Category: Ealing and Northfield

Labour’s Transport and Environment spokesman, Bassam Mahfouz, is a cheerful, pleasant chap but he does have a tendency to be political in a weird, denying-the-facts sort of a way.

In recent months the Heathrow 3rd runway issue has come back into play. At the start of September the government set up the Davies Review to look at airport capacity. Ealing and Acton MP, Angie Bray used her Gazette column last month to restate her opposition to a 3rd runway. Local Conservatives were also keen to underline their opposition to a 3rd runway in the light of the Davies Review so tabled the following simple motion at tonight’s council meeting.

No to Heathrow Expansion

This Council reaffirms its opposition to a third runway at Heathrow Airport and pledges to campaign vigorously against any proposals contrary to this position.

Nice and simple. Everyone can agree and work together. No. Cllr Mahfouz had different ideas. He put in a motion that read as follows:

No to Heathrow Expansion

This council notes that in their election manifesto in 2010 the Conservatives said: “Our goal is to make Heathrow airport better, not bigger. We will stop the third runway and instead link Heathrow directly to our high speed rail network, providing an alternative to thousands of flights. In addition, we will block plans for second runways at Stansted and Gatwick.”

The council notes that in their election manifesto in 2010 the Liberal Democrats said: “We will cancel plans for a third runway at Heathrow and other airport expansion in the South East”

The council notes that after the election of Ed Milliband as Labour leader Labour announced that they would not support expansion at Heathrow airport.

The council notes that a number of Conservative politicians have now backed calls for expansion at Heathrow.

The council is dismayed that the Chancellor George Osbourne has announced another U-turn for the Tory-led Government with decision to set up a review to examine expansion of airports in the South East.

The council is particularly disappointed that the Chancellor refused to rule out expansion at Heathrow.

Council resolves to renew its opposition to a third runway at Heathrow airport.

Council asks the portfolio holder for Transport and Environment to write to the relevant ministers and shadow ministers from all parties to demand the promises they have made to the electorate.

I think he meant “to demand that they keep the promises they have made to the Electorate” at the end there.

Ridiculously he quotes Tory and LibDem manifestos opposing the 3rd runway but omits to mention that the Labour manifesto supported it. He accuses George Osborne of U-turning when we know that Alistair Darling is in favour of a 3rd runway. This is complicated. Some senior national policiticans of both parties are in favour of getting on with the 3rd runway on macro-economic grounds. London Mayor Boris Johnson is not and neither typically are local MPs or councillors. Mahfouz just isn’t very honest or grown up is he?

This kind of thing really winds people up. Instead of just getting all the councillors to agree to something simple Mahfouz has tried to turn this into a petty fight.

The Ealing Rubbish Fiasco has been going on for six months and we have still not seen a full resumption of the normal service. The council has been slow to divulge the data I am using here. The August data was sent to me on Friday. There have essentially been five waves of problems that residents have had to endure:

The initial, bags-in-the-street, in-your-face fiasco

In April the contractor’s mobilisation plan failed. The rounds were not right. The vehicles purchased by Enterprise were either too big or weren’t ready in time. Rubbish was left in the street. Cllrs Bell and Mahfouz frantically cycled around the Borough trying to keep up with the chaos. This phase passed off pretty quickly for most people. Two weeks of mess, bags piled up, streets not swept, no record kept of street cleaning. The council would like you to think that was the end of it.

The council fails to clean the streets

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 five months one street in eight is still unacceptably dirty and we still have twice as many dirty streets as last year.

The council sends pretty much all re-cycling to Kent

After a couple of weeks it was decided that kerbside re-cycling could not be continued. All the borough’s dry re-cycling was shoved in lorries and taken to Kent. This lasted for four months in which time 87% of all dry re-cycling was mixed up and effectively kerbside re-cycling stopped. The council never told the truth about this.

Double spike in missed collections

In the first month of the Ealing Rubbish Fiasco over 8,000 collections were missed. This was probably an under estimate as it would only take a couple of calls to tell the council that an entire road was uncollected. This seemed to get better in May and June and then spiked up again in July and August as the contractor took delivery of new recycling vehicles and re-jigged the collection rounds which their staff couldn’t get right. There were almost as many missed collection in August as there were in April. Over 25,000 missed collections in five months, five times as many as the previous year.

Council still failing to clean up after itself

Residents will have noted that even in October the council is still failing to clear up after itself. The street cleaners leave their bags out for days on end and fly-tips are up 31% over five months. Combine the 50% cut in envirocrime officers checking up on how businesses handle their waste and the look of the borough has turned noticeably worse. Plastic bags in the street are a bigger feature of our life than they were six months ago.

The council has spent six months telling us that things weren’t that bad. They were and we have a noticeably dirtier environment now and many residents have had their faith in the recycling system knocked.

I spent 18 minutes this evening responding to NHS North West London’s “Shaping a Healthier Future” consultation document. Obviously I have previously read the background papers and discussed the issue a number of times so I haven’t included all of that time in my 18 minutes. The point is that ticking the boxes does not really take that long and you should not be easily put off.

