Category: Ealing and Northfield

This morning the Ealing Labour councillors were out in force in the rain at Ealing Hospital with Ken Livingstone, Andy Burnham, the Labour health spokesman, and Virendra Sharma, MP for the Southall half of the Ealing Southall constituency. They were no doubt taking a photo to go in a last minute leaflet to go out before May 3rd. Labour know that Livingstone is such a weak candidate that they are trying to make Ealing Hospital into the key election issue – we know that this is all they talk about on the doorstep.

Just to the right of Andy Burnham is Onkar Sahota, Labour’s candidate for the Ealing & Hillingdon GLA seat. He is a GP and the person in this group shot most able to influence the future of Ealing Hospital. His decisions about where to send his patients are what will decide the fate of this hospital through the commissioning process.

The NHS is responding to the requirement to reinvest £20 billion of savings into new services by consolidating higher volume services on fewer specialist centres. This process is being driven and controlled by doctors not politicians and certainly not the London mayor. If you want to know who started the process of taking £20 billion out of health service costs so that it could be reinvested in new services, the so-called Nicholson Challenge, then read here. The answer is of course Andy Burnham when he was Labour’s Health Secretary. I don’t hear Livingstone telling us where he can find a few billion Pounds so that he can subsidise hospital services in London that doctors like Sahota don’t want to send their patients to.

I’ll make two predictions about Ealing Hospital. It won’t close before I reach retirement age and it will be dealing with A&E cases for as long as it is open. In the meantime Labour is telling lies about Ealing Hospital. The sad thing is that it will probably help them cement their core vote. Why should Labour care about frightening people if it will get it a few extra votes?

Council leader Julian Bell says that our rubbish and re-cycling service “is now almost back to normal”. He is kidding himself I fear.

We are now into the fourth week of the new service, it started on 1st April. It seems that the initial, obvious, bags-in-the-street failure of the service has been partially overcome. There were 1,061 complaints of missed collections on Monday 2nd and Tuesday 3rd April.

One of the techniques used by the contractor Enterprise to overcome the initial crisis was to abandon kerbside re-cycling for many residents. As we know from this video the council is using two compartment lorries to collect food waste separately from other dry recyclables that are then all crushed together and sent to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). The latest news is that this facility is in Kent – so much for saving the planet then.

The MRF process which takes residents’ carefully sorted rubbish and then mixes it all up and crushes it vastly reduces the value of the waste stream and causes a much higher proportion to be sent to landfill. Apart from the obvious waste it will be hard to convince residents to spend time sorting re-cycling and providing space in their homes when they see it all go in the back of a lorry, see here. In even worse news it seems that this “temporary” measure will continue until June when the contractor finally has all of its new vehicles delivered.

Yesterday alone in Northfield we had two residents complaining about this.

Mr M of Bramley Road:

The recycling collection today in Bramley and Airedale Roads W5 resulted in the contents of the Green Boxes (whether or not sorted by material type) and the White Sacks all being thrown into the back of a refuse lorry together. This made it a waste of time to separate, clean and store these materials in dry conditions during the previous week.

Mr M of Ealing Park Gardens

Well it appears that nothing has changed as again today all the plastics, newspaper, cardboard and bottles put out by us and our neighbours are just thrown together into the dustcart! You suggest in the earlier message that this is a temporary thing with a new contractor, but it seems to me that it is more likely that the contractors have decided they can get away with a hopeless service which comes in on price by employing fewer people and hiring fewer vehicles to do the job. Then if you lump everything together (literally!) there’s profit to be made. This is obviously not a real green, eco-friendly service but a contract being done on the cheap.
I will be forwarding this to my local councillors to investigate further.

The other major continuing failure of the new contract is the ineffectiveness of street cleansing – more on this later.

I fear that we are heading towards a new normal which is worse than the old one.

I have blogged about Nick Grant, the branch secretary for the Ealing branch of the teachers’ union NUT, before here.

In a surprising unforced error (see answer to question below) the council has admitted that at a time when every penny counts it has given the NUT an extra £10K worth of Ealing residents’ cash. It seems that when Nick Grant got elected to the NUT’s governing national executive (supported by the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP) of which he is also a member of its national executive) the council gave him another day a week off for union business. I don’t suppose that it costs much less than £50K to “employ” Mr Grant. So one day a week is the equivalent of a £10K a year bung to the NUT which has absolutely nothing to do with providing services to Ealing residents. On the contrary Grant is in the vanguard of organising strikes in Ealing’s schools.

Mr Grant is not only one of 10, yes 10, SWP supported people on the NUT national executive he is also co-founder of the Anti Academies Alliance. Unaccountably, at a time of high stress, the council is giving this man another £10K to be an extreme left-wing activist.

