The Telegraph is covering this again today as the total heads for 500,000. At 11:37am the tally stood at 477,738.
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 stop paying another tax and having your movements traced by the state.
I initially wrote off the Mayor’s press release yesterday as yet another attempt to convince people that Waste for London would be a good wheeze. Another press release from Hammersmith & Fulham sent to me this afternoon, which essentially argues for the Belvedere incinerator in particular, made me re-read what the Mayor’s office is saying and it looks to me like he is coming round to a view that incineration may well have a place. Or maybe he is so desperate to hold onto his WfL dream that he doesn’t mind if he flip-flops on Belvedere in the process.
He says in paragraph 3:
The Mayor believes that London’s rubbish should be recycled and that new technologies, which can extract both heat and energy from waste should be used for the rubbish that cannot be recycled. The days of landfill are over and the Mayor does not support mass burn incineration. However even with the old technologies and incinerators that London currently has, London is missing a real opportunity to cut emissions by not extracting heat from waste. If this process was used in the four incinerators existing and planned, in or around the capital, the provision of heat and hot water to nearly 100,000 homes could save 670,000 tonnes of carbon, the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions as six million people travelling by plane to Paris, the equivalent of 30,000 return journeys.
The Mayor seems to be differentiating between “mass burn incineration”, I think he has just coined this term to get himself out of a self-dug hole, and “new technologies, which can extract both heat and energy from waste should be used for the rubbish that cannot be recycled” – in other words incineration. The Belvedere incinerator is just such a new-style incinerator but one which the Mayor has been fighting. It seems the Mayor is finally admitting that incineration has a place in London.
The impression is reinforced by note 1:
By extracting heat from waste we could make significant savings on carbon emissions. We would save 670,000 tonnes of carbon emissions which is the equivalent of 30,000 return plane journeys from London to Paris, six million passenger journeys to Paris through the heating of nearly 100,000 homes. Belvedere incinerator could receive waste from Essex and Sussex if it opens it doors.
Doesn’t the last line endorse Belvedere? Perhaps the Mayor doesn’t want any more judges telling him that his case is “totally without merit”, see previous posting.
The London Assembly has just been suspended by Chairman Brian Coleman after a shouting match between the Mayor’s so-called Chief of Staff Simon Fletcher and himself. It was quite extraordinary to see a local government officer shouting at the elected chairman at such a scrutiny type session. I brought an issue of The 8 Best Crossbows Reviewed & Revealed ( 2018 Hands-on Guide ) to read since the meeting was to be drawn out and boring. However, the meeting broke up after only 12 minutes, most of which was taken up with formalities. The travel information requested by the London Assembly on 3rd January was simply not available two weeks later. John Ross, Director for Economic and Business Policy (they do love their titles these people), the man responsible failed to turn up and sent a deputy who explained that it was all too difficult and then Fletcher was incredibly insolent as Coleman tried to work out how to proceed in the light of the failure of the GLA staff to submit to scrutiny. Coleman finally suspended the meeting in a hail of invective from Fletcher.
Fletcher has previous. LibDem AM Mike Tuffrey has said previously: “Simon Fletcher comes across as a shadowy figure in the twilight zone of the Mayor’s decision-making”. Another quote from Fletcher himself is: “I don’t sneeze without the mayor’s permission”. As a member of the Trotskyite splinter group Socialist Action Fletcher has been careful to keep his mug out of photographs so no pictures to show you unless you follow the link below and see him in action.
Clearly the Mayor and his staff don’t like it up them. Follow the link if you want a laugh. The whole thing is only 12:36 but skip to the last minute for the bust up bit.
Livingstone must be worried as he has issued a pre-emptive press release about this morning’s GLA session.
The Assembly Members are quizzing various members of Livingstone’s staff involved in the Mayor’s foreign travel. No doubt they will be questioning the costs involved and pointing out how little has been achieved.
You know he is getting desperate when he starts taking quotes out of local papers that are three years old:
… why should the people of north London suffer in order to attract hundreds of foreign students?
Brian Coleman, Barnet and Potters Bar Times, 8 April 2004
His press release goes big on a trip to New York and plans to visit India. Fair enough. It does not mention him wasting his time in Cuba and Venezuela. It does not mention him hanging out with the Chinese but being uncharacteristically silent about their human rights abuses.
This morning the Radio 4 Today programme is reporting on Richmond’s consultation on their idea of trebling residents’ parking permit charges on large vehicles such as Renault Espace people movers to £300.
Just under half (49%) of people were said to be in favour with 39% against, see press release. The council is pleased that 64% of people said that the plans would make them think about changing their vehicle to a less polluting model.
Being a LibDem council they can’t help telling porkies though. The Today programme is reporting this morning that residents rejected a proposal to surcharge second permits by 50%. Funny how this is not mentioned in their press release and the consultation results are not available on the website. So democracy is only any use when it returns the “right” answer. Ken Livingstone has said that he really likes this proposal. We know from bitter experience with the Tram he also approves of Richmond’s attitude to consultation – talk about it if the result agrees with your position otherwise ignore it.
