Category: Ealing and Northfield

I wonder if Ealing & Hillingdon’s GLA member, Onkar Sahota, will turn up for today’s Mayor’s Question Time meeting of the full London Assembly at 10am? I guess he will turn up but as he has only put down one question you wonder if his heart is really in it.

Sahota is paid £53,439 a year to perform a specific function on behalf of the 600,000 population of the boroughs of Ealing and Hillingdon. That function is scrutiny. Questions, which have to be answered promptly, are the main mechanism by which assembly members can hold the mayor to account. Sahota has only been an assembly member for 4 months. Is there nothing he wants to know? Altogether assembly members have asked 505 questions for today. 1 out of 505 does not sound like a high work rate to me.

I wouldn’t like Sahota to ask questions for the sake of it but the main responsibilities of the Mayor are overseeing the police and public transport. Are there really no police or transport issues across these two boroughs? Between them these two services spend over £10 billion per annum. Dr Sahota, what are you doing?

Four times on Saturday at the NHS rally on Ealing Common I was confronted by aggressive young men in their late twenties to mid-thirties who felt that as a Tory I shouldn’t be there. As a 25 year Ealing resident and someone who has worked hard on the cross-party hospitals campaign I didn’t like it very much.

They were all members or fellow travellers of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). These people are aggressive, unpleasant and quite barking. For instance they say:

Workers create all the wealth under capitalism. A new society can only be constructed when they collectively seize control of that wealth and plan its production and distribution according to need.

They haven’t moved on from 1917. Almost a century of history that proved them to be absolutely wrong has passed them by.

I took a leaflet from one of the SWP crew. It didn’t say anything about the NHS reconfiguration but asked “Why you should be a Socialist!” and promoted a public meeting on that subject at the West London Trade Union Club on Thursday.

I don’t understand why the Labour politicians in Ealing are so happy to march under the SWP banner, which they literally did on Saturday for two hours. You can’t imagine how much pushing and shoving it took to keep this group at the front of the march in public view. Do you really imagine that the SWP placards would be in such full view if Ealing Labour was that worried about them?

For the vast majority of Ealing people the march and rally were about protecting local services from a badly thought out reconfiguration – and that is the official position of the council, agreed by all parties. Slogans such as “Health cuts no way, Make the greedy bankers pay” rhyme very well but are hardly tailored for Ealing.

You wonder if the bakers dozen of SWP placards you can see in this picture were carried by SWP activists on a day out or local people who didn’t really understand what the SWP stand for.

Two things strike me. Why does the SWP insist on branding these placards like this? Their brand is so poisonous I can’t see what they achieve by this. I guess they feel they can hijack Ealing people’s concern for their local services as part of their revolution. The other thing that strikes me is why are three of Ealing’s leading elected Labour politicians so relaxed about being haloed by this irrelevant, extremist tosh?

In spite of promises to reinstate kerbside re-cycling which is the most environmentally friendly approach to re-cycling, Ealing Council still mixed up most (81%) of dry re-cycling in July. In figures released by the Council last Wednesday, it became clear that 1,132.60 Tonnes out of 1,399.62 Tonnes of dry-recycling (81%) was sent by Enterprise to the Ideal MRF in Kent. Across the Borough, most of residents’ carefully sorted re-cycling was mixed up and sent to Kent to be re-sorted again at great expense.

For the first four months of the current financial year 87% of dry-recycling was sent to the MRF.

The Council keeps telling us that things are going to get better, but when the numbers finally dribble out weeks after the month end, it seems that the rate of improvement is all too slow. The Council has consistently downplayed this huge backward step in our re-cycling. The gold standard for re-cycling is kerbside sorting which ensures that the best use is made of the waste. The Council has thrown away most of residents’ sorting and separating efforts for 4 months now.

In the coverage of the sheds with beds issue there is a clear difference in the comments being made by the government and by Ealing council and its Labour councillors.

In the BBC News piece last Friday Grant Shapps, Minister of State for Housing and Planning, said:

This is a pretty sophisticated shed if I ever saw one. Had that been stopped at the early stage we wouldn’t be ending up with streets of buildings like this with lots of people shoved into small spaces. This needs to be actually tackled by the councils on a planning basis from the outset and they need to show an example by knocking some down.

Shapps clearly feels that councils could have done more, earlier. By coming down hard on the first few sheds councils might have stopped the thousands from being built. Quite.

The council’s position is summed up by leader Cllr Julian Bell:

We’re doing everything we can to tackle this issue and have created a special team dedicated to investigating illegal outhouses, but we need more funding and greater powers.

