Author: Phil

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Mayor Johnson

Western Extension to go

Today the Mayor has announced the scrapping of the Western Extension of the Congestion Charging scheme. I am pleased to see the Mayor honour his manifesto commitment:

I will do what Ken Livingstone did not, and listen to Londoners on the Western extension. The Western extension was introduced despite the overwhelming opposition of local residents and I think that was wrong. I will consult the residents in the zone and on the border on whether we should keep the Western extension, and whatever the result I will abide by it.

Labour and the Greens really don’t like it, see their comments below. Knowing a few people who live in K&C and who greatly enjoy being able to commute into the City at a 90% discount their arguments simply don’t stack up. They talk about £70 million in income being lost. This is an exaggeration. If you look at page 122 of TfL’s Annual Report and Accounts you will see that the entire scheme had a net income of only £137.0 million last year. The idea that fully half of it will be lost by the loss of the Western Extension is ludicrous as are the rest of their claims.

Shawcross and Jones’ brand of nannying disdain of the democratic process is insulting and shows just how detached progressive types have become from the lives and aspirations of real people. The Mayor feels obliged to honour his manifesto commitment and still Shawcross and Jones insist that they know best and are prepared to tell porkies to make their case. Even the LibDems, notionally part of the progressive alliance but always keeping an eye to their own electoral advantage, have applauded the Mayor’s decision.

Continue reading “Western Extension to go”
Categories
Parking Services

Yellow boxes at T-junctions

Today I issued the following statement on yellow box junctions:

On behalf of the Council I would like to say sorry and offer our unreserved apologies.

We will be refunding everyone ticketed at the affected yellow box junctions since 20 June.

The decision was made after an email sent by the Department for Transport on 20 June, was brought to my attention today.

At the beginning of November we immediately suspended the junctions following advice from the Department for Transport. I believed that this was the first time the Council had been given this advice or the decision to stop enforcing them would have taken in June.

I am furious that this email was never brought to my attention and I have ordered an immediate investigation on how this could have happened.

The Council is putting in place arrangements to refund the money.

The six box junctions affected are double width yellow boxes at T-Junctions:

– South Road junction St Joseph’s Drive, Southall

– South Road junction Cambridge Road, Southall

– South Road junction Hamilton Road, Southall

– High Street junction Avenue Road, Southall

– Uxbridge Road junction Lower Boston Road, Hanwell

– The Broadway junction The Mall, Ealing

The local papers have taken up the story here and here.

I will not be commenting further until I have seen the results of the investigation that I initiated today.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Help one of our parks

Boris Johnson launched his ‘Help a London Park’ scheme today. Londoners will be able to vote to decide which ones will get a £400,000 cash boost. London councils have nominated almost 100 green spaces in their areas that could do with a facelift and 47 have now been shortlisted. Two Ealing parks made the short list: Brent River Park and Southall Manor House Grounds.

I am in a quandary as to how to vote myself and it would probably be unwise of me to come down on one side or the other. I have visited both sites and like many of our open spaces they would both benefit from some help. You may think that the vote is a bit of a gimmick on the part of the Mayor but I think we can also agree that if we are apathetic there are other boroughs that will get the cash for their parks so, as Al Capone said: “Vote early and vote often”. Follow one of the links above to vote.

Categories
National politics

First stealth tax rise happened at 6pm

The first tax rise to pay for Brown’s binge has already occured. According to the Pre-Budget Report:

Maintaining high levels of tax on tobacco helps to reduce overall tobacco consumption. Tobacco duties will, therefore, be increased from 6pm on 24 November to ensure that the overall level of taxation on tobacco remains broadly unchanged following the reduction in VAT to 15 per cent. The increase in duty will be maintained when the VAT rate is returned to 17.5 per cent in January 2010.

So smokers will have to pay extra this week for their fags then the fall in VAT will come into force on 1st December to take the price down again to where it is today. Finally, on 1st January 2010 the 2.5% on VAT goes back on and the duty rise stays in place.

