Category: Ealing and Northfield

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.

Earlier today in the Telegraph Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, used the phrase militant malcontents to describe Len McLusky, Unite and its machine politics. I have previously talked about how one group of militant malcontents, the Socialist Workers Party, are working in our education system here in Ealing.

Another one is the lovely Mik Sabiers, one of the South Acton councillors. To talk to he is a charming man but his financial ideas are out there with the fairies. He seems to be very pleased to be promoting the FTT at the next council meeting. Fancifully he refers to it as the Robin Hood Tax. His motion says:

“This council notes the continued negative impact of the Tory-led government’s cuts programme on local residents and believes there is an alternative to the ideologically driven attack on our valued local public services.

Recognising the rise in speculation on financial markets that have resulted in large rewards with little effort for a select few to the detriment of the many, council calls for central government to fully implement the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) to not only cover shares but other assets including bonds and derivatives. This would help raise some £20 billion from those speculating on markets rather than those making long term investments.

Council therefore calls upon the government to enact the FTT and direct the revenues from this measure to reverse on-going cuts in central grants to local councils across the country which could use the funds to invest in jobs, homes, schools, businesses and across their local Communities.”

Didn’t Cllr Sabiers get the memo from Ed Miliband and Ed Balls saying that the fiscal discipline bought in by the Coalition would be stuck to by Labour? No, Sabiers wants to turn on Brown’s spending taps again. I guess that the Ealing Labour group will vote for this en bloc – flying in the face of the discipline the Labour leadership is trying to enforce on the party.

Cllr Sabiers views are easiest to understand if you pull out his declaration of interests. He is a member of three unions: Unite, GMB and the NUJ. He is actually an employee of Len McLuskey’s Unite. Cllr Sabiers likes to call himself a journalist. He is paid to do internal comms for Unite – and put up silly motions at Ealing Council. None of this will get your street looking nice.

The last two month’s street cleaning figures have been dire to say the least. The proportion of streets cleaned right first time fell to 65% in May according to the answer to a written question (number 39) asked by me at the last council meeting.

For the last year (2011/12) of the old May Gurney service the contractor very consistently managed to get 88% properly clean first time. The Enterprise contract requires that a level of 95% is achieved.

Last year on average Enterprise was appalling, only managing to get 70% of streets right first time over the course of the year. In April only 76% of streets were right first time. In May this number fell to 65%. So over 1/3rd of all the Borough’s streets were unacceptably dirty after the first clean in May.

The council inspected 28% of streets in April and 22% in May and sent the contractor back to clean them. Of these reinspected streets 95% in April and 86% in May finally made the grade. Astoundingly in May 14% of the streets inspected (only one in 5) were still unacceptably dirty after 2 cleans. The original concept of the contract was that 95% of streets should be Grade A clean first time. How far we are from that vision.

The only way the council will solve this is to increase the number of inspections it does. Right now it is cheaper for the contractor to go back to a few streets and re-clean them than it is for them to get it right first time across the Borough. Only when the level of inspections increases will the contractor be forced to get it right first time. Cutting the inspections was a mistake.

Jason Stacey’s Conservatives in 2006 proved that the only way to clean up Ealing is to focus on it and hold the contractor to account. This administration is failing to do that.

When you dial the council’s help desk you still get an autoresponder that says “Press 1 for a missed collection”. It is now over 14 months into the Enterprise contract and it is still broken and there is still no evidence that it has been sorted out.

Under the old contractor, May Gurney, in 2011/12 just under 12,000 collections were missed, slightly under 1,000 per month.

In the first year of the Enterprise contract until the end of March 2013 over 54,000 collections were missed. This was quite ridiculous. 1,000 missed collections a week rather than 1,000 a month as before. You can see all of the figures laid out on ealingtoday.co.uk.

You might have thought that the council would have sorted this out by now but unfortunately not. In an answer to a written question (number 38) asked by me at the last council meeting it transpires that the council is still missing over 2,600 collections a month.

How long will this nonsense go on for? 2,600 people are still having to phone up every month to tell the council something has gone wrong. That is more than 100 every working day.

We know that Labour has cut road spending by 40% (which is £10 million). As well as this huge cut the distribution of the remaining money has been very uneven. One ward, Ealing Common, has had absolutely nothing spent on it for three years. Other wards have had over £1 million spent on them. Many residents feel that their areas are looking shabby and the bad state of their roads, as well as continuing poor cleaning, is a huge part of that.

If you analyse where the roads and pavements have been worked on there is a marked divergence between each of Ealing’s three Parliamentary constituencies.

Ealing Southall seems to have got its fair share, although this share is 40% less than it was when the Conservatives were in power.