The government clearly doesn’t buy this line. Indeed a CLG press release announcing a grant of £280K to Ealing Council to tackle this issue specifically said:

Some councils have argued that they need to have a new legal power of entry into premises without notice. However, councils already have this ability provided they obtain a magistrates’ warrant – which provides a proportionate check and balance on the use of such powers.

The CLG press release covering last week’s raid also delicately pointed out:

Magistrates’ warrants were issued ahead of the dawn raid, granting Ealing Council the legal power to enter the premises without notice.

The government is quite reasonably pointing out that the council can enter premises without notice but they need to be overseen by a magistrate. Does the council really want the power to enter premises at will?

Bell’s position is essentially “Not me Guv”. He is trying to kid us that this is all some kind of surprise to him and that he is dealing with it as best he can in trying circumstances. This is nonsense.

Bell is in a difficult position as is Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma. Don’t forget that Julian Bell isn’t just a Greenford councillor and leader of his party group on the council. He is Virendra Sharma’s paid employee working as a researcher in Parliament and has been since Sharma was first elected as an MP in 2007. This problem didn’t just emerge this year or last year. It has been building up over decades. Decades during which 15 Labour councillors in Southall were effectively silent except for a few ineffectual complaints that something should be done from one or two. Sharma started as a Southall councillor in 1982, thirty years ago. These sheds were literally built around him during his time as a councillor. To claim ignorance is risible.

If you can bear it you can read three year’s worth of minutes of the Southall Area Committee from 2005-2008 (the area committee was wound up in 2008 and I can’t get minutes before 2005 off the website) there is not one mention of back garden buildings or sheds with beds in three years and certainly no substantive discussion of planning enforcement or overdevelopment beyond some muttering by Cllr Kang about planning enforcement.

The Labour party isn’t some kind of irrelevant, minority cult in Southall. The constituency Labour party in Southall is the largest in the country. At the time of the 2010 Labour leadership election it had 1,206 members. Only 4 CLPs had a membership of over 1,000 and Ealing Southall was the biggest. The idea that the Ealing Southall Labour party hasn’t known that this was going on for decades is incredible.

According to theyworkforyou.com Virendra Sharma has spoken or asked questions in Parliament on 441 occasions. The only time I can find any mention of the sheds with beds issue was on 13th June this year. This statement, which is very much in keeping with the council line, came after the Sun article in October 2011 and after Chris Rogers’ pieces on the BBC in February. He was hardly breaking new ground here. This was just a statement designed to allow Sharma to say that he had raised this issue in Parliament. Great. The technical term is covering his arse. Sharma regularly asks questions and makes interventions on TB, Sri Lanka and health issues and foreign affairs more generally. He clearly has interests that he pursues in Parliament. This clearly isn’t one of them though.

I look forward to hearing more from Councillor Bell and ex-councillor Sharma listing the things they have done to highlight this issue and even to tackle it but I suspect I won’t. Southall is owned by Labour politically speaking. Labour might own this problem of its own making too.

On Friday the Southall sheds with beds story made it onto the BBC 10 o’clock news again. BBC investigative journalist Chris Rogers has now done three big pieces on this issue:

• Police raids in crackdown on ‘slum landlords’
• The illegal immigrants desperate to escape squalor of Britain
• ‘Sheds with beds’ are London’s modern day slums

The Sun also covered this issue in its own inimitable fashion in October 2011. The most recent raid has been covered by the Gazette and ealingtoday.co.uk which both pretty much just re-hashed the CLG press release. The council also did its own press release. The actual raid happened on Tuesday and it took until Friday to make the media.

Some facts emerge from this coverage:

• This has been going on a long time. In the Sun piece Bilhar says: “I’ve been here nine years and have never had a visit from the council.”
• The going rate for the rent seems to be £40 per man per week with 4-5 men per shed making the sheds worth £500-800 per month each to the landlord.
• The people seem to be overwhelmingly single, working-age men of South Asian and mainly Punjabi origin in the case of Southall.
• The estimate given for the number of these buildings is 10,000 in the South East of which the highest number are in Southall and Slough with 2,500 in Ealing.
• The men work at a rate of £50 per day for cash in hand.

