Category: Ealing and Northfield

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Ealing and Northfield Health, housing and adult social services National politics

Tories punish landlords

I have been giving Cllr Hitesh Tailor, Labour’s housing spokesman in Ealing, a hard time over his handwringing over the Tories’ reform of the discredited housing benefit system, in particular Local Housing Allowance. See here, here and here.

Sorting out the re-cycling tonight I noticed this advert on the back of the Gazette’s property supplement from last week. It promises landlords “High Rents Fixed until April 2013.” Note “High Rents” not “reasonable rents” or “fair rents”.

The bottom line is that Tailor is concerned that people like Somali refugee Saeed Khaliif might be inconvenienced by the new government’s changes to the Labour’s Local Housing Allowance (LHA) system. The government wants to limit LHA to £500 per week from April 2013. This is hardly radical. You need to earn about £50K a year to be able to pay that amount of rent (and nothing else). The idea that taxpayers want to give way more than even this generous cash limit to indigent refugees to live in Hampstead is plain silly. Cllr Withani and other leftie housing types will tell you that this reform will be hard on tenants. The reality is that it will be hard on landlords who have enjoyed high rents totally divorced from reality. Under LHA landlords have been receiving supernormal rents. It seems that Cllr Withani is the landlord’s friend.

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Ealing and Northfield Policing

Labour won’t tell truth on policing

On Monday night and throughout Tuesday Ealing council leader Julian Bell did a very good job of leading the Borough in the face of the terrible Ealing riot of Monday night which saw the tragic death of Ealing resident Richard Mannington Bowes.

On Wednesday Bell decided to start the political mudslinging with a series of tweets, see here. In a piece for the Ealing & Acton Gazette yesterday he said:

I am also angry with those responsible for cutting Police numbers and resources as it was clear to me as I watched from the Town Hall steps a heroic thin blue line of local officers (including my own Ward Neighbourhood Police Team Sergeant) attempt to secure the Town Centre from these thugs, that they were woefully under-resourced and lacking in sufficient numbers to do what was needed.

This statement is nonsense and the worst kind of political opportunism. Bell’s deputy and portfolio holder for community safety, Cllr Ranjit Dheer, got in on the act with a letter to the Gazette about police numbers.

Is the Tory government going soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime?

Dheer asks.

Nationally and locally Labour think that there is political advantage to be made out of this issue and have wasted no time in getting their blows in first.

Bell and Dheer are pretty brazen. Far from tinkering around the edges with police numbers they have presided over a 38% cash cut in the council’s contribution to policing which has resulted in a 58% reduction in headcount, see here.

The police like most other parts of the state will have to do more for less over the next few years, as has been acknowledged by senior Labour figures, for instance:

  • Labour’s last Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, said he could not guarantee police officer numbers.
  • Ed Balls admitted Labour would have cut police staff.
  • Yvette Cooper admited that police funding would be cut by Labour and that Labour’s plans were to cut 12 per cent from police funding.

Ealing Labour hold firmly to the belief that if they consistently lie to Ealing residents they will convince them that black is white.

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Ealing and Northfield Mayor Johnson

Like father, like son

Amiri Howe, the gobby bloke with comedy glasses who was haranguing the London Mayor today turns out to be Darcus Howe’s son, see more of the family history here. The Ealing and Acton Gazette lapped it up fast enough here and no doubt Howe fils will be all over the London news bulletins.

It costs young people £30,000 to go to university now. Did you pay to go to university Boris? Did you go to university? It’s £30,000 to send a youth to prison. D’you pay to go uni? You’ve got money to send youths to prison, but you ain’t got money to send youths to university.

The media loves a character. Shame he is talking moral equivalencing rubbish. The rioters are criminal thugs. The government is attempting to balance the books and is doing the right thing.

Father and son need to explain why it is only one small group who feel the need to destroy. Rather than making Black Power salutes Howe fils needs to explain why Afro-Caribbean youngsters have been in the vanguard of the looting, arson and vicious assaults we have seen across London in the last week. Failing that a bit of silence from these two would be appreciated, by me anyway.

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Ealing and Northfield Mayor Johnson

Boris on Ealing Green

I have just left the Boris travelling show on Ealing Green. It was great that he came to see for himself one of the main centres of the damage on Monday. Everyone was glad to see him except one very loud, young black man in comedy glasses. No doubt he will be the focus of any footage shown on TV. A student from the adjacent Drama Studio London trying to get himself noticed I expect.

Sorry about the appalling picture. You can just about make out the Boris mop about 1/5th of the way from the left. No doubt other will do much better than me.

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Ealing and Northfield Policing

Bell has to take responsibility for his own decisions

Up until this morning I would have had no problem congratulating Ealing council leader and Labour group leader Julian Bell on his good, even very good, personal performance over the course of the previous 48 hours and his response to the riots that took everyone by surprise on Monday evening. Cllr Bell has led Ealing well. Well done.

