Author: Phil

Ex-Mayor Livingstone Public sector waste

Another stupid tax

The London Safety Camera Partnership is another stupid bit of London government that costs us a lot but achieves very little. They also hate scrutiny and take the longest time to fess up to what they do.

In the summer I was harassing them to publish their figures. They had not published any on their website since their 2002/3 ones. I wrote to them in August and they finally managed to put them up on their website on 16th October. See PDF. Six and a half months after your year end is a little pedestrian I think. Still no figures for the two years before.

What the figures show is that the eye watering speeding fines you get simply get spent on their costs and very little is left behind to do anything that you or I might actually value. Last year LSCP collected £9,455,820 in fines. They spent most of it in costs of £8,832,898 leaving a surplus of £622,922 or just 6.6% of their income. It is one thing collecting fines but to waste them all in collecting the money in the first place is pretty tragic.

They are not good at being transparent with their minutes either although they do give occasional insights to their mindset. They put up a big batch of minutes on 5th January when the website was set up and then another batch on the 2nd August. The last meeting covered is 30th June. God knows what they have been doing since then. Still, you can actually find some laughs in the minutes such as this gem from the 44th board report.

David Kessly (TfL) concluded that having such a hefty surplus (£710,000) was not the ideal predicament, particularly when it is all returned to the DfT.

Translating this statement into real language you get: As a representative of TfL I regret that we mismanaged our finances such that we made a surplus which we had to return to central government. If we had done our job properly we would have found some wasteful activity to spend this surplus on such that we ended up with a near zero surplus. You see these partnerships are meant to return their surpluses to the Department for Transport but the people in charge would rather waste your cash. Hence their £800K ad campaign earlier this year (see previous posting).

Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor apologises for “misunderstanding”

Post author By Phil
Post date 23rd Dec 2006
No Comments on Mayor apologises for “misunderstanding”

I received a letter today from the London Mayor apologising for a misunderstanding relating to his swanking around at a charity auction earlier in the year. When I first wrote to him to ask where the £10K was coming from he said it was coming from his charity account. Now we find out that only £5K is coming from there and £5K is coming out of the Londoners’ budget. Whilst I think the Londoner is a waste of our money I would prefer that the Mayor made up the shortfall from his own pocket.

Is the Mayor a porky pie teller or is he just bad with money? The sequence of events is:

Mayor bids £10K of our money at a charity dinner on 12th September
Evening Standard reports it 22nd September
I write to Mayor 2nd October to challenge him to reveal where the money is coming from
Mayor cynically uses full 20 working days service standard to delay response for a month
I get a response on 2nd November (see previous posting) explaining that the £10K will come form the Mayor’s charity account
on 25th November it becomes apparent that the charity account did not have enough cash in it to cover the whole £10K and only £5K had been taken out of it (see previous posting). I write again
Mayor cynically uses full 20 working days service standard to delay response for the best part of a month
I get a response on 23rd December apologising for the misunderstanding.

Maybe the Mayor thought that he could fob me off with a glib answer when I first asked the question. Now he is apologising for the misunderstanding. Either way I wish he would spend our money on valuable stuff we want not on posing as a big philanthropist. He can do that with his own money.

Tram

Stop the Tram

Croydon Tramlink Lots of people are signing up to Graham Weeks’ anti-tram petition at the No 10 website. Follow the link to take part. Graham got his picture in the Gazette this week. Well done.

As of the time of writing 443 people had signed up including council leader Jason Stacey, Tory PPC for Ealing Acton Angie Bray and Northfield councillor David Millican.

Graham’s petition reads:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop any more money being wasted on the plan for a West London Tram.”

Ealing and Northfield

Stacey responds to SEAL

Some Northfield residents have been upset by the proposed or actual replacement of Edwardian street lights with modern “hockey stick” columns by the Council. Northfield councillors have been receiving a number of e-mails from residents, especially those of Salisbury Road. There is even a group called Save Ealing’s Antique Lampposts (SEAL) apparently. This issue has been discussed by the Conservative group on the council and here is the latest from council leader, Jason Stacey:

We are trying to work through this issue as we speak but there are some complex technical issues as well as financial ones which we are trying to work through and to be frank these are not proving easy.

