Category: Mayor Johnson

I am not sure what to make of reports in Today’s Independent and Evening Standard that London Mayor Boris Johnson is seeking to emulate Paris Mayor, Betrand Delanoe’s, “Autolib” electric car scheme.

For one thing burning fossil fuels, losing half if it turning the energy into electricity, losing half of it in transmission losses, losing half of it charging a battery and losing half of it converting it into motion in a motor is a really crap way of propelling a car compared to the internal combustion engine.

For another I have to be suspicious of a scheme from a French Socialist Party mayor that involves the state owning and running a fleet of cars.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against a fleet of cars available for public use, just wary of their being publicly owned. I am really impressed with car sharing schemes, and if, big if, electric cars make sense I would like to see them owned and run by car sharing experts, not TfL.

More generally I would like to see us explore the whole idea of public cars. Black cabs, minicabs, car hire, car sharing and some version of Autolib are all examples of public cars. Cars used by anyone. Why is it only black cabs can use bus lanes? Are there other concessions we should give public cars to encourage more people to give up their own cars? Why charge VAT on public cars? Aren’t they just another form of public transport? Streetcar claim to be London’s largest car sharing operator and further claim that each of their cars takes 6 private cars off the road.

Yesterday the Mayor’s budget passed its final hurdle at the London Assembly. There was a three hour debate which did not amount to much. Opposition members failed to amend the Mayor’s budget so it is now final.

It takes at least two thirds of Assembly members to overturn or amend the Mayor’s budget and with 11 out of 25 members being Conservatives this is never going to happen.

The Mayor says:

So for the first time in the history of the Greater London Authority, I am delighted to announce the first ever freeze of the GLA precept. Over the last eight years, Londoners have been afflicted with a 152 per cent increase in the council tax, without any regard to waste or cost controls. This budget outlines my commitment to deliver on frontline services and to tackle the big issues like crime and safety, whilst also providing value for money and keeping taxes as low as possible. By focussing on modest savings across the board, this year we have achieved over £100 million of efficiency savings, which we are looking to increase to almost £1 billion over the next three financial years.

It is worth remembering the eye-watering rise in precept we had to endure during Ken Livingstone’s first term as mayor. The rises to-date are listed below.

Livingstone raised the Band D precept from £123 per annum by a factor of over two and a half times to £311 in eight years a rise of 152% as the current Mayor points out above.

Note the rise of 17.1% the year before Livingstone became responsible was what the civil servants did all by themselves as they went from separate Police and Fire precepts to the GLA.

On Thursday the black cab trade got together and blocked roads in Westminster to protest about a scheme being run by Westminster Council and the Met to get people into cabs late at night in the West End. See BBC story here. I guess the story got lost in all the snow but it sounds like the black cab drivers will be doing this again soon.

It is in no-one’s interest to have young people wondering around late at night trying to get transport home. Westminster has come up with an imaginative scheme but the black cab drivers see it as a threat.

This YouTube clip shows how much they hate minicab drivers impinging on their frankly unfair privileges. The piece ends with the sentence: “How long before it starts to get nasty and someone gets hurt badly?” Judging by the thuggish black cabbie who was berating both the minicab driver and his customer in this clip that sounds like a threat that black cab drivers will get violent if they feel like it. What a scumbag?

In London there are about 22,000 black cabs and 44,000 minicabs. I often find black cabs are superior to minicabs. But most of all, when I get into a taxi in Newbury, I usually just want to get home and too many black cab drivers want to do the airports, work during the day but still protect their privileges if they deign to go out late on a Saturday.

I hope Westminster succeed with their scheme in the short term. In the longer term we need some legislation which takes into account modern technology. It should be possible to text, phone or e-mail details such as location (GPS?), destination, desired pick up time, type of vehicle required, etc and get back in seconds two or three competing bids detailing price and time to pick up such that all you need to do is hit the reply button to strike a deal. The current minicab regime is totally ungreen because it forces drivers to travel half their time empty. This not only wastes fuel but makes minicabs twice the price they should be. Doh! By the way this is the only reason that black cabs can compete.

Rather than the current two tier system we need 66,000 or more cars that are better than minicabs in terms of driver and car quality, cheaper and more easily accessible by anyone, anywhere. Are you up for this Mayor Johnson?

Update: Why does it not surprise me to find an RMT banner at this protest? Oh yes, thuggish bullies.

