Category: Ealing and Northfield

This graph explains why too many of Ealing’s roads look bad. When Labour last had a long spell in power, 12 years up to 2006, they thought that they could get away with barely spending anything on roads at all.

From 1994/5 to 2006/7 Labour spent roughly £12 million in 12 years. Indeed Labour spent absolutely nothing in the year 2000. This level of spending was totally inadequate for a borough of our size. Labour thought that they could get away with raising council tax by 179% and spending £50 million on the Response programme but that the road outside your house was unimportant.

When we were elected in 2006 one of the things that we quickly realised was that the roads backlog was huge. Immediately £500K was set aside to boost the paltry £1 million allocated by Labour for 2006/7. Then a comprehensive road resurfacing programme was kicked off which saw a total of £25.5 million allocated to properly resurfacing roads as opposed to the ineffective skimming that had been done previously to stretch the meagre budget.

According to the budget book Labour plans to spend £3.5 million on road resurfacing next year. That will bring the total allocated over a four year cycle to £15.5 million. Compared to the £25.5 million allocated by the previous Conservative administration this represents a 39% cut in this budget.

Bell’s final flourish is to quote a partial account of council statistics like the manager of a Soviet era tractor factory:

Finally even in these times of unprecedented Tory led Government cuts we are improving the performance of the council. We are improving school standards, estate satisfaction and the recycling rate. 80% of residents think the council is doing a good job and 70% think the council is well run, also 70% of our key performance indicators have improved.

The numbers provided by officers show that the council cannot even get basic services like street cleaning and rubbish collection right. Bell is far too complacent.

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Feel the difference.

When council leader Julian Bell talks about investment he gets even further into trouble. He says:

Thirdly we have made huge investments even in these tough times. We are spending over £260m on providing new school places. The council itself is providing over £103m of this money. We are also providing £18m for the new Acton town hall complex that will include a new swimming pool, leisure centre, library and community facilities, and money for road resurfacing, footpath repairs and shopping parade improvements across the Borough. Labour is delivering the capital investment that the people of the borough want.

When he talks about school places he fails to mention that £150 million, almost two thirds, comes from central government, or the Tory-led Coalition as he might call it. When he talks about the Acton Town Hall project he is talking about a project that the Conservatives kicked off and set £12 million aside for in 2010. He might explain why the bill has gone up £6 million. On roads and pavements Labour is spending 40% less than the previous administration. Cutting frontline services that residents value 40-50% is typical of this administration. The shopping parade programme is another Conservative programme that we are happy to see the current administration take forward.

Just about the only new idea in the capital programme is the £5.5 million Southall car park which has no economic justification. Bell is strangely quiet on his boss’s new car park.

Bell’s second point contains about five different lies and evasions. He says:

The second key point is that we are continuing to protect services for the vulnerable despite an £85m government cut to our budget. Our budget analysis shows that 71% of all of our savings come from efficiencies, management cuts, increased revenue and changes to contracts. Only 29% have come from reductions to services. This shows how we are prioritising the frontline whilst saving money. We have protected the council’s youth service, Children’s Centres and care packages for vulnerable adults.

The government cut was £55 million. The other £30 million is new things the council wants to do (we call that growth) and inflation. All this talk about cuts simply ignores new money such as £31 million of New Homes Bonus. Bell’s trick is to only repeat bad news. Good news gets buried. He uses public money and public servants to repeat this nonsense.

When Bell talks about “increased revenue” he is talking about £10 million of price rises. These are not cuts. They are simply alternative sources of revenue. Labour has increased parking charges three times in three years and introduced a £40 garden tax. It has also decided to levy council tax on people who cannot afford it – Bell could have paid for this with new government flexibility to charge counil tax on empty properties and second homes but Bell just pocketed the cash. Bell fails to mention £10 million of cuts to the voluntary sector – council officers would much rather keep money back for salaries for council officers. The council has made very modest management savings – it still employs the same top team it had when it was supposedly 30% bigger. Changes to staff terms and conditions are derisory and leave stafff working 35 hour weeks and taking 27 days holiday from day one.

Bell really is having a laugh.

Council Leader Cllr Bell has written a piece in the Gazette titled: “Protecting Ealing from ravages of the Tories”. His language is just silly.

He makes four points, the first of which is:

First is the council tax freeze – we have frozen council every year since we returned to power and we will freeze it again next year. We all know that we are facing tough times, we have unprecedented Government cuts, a lacklustre economy and wages failing to keep pace with inflation. All this is resulting in a real squeeze for people in Ealing and our council tax freeze shows that we understand the pressures people are facing. The council tax freeze is worth £108 in real terms to the average family. We are demonstrating what Labour values are all about at the same time that the Conservatives cut taxes for millionaires.

Bell simply forgets to tell you that the council tax freeze was started by the Conservatives two years before he arrived on the scene.

Bell forgets to mention that since he has been in power the council has received £18 million in council tax freeze grants.

When Labour was last in power for 12 years it raised council tax by 179%. Don’t trust Bell.

The council has just published the attendance records for councillors for the last municipal year.

Five councillors failed to attend at least 2/3rds of the meetings set for them. We can forgive Cllr Aslam as he was the Mayor last year and attended all council meetings to act as the impartial chairman of the meeting but, didn’t attend any of his ward forums, as is usual because the Mayor takes a year off from being a regular councillor and avoids political meetings, even ward forums.

The other four have no such excuse.

