Category: Ealing and Northfield

Labour’s Cllr Bassam Mahfouz was chirpily tweeting through tonight’s meeting of the cabinet. Four out of five of his tweets endorse policies of the previous Conservative administration.

On 23rd February 2010 Cllr David Millican kicked off the first Shopping Parades Improvement Programme, see here.

By 2004 Ealing was the dirtiest borough in London with 49% of streets significantly dirty. Not only that but Ealing paid amongst the most for its terrible service, see here.

The process for chucking out our previous appalling graffiti contractor and putting in place the graffiti and fly-tipping contract that Cllr Mafouz is extolling was started on 27th June 2006 by Cllrs Will Brooks and Susan Emment, see here.

It wasn’t quite so easy to chuck out the incumbent street cleaning and waste disposal contractor, ECT, in 2006 so the then council leader personally undertook a series of “Reality Checks” to demonstrate to both council officers and the contractor the need for better performance. The combination of this top level focus and additional spending on cleaning saw the Borough visibly transformed.

Cllr Mahfouz knows that street cleaning is now the litmus test for any Ealing administration and that he must keep up the standards set by his predecessors.

On the 6th May 2008 I kicked off the Pitzhanger Manor project, see here.

On 12th May 2009 Cllr David Millican, Cllr Brooks and myself kicked off the Acton Town Hall regeneration programme, see here.

The only Tory policy that Cllr Mahfouz didn’t endorse tonight was the £50 cash back. Mahfouz can’t avoid the fact that when he and his group had to vote on the matter they all voted in favour to man and woman.

At a scrutiny meeting last Thursday we discussed the business case for the new car park proposed in Southall, see papers here and here.

This is a massively expensive venture due to cost £5.45 million of which £127,000 has already been spent on a temporary car park at Hambrough Road and other preparatory work. There was broad agreement that Southall is congested with traffic and needs a solution to its parking pressure.

The council’s paper was hilariously patronising in places: “The characteristics of the majority Asian population, mostly relies upon the usage of the car.” Most people in west London rely on their cars if not for commuting then for much of their leisure activity at the weekend.

The scrutiny committee asked to see a business case. What they were shown in the papers was some history, a political argument and some facts that allude to demand. The main plank for the demand argument seems to be that Ealing and West Ealing combined has a higher ratio of car parking spaces compared with retail floor space than Southall. For comparison (see bottom of page 6 of main report) the Ealing/West Ealing number is 2.34 compared to 0.92 for Southall. The council’s case is that Ealing has 2.5 times as much parking as Southall. They omit the figures for office space as they would substantially redress the balance and undermine the case the council is trying to make. The second main plank of the demand argument is that the council’s Herbert Road multi-storey car park is at capacity. It is, but only on weekend afternoons, like most town centre car parks, just the same as the massive Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre car park and the whole of Kingston town centre. Overall the Herbert Road car park is only 35% occupied through the length of its charged for opening times.

Cllr Kamiljit Dhindsa, Southall Green ward, was particularly vociferous on the car park subject and spoke in favour of adding 500 spaces to Southall. The Council’s ambition is to provide 90 spaces, maybe a few more if possible, for the £5.323 million left in the pot. We are talking £60K per parking space here so let’s hope that Cllr Dhindsa doesn’t get his way! Dhindsa also felt that the price for parking in Southall was too high and that the current charges of £1.50 an hour weekdays and £2 an hour on weekends was unfair compared to charges around the £1 mark elsewhere in the Borough.

We all want parking to be easier and cheaper so Cllr Dhindsa’s aspirations are perfectly reasonable. The reality is though that we will mostly be disappointed. It is not clear why Southall should be different. The council’s demand evidence is weak.

I will write further on:

• The finances of the new temporary car Southall car park at Hambrough Road
• The business case for the proposed new car park at the cattle market site
• The trade off between businesses and residents that sits behind all of this.

At the scrutiny meeting last Thursday we finally found out how well the new car park in Hambrough Road, Southall is doing. In short it is a whopping disaster. The photo above was taken by me on Friday 20th January at 4:04pm. It shows two vehicles parked in the 45 spaces provided at a cost of £70,000.