There is something of the Mayor’s cheerful optimism in this press release this morning. “Crossrail deal finalised” and “Full speed ahead for Crossrail”. The Mayor is dead right to focus on Crossrail and his opponents are dead wrong to bemoan what they characterise as his “Bonfire of transport projects“. Crossrail is a no-brainer for London and the whole country.

We desperately need the additional transport capacity and its ability to link east and west through to the West End and the City will help keep London competitive for many years to come.

Only yesterday Christian Wolmar was opining to the BBC that Crossrail’s funding was in doubt. Today’s announcement is designed to keep the momentum up. Unfortunately the first and third paragraphs of the announcement are pretty much a repeat of what was announced back in October 2007 by the City of London itself. At the time the £200 million squeezed out of the City of London was seen as being the last bit of the Crossrail funding jigsaw.

5th October 2007 from City of London:

At a special meeting on Tuesday 2 October, the Court of Common Council agreed to support a financial contribution for Crossrail of £350 million. This includes a one-off lump sum, payable to the government in 2015/2016, of £200 million from the City of London Corporation’s own funds. Michael Snyder and the City Corporation have also agreed to lead the efforts to raise additional contributions totalling £150 million from businesses across London.

Today from Mayor of London:

A deal worth up to £350m that will help deliver Crossrail on time and on budget has been finalised with the City of London Corporation. The agreement was announced today by Andrew Adonis, Transport Minister, Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and Sir Michael Snyder of the City of London Corporation.

The City of London Corporation has agreed to make a direct contribution of £200m to the Crossrail project. In addition, the City Corporation will seek contributions from businesses of £150m, and has guaranteed £50m of these contributions.

I guess the £50 million guarantee is additional. It is somewhat modest in the face of an overall bill of £16 billion no disrespect to the City of London intended.

The important part of the announcement seems to be that TfL and the DfT have agreed the governance arrangements for the project – indeed an important milestone. But, the scheme’s funding arrangements do seem to be based still on nice decade assumptions rather than credit crunch/recession ones.

The GLA’s £3.5 billion contribution is a proposal to raise debt finance by levying an extra increment on non-domestic rates where businesses have a rateable value over £50,000. £500 million from sales of surplus land and property is assumed as are £300 million of developer contributions and £300 million from the London planning charge (such Statutory Planning Charges are in effect an extension of the Section 106 system that allows local authorities to extract “planning gain” from developers). That sounds like £4.6 billion of froth funding to me. Another £5.0 billion comes from TfL and Network Rail. That sounds like higher fares to me. The government in the shape of DfT is only providing £5.1 billion of the total £15.9 billion. It doesn’t sound to me like they are pulling their weight.

I met Peter Hendy, London’s Transport Commissioner, last Tuesday. He said of TfL and its time under Livingstone that with the exception of the West London Tram “we never stopped doing anything here”. I should imagine he is relieved not to be wasting money and management time on projects that would never be funded by central government and which could never be funded from TfL’s own resources. Johnson is right to prioritise and protect Crossrail. He is right to have cleared away a long list of relatively minor transport projects that the old mayor should have canned. But, the Crossrail funding package does need to be re-opened and the government needs to do more if confidence in the project is to be maintained.

Today the Mayor has announced the scrapping of the Western Extension of the Congestion Charging scheme. I am pleased to see the Mayor honour his manifesto commitment:

I will do what Ken Livingstone did not, and listen to Londoners on the Western extension. The Western extension was introduced despite the overwhelming opposition of local residents and I think that was wrong. I will consult the residents in the zone and on the border on whether we should keep the Western extension, and whatever the result I will abide by it.

Labour and the Greens really don’t like it, see their comments below. Knowing a few people who live in K&C and who greatly enjoy being able to commute into the City at a 90% discount their arguments simply don’t stack up. They talk about £70 million in income being lost. This is an exaggeration. If you look at page 122 of TfL’s Annual Report and Accounts you will see that the entire scheme had a net income of only £137.0 million last year. The idea that fully half of it will be lost by the loss of the Western Extension is ludicrous as are the rest of their claims.

Shawcross and Jones’ brand of nannying disdain of the democratic process is insulting and shows just how detached progressive types have become from the lives and aspirations of real people. The Mayor feels obliged to honour his manifesto commitment and still Shawcross and Jones insist that they know best and are prepared to tell porkies to make their case. Even the LibDems, notionally part of the progressive alliance but always keeping an eye to their own electoral advantage, have applauded the Mayor’s decision.

