Author: Phil

On Saturday afternoon the Ealing Central and Acton Constituency Labour Party selected Rupa Huq as their candidate to fight Conservative Angie Bray at the next general election. Rupa is a local girl to the tips of her toes – she lives in my ward Northfield, and a pleasant woman she is.

One thing I find slightly strange about the way she presents herself is her banging on about being “deputy mayoress”. Rupa even uses a photo of herself in the council chamber with her ribbon and badge on her twitter account. In a piece in the Guardian she said “I have become deputy mayoress of the London borough of Ealing”. This is a strange form of words. Cllr John Gallagher was appointed Deputy Mayor, being a long serving South Acton councillor. As he does not have a wife, he nominated Rupa to be his consort which is a slightly different thing from being deputy mayor.

In her Guardian piece Rupa burbled on about public service:

I’m talking about serving in local government, the selfless calling to represent your local community. The issue has become central to my own life: in recent weeks I have become deputy mayoress of the London borough of Ealing. The result has been an eye-opener as some of the vestiges of pomp, ceremony and patronage seem to be alive and well – despite our 13-year entanglement with the non-hierarchical, New Labour-induced New Britain.

Now I am sure that Rupa works hard as a university lecturer and is an all round good stick but she has never served in local government except to ride in the Mayor’s car and eat the odd vol-au-vent accompanying John Gallagher on his duties. Rupa did indeed try to become a councillor in 2010 but failed. You can see the results here. She got 1,754 votes.

Both Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma (1994/5) and Ealing North MP Stephen Pound (1995/6) were Mayors of the London Borough of Ealing so I guess Rupa feels that maybe she will get a boost too through her municipal connections but she might make her role a bit clearer.

I live in the Ealing Central and Acton constituency and I will be working hard over the next year and a half to get our excellent MP Angie Bray re-elected. I wish Rupa good luck but I will be making it my business to make sure that Rupa sticks to the facts.

Speak up for decency in British politics, and add your name to @Ed_Miliband 's – http://t.co/06cfacQoTr

— Sitarah Anjum (@SitarahAnjum) October 1, 2013

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Speak up for decency in British politics, and add your name to Ed Miliband's – http://t.co/hEwrXeWWmn

— Yoel Gordon (@ElthornePR) October 1, 2013

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I did not like the Mail story on Ralph Miliband. That said his son is being being entirely cycnical in using the interest that story has received as a tool for harvesting e-mails from the public. Local Labour councillors are joining in like good soliders. Apparently Labour has collected 10,000 e-mails. If you are foolish enough to follow the links above you will get to this webpage:

Not only is this ploy cynical but Labour is breaking the law. This line at the bottom of this is not sufficient for the Information Commissioner.

The Labour Party and its elected representatives may contact you using the information you supply. If you do not wish to be contacted, please write to the Communications Unit at The Labour Party, Labour Central, Kings Manor, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6PA.

Guidance from the Information Commissioner says:

Organisations must not make it difficult to opt out, for example
by asking customers to complete a form or confirm in writing.
It is good practice to allow the individual to respond directly to
the message – in other words, to use the same simple method
as required for the soft opt-in. In any event, as soon as a
customer has clearly said that they don’t want the texts or
emails, the organisation must stop, even if the customer hasn’t
used its preferred method of communication.

All you will get for “adding your name” is Labour junk mail.

Back in April last year when a new contractor, Enterprise, took over the Borough’s street cleaning contract it fell apart spectacularly. A year later and a larger group called Amey took over Enterprise on 8th April 2013. 17 months on and we are still not getting the service we should be getting.

This graph shows the progress that Ealing has made with street cleaning over those 17 months.

In its last year of running the contract, even when it knew it had lost the re-tendering competition, May Gurney got 88% of our streets clean first time. Their contractual target was 90%. At this level our street cleaning wasn’t perfect but it was good. The Conservatives were glad that our legacy of a clean borough had been maintained.