Categories
National politics

Second stealth tax rise set for 1st December

At the same time that the VAT cut of 2.5% comes into force on 1st December Gordon Brown will swipe it away again from drinkers increasing alcohol duty to compensate. When the VAT saving comes off again at the end of 2009 the duty rise stays in place. According to the Pre-Budget Report:

The Government will increase the overall duty on alcohol from 1 December so that the total VAT and duty remain broadly unchanged following the reduction in VAT to 15 per cent. The increase in duty will be maintained when the VAT rate is returned to 17.5 per cent in January 2010.

If you look at table 1.2 on page 10 you will see that the total VAT saving of £12,400 billion between 1st December and the of March 2010 is paid for in large part by extra taxes on smokers and drinkers that they have already started paying. Some £3.3 billion (or 27% of the total VAT saving) will be paid for by smokers and drinkers. Funny how this line didn’t get in Darling’s speech.

Categories
National politics

Keep your eyes peeled

We will see lots of smoke and mirrors this afternoon in the pre-budget report.

We have already heard about the VAT yo-yo and we can expect to see the Prime Minister (for he is still the Chancellor in all but name) pushing more people into state dependence by taking too much tax off them and then asking them to reclaim it through his pernicious tax credit system. Just so you know the claim forms are 12 pages long with a 36 page how to guide to help you fill it in. With tax credits you need to constantly update the state on your circumstances so that they give you the right portion of your own money back.

Continue reading “Keep your eyes peeled”
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Ealing and Northfield

Booby Bell

The leader of the Labour opposition group on the council, Cllr Julian Bell, is a prize booby. He likes to make a show of himself at least three times a week. One of his finer moments this week were his quotes in the Ealing Times:

I would say to the council no more excuses, we need to get this sorted out.

They have said they are using a new computer system and new reporting measures as excuses to why they have been slow in the past, but it’s time to stop.

As you can see from the example of St Albans, the best performing authority, if there is a real will to turn things round you can do it.

He was responding to a typically statistically challenged article written by the Ealing Times’s Alex Hayes. Hayes had noticed figures released on Monday in response to a question by Tory MP Andrew Selous. These showed showed it took Ealing on average 45 days for a new housing benefit claim to be processed, the fifth slowest in the UK. League tables are always attractive to journalists as the can easily be spun if you only have half the facts, or not even half in Hayes’ case.

This performance was indeed not as we would like. But, we might consider a few of those facts (most of which are publicly available):

Bell is comparing us with St Albans who are twice as good as the 2nd best authority in the country. They are what a statistician would call an outlier.

In a previous written answer Kitty Usher, the relevant minister, stated that the average council’s processing time was 27 days in 2007/8. So although Ealing performed badly it was only 18 days short of the average across the country last year.

This was last year’s data. Bell doesn’t know, because he didn’t ask, that the council is achieving something like 34 days this year.

In 2006/7 the council only achieved something like 70 days. That was our inheritance from the previous Labour administration.

Since then the new administration has invested in this service, recruiting new people to tackle Labour’s backlog.

Not only were the old Labour administration bad at doing the things that all people value like cleaning the streets but they couldn’t even look after the weakest is society effectively. Bell really should try harder.

Categories
National politics

Next week’s tax swindle

The Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson, used his first sentence on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Programme to tell a direct lie. This guy has previous as we all know but we can be sure that he will have prepared very well for this interview and that the first thing he said was the main thing he wanted to convey. Although the 7.50am slot is not quite as prestigious in news terms as the 8.10am slot it has got to be the next best thing. Peter the Porkie Pie teller wanted us to hear this message:

Well I think every government now recognises, and we saw this at the international conference in Washington, that governments now around the world have got to provide a much needed stimulus to their economies.