Unfortunately, he did rather blow it this morning with a string of partisan tweets that attempt to shift the blame for events onto the government and away from the rioters themselves. As Bell has started pointing the finger allow me please to take my turn.

Last year the council spent £1 million jointly funding a team of 43 police officers (1 inspector, 2 sergeants and 40 PCSOs) and another £70K funding two officers to work on our housing estates. A total spend of £1.07 million to fund 45 police officers.

In the current financial year Labour under Julian Bell has decided to spend just £660K to fund 19 police officers (1 inspector, 9 PCs and 9 PCSOs). So the Labour council has cut its revenue spending on policing by 38% and reduced the headcount by 58%. This massive cut is way out of proportion to the 12.5% cut the council is having to deal with and ignores what the council already knows about residents’ concerns.

If you check out the residents survey, here, you will see that residents’ single biggest concern is “Crime: including anti-social behaviour and terrorism”. This is cited by 20% as a personal concern, top of the list with the next biggest concern being cited by 15%.

Labour are quite aware of this concern and even put crime in number one spot on their list of five key pledges in their manifesto:

There is no doubt that crime and public safety are going to be even more of a worry to people for a long time to come. Bell needs to take responsibility for his own decisions which have ignored public concerns.

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Ealing and Northfield Policing

Last night in Ealing

I have spent the morning out in Ealing and West Ealing trying to understand what has been going on. Last night’s violence was truly appalling but I thought that it was worth recording my actual experience rather than merely sounding off. I do not want to minimise what happened last night in Ealing but I am keen to keep it in perspective. I would be very interested to hear your actual experiences.

The only building that has been set fire to is the one that houses the mini-supermarket opposite The Grove (the old Queen Vic) pub on Ealing Green.

There were a number of frankly hysterical reports of fires on Twitter last night and although fire is extremely dangerous and frightening it was only one building in all Ealing as far as I have been able to find out. I would guess the rebuild cost would be in the order of £1 million. I talked to and thanked the fire crew that were packing up. They had been there since 2am and I talked to them at 9.30am.

There were probably around ten vehicles set fire to, including a bus near Ealing Green and a van on Carlton Road. Many cars were damaged on Mattock Lane, around Ealing Green and up Madeley Road.

Walking from Ealing to Ealing Common and back to the end of the West Ealing paprade there were maybe 100 shops and businesses with windows put in. About five businesses were extensively looted and another five or so suffered substantial damage. I will post some further reports on these later.

My summary of the morning is as follows:

The council had 45 men out at 5am cleaning up and the police have 57 people in custody. About 100 volunteers turned up to help clean up at 10am in the town centre but in reality there was not much to do. There is one burnt building – about £1 million of rebuild I would say. Maybe 100 broken shop windows across Ealing. Say £100K. Ten vehicles including a bus and a van burnt, say £300K. Another 100 car windows, say £50K. Maybe five business broken into and looted. Maybe another £500K of looted and damaged stock. Total damage in the order of £2 million. It was probably caused by 150 odd mainly black, mainly teenage boys. Some older. Some younger. Some women.

Although our town was taken over by a hundred odd feral scumbags last night a good proportion of them ended up in cells overnight and the good people of Ealing in their many thousands are calmly getting on with their business and helping each other out. The council is doing a good job too. I am sure that we are all thankful that there have been no reported injuries.

Apparently the police advice is as follows: They would like shops to close by 5pm and residents to be off the streets by 7pm in case of further disorder.

There were 6,000 police on the streets of London last night. There are due to be 16,000 tonight. Police leave has been cancelled and they have been put on 12 hour shifts. Thank you guys.

Update: Yesterday I said: “I am sure that we are all thankful that there have been no reported injuries.” I was wrong.

On Monday night a man was severely injured trying to remonstrate with demonstrators on Springbridge Road. See here and here.

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Ealing and Northfield

Department for Housing Misinformation and Fear

Cllr Withani really is a bit of a comedian. Why does he think he can tweet nonsense and have people believe him?

According to the Guardian article he quotes rents are going up by 4.4% pa as reported by findaproperty.com and 4.1% as reported by LSL Property Services. I don’t know how authoritative these sources are but the Office of National Statistics reports that CPI was 4.2% in June and RPI was 5.0%. So far from “soaring” rents are barely keep pace with inflation on these measures. In any case Local Housing Allowance is linked to market rents so will go up with them.

What he says is nonsense twice over as many of the changes in housing benefit are not due to come into force until April 2012 or even later. Those that have come into force only did so in April 2011 so would not have any visible impact on rents yet, either upward or downward.

Cllr Withani is beside himself with glee at the idea that the market will fail and that people will be seriously inconvenienced in large numbers so that he can say I told you so. In the meantime, in the real world, taxpayers are relieved that housing benefit is to be capped at £500 per week and that young people will have to make do with sharing houses – just like those who pay the bills have to… To be able to earn enough to pay rent of £500 per week you need to earn about £50K.

