Apparently journalists heard about it before the candidates. The annoucement on the website seems to be incomplete as it does not mention the length of the delay and is not featured very prominently. Good communications is as much about handling bad news as it is about getting out good news and pursuing your own agenda. CCHQ needs to make sure that ordinary London Tories are as much “in the loop” as the press. The website is a tool that the allows the party to create a level information playing field. It is ordinary Tories that will elect a candidate not the village people at CCHQ and in the lobby.
Today the passport people asked me for some more photos. I sent off for a new passport last week and this week they write to say that my photos are too small – apparently my face was a couple of millimetres too short on the photos. I took them in a photobooth at Hammersmith Tube station branded “Photo-me at the Underground” so I expect lots of people have had their photos returned or maybe I just have a freakishly small head?
At least I should be grateful that I got away with paying only £51 for this crap service. Since 1st April this year the passport wallies have been known as the Identity and Passport Service. They are a self-funding agency so they don’t cost the taxpayer much only you have no choice about buying from them. This means they make you use a premium rate 0870 number to call them. It also means they are free to increase their charges as much as they like.
In order to hide the costs of driving through identity cards that no-one wants they are going to keep on ramping up the cost of passports. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, the cost of a standard passport was only £18. From 5th October a standard ten-year British passport will cost £66, up from the current £51 or a 29% rise. But the last rise was only in December 2005, when fees went up from £42. It gives a £24 rise, or 57%, in less than a year.
Phil Taylor 