As you are probably aware, the previous administration entered into a PFI contract with EDF to modernise all street lighting in the borough. This contract is effectively coming to the end of the first year of a four year programme. For most roads in the borough this new street lighting will take the form of the ‘hockey stick’ style lighting but as part of the contract some roads were allocated the new ‘heritage style’ lighting. Needless to say upon reviewing this, this applies literally to only a few roads in the contract and does not cover many of the roads with the old style heritage lamps which exist at present.

The new administration has asked for the costs to be drawn up which would enable us in these roads to install the new heritage style lamps instead of the hockey style. The costings we have received back is that it will cost £800,000 per year over the life of the four year contract – a total of £3.2 million. There is undoubtedly therefore an issue with this cost as effectively £800,000 represents around 10% of our available total capital expenditure for the coming financial year.

Many residents have also suggested to us that the existing heritage lighting be retained; perhaps with some restoration work on them to bring them back to former glory. This seemed to me on the face of it a good option as we could maybe escape the costings set out above and set aside some budget for improvement work to the existing lighting stock.

Unfortunately, it seems upon further investigation that this too has problems. One of the reasons why the previous administration undertook this PFI contract was that our street lighting stock did not meet EU regulations surrounding the quality, height and strength of lighting that it supposed to be emitted. We are required as a council to conform with these regulations and one of the problems raised is that we cannot get the old style heritage lighting (whatever we do to modify it) to at the end of the process to conform to these EU regulations.

Work is still continuing on all of this, but I just wanted to highlight to you some of the issues we have been having with this and we are working on possible options on the way forward. It may be that after everything there is no way round this on contractual, financial and regulation grounds, but I know that this will not be welcomed by residents in some areas and, as you say, may take something away from the distinct character of the area. It is also possible, for example, that we move all affected roads to the end of the programme to enable us to gather the one off cost together to meet the cost of having heritage instead of hockey style lighting. I hope early in the New Year to give you a definitive answer on where we are going with this.

Ealing and Northfield

Jason Stacey on Northfield

Council leader Jason Stacey visited the ward on 30th November to do one of his “Reality checks”. I was busy interviewing potential new headteachers for Little Ealing Primary School that day so I could not be there. The other two Northfield councillors, David Millican and Mark Reen were there along with council officers and representatives of ECT, the council’s refuse, recycling and street cleaning contractor.

Jason’s somments were published on the council’s website in the last day or two, see below:

Ealing Council needs to do more to tackle the issues of graffiti and dumped rubbish from streets in the borough’s Northfields ward.

Council Leader Jason Stacey visited the area for one of his Reality Checks recently and found a number of walls and street furniture covered in graffiti.

He found some shopkeepers and residents need to be educated about when and where they should leave their black bags.

However, he said overall the standards of street cleaning in the area by the council’s contractors ECT generally good.

The places he visited were: Midhurst Road, Mayfield Avenue, Ridley Avenue, Northcroft Road, Alley by number 47 Belsize Avenue/junction with Northcroft Road, Belsize Avenue, Derwent Yard, Derwent Road, Overdale Road, Weymouth Avenue, Airedale Road, South Ealing Road, North Road, Chandos Avenue, Little Ealing Lane, Niagara Avenue, Blondin Avenue and Cramner Avenue.

Ealing envirocrime

Envirocrime walkabout

On Monday I spent an hour with Ricky Wright, our ward’s envirocrime prevention officer. We started off at Northfield tube and spent an hour in the southern part of the ward ending up at South Ealing tube station.

One issue that Ricky is trying to tackle is getting the shop keepers at the south end of South Ealing Road to make sure that they handle their waste properly. Some of then did not have commercial waste agreements until Ricky started chasing them. Some of those who have signed up with the council’s own trade waste service seem to be getting a poor service and if the council’s service is not really hot then it is too easy for traders to blame the council rather than make sure they look after their own waste properly.

The bottom line is that councils have not been responsible for trade waste for years. Businesses are responsible for storing their waste on their own premises and disposing of it properly. If you see a trader misbehaving then please challenge them or call the Ealing council customer services line – 020 8825 6000.

