Author: Phil

Election bribe?

It looks like the Mayor is ramping up for the Mayoral elections next May.

Today he has announced a cut in bus fares for Oyster users from £1 to 90p. It seems a bit strange that he should be announcing this cut in June. Last year he announced rises on 11th September (see previous posting). I guess that the Mayor will use the three months between now and when he traditionally announces inflation busting fare rises to re-announce this cut many times over. No doubt we will hear much more about this cut from September to next May as well.

We will hear less about how the cut will be paid for. Bus costs are soaring so I haven’t got the foggiest how it will be paid for. Bus costs are due to rise by 8.2% this year (see previous posting).

Obviously the Mayor fails to mention that off peak fares went up from 80p to £1 last year and this year they will go back down to 90p so they will still be 12.5% higher after the so-called cut.

National politics

Cameron in Tooting

This lunchtime I ventured to Tooting to hear David Cameron lay out his plans for beating Gordon Brown and winning the next general election. Two other Ealing councillors were there: Edmund Yeo and Jim Randall.

It was good stuff and the way Cameron contrasted centralised state control, so inextricably linked with Gordon Brown, and his own vision of social responsibility resonated with me at least. The “Our society. Your Life” line did not work quite so well with me but I got the idea. It was a great event with 200 activists enthusiastically welcoming what Cameron had to say. I could have done without Fancis Maude as MC but the warm up acts, two PPCs plus MPs Grant Schapps and Michael Gove were all good and went a long way to showing that the Conservatives have a whole range of talent.

In questions Michael Crick, Newsnight’s political correspondent, had a go at Cameron on his “grammar stream in every subject, in every school” offering. “Would Cameron allow schools to opt out if they wished?” Yes, of course he would as Cameron wanted more choice for parents and more independence for schools so if parents liked a school without a grammar stream then fine. Crick back in box. I can guarantee that this segment will not appear on Newsnight tonight as it made Crick look a twit.

Winston MacKenzie, complete witrh fedora, introduced himself as the leading Conservative candidate to be London Mayor. Cameron was quick to quip “You are now”. His rambling question was basically: “How are you going to reach black boys?” Cameron’s answer was through their parents and their community which is what he means by social responsiblity. McKenzie did not say that he used to be a Veritas man.

Channel 4 tried to ambush Cameron with an unpublished poll to be aired tonight on C4 which seemed to be a bit rude as no-one else knew what the guy were talking about. Talk about up yourself.

The message I will take back to Ealing, which comes naturally anyway to me and is pretty much the Ealing Conservatives’ motto, is “standing up for all of the people, all of the time”. Amen.

Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor takes on Fire Brigade

Post author By Phil
Post date 16th Jun 2007
No Comments on Mayor takes on Fire Brigade

The Mayor does not like the body that runs the London Fire Brigade. It is called the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority. The reason he does not like it is because he does not control it. If you want to know why LFEPA does not pay a contribution to the Londoner (see previous posting) it is because LFEPA told him to bugger off.

There are 17 people on the Authority, 8 Assembly Members and 9 councillors. Now that both the Assembly and councils are dominated by large Tory groups the Mayor knows that LFEPA will be even less controllable.

This is democracy at work but the Mayor is using his powers to frustrate it. The Mayor has turned down all the Conservative and LibDem nominations except for one Tory woman councillor on the basis that they are too white and too male.

It is a bit hard to know what to do about the Assembly Members on LFEPA. There are 8 places but only 2 BME AMs who are both Labour. The Mayor has approved one Labour BME AM, Murad Qureshi, but has left the other one on the bench. As much as the Tories and LibDems might want to nominate BME AMs the hard fact is that they have not got any. Is this the point the Mayor is trying to make? Why doesn’t he resign his own job as he is himself the classic white, middle-aged, male politician?

The Mayor is not being consistent. He is effectively in alliance with the Greens but he has re-appointed AM Darren Johnson to LFEPA in spite of the fact that the Greens are “hideously white” to steal a phrase from Greg Dyke. Check out their key people here.

Bizzarely he has also re-appointed Peter Hulme-Cross from One London. The two ex-UKIP Assembly Members are not only hideously white but also hideously male and middle-aged like the Mayor. Does the Mayor think that they will not get returned next May so he does not need to make a point with them or is he plotting to bring them into his Labour/Green coalition?

The Mayor is simply not entitled to tell the Tories and the LibDems who they think is best equipped to help direct LFEPA.

