Category: Mayor Johnson

Today Mayor Johnson used the occasion of Mayor’s Question Time to announce that he aims to ensure that London’s portion of the council tax, the GLA precept, will be frozen next year.

Not a Livingstone style, Newspeak freeze of RPI (=5%) but a straight English freeze of 0%.

You can read his full remarks here.

The key bits are:

In its original 1998 White Paper, the government envisaged that the GLA should be a small, strategic body. But as new powers have been added, and new ambitions acquired and new schemes conceived there has been a steady expansion of headcount, from 400 in 2001/2002 to 800 today, excluding consultants and agency temporary staff. That is a 100 per cent increase in eight years, and the effects have inevitably felt in our council tax precept, rising from £122.98 in 2001/2002 to £309.92 this year.

And though I appreciate that the expansion of the GLA plays only a part in the precept increase, I believe it is our duty to do everything we can to lift the burden on Londoners.

The people of this city are feeling a serious financial squeeze. It is our job to deliver taxpayer value. It is our job to restore trust in the way we spend their money. That is why my budget guidance is that we work towards freezing the precept next year.

We can do this if we first establish a clear set of priorities, and that means thinking about how we want London to look and feel in 2012, when we welcome the world to our city.

…

Next year’s savings target of £7.5m is already well on the way to being achieved. Circa £1m has already been achieved from the restructuring of my office and £0.5m from stopping my predecessors plans for unnecessary growth. A personal priority of mine has also been to review Press Office and Communications- 20% savings will be made in this area – and I’m extremely grateful for their proactive engagement on this, identifying savings which go beyond what I asked for. Other savings will be achieved through reprioritising programme budgets, existing efficiency programmes and putting a freeze on all but essential recruitment. This will include the 100 vacancies currently on our books. Our expectation is that many of these may be deleted.

Evening Standard coverage here.

Today’s announcement of fare increases across London’s transport systems is perhaps the first really hard decision our new mayor has had to make.

It is a job well done.

He has protected the vulnerable but faced the reality of financing Crossrail and dealing with the previous mayor’s use of the “Fares Fair” weapon.

Those on income support will get half price fares without being dependent on a South American dictator. Older people and the disabled will be able to use their Freedom Passes 24 hours a day.

At the end of October, in the run up to the election, the old mayor tried to kid us with his unaffordable and disingenuous freeze.

The old mayor used his £3 million a year Londoner not-so-freesheet three times to trumpet his 10p off bus fares swizz. None of the Mayor’s outpourings mention that two years ago off peak Oyster bus fares were 80p, they went up to £1 the next year and this year they are 90p. So the old off peak fares are 12.5% higher than they were even after this supposed cut. The old mayor’s own figures demonstrated that he was lying about the affordability of 10p fare cut.

It is straightforward to demonstrate Livingstone’s wishful thinking and dissimulation. In February last year Livingstone wrote to me to say that bus subsidies would be £463 million in 2006/7 and £528 million in 2007/8. The outcome, as reported in TfL’s Draft Annual Report and Accounts, was £617 million in 2006/7 and £659 million in 2007/8. That’s £285 million lost in just two years.

This is the headline story in today’s Evening Standard. The mayor has contributed a piece defending himself and the paper has come out in favour of the changes.

For the last couple of years I have tracked the number of people employed by Transport for London (TfL) who earn £50K or more. In an idle moment yesterday I came across TfL’s draft Annual Report and Accounts, more on this later. You need to scroll down to page 35 of the report to see the table of employees’ remuneration.

This year has seen the total who earn more than £50K leap from 1,411 to 1,954, a jump 543 people or 38%. To be fair some part of this jump must be down to TfL’s takeover of Metronet. It is still pretty eye-watering that TfL employ the best part of 2,000 who earn over £50K.

The upper echelon of £100K plus earners has increased at a good rate too but not at the rate of the £50K plus group. Maybe Metronet didn’t have that many high flyers. Either that or TfL binned them. Last year’s number of 112 has jumped 10% to 123. With 123 bloody geniuses working for them you might think they could stop the bus strikes.

If you go back to 2002 TfL (Corporation) employed 59 people who earned over £50K. Today the comparable number is 611, or 10 times bigger. Has this recent explosion of high earners delivered the kind of service we all want?

I am really pleased to see that Boris Johnson is promoting Richmond’s Community Toilet Scheme. Ealing has been looking at this too, see paper here.

One of the biggest businesses in London is Transport for London. More public conveniences in and around TfL’s estate would be welcomed by Londoners.

As the mayor controls TfL and its budgets it would be good to hear from him what he is going to do to himself rather than hearing from him exhortation to businesses to sign up for a scheme that is run by Richmond council. I think many boroughs are interested in this scheme but it is their responsibility and their budgets that would be involved.

A particular problem in our neighbourhood is the tube staff not letting minicab drivers use their loos at South Ealing. Considering that the minicab drivers are all vetted and registered by TfL it should be no great hardship to give these people access to tube loos. I think some customers might occasionally enjoy a leak at South Ealing too.

At the very least TfL could give minicab and black cab drivers access to all TfL staff loos. Then TfL might think about staff loos on certain bus routes. It might check that all staff of tenants of units on its premises have access to toilets. Then it might think about how more of its estate could be set aside for public toilets. Over to you Boris.

I do feel sorry for young mother Maja Krogh fined £50 for not paying her 90p bus fare and given a criminal record, albeit a temporary one (see today’s Evening Standard). That said, she might have forgotten to swipe her card every day for all we know. Too many people still do across London’s transport system.

Transport for London’s crusade against fare dodging would have more credibility if all of its staff consistently confronted fare dodgers all the time. Too many staff shrug their shoulders when people tailgate you through ticket barriers or fail to swipe on to buses. It seems staff can only stand up to fare dodgers when they are in gangs of ticket inspectors backed up with police. It looks unfortunate to say the least to see an inspector accompanied by an officer round on a mother with a young child.

But TfL must collect its fares. In 2006/7 every bus journey cost TfL 87p. Unfortunately it only managed to collect an average of 55p per journey. As a result TfL’s bus operations (forget buying the buses in the first place, just running them) need subsidising to the tune of £617 million. If TfL could rouse itself to collect 90p per journey, it could run buses at a profit.

Today the papers are covering the publication of the 6th Congestion Charge Monitoring Report by TfL on Wednesday, see here. Or rather not in many cases. Nothing in the Standard and only a perfunctory piece in the Telegraph.

The Guardian had a news piece and some editorial.

The Guardian says:

London’s roads, it emerged yesterday, are just as snarled up as they were before the congestion charge was introduced five years ago. So was it a costly mistake? Quite the opposite. The charge netted £137m last year and has cut the number of cars entering the central zone each day by 70,000. Unfortunately, road diggers and construction mean those who do drive in spend too much time in jams.

The Guardian is quick to crow about the £137 million surplus the Congestion Charge apparently makes. Typically TfL figures do not include indirect overheads – when TfL’s accounts get past the Audit Commission this number will be down below £100 million.

The Guardian is also not quick to point out that £73 million of this income is from fines. It’s a pretty rubbish system that takes over £250 million off Londoners and puts back less than £100 million most of which is fines income.

Even that money is not free and clear. This infrastructure cost about £320 million to set up. Over the five years or so of operation of this system it has taken about £1.2 billion off Londoners and spent just about every penny on … the system. It has generated very little net cash.

The Congestion Charge had failed on every level.