Category: Ealing and Northfield

I attended cabinet tonight on behalf of Acton residents to raise the excessive PM10 airborne pollution levels around Horn Lane arising out of the industrial sites around Acton Mainline station. This area suffers from hugely raised PM10 levels and locals are anxious about potential respiratory problems as a result.

The picture (generated from Ealing councils own monitoring data) shows that PM10 levels are hugely elevated above those measured on Western Avenue (in blue) and the Hanger Lane Gyratory system (in black). It is clear that Horn Lane is different from Ealing’s busiest roads. During weekdays PM10 levels shoot up to 6 times the level of really polluted areas.

Tonight the cabinet discussed a report that proposes to spend £5K of the London Mayor’s Mayor’s Air Quality Fund doing scenario development for air quality action planning on Horn Lane (whatever that is?). After eight years of monitoring it would be nice if the council had a clue as to where the excessive PM10 levels were coming from.

Tonight at cabinet the Labour administration agreed that Horn Lane was an outlier in terms of PM10 levels but no-one seemed to want to take up the challenge of owning the problem. Council Leader Julian Bell stated he lived in the area but didn’t want to own it. Cllr Mahfouz has cabinet responsibility but didn’t want to make any commitments – I asked him three times. Cllr Patricia Walker, an Acton Central councillor, thanked me for doing her casework but was similarly unwilling to push herself forward.

If Bell is being a little one sided when he talks about council tax in his little leaflet he is downright lying on the flip side when he talks about Council Tax Benefit which has now become Council Tax Support. He says:

The Tory-led Government have cut council tax benefit for low income families. Until this year low income working families have had their council tax paid by the Government but from next year the Government have cut the amount of money available by 10% and told councils to cut council tax support.

The government has done no such thing. It has taken £2.5 million off Ealing Council and asked it to make its own mind up about what it does. This is harsh. We live in harsh times. As Liam Byrne told us: “… there’s no money left”. But, the Ealing Labour group has decided that this cut must be passed on. The Ealing Labour group insists that the pain must be felt.

Nine councils in London have refused to pass this cut on to residents. Five of them Conservative, none of them Labour majority councils. Tory Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham, Richmond, Wandsworth and Westminster have all spared their residents this rise. People on the Vale Estate in East Acton will look enviously at their neighbours over the road in Hammersmith & Fulham and wonder why their Labour council is punishing them whilst the “terrible” Tories next door aren’t.

As it happens the Government has also allowed the council to choose to end council tax discounts for second homes and empty properties. Ealing council chose to do this (see Section 2.5, page 2) – the value of this new income was – £2.5 million. This one change, unmentioned by Labour, would have put right the council tax benefit cut. Labour are silent on this new money.

The Ealing Labour group could have taken on their own unions and tackled the generous terms and conditions enjoyed by council staff. The 35 hour working week and long holidays enjoyed by council staff are worth about £13 million compared to those of many of the workers in the private sector who pay council tax.

Labour would rather inflict pain on those on benefits. I can only imagine that their intention is to use their own choice as an electoral weapon – hence the leaflet. Rather like the torturer who convinces his victim that he is his friend and that if the victim gives in then he will stop jabbing him with the cattle prod. Every single Labour councillor in Ealing voted for the cattle prod. We know who you are.

Cllr Bell tells us that he has been out leafleting in his ward this morning. Shame he isn’t telling the whole story. His leaflet tells people that “Your council tax will be frozen for two years” and “Labour is saving the average family £108 by freezing council tax”.

Conservatives in Ealing welcome the continuing council tax freeze in Ealing. We started it two years before Bell came along and when we did it there was no council tax freeze grant from Gordon Brown to pay for it. Since Bell has repented of Labour’s previous council tax gouging ways the council has received £18 million in council tax freeze grants from the “Tory-led Coalition” as he likes to call it. Bell’s leaflet fails to mention that everyone’s bill has actually gone down two years running thanks to small cuts in the GLA Precept – Boris Johnson has promised to cut his share of the bill by 10%.

In the twelve years Labour ran Ealing from 1994 to 2006 it increased Council Tax by a staggering 179% – 48% in its last four years from 2002 to 2006.

We should all be grateful that Bell and the Ealing Labour group have joined the Conservative-led consensus that council tax had become unaffordable and unjust under the previous Labour government.

