Category: Ealing and Northfield

I enjoyed the full “screw you” customer experience at the hands of Ealing Council yesterday afternoon. Often I have good experiences of council services and I am quick to share them because too often we remember bad experiences and discount all of the good ones we have. Today was unnecessarily bad though so deserves being highlighted.

My parking permit expired on 8th July. Full marks to the council for sending me a renewal reminder in plenty of time. It was entirely my fault that I left the reminder on my desk for a couple of months or so and let my permit expire. My attention was rudely drawn to my oversight by the issuance of a £55 ticket on Friday. Again my bad, no complaint.

I figured that I would renew my parking permit online. No such luck. The system offered my a new permit with a start date of 9th July. Try as I might I could not change the date. Who wants to buy a parking permit that starts on 9th July three weeks later on the 30th July? I gave up on online and went to customer services at Perceval House in the town centre.

The first obstacle was the contractor’s van parked between the pedestrian crossing in front of Perceval House and the entrance to customer services, which can clearly be seen as the absence of proper Field Service Management. I called up to the comms team that is responsible for the contractor that maintains the posters in front of the building. They seemed largely unconcerned that their contractor was driving on the pavement and blocking access to the building.

Once in the customer services centre it was pandemonium. There were 173 people waiting in the queues and 24 waiting in the general queue that handles parking and environment issues. There were lots of people milling around the front desk and one middle class lady being huffy – well handled by the receptionist. I have never seen customer services’ reception so full.

I set my stopwatch when I entered the building. 44 minutes later I was sitting in front of a service agent. She did a quick and pleasant job so no complaints there. She told me that there were seven staff serving the general queue for environment and parking enquiries although I have to say it seemed to me that only five were actually working.

The staff performed well I thought in spite of the crush. The council’s senior officers need to be more diligent about making sure the IT works, sorting out their mindset about customers and the front of house and getting their contractors out of the way and making sure that the staffing rotas meet the demand.

The Ealing Labour party held a fund raising do on behalf of their GLA candidate Onkar Sahota at the council run Dominion Centre in Southall on 31st March. Back in April blogger Mark Wallace accused our own council leader, Julian Bell, of mis-using the facilities of Parliament to promote Sahota.

I wondered what was going on so asked a written question (Number 39) at the June council meeting:

Question 39:

Can the Leader confirm that the council received the full, published booking fee for the Labour party fundraiser held on Saturday 31st March at 7 pm at the Dominion Centre, The Green, Southall, UB2 4BQ? If any discount was offered please state the basis of the discount offered.

Answer 39:

This event was not a fundraising event as originally planned and no funds were raised for the Labour party. The booking at the dominion centre was mistakenly made at the cahritable (sic) rate, this mistake has been rectified. The full published booking fee is in the process of being paid.

The answer raised more questions than it answered. As a result I asked a further question in July (Number 21).

Question 21:

Can the Leader confirm what payments were received and when by the council in regard to the Labour party fundraiser held on Saturday 31st March at 7 pm at the Dominion Centre, The Green, Southall, UB2 4BQ? When was the first payment received? How much was it? When was the second payment received? How much was it? What is the usual fee paid by a corporate user for this facility on a Saturday night?

Answer 21:

The first of payment £225 was received 26th April. This was given at the discounted rate of £75 per hour to the IWA (3 hrs), who are entitled to the discounted rate. The balance of £105 was received 23rd July 2012.

So it seems that the Labour party used the Indian Workers Association as a badge of convenience to get a cheap rate for this hire. You wonder how many times they have done that? More than that even when caught red handed diddling the council it took a second written question to get Labour to pay up. The first question was asked on 12th June. The second one on 17th July. Labour managed to pay up on 23rd July.

At Cabinet on Tuesday Labour nodded through the Parking Annual Report – this is an innovation bought in by me when I was in charge of parking as a part of a range of measures to modernise and improve a service that was seen as failing at the time. To give you an idea of how bad this service was when we came into power one of the first things we had to do was write off £6 million because the service has overstated its income – if a listed company had been caught doing this the directors would have been facing prosecutions. Follow this link and see half way down page three.

