Author: Phil

In response to my letter of two weeks ago Labour portfolio holder Bassam Mahfouz has been writing in the Gazette this week. Somehow the political assistant to the Labour group managed to get a name check on a letter that was clearly written in Mahfouz’s shouty style. Residents will be appalled to be reminded after all of Labour’s dramatisation of the cuts that the council can somehow still afford to provide political assistants to political groups on the council.

Getting back to Mahfouz’s letter let’s take a closer look. He says:

As usual with Councillor Taylor, he has not let the facts get in the way of a good rant.

If you are going to accuse someone of ranting you might avoid using twice as many words as them in your reply.

Mahfouz then goes on to address my argument, which is a refreshing change for him. He says:

The changes to CPZ charges in Ealing reflect the fact that under the Tories, residents who did not have a CPZ were massively subsidising those who did.

More than one in three households in our borough do not even own a car and it cannot be right that their council tax should be subsidising those who not only have their own car but also benefit from having a CPZ to park in.

The judgement in the Barnet case found that it was illegal for the council to raise parking charges to fund other services. If he actually looked into the issue, he would know that in Ealing the CPZ charges do not even cover their own costs.

Note that Mahfouz is asserting here without presenting any evidence. I have laid out my evidence and cited my sources. In my previous blog posting I showed how the council had argued three years ago that it was subsidising CPZ users to the tune of £500K – £1 million in 2009/10 at the end of the Tories’ four year freeze on parking charges. But, if you look at the figures in a little more detail it seems that most of this apparent subsidy is created by including £600K of capital costs in the running costs of CPZs. This is plain ridiculous. The one off cost of implementing new CPZs should not be included in any fair assessment of ongoing running costs. It is also worth noting that a pretty generous allowance of £500K of corporate overheads was included. What business in the real world would carry almost 40% corporate overheads on a turnover of £1.39 million? These numbers show that in 2009/10 the CPZs were pretty much paying for themselves and if they weren’t it was because they were making a ridiculous contribution to corporate overheads. Since then costs have gone down and income has shot up 133%. There is a massive difference between CPZ operating income and expenditure only it is a massive profit not a massive subsidy.

Typically of Mahfouz the last half of his letter is irrelevant to the CPZ topic I raised. I am happy to debate those issues another time but you can always tell when someone is losing an argument when they throw is so much material that is simply off topic.

On the central point Mahfouz doesn’t understand the numbers and the council is ripping off people who live in CPZs. Let’s debate it at scrutiny Cllr Mahfouz.

A couple of weeks ago, on 16th August, the Gazette published a short letter from me dealing with Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs) and the council’s unreasonable ramping up of these charges three times in the last three years. My letter was short (only three column inches) and heavy on facts.

On Monday 22nd July a group of Barnet residents won a case in the High Court regarding similarly eye-watering rises in charges in that borough. Mrs Justice Lang said that the 1984 Road Traffic Regulation Act “is not a fiscal measure and does not authorise the authority to use its powers to charge local residents for parking in order to raise surplus revenue for other transport purposes”. You can read about it in the Evening Standard, the Guardian and the Daily Mail. Take your pick.

Since then Barnet has decided not to appeal this judgement.

In Barnet parking permits went from £40 to £100 and visitors’ vouchers went from £1 to £4 (for an hour mind). Similar rises have happened in Ealing. Parking permits rose from £25 to £50 and £45 to £80. Visitors’ vouchers went up from 40p to 60p for some people but some went from 3 hours for 40p to one hour for 60p, a rise of 350%. Similarly all day passes went from £1 to £4. Coming after a four year freeze when the Conservatives were in power it was quite a shock. The only difference seems to be that Ealing did three rises in three years whereas Barnet alerted the public by doing one big rise.

To reinforce my case I quoted some numbers from the council’s own publications.

In 2009/10 the council had a controlled parking income of £1.39 million. I got this figure from the final report of the Controlled Parking Zones Specialist Scrutiny Panel, see Table 1, page 11. This panel was chaired by me and I specifically asked for this information because I knew it was something that the new Labour administration would be tempted to misbehave with.

On the face of it the council demonstrated that non-CPZ users were subsidising CPZ users to the tune of £500K – £1 million in 2009/10 at the end of the Tories’ four year freeze on parking charges. This was Labour’s case for increasing CPZ charges so much.

If you look at the figures in a little more detail it seems that most of this apparent subsidy is created by including £600K of capital costs in the running costs of CPZs. This is plain ridiculous. The one off cost of implementing new CPZs should not be included in any fair assessment of ongoing running costs. It is also worth noting that a pretty generous allowance of £500K of corporate overheads was included. What business in the real world would carry almost 40% corporate overheads on a turnover of £1.39 million? These numbers show that in 2009/10 the CPZs were pretty much paying for themselves and if they weren’t it was because they were making a ridiculous contribution to corporate overheads.