Councl leader Julian Bell really is talking nonsense today in his quote on ealingtoday.co.uk about the beds in sheds issue. In response to the announcement that the government is giving Ealing another £270K on top of the £280K already received to tackle beds in sheds (not mentioned in latest press release) Bell says:

My fear is that the dire shortage of private sector housing, high rents and changes to benefits is likely to create a ‘perfect storm’ where more and more people will be pushed into unsuitable housing at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords.

From reading the council’s own reports, talking to the borough commander and seeing the BBC TV news coverage of this issue a major driver of the problem is young, Punjabi illegal immigrant men who want to work as day labourers for cash in hand. No sensible level of housing, rents or benefits is ever going to make it possible for these guys to live decently. Their employers really don’t want to spend that much. Their employers and landlords, often the same people, are simply out to exploit them and their illegal status. Bell’s “perfect storm” is nonsense.

I couldn’t quite believe the lady from LBC who phoned me at 9.30am yesterday and told me about the now famous Lisa from Ealing and her leaflet. I imagined that someone from the council had rather stupidly and insensitively included a leaflet about fostering in with a mailing of housing benefit advice.

Now I have seen the actual leaflet it is quite clear that the council has been extremely foolish to link housing benefit changes to fostering in this direct way. We need more foster carers in Ealing and fostering is a great thing to do but to link it with a loss of benefits it totally inappropriate. To produce a leaflet that makes the link directly is just the wrong thing to do.

I can’t imagine that a leaflet of this kind would be produced without a high level of sign off by officers. I can’t imagine that the council’s head of communications wouldn’t have signed this off. I really can’t imagine it going out without sign off by the leader of the council himself. The leader owns the comms function. The council and the leader have been noticeably silent on this issue for two whole working days now.

Is the Labour administration doing its job? Did any of them see this leaflet and not get it? Did the comms people run it past the leader? Who is in charge? Didn’t anyone think this was a crass thing to do? And now it has happened is anyone going to say sorry?

Yesterday the council announced that it was saving £1 million by re-negotiating staff terms and conditions. Council leader, Julian Bell, said:

With £85million of budget reductions having to be achieved it was necessary to find savings in the councils pay bill.

Our people are crucial to us continuing to provide good services in these times of austerity so we have worked hard to be fair and minimise the impact on our lowest paid staff.

I am sure that residents of the borough facing real financial difficulties will acknowledge this was the right thing to do.

£1 million sounds like a lot of money but in the context of a £130 million pay bill that is not decreasing because of regradings it is less than 1%. With £85 million to find the council is upping fees and charges by £10 million and taking another £10 million out of the voluntary sector and only managing to get £1 million out of staff terms and conditions. This really is small beer and illustrates how dependent on the unions Labour is here in Ealing.

I have worked with many fine people at Ealing council but I do have to say that their terms and conditions are rather comfortable compared to those enjoyed by many people working in other fields. Staff do 35 hour weeks. New starters get 27 days holiday which goes up to 30 days after 5 years and 33 days after ten. The chief officers get 33 days on day one. In the 2009/10 financial year non-school staff alone earned £1.8 million in overtime, anti-social hours and special responsibility allowances. The difference between these Ts and Cs and the kind of Ts and Cs enjoyed by the bulk of the workers paying council tax in Ealing is worth about 10% of the £130 million pay bill, not the 1% the council is going for.

If staff did a 37.5 hour week that would be worth about £9 million.

If staff only had 20 days holiday that would be worth at least £4 million.

Bell’s £1 million, which took him the best part of three years to get, looks like small beer and is £500K less than he set out to get. Bell negotiated this deal himself so he has no-one else to blame.

Today Education Secretary, Michael Gove, excoriates the Marxist “Enemies of Promise” who penned their letter this week warning of “the dangers posed by Michael Gove’s new National Curriculum, which could severely erode educational standards.” Gove’s counterblast in the Mail on Sunday is witty, accurate and savage.

In Ealing of course we have our very own Enemies of Promise. They are all on the public payroll you won’t be surprised to learn. First off there are the paid union representatives.

