Month: Sep 2008

Categories
Ealing and Northfield Northfield Ward Forum

MPs on ward forums

The Gazette had a funny piece on Friday. It was our three local Labour MPs sounding off about the new ward forums. It might have been useful to hear their opinions once they had attended one or two of these new meetings themselves. As it was they pretty much spouted the local Labour party line.

The first ward forum ever in the borough happened in Virendra Sharma’s constituency, Northfield being one of the wards that make up the Ealing Southall constituency. It would have been nice to see him there but Sharma only likes to turn up to council meeting once every six months to qualify for his allowance. I reported his last appearance here. Sharma has until 3rd October to attend another council meeting otherwise he will cease to be a councillor.

Ealing North MP, Steve Pound, was quick to find fault:

I’m also a bit suspicious about the expensive glossy leaflets that are being produced with ratepayers’ money and distributed throughout the borough.

In Northfield our “glossy leaflet” was a pretty dry exposition of what the meeting was about, ward boundaries, etc. It is a bit pointless to have a meeting if you don’t invite anyone. The glossy leaflet succeeded in pulling in over a 100 residents to a productive meeting. The Northfield councillors are very grateful to those that came.

No doubt we will shortly be able to see how much of their new communications allowance our three local Labour MPs have spent over the last year. In March 2007 all three local Labour MPs voted in favour of giving themselves a £10,000 per annum communications allowance, see here. Maybe Pound was being ironic?

The points they all make about decisions being made centrally by the cabinet are kind of right but just wrong too. The old area committees effectively just made recommendations to cabinet, that were rarely overturned. I suspect that it will be even harder for cabinet to overturn any spending proposals made by ward forums unless they are technically infeasible.

Categories
Customer Services Ealing and Northfield

Check your gullies

We are going to get a lot of rain down today and tomorrow so it is a good time to check that the gullies in your road work. Gullies are the road drains that have thick metal grates. Gullies are a council responsibility, most other water things are down to Thames Water. Gullies get cleaned out annually on main roads and bi-annually on side roads. Occasionally a gully can get blocked and the only time anyone can spot it is when it rains.

On Sunday I noticed the gully outside my office window was blocked and that a small lake had formed in front of my house after a short downpour on Sunday afternoon. I e-mailed the council as instructed on the council’s gully cleaning webpage. I got an e-mail acknowledgement at the end of Monday with a job number. This lunchtime I noticed a truck from McNicholas doing the work. The guy doing the job was very cheerful and explained what he did. They are busy right now as we have had lots of leaves down early and rain.

Ideally the gullies should be cleaned out within three working days so I might complain that the guys were a day and a half late but I accept that this is their busy time. If a blocked gully is causing “disruptive flooding” they reckon to be there in an hour.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Mayor makes tough decision

Today’s announcement of fare increases across London’s transport systems is perhaps the first really hard decision our new mayor has had to make.

It is a job well done.

He has protected the vulnerable but faced the reality of financing Crossrail and dealing with the previous mayor’s use of the “Fares Fair” weapon.

Those on income support will get half price fares without being dependent on a South American dictator. Older people and the disabled will be able to use their Freedom Passes 24 hours a day.

At the end of October, in the run up to the election, the old mayor tried to kid us with his unaffordable and disingenuous freeze.

The old mayor used his £3 million a year Londoner not-so-freesheet three times to trumpet his 10p off bus fares swizz. None of the Mayor’s outpourings mention that two years ago off peak Oyster bus fares were 80p, they went up to £1 the next year and this year they are 90p. So the old off peak fares are 12.5% higher than they were even after this supposed cut. The old mayor’s own figures demonstrated that he was lying about the affordability of 10p fare cut.

It is straightforward to demonstrate Livingstone’s wishful thinking and dissimulation. In February last year Livingstone wrote to me to say that bus subsidies would be £463 million in 2006/7 and £528 million in 2007/8. The outcome, as reported in TfL’s Draft Annual Report and Accounts, was £617 million in 2006/7 and £659 million in 2007/8. That’s £285 million lost in just two years.

This is the headline story in today’s Evening Standard. The mayor has contributed a piece defending himself and the paper has come out in favour of the changes.

Categories
Customer Services

Mixed picture at Ealing’s Customer Services

I made another trip to Customer Services this morning to see how we are doing. It was the 1st of the month and it was a Monday, combine that with the fact that everyone has just got back from their holidays and you might expect the place to be busy – you would be right.

At first glance it looked like mayhem. There were 20-odd people waiting to get a ticket from the meeters and greeters. There were over 30 waiting for the cashiers. The Parking Services queue was 29 and the wait was almost 2 hours.

My own experience was good. I arrived at 11:37 and I only had to wait four minutes to talk to one of the meet and greet staff. They told me about the wait for Parking Services and at that point most people would give up and try another day.

I did a bit of further research on the cashiers’ queue. Most of the people were paying their Council Tax on a monthly basis with their paying in books. They do have lots of different paying in options so I am perhaps not too worried about this group. If they want to come in on the first of the month every month then it is up to them. There were three staff on and they worked through the queue pretty fast from what I could see.

The Parking Services queue was totally unaceptable. On making enquiries I found out that only 3 out of 5 of the Parking Services workstations were manned. I will be chasing this one up.

On the positive side the meeters and greeters and security staff all seemed to be good natured and handled themselves well on what must have been a stressful day.

Since I last wrote a piece on Customer Services the front door has been fixed and the littering problem has been solved. Since then the door seems to have broken again. There is still lots of sticky tape messing it up. More nagging required.

I would be very interested to hear your Ealing council customer service stories – good or bad.