The main thing to do in my view is to “Strongly oppose” the three options A, B and C on offer as they all three move services away from our borough (questions 24a, 25a and 26a). Under the catch all question 34 I wrote:

All three options presented are bad for Ealing. Option A is particularly inequitable. They all move services away from Ealing.

My answers are not particularly sophisticated, they don’t need to be. If you want to get inside the decision maker’s heads and make them question their assumptions then please just respond to the consultation. You don’t have to be eloquent or long-winded. Just the fact of receiving lots of individual responses will shake the decision makers.

The council has spent £56K on a very detailed, technical reponse to the consultation authored by ex-NHS trust chief executive Tim Rideout. This will be discussed at an extraordinary cabinet meeting on Friday at 3pm. See all of the papers here.

The council can do the detailed, technical stuff. You do the emotional, personal stuff.

The consultation closes on Monday. Get cracking.

If you are wondering how much the Altogether better magazine you received through your letterbox this week cost I can tell you. Everyone in the borough got one at a price of £40K.

20-30 people have had their council tax flushed down the toilet to fund this nonsense.

Lots of the facts and figures are wrong and most of the projects they are talking about have been around for a long time. You will have read it all before in Around Ealing.

David Millican, the Conservative group leader, says:

This glossy magazine is a complete waste of public money. The politically motivated leading article starts by saying that “times are tough” and talks about “value for money” yet fails to mention how many thousands of pounds this publication is costing. Dreadful!

It would be better if the council stuck to cleaning the place up rather than blowing its own trumpet.

I was disappointed by the hospital debate at the Town Hall yesterday evening. There was a good turnout and there were pretty much bang on 300 people there (14 rows of 24 chairs at 80%-90% full with about 20 standing). The audience unfortunately included very few “civilians” – the uninterested (meaning without interests) and the persuadable – either way. The vast majority were local politicians, health service workers and trade unionists who had come to make their points rather than listen to a debate with an open mind.

Of the 22 questions asked up to 9pm 9 were asked by local politicians (Cllrs Kaur, Kang, Dheer, Costello, Anand and Bell, MP Virendra Sharma, Ealing Southall Respect Party candidate Salvinder Dhillon and Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate in the London Assembly elections Mark Benjamin. Four members of the Ealing Save Our Hospitals campaign, Dr Paramjit Sandhu, Bridget Ogden, Fran Tindall and Colin Stanfield asked questions as did Hammersmith hospitals activist James Doheny.

One chap with long hair at the back, who didn’t identify himself, told us that there were “some crooks in the room tonight” and that he didn’t “really have a question”. I met him selling copies of the Socialist Worker on my way out with another person. Similarly Tony Gill who described himself as a Hanwell resident from the West London Socialist Party was later outside with two others selling their paper called the Socialist which featured hospital pneumatic tube carriers. The tube carriers safely and reliably transport lab specimens, IVs, pharmaceuticals, documents, supplies and other materials throughout the hospital’s pneumatic tube system. Click here to learn about hospital pneumatic tube systems. Robert Sale from trade union campaign Brent Fightback was another at-the-backer.

That left 5 questions from “civilians” – possibly. Tranjit from Southall called the consultation “self-fulfilling” and asked why we had choose between hospitals. Inderjit who had previously sat on the council’s own health panels talked about Southall’s particular health issues. A “working man” tried to draw parallels with the time of the Thatcher government and asked if we would be driven out of country in search of healthcare. An Ealing hospital nursing sister called Jenny of 26 years standing talked of Southall’s specific health issues and its “hidden population”. Finally a “resident of 40 years” talked with the angry sense of loss that many older people feel when contemplating the modern world.

Between the chairman, Victoria Macdonald, Health correspondent of Channel 4, and the two microphone carriers (both from the SOH Ealing campaign), not enough effort was made to find a broader range of actual questions rather than well rehearsed, often political positions. Dr Sahota spent much of the meeting waving at the microphone carriers so maybe that explains the narrow range of the questioners we heard from.

The problem we have in Ealing is that NHS NWL has come up with a response to the Nicholson challenge that piles the pain of the whole region onto us. It is inequitable. We are right to fight it. We need NHS NWL to think again and work out how to square the circle fairly. NHS NWL cannot change the macroeconomics but they can work out how not to screw our borough. The howls of rage from the left (including the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party all selling their newspapers outside the hall last night) are diluting what should be our central message which is that NHS NWL need to come up with a fairer solution.

I have been keeping track of the cost of the senior management team at Ealing Council. You might have thought that it would have been halved like envirocrime officers and park rangers or stopped almost completely like the councils contributions to voluntary organisations. No.

Over Labour’s first two years in power, whilst they have been screaming “cuts” to the rooftops, they have only managed to take just over 5% out of senior management costs. The council still has 91 £100K staff, indeed it has one more than last year.

Central government has been doing rather better than this as reported by the Telegraph yesterday. 37% of the most highly paid have been taken out. The council should take note of what Francis Maude has achieved.