Category: Ealing and Northfield

Tonight the council’s hapless rubbish and recycling contractor, Enterprise, will be back in front of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee at 7.45pm at the Town Hall for a grilling on their somewhat less than elite performance over the last six months. The officers’ report for the meeting veers between being refreshingly honest, if understated:

This street cleansing after collection part of the contract has not been performed by Enterprise as well as is required in the first 6 months of the contract.

and weirdly confusing outputs (demonstrably worse) with inputs (aspirational):

It must be stressed however, that this represents performance against an enhanced specification

There are three key points to take away from the report that will be discussed tonight at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee:

Missed collections

There have been 5,000 missed collections a month on average for 6 months. A total of 31,201 missed collections in first six months of the contract compared to 6,422 the previous year. Missed collections have been running at five times the rate of the previous year for six months.

Re-cycling

For four months pretty much all of the borough’s dry recycling (86%) was mixed up and sent to Kent. This has disillusioned many of our recycling residents.

Street cleaning

On average, for four months, one third of the borough’s streets were unacceptably dirty. There are still more than twice as many dirty streets as last year.

£1 million is a lot of money for one vote but that was the value of one vote on the planning committee last Wednesday.

On Wednesday the Conservative members of the planning committee walked out of the meeting when discussion of a planning application in East Acton ward came up. It is a block of flats adjacent to North Acton tube station that carries with it a £1 million worth of Section 106 funds, also known as “planning gain”. It seems that the Ealing Labour group is so keen to get its hands on this money it is prepared to subvert the planning process and ignore its own manifesto.

In August planning application P/2011/4250 for a housing and commercial development of 18 storeys was refused on the following grounds:

1. Overdevelopment by reason of lack of amenity space.
2. Low proportion of affordable housing.

Apart from a few balconies and a rooftop play area there was no amenity space (gardens, playgrounds, balconies, etc). The proportion of social housing proposed made a mockery of Labour’s manifesto pledges to “build 3,000 affordable homes “ and “reinstate the requirement for 50% affordable homes in all private developments”. The developer was offering to provide 20 affordable homes out of 151, a measly 13.2%.

This decision was not made lightly. There was an hour long debate about the merits of this proposal in which detailed questions were asked of officers.

The vote in August was telling. The Conservatives and one LibDem opposition councillors voted against the application along with the only ward councillor from the affected ward, East Acton’s Cllr Kate Crawford. The rest of the Labour group voted for, ignoring their own aspirations for more affordable housing in favour of Labour’s North Acton vanity project (of which more later).

On Wednesday this same application came back to the planning committee. Normally when an application is refused the developer will either appeal or come back with a substantially modified proposal. In this case the Labour chairman of the planning committee, Cllr Ray Wall, and the planning officers allowed this application to boomerang back to the committee after three months using the pretext that on the 6th September 2012, there was a government ministerial statement from Eric Pickles (Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government).

The only concession that had been made as a result of the previous refusal was to increase the amenity space by 380m², by giving 19 flats larger balconies and providing another play area on the top of a ten storey building.

No attempt had been made to get anywhere nearer to Labour’s manifesto commitment of 50% affordable. It seems that Labour would rather take the cash.

They are particularly keen to get hold of contributions to Cllr Bell’s North Acton piazza, a concrete square that replaces a well used petrol station. This developer was offering £692K towards this particular project. This sum had been promised up front, to “be paid prior to the commencement of any part of the development“. The only thing better than free money is free money right now!

Anyway the Conservative councillors could see what was coming and didn’t want any part of it. They walked out and the lonely LibDem member of the committee was the only one to vote against the massed ranks of Labour councillors ignoring their own manifesto. As for Cllr Crawford she has seemingly been mollified with a 2.5m² per flat increase in amenity space. As the developer has not offered any increase in affordable homes it seems too that she is happy to wave goodbye to Labour’s affordable housing promises.

The council hasn’t consulted anyone about its piazza or made any public decisions. It is ignoring its own manifesto promise to increase affordable housing and pressing ahead with delivering the piazza in spite of objections from residents.

Labour has got its way, and collected £1 million, thanks to Kate Crawford’s one vote.

I asked a question (52) about road resurfacing at the last council. The council officers declined to do the analysis I asked for but at least they published the base data. I have done the analysis myself. You can download my workings if you want to check – I deal in numbers and I am happy for you to check what I have done.

This year and last year were the first two years where the current Labour administration was responsible for setting the priorities for capital spending. Essentially Labour has halved road spending. They allocated £2,922,525 in 2011/12 and £3,610,000 in the current 2012/13 financial year.

