Author: Phil

Over Christmas (yes, I know!) there has been a consultation running on the plans for the Crossrail station at Ealing Broadway. In an exercise of appalling expectation management these plans are two years late and are now presented as a fait accompli. The Crossrail Act 2008 effectively makes Crossrail its own planning authority so the current exercise doesn’t really have teeth I am afraid.

In theory the consultation closes today but the council will still record people’s comments and they will be included in the report that is considered by the planning committee in the next few weeks.

Local Conservatives very much welcome that the Government has pressed ahead with the Crossrail scheme in spite of harsh economic conditions. Now it is up to our local Council to make the most of it. In a number of ways the scheme now proposed by Crossrail for Ealing Broadway station is not good enough.

On the positive side the scheme provides twice as much space in its concourse as the existing station and will provide step free access from the street down to the platforms via lifts, primarily for the use of mobility impaired passengers.

On the negative side there will no escalators, as originally envisaged, so most people will still be using stairs to get down to the platforms unless they want to wait some time for the lifts. Also the new eastern access proposed for emergency purposes will not be available for day-to-day use which will be a lost opportunity for many Ealing residents who approach the station from the south east on foot.

This proposal does not specifically show us how the new station forecourt at Ealing Broadway will be laid out. In particular many residents will be keen to see how facilities for cars to drop off passengers are provided. It is appropriate to prioritise pedestrians and bus passengers immediately adjacent to the station entrance. It is not appropriate to banish people who are dropped by cars.

The thing that Ealing residents will notice most is the stark entrance proposed to the building. The modern, upward tilting canopy bears no relation to its surroundings. It may well succeed in signposting the Crossrail station and but it will devalue Ealing’s town centre.

To me the proposed canopy sticks out like a sore thumb. Ealing town centre’s predominantly Edwardian architecture and Haven Green require a more sympathetic solution. The station should welcome people to Ealing rather screaming “CROSSRAIL” at the top of its voice across Haven Green.

The Labour party is delivering this leaflet in Acton right now.

Most of what is written on the left of this card are statutory education duties that a Conservative administration would have been doing anyway. Nice of Labour to take credit for the Acton High School 6th Form which was kicked off on 2nd December 2008 by a Tory cabinet I was sitting on. The primary school expansion programme was also kicked off by the Conservatives and it was our group that decided that the primary school expansion programme should go forward with high quality buildings and no Portakabins in playgrounds. Most of the money for this programme has come from the government, not the council. We are pleased that Labour has carried on with this programme where we left off but it is pretty tacky to take credit for the whole thing.

Much of what happens in local government is uncontroversial. This kind of dividing lines nonsense is just another big Labour lie.

Looking at the right hand box, the local Tories also wholeheartedly approve of the Labour group freezing council tax for four years (like just about every other council in the country). It might be nice if Labour acknowledged the £20 million of council tax freeze grant it has pocketed from the government to pay for it in large part (which is why most other councils also did the same thing). We might have gone further but I am certain that we would not have put up the council tax at all at the very least.

The “Tories attack Acton families” logo shows you just who is the nasty, name calling party in this borough at least.

Actonians might wish to consider:

• it was the Tories who kicked of the South Acton Estate regeneration
• it was the Tories who kicked off the Town Hall and swimming baths refurbishment
• it is the Tories who are supporting the Acton Arts Centre Project
• it was the Tories (Boris Johnson) who put the Oak Tree mural on the Vale
• it was the Tories (Boris Johnson) who put the ACTON sign on the railway bridge
• it was the Tories (Angie Bray) who have taken the lead on getting the pollution associated with the Horn Lane good yard under control
• it is the current Tory-led Coalition (as Labour loves to call it) that is getting on with Crossrail which will keep Acton linked in to a prosperous London.

On the other hand it was the Labour councillors on the planning committee, including East Acton’s very own Kate Crawford, who voted en bloc to push through the Oaks scheme in spite of the well argued planning points raised by the Conservative councillors.

It is a Labour council that is skimping on Acton’s roads and leaving them looking broken and dirty.

No-one is “attacking Acton families” although Actonians might rightfully conclude that they have 9 pretty useless Labour councillors who don’t seem to fight very hard for Acton and are led by a leader who lives in Acton but keeps dumping on it.

The Labour party paid for someone to push this through my door today whilst we were in the park, Walpole Park as it happens. Let’s take apart Labour’s spin and lies.

