Month: Nov 2006

Categories
Ealing and Northfield Health, housing and adult social services

Ealing social services going up

Today the government’s Commission for Social Care Inspection announced that Ealing’s adult social services have been graded as two star, see Ealing Council press release.

This is quite an achievement. They have gone from no stars two years ago to one star last year and two stars this. This service will continue to improve under the new Conservative administration and will never again be allowed to fall into the poor state that it was in two years ago. To give you an idea of how bad things had got two years ago there were only 2 no star councils in the whole country that year and there are none today.

For the whole CSCI report follow link.

Categories
Health, housing and adult social services

Health, Housing and Adult Social Services Panel

Townhall.jpgLast night we decamped to St Bernard’s Hospital, next to Ealing Hospital, which is the headquarters of West London Mental Health Trust (WLMHT). WLMHT meets the mental health needs of people across Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing and Hounslow.

We had another full agenda covering:

  • Nuffield Speech and Language Unit – again!
  • a presentation on health inequalities
  • childrens’ and adolecsents’ mental health services
  • stopping smoking.

The review of the Nuffield now seems to be safely in the hands of Ealing PCT who are starting right at the start and looking at demand for the service across its whole catchment area, basically anyone who can get there in an hour. They will be running a proper consultation process in the new year. None of this will be cheap as they have effectively hired an interim manager for at least 6 months to run the process.

Ruth Barnes gave a presentation on health inequalities and pointed out that health inequalities are Ealing PCT’s number 1 priority. That is fine but it is a bit obvious that those that make all the right choices all their lives, whether it is in education or health, will have better outcomes than those that make crap choices all their lives. The presentation kept referring to the good outcomes in places like Hangar Hill where homes cost about £2 million. If you live in one of these you have probably been making cute decisions all your life and you will probably have a long life. If you follow the inequality logic to its natural conclusion you end up pushing all of your health resources at people who are basket cases. It does seem though that the PCT is responding to this priority in the right way with behaviour changing initiatives – unfortunately these are just the services that they are having to freeze or cut due to Labour’s mismanagement of the health service.

Trevor Farmer gave an overview of the childrens’ and adolecsents’ mental health services these seem to be undergoing reorganisation right now to ensure that people are kept out of the most intensive service provision. This is a good thing in its own right, if it is the right choice for the individuals involved, but I am afraid that a major driver is budget cuts. It looks like the service will lose £200,000 next year so will in effect suffer a 10% budget cut on its £2 million overall revenue budget.

We had a brief discussion of the stopping smoking service. At £250K per annum this may be money well spent. The question I failed to ask was how many people are stopping! Damn!

We have decided to ask the PCT for a breakdown of its funding last year, this year and next so that we can understand budget pressures and their impacts on services.

The meeting closed just before 9.30pm. Time well spent on the whole.

Categories
Health, housing and adult social services

Ealing Hospital chief exec moving on

Fiona Wise.jpgFiona Wise, the Chief Executive of Ealing Hospital NHS Trust, announced at last night’s Ealing Local Strategic Partnership executive board meeting that she was moving on. Apparently she is going to North West London Hospitals NHS Trust.

Clearly she is a brave woman. Ealing is rated as providing good services with good use of resources whilst NWL is rated only as fair with weak use of resources.

Categories
Communications disease Ex-Mayor Livingstone

£27,000 is only small beer to the Mayor

Guess who?The Evening Standard is today reporting on the cost of the Mayor’s silly spat with Trevor Phillips. Apparently TfL had signed up as a sponsor of the Commission for Racial Equality’s conference, starting in London today, to mark 30 years since the Race Relations Act. They have spent £27,000 on this and as a result of the Mayor pulling out of the conference and using it as an opportunity to slag off Phillips TfL have had to withdraw too. The Livingstone pulls out story was covered on the Today programme this morning (see online version).

I guess that if TfL have a £78 million comms budget then the idea of sponsoring such a high profile conference would be attractive. It is pretty hard to spend that much cash on marketing, PR, etc unless you spend some big lumps on pretty marginal rubbish. Some mug comms guy at Barclays has also convinced his bosses that it might be a good way of showing corporate social responsibility. I can’t think of any sound marketing reason for sponsoring a conference like this. It must be pretty hard to argue what audience you are reaching and what messages you might be trying to convey to them. I don’t suppose TfL waste much time on that kind of discipline.

Anyway, you might imagine that TfL was independent enough from the Mayor to be able to continue even if the Mayor pulled out, but no. Livingstone’s ego is so big he thinks that wasting £27K to underline his point is of no consequence.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Happy cardboard day

card_in_box.jpgFrom today we can put out cardboard with our recycling. It is another example of how the new Conservative administration at the council is delivering on environmental pledges.

The council’s instructions on how to use the service are as follows:

Flattened boxes and household cardboard packaging, egg boxes and greeting cards will be accepted. Residents are asked to keep cardboard separate from paper using a carrier bag, to break up large items and remove any tape that may be stuck to the cardboard. Larger cardboard items may be collected by a different vehicle at a different time on the normal collection day.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Ealing Symphony Orchestra, how great?