There are some good things in the annual report, including good work to tackle Blue Badge fraud – another initiative kicked off under the previous administration. The one obvious bad thing is the £1.8 million jump in income from parking permits and charges (excluding income from fines which actually went down slightly). This jump in income is equivalent to a council tax rise of 1.5% and was only levied on car drivers. Labour is pressing car drivers hard – this rise in charges came into force on 1st January 2011, was followed by another one this January and will be followed by another one next January.

Note – to work out £1.8 million figure go to income analysis on page 23 and take out PCN income.

Tomorrow (Saturday) there will be the chance to ask the doctors who are leading the proposed re-organisation of healthcare in the North West London area some questions. There will be a consultation event at the Dominion Centre in Southall running from 10am to 4pm.

There will be two question and answer sessions. These will give people the opportunity to ask the doctors in charge questions about the consultation. The sessions will be from 11am – 12pm and 1pm – 2pm. Dr Mark Spencer, Medical Director for NHS North West London and clinical lead for the programme and Dr Mohini Parmar, Chair of Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group and a programme leader will be there apparently. More details here.

This morning Central Ealing & Acton MP, Angie Bray, opened the new Bike Hub on Haven Green. This great new facility has been provided thanks to funding from Transport for London. Haven Green is one of the focal points of our borough and this scheme manages to improve Haven Green and provide a great facility for cyclists. When all of the work is finished in September it will look really great.

The half of the Bike Hub that is finished already looks pretty good. You can see the unfinished half behind Angie. For some reason the Council’s press people managed to stand the official party in front of the unfinished part instead of turning them through 180 degrees so that they appeared in front of the finished bit. The bike stands are unique and seem to work really well. The sheds are lit and monitored by CCTV. Apparently Ealing Council rushed the opening so that it could be opened in time for the Olympics. The other half will be finished in about three weeks and then they can start work on the corner of Haven Green that is still surrounded in fencing. It should all be looking good by the autumn. If you are looking for a great road bike check out this budget road bike.

The whole exercise is being funded by Transport for London with a bit of Section 106 money from developers. Labour’s Transport lead, Cllr Bassam Mahofouz, talked about £1 million being spent on cycling in Ealing in the current year. What he didn’t say was that every penny of this money was coming from TfL. I will be calling this lovely building the Boris Bike Hub from now in order to recognise the London Mayor putting his money where his mouth is and actually funding cycling. Ealing Council is not spending a penny. Ealing Labour party has decided to prioritise the Southall car park and Ealing Council buildings for receiving Ealing Council capital funds.

Labour’s Cllr Hitesh Tailor is one of the more nakedly partisan voices in the Ealing Labour ranks. He is not beyond bending the truth, telling half truths and exaggerating. He is unfailingly unpleasant with it.

This tweet is typical of his work. All local politicians are angry about the wholesale closures of 4 local A&Es proposed by NHS North West London. Local Conservatives, both Ealing & Acton MP, Angie Bray, and the local councillors’ group on the council, have consistently argued against the closure of A&Es and the removal of clinical services from all of our hospitals. Indeed I attended the first cross party campaign meeting last Thursday, chaired by Labour GLA member Onkar Sahota, and am due to attend the next session tomorrow.

You might think reading Tailor’s tweet that Angie Bray has gone off message. She hasn’t. Tailor is either lying or he just doesn’t know what is going on.

On Monday night there was an Opposition Day motion on the NHS. It read:

That this House regrets the growing gap between Ministers’ statements and what is happening in the NHS; notes mounting evidence of rationing of treatments and services by cost, despite Ministers’ claims to have prevented it; further regrets the increasing number of cost-driven reconfigurations of hospital services, despite the Coalition Agreement’s promise of a moratorium on changes to hospital services; further notes growing private sector involvement in both the commissioning and provision of NHS services, contradicting Ministers’ claims that the NHS reorganisation would not increase levels of privatisation; recognises that, according to the Government’s Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses figures, actual Government spending on the NHS in 2011-12 fell by £26 million, the second successive real-terms reduction in NHS spending, following a reduction of £766 million in the Government’s first year in office, in breach of the commitment in the Coalition Agreement; believes the Government’s decision to reorganise the NHS has distracted its focus from the financial challenge, with seven out of 10 acute hospital trusts in England missing savings targets in the first half of 2011-12; calls on the Government to take action to prevent rationing by cost in the NHS, based on the evidence presented; and further calls on the Government to honour pledges on NHS spending in the Coalition Agreement, and the commitment that future savings will be reinvested into the NHS front line, and to return at least half of the underspend to the Department of Health budget.