It is not hard to work through the economics of this activity. If each shed is worth £500 per month say then rogue landlords are potentially pulling in £60 million a year in rent from these 10,000 sheds, £15 million per annum in Southall alone. You can double or treble this number when you add in people in main buildings sharing rooms. This illegal workforce probably numbers near enough 100,000 across the South East. Previously the police have told me that their working estimate for the Southall component of this workforce is 20,000. At £50 per day these men are potentially earning maybe £10K per annum each and doing a billion Pounds worth of labour at maybe half the cost of legally employed, semi-skilled UK citizens doing the work (where you have to pay Employer’s NI and properly take out Employee’s NI and PAYE).

With the economic crisis this workforce maybe working less often and at lower rates than they were 4-5 years ago but across the South East thousands of dishonest employers are employing these men and potentially denying tens of thousands of UK workers a job.

The council might claim that this is an issue of planning enforcement that it is ill-equipped to deal with due to the law as it is currently framed. But, at base this is a massive, illegal enterprise that has been going on under the noses of the authorities for years. To tackle it you need to follow the money. As soon as we get the employers and landlords in court or being assessed by HMRC the sheds will quickly become home offices, gyms and tool sheds – and stay that way. The men will disappear as soon as the money does.

I was not happy to see a report in the Evening Standard yesterday saying that Ealing was the top borough for giving out tickets for straying onto a bus lane. Ealing does cover a large area so you might expect us not to be at the bottom but we don’t necessarily have to be at the top either. The ealingtoday.co.uk website picked up the story yesterday.

I have been keeping track of the parking tickets given out by the Borough. I have just had a look at June’s data, see here.

For comparison the council gave out 197,302 tickets in the 2011/12 financial year (see Annual Report here). I have multiplied the monthly totals by 12 to give the equivalent yearly rate and divided that by last year’s total number of tickets issued to give an idea of the proportion that one road feature or offence represents compared to the whole borough.

During June there were 12 road features or offences in one place that accumulated over 200 tickets in the month. Almost a quarter of all tickets issued in our borough were issued on these sites (23.7%). Interestingly all of the high volume sites are policed with CCTV (the J code indicates a ticket policed by CCTV). The top 12 were:

It really stands out that 6 out of 12 sites were bus lane enforcement (34J). For three months running the 100 odd metres outside Morrisons on Steyne Road in Acton has been the second most prolific site for tickets in the entire borough, see April and May figures. An average of 508 tickets per month over three months, or 6,100 tickets a year. The number for bus lanes tickets across the whole borough given by London Councils is 24,690. So this tiny bit of bus lane is driving one quarter of all bus lane tickets across the borough. This does look suspiciously ike the borough is raking in the income without making sufficient efforts to give people the information they need to comply.

Shockingly the council has admitted that street cleaning is not going to be up to scratch until the end of September, fully six months after its contractor Enterprise started the street collection and cleaning portion of their £15 million per annum contract.

This whole matter is going to be discussed again at the Overview & Scrutiny Committee on Thursday at 7pm. As a prelude the council’s Assistant Director Street Services, Earl Mckenzie, authored a report on the environmental services contract which was published at the end of last week without fanfare. Section 1.4 of the report admits: “… it is planned same day street cleansing will be taking place fully by the end of September 2012.”

The street cleaning figures have been awful since this contract started, as any resident with their eyes open knows. The person in charge of the Ealing rubbish fiasco, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, has clearly learned his personal philosophy at the knee of Eric Idle. Ealing’s own Comical Ali told us at the last council meeting that 80% of the Borough’s streets were clean enough in the first week of July. It was highly suspicious that he had plucked this one week’s figure out of the air. It seems that the outturn for the whole month was 75% which is markedly better than the previous three months which averaged only 59% good enough (with 41% being unsatisfactory).

Mahfouz repeated his statistical twisiting on the actonw3.com and ealingtoday.co.uk websites at the start of August.

As we mentioned in a council meeting two weeks ago grade A streets for cleanliness was back over 80% in the first week of July and improving solidly.

The reality was that the service slumped again pulling the average for the month down to 75%. He was less keen too to explain that the reason for this marked improvement (from bad to not so bad) was that the contractor had gone back over sites that had been marked down and cleaned them a second time – had taken resits if you will.

Before April the old contractor routinely got better than 90%. We still have a long way to go before we get there. The end of September will be fully six months since this contract started. Let’s hope that the end of September isn’t another promise made by the council that its contractor fails to keep.

Labour’s Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, who is responsible for Transport and Environment in Ealing, has always liked to look on the bright side but today proved that he really is the Comical Ali of Ealing when it comes to the Ealing rubbish fiasco.

In a statement to the ealingtoday.co.uk and actonw3.com websites today he said:

We know that there have been problems with this contract but things are improving all the time. On Tuesday we saw all streets in the borough returned to kerbside sorting with the complete roll out of new recycling vehicles.

