Category: Ealing and Northfield

Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma gave us the benefit of his economic wisdom in the Gazette this week. Of course it is just a rehashed Ed Balls press release. If you follow this link to what equally useless Labour MP for Midlothian, David Hamilton, passed off as his own work and published on his website on 5th December they are the same except Sharma has changed “This week” to “Last week” and added another paragraph on the end.

Then again it probably wasn’t Sharma who did the cutting and pasting. No doubt it was his researcher, Ealing council leader Cllr Julian Bell, who is paid to work for Sharma two days a week but still draws a full-time allowance from the council. You pay twice over for Cllr Bell but all you get is a lazy cut and paste job.

Tonight, along with many residents and a number of local councillors, I attended the meeting held by West Ealing Neighbours (WEN) to discuss the Lido junction project being proposed by the council. WEN are to be congratulated for pushing for this project over many years. The meeting was chaired by David Highton (left) from WEN and the portfolio holder, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz (right), was there to answer questions.

Local councillors very much welcome this scheme and the safety benefits that it will bring. They wrote to the Gazette on 25th November to say as much. We are anxious though that this scheme will have a big impact on journey times north to south through the junction. Don’t misunderstand me. We do not think that this is more important than the potential safety benefit. It is not. But, we are keen though that residents across the borough are aware of it.

Once the scheme is in the people that benefit from it will accept the benefits of the scheme without a second thought. The people queuing southbound to get over the junction will curse the council and the “idiots” who changed the lights. Of course WEN, the residents who demanded this scheme, the council transport people, the councillors, etc are not idiots. They have weighed the safety benefits of this scheme against the increased delays and quite rightly chosen one over the other. We need to remember that!

For this reason the local councillors are keen that this consultation reaches as many people as possible. A paper consultation document has been delivered to 2,639 homes immediately adjacent to the junction. This is a large number but it still only covers a very small area. We strenuously requested that the council do a consultation event at Waitrose but this was refused on the grounds that it would set a precedent. If you would like to read more and take part please follow this link.

On Monday I popped along to the opening of the new car park in Hambrough Road Southall. In other parts of the borough: South Ealing, Acton, West Ealing, etc, the trend has been for the council to close car parks. Southall is different!

A month ago I complained about the misbehavior of the Ealing Labour group and their Ealing and Hillingdon GLA candidate, Onkar Sahota. They are at it again. On Monday Sahota placed himself behind the mayor and the council leader in the photograph which appeared in the Gazette today. Both Bell and Gallagher are experienced councillors who know that they are breaking the rules. Gallagher is meant to be an apolitical representative of the whole borough but yet again he is happy to allow himself to be used for political purposes.

Although Sahota is standing for public office he is happy enough to bend the rules. Yet again he and the Labour group are using an official Ealing council function to promote his candidacy. Is it too much to expect Ealing Labour group to play by the rules?

When I went to Southall on Monday morning it took me only six minutes to drive from West Ealing to the Herbert Road MSCP arriving at 9:39. It took 10s to park. There were so few cars in the car park that I was able to count 22 spaces occupied out of 270.

The Labour group will tell you that the new car parks in Southall are needed to support the weekend trade. The trouble is that car parks cost you money 24/7. If the new car parks are empty most of the time then they are simply unaffordable. It is hard to see how you justify a business case for any new car parks in Southall.

As was to be expected the Reynard Mills planning application is back to vex residents of south Ealing and north Brentford, see here.

There is a public meeting called by Windmill Road Action Group on the 28th November, 7.30 pm at St Faiths Church on Windmill Road.

Unfortunately the Northfield councillors will not be there as the meeting has been scheduled to coincide with our group’s discussions of the next budget round.

We worked very effectively with Brentford councillors and local residents last time round to throw out the last over-sized proposal. This proposal is not a lot smaller. No doubt we will see this one off too.

In this morning’s Sunday Telegraph there is a piece on councils introducing garden stealth taxes which mentions our own Labour council here in Ealing.

The current Labour administration wants to make garden waste re-cycling a chargeable service from 1st April next year, £40 per annum, reduce it to a fortnightly collection and stop it altogether during January. The Tories are campaigning to fight Labour’s pay-more-get-less garden tax.

The garden tax petition online is heading for the 600 mark this weekend not helped though by the council’s petitions system being offline for maintenance for 24 hours up until 8pm last night. How very 20th Century? We have the same number of signatures again on paper – I have collected 24 myself over the last week. It is not a hard sell!

