Beales, the only department store in Ealing, is to close in October, Sunday 28th to be precise. See Beales’ statement.
At first sight this appears to be a blow for Ealing town centre. The good news is that Beales is one of the largest sites in the town centre and should be filled pretty quickly. That raises the question what with?
Beales is the kind of store I go to once or twice a year so I can quite see how they cannot stay in business.
As predicted back on June 18th (see previous posting) when the Mayor announced a partial bus fare cut he is using the summer to electioneer. The August issue of The Londoner – the Mayor’s £3 million a year “freesheet” – has a totally outrageous front page headline and article followed up by a page 5 opinion piece from the Mayor.
As ever the Mayor is lying outrageously. He says:
I am pleased that the strength of London’s economy, and efficiencies achieved by Transport for London, mean that fares can now be reduced with no cut in this investment programme or financial risk to the transport budget.
This economic strength and operating efficiency creates benefits that should be returned to London.
The stuff about London’s economy is meaningless waffle and irrelevant to bus pricing.
The talk about efficiency is a lie. Back in February, after a two month wait, the Mayor wrote to me and admitted that bus subsidies would increase by £65 million in the current financial year. Click to enlarge his letter below:
How is it possible to reconcile a £65 million increase in subsidy with the notion of “efficiency”? Bus costs are out of control and cannot be used as an explanation of why it is possible to cut fares. The Mayor is a liar.
Another thing that stood out from the TfL numbers I found yesterday was how badly the finances of the Congestion Charge are going. I say stood out. I mean I spotted them because I was looking for them. They were actually buried on page 99. See below, click to enlarge.
TfL have restated them without saying so. In last year’s numbers they included £1.1 million of Capital financing charges and had done for the previous 3 years. This year they have mysteriously disappeared. They have also laid them out differently to make the surplus look bigger. The Mayor talks about a £120 million surplus but he can only make this ludicrous claim by ignoring indirect costs such as advertising (although how indirect can an £8.7 million campaign on the Western extension be?). The Audit Commission makes him bring indirect costs into the picture which bring his headline surplus down from £122 million to £89 million.
Bizzarely the income is down £1.7 million. You may remember that in 2005/6 30% of income came from fines. I can only think that due to the ability to pay next day and people’s changing behaviour this fines income has dropped away. Obviously it is a good thing if fewer people are picking up penalties.
As you might expect from out of control TfL costs are up. Up £16.6 million or 8.5%. The net effect of less income and more cost is that the surplus from this scheme is down a massive £18.3 million.
Few people paying their £8 a day realise that practically none of this cash is serving any good purpose. I have just updated the cummulative cash flow that I did for ConservativeHome to mark the fourth anniversary of the Congestion Charge. Previously I had used estimates for 2006/7. Now I can use TfL’s actual numbers. Income: £930 million. Cumulative surplus after over 4 years of operation: £14 million. See below, click to enlarge.
Last year I wrote that 831 people employed by TfL earned over £50K. I have just seen this year’s Annual Report. TfL have restated last year’s numbers. Last year’s number was 1,029 not 831. This year’s number is 1,411. I know that we have a large and complex public transport infrastructure but having a cadre of 1,411 highly paid managers seems a bit over the top. The rate of increase in their salaries is horrifying.
Last year I toted up the number of £100K plus salaries. It came out at 76. With the restatement it is now 90 for last year. This year the number of TfL managers earning over £100K is 112. Do we really have 112 people worth £100K in TfL? I don’t think so.
The Sunday Telegraph is running a piece today on how the MoD employs over 1,000 people in communications jobs. Not battlefield communications just the every day telling of stories to the public so that they think the state is great. The MoD has no competitors so it is not as if they need to compete with other defence suppliers for our business.
I know defence is a high risk business and things sometimes go wrong but we don’t need 1,000 people here. We need naval personal who are a bit tougher and don’t wibble so much. We need helicopters to get injured soldiers to field hospitals. We need fast defence procurement of kit that works. We need to sack about 900 comms people.