Mandelson and Brown are using the G20 meeting in Washington on Saturday as a cover for their plan to spring pre-Christmas tax cuts on the British public one week from today when Alistair Darling presents his Pre-Budget Report. The speculation in the Sunday papers over the weekend (see Telegraph story here) was that the government would use the complex, bureaucratic and fraud prone tax credit system to achieve this. See the 36 page guide to filling in the form for a tax credit application here. Don’t forget who invented the tax credit system introduced in 2003, Gordon Brown of course. It is telling that fraud and overpayment loses in the tax credit system to-date are of the same order of magnitude as the 1-2% or £15-30 billion fiscal stimulus currently being mooted. Oh yes.

George Osborne’s combative performance on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday sent me in search of the G20 communiqué. If you cut and paste the G20 communiqué into your word processor and run a word count over it, it will come out at something like 3,636 words long. Only 21 words were devoted to fiscal stimulus:

Use fiscal measures to stimulate domestic demand to rapid effect, as appropriate, while maintaining a policy framework conducive to fiscal sustainability.

There are certainly some countries that could afford to stimulate domestic demand while maintaining a policy framework conducive to fiscal sustainability. Unfortunately, the UK isn’t one of them.

Osborne did well to nail the government’s spinning of this communiqué at the get go but from Mendelson’s performance this morning we know they think that this is a good line and they are sticking with it even if it is a porkie.

There is one tax cut we should all be entitled to next week. That is a 5% uprating of tax thresholds in line with September’s RPI of 5%. This does not fit into Brown’s fairness agenda so next week’s tax swindle will almost certainly be a headline grabbing tax credit gift to the lower paid and those with children, some 6 million households, and a another stealth tax rise as Brown uses good old fiscal drag to raise thresholds by something rather less than 5%. Just wait.

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Uncategorized

In praise of Pound shops

I know that many people hate Pound shops and see them as being pretty much the fifth horseman of the apocalypse but they do have their place.

On Saturday I bought a gift for a child at Early Learning Centre in the Ealing Broadway Centre. Being in a hurry I wanted one of those gift bag thingies to present it in. Being a simple man of a certain age I thought stationary – WH Smiths! In I went and found a rather attractive gift bag that would certainly have appealed to the mother of the tot although it might have been a bit sophisticated for the child herself. I went to queue up and found about ten people waiting on one till.

As I was in a hurry I flung my prospective purchase towards a display and marched out in a huff. What now? What about the Pound shop two doors down? Five minutes later I had found a perfectly pleasant gift bag (one which passed muster with my wife I might add), paid for it and got out of the shop again. Pound shop 1, WH Smith 0.

Pound shops, and their close relative the Asian-owned cheap hardware store, have an important role to play. They keep the large multiples honest with their merchandising and packaging. We all bemoan the march of supermarkets and large multiples and laud independent traders when they are bijou boutique shops but we forget that these Pound shops and hardware stores too are often independents working on small margins. Some people might call their wares cheap tat but do you really want an expensive basket to put your wet washing in or something you picked up for very little from your friendly local cheap hardware store? Often these people are providing items from which the multiples could not make sufficient profit. How else would you get hold of this stuff?

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Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Lazy lackey

I like the Dave Hill blog. Although Hill is an avowed old leftie he is hard working and often comes with some interesting stories. Hill can also be pretty even handed but he sometimes inadvertently shines a light on some things that would be better left in the dark (from the point of view of furthering the causes he holds dear). One such is his reporting today of John Ross’s blog. He was the old mayor’s economic policy advisor, paid something like £120K per annuum, and one of the Socialist Action cell that the old mayor relied on during his eight year time in office.

Ross’s hagiography of Livingstone is laugh out loud funny:

Ken Livingstone will be remembered as a great Mayor of London …

An inspirational speech by the former Mayor of London …

When Ken Livingstone returns as Mayor …

This stuff might make suitable reading for Socialist Worker types but to a general audience it only makes Livingstone and his aspirations of a return to the mayoralty look ridiculous. Hill is regularly fed with this rubbish by Livingstone and his cronies and he does them no favours by actually publishing it. Doh!

Why am I not surprised that this so-called economics expert has managed only 6 blog postings in three months during this time of almost unprecedented economic turmoil? With this kind work rate I can’t see how this guy ever justified a fraction of his salary.