Category: Ealing and Northfield

There has been a good deal of debate in Ealing about the “cuts”. One thing we have not heard about is the Labour administration’s ideas about shared services. Today we have heard some early results of the Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham project – an ambitious programme that aims to save £33 million across the three councils by 2015/6. In particular the project aims to halve the number of middle and senior managers. As I pointed out last Friday Ealing’s bill for its senior management team is £8.9 million. Half of that would be well worth having.

The detail of the first £1 million of savings makes interesting reading:

• £320k by sharing a single director of children’s services
• £320k by sharing a single director of adult services
• £100k by sharing a single director of libraries
• £150k by combining environmental services across Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea
• £120k by combining making a joint appointment to the director for schools’ quality and standards between Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea.

All these savings involve taking out senior management roles; something that Ealing has signally failed to address.

A more detailed document is available here.

Michael Rowan, owner of cowboy business Rowan’s just by Kew Bridge has got his just desserts, having just been fined almost £9,000 for flyposting. His business’ signs have been a plague all over West London for years. It is great to see that Ealing council has finally caught up with him, see here.

From my earliest days as a councillor I have worked on this issue and Rowan’s antisocial business has been a feature all along. I blogged about Rowan’s in October 2006, March 2007 and June 2008.

Ealing Conservatives are livid about Labour’s propoal to impose a £40 garden tax on anyone who wants to use the council’s garden waste re-cycling service. Today they issued the following press release:

Free Recycling Leads to Massive Increase in Recycling Rates

Written Council answers have revealed that the tonnage of garden waste recycled increased by a whopping 103% after the Conservative Administration abolished the charges in 2007.

Cllr David Millican, Conservative Group Leader said:

“Prior to the charge being abolished, only 1,722 tonnage of garden waste was recycled. This jumped to 3,496 tonnage after the Conservative Administration removed the cost of the pink sacks and made the service free.

This whopping increase is a clear signal that most people are willing to do their bit for the environment as long as it’s free and easy to do so.

It is therefore disappointing to note that the Labour Administration will be charging residents £40 a year from April to collect their garden waste and reducing the collection to fortnightly. Many people get a cheap skip bin hire to throw away a lot of stuff. This is a massive step back in the wrong direction.

Ealing is a leafy Borough and many residents often tidy up the leaves from the street that fall/ blow into their front gardens. This saves the Council and helps to keep our streets clean. Many residents will probably stop doing this, as they will have to pay for taking pride in their neighbourhoods.

I intend to present a petition at the 13 December Council Meeting demanding that the Labour Council abolish the charge and keep recycling free and weekly.

The petition can be signed online:
http://ealing-consult.limehouse.co.uk/portal/petitions or by phoning: 0741 263 5228

The Ealing Tories are proud of their record of doubling re-cycling rates whilst we were in power.

Labour’s £40 garden tax will send this into reverse – even the council’s own reports says that re-cycling rates will drop by 1%.

That petition reads as follows:

We support waste reduction and recycling; and believe it should be kept free and weekly.

Therefore we demand that Ealing’s Labour Council abandons its plans:

• to impose an annual £40 garden waste tax and to collect garden waste fortnightly
• to withdraw the white sacks for plastics recycling collection
• for the option in the contract to collect waste and recyclables fortnightly

We believe that these changes will increase fly tipping, reduce the rates of recycling and alienate the very people whose support is needed.

If you want to sign follow this link.

Since Labour won the local elections in 2010 they have been blurring the line between official civic events and Labour party rallies. I have asked the Chief Executive to clarify the status of the Diwali lights switch on event held outside Southall Town Hall on Monday. Pictured on the left of this photo is Labour’s Ealing & Hillingdon GLA candidate Onkar Sahota who is naturally keen to get his face seen in the area.

You can understand the Mayor turning on the lights and the council inviting the local MP, the council leader and local councillors. As they are all Labour politicians you can understand that they all had a jolly time and thought that it was OK to throw Sahota into the mix. But, this looked like a council event paid for with public money and if it was then it was wrong to include Sahota. It would be nice to think that the opposition leaders and actual GLA member for Ealing & Hillingdon, Richard Barnes, were invited. I have asked. Will report back.

This is not the first local event that Sahota has gate crashed. He turned up and spoke at the riot meeting last Monday. 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”. The riots had nothing to do with the Coalition’s deficit reduction programme and Sahota shows what a lightweight he is repeating Ken Livingstone’s widely derided remarks and trying to link the two. Next time it would be nice if he declared his interests before he spoke.

At council last week there was a petition from a group of Acton residents asking the council to keep Acton baths open. It is due to close on December 4th for well over two years, see here. The council says that a new swimmimng pool will be re-provided in “Spring 2004”. By last Tuesday Santha Bradford and her team had got 1,862 people to sign their petition. They are waging a very impressive campaign, using online and paper petitions, the local paper and online video. All this is summed up with regular updates on the actonw3.com and ealingtoday.co.uk forums.