At the last council meeting Cllr Withani got one of the Labour councillors to ask him a tame question about housing benefits so that he could wring his hands dramatically and frighten people. The Tory housing spokesman Will Brooks asked him a question I have twice asked before on here: “How many people lost their homes as a result of Labour’s James Purnell limiting LHA to the five room rate in April 2009”. Yet again Withani failed to answer.

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Ealing and Northfield National politics

False Economy? Unfair economy certainly

The union backed campaign website False Economy did well this morning to get its report on charities losing cash from local councils onto the BBC News website front page and I heard it listed 5th on the Radio 4 9am new bulletin, see BBC story here.

False Economy is backed by public service unions such as Unison, PCS and FBU and the TUC itself. Key players are Alison Charlton, a Unison communications officer and Nigel Stanley, head of the TUC’s Campaigns and Communications Department. You get the picture.

It is the start of the silly season so you can half understand the BBC going for such a weak story. The BBC though is telling only half of it and it is ironic that it is the public service unions that are pointing out how council officers would rather rape and pillage the voluntary sector than look closely at their own staff numbers and terms and conditions. You only have to look at my own Labour council here in Ealing to get the picture.

In Ealing:

  • although the council is at great pains to dramatise the £85 million of savings it wishes to make as “cuts” almost half of this amount is its own growth (new spending commitments), additional borrowing costs and inflation. The cut in government grant does approach 30% but this is only about 12% in the council’s total income and expenditure.
  • in spite of massive changes to the council’s income there have been no changes to staff terms and conditions which include 35 hour work weeks.
  • the cost of employees rose by 1.6% last year to £152 million, see Statement of Accounts here.
  • at its last cabinet meeting on 26th July Ealing Labour cut Supporting People spending on people with housing issues, most of which goes outside the council, by 47%, see paper here.
  • at its cabinet meeting on 7th June Ealing Labour cut the amount it gives to voluntary organisations in the form of discretionary relief from business rates from £396K in 2009/10 to £88K. A cut of 78% or £308K for local voluntary organisations in Ealing, made even worse by the fact that these discounts on business rates are matched by central government to the tune of £197K, 78% of which will be lost too for no gain by the council, see paper here.
  • at its cabinet meeting on 26th April Ealing Labour cut 28% in the health and social care grant budget and 30% in the community grants budget over the three years 2011/12 to 2013/14, see paper here.

What we can see is that Ealing’s Labour council has made very little progress with reforming itself but has taken its own cut in government grant rather than the much lower cut in its overall income as the minimum starting point for the voluntary sector and in the more obscure areas such as rates relief and Supporting People has been truly vicious. Ealing’s Labour council has protected itself and externalised the pain. It is strange to see public service unions calling them out on this. You might have thought that they would be a bit embarrassed.

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Ealing and Northfield

Bell’s Herbert Road photo lies for him

I have been meaning to repeat my Southall car park mystery shopping for a while now so when I saw Labour council leader Julian Bell’s tweet and the accompanying photo just now I jumped in the car to check his facts. He is either mendacious or lazy.

It took me 9 minutes to drive from Sainsbury’s in West Ealing to the Herbert Road multi-storey car park. This is my standard journey. The park time was about 30s and I found an empty space on level 2. Although the lower levels were full the car park got emptier as you went up and the top floor was totally empty, see my picture below timestamped at 11:55am, half an hour after Bell’s. In all I counted 6 disabled spaces free and about 140 regular spaces. Bell clearly does not want to see beyond the end of his nose.

On the way home I looped into the Conservative Club car park which is available to the public. There were about 50 empty spaces there.

Parking in Southall is easy most of the time. At the busy times it will still be rammed. There is no business case for Labour’s £5.5 million car park.

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Ealing and Northfield

Cinema chief executive comes to Ealing

There will be big excitement tonight if Justin Ribbons, chief executive of Empire Cinemas, attends the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting tonight at 7pm in the Queen’s Hall. The venue has been changed to accommodate the large numbers of the public that are expected to show up.

At Tuesday’s cabinet meeting the cabinet gave officers permission to proceed with a compulsory purchase (CPO) of the cinema site in the event that building work does not proceed. Typically of Cllr Mahfouz he is trying to get on the right side of this issue and put his opponents on the wrong side. In reality this is a totally non-political issues and politicians of all sides, council officers and the public have all been working hard on this issue since the cinema was knocked down in November 2008.

Whatever Mahfouz or anyone says the council was only ever in a position to talk about a CPO until Empire’s planning permission runs out in November 2011. Property case law in this country is such that a CPO would not have got anywhere in the courts until the planning permission had ran out and it would be unusual if a property owner did not go to law when served a CPO in these circumstances. So nothing was ever going to happen or will happen until either Empire starts work of its own accord or the day Empire’s planning permission runs out in November of this year.

The only person who seems to have got to meet Empire’s elusive chief exec face-to-face is Conservative MP for Ealing Central and Acton, Angie Bray, see here. The rest of us will be interested to hear what he has to say this evening.