Since 2009/10 the council has pushed up CPZ charges three times in three years. At the same time it has reduced services to save money. You cannot walk into Perceval House and get permits or vouchers since February. Paying for vouchers by phone saves the council more money, especially when it offloads the cost of phone payment onto customers. The vouchers have been standardised saving inventory costs. I could go on. The point is that the council’s CPZ costs have probably gone down since 2009/2010.

In the three years since the council’s income has increased 133% to £3.24 million, a rise of £1.85 million. Again these numbers come from council sources. In July the council published its Parking Annual Report.

This table comes from the Financial Information on page 21.

If you add “On-Street Permits and Vouchers” to suspensions and dispensations (On Street) you get £3.238 million which is the CPZ income I believe.

I think that I have made a good case for this to be looked into. On 13th August I wrote to the chairman of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee and asked him to look at this. I followed this up with a request in person at the last meeting of the committee on 15th August where it was agreed to look at this matter. Labour needs to come clean on this.

This graph show the level of PM10 pollution on Horn Lane through August compared to the heavily polluted main roads Western Avenue and Hanger Lane. The first week of August the system wasn’t working. Since then, during the working day, Horn Lane has been 3 times worse than the adjacent busy roads. Yesterday it was five times worse. This problem is not going away.

Today’s Gazette front page is a huge missed opportunity for our area. On the effective deadline for submissions to the Independent Review Panel that will decide the fate of our hospitals the leaders of the Save our Hospitals campaign are talking about the wrong subject.

In the front page headline the Gazette quotes council leader Julian Bell’s “body blow” phrase in respect of the judicial review that was refused this week. But this judicial review was always a side show. The main event is the Independent Review Panel. This reports to the Secretary of State on Friday 13th September, in four weeks time. There is not a hard deadline for making submissions to this process but the IRP themselves say:

We will try to take account of any evidence received for as long as we can up to report submission. But if people could get their evidence by Friday 16th August that would be very helpful.

The Gazette headline should have been “Act today to save your A&E”. Clearly Cllr Bell and Onkar Sahota were so excited about their hopeless JR that they forgot to keep their eyes on the ball and tell people to act today.

So, today is the day! The IRP is most likely to be influenced by large numbers of individual submissions from members of the public – you. Send an e-mail today to: info@irpanel.org.uk

My own effort is below. You may think my language is tame. Fine, then do your own! Today is the day.

Dear sirs,

I am writing to ask you to look again at the Shaping a Healthier Future proposals for North West London (NWL). There are many good things in the plans but the final location of the proposed services results in a very unfair outcome for those living at the centre of the NWL area, especially in Ealing.

Most of the acute services that residents of my ward, Northfield, rely on will move far away under these proposals.
Instead of having a good-sized acute hospital on our doorstep we will have a large scale polyclinic and long journeys for anything more.

The solution that the NWL clinicians have come up with is simply unfair to Ealing residents.

Yours,

Phil Taylor
Ward Councillor
Northfield Ward
London Borough of Ealing

Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma invites ridicule by invoking apartheid when issuing a press release about recent high profile activity by the UK Border Agency is Southall.

I don’t think that the Home Office ad vans are particularly welcome or effective and I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of the drivers stuck at traffic lights but they merely point out to people who have broken the law that there is an alternative to being dragged off in handcuffs. Apartheid it isn’t.

The reason the ad vans came to Southall is because the authorities estimate that there is an illegal population of day labourers in the order of 20,000 in Southall. That is more than an entire new ward of illegals hidden in sheds and HMOs in the five wards of Southall.

Sharma has been a politician in Southall since 1982. He has literally seen the whole beds in sheds/day labouring culture being built breeze block-by-breeze block, shed-by-shed around him over two decades. Has he spoken out? (Yes, once after the whole matter had been laid out in detail in BBC TV news reports).

Sharma ends his press release by saying:

This is not the British way and is more akin to apartheid South Africa than modern multicultural Britain.

Before Sharma invokes apartheid he might explain why every single Labour party political representative for Southall comes from a Punjabi background. Every one of 15 local councillors for the 5 Southall wards. The MP. The London Assembly member Onkar Sahota.

Ealing’s Punjabi community is one of joys of living in Ealing and the way that the community has made a life for itself here is a model for others to follow. The unwillingness of this group’s leaders to share their hard won political power with others is a blot on an otherwise superb record.