I am ashamed to admit that after living in Ealing for almost 20 years that I saw my first performance by the Ealing Symphony Orchestra last night. What a fool! They were great. I hadn’t really noticed them before until the Mayor, the lovely Ealing version Diana Pagan, not the horrid London version, had some tickets and I was quickest to say that I would take them. It is a good sized band and their conductor, John Gibbons, was impressive if you ignore the fact that he made his first entrance and then realised that he had left the right score in the car.

Although many will have come across Rodrigo’s Adagio from his Concierto de Aranjuez before, it is one of those Classic FM standards, the rest of the programme was very fresh and well chosen. John Adams’ The Chairman Dances from Nixon in China was a demanding piece, well executed. It was great to hear the Adagio in the context of the whole concerto with a good young guitar soloist, Morgan Szymanski. A piece by Karl Jenkins called Passacaglia was written as a memorial and was a moving, short string piece. Finally, they did Malcolm Arnold’s 1st Symphony. It was perhaps a demanding finale for the audience and it is not the kind of thing I would play for myself but it was an insight into the dark side of a composer who is usually thought of as being a film composer.

Anyway I will definitely be going again to see ESO again. At £10 a performance it is a steal. Although last night’s programme was all 20th century don’t be put off, they do quite a mixture. They are playing again locally in February and May, see programme. Go and see them.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor needs to explain missing cash

I have written to the Mayor today to ask him to explain a discrepancy between what he has told me and his reply to a question by Andrew Pelling, AM. The Mayor wrote to me at the end of October to say that the £10K he had bid for a trip to the Winter Olympics for two at a Variety Club do on 12th September had been made “on behalf of my charity account in the GLA budget”, see previous posting. This does not accord with a reply to a question asked by Andrew Pelling in time for the last Mayor’s Question Time on 15th November. The reply states that only £5,000 was given to the Variety Club.

According to the answer the Mayor’s charity account currently only has a balance of £1,257.37. Could it be that the Mayor cannot pay the second half of this bill out of the charity account because there is not enough money in it? Perhaps if he is going to swank around at big charity balls he might spend his own money. Mr Mayor are you prepared to pay up?

The Mayor promised to offer these tickets to Londoners through a prize draw in the Londoner not so freesheet. Three months have gone by since the ball on 12th September and still no sign of the draw in the December issue of the Londoner.

Categories
Tram

£1 million for tram consultations

Today the Ealing Times is reporting that the Mayor has spent £1 million on tram consultations up until now. I can’t say that I am that surprised. Back in August the Ealing Times itself came up with a figure of £24.5 million when they asked the Mayor how much he had spent on the tram to date (follow link).

I was not surprised to see the Ealing Times making information requests back in August but I am quite surprised to see that this time is is Capital Radio. I never thought of them as being a “serious” news organisation.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Culture vulture?

Dr HuqA vaguely local figure appeared in the Evening Standard yesterday. They reported speculation that Rupa Huq might end up as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow, George Galloway’s seat. Local you ask? Kind of.

The local bit is that she is a governor at Little Ealing Primary School which happens to be the school where I am a governor too. We both started at the same time last autumn.

She stood as a Labour candidate in the Chesham & Amersham seat in May 2005 where she came 3rd with 14% of the vote. I think that counts as a sound kicking. I guess the reason that Rupa, Cambridge-educated, Labour BYT, is a school governor in the Ealing Southall constituency is pretty obvious – see Monday’s posting.

Rupa is an academic, a sociology lecturer at Kingston. Her area seems to be yoof culture. I thought it was a bit seventies being a sociology lecturer but it looks like she is retraining as a media studies lecturer so I guess that is progress.

Rupa has her own blog so make your own mind up.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Another Livingstone power grab

Guess who?The Mayor is trying to make another grab for control of waste, an area that has traditionally been under the control of local authorities and which he sees as being a way to get more power for himself. His press release issued today says:

We need one city-wide body to manage London’s waste sustainably, so we don’t dump it outside the city or burn it. David Miliband, the Secretary of State for the Environment, could resolve these problems by unequivocally backing the creation of a single waste authority under the office of the Mayor of London, which would give us a city-wide body similar to the way we deal with transport.

So the Mayor wants to centralise London’s handling of waste and make it as inefficient and wasteful as Transport for London.

I don’t recommend that you read the 404 page Municipal Waste Management Strategy and certainly don’t ask how much it cost in all its full colour, commissioned artwork glory. I did load the PDF and search for terms such as “savings”, “cheaper” and efficiency savings”. You will not find any references to saving you money in this document. How can you centralise a service on a pan-London basis and not make one of your key objectives slashing costs? You will find talk about sustainability and vision which all equals much greater costs to ordinary Londoners.

The Mayor’s strategy talks of a fifth functional body. Imagine Waste for London in addition to Transport for London. Maybe WfL will have a £78 million comms budget too. Maybe WfL will employ 821 people who earn more than £50K per year. You can assume that WfL would really hurt your pocket.