Enterprise/Amey has had a very patchy record. After the initial bags-in-the-street crisis of last April the service went off at the the end of last year and again this spring. It has improved since its May nadir of 65% clean first time to 72% in August. On average over the first 17 months of the contract 30% of Ealing’s streets have been unacceptably dirty across the whole borough every month for 17 months.

The Enterprise contract requires the contractor to get at least 95% of streets grade A clean. The original concept of the contract was that this would happen on first clean. Instead Enterprise has consistently only managed 70%.

There is a similar story with missed collections. May Gurney consistently got the number of missed collections down below 1,000 per month for the last year of its contract. Enterprise/Amey has averaged 4,000 missed collections per month over 17 months and has never got them below 2,000. That is a lot of phone calls from miserable residents that go like this:

To report a missed refuse or recycling collection press 1.

All of this leads me to question does the council really care about this? Has it concluded that a bit rubbish is better than a lot rubbish? Has Amey no interest in this contract? We certainly have not heard anymore about Cllr Mahfouz’s spot checks. Has he done any lately? If he has they haven’t achieved very much.

This graph compares PM10 particulate pollution on Horn Lane to the Western Avenue and the Hanger Lane Gyratory since Angie Bray went to visit the Horn Lane goods yard on 12th July to find out first hand why this area is so badly polluted. The picture shows that apart from the fact that the Horn Lane monitoring site was broken down for a couple of weeks in late July and early August Horn Lane is often 4 times worse than these two very busy roads and even spikes up to 6 times.

Today is the first bi-monthly meeting between residents and operators. These meetings were one of the actions coming out of the first session in July. The graph shows that we still have a long way to go.

Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, Labour’s Transport and Environment man, often makes statements that defy reality. Today’s is another. In response to my suggestion that the council is taking liberties with CPZ charges Mahfouz says:

Our figures show that, even when taking into account the most recent increase, the cost of administering residential parking is still more that the income generated. The difference is subsidised by council tax payers, many of whom don’t even own a car or live in a CPZ.

This is quite unbelievable. Can the council really be that inefficient? When it charges £80 or £50 for a parking permit does that activity really consume all of that cash? When you have to keep £30 worth of 60p visitor’s vouchers in a drawer in case a tradesman calls the council isn’t making any money out of that? The £4.50 paid for a daily voucher really just disappears in a puff of smoke as soon as it reaches the council’s grasp? The permits have doubled in price. Some of the vouchers have gone up by 350%. Meanwhile the council’s costs have gone down. They withdrew costly face-to-face transactions in February. The CEOs now enforce CPZs on motorbikes. The new phone service saves money and offloads the payment charge on to the customer. The vouchers have been standardised saving inventory and admin costs. I could go on.

There are three possible explanations for Mahfouz’s statement:

– Cllr Mahfouz is telling a lie
– Cllr Mahfouz really doesn’t understand the numbers and is just talking nonsense
– the council is so wasteful that that the £3.24 million a year it collects from CPZs is all used up on operational costs.

I have asked that these numbers are laid out in detail at a meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee so that Mahfouz’s silly assertion can be tested. Note that Mahfouz chooses not to back up his argument with any numbers. He is talking nonsense.

Good news today that Ealing has been shortlisted as one of six boroughs to receive funding from a £100 million budget set up by the Mayor of London to create “mini-Holland” areas with exceptional facilities for cycling. The council’s officers are good at bidding for these pots of money and they are to be congratulated for getting us this far with this exciting scheme.

The London Mayor is a keen cyclist and has prioritised the spending of our transport Pounds in London on cycling, exemplified by his £913 million
“Crossrail for the bike” vision.

You might think that with the council leader and transport spokeman’s extravagant lycra wearing that they would have directed some funds to cycling rather than to the uneconomic car park in Southall that they opened last Friday. No. Essentially the London Borough of Ealing spends nothing on cycling. Any cycling funds, whether revenue or capital come almost exclusively from TfL and the London Mayor.

This information is hard to get hold of because the council’s expensive comms people are not always as careful as they should be to point out the source of the council’s funds.

I asked the following question (number 35) at the June council meeting:

Could the portfolio holder list the revenue and capital spending projects related to cycling and encouraging cycling in the 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2013/14 financial years and state the source of funds for each of these?

