Category: Ealing and Northfield

Council leader Julian Bell is off on his bike for six days to the South of France. He leaves today and will cycle for six days to Cannes on a charity bike ride associated with the MIPIM property conference which itself runs through to Friday of next week.

Bell takes a salary for doing two jobs. He takes a fulltime allowance to be leader of the council. Unlike his Conservative predecessor Jason Stacey he doesn’t do a fulltime job though. He also works two days a week and draws a salary as a Parliamentary researcher for Southall MP Virendra Sharma. Both of these jobs have extensive holidays. We all know how many days that Parliament has off. The council also goes very quiet during school holidays which is the natural time for councillors to take time off (unless they are Cllr Ed Rennie).

I hope that Cllr Bell raises some money for charity. Maybe, like Cllr Rennie, he will also be giving some of his taxpayer funded income to charity too. Hopefully nothing much will happen over the 10 days or so for his lacklustre deputy, Cllr Ranjit Dheer, to deal with.

Another feature of the council’s finances that Labour are not bragging about, and deplorably the officers seem incapable of communicating clearly to residents either, is the New Homes Bonus. The New Homes Bonus is a grant paid by central government to local councils for increasing the number of homes and their use. You can read more about it here.

So far the government has given local councils £1.3 billion of new money. Ealing has already achieved £31 million of New Homes Bonus. It will get £5.1 million of this money in the next financial year. For more information see Table 4 on page 15 of the budget report.

Like the CT Freeze Grant I talked about on Thursday it isn’t ring-fenced and the council can spend it on what it likes. Added to CT Freeze Grant that is £49 million of new money that the council hasn’t told you about because it doesn’t suit its message. This may be acceptable if unattractive if it is coming from Labour politicians but it isn’t acceptable when it is council officers only telling half the story.

I have had a month off from the blog. Over the next few days I am going to comment on various aspects of the budget that was agreed at the council meeting last Tuesday.

At the meeting the Labour administration used a question to re-announce that they will freeze council tax for their 4th budget next year for the fourth year in a row, they first announced it in the Gazette at the start of the year. This news will be welcomed by most residents and it certainly is by the Conservative opposition on the council. We started the freeze, along with the new London Mayor Boris Johnson in the 2009/2010 financial year. This year bills will even fall slightly due to a cut in the Mayor’s precept.

Labour has not been so keen to re-announce the source of the funding for this freeze. When we set a standstill council tax for two years there was no council tax freeze grant. The current Labour administration has accepted £18 million of grants from central government to freeze the council tax, see Table 3 on page 14 of the budget report. They keep talking about the freeze and they keep telling porkies about their £85 million savings target and calling it cuts but they never tell you that they have had £18 million of new money from central government to fund the freeze.

You might think that the council’s communications team, who are paid for from public funds, might feel they were under some kind of obligation to act impartially. They might be under an obligation but they show no signs of feeling it!

The council is forever highlighting its savings target of £85 million without putting it in any kind of context that allows people to understand that the real cuts are about 12.5% of total revenue. For instance see the latest issue of Around Ealing above.

The announcement yesterday of a welcome extension to the flats re-cycling service comes with no mention that the capital costs of the scheme, and a wider push to get recycling up, is to be entirely funded by £1.1 million of new money from central government. The Gazette picked up the story but it just lazily repeated the press release.

The first line of the official cabinet report says:

Approves the introduction of the recycling services outlined in paragraph 2.4 below as a result of receiving the external funding from the DCLG (Department for Communities and Local Government) Weekly Collection Support Scheme (WCSS).

The background to this is that the council’s officers did well to bid for and win £1.1 million of new money from DCLG to improve the Borough’s re-cycling rate. But, it doesn’t suit the Labour party that this fact is shared with residents. Officers should not be colluding in this.

It is one thing for Labour councillors to only tell half of the story but when the council’s paid employees do it it is simply not on. I have written to the chief executive of the council to complain about the behaviour of his communications officers.

Update: As a result of my complaint to the chief executive the following line got added to the press release:

The above enhancements will be funded following a successful bid from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

The council is proposing to mess with the successful Streetwatchers volunteer programme. This has been running for over ten years and there are around 300 Streetwatchers, all volunteers, who help the council to identify fly tips, graffiti and other nuisances. The council has a terrible record on keeping the borough clean having halved the effective Envirocrime service and overseen a nine month period where one quarter of the Borough’s streets were unacceptably dirty.

