Author: Phil

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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.

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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.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Lords of Transport

For the last couple of years I have tracked the number of people employed by Transport for London (TfL) who earn £50K or more. In an idle moment yesterday I came across TfL’s draft Annual Report and Accounts, more on this later. You need to scroll down to page 35 of the report to see the table of employees’ remuneration.

This year has seen the total who earn more than £50K leap from 1,411 to 1,954, a jump 543 people or 38%. To be fair some part of this jump must be down to TfL’s takeover of Metronet. It is still pretty eye-watering that TfL employ the best part of 2,000 who earn over £50K.

The upper echelon of £100K plus earners has increased at a good rate too but not at the rate of the £50K plus group. Maybe Metronet didn’t have that many high flyers. Either that or TfL binned them. Last year’s number of 112 has jumped 10% to 123. With 123 bloody geniuses working for them you might think they could stop the bus strikes.

If you go back to 2002 TfL (Corporation) employed 59 people who earned over £50K. Today the comparable number is 611, or 10 times bigger. Has this recent explosion of high earners delivered the kind of service we all want?

Categories
Communications disease

Government’s spin bill rises to nearly £400m

Today the Telegraph has covered a story I did a month ago. See here.

They say:

Official figures showed that central government spent a total of £391 million on advertising, marketing, PR and other presentational work in 2007-08.

The total is up by £53 million on the previous year, when it was £338 million – a rise of almost 16 per cent.

They missed the angle that this surge in spending was to pay for Brown’s election that never was.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Old news from SEC

It seems that Ealing Times are falling for Save Ealing Centre’s trick of recycling old news.

They have two items posted today that refer to a report from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). The first piece quotes extensively from CABE’s report dated 4th July.

The CABE report is not terribly negative and one of the main differences in opinion is that CABE are in the anti-car camp whereas Ealing Council is keen to have some car parking in the town centre to ensure the continued success of the town centre. A lot of the arguments about car movements around the site and car use in general ignore the fact that the curent site IS A CAR PARK.

In the second piece the old CABE report is referred to again and SEC spokesperson Anthony Lewis says:

We believe the time has come for Ealing Council to reconsider its proposals to redevelop Dickens Yard in isolation, and instead to hold back on the Dickens Yard development until it has worked up and set in place an integrated master plan for the whole of the centre of Ealing.

This is SEC’s long grass strategy, see previous posting.

SEC are waging a media campaign, but that is what it is. That is all it is.

Apparently SEC is in the process of putting together its own plans for Ealing’s future. That is very nice. I guess if they had £500 million – £1 billion in the bank they could make them happen. Back in the real world the council is trying to do the doable.

Categories
Mayor Johnson Policing

Two teens dead in a week

The last week has seen another two teenagers die in London. It seems we have almost equalled last year’s tally with only two thirds of the year gone.

Ahmed Benyermak died on Wednesday last week when he fell from a 13 storey building in Hackney whilst being chased by an armed gang. The Evening Standard counts him as the “24th teenager to die violently in London this year”.

On Sunday morning it was Charles Junior Hendricks who was stabbed in Walthamstow. Unlike the BBC the Evening Standard are counting Hendricks as number 25 because they are including Ahmed Benyermak in their tally whereas the BBC talks about the “24th teenager to be killed in a stabbing or a shooting in London this year”.

The first 20 kids are listed by the BBC here.

21: Frederick Moody Boateng
22: Ryan Bravo
23: Nilanthan Murddi
24: Ahmed Benyermak
25: Charles Junior Hendricks

Categories
Northfield Ward Forum

Northfield leads with ward forums

The council announced today that Northfield is keeping ahead of the pack by holding the first official ward forum in the borough on 4th September.

Any and all Northfield residents are invited to the Northfield Ward Forum to be held on Thursday 4 September at 7:30 pm at the Log Cabin, 259 Northfield Avenue, W5 4UA. Entrance behind Northfield Library.

Whilst Northfield councillors have organised three informal ward forums over the past year the council has now formalised this for every ward. The new ward forums replace the old area committees. The purpose is to give residents more opportunities to participate in local democracy, interact with the council, influence services and help to improve their local areas.

Led by elected councillors, the new ward forums feature joint problem solving on local concerns, including round table discussions on issues such as community safety, traffic and transport schemes, parks and street improvements. Each ward will have the chance to influence an annual budget of £40,000 for local capital improvements for their neighbourhood.

We hope you can all come to this new-look Northfield Ward Forum.

Please note: The flyer that the council sent erroneously ave a staert time of 7pm. The start time is 7.30pm.

Categories
Parking Services

Take your pick

On the front page of today’s Telegraph there was this piece titled (in my edition) “Drivers face big rise in the cost of parking”.

According to the Telegraph:

Local Government minister John Healey said that local councils should charge more for basic services such as off-street parking, despite people in many parts of the country experiencing inflation-busting council tax rises.

In a speech to the Local Government Association, he said: “Only one in five councils are using charging to the full potential. Not just to cover costs but to shape their area.”

In a clear sign that he believes motorists should be targeted, Mr Healey said that charging more would result in “reducing congestion, improving levels of health and exercise, encouraging the use of local shops”.

It seems that Labour intends to underfund local government and is signalling that councils can use parking charges to cover the gap. Healey is using phoney greenery to cover his tracks.

This time last week we made this announcement about parking charges in Ealing:

  • Pay and display parking charges that have been frozen for the past two years, will be frozen for a further two years.
  • Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) permit vouchers (priced at £25 and £45) will be frozen for a further two years. The cost of CPZ permits has not been increased for the past two years.
  • Residents in CPZ areas will also receive a book of free visitor parking vouchers to use from April 2009.
  • New facilities to renew parking permits online and an expanded over the phone parking payment service will also be introduced in early 2009.
  • The abolition of parking charges in council car parks after 6pm and on public holidays will remain. This was introduced two years ago and has been such a success that it will remain.
  • Following a review of box junctions in Southall, the box junction at South Road/Hamilton Road will be removed.
  • The opening hours of the Herbert Road Car Park are to be extended by 2 hours from 10pm to 12 midnight. This is being introduced following representations from Southall traders.

It seems that the government wants to make your life harder. Ealing council doesn’t.