Let’s start with the “Investing” box. The council spends almost nothing on cycling. It merely rebrands the London Mayor’s spending on cycling as its own. The cycle hub was paid for by Transport for London, not the council. It would certainly have happened if the Tories were in power.

Not quite sure what they mean by “a new transport interchange at the station”. There is a modernisation of the railway bit of the station going to happen with Crossrail and a new frontage. Hardly a new transport interchange and all paid for out of the Crossrail project. Nothing to do with the council. The council might have insisted on escalators, an exit to the east of the station and a more sympathetic frontage but all three of these have slipped through it grasp. When the Tories were in power we kept a close eye on Crossrail with a scrutiny panel. I would hope we would have got a better deal for Ealing out of Crossrail than this council has.

The Walpole Park line particularly rankles with me as I kicked the project off in 2008. The early stages of these things take a while. It was a Conservative administration that allocated the council’s share of the money for this and I personally met the Heritage Lottery Fund to argue the case for this project, more here. It is great that the Labour council has continued this project (it was so far advanced it would have been hard to stop frankly) but to try to claim it as a uniquely Labour achievement is simply unjust.

Much of what happens in local government is uncontroversial. Good ideas prosper hopefully but take a while to work through the system. More than 4 years often. This kind of dividing lines nonsense is just another big Labour lie.

The current Labour administration has had little flexibility in capital spending, like ours before, due to the demands of school expansion. Where it has had latitude it has spent £2.5 million on an empty car park in Southall and £10 million on new offices for council staff. The car park really was their idea and one we consistently fought. The officers tried to interest us in building them new offices, we said no. Funny how these two don’t appear in the leaflets.

Looking at the right hand box, the local Tories also wholeheartedly approve of the Labour group freezing council tax for four years (like just about every other council in the country). It might be nice if Labour acknowledged the £20 million of council tax freeze grant it has pocketed from the government to pay for it in large part (which is why most other councils also did the same thing). We might have gone further but I am certain that we would not have put up the council tax at all at the very least.

The “Tories attack Ealing families” logo simply shows you just who is the nasty, name calling party in this borough at least. No-one is “attacking Ealing families” unless you call leaving Ealing’s roads unmended and dirty an attack on families. I wouldn’t use that language. I would say that the Labour party is lying to “Ealing families” on a massive scale though.

Ealing’s council leader, Cllr Julian Bell, has used his last opportunity in 2013 to write in the Gazette to return to the NHS and Ealing’s A&E closures. Labour has been trying to get away with its big NHS lie ever since the 2010 general election. This press release from Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma is typical. Labour’s big NHS lie was the basis of Onkar Sahota’s GLA campaign and it will get repeated all through the next 17 months until May 2015.

Bell used his New Year message to discuss a matter over which he has little if no control to the total exclusion of anything he has any responsibility for such as the poor state of our roads or the litter in our streets. All very dull bread and butter matters and nothing you can take through the courts on the public purse.

As I have explained before the NHS changes in Ealing follow on directly from Labour party policies that were spelt out in their 2010 manifesto. Anyone with any knowledge of NHS finances knows that the Shaping a Healthier Future programme is being driven by the Nicholson challenge – a programme put in place in 2009 by the then Labour Secretary of Health, Andrew Burnham. It is designed to take out £20 billion in efficiencies and put it back into new services in order that the NHS can deal with new demand within a flat real terms budget.

It is quite easy to prove that this is Labour’s policy – they wrote it down on page 4:3 of their 2010 manifesto:

This is the Nicholson Challenge in black and white in the Labour manifesto.

Labour’s big NHS lie is that it would all be different under Labour. Yet the policy constraints that have given rise to Shaping a Healthier Future were all put in place by the previous Labour government; the Nicholson Challenge and the 35 year PFI at the West Middlesex.

Shaping a Healthier Future came up with a solution for North West London (NWL) that was manifestly unfair to Ealing, a solution that was opposed by all local politicians. The NHS NWL bureaucrats came up with this not the government. The courts agreed that the NHS NWL proposal was reasonable and lawful. The Independent Reconfiguration Panel agreed with NHS NWL subject to a couple of caveats. The only decision maker who has done anything at all to mitigate the effect of the Shaping a Healthier proposals on Ealing is the Secretary of State, Jeremy Hunt.

Bell’s last paragraph make his intention clear:

Well now we know the truth and the people of Ealing have only one recourse left to them – to hit the government where it hurts in the ballot box at the local and European elections on the 22 May 2014 and at the General Election in May 2015.