This latest move further threatens the cleanliness of our borough and upsets a wonderful volunteer resource. The council is proposing to sack the person who has built this team up and move it from the Streets function to the Neighbourhood Governance function. The volunteers haven’t been consulted and don’t like what they are hearing.

The Conservative group wants to see Streetwatchers enhanced and expanded and we can’t see how removing a lynch pin officer will achieve that. If the council is to change anything it needs to get these valuable volunteers onside first. The lack of consultation with the volunteer Streetwatchers shows yet again how dismissive the council officers are of volunteering in general, remember the way library volunteers were treated.

It should be noted that the council is cutting a frontline officer managing 300 volunteers in preference to the post of the Labour group political advisor who the council tax payers of this borough outrageously paid to go the Labour party conference last year. I know which cut residents would choose.

My colleague Cllr Mark Reen has used a written question (question 18) to confirm that the Labour group abused public money earlier this year to send their political assistant to the Labour Party conference. Ealing residents will only be dimly aware that the council has political assistants. They will be appalled to learn that someone’s council tax has been used to pay the expenses of one of them to go to a party conference. The language of the council’s response is hilariously circumloquacious. Rather obviously it was the Labour group political assistant who attended the Labour party conference.

Question 18:

Does the Council pay for any Officers to attend party political conferences?

Answer 18:

This would not be appropriate for most council officers and has never happened, save for one of the council’s political assistants, who attended the Labour Party conference in September/October 2012. This was authorised by reason that, as part of the employee officer’s performance appraisal process, developmental objectives were identified that would be met in part by attendance at one of the party political conferences.

The same opportunity was offered to the council’s other political assistant but was not taken up.

How strange? The Labour group PA had unique training needs that required public money to be spent to send him to the Labour conference. The Tory group PA had no such unique training needs and was offered the same deal.

Chief Executive, Martin Smith has made a big error in allowing this I have to say. Council leader Julian Bell should have known better. It stinks. The Labour party in Ealing has a track record of misusing public funds for its own party political advantage. This is just another example.

Figures released on Thursday night (question 30) show that missed collections across the borough are still running three times ahead of last year. (The official answer to my question is slightly garbled – the chart puts the right data in the right place). My own ward in particular suffered from repeated missed collections in November.

In October missed collections were only twice as bad as the previous year. They went backwards in November. At least some of the problem has been vehicle breakdowns, certainly in Northfield ward.

Eight months into the new Enterprise contract Ealing council has still not managed to give residents the service that they pay for.

Figures released on Thursday night (question 32) show that 20% of Ealing’s streets were unacceptably dirty in November. Eight months into the new Enterprise contract Ealing council has still not managed to give residents the service that they pay for.

This new contract is actually meant to be better than the old one. The previous contract with May Gurney demanded that at least 90% of Ealing’s streets were graded A in the nationally agreed measurement scheme for these things. As you can see last year May Gurney typically exceeded this. The new contract says at least 95% of Ealing’s streets should be cleaned to grade A standard. Again the figures show the nearest that Enterprise has got to this was August and September when 12.9% of streets were unacceptably dirty. In October and November these numbers were 16.2% and 19.5% respectively. Of course it is harder to keep the streets clean in the autumn but Enterprise has been 2.5 times worse than May Gurney was the year before. May Gurney consistently met its 90% target last year. Enterprise hasn’t got anywhere near its contracted target.

Back in November Enterprise came to the Overview and Scrutiny meeting for a grilling. You wouldn’t know it from the minutes but three different Tory councillors asked essentially the same question. When will Enterprise meet its 95% grade A target? Three times the question was ignored by council leader Cllr Julian Bell and the man in charge of this nonsense Cllr Bassam Mahfouz. Neither the Labour administration nor Enterprise has made any undertaking as to when Ealing residents will get the service they pay for.

I am sorry that our streets have been looking so tatty lately. I have obtained figures for street cleaning in October that show that Northfield ward had the dirtiest streets in Ealing in October, almost 30% of our streets were dirty. The graph below show the percentage of A rated streets in each ward for the month of October.

Problems continue with collections with the south of the ward having particular problems this week. This photo was taken at 3pm today in Darwin Road. It looked as if no recycling had been collected. It was due to be collected on Monday. There were 10s of food boxes uncollected in Carlyle Road and driving past it looked like Julien Road, Wellington Road and Bramley Road had not had their recycling collected. These failures are down to 2 vehicle breakdowns earlier in the week officers tell me. Please let me know if your road has problems and if the whole area isn’t cleared up by Friday lunchtime. Councillors have been chasing in response to e-mails from residents. Thanks for letting us know.