The Ealing Southall Labour constituency Labour party is the largest in the whole UK and yet it is in special measures due to membership irregularities and has been for years. It visibly practices a version of ethnic preference of its own. How else can you explain the narrow ethnic background of every single one of its representatives? Where are the people of Somali descent? Where are the new people from the EU? Where are the remaining white people? Where are the Tamils, the Nepalis and Gujeratis? When will the Labour Party sort out Sharma’s corrupt back yard? Multiracial it ain’t.

The graph shows the missed collections rate every month compared to the (very consistent) average achieved by the previous contractor May Gurney throughout the length of their last year on the contract, 972 missed collections per month on average. For the last five months up until the end of June (for which I recently got hold of the number) 2,600 residents have had to call in a missed collection. Not surprisingly the council’s automated voice response technology still says:

Press 1 for a missed collection

66,000 missed collections since Enterprise took over. That is a lot of phone calls.

Great news that Ealing has done well with Keep Britain Tidy’s Green Flag scheme. The Borough had two of these awards and has added 7, the most new sites for any borough in the UK.

One of the new Green Flags goes to Northfield’s very own renewed green space, Bramley Gardens by the Tube station (photo taken on May when the alliums were pushing through the daffodils). The Northfield councillors have been working on improving this area since we were elected in 2006. We used the opportunity presented by the new children’s centre at the Log Cabin to remodel the green space and got the full support of the ward forum to contribute financially.

All of these things take some time to come to fruition but it is great to see the Keep Britain Tidy acknowledging the improvements.

I have just obtained the latest street cleaning numbers. A third (34%) of Ealing streets were still unacceptably dirty in June. 15 months into Enterprise’s contract and still the contractor is nowhere near getting to the required standard of cleaning 95% of streets to the national recognised Grade A standard, ie only 5% not good enough. Enterprise is 7 times worse than it should be.

The graph shows the rate of Grade A cleaned streets first time (in blue). The council then checks about 20% of the streets (down from 50%), the contractor is asked to reclean the failed ones and the council inspects some of those a second time. The red line is the rate at which that minority of streets is Grade A. Amazingly after two cleans 17% of the failed streets were not good enough. In June 77% of streets were never looked at, statistically they were 34% dirty and were never looked at again.

The blue line is the set of figures that most accurately match residents’ perception of the service they get. The red line is really just an artefact of the not very effective performance management regime that the council is using to attempt to manage Enterprise. Both lines show a marked deterioration under the new contract.

Earlier this year Labour spokesman Bassam Mahfouz was claiming that Ealing streets were 99% clean. This was a sleight of hand. Mahfouz thinks he can take a number out of context and fool people if he repeats enough. For two months in January and February the 20% of streets that were inspected eventually got up to 99% clean after the dirty ones got a second clean. 20% of the remaining 80% of streets were unacceptably dirty, were never inspected and remained dirty.

Since the winter months spring growth has highlighted Mahouz’s lying with numbers.

As you may have noticed the council is currently working on the latest phase of its £2 million project to tart up the Town Hall. They are currently pulling up the perfectly good paving slabs outside Perceval House and replacing them with York stone.

As you can see from my photo the existing pavement is in very good condition, much better than the pavement outside many of your houses. Certainly much better than the undulating brick pavements on the south side of Ealing Broadway.

This work is due to last two weeks from Monday 8th. I have asked how much and what the condition of the pavement was before they ripped it up.

The briefing note on the project came with the following line in the cover note:

Please note that the Comms team are aware of the works and have decided not to publicise this online.

Not at all embarrassed then.

This morning Cllr Bell, the leader of the council, is leading a group of cyclists on a ride from Ealing town Hall to City Hall to promote Ealing’s bid for part of the Mayor’s “mini-Holland” scheme. He is to be congratulated on finding an imaginative way of promoting the Borough’s bid.

No doubt we will see lots of pictures of Cllr Bell and his sidekick Cllr Bassam Mahfouz in their Lycra. Both of these Labour politicians make much of their cycling and much of the cycling projects that go on in the Borough. The truth is though that Ealing council spends hardly anything on cycling except for the odd bit of cash dispensed by ward forums. The biggest source of cycling funds is Boris Johnson’s Transport for London backed up with some Section 106 money here and there.

As Ealing’s own king MAMILs cycle down the Uxbridge Road trashing their expensive wheels in the process they will find that it is no use having cycle lanes, bike hubs, bike repair clinics, taster sessions and coaching if the council doesn’t keep the roads in good order. After Labour has slashed the roads building budget by 40% there is no hope that cyclists will get a better deal from the Ealing Labour group anytime soon. Their priorities for the Borough’s own funds are tarting up the Town Hall and building a car park in Southall.