Officers gave a very incomplete answer that related to capital only. It is badly drafted and contains a number of errors. What you can see is that out of the £4-5 million a year spent on cycling capital projects in Ealing the council contributes less than £10K per annum. I only got this answer after I chased for it and it has never been published by the council.

At the next council meeting I asked the question again to get the revenue side of the picture. This time the council lost all of my questions. I finally got an answer on 13th August from officers having first asked it on 11th June. Again this has not been published. The first bullet of the answer says it all really:

My understanding is that Cllr. Taylor now requires information on the source and allocation of funds from revenue budgets related to encouraging cycling in the three financial years from April 2011 until the end of March 2014.

1. Almost all the revenue funding used to encourage and support cycling in the Borough comes from Transport for London through the Local Implementation Plan 2011 – 2014.
2. Of this, the majority comes from the Direct Support for Cycling programme of activities. Some other activities are funded through the School Travel programme (such as cycle incentive schemes, BMX and cycle sport instruction) and the Smarter Travel programme (such as supporting the SACA Birmingham – Southall charity ride) . Both School Travel and Smarter Travel programmes are also funded through the Local Implementation Plan 2011 – 2014 from Transport for London. In addition £8,000 has been made available through the LIP for National Bike Week programmes over the three years in question: this year this funding went towards the Ticket to Ride cycle ride event.
3. For the years in question LB ealing has been designated by TfL as a “Biking Borough”. This entitled receipt of additional Biking Borough funding, primarily capital funding to the ealing Broadway Cycle Hub, and also for residential cycle parking. It also included revenue budgets for promotional materials and publicity of approximately £7,000 per annum, and £4,000 for After School Clubs, as well as small amounts of c.£1,500 to augment activities funded in the DSC programme.
4. The Direct Support for Cycling (DSC) programme won the National Transport Awards “Achievements in Cycling” award in 2012. A full account of the DSC programme in 2011/2012 is given in “DSC 9”, the last of the annual reports we have prepared specifically on this programme.
5. The budget for the Direct Support for Cycling (DSC) programme has been £200,000 in the current year and last financial year, and £190,000 in 2011/2012.
6. DSC spend in each of these years has been on a variety of projects. The main area of spend is on schools cycle training, mainly for Years 5 and 6. The second main area of spend is the programme of cycle training for adults, families and children not trained in school. Cycle training is to National Standards specified by the Department for Transport and referred to as Bikeability.
7. The breakdown for projected spend this financial year is as follows:
(a) Schools cycle training: £95K
(b) Adults, families and non-schoolchildren: £50K
(c) Dr Bike cycle health checks £20K
(d) GP referral cycle training programme £6K. While we have the assistance in staff hours from colleagues in Public Health, we do not receive any funding from this source.
(e) Southall Women’s Cycle Club £5K
(f) Training in Safe Urban Driving (Cyclist and pedestrian awareness) to HGV drivers employed by the Council: £2K
(g) Survey and evaluation of training: £2k
(h) Allocation to fund LB Ealing staff: £20K (in the previous two years this has not been required).
8. However, we have just heard that TfL has awarded an additional £165,000 to LB Ealing under the TfL Borough Cycling Programme for 2013/2014. Of this £15K will go to monitoring, £80K to cycle parking, and £70,000 to cycle training. There will therefore be an additional £70 K available to elements of the DSC programme.
9. In the three years referred to we have also used c.£6,000 from two Section 106 agreements to fund the “Keep Riding through Winter” scheme in the DSC programme.
10. In 2011/2012 we used £2,000 from a Ward Forum for additional schools cycle training.
11. Apart from these sources, the Council has bid to Transport for London for a major project known as the “Mini-Holland”, which would be primarily capital but also include revenue funding for cycling if successful. We will learn the result of this bid at the end of 2013.

So that it then. No amount of Lycra adorned photo opportunities can hide the fact that Ealing spends nothing on cycling. The Mayor and TfL do. The council doesn’t.