Month: Nov 2007

Tonight the Standard’s Ross Lydall reports that the Grand Depart staged in London for the Tour de France only cost TfL £3.8 million and generated £123 million in benefits. This is the kind of economics that the Mayor and his bodies love. Just like the Mayor’s “6 jobs will pay the £740K India bill” claim it is utter rubbish. TfL’s press release is here but there are no links to the report they mention – probably because the details of the report would demolish the press release. Apparently “An executive summary of the report is available to media on request”.

TfL are being really evil about releasing details of this spending. I asked twice by e-mail about the advertising spend and got an answer, £3 million, after a six week wait. Since then I have asked TfL commissioner, Peter Hendy, twice for a full breakdown of the whole thing – I wrote again today. Hendy shows his contempt for accountability by ignoring letters written on 2nd August and 16th October.

The real number is much more like £10 million but TfL don’t want to discuss that.

The Mayor is clearly pleased that Sir Ian Blair got through his vote of no confidence at the MPA yesterday.

The Mayor cites this article by Bill Bratton, Chief of Police at the Los Angeles Police Department, in the Telegraph in support of his case.

It is notable that the Metropolitan Police Federation has nothing to say on Blair. Nothing negative but nothing positive either.

Conservative Mayoral Boris Johnson candidate seems to have his finger on the pulse on this issue:

This vote was a foregone conclusion but Londoners still think it is outrageous that an innocent man was gunned to death and nobody in the Met has paid the price for it or explained how events such as this will not be repeated in the future. Sir Ian Blair should take a leaf out of the book of Paul Gray who resigned over the spectacular cock-up at HMRC. When an institution is so gravely at fault, the boss must pay the price.

Although both the Mayor and Blair can claim credit for rolling out the Safer Neighbourhood Teams there is precious little evidence that they have had any effect in relation to reforming the core of the Met. The SNTs are a rather striking add-on but the rump of the Met remains untouched. As well as having the wrong instincts Blair has failed to reform the Met. The SNTs actually illustrate this. In other forces PCSOs are allowed to arrest. The Met’s unionised labour seem to inhibit it from giving the PCSOs a bigger role.

At the start of November I pointed out that penalty charges were the Congestion Charge’s Achilles’ heel. Figures taken from a question from LibDem AM Sally Hamwee showed that last year £95.0 million out of the CC’s total income of £252.4 million was derived from penalty charges. This figure is actually more than the total net profit raised from the scheme of £89.1 million. An entrepreneur called Matthew McClusky has come up with a gizmo he calls the KenBuster which will automatically pay the CC when a driver crosses the zone boundary.

Any Londoner knows that the CC scheme has been set up to ensure that people fall foul of it and have to pay fines. One slip and you get a fine. It would have been easy for TfL to set up up a direct debit arrangement that simply billed people when they entered the zone – after all TfL knows when that happens and knows who you are from your number plate. But no. They wanted to make it hard to use the Congestion Charge so you have to remember to pay. This device only costs £200 which is the same as two fines.

The CC is toast. Add this development to the Mayor’s dumb idea of letting small cars travel for free and soon the zone will be getting even more congested and losing money. Stay in India Livingstone, please.

You may have heard radio and TV coverage over the weekend of a survey from an outfit called the London Policy Institute. They asked the YouGov polling organisation to quiz a thousand plus Londoners on what they thought the issues will be in next year’s Mayoral election, see their press release.

There were three interesting findings.

Firstly, it looks like Londoners will decide on the issues. The poll said 39% stated that they will vote for the candidate who provides the best policies for London ahead of the personal qualities of the candidates (20%) or which party they supported (19%). This does not surprise me. Both leading candidates are big characters who are well known. Love ’em or hate ’em people know who they are. They will be straining to hear what they will actually do. Livingstone can slag off Boris’ journalistic past and call him a buffoon whilst Boris can highlight the appalling waste at City Hall and the Mayor’s tendency to puff himself but people know this stuff already. Instead they will be asking “where is the beef?”.