Bell knows he is lying to you and that his party is not proposing to find another £20 billion to undo Nicholson. Bell, Sahota and Sharma really are that blatant.

I didn’t get a chance to speak last night in the NHS debate at full council. In my speech I wanted to explore the policy background to Shaping a Healthier Future (SaHF). A bit wonkish maybe but if you look at the history of this project and the policy environment it becomes clear quite how venal Labour has been over the future of our hospitals.

Anyone with any knowledge of NHS finances knows that the SaHF programme is being driven by the Nicholson challenge – a programme put in place in 2009 by the then Labour Secretary of Health, Andrew Burnham. It is designed to take out £20 billion in efficiencies and put it back into new services in order that the NHS can deal with new demand within a flat real terms budget.

It is quite easy to prove that this is Labour’s policy – they wrote it down on page 4:3 of their 2010 manifesto:

This is the Nicholson Challenge in black and white in the Labour manifesto.

It easy is to show too that this is the driver for Shaping a Healthier Future. Go to page 17 of the consultation document where it says:

So Labour’s own policy has led directly to NHS NWL needing to find £1 billion of savings in North West London and hence this programme.

Now you might well say that the Conservatives didn’t have to keep Labour’s policy and that is a fair criticism. I might add though that Labour isn’t proposing to find £20 billion to make Nicholson go away and that this sum is not far short of all council tax collected every year or all business rates collected every year. It is a truly large sum of money.

What is clear though is that if Labour had been in power the overall financial settlement for the NHS would not have been any better, indeed it might have been worse as the Conservatives have made keeping overall NHS spending rising in real terms into a totemic promise. SaHF would probably not have looked very different under a Labour government as it would have been the same set of managers working to the same set of constraints.

If it wasn’t hard enough for the health service managers designing a response to Nicholson they also had to contend with the fact that Labour’s Alan Milburn signed off on a 35 PFI deal for the West Middlesex Hospital in 2001. Against that fixed constraint Ealing Hospital for one was always going to lose out.

So Labour’s “Tories close your hospitals” line is pretty much upside down. It is rare that a policy is so clearly and easily traceable from its effects on the ground back to the original decision. The stage was set by Labour and the only person listening to our borough is Jeremy Hunt.

Ealing’s recycled plastic bottle Christmas tree has been causing a minor stir this week. No doubt Labour’s councillor Bassam Mahfouz, who holds the Transport and Environment portfolio, thought that it would be bracing and improving for residents to be hectored about re-cycling at Christmas. It is quite right for the council to promote re-cycling for many different reasons. It saves the council money and allows it to keep council tax low. It often provides high quality waste streams that can be used to displace new raw materials and save energy. All good stuff.

But Mahfouz’s Christmas tree is pretty insulting if you are a tax payer. It looks pretty enough at night to be sure but during the day it looks drab and the railings around it are reminiscent of road works. The insult is the mighty £12,961 cost of this project.

I don’t know how you get to a place in your head where you think this is a reasonable way to spend taxpayers’ money. The latest figures I could find (2011) for earnings of residents of the Ealing Central and Acton constituency where this tree has been placed state that the average (median) annual gross pay of residents is £31,198. With a personal allowance of £9,440 this tax year and all the rest of this income being taxed at 20% the average person is paying £4,352 of tax in the constituency. By my reckoning it took three Ealing taxpayers a year to pay enough tax to pay for this nonsense. Never again please.

Labour’s favourite insult at the full council meeting last night is that the Conservatives are out of touch. Perhaps Mahfouz should look in the mirror.

Last night the council’s Property Strategy was due to be discussed at the council’s cabinet meeting. This title is code for selling council assets like day care centres to build three new offices for council staff in Acton, Greenford and Southall. In the event this element of the report was withdrawn without discussion:

To seek delegated authority to acquire 42 Lower Boston Road, Hanwell W7 2ND

It did seem to be out of place. It is a land acquisition to support the expansion of the adjacent St Mark’s primary school in Hanwell. Sure it is a property transaction but unrelated to the rest of the property strategy.

It is a matter of public record (go to Land Registry and pay £3) that this land is yet another part of Ealing’s GLA member, Onkar Sahota’s, extensive property empire, more here.

After council leader Julian Bell and Sahota’s dealing over his planning permission for Castlebar Road you might think that council would either be steering well clear of any transaction with Sahota or doing it in a totally transparent way.

It may well be that Onkar Sahota owns some land that St Mark’s needs. Given the history, the transaction cannot be waved through hidden on gold papers in an obscure corner of a cabinet report.