This unforced error on the part of the administration is yet another illustration of the laziness and lack of attention to detail exhibited by the councillors who are supposed to be in charge. It is customary for such answers, which are formally the answers of the portfolio holders themselves, to be passed to the portfolio holder for approval. In practice the answers are written by officers but if I had seen this answer going over my desk I would simply have asked that the additional information, which was not asked for, was omitted. Their laziness at least allows you to get a glimpse of what is really going on.

Update: Apparently the average teacher union rep on facility time in Ealing costs £76K per annum so the pay rise was more like £15K than £10K.

When the full council signed off the budget in February 2011 it contained a promise to cut union facility time, paid time to allow union reps to do union business, by 20% in 2012/13 (see page 178 of the budget signed off at full council on 22nd March 2012 here).

The same budget cut a number of frontline services, such as envirocrime officers and park rangers, in half in 2011/12. The one year delay compared to the cuts in frontline services was justified in terms of the union reps having a role in managing the process of re-organisation from the staff side.

In answering the question, see below, I asked at the last council meeting (question number 12, here) the council has revealed that the facility time budget will remain flat in the current financial year. There is no explanation of why the Labour administration has quietly changed its mind. Is the Labour administration frightened to take on the unions? Has it already agreed to back off? Will Labour tell us what it proposes to do about the £250,000 per annum a year that the council spends on union reps doing union business?

Question 12:

Could the portfolio holder state:
Facility time budget in 2011/12. Also breakdown teaching/non-teaching.
Facility time spend in 2011/12. Also breakdown teaching/non-teaching.
Facility time budget in 2012/13. Also breakdown teaching/non-teaching.
Names of staff and union along with % of their time spent on facility time during 2011/12.

Answer 12:

Teaching:

The total facility time awarded to teacher union reps in 2010-11 was
2.5 fte. That equates to 15 days per week split among the teacher unions and professional associations. This figure would normally be 2.3 fte (or 13 days per week) but an additional 0.2 fte (or 1 day) was granted to the NUT as their local secretary was elected onto the NUT national executive.
The cost of this for the year was £146,700.

Non-Teaching:

UNISON = 10 Days split between 2 people
GMB= 5 Days split between 3 people
The cost of this for the year was £105,000
It is anticipated that this arrangement will remain as in for 2012/2013.
The council is currently discussing reductions in facilities time with the trade unions. Reductions in trade union facility time form part of the administrations saving plans.

Ealing Council has failed to make any progress over the last year in cutting the cost of its senior management team. In fact it has gone up by 2.2%. The Labour council has tried to dramatise the magnitude of the cuts it is facing by exaggerating them and repeating the mantra that the government is going to far and too fast but here is a case of Labour going not very far, slowly. Compared to the 50% hit taken by some frontline services the council’s senior management team has got off lightly and it looks like the process has run its course.

For the last three years the Conservatives have asked the same carefully worded question to keep track of this. Last year there was modest fall of 7.7% in total costs and the management headcount fell by 8. This year the headcount has crept up by 1 and the bill by 2.2%. Most of this rise is accounted for by National Insurance changes as pay has been frozen for this group and there seems to have been little or no grade inflation, but it is noteworthy that one new manager has been added to the numbers.

In October 2010 the former council leader asked a series of 3 questions (40-42, here) asking how many and how much the senior management team at Ealing council cost. In October 2011 I repeated the questions (15,17 and 18, here) to see how much Labour has saved on the senior management team in the course of a year. I repeated the process this April (questions 15, 16 and 18, here). The answers are tabulated below.

For previous blogs on this subject see here and here.

Today the Tory group on Ealing council has written to the Mayor demanding an extraordinary council meeting to examine the waste and re-cycling contract which has blown up so spectacularly in the council’s face over the course of April. It is likely that this meeting will take place on Tuesday 8th May at 7pm.

Over the last two weeks or so thousands of Ealing residents have been inconvenienced by this botched contract. Between the council and their new contractor there has been a massive failure. Yet again the leader of the council has had to take over and involve himself in the detailed working of another part of the council.

Hopefully the waste service will regain its equilibrium quickly. I fear that long term damage will have been done though to our re-cycling rates after people have seen their carefully sorted re-cycling shoved into what looks like a regular garbage truck or one of those cage trucks. The council says that this mixed, dry re-cycling is all going to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF or Murf).

We all hope that is true but a MRF is not magic. Man or machine has to sort the waste that Ealing residents have already put a huge effort into sorting. This costs money, reduces the value of the waste stream and ensures that more goes to landfill. It will be hard for the council to insist that residents resume this work once they have seen the council’s contractor just chuck it all in the back of a lorry. Even harder to persuade new people to take up re-cycling.