Ealing North has had well over half of the cash for the whole borough which has compensated for Labour’s cut. In Ealing North they are enjoying the same level of spending that the borough as a whole enjoyed for four years of Conservative control.

The part that misses out is Ealing Central and Acton. Angie Bray’s constituency is only getting 13% of the Borough’s roads spending. This represents a £7.3 million loss compared to what was happening under the previous administration. It doesn’t look fair.

At last week’s Council Meeting, Cllr Isobel Grant, Cleveland Ward, presented 112 letters from students and parents of Mount Carmel School asking for plastic recycling facilities at their school.

The Council has since confirmed that it will be introducing this to all schools and as a priority, Mount Carmel School will have a collection of plastic starting in the autumn. This was something that the council had in hand anyway and the funding for this is part of a £1.1 million grant from central Government that the council bid for and won earlier in the year (although the report failed to mention schools).

The pupils at Mount Carmel were lucky with their timing and lucky too that the council is getting £1.1 million of fresh funds from the “Tory-led Coalition”. The council likes to talk about cuts but is loath to admit when it gets new money from central government. No doubt any future references to this funding will acknowledge its source, unlike last time.

I popped into the newly made over Perivale library at lunchtime today. It has just been refurbished and looks much the same only smarter and not subsiding in the corner. I think that is what people wanted.

The Conservatives on Ealing council fought hard, along with 8,000 residents who signed petitions, to ensure that this and other libraries weren’t closed in 2011 (the chop list was Hanwell, Perivale, Northfield, Northolt Leisure Centre and the mobile library). The mobile library service was shut down in the end.

The council’s officers don’t think that the smaller libraries in the borough offer good value for money. In the 2007 budget round they came for Hanwell. The Tories said no. In the 2008 budget round they came for Perivale. The Tories said no. They tried it again in 2010 with a new Labour administration. They said maybe and got themselves in big trouble. On the 14th July 2011, in the face of demonstrations on the Town Hall steps and petitions from 8,000 residents the Labour administration gave up with their consultation and removed the threat.

It is worth restating that when the Conservatives were in power five libraries were refurbished and modernised and a brand new library opened within the new Northolt Leisure Centre. In our 2010 manifesto we promised to:

Modernise Acton, Hanwell, Perivale and Southall libraries

That is all happening. Good news.

Lots of tweets this morning from Ealing Labour types from their Ealing North dinner last night. The dinner in support of Stephen Pound’s (GMB member) constituency was addressed by MP Sadiq Khan (GMB member) and Paul Hayes, GMB London Regional Secretary.

Funny how the Labour types don’t mention Paul Hayes. The GMB posters lining the walls give a clue as to who is paying the piper and calling the tune in the Ealing Labour party.

In the real world you have to think very hard about committing £6.8 million to a project with a 13 year pay back period. That is what the council is doing with its scheme to replace all of the bulbs in our street lighting with LEDs. Superficially this is a very attractive scheme. It ticks all of the green and cost saving boxes. It does though tie up large amounts of capital for a long time and like all forms of financial resource capital is a very limited commodity right now.

Next Tuesday at full council we will be debating an update on the council’s Corporate Plan. On page 26 it says:

Developed the Business Case for investment in LED street lighting which was approved at April cabinet.

The paper backing this says that the payback period for this investment is 13 years. If you dig around the budget papers you will find that the capital value of this project is £6.8 million. You might feel that the council should wait for this technology to mature before irrevocably committing £6.8 million of scarce capital to a technology that might be half the price next year.

£6.8 million would allow us to expand a primary school or to significantly add to our road resurfacing programme which Labour has cut back from £25 million ’s when the Conservatives were in power to £15 million under Labour (a 40% cut). This project will use imported lightbulbs and take away the jobs of people who change the lightbulbs in our streetlights (because the bulbs have a longer life). Investment in roads and schools at least ensures that jobs are produced close to home.

Next Tuesday at full council we will have to spend a whole evening debating an update on the council’s Corporate Plan. In practice this will involve the opposition puncturing the Labour administration’s high opinion of itself.

There are lots of good things that the council does. In the nature of the council’s business they are quite mundane. The council takes 36 pages to enumerate its many “achievements”. There are a number that stand out as being somewhat overblown. My eye was first caught by this statement on page 26:

Worked constructively with Enterprise to deliver high performing refuse, recycling, cleaning and ground maintenance. Contract performance continues to improve, at board and contract management level, corrective and remedial actions are taken to ensure continuous improvement across all aspects of the service.

We know that in the first year of the Enterprise contract over 54,000 collections were missed and on average, over the whole year, only 70% of streets were cleaned right first time up to the required Grade A standard. 30% were unacceptably dirty.

I don’t really understand how council officers can sign off on reports that twist the truth so far.