The Telegraph reckons that they are paid £39K each so the overall bill is £39 million. I don’t suppose they are all that well paid but by the time you add in pensions, office costs, media costs, etc you are talking about a £50 million bill. Although this is only about a half of what our maniac London Mayor spends it is too big a part of defence spending.
It looks like this spending has grown like topsy as all the disparate parts of the MoD compete with each other to look good and pull in funds. The Sunday Telegraph has jumped on this story but the document they quote from gives us some hope that there is a new head of the comms service in the MoD who is trying to get a grip on this. We’ll see.
Self-proclaimed Southall boy and Evening Standard columnist Nirpal Dhaliwal was writing in the Sunday Times today about the Ealing Southall by-election.
According to Dhaliwal, who usually writes about his infidelity and wider social mores rather than political matters, “The Tories offered no solutions to Southall’s problems”. He went on to quote a well known political commentator from Southall:
I spoke to Parag Bhargava, who manages a Southall marriage bureau, who told me the area needs a Tube link to ease the traffic congestion that is affecting local businesses, and that more facilities are needed for young people who are increasingly caught up in antisocial behaviour.
The other issues the town faces, he told me, are the rising number of Asian women who can’t find a husband, as young men opt for a social life and one-night stands, and the fact Sikh women generally prefer Sikh men who don’t wear turbans, causing a glut of turbaned bachelors. If Tony Lit had offered solutions to any of this he’d be sitting in Westminster tomorrow, said Bhargava. Cameron’s new look Tories have a lot to learn.
I suspect that Dhaliwal has a lot to learn. Southall is already on the train network and extending the tube out there would be prohibitively expensive. The Crossrail project, which has been in the drawing board since before Labour came to power is still not beyond the planning stage. Our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, spent 10 years as Chancellor not building Crossrail. The surest way to bring prosperity to Southall would be to connect it to the City of London with Crossrail. Belatedly the London Mayor has realised that he should focus effort on making Crossrail happen and not waste his political capital and a whole heap of cash on the West London Tram. When will Brown get behind it? Dhaliwal should stick to his knitting.
The council’s Parking Services organisation has started enforcement by CCTV outside Ealing Broadway station. This has given rise to much negative comment in the Gazette and the Ealing Today forum.
Last week the Gazette had a page 2 headline “£80 for 3 seconds’ parking”. This week it has printed four letters on the subject and there was another article on page 7 with the heading “CCTV ‘spycam’ angers drivers” along with their tendentious GONE PARKING MAD! logo.
Meanwhile there are two separate threads of comments on the Ealing Today forum:
I wrote to the Gazette last week to remind people that it was an offence to stop in bus stop clearways, ie those bus stops with a thick yellow line next to the pavement, and to invite people to get involved with the current scrutiny panel which is looking into Parking Services but the Gazette has chosen not to print my letter. Now I fully accept that as a councillor I don’t have a God given right to get my letters published, especially if they are tedious or long-winded. I thought it might be useful to point out that stopping in a bus stop clearway is an offence, something that the Gazette’s article refused to do – I guess it undermined the line they wanted to take. I thought it might be useful to promote the Parking Services Specialist Scrutiny Panel but clearly the Gazette wants to carp and wind people up and giving people the chance to raise their concerns with the council does not fit into its agenda.
In its reporting the Gazette is being misleading. For instance, this week they say people “have been caught out stopping for a matter of seconds by the stops”. Either they have stopped on the bus stops – offence – or they have not – no offence. Although some people don’t like these cameras at least you know where you are with them. You get to see the picture. Again there is no discussion in the articles of what offences may have been committed. No advice to the public.
Here is some public service information from me as the Gazette sullenly refuses to take this role on:
The drop off situation at Ealing Broadway is a mess and your councillors are aware of it and it will be dealt with.
The access road is private property. I understand the police have asked them to keep it coned off for security reasons.
We can debate the proper place of bus and pedestrian access as against car access but the fact remains that there are a bus stop and a pedestrian crossing directly in front of the station which have been given priority. It is an offence to park on either of these. The Highway Code says:
Rule 167: You MUST NOT park on a crossing or in the area covered by the zig-zag lines.