The worst offender is Labour councillor for Hobbayne ward Wendy Langan. She has only turned up 7 times in a municipal year and has made no other contribution to the life of our Borough. She has regrettably claimed a full back bench allowance of £9,612. Hanwell residents will be unimpressed with Langan claiming £1,373 per meeting.

It may be that she is ill, in which case that is a shame but she might have explained herself and maybe resigned if she was incapable of doing the job she was elected to do. Her fellow ward councillor Colm Costello is not impressed.

The percentage figures flatter East Acton Labour councillor Atallah Said. He too has only done 7 meetings but as he was only asked to attend 11 all year he doesn’t look quite so bad. He failed to attend half the council meetings so only managed 64% attendance.

This is not a new thing. Last year Said had the worst attendance. He only attended 8 out of 14 meetings (57%). This was by far the worst attendance record of anyone on the council. The first year that Said was a councillor, in his first flush of enthusiasm, he managed 19 out of 33 meetings (58%) and was also the worst attender.

Acton residents won’t be pleased that this man is drawing an allowance of £9,612 to go to 7 meetings. Again, the man makes no other visible contribution to the life of the Borough. £1,373 per meeting.

Benjamin Dennehy, now UKIP councillor for Hanger Hill ward, has only attended one more meeting than the laggards Langan and Said.

The contrast with his notably hard working ward colleagues could not be starker. Dennehy costs £1,181 per meeting.

Finally there is one of Perivale’s Labour councillors, Edward Rennie. He disappeared for 4 and a half months last year. He turned up to a scrutiny meeting on 27th September and then came back on 13th February. It was rumoured that he had gone to Bangalore in India to train as a priest. All very nice but not whilst you are serving as a councillor.

It seems that Rennie has not been paid or has not claimed for two months of his allowance so he has only had £8,010 out of the £9,616 back benchers usually get. That is the equivalent of two months money not over four. There was talk of Rennie giving some cash to his ward forum fund. I have seen no evidence of this. Maybe this was a less embarrassing way for him to make partial amends for his extended absence. Maybe someone can tell us? Still he has been clocking up £400.50 per meeting.

What all four of these councillors have in common is that they are new councillors who were only elected in 2010. Being a councillor is very demanding in terms of time and emotional energy. Four years can be a very long time if you are not motivated. That is no excuse though. Residents are entitled to expect their councillors to work hard for them.

The process of deciding which roads and pavements to resurface is meant to be entirely objective and decided purely by officers. You do have to wonder though how it comes out with such diverse outcomes for different wards. Labour has cut road spending by 40% so it is all the more important that the money is spent fairly.

This graph show the breakdown of spending on roads for each ward for the last three years that Labour has been in control. I have colour coded the bars so you can see which wards voted for which parties (note that Hobbayne, Perivale and Northolt Mandeville have one Conservative and two Labour councillors and Elthorne has one from all three parties). The average spend per ward is £522K, represented by the thick black bar. The numbers are tabulated below.

14 wards have had less than the average. I have already highlighted the four wards that have done worst getting 1/6th or less of their share.

Over the last three years five Labour wards have each had over £1 million spent on their roads and together have had half of all spending lavished on them. The leader of the council’s ward, Greenford Broadway, has done well. Cllr Julian Bell’s ward came 3rd, getting £1.265 million. The man in charge of this spending, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, represents Northolt West End ward and quite by chance his ward came 2nd, getting £1.325 million. Perivale has done best getting three times the average spend. You wonder how absent Cllr Rennie managed to achieve this. Certainly his Labour ward colleague Sitarah Anjum wants to claim credit.

Last year the two Labour Northolt Mandeville councillors were caught red-handed making similar claims.

Are these Labour councillors idly bragging or is the system not as objective as one might like?

Southfield ward with its three LibDem councillors has also been shockingly treated by the Labour administration. It has had nothing spent on its pavements in three years. In three years one road has been resurfaced. Whellock Road at a cost of £87K in 2012. Nothing spent in 2011. Nothing due to be spent this year.

Southfield is getting the 4th worst deal on roads in the Borough.

Ealing has spent £12 million on its roads in the last three years so on average you might expect Southfield to get £522K. Southfield has one sixth (17%) of its share of Labour’s much reduced spend on roads.

On the actonw3.com website Cllr Mahfouz has responded to criticisms that the council is not doing enough to clean up Horn Lane. He uses council officers’ somewhat misleading bar chart to argue that “PM10 levels have dropped quite considerably in recent years”.

Once you strip out the distraction of what happened some years ago you are left with an essentially flat picture that says that Horn Lane has been hovering around the annual limit value for the protection of human health laid down in EU directive 1999/30/EC of 40ug/m3 for PM10s. Cllr Mahfouz seems to think that this an OK place to be. It isn’t.

Cllr Mahfouz is unwise to be so complacent about this issue. When his boss Cllr Bell had these figures brought to his attention he had the good sense to at least promise to take action. Last Tuesday when the council invited West Acton Residents Association (WARA) to meet with officers and Cllr Bell, he suggested that he would contact Chris Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, who was his boss in a previous life.

By Thursday, at the Overview and Scrutiny meeting called by the Conservative opposition on the council, this promise had developed into an “Air Quality Summit for Horn Lane”. Cllr Mahfouz was at that meeting and would have heard the committee ask that both local councillors and representatives of residents associations be invited to take part. This is potentially a good result for residents, although they will be sceptical as previous meetings with the Environment Agency at Parliament arranged by local MP Angie Bray did not produce obvious progress.

The opposition has successfully used the mechanisms of the council to raise this issue up the administration’s agenda. Cllr Bell seems to be listening. Cllr Mahfouz not so much.