Here is the BBC London coverage.

Parking Services

Parking Services Specialist Scrutiny Panel

Post author By Phil
Post date 15th Jun 2007
6 Comments on Parking Services Specialist Scrutiny Panel

Parking Services Specialist Scrutiny Panel Parking Services have had some coverage both last Friday and this. Last Friday council leader Jason Stacey highlighted in his weekly message how the new Parking Services enforcement contract has led to a 20% fall in the number of PCNs being issued in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. Today the Ealing & Acton Gazette is covering the problem of the £6 million hole in the parking finances caused by overstating of income in previous financial years. No actual money has been lost in this transaction, instead the council has admitted that £6 million of income they thought they would collect cannot in fact be collected, but the effect is that the council has £6 million less than it though it had. This is yet another hangover from the poor financial management of the previous administration.

I have been asked to chair a scrutiny panel looking into Parking Services. No doubt it will be of interest to many Ealing residents. So far the officers have not been great at promoting the dates for these meetings. If you follow this link you could work it out by going into each month in turn! If you follow this link there is not much info. Altogether pretty rubbish.

Anyway if you are interested in this topic here are the dates:

Thursday 5th July 2007
Tuesday 11th September 2007
Thursday 15th November 2007
Thursday 10th January 2008
Wednesday 5th March 2008

All the meetings take place at 7pm at the Town Hall.

Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Tube bosses have no idea

Two stories in last tonight’s Standard show just how warped Transport for London’s priorities have become.

On the one hand 40 Underground ticket offices are to be shut. This move is apparently designed to increase use of Oyster cards. Make no mistake that although these might be convenient for some, even most, users the reason that TfL is pushing this change is to reduce its costs. TfL says it will not cut station staff but clearly it will be tempted to. Users want the Oyster but they also want a friendly face behind the ticket window, especially if they are from out of town. On the other hand Andrew Gilligan calculates that Bob Kiley, the ex-boss of TfL, will have cost us £4 million before he actually shuffles off the stage. This sum is dwarfed by the £78 million spent by TfL on advertising in 2005/6.

Given the choice between spending cash on bigging up the Mayor or making life easier for customers TfL chooses protecting the Mayor’s propaganda budget rather than services that customers value.

Ealing and Northfield

Comments from WEN

I see that Eric Leach of West Ealing Neighbours is trying to connect the recent Northfield Ward Forum (see previous posting) with ideas that have been promoted by by the Neighbourhood Governance specialist scrutiny panel.

Eric is just plain wrong. In Northfield I think that we have gone some way in proving that councillors can just get on with talking (engaging in the jargon) with residents without the paraphernalia of ward budgets and officer support.

Ealing and Northfield

Brian Castle has died

Recently (see previous posting) Brian Castle came to West Ealing to talk to West Ealing Neighbours about regeneration. It is a shock therefore to learn that he died of a heart attack on Sunday at only 51. Brian was the Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Economic Development and a ward councillor in Cleveland.

I had not had the chance to get to know Brian that well but he always came across as being intelligent and capable and the kind of person you would be glad to have on your side.

Ealing and Northfield Northfield Ward Forum

Northfield Ward Forum

Tonight saw the Northfield councillors experimenting. We called a Ward Forum. The idea was to get neighbourhood groups together to briefly inform them about the council’s priorities but, more importantly, to find out what their priorities and issues were. We had a good turnout with 17 representatives of residents groups, 5 officers, 2 councillors and our Safer Neighbourhood Team Sergeant, Cliff Elam. David Millican chaired the event and I spoke about the council’s priorities. Mark Reen was busy chairing the Health, Housing and Adult Social Services Panel which I would have been at if this had not got into my diary first. We had West Ealing Neighbours, Boston Manor RA, EFRA, NABTA, representatives from ECC and the South Ealing Mission and a couple of our Street Watchers. Susan Wyatt from the council explained that although Northfield only had 3 Streetwatchers now there were 24 people who had expressed an interest in being one. There would be a kick off meeting for these people in September.

