Follow this link to see 18 Doughty Street’s little movie about the Mayor.
It is meant to be a fun, attack ad style clip. It makes some telling points though about the company the Mayor keeps. I was pleased to see them take up my line (which they picked up from Victoria Borwick/CPS which they picked up from the Standard who were quoting me) about the Mayor spending £100 million to promote himself.
I am listening to the final budget debate and waiting for someone to ask the most obvious question. How can we sustain the drawing down of reserves at the rate of £436.9 million per annum?
Follow this link and go to the last page.
The GLA bodies are expected to draw down reserves next year as follows:
To give some context this sum is about the same as the LFEPA and LDA budgets and three times the GLA budget.
Elizabeth Howlett, as a member of the MPA, did ask whether it was prudent to draw down their reserves to the tune of £4.0 million but in all the hurly burly of talking about bussing young people around the Mayor has managed to avoid talking about this massive hole.
In reponse to a question from Richard Barnes, one of the Tory assembly members, about which inflation rate he uses when he makes promises about the future the Mayor said:
whichever is the most favourable at the time.
It all very well being a cheeky chappie but this is taking the mickey.
Presenting his budget just now the London Mayor highlighted how the appalling ten year record of the current Labour government in caring for children had been shown up by Unicef’s report today.
The Mayor spent most of his short speech excoriating the Conservative group for their calling into question the Mayor’s spending of £55 million on young persons’ concessions.
Obviously he did not mention the actual expenditure. He simply talked about the 385,000 young people that receive the concession. In trying to shame the Tories he theatrically listed the number of young people affected in each Tory constituency in turn. In doing so he highlighted the fact that 9 out of 14 GLA geographic constituencies are Tory held as against only 5 Labour ones. 2 Labour members are elected by PR as are the 2 Greens, 5 LibDems and the 2 One London ones making a total of 25 GLA members. Under the GLA Act it takes 2/3 of Assembly members to over-turn the budget. As a result the Mayor has bought the 2 Green members with £47 million of green bungs so that 7 Labour members and 2 Greens can defy the other 16 Assembly members to push through a minority budget that will see the Mayor’s share of council taxes going up by 5.3%.
Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing got top billing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. The flagship 8:10am interview saw Transport Minister Douglas Alexander well and truly wriggling, follow link. I had a couple of comments on my blog today suggesting the site had been closed down at this time but I am quite prepared to believe that it has just been overwhlemed by volumes. The petition hit the million mark around 10am on Saturday and had put on another 100,000 by early this morning. During the course of the morning another 50,000 have signed up.
Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing reads as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.
Get clicking and signing if you want to avoid paying another tax and having your movements traced by the state.
This morning the council has announced the initial results from the massive consultation on the future of our waste collection services, see press release. It seems that the results from the massive waste consultation were clear in some areas but not in others. Altogether 10,500 people responded.
The whole of Ealing, the Elthorne ward south of the railway tracks and Southfield ward have clearly opted to keep black sacks. The picture is less clear in the rest of the borough. As a result a new, simpler consultation is going out to the rest of the borough this week. It was clear that the two wheelie bin and fortnightly collection options were not popular overall so second time around it will be a straight choice between bin bags and one wheelie bin.
The council has heard the clear message that plastic recycling is popular and this will be added to the recycling service this year.
Just before 9am today the No 10 road pricing petition stood at 996,192. Towards the end of January it looked like the petition was running out of steam and would top out at the 600,000 mark. Since then it has got it has got its legs back.
The Telegraph and its motoring correspondent, David Millward, have been pushing the issue, although confusingly they are running their own petition alongside Peter Roberts’ original petition on the No 10 petitions site. Today they are covering the million milestone on their front page, yesterday it was the bailiffs angle, on Thursday it was the impact of devolution on road pricing and on Tuesday they looked at the security and integrity of the petition itself – it is much more robust than a paper one!
There is even a video interview of Peter Roberts, the guy who started the thing off. Well done Peter.
Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing reads as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.
Get clicking and signing if you want to avoid paying another tax and having your movements traced by the state.
On Monday the new Conservative association for Ealing Central and Acton had a knees up at Pitzhanger Manor. It was all a bit posh with champagne and black tie but was good fun all the same. Ben Moore-Bridger from Ealing Times covered the event and wrote a nice piece about it. The new candidate, Angie Bray, came across really well and everyone enjoyed Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s speech to the troops.
The setting was wonderful – the Georgian Eating Room at Pitzhanger Manor. The picture left is a bit small and taken with a fish eye lens (I nicked it from the Ealing council site). The picture does not convey how pretty the room is. It manages to be both grand but welcoming at the same time.
A great place for a party. Anyone can hire it. Follow link for more info.
The Mayor has just released a press release quoting my blog and using tiny little snippets in the hope that lazy journalists will pick up what he is saying without any research.
The Mayor says:
Cllr Phil Taylor, prominent Ealing Councillor and deputy chair of Ealing’s powerful Finance and Performance Committee, argued on his website that the Freedom Pass should be “re-targeted” away from most pensioners to the “very old”.
Apart from the fact that we don’t have such a committee in Ealing and I am in fact the deputy portfolio holder for Finance and Performance (an honorary title that allows me to carry the portfolio holder’s bag) the Mayor is right. As a ward councillor I meet many old people marooned in their homes unable to leave. Freedom Passes are no use to them, they can’t even get out of their front doors, let alone onto buses. It is very poor targeting of limited resources to spend £213 million on over a million people, many of whom really don’t need this concession. It would make much more sense for the boroughs to free some of this cash up to spend on the really old who are amongst the most disadvantaged in society.
The Mayor is not protecting the old and disabled he is protecting his power. It is easy for the Mayor to posture in this area but the boroughs have real responsibilities for the care of the old and disabled. The Mayor is essentially saying he knows best in spite of having no responsibility for care, unlike the boroughs. Freedom Passes may bolster TfL’s budget but they are not necessarily the best way to help these groups.
The Mayor says:
Cllr Taylor went on to question the benefits of encouraging more Londoners to use public transport, calling it “quite mad.”
The Mayor is being typically mendacious. I said:
The other thing the Mayor needs to accept that this scheme covers over one million people. It is not green Mr Mayor to give a million people free travel. In fact it is quite mad from an environmental point of view.
If the Mayor is going to enter into the green debate he needs to be consistent and free travel is stupid from a green point of view. Walking and cycling should be free obviously, public transport needs to be costly to deter travel, car travel needs to be more expensive and we need stupid taxes like the Mayor’s over-large and fast-increasing precept to go away.
The Mayor says:
He adds: “There are few people who are in work or on good pensions who would strongly argue that they should be the recipients of this largesse.” 43,000 Ealing residents are beneficiaries of the Freedom Pass.
Just to be clear I was trying to say that of those people who are entitled to Freedom Passes there are a large number who are in work or on good pensions who would accept that they should not be a priority for public spending compared to older pensioners without means.
I will leave Roger Evans to speak for himself.
To see the original piece follow this link.
In a press release today Ealing Council announced that it will spend an extra £1.5 million on street cleaning next year. The street cleaning budget this year (2006/07) is just over £2.035 million. The extra spending of £1.528 million will take this budget up to £3.563 million next year.
As a result many more streets will be cleaned every day instead of twice a week. Other streets will be upgraded from being cleaned once to twice weekly. Streets around rail and Tube stations will be cleaned daily in the morning and again in the afternoon, so they will be tidier when commuters arrive home.
Council Leader Jason Stacey said:
Once the new arrangements are up and running, residents should be able to see the difference, especially in our town centres and around our key community areas.
I am pleased to be able to announce this significant additional investment as it will mean more parts of the borough will get cleaned more regularly.
Residents have told us they want cleaner streets and that is why it is one of this administration’s three key priorities.
Phil Taylor 