It is great that the new Labour council is carrying on with the previous Tory administration’s plans to redevelop some of the key public assets in Acton town centre. This always was going to be a difficult project – replacing a suite of complex but faded public buildings for which people have great affection with more practical modern buildings but keeping the right level of the heritage of Acton intact. The Labour administration seems to be getting it badly wrong and it is because it is paying more attention to its own politcal fortunes than the needs of Actonians. They are closing the baths for too long. Well over two years. The works programme has been built around delivering the new complex by “Spring 2004”. We all know that this means in time to get Labour re-elected at the local elections in May 2014. The users want as small as possible time without a pool in Acton. Closing the baths before planning permission has been given shows that the works programme is built around politcal not user needs. No commercial business would shut its doors for so long. They certainly wouldn’t close until they had planning permission in the bag.

Last Thursday I enjoyed meeting 50 or so pupils of Ealing 6th forms at a Question Time style event at the Town Hall. There were pupils from Greenford, Cardinal Wiseman and Featherstone.

The panel included Superintendent Ian Jenkins from the police, Mike Cox, the LibDem’s GLA candidate for Ealing & Hillingdon, Stephen Pound, North Ealing MP, a representative of the UK Youth Parliament and me. The event was chaired by Ealing’s Youth Mayor, Jahanara Chaudhry.

The largest part of our two hours was taken up by a discussion of the riots in August, in particular the question “What caused the riots this year?”.

Unlike the BBC’s Question Time the audience were given first crack at the questions. I wrote down the dozen responses to this key question. Apologies for not being able to record the names of those who spoke.

It happened because it was allowed to happen.

People saw this looting was getting people something and joined in.

It is because youths wanted to break something & steal something.

Government partly to blame for the riot.

Just plain criminality.

It was mainly organised crime.

The sheer anger of kids being treated in a certain way.

It was criminality – people behind it thought that they could get away with it.

It was done by opportunists.

It was done by criminals but there is not enough for them to do.

Breakdown of communication between government and the Youth.

There is a reason those people have got criminal records.

The apologists were very much in the minority. The majority saw this as a crime and public order problem. Top marks all round!

One of Ealing council’s Labour administration’s most telling mistakes over its first 17 months in power has been over the Friar’s Green CPZ. You can read the whole sorry story here.

It is a story of waste and arrogance. Overturning a decision made in public, ignoring residents and doing the wrong thing.

The council has now gone to the expense of reconsulting residents about whether they want a CPZ in their area and they have had to complete yet another stupid form. Residents have responded massively (53%) to the latest consultation and voted 70% to 29% in favour of a CPZ, as reported on the actonw3.com forum this week.

On Wednesday we had a business-like scrutiny session discussing the street scene in Ealing: crossovers, trees, streetlights and their relationship. Good solid council stuff of which more another time. At the end of the session Jason Stacey, the former council leader, suggested that we ask officers for a report on the business case for the proposed new car park in Southall. Opposition councillors have repeatedly questioned the wisdom of this £5.5 million project and don’t believe that the case has been made. Labour’s Cllr Wendy Langan told us that the administration had nothing to hide and welcomed the scrutiny. Often decisions at scrutiny meetings are made by assent without a vote. On this occasion one of the Southall councillors, Cllr Dhindsa, said he didn’t like the idea. As chairman I confirmed that we were entitled to look at whatever matters we wished so we voted on the matter. Three Labour councillors voted with the opposition councillors to ask to see the business case. It makes a nice change. Too often lately Labour councillors have voted en bloc at scrutiny meetings.

Subsequently LibDem councillor Malcolm let his Napoleon complex get the better of him, see his blog here. Reading it you would imagine the whole initiative was a LibDem one. On the contrary, it was Cllr Stacey’s idea. He mentions Cllr Steed attending – only he had no vote, he just appeared towards the end of the meeting. Nice of him to take an interest but he had no vote and played no role.

Inspired by this small victory for good government I made another of many trips to Southall today to see how well used the existing Herbert Road multi-storey car park (HRMSCP) is used. I left Sainsburys in West Ealing at 16:17 and arrived at HRMSCP at 16:30. As ever the 13 minute journey and in particular crossing the main junction was the most difficult bit of the whole experience. IT only took me 30s to park. The car park was busy but I counted 2 disabled spaces and 101 regular spaces – no problem!

Anyway it will be interesting to see what officers come up with at the next meeting of our panel on 29th February next year.

The issue of union facility time, where union reps are paid by the state to represent state workers has been coming to the fore in recent weeks, partly as a result of a campaign by the Guido Fawkes blog which labelled them as “Pligrims” after a particularly vexatious non-nursing nurse called Jane Pilgrim. The Sunday Telegraph had a leader and feature on the subject today.

In March this year I pointed out that the Pilgrim budget in Ealing was £250K. This is being trimmed next year by 20% unlike user services such as envirocrime officers and park rangers that were halved this year.

For my money an appropriate level for facility time is zero, ie all trade union representation is paid for out of union dues or done by volunteers.