Outside South Ealing tube station a resident approached us to talk about the state of the little park just there. It appears it is being increasingly used by drinkers and drug takers – one bench was surrounded by cans and we even saw a syringe in a flower bed. Yuck! Ricky passed the info on to the Safer Neighbourhood Team.

On my way back to my car I spotted a fly tip of roofing material on Weymouth Avenue and called it in myself. Checking this morning it was still there so customer services got the Mr Angry treatment from me I am afraid. They are usually pretty good at moving these quickly so I was disappointed that this one was still there 2 days after I called it in. Hopefully it will be gone tomorrow. I’ll check.

High tax, low pay Public sector waste

Prescott’s sign

The Conservative party are today highlighting the cost of changing Prescott’s job title. A new sign for his office cost £645 and new business cards cost £726. The new sign reads “Deputy Prime Minister’s Office” instead of “Office of the Deputy Prime Minister”.

You might think so what? But in high tax, low pay Britain somebody spent the year on the minimum wage doing 37.5 hour weeks to earn £10,342.50 and pay £931.79 in tax. Add in National Insurance and you can see the correlation. When you have a government that spends so freely you even have to tax the low paid hard to pay for the privileges of our masters.

Ealing envirocrime

Council sorts out corner of Ridley and Fulmer

Post author By Phil
Post date 18th Dec 2006
No Comments on Council sorts out corner of Ridley and Fulmer

In another example of the council being more pro-active and sorting Northfield’s environment out the council’s contractors moved onto the site at the corner of Fulmer Way and Ridley Avenue last Thursday.

The exercise was led by the Envirocrime protection team. You can see me chatting with David Stokes, one of the team leaders, below. As an ex-park ranger he finds it hard not to be hands on so the opportunity to tear into some undergrowth with a power tool was more than he could bear.

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The site had been used as a dumping ground so first of all a lorry load of sofas and the such-like had to be cleared away. Someone had dumped some old asbestos roofing – this is typically pretty safe but it still needs to be handled properly so a specialist Asbestos Consultants, was sent out to do this. If you’ve ever seen anyone safely dispose of an asbestos fence, then you know how much work is involved. The broken down fence was removed along with some of the larger shrubs. We left some of the budlea for the butterflies next summer. A new fence was then put up around the site to make it look smarter and to keep fly-tippers and drinkers out.

Ricky Wright, who is the Northfield Envirocrime Protection Officer, led the exercise. He reports to David. Ricky traced the owners of the land, wrote to them and served a notice under Section 80 of the Environmental Protection Act notice (this relates to abatement of nuisance). The notice was not complied with so he arranged for the council’s contractors to carry out the works in default. The council will now seek to collect its costs from the owners. Ultimately they will simply put a charge on the property so that costs are recovered when the owner gets around to selling it.

This kind of action takes meticulous work from officers and unfortunately it takes some time to jump through the legal hoops. You can see the almost finished result below. I talked to both of the immediately adjacent neighbours who were thrilled to see the work being done. Well done to all.

Communications disease Health, housing and adult social services

NHS logo bill doubles

In another example of warped priorities in Labour’s management of the NHS the Daily Mail is reporting this morning that NHS spending on policing its logo has doubled in the last four years. The information comes from a written answer to shadow health minister, Andrew Lansley.

In 2001-02 this spending was £179,807 but by last year it had risen to £333,996.

In fact they even have a whole website devoted to it.

Health, housing and adult social services

Ealing Times hatchet job

The Ealing Times has done a piece on me today. You would probably call it a hatchet job.

It is an entirely respectable argument to point out that Labour are using the language of reducing health inequalities to direct NHS resources at their own voters. The traditional approach to the allocation of NHS resources has been clinical need. Any combat medic or A&E doctor has to practise “triage”. The logic of tackling health inequality does take you in the other direction.

The language I used was easy misinterpret but Benedict Moore Bridger of the ET is really taking the Mickey. When you try to highlight how New Labour are singing the song of health inequalities while at the same time reducing health spending in Ealing you might think that the local paper would spot the real issue not just have a go at someone’s turn of phrase.