This is a valuable site, owned by the council and very large, it could easily accommodate 8 good sized family homes of the style of those already in the neighbourhood. It is worth some millions of Pounds on the open market since it is near corporate office headquarters of many businesses – I am not a property expert to give you a valuation. It is temporarily being used as a car park and will probably end up being a small residential development eventually. This car park would have cost a lot more if the land had to be purchased to provide it. All the council has done is demolish the old Disraeli Nursery that was on the site, level it, cover it in tarmac, put in some signs and lines and a height restriction hence the relatively small bill of £70K. Learn more from BaltimorePavingPros.com on high quality parking lots.

I have asked twice for information on the takings for this car park and have been refused twice. At the meeting we were told the takings at this car park for January (£329) and February (£633). The car park is so far south down Hambrough Road it is not attracting customers who want to access the shops. There are plenty of empty spaces much nearer to the Broadway.

If you were doing this as a commercial venture you might want a minimum return on capital of 5% on your investment of £2 million say (anyone care to speculate on what 1,563 sqm of Southall residential is worth?). You would need to make a net profit after all of your expenses and corporation tax at 21% tax of £100K per annum to make it worthwhile. Right now the gross income of this site is well shy of £12K per annum.

One reason that the Hambrough Road car park is so unsuccessful is that the parking service and the portfolio holder are overly enamoured of pay by phone. Many drivers still don’t trust this style of technology. Putting in pay and display machines is expensive. They cost £8K each to install and £27 per month to maintain and give you all sorts of headaches around collecting cash and dealing with thefts.

If the council does go ahead with the full-sized, permanent car park they will have good evidence from this temporary car park that it is not viable before they even start.

Last Thursday councillors had first sight of the officers’ ideas about the income (and expenditure) that could be expected from the new car park in Southall.

The modelling they have done to-date assumes that the car park will have 90 paid for places (plus some free Blue Badge spaces) with the same hours and rates as the existing Herbert Road multi-storey car park. The results are horrendous, see spreadsheet reproduced below.

The council’s officers predict that with the pay by phone mode of payment the car park will produce a net income of £25.64 per month – how wonderfully spurious those 64 pence are? We know from the Hambrough Road experience that this will not work. Putting in one pay and display machine and maintaining it every month will wipe out that “profit”. In the past the council has stated that the car park will cover its costs. What they are saying is that they will borrow £5.323 million at an interest rate of 3% currently, or £160K per annum, and make nothing from it. Council taxpayers will have to repay this over 10 years with no help from the car park itself.

It is understandable that the Council’s officers are gun-shy after they have seen the appalling performance of the temporary car park in Hambrough Road. That temporary car park gives decision makers a chance to change their minds. Will they take it?

In May 2010 Labour included “A new car park for Southall.” in their manifesto. This does not give them the right to provide one. They still need to demonstrate that the decision is a reasonable one, based on sound policy making. The performance of the Hambrough Road car park and the projections for the final version of the car park show conclusively that the decision is not reasonable.

The Labour members of the scrutiny committee last Thursday did not want to hear this. Their basic position is that might is right. They cannot argue that the decision is financially sound so they argue instead that it will provide benefits to Southall traders that are unquantified anywhere in the reports. Southall traders have not been consulted about this scheme.

Indeed the most telling exchange of last Thursday evening was when Cllr Jason Stacey for the Conservatives asked Biljinder Thakher from Southall Traders Association whether he would choose a new car park on the cattle market site or wider use of dual use CPZs which allow both residents parking and pay and display (like our neighbours in Hammersmith & Fulham and much of the rest of south west London). In spite of Labour councillors trying to shout down the response he clearly stated that as a representative of Southall traders he would go for dual use CPZs.

What is happening in Southall is quite straightforward. There is a widespread perception, shared by the councillors, that Southall is congested and has a parking problem. This “problem” is acutely felt by the traders who would love for the Council to give their businesses a boost by providing extra parking. Meanwhile residents don’t want to see shoppers competing with them for on street parking. The councillors want to keep everyone happy so £5.45 million of everyone else’s money looks like a good solution. In the meantime there has been no attempt to research driver/shopper’s behaviour, no attempt to redesign Southall town centre, no attempt to signpost the existing parking facilities, no attempt to come up with park and ride type facilities.

There was general agreement at last Thursday’s scrutiny meeting that the congestion and parking issues in Southall needed to be addressed. The previous Tory administration made two attempts to tackle the problem. Labour’s answer is to throw a headline grabbing but essentially wasteful lump of cash at the problem. £5.45 million worth!