The secretary of the NUT branch for the Borough of Ealing is called Nick Grant. Grant calls himself a Marxist and is a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He is a member of the NUT national executive council so he is a big wheel in the union. He doesn’t do any actual teaching. He enjoys a full-time salary, paid for by you and me. Scandalously the union got £15K more last year so that he could take his union role fulltime. He uses his time for activities such as co-founding the Anti Academies Alliance, “convening” the Ealing Alliance for Public Services, writing articles for the The Socialist Worker and organising strikes in Ealing’s schools.

Nick Grant’s assistant secretary at the local NUT branch is called Stefan Sims, who came to national fame for campaigning against army recruitment. He was also the front man of the campaign against Featherstone High School in Southall becoming an academy. Simms is another Socialist Workers Party member.

The total bill that Ealing council pays for Grant, Stefan & Co in union facility time, ie time off on union business, is £160K, up 9% over the last two years and on average £76K per person. Grant is full-time and Simms is part-time.

It is not just the teaching union reps who are on the fringe. The Labour administration, especially the Southall wing of it, is doggedly Old Labour and obstructive to Gove’s agenda of demanding excellence for all. When Featherstone High School in Southall looked at taking the academy route the local MP, Virendra Sharma, and his assistant, Julian Bell, along with all of the 15 Southall Labour MPs tried to strong arm the governing body into voting against academy status. Ridiculously Sharma asked to address the governing bodies decision making meeting. Luckily Southall Old Labour lost the argument and Featherstone is now an academy.

The Enemies of Promise are here in Ealing too, arguing that a little bit rubbish is not so bad, that OK is fine, that great isn’t really worth the trouble.

The Enterprise contract is still in a crisis, almost a year in and the figures are getting worse. My walk to school is just depressing and the streets in my neighbourhood have got visibly dirtier in the last few weeks.

I pulled out the missed collection numbers up until January, see graph below. Almost 6,000 collections were missed in January and the figures have got worse three months running. On average, over ten months missed collections were 4.5 times worse than they were under the old contract. In ten months last year 10,000 collections were missed. In the same ten months under the Enterprise contract 44,000 collections were missed, that is 34,000 more missed collections in ten months with the new contract.

The council and Enterprise have screwed up massively. And they continue to do so.

This week I got a nice letter from council leader Julian Bell while he is having a cycling holiday to the South of France. I guess that you got the same one too with your council tax demand. It jauntily talks about the continuing council tax freeze.

There is lots of stuff it doesn’t mention.

First off your bill is just about the only bill you have which is going down and it is all down to the Conservatives. The Conservative London mayor, Boris Johnson, has actually fractionally cut his bill so the overall council tax bill will go down.

The freeze that Bell is talking about started four year ago under the previous Conservative administration. We froze the tax for two years running. When we froze the council tax there was no CT Freeze Grant from Gordon Brown. Since 2010 the Labour council has accepted £18 million of CT Freeze Grant from the “Tory-led Coalition” as they like to call it. This is totally new money that the council can spend on what it likes. They don’t like to talk about this as it seriously undermines their cuts message.

I am glad that Ealing Labour has reformed itself (with £18 million of central government persuasion). In the twelve years Labour ran Ealing from 1994 to 2006 it increased Council Tax by a staggering 179% – 48% in its last four years from 2002 to 2006.

Conservatives cost you less. As soon as Labour gets the chance to stick its hands in your pockets you can be sure that it will.

Cash transportation company Loomis who do business with the Sainsburys Local on Boston Manor Road are totally taking the Mickey. Local resident Nigel Brooks took this photo of a Loomis security van mounting the pavement adjacent to a pedestrian crossing at 8.20am this morning. As well as endangering pedestrians large vehicles like this on brand new pavements smash them up pretty quickly. Judging by the four large vehicles stopped adjacent to the Sainsbury’s in this photo it looks like the delivery drivers are just ignoring the zigzags.

If you use this branch of Sainsbury’s please bend the manager’s ear. I have reported it to the police. I will get round there tomorrow. I have also written to Loomis having talked to their operations people on the phone on two previous occasions. In this case the driver needs firing frankly. These vehicles are simply not entitled to be on the pavement at any time.

Update:

I talked to the store manager Miriam on Saturday and this morning I got the following response from Loomis on Twitter (quite a good way of getting in their faces):

https://twitter.com/LoomisUK/status/311035523969998849