Eric Leach for WEN outlined their core issue of wanting to promote West Ealing as a town centre in its own right and the issues of parking and heritage lamp posts. Mike Jordan for Boston Manor RA observed that “graffiti has been cracked” and praised our envirocirme officer, Ricky Wright, and Cliff Elam. This has been very much a joint effort of residents, council and Police. BMRA will continue to press for safety improvements on Boston Road and a CPZ around the tube station. We were able to clarify that the small CPZ around the station is going ahead. Sharon Grant from ECC was made aware of residents concerns about parking pressure on Sundays. EFRA have specific problems with parking in Blondin and Niagara Avenues. They are keen to promote a road safety scheme in Windmill Lane and get fed up with not being formally consulted about local schemes. They don’t want to be consulted about loft conversions they want to be consulted about the big stuff! It seems there is a specific problem with the transport planners not including residents associations in their consultation process. The Northfield businesses and traders have quickly recruited 61 out of 200 businesses to their association and they are holding an event on Saturday.

Throughout the meeting we kept being reminded about what a great place Northfield is to live in. Northfield is the safest, cleanest and healthiest ward in Ealing. It is no coincidence that it also has a lot of active citizens. It was a real pleasure to host such a constructive group of people. The idea of a ward forum was welcomed and we promised to organise another one in four months time.

There was some speculation at the meeting that this meeting was a prototype for ward forums across Ealing. The idea of ward forums has been explored by the Neighbourhood Governance scrutiny panel over the last year or so. I am sure that some councillors feel that ward forums, perhaps with some cash to spend, organised for them by the council, will help them do their job better. The Northfield councillors have proved that you can just get on with it. The cash spent by the area committees is so tiny that the idea of dividing it even further does not seem very practical. Furthermore, the idea of ward councillors holding a budget would, in my view, put them in the awkward position of having to say no a 100 times for every time they said yes and people questioning them as to their probity every five minutes. No fun!

Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor still batting for wasteful TfL against councils

Post author By Phil
Post date 5th Jun 2007
No Comments on Mayor still batting for wasteful TfL against councils

The Mayor is trying to use the Freedom Pass yet again to scare pensioners, bash councils and pretend he is the pensioners’ champion when in fact he is just trying to squeeze more money out of councils to cover the out of control costs of Transport for London, see his press release.

He is taking my name in vain again but that is really a small part of the story.

The Freedom Pass has a really frightening impact on council finances and they are right to fight to overturn the current legal situation that if London Councils and TfL cannot agree then the Mayor gets to impose a settlement, even though he can in no way be described as an honest broker. To get an idea of the financial impact look at Ealing’s own budget book. If you scroll down to page 23 you see will that the largest levy we pay is for concessionary fares, ie the Freedom Pass. This year Ealing bill will increase by £810K or 9.4% to reach £9.44 million. This is about the same amount of cash as we spend in Ealing on bin collections, street cleaning and recycling put together. This kind of rate of growth is simply not manageable and yet the councils don’t have the buying power they should command.

The real problem is TfL. They are a total shower. Recently they have:

The Mayor is responding to a press release yesterday from London Councils. Their position is well put in Daniel Moylan’s letter to the Mayor dated 31st May. Moylan is the chairman of the London Councils’ Transport and Environment Committee.

Communications disease Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Olympic logo cost £400K

I don’t quite know how they managed it but apparently the London Olympic logo cost £400K according to the Telegraph this morning. Although the Telegraph story is accompanied by a photo of the grinning London Mayor nothing appears on the Mayor’s own website. There are two explanations for this. Either the Mayor is embarrassed, unusual I know, or the Mayor’s press machine has been slow to take up the story.

The £400K figure is hard to believe although they did use top notch brand consultants Wolff Olins. Apparently “LOCOG last night stressed that the logo was paid for by private money”. If the London Olympics is a private venture why are we spending £10 billion of public money on it?

You can see how the Wolff Olins guys managed to talk LOCOG out of the cash when you see the twaddle they spout about the project:

The emblem is 2012, an instantly recognizable symbol and a universal form, one already closely associated with the Games in London and marking a moment of change for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Neither an appendage to London nor the Olympic symbol, it brings the two together in an inclusive way. It is a brand which can be read and understood by people of all ages, around the world.

Echoing London’s qualities of a modern, diverse and vibrant city, the London 2012 emblem is unconventionally bold, deliberately spirited and unexpectedly dissonant. Comprising neither sporting images nor pictures of London landmarks the emblem is designed to signify that while the Games is hosted in London, it is not just for London, but also for the UK and for the world. That it is as much for the athletes as for everyone, regardless of age, culture and language. It is a brand to help take the Olympic and Paralympic Games into a new era.

They do talk a good game but what a load of bilge? Why does it not surprise me that the word inclusive creeps into this nurge? Is inclusive a synonym for unexceptional, bland, unidentifiable?