At the end of the evening the committee split down party lines with the Labour councillors welcoming the report and recommending that the council proceeded with this daft “investment” and the opposition councillors voting against.

The numbers prove that a new car park won’t solve Southall’s congestion problems. Labour have dug themselves into a hole. Time to stop digging? The Hambrough Road car park should be shut and the site used for housing and the whole car park idea shelved. In the meantime maybe they should spend a small amount of money on signposting the existing car parks and trialing some dual use CPZ bays.

Council leader Julian Bell is keen to big up the large amount of school capital spending that is going on in the Borough right now. He is less keen to explain why we need all of the new schools or to be honest about where the money is coming from. Cllr Bell’s tweet points to this press release from the council which says:

An additional £80million has been earmarked over the next four years for the borough’s schools. This includes projects to expand schools following a massive surge in primary school applications as well as improvements to special needs education.

The largest part of this money is coming from the Tory-led coalition government. If you add the £14.8 million for high priority school improvements to address condition issues the total is £95.3 million of new schools capital (as confirmed in section 4.14.2 of the budget report).

If you dig around further in the appendices of the budget report (appendix 6b, page 70 – simply add up all schools items marked with a G) you will find that £79.1 million of this money is due to come from central government grants. For all of Labour’s huffing and puffing about cuts, and about the end of Labour’s wasteful BSF scheme, 83% of this new spending has been provided by the Tory-led coalition from centrally collected funds.

Don’t expect Labour to explain that.

This photo shows members of the Unite union protesting this morning opposite the building out of which Ealing’s CEOs (traffic wardens in old money) operate. They are in dispute with their employer (NSL, not the council) over the alleged unfair dismissal of CEO and Unite shop steward Parveen Bhardwaj.

I was very surprised to see this story on ealingtoday.co.uk this morning. In half an hour of talking to at least five of the staff on strike not one mentioned quotas. Their issues were that they felt that NSL was taking a hard line with staff on the old terms and conditions which they enjoy following their transfer under TUPE legislation from employment by the council. I fear that ealingtoday.co.uk’s one woman band, Annemarie Flanagan, has only told the headline worthy half of the story.

Unite regional officer Richard Gates told me that 59 out of 94 staff are Unite members and therefore out on strike today and tomorrow. This means there will be less traffic enforcement in the borough but there will be some so behave out there.

A typically unpleasant and context free tweet from Cllr Tailor last night. Rather than discussing the budget last night a number of Labour councillors, and even Cllr Steed from the LibDems (who has a reputation for being more left-wing than most of the Labour group), objected to the leader of the Tory group on the council making a reference to immigration during his budget speech. I thought that we had got to the point where we could discuss the influences on our society in a dispassionate way without the left screaming “race” every time someone tried to discuss immigration.

The context in which Cllr Millican was speaking was the schools capital budget. If you read the budget documents you will see that fully two-thirds of all of the council’s general fund capital spending, some £291 million out of £427 million over the five years from April 2011 to March 2016 (Table 15, page 28), is being devoted to schools capital. This money is not being spent for fun. In the main it is being used to build new school places. Although young families not moving out of the borough is a secondary driver for this change the biggest influence is new arrivals and the children of new arrivals – immigration.

Cllr Millican pointed to an answer to a Parliamentary question answered by ONS for MP Nicholas Soames, see here. This spells out that 77.2% of the 4,526 babies born in Ealing in 2010 had one or both foreign-born parents.

Labour councillors last night objected that this statistic was not relevant to the debate. They don’t want to discuss the major driver for almost £300 million of capital spending. If one is being generous one might assume that they feel that there is nothing that the council can do about this immigration so we should simply get on with it. The question arises though how much longer can we go on dealing with this kind of disruption to our town. Are we not even allowed to discuss this fundamental transformation?

There are lots of things we could spend capital on. Improved parks. Better roads. Arts venues. You name it. But, the council has a legal duty to provide school places first and Labour’s uncontrolled immigration means that there is no money left for much beyond schools. What little room for manoeuvre that the local Labour party has is being spent on new council offices and a car park in Southall.

If we cannot use official ONS statistics to illuminate a debate on the budget in Ealing then the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.