When I was looking at the Ealing petitions site tonight I noticed that Onkar Sahota has started two petitions to “save” two local hospitals. Having started these on Wednesday last week Sahota had managed to get one mate to back him up by Friday. Two petitions with two signatures each. It doesn’t sound as if the Ealing Labour group really believes its own rhetoric. Maybe council leader Julian Bell should get off twitter and get his group organised. Most of them have yet to upgrade from their quill pens and ink pots.

Dr Onkar Sahota is Labour’s hapless candidate for the GLA Ealing & Hillingdon seat currently held by the ebullient Tory and Deputy Mayor, Richard Barnes. Sahota is a local doctor and Daddy’s boy, son of Gurdip Sahota, Chair of Ealing Southall branch. [Labour’s chief whip, Cllr Brian Reeves, recently told me that I had got this bit of the story wrong. He told me that my error was the source of some amusement in the Labour group. He didn’t have any further corrections for me.]

Sahota is yet another Punjabi Labour representative. Apparently only Punjabi’s need apply to represent Southall on behalf of the Labour party. The MP and all 15 councillors are Punjabi. There are Sikh Punjabis, Muslim Punjabis and Hindu Punjabis but Punjabis one and all. Now the GLA candidate is. At least Sahota is 2nd generation. The old guard keep a tight grip of Southall. Of the MP and 15 councillors only one councillor as far as I know is second generation, Cllr “Comrade” Kausar.

Sahota paid a visit to the first riots panel meeting on 17th October. He introduced himself as Dr Onkar Sahota and raised a point about the problem of closing GP’s surgeries early because of the riot. Fair enough. He did not introduce himself as a GLA candidate and if he had done he would probably have been booed into silence when he went on to make a nakedly political point and say that it was the “wrong time to have public spending cuts”.

I don’t see Sahota worrying Barnes unduly in May.

Council leader Julian Bell tells us he attended the topping out ceremony at Dormers Wells High School on Friday. He takes the opportunity to take a swipe at the Tories over the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. When he says “we save (sic)” presumably he means Michael Gove, Angie Bray and David Millican who all worked with the Labour administration to make sure that these two projects slipped through the closing door.

I have been looking at the James report into Education capital this morning. A heavy topic but it is the kind of thing I have to do to keep on top of Bell and Labour’s truth mincers. The James report says:

BSF was announced in 2003 with the, with hindsight, somewhat quixotic aim of rebuilding or refurbishing every secondary school in England by 2020. To date BSF funding has totalled £8.65 billion made up of £3.5 billion of conventional funding and £5.15 billion of PFI credits. In 2010-11 it had a total budget of £3.7 billion. This made it the Government’s single largest capital programme in any area.

The programme started with excellent intentions but the scale of it made it extremely difficult to implement with the initial structure. By the end of March 2006, BSF had spent £27 million but was materially behind schedule with no schools built. Following an overhaul of the procurement process, a new target completion date of 2023 was set for the programme. In addition, the estimate of the overall cost was increased from £45 to £55 billion, as the scope of the programme was increased. As of November 2010, around 8% of the planned renewal originally envisaged after seven years had been achieved. This was clearly well short of the original objectives, and a number of reviews of the process were launched from that time and have continued right up to the present day.

So the programme was huge – £55 billion. It was the government’s largest single capital programme. It was also really wasteful with a hugely top heavy management and financial structure, huge procurement costs that created custom-made, architect-designed but often impractical buildings. By March 2011 BSF had delivered 310 schools at a cost of £8.65 billion. An excruciating £28 million per school. The programme did not prioritise a school’s physical condition so it literally knocked down good buildings to deliver Gordon Brown’s grandiose vision and replaced them with expensive to run, designer schools with hard to manage and heat spaces.

This picture taken from the James report shows the way capital spending in the education department changed under Labour. Does it look sustainable to you?

Can we remember who slashed the country’s capital programme? Ah yes, it was Alistair Darling on the occasion of the 2009 Pre-Budget Report, see here. Do we not think that the PBR affected the government’s single largest capital programme?

As it happens we are building all sorts of schools all over Ealing, with the help of government funds. Don’t expect Labour to tell you about it though. More on this later. BSF was a financial disaster. It was unaffordable. It often produced bad buildings. Darling effectively cancelled it November 2009. Bell is just playing games as usual.