Rule 215: You MUST NOT stop or park on a Bus Stop Clearway within its hours of operation.There are yellow lines opposite the station which you can use for dropping off. Picking up and dropping off is fine on yellow lines EVEN WHEN LOADING RESTRICTIONS APPLY.
The Highway Code is online here.
The council is aware that there are questions about Parking Services and as a result the Parking Services Specialist Scrutiny Panel has been set up to look at some of these. I am chairing it so I am learning a lot about parking right now.
There will be four meetings on:
- Tuesday 11th September 2007
- Thursday 15th November 2007
- Thursday 10th January 2008
- Wednesday 5th March 2008
All meetings are open to the public and will be held at 7pm at the Town Hall. Please note we will not be looking at the specifics of individual cases.
For more information follow this link.
Having only had 3 hours sleep I am still somewhat grumpy this morning. My gloom was raised somewhat by looking at the vote share last night compared with the general election in 2005.
With a lower turnout Labour are the big losers losing 7 points. The LibDems are the big gainers picking up 3 points as did Others. The Tories are small gainers, having picked up 1 point.
The Tory vote share went up! It was only marginal and it doesn’t feel great but the numbers look better than they might have this morning. For all the reported mistakes made by the Tory campaign over the last three weeks we managed to stop the LibDems creating momentum.
Hidden in the Others figure above is a very poor result for the Greens. Vote share down from 4.6% to 3.1%.
As an Ealing councillor I am pleased this morning that we held on to our Cleveland seat yesterday and increased our majority from 88 to 231. Well done to Greg Stafford and welcome to the Conservative group on Ealing council which is now 42 strong.
The Ealing Southall by-election was not such a pretty picture. Virendra Sharma was elected with 15,188 votes. The LibDems were second with 10,118 and Tony Lit came in 3rd on 8,230. This was a poor result for Labour with their majority cut drastically. In the long run the weakness of their candidate will become a huge issue for them. The guy is Piara Khabra II. Although in theory we had less votes than the general election the turn out was lower so we probably have not lost vote share. I am sure someone else will have done the maths by the morning. Now is not the time. It is clear the the LibDems did gain vote share and they have every reason to be pleased with themselves. Optimistic Tories will observe that by saving Ming Campbell’s bacon Nigel Bakhai has screwed the LibDems, who might be quite dangerous without him.
This by-election has given me two new topics to blog about. One will be how rubbish our new MP is. If you google Sharma you come up with nothing except he is a councillor, with a pretty atrocious attendance record, and a candidate and now MP. He is a man without distinction or opinion. Tonight at the count he had to be told to stand up for the cameras. He duly did as he was told. No doubt he will carry on doing what he is told in the tradition of Khabra. The second topic will be outlining what awful liars the LibDems have been during this campaign. I will be going though their leaflets and exposing the porkie pies.
Yesterday during Mayor’s Question Time the Mayor effectively announced the death of the West London Tram.
To see the exchange between Angie Bray, Conservative AM for West Central and PPC for the Ealing Central and Acton constituency, and the Mayor follow this link and move the slider to 2:34:35.
In answering a question the Mayor slipped into announcement mode and came out with:
If we get a decision from Ealing for some bus priority measures and we get the announcement as we are expecting in most probably September on Crossrail we will put the West London Tram on hold to see the impact of both bus priority measures and eventual opening of Crossrail and you come back to revisit the decision in the middle of the next decade.
People like me have been saying all along that we would be more sympathetic to the tram if we believed that the bus improvement option had been taken as far as it can be along the Uxbridge Road. Anyone driving down the Uxbridge and seeing delivery vans and people stopped with their hazards flashing knows that with some simple management measures this road could be vastly improved.
For one thing you have to be cynical about it not being a red route. I guess making it a red route would have undermined the case for the tram so the Uxbridge Road has been allowed to fail as a bus route by TfL to make the tram viable. Now the tram is dead we might see the Uxbridge Road working.
Phil Taylor 