I went to bed in a bad mood last night after watching the BBC London News on BBC1. The opening line of the package (scroll down to the bottom of this story and press play) on the day’s transport announcement was lifted straight from the GLA Labour Group. Along with some tacky graphics of transport projects going up in flames the “journalist” mouthed:

Bonfire night just got longer with a raft of transport projects added to the pile.

How different is this from the GLA Labour Group?

Boris’s bonfire of transport projects

By contrast the piece in today’s Guardian is a model of even handed journalism. No doubt the BBC would say that their piece ultimately was balanced and that they gave airtime to the Mayor to explain his policies. They did. But they made the Mayor go second to a piece of visual polemic calculated to grab mindshare. TV is above all a visual medium.

To make it worse their graphic gets the number wrong by a factor of 1,000. The number should be £500 million not £500 billion. In their rush to follow the Labour line the BBC can’t even get their facts right.

The Mayor is right to focus on the existing Tube system and Crossrail. Over the next year a lot of projects are going to be canned by Government and the Mayor’s strategy of clearing the ground and focussing on Crossrail is the right strategy for these straightened times. People in Ealing who struggle into town on our existing, shoddy rail and Tube services will no doubt agree.

Today the Mayor has launched his Way to Go! transport vision document. Like Monday’s crime vision thing called “Time for Action” it is very readable. Labour’s transport spokesman on the London Assembly, Valerie Shawcross, is very rude about it (see the Labour Group statement here):

This document represents a shocking failure to understand the importance of transport to Londoners and fails on every single level to provide London with a ‘Direction of Travel’ on our future transport needs. It is utter drivel. This is a huge disappointment for London’s travelling public. In his six months as Mayor this drivel is all Boris has managed to come up with.

A typical Labour moan is that the document lacks “any vision or ambition”. This is Labour code for “there are no promises to spend lots more money”. Shawcross is a lightweight who isn’t going to make many converts with this kind of language.

Shawcross goes on to say:

There is nothing about how the Mayor will encourage people onto public transport, but plenty about giving back road space and speeding up traffic lights in favour of the ‘oppressed’ motorist.

I guess Shawcross hasn’t spent much time on outer London council estates where every spare bit of land is covered with cars. Whilst middle class, professional Londoners might tend to maintain cars that they use at the weekend whilst using expensive public transport for commuting less affluent people tend to use cheap cars to make a living. Shawcross might think it will be improving for these people to waste their lives queuing at traffic lights set to punish them but some of us feel that that is simply an evil waste of life. Have Labour politicians really got this out of touch?

One bit of the Mayor’s document I really liked was the statement:

And that is why Peter Hendy, Transport Commissioner, has called in consultants to help with a thoroughgoing search for savings, on which I will be reporting in due course.

I look forward to reading that piece of work. I might suggest that some organisations can look for their own savings without spending out on consultants but that would perhaps be churlish. I could certainly give our Peter a few good tips.

I have been holidaying for a few days with the in-laws on the Redneck Riviera hence the continuing paucity of postings on the blog.

Rather sadly I am currently listening to the webcast of the Mayor’s first appearance as MPA chairman here in my board shorts by the beach. While I have been away the Met seems to have been the biggest story in London whether it was Sir Ian Blair’s resignation or Met BPA trying to undermine it with its counter-productive efforts to dissuade a wide range of people from joining the Met.

Non-Tory members of the MPA and left leaning blogs such as Tory Troll have been decrying Sir Ian Blair’s resignation, or at least the manner of it, and Boris’s decision to launch an investigation into racism in the Met in an attempt to head off the ridiculous Metropolitan Black Police Association’s attempt to spread unrest in the Met.

LibDem Assembly Member and member of the MPA Dee Doocey stands out as being particularly silly. Although she wanted Blair to go and voted against him in the MPA’s vote of confidence in him some months ago she said today:

I do not have a problem with the outcome, I believe he should have gone a long time ago, but it was the manner in which it was done. If you do not consult the MPA on a matter as important as this, then what happens next time?

The impotent and unrepresentative MPA cost us £3 million last year. The Mayor has demonstrated that his million vote mandate trumps the quango-state and, believe me, London will end up with a police force that is accountable to the Mayor before too long and not one that is effectively accountable to no-one unless you count a constitutional mess of Home Secretary, expensive quango, the mayor, etc.

In Ealing I have come across many fine black officers and I can’t see that the activities of the Met BPA are doing anything to enhance their status and advancement.