The Evening Standard today reports that the London Mayor will be increasing his charge on us by 13.3% in April. For me this means that the Mayor’s charge will be £481.02 next year. In 1999/2000, the year before the Mayor came into being, I was charged £129.07 for the Met and £45.95 for the London Fire Brigade. So the Mayor’s charge has gone up 2.75 times in seven years. Does this mean 2.75 times more police? No.
The Independent today picked up on a story being pushed by the Local Government Association. They are suggesting that more councils copy Three Rivers District Council in Hertfordshire and give parents £80 towards laundering reusable nappies rather than filling up landfill with disposables. All sounds very nice in theory; £80 is not huge amounts of cash to give to young parents and landfill costs will be reduced. In practice it sounds like an extra activity that councils do not need, it sounds like more forms to fill in, more officers to process the forms, etc. Leave it!
I am relieved to find that this brilliant suggestion comes from the Labour councillor from Dudley who leads the LGA Environment Board.
I naively thought that I might hand deliver a letter to Borough Commander, Collette Paul, this afternoon. I am keen to chase her up and find out what is happening to these Safer Neighbourhood teams that are being widely advertised but don’t seem to be here yet. There was another full page in last week’s Gazette.
How silly of me! There is no letterbox at the Police station. No opportunity to communicate with the Police there. Clearly they think that broadcasting ads is all they need to do to keep us sweet. I thought about waiting to hand the letter in to the desk officer. There was already a queue of six in front of me at 13:45pm today. I did not fancy waiting for an hour or so in the very unpleasant waiting area before being allowed behind the security doors. I went off to the Post Office and put a stamp on the envelope – much quicker. Clearly Commander Paul would rather keep her parking place in front of the station rather then using the space for a reception suite that allows more than one desk officer at a time to deal with the public.
The Evening Standard is keeping up its campaigning on rail station safety. It talks about a 38% rise in violent assaults at stations over the last five years. Ealing Broadway is listed in the Worst 20 mainline stations. Luckily it is only 18th with 60 violent crimes last year. Still that is 60 of our neighbours with their heads kicked in.
This morning the Gazette covered the full council meeting on Tuesday and its discussion of how dirty Ealing is. Most of the discussion was driven by Audit Commission figures and in particular Best Value Performance Indicators (or BVPIs in the jargon – central government targets to you and me).
In 2003/4 Ealing was the dirtiest borough in London. In spite of being the 9th highest spender at £27.41 per head it had the worst BVPI 199 (Relevant land with significant/heavy littering) score. This figure is easy to pull out from the performance indicators link on the Audit Commission’s home page.
More recent data for 2004/5 is harder to find, see spreadsheet published on 16th January. This shows that Ealing was 4/5th equal worst on BVPI 199 last year. You might call this improvement but you would not call it Queen of the Suburbs.
See also Ealing Times story.
The first thing that struck me reading the Ealing & Acton Gazette this morning was that the Mayor must have shares in it. Three full page ads from the Mayor’s empire:
He likes to spend the money twice over as he already spends £3 million a year telling us all the same stuff in the Londoner.
I notice this evening that the Ealing page of the Safer Neighbourhoods portion of the Met website has bee updated. Instead of showing that there are only 8 teams in place there is now a list of the 23 wards in Ealing. Unfortunately 15 out of 23 wards are “Team not yet in place”. I guess you might call this progress. At least they are showing intent. Only 10 weeks to go before they have to be in place to meet Ken’s commitment.
In a discussion of wealth redistribution Simon Hughes on Question Time tonight passionately told us how people in his constituency work on the minimum wage for companies that give people £100,000 bonuses and £1 million pay offs. Sounds like Ealing Council to me.
Non-executive chairmen and directors of NHS bodies play a vital role in the governance of these bodies. There is no shortage of public-spirited people who want to do these jobs. I have been turned down myself so I guess that implies that are lots of talented people that want to do them who were chosen ahead of me. But the NHS seems to want to throw more money at these people at a time when NHS budgets are under pressure. The Telegraph reports today that chairman of these bodies will be getting £30-60,000 for these part-time roles rather than the standard £21,882 now. Non-exec directors will also be getting £7,500 for 2-3 days work per month.
These jobs once had a whiff of volunteerism about them but clearly the NHS is thinking that they need to be “professionalised”. By raising these stipends the NHS is looking to buy these boards. It is hard to challenge producer interests and criticise the norms promulgated by the nomenklatura of modern British civic life if you are bought and paid for.
The article quotes both NHS Confederation and Department of Health sources who have the effrontery to make comparisons with the private sector. How can we afford a National Health Service, free at the point of delivery, if these people all want top dollar? Where is the public service ethic that is expected of frontline staff? Not in the boardroom clearly.
The nomenklatura is alive and well and looking forward to large windfalls in Ealing. The Ealing PCT Chairman, Marion Saunders, currently gets £21,882 (to rise to £30,000 to £40,000). Her background is working in Ealing Social Services. Non-exec Philip Portwood will be looking forward to £7,500 instead of £5,673. As an Ealing Councillor he already received £18,000 in allowances last year. The other non-execs come from a range of health and social care backgrounds.
Talking of Ealing PCT I received a letter from Robert Creighton, the £110K+ Chief Exec, this morning detailing the costs of their “Your NHS” publication. To their credit they have been able to get this publication out 315,000 people for only £22,000. To be curmudgeonly it does not change my two week wait for a GP’s appointment to the two days they claim. See October story. It took me a while to write to them, their response was pretty quick.
Tom Berry, Head of Campaigns & Marketing, at the Disability Rights Commission very kindly wrote to me tonight to tell me how much the “Are we taking the dis?” campaign cost. £1.2 million for a national billboard and press campaign out of a £22 million overall budget for the DRC.
The DRC was set up by an act of Parliament to eliminate discrimination against disabled people, promote equal opportunities and encourage best practice. I am not sure that their campaign is a good use of this money I am afraid.
Phil Taylor 