So in addition to labouring under the second highest council tax in London the owner of a Renault Espace in Richmond will have to pay £300 to park outside their own house. Apparently this will all come to pass in 3 months time.
Electric cars will be exempted from any charge at all. This is just scientific mumbo-jumbo as it uses way more carbon to burn fuel, turn it into electricity, lose a chunk in transmission losses, lose another chunk in charging a battery, lose another chunk in converting electricity to motion than it does to burn petrol in an incredibly efficient internal combustion engine. For the same reason that trams are an environmental swindle, so are electric cars.
Follow the link to see their consultation document.
Talking of no shit, no WfL either.
The poor old Mayor is out of sorts today after being told by Ben Bradshaw, Labour’s Minister for Environment, Marine and Animal Welfare, that he can’t have his grandiose, strategic, pan-London waste authority.
Even a Labour minister has the good sense to know that it will be a total waste of cash:
Even after the initial set up costs, our analysis indicated that it could cost up to £5 million a year more to manage London’s waste through a Single Waste Disposal Authority because of the introduction of an extra tier of management.
You can read Bradshaw’s letter here.
As I have blogged before the Mayor’s now busted strategy talked of a fifth functional body. Imagine Waste for London in addition to Transport for London. We have saved WfL’s £78 million comms budget and the 821 people who earn more than £50K per year. At least that is what they would have been if WfL was anything like TfL.
Sorry about the Anglo-Saxon expression but it really is shit that a small minority of our residents think that it is OK to have a dog and not clear up after it. The picture below was taken in Junction Road on Saturday morning first thing.
There have been persistent reports of dog fouling in Junction Road. Ricky Wright, the Northfield envirocrime protection officer, decided to prioritise this issue and put up a sign. This had a small effect but the problem remained. After visiting the area once with the Safer Neighbourhood Team and failing to make any progress Ricky literally decided to stake out the site every morning last week. He had to wait to Saturday to get a result.
The person concerned let their dog foul in plain sight and then managed to bag it but just chuck it in the street. A strange kind of half measure. Anyway they got an £80 littering fine for their (lack of) trouble. The fine would have been bigger if it had dog fouling.
As you can see from the photo the street was otherwise clean. No amount of expensive cleaning by the council can keep our streets looking good unless we change the behaviour of the small minority who mess the place up.
Some people may ask whether this was a good use of resources. For myself I am sure that it is. It is only by directly confronting poor behaviour that we can have an impact. Well done to the council and Ricky in particular.
I asked road pricing campaigner Peter Roberts for the secret of his success. See his response below:
I started the petition on Nov 20th last year and sent an e-mail to 29 friends asking them to sign it and forward to all their contacts. I also went to all the forums I could find with an interest in motoring or driving and placed a link. This was only about six or seven sites. Two weeks later it had over 10,000 signatures and was the number one petition. At this point, the ABD became interested and placed a link on their website which helped a little but the main growth was from people signing and forwarding the e-mail. So far, every day has seen an increase in the number of people signing with yesterday being the highest at 60,588. I am not sure if it can continue to grow like this, but it should reach 1 million by 20th Feb even if the daily number falls to 20,000.
Peter’s petition stands at 337,183 – over a third of a million. Wow! Please sign it.
This morning I was on duty at Northfield Community Centre in Northcroft Road. The Northfield councillors do their surgeries there on the second Saturday of the month from 10.30am-12 midday.
This was my third time, we take it in turns. The first time I had two people, second time none, this time three. I do not want to discuss the specifics of their cases obviously but there were some common threads that are worth commenting on. The three cases were:
The common thread here seems to be the lack of a customer service ethic amongst council staff. The story was unreturned phone calls, letters not responded to and slapdash work. The lack of service ethic applies to those at the top just as much those on the front line.
What is sad about these cases, and hundreds more like them I expect, is that an awful lot of calls and letters and anger could have been averted by a quick response, a straightforward apology and some attention to detail in the first place. I have three letters to write on Monday.
Peter Roberts, whose road pricing petition I have been tracking lately, commented on an earlier posting today. I thought I would repeat his comments here to give them due prominence:
It has over 300,000 now and will go over the 500,000 next week.
Surely it is time the government realised the strength of feeling here. This is as much about the government’s attitude to population control and waste as roads. Whoever would have thought ten years ago we would have to fight a government who were determined to track our movements and use vast sums of our money to do so.
We already have a perfectly good form of road usage tax in the fuel duty. It rewards those who choose economical, low emission cars and penalises those who drive large thirsty vehicles. It also costs very little to administer.
The scheme proposed by the government will cost billions to introduce and administer, and for what? People do not sit on congested roads because they enjoy it, they do so because they have little option. Charging them £1.34 a mile is just not right. Of course, the government do get the added advantage of being able to track every move you make. George Orwell was about 25 years early.
Phil Taylor 