Mahfouz was immediately debunked by a range of Acton and Ealing residents. Here is a selection.

Jerry Foulkes on ealingtoday.co.uk:

There was no kerbside recycling in Sunnyside Road on Tuesday this week (31st July) all the recycling was tossed into one big truck just as it has been since Enterprise took over in April. Either Councillor Mahfouz is mis-informed, or in denial, or both.

Sara Nathan on actonw3.com:

Road sweeper in Goldsmith Avenue today – BEFORE the rubbish recycling collection natch- said there was no co-ordination of the different services at all and he had no idea when the rubbish pickup was. This is a hopeless waste of money.

Andy Horridge on ealingtoday.co.uk:

Weds 1 Aug, 8.45pm. The recycling wagon eventually arrived. It was ‘kerbside sorting’, but the vehicle was the ridiculous type that has a hydraulically operated ‘basket’ arrangement that has to be swung upwards every 5 minutes to enable the basket’s contents to be dropped into the vehicle’s hopper(s). The previous contractor’s vehicles were far better suited to the job in both size as well as function.

Nina Battleday on actonw3.com:

Our recycling of plastics is usually on Wednesday.On 25 July nothing was collected. I reported this by Email, received a reply telling me that it would be collected, it wasn’t. Not collected 1 Aug either. Phoned Ealing, they told me it would definitely be collected today. Nothing has happened, which does not surprise me in the least. Yet another phone call tomorrow, I fear. Meanwhile, our estate is loaded up with unsightly bags full of plastics.

Nicola Howard on actonw3.com:

Again, recycling not collected on Baldwyn Gardens. This is the second week in a row. Collection day is Thursday, not when Enterprise feel like it. It’s about time Bassam Mahfouz resigned and, heads should roll.

Nigel Brooks on ealingtoday.co.uk:

It was all being dumped together on Boston Road this week. The road then received a perfunctory ‘sweep’ and there were green bags dumped for three days before collection. Simply, get your damned act together Cllr Mahfouz. Get out on the streets and stop patronising residents with supposed ‘progress’ reports!!!

Harold John Ward on ealingtoday.co.uk:

You are right the recycling is a joke and the one which is great we have to pay to have our garden rubbish taken away and yet where I live in South Ealing people are just leaving the rubbish out but not in the green bags so its not taken by the lorry that comes for the garden staff so it’s left there then the next day the smaller trucks come round and pick it up because people must complain about it so whats the point of me paying when you can just leave it out and you still pick it up free of charge so this is very unfair on us that have paid don’t you think councillor Bassam Mahfouz?

Jon Kennedy on actonw3.com:

Its the same all over u need to phone the council we were promised that the sweeper will come after the collections next week

Ellie Rose on actonw3.com:

Sweeper came before the collection today here also in West Acton. After the collection, there were cans, carrier bags and paper all over the road and pavement.

Jocelyn Ridley on actonw3.com:

It would be nice to have a collection. For the second week running Baldwyn Gardens has been missed out. Really irritating.

I have been keeping track of the parking tickets given out by the Borough, see here. I have just had a look at May’s data, see here.

For comparison the council gave out 197,302 tickets in the 2011/12 financial year (see Annual Report here). I have multiplied the monthly totals by 12 to give the equivalent yearly rate and divided that by last year’s total number of tickets issued to give an idea of the proportion that one road feature or offence represents compared to the whole borough.

During May there were 8 road features or offences in one place that accumulated over 200 tickets in the month. One sixth of all tickets issued in our borough were issued on these sites (17.5%). Interestingly all of the high volume sites are policed with CCTV (the J code indicates a ticket policed by CCTV). The top 8 were:

Figures released by the council on Friday show that the whole borough has endured a third month of dirty streets since the new waste, re-cycling and street cleaning contract started on 1st April. In a written answer to a question (number 40) asked by me it emerged that 41% of streets across the whole borough were unacceptably dirty in the month of June. Coincidentally 41% of streets across the whole borough were unacceptably dirty for the whole first quarter of the new Enterprise contract.

Ealing has been visibly dirtier for months now. The Labour administration has consistently tried to underplay the size and duration of this service failure. It has affected the whole borough for the whole of the first quarter of the council’s financial year. When we met to discuss this issue at our special council meeting on 8th May the Labour leader of the council asked that we put events in context and said that the service was ‘essentially back to normal’. If this is normal then the new normal is a lot worse than the old normal.