Today is the London Congestion Charge’s 4th birthday. The Conservative Home website has published an article from me that shows how pretty much all of the £927 million collected over the four years has been wasted on out of control costs.
Author: Phil
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Tram bill hits £30 million
Ealing Times is reporting today that the latest tally of spending on the West London Tram by the Mayor has reached £29.8 million despite all three boroughs on its route and local people being against.
They quote our local London Assembly Member, Richard Barnes who represents Ealing and Hillingdon, as saying:
“The sheer cost of this scheme is staggering and it’s now clear that because he has wasted so much money on the project the Mayor feels he cannot back out, despite the lack of support from West London. Livingstone should bite the bullet, cut his losses now and listen to local objections before any further money is squandered on a scheme West London doesn’t want.”
Quite right Richard.
Checking Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing this morning I find that it has just passed the 1.5 million mark. At 8:18 this morning it stood at 1,501,634.
The petition has been propelled by extensive coverage across radio, newspapers and blogs. There are some people that try to write off 1.5 million people going through a pretty long process as a few people clicking on a website. For instance, Peter Riddell in the Times on Tuesday:
It is obviously significant that more than 1.5 million people marched against the Iraq war four years ago and almost 1.2 million have signed the petition against the planned vehicle tracking and road-pricing policy. It shows that a large number of people care and, in the case of the petition, how effective the motoring lobby is.
The numbers reflect particular interests. By definition, they cannot represent the broader public interest. These protests are populist, not democratic: only some people are being heard. Government and Parliament exist to reconcile divergent interests. When the Government rejects them, however, it appears to be ignoring the popular will; witness the alliance of The Mail on Sunday proclaiming “How many people have to sign a petition before this Government takes notice?” and Henry Porter in The Observer giving warning of “road rage like never before” if the Government snubs the petition.
Perhaps Riddell should have a look at another petition on the Number 10 e-petitions site. It read “Don’t Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy” and has garnered 1,835 signatures. Perhaps Riddell should work out which bit of no he doesn’t understand.
Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing reads as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.
Get clicking and signing if you want to avoid paying another tax and having your movements traced by the state.
Follow this link to see 18 Doughty Street’s little movie about the Mayor.
It is meant to be a fun, attack ad style clip. It makes some telling points though about the company the Mayor keeps. I was pleased to see them take up my line (which they picked up from Victoria Borwick/CPS which they picked up from the Standard who were quoting me) about the Mayor spending £100 million to promote himself.
I am listening to the final budget debate and waiting for someone to ask the most obvious question. How can we sustain the drawing down of reserves at the rate of £436.9 million per annum?
Follow this link and go to the last page.
The GLA bodies are expected to draw down reserves next year as follows:
To give some context this sum is about the same as the LFEPA and LDA budgets and three times the GLA budget.
Elizabeth Howlett, as a member of the MPA, did ask whether it was prudent to draw down their reserves to the tune of £4.0 million but in all the hurly burly of talking about bussing young people around the Mayor has managed to avoid talking about this massive hole.
In reponse to a question from Richard Barnes, one of the Tory assembly members, about which inflation rate he uses when he makes promises about the future the Mayor said:
whichever is the most favourable at the time.
It all very well being a cheeky chappie but this is taking the mickey.
Presenting his budget just now the London Mayor highlighted how the appalling ten year record of the current Labour government in caring for children had been shown up by Unicef’s report today.
The Mayor spent most of his short speech excoriating the Conservative group for their calling into question the Mayor’s spending of £55 million on young persons’ concessions.
Obviously he did not mention the actual expenditure. He simply talked about the 385,000 young people that receive the concession. In trying to shame the Tories he theatrically listed the number of young people affected in each Tory constituency in turn. In doing so he highlighted the fact that 9 out of 14 GLA geographic constituencies are Tory held as against only 5 Labour ones. 2 Labour members are elected by PR as are the 2 Greens, 5 LibDems and the 2 One London ones making a total of 25 GLA members. Under the GLA Act it takes 2/3 of Assembly members to over-turn the budget. As a result the Mayor has bought the 2 Green members with £47 million of green bungs so that 7 Labour members and 2 Greens can defy the other 16 Assembly members to push through a minority budget that will see the Mayor’s share of council taxes going up by 5.3%.
Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing got top billing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. The flagship 8:10am interview saw Transport Minister Douglas Alexander well and truly wriggling, follow link. I had a couple of comments on my blog today suggesting the site had been closed down at this time but I am quite prepared to believe that it has just been overwhlemed by volumes. The petition hit the million mark around 10am on Saturday and had put on another 100,000 by early this morning. During the course of the morning another 50,000 have signed up.
Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing reads as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.
Get clicking and signing if you want to avoid paying another tax and having your movements traced by the state.
This morning the council has announced the initial results from the massive consultation on the future of our waste collection services, see press release. It seems that the results from the massive waste consultation were clear in some areas but not in others. Altogether 10,500 people responded.
The whole of Ealing, the Elthorne ward south of the railway tracks and Southfield ward have clearly opted to keep black sacks. The picture is less clear in the rest of the borough. As a result a new, simpler consultation is going out to the rest of the borough this week. It was clear that the two wheelie bin and fortnightly collection options were not popular overall so second time around it will be a straight choice between bin bags and one wheelie bin.
The council has heard the clear message that plastic recycling is popular and this will be added to the recycling service this year.
Just before 9am today the No 10 road pricing petition stood at 996,192. Towards the end of January it looked like the petition was running out of steam and would top out at the 600,000 mark. Since then it has got it has got its legs back.
The Telegraph and its motoring correspondent, David Millward, have been pushing the issue, although confusingly they are running their own petition alongside Peter Roberts’ original petition on the No 10 petitions site. Today they are covering the million milestone on their front page, yesterday it was the bailiffs angle, on Thursday it was the impact of devolution on road pricing and on Tuesday they looked at the security and integrity of the petition itself – it is much more robust than a paper one!
There is even a video interview of Peter Roberts, the guy who started the thing off. Well done Peter.
Peter Roberts’ petition to scrap plans to introduce road pricing reads as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.
Get clicking and signing if you want to avoid paying another tax and having your movements traced by the state.
Phil Taylor 