It was the kind of motion that no government MP was going to back and it got voted down by 303 votes to 228 and Angie was one of the 303. During the actual debate the Ealing situation was mentioned but Ealing was not the point of the motion.

It does get hard to work on a cross-party basis if your partners are going to misrepresent you at every turn. Please stop it Cllr Tailor.

If you want to know what Angie Bray thinks here are the extensive comments that she made at the Westminster Hall debate on West London NHS Services held on Wednesday 11th July.

This week the local Conservatives launched up our Clean Up Ealing campaign. This picture shows one green bag left by the street cleaners overnight in Mattock Lane, Ealing. By this morning a flytipper had added another bag (slightly different green and not stencilled like the council bags). The flytipped bag contained foodwaste so the foxes have pulled both bags apart looking for food.

In our short time in power we thought that we had licked street cleaning so we are really sorry that since 1st April residents have had to put up with such a poor service from Enterprise, the council’s new contractor, and that our borough has looked so awful. We feel that the Labour administration has played down the scale of the service failure that residents have had to put up with and has been slow to hold the contractor to account.

It looks like residents won’t be getting a proper service across the borough until well into August. By keeping this issue at the top of the political agenda we hope that the council will work harder to put things right and think about how residents can be compensated for five months of poor service.

To help with our campaign take a picture of any problems that you come across and either tweet pictures using the hash tag #CleanUpEaling or email us at campaign@ealingactonconservatives.org.uk and we will put up your pictures and stories on our website and on twitter. To see what is going on click here.

When we met at the special council meeting called on 8th May by the Conservative group on Ealing Council to discuss the Ealing rubbish fiasco council leader Julian Bell offered soothing words and asked that we keep things “in perspective”. Bell and his Labour administration want you to believe that apart from some mayhem during the first couple of weeks of April everything is all better now.

As I showed yesterday this certainly isn’t true of the street cleaning statistics which show that in May almost half of Ealing’s streets were unacceptably dirty.

The statistics for missed collections show some improvement but also that we are far from out of the woods yet. Although missed collections have halved from April they are still almost three times higher in May than they were the previous May.

For the last three months I have been keeping an eagle eye on the performance of Ealing’s new street cleaning, rubbish and re-cycling contractor Enterprise. In particular I have been asking questions to understand the extent of the problems that we have been having.

If residents are wondering why streets across the whole borough have looked much dirtier over the last three months the reason is that they are. It isn’t just perception, it is statistical fact.

Council figures released in an official answer to my question last week show that half of streets checked in May (47%) were unacceptably dirty compared to only 7% the previous May. Things were bad in April with one third of streets checked being unacceptable (33%). They seem to have got much worse in May.

Ealing has got visibly dirtier under the new rubbish and re-cycling contract. Labour needs to put things right now and work out how it can compensate residents for three months of poor service.

Interesting interview with new GLA member for Ealing and Hillingdon Onkar Sahota on the Londonist blog today.

Sahota is quite happy to speak utter nonsense. He likes to make out that he is a regular GP: “I was a full-time GP. I trained as a doctor at Sheffield medical school but have spent most of my life in Hayes and Ealing. I did my post graduate medical training at St Mary’s in Paddington and joined my first partnership in 1989 in Hanwell.”

Of course he isn’t quite your avuncular family doctor. He is a very successful, large scale medical entrepreneur. I don’t criticize him for that. I criticize him for talking nonsense. He says: “I’ve always worked in the NHS, never in private practice.”

Of course GPs have always wanted to have their cake and eat it. To be get a predictable income from the state but to own and run their own businesses and play all those lovely tax games. The dividends. The family on the payroll. The tax free air fares to medical conferences in Switzerland that make your skiing holidays rather cheaper than regular people’s even though you earn six, eight or ten times the average wage.

Sahota talks about being his own boss and having “three sites with 12,000 patients in Ealing”. Sure he does. He is the sole owner of Healthcare 360 Limited which operates these three surgeries. You can’t work out his income from his Companies House filings but he has personally received an average of £100K a year for rent for the last four years from this company as he owns two of the buildings the company operates from.

Interestingly for all of his claims to be a Southall lad he has been telling Companies House that he lives in Cranford, Hounslow since 2003. He is either lying to Companies House or lying to Ealing voters.