Secondly, the pecking order of people’s concerns was striking. When asked what was important to people when voting in next year’s mayoral elections:

82% cited public transport provision
80% health provision
79% policing
78% levels of council tax
74% protection from terrorism
74% environment
68% immigration
64% availability of affordable housing
64% economic sustainability
58% education provision
58% planning policy
49% arts and culture

At the other end of the scale two areas were identified as not being significant:

51% cited preparation for the 2012 Olympics
44% cited congestion charging

Finally, there is little appetite for the Mayor to have more power. 41% of Londoners stated that the Mayor of London should have less power, 16% think the Mayor of London should have more power and 27% said they are happy with the status quo.

While Livingstone is off on his week long India beano the Standard is laying into him at home.

They report how the Metronet bust up is going to lead to a lot less investment in the Tube over the next few years.

Then they talk about how the India trip is costing us £740K. The economically challenged Mayor said soon after arriving that the trip would be paid for if just 6 people got new jobs as a result. This is just a fantasy and illustrated why Livingstone is so bad with money. He simply does not understand it.

On the comment pages Andrew Gilligan points out how gratuitously the Mayor uses his website, paid for by us, to hurl insults to all and sundry.

Finally, Gilligan does a two page feature critiquing the Met’s performance and the Mayor’s rather exaggerated claims about it (not online).

Yesterday the Mayor leapt on one line in a page 4 article in the Evening Standard. They said:

“… an Evening Standard survey, carried out by YouGov, showed that 44 per cent of Londoners support Sir Ian. Just over one third think he should go.”

According to the Mayor 37% think he should go so a net approval rating of +7%. Pretty weak. Interestingly 81% of Londoners have an opinion so it is a pretty high profile issue still in the run up to the MPA meeting on Thursday at which Blair will again face calls to resign.

Today in the Telegraph Brian Paddick, who used to be one of Blair’s assistant commissioners and who has just been selected to run for the LibDems as London Mayor, really puts the boot into Blair. I have reproduced some the key section of the article below:

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is in the line of fire now. Mr Paddick delivered a devastating verdict on his former boss. “His position is unsustainable, I think he should resign,” he said. “I was removed from my job when the ‘kiss and tell’ happened and the reason I was given was that I, rather than the policing of Lambeth, had become the story. Ian Blair has become the story. London would be safer with someone else in charge.”

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has, this former senior policeman believes, lost the confidence of the rank and file. “Ken Livingstone says police officers regularly come up to him and say ‘give our regards to Sir Ian’ – well either he is taking one of those substances we were talking about earlier or he doesn’t appreciate sarcasm,” he said.

Mr Paddick fell out with Sir Ian over the handling of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Mr Paddick said he was told within hours that the police had killed the wrong man – but Sir Ian maintains that he did not know for another 24 hours. When we asked whether he believed that the commissioner did in fact know earlier, he replied: “Libel laws prevent me from answering that question.”

He did say, however, that he was convinced that a story suggesting that the suspects in the Stephen Lawrence case could be charged again, which was published on the day that a critical report was coming out last week, was deliberately planted to divert attention.

The problem, according to Mr Paddick, is that Sir Ian has politicised the Met. “When Labour were the only party who wanted ID cards, Ian Blair came out in support of ID cards. When Labour wanted to extend the 90 days detention he sent one of the assistant commissioners into the House of Commons to persuade rebel Labour MPs to vote with the Government. When during the last general election the threat assessment for Tony Blair was that he should travel around in an armour proofed police Range Rover, Number 10 phoned the commissioner’s office and said we want ‘Vote Labour’ on the side of the police car, and Ian Blair did it. The decisions Ian Blair has made, the things that Ian Blair has said, have been very helpful to Labour. He has allowed himself to be seen as too aligned with Labour.”

Mr Paddick claims that Sir Ian forced him to put his name to a press release supporting Government proposals to allow terrorist suspects to be detained for 90 days without trial – even though he had made clear that he opposed the plan. “His office said ‘you are a deputy assistant commissioner in the metropolitan police and as such you will support 90 days’. It felt as if I had a gun to my head,” he said.

The political independence of the Met is, in his view, being compromised. “Police officers want the public to be proud of them, if there’s a perception that their chief is aligned to a political party that undermines rank and file officers.”

Any of the 44% approvers reading this piece are likely to think again.