Labour have learnt their lesson and haven’t quite gone back to the bad old days. For ten years they spent about £1 million a year on our roads and pavements. In 1999/2000 they spent absolutely nothing. When we were elected in 2006 there was a frightening backlog. We immediately added £500K to the current year’s spend in 2006/7 and we spent another £25 million in 4 years. If the council can’t keep up the roads it is hard to know what it is for. Since Labour got back into power it has halved road spending again. Not quite the bad old days, unless you live in an opposition ward.

If you look at how spending has broken down by ward over the last two years you get the picture below.

One ward, Ealing Common, has had no roads or pavements resurfaced in two years. Acton Central, Greenford Green, Hanger Hill, North Greenford, Northfields, South Acton and Southfield have had just one road or pavement done. Cleveland and East Acton have had just two. At the other end of the spectrum the Labour held Northolt West End ward has had £1.2 million spent on it doing 17 roads and pavements. This is Labour roads boss, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz’s own ward. Funny that.

The average spend per ward has been £284K these last two years. Southall Broadway got just over the average. All the ward above the average are essentially Labour wards (one out of three councillors in Northolt Mandeville is a Conservative).

It is quite clear that in the last two years expenditure has been focussed in Labour’s core areas. In 2011/12 50% of expenditure went to the 5 wards of Southall (they might expect to get 22% on average). In 2012/13 49% of expenditure went to the 2 wards of Northolt (they might expect to get 9% on average).

What will Labour do next year? Half the money spent in Acton? In two years Acton has got just 3% of the roads cash to do 4 roads and pavements across three wards in two years. It might expect to have got 13% if it matched its share of the wards. Let’s see.

The council makes a big thing about the £85 million savings it is making. At the centre of this is a £56 million cut in the council’s grant which is the equivalent of something like 28% of its grants. At the last council meeting I asked some questions about union facility time. See questions 11, 12 and 13.

Overall union facility time has risen by 5.2% in Labour’s first two years in power. That is right up 5.2%. The council spends £264,800 to employ 5.1 people on union business.

It is quite striking that the non-teaching portion of this cash handout to the unions has been frozen for the last two years. The teacher portion of this has shot up 8.9%. Apparently the teacher shop stewards are twice as expensive as the council’s other shop stewards. The teaching shop stewards cost £76K per annum each on average. The others cost £35K each on average. Apparently Socialist Worker extremists such as Nick Grant and Stefan Simms, secretary and assistant secretary of Ealing’s NUT branch, are worth £76K a year each to Ealing residents even when they work for the NUT organising strikes rather than teaching.

The most egregious part of this is that the council has given Nick Grant, the NUT’s branch secretary for Ealing, an extra day a week to undertake his duties as a national executive member. Repeat. This extra cash does nothing for Ealing. It is a gift from you, the Ealing council tax payer, to the NUT union. It is worth about £10,000 per annum. When I asked what is the value of this to Ealing council tax payers the answer was:

The arrangement permits some insights and information about the NUT’s approach nationally to various issues such as wage bargaining.

Do you believe this? Is this how you want your money spending?

At the last council meeting I asked my usual questions about the rubbish and re-cycling service – the council still refuses to give me this data unbidden. The council still will not divulge the key performance indicator outcomes and are citing commercial confidentiality and refusing point blank to divulge whether Enterprise has incurred any penalty payments since the three month grace period written into the contract expired at the end of June. See answers to questions published late on Thursday.

Streets still twice as dirty for second month running

The worst part of the Ealing Rubbish Fiasco has been the street cleaning. It seems to be the slowest part to get fixed. For three months the council badly failed to clean the streets. For three months a third or more of all of the entire Borough’s roads were unacceptably dirty. In month four a quarter of streets were unacceptably dirty after the council went back to the old system of allowing the contractor to clean up failed streets. After six months one street in eight is still unacceptably dirty for the second month running and we still have twice as many dirty streets as last year. It seems that the idea of cleaning streets the same day is very hard to make work.

Missed collections – still broken

We have now got to 30,000 missed collections over the first six months of the new contract. In September they were still running 4 times ahead of where they where the previous year and overall they are up 5 times on the previous half year.

Dry re-cycling to Kent

The council went backwards here slightly sending 19% of dry recycling to Kent in September. In the first four months of the contract on average 87% of all dry re-cycling was mixed up and effectively kerbside re-cycling stopped. Things have got much better in the last two months but are still not where they should be at. When the system is fully working there should be a small amount of dry recycling from flats going to Kent, that is all.

The council has spent six months telling us that things weren’t that bad. They were. We still have way too many dirty streets and missed collections.

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Reference: https://www.maideasy.com.au/house-cleaning/.