The council relies on the massive goodwill of Ealing’s residents to achieve high re-cycling rates, achieve high prices for its waste streams and minimise landfill and rising landfill taxes. Many of us spend at least half an hour a week sorting it all out to say nothing of the large amount of space that this cottage industry takes up in our kitchens, garages, sheds and/or gardens. The last few weeks will made many question why they bother. I hope that they will bother but the council must demonstrate that it values the contribution of residents. Seeing staff insolently flinging residents’ containers back at their front gates doesn’t help.

Last night the Labour administration had the opportunity to get on the front foot and apologise to a full council meeting for the unfolding waste and re-cycling disaster that is sweeping across the borough. They chose not to take it and instead stuck their collective head firmly in the sand.

Ealing’s waste system moves from the south east to the north west over the course of the working week. For it to fall over so badly across Southfield, Ealing Common, Acton, Northfield and Hanwell on Monday bodes ill for the rest of the week. Problems are likely to multiply through the week and then be redoubled again by the Easter bank holiday.

It seems that the new contractor has hired the wrong vehicles to get the contract underway and is asking crews to take on beats that are much larger than the old ones. Many of the Borough’s roads are very narrow and the previous contractor had learned through hard experience that smaller vehicles were required to service some of our roads. To cope with the emergency the new contractor is grabbing people’s carefully sorted recycling and mixing it in the back of a range of vehicles. The council claim that this mixed waste will go to a Materials Recycling Facility (or “Murf”) for recycling but in doing so much of the value of the waste stream will be lost and more will go to landfill than would otherwise have been the case.

The great improvement in recycling rates in this borough have been achieved by the hard work of its residents. Seeing their hard work taken for granted will cause people to think twice about their role in the system. Labour had other things to talk about at the full council meeting last night so failed to take the opportunity to apologise. Today the leader of the council, Labour’s Cllr Julian Bell, wants to talk about Olympic loveliness in his Gazette column.

The council bureaucracy has issued an apology by making a statement on its website. The portfolio holder, who is ultimately responsible, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, showed cowardice under fire and pushed his executive director, into the line of fire to take the bullet:

Keith Townsend, executive director of environment and customer services, said: “I would like to apologise to anyone whose collection has been missed. We are doing our utmost to ensure refuse and recycling collections continue to run smoothly but we would ask for residents’ patience as the new contractor takes over.”

I wonder how long that press release will stay on the council’s website?

Local councillors are getting lots of reports of failed rubbish and re-cycling collections across Northfield yesterday.

We heard that the new joint collection of green boxes and plastics failed at Claygate Road, Raymond Avenue, Boston Road and the North/South Road estate. Also food waste failed on Trent Avenue.

This morning I have had black sacks left behind at my house. Have heard reports of failures from South Acton, Elthorne and Southfield wards too.

You might expect some teething problems with the handover from old to new contractors but this does seem rather large scale.

If there is a problem in your road then click here to report quickly without hanging on phone (which seems to be backed up too right now).

Apparently the Labour cabinet were in uproar last night over the final report of the riots scrutiny panel. Usually Labour cabinet meetings are just a rubber stamping session where the administration formally agrees its business by agreeing a succession of detailed papers drawn up by officers. The Labour cabinet members hardly ever say anything at these meetings. Most of the talking is done by Labour leader Julian Bell. There is almost no debate.

Last night was different. Each Labour cabinet member took it in turns to lay into their own Cllr Shital Manro, the riots panel chairman and chairman of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee (OSC), and tell him how much they hated the report. They gave the impression that they hated him too but that is another matter. Cllr Manro was reduced to pointing out that it might have been useful if they had bothered to read drafts of the report earlier in the process. The cabinet demanded that the report is re-written and, bizarrely, Cllr Manro agreed. Whenever does HM Government ask for a select committee report to be re-written? They can ignore it but they can’t change it. Labour really doesn’t get scrutiny.

They were considering a report by a cross party group of members into the riot; three Labour, three Conservative and one LibDem worked on the report, including me. It was a comprehensive bit of work and the report totally failed to make any political points. Indeed in his forward the panel’s chairman, Cllr Manro, said:

As we set about our work we were deluged with theories on the causes of the disturbances, theories which appeared mainly based on justifying entrenched views on the organisation of Society.

We discovered that although recognising the financial background and the pressures of a consumer society, less than 1% of our young people were on the streets that night and over half of those arrested did not come from Ealing. We, therefore, firmly concluded that it was opportunistic criminality that occurred and not a significant reflection of much else.

The report is well worth a read, see here. It lays out what happened and points out clearly what worked well and what didn’t.

This report, like all scrutiny reports that go to cabinet, was sent for noting (by cabinet). Scrutiny is designed to challenge the executive and to make recommendations for improvement in a non-partisan way. It is hard to see how cabinet can send back a scrutiny report to OSC for revision. They can ignore the report’s recommendations if they like. They can point out any shortcomings that they feel there might be. They cannot rewrite history. The report was a product of scrutiny, not the executive.