Category: Ealing and Northfield

Today is the last day of the libraries consultation. If you have not yet completed the council’s questionnaire then click here. Their questions are very irritating and their initial presumption of 30% cuts is an outrageous lie. But, please go through their questionnaire anyway. If the council gets a big enough raspberry it will go and pick on someone or something else.

One assumption made by the Labour council is that the tiny, understaffed libraries at Pitshanger (3.9 FTE) and Northfields (3.6 FTE) can be staffed by volunteers as their user groups are nice, middle class people who can look after themselves. From my knowledge of these two communities they are rather busy going to work, raising children, looking after their parents and keeping their homes and gardens looking decent. They are very community minded but they pay £2,000 a year in council tax and something like £6,000 a year in other taxes to keep the council going and they are very resentful that the council wants to use their precious time to replace very cheap librarians.

Of course Labour has a very different model in mind for its heartlands of Acton (12.3 FTE) and Southall (12.6 FTE). The order of the day here is to have hugely over-staffed libraries that are not threatened in any way.

I wonder how many copies of Atlas Shrugged they stock in Acton and Southall.

Apologies for failing to finish of my series of blogs on Labour council’s pyramid of nonsense on the cuts. I have been enjoying some sun and the wedding on the telly.

The Labour council, Labour councillors and supposedly apolitical officers, have been trying to maintain this line as used in the libraries consultation:

Due to cuts to our government funding, Ealing Council needs to save £65million over the next three years. This is approximately 30% of the money that the council has available to spend on its services.

If you look at the budget papers, here, you will see that the council is planning for growth of £7.3 million. These are decisions that the Labour council have made to increase spending that have to be paid for by cutting other spending (or raising new income). However unavoidable or unwelcome they are these are not cuts imposed by the government and it is simply a lie to characterise them as such. During the four years that the Tories were in power we put in growth of £40 million. We did not go around saying that he Labour government had imposed £40 million of cuts on us. This is what Labour are doing in black and white in the consultation document.

You can reasonably deduct the £7.3 million from Labour’s £65 million figure. This gives us an honest characterisation of the cuts as 12.5%.

This level of cuts is very difficult to deal with and none of Ealing’s politicians would have liked to have dealt with it. Labour’s Cllr Bell and Johnson have had to drive through some very tough decisions and they deserve due respect for what they have done. That said the “cuts” are not 30% they are 12.5%, one eighth of spending not almost one third as they have mendaciously tried to suggest.

Cllr Colm Costello published this photo on Tuesday on his blog which shows three of the Labour cabinet peering at a Conservative campaign leaflet during Tuesday night’s cabinet meeting. You might have thought that they would be listening in rapt attention to their leader, Julian Bell, as he spoke, but no.

Apparently some of the Labour councillors are upset by this photo and Cllr Costello has been approached by officers to take it down citing council rules regarding filming.

It would be a bit intrusive and undignified if people were snapping away all of the time but this photo is so precious that it would be a shame if it were suppressed.

I cannot help but feeling that it is a case of the biter being bit. Some of the Labour councillors have been regularly tweeting through meetings and a few minutes before this photo was taken Cllr Mahouz produced this typically venal tweet.

He produced this in response to a helpful and constructive comment from Cllr Mark Reen regarding Labour’s proposals to take 30% out of the council’s grants budget. Mahfouz is from the lie big, lie loud school of political communication.

I just saw on the TheyWorkForYou.com website that Ealing Southall’s rather low output MP, Virendra Sharma, has raised himself to ask a question in Parliament. See here.

He was interested in the number of people receiving English for speakers of other languages classes in the 2005-2010 period. No doubt he will want to complain about reduced availability of these classes in future.

There is a golden rule with asking political questions. Make sure you know the answer in advance!

I don’t know if it is fair to simply add these numbers over the five years but if you do so you get to 8,660 people learning English for speakers of other languages. The 2001 census population for the constituency was 89,175. You could argue that 10% of the population was learning English.

On the one hand it is great that so many people are taking the opportunity to improve themselves but on the other the answer underlines the huge change to our society implemented by New Labour. I don’t remember their asking for our permission first.

I was in Southall this morning. Drove past Sainsburys in West Ealing at 9:15am. Arrived Herbert Road multi-storey car park 9:22am and parked within seconds. There were only 9 other cars in the whole car park.

I know school holidays are quiet and these three days wedged between two four day weekends doubly so, but this was a normal working day and the car park was empty.

I am sure that Labour supporting voices will say I chose another quiet day to go Southall. Sorry but I go when I need to go Southall. With so many quiet times the return on investment for this car park must be really terrible. You can’t buy land, put a new building on it and then have it empty most of the time. Best service will be provided to you if you consult best rated mobile car detailers in St Marys County. Take a chance!

Following on from my piece yesterday, to put the cuts in context you need to work out what total council spending was last year, before the cuts happened.

What did the council spend last year? The accounts aren’t out yet and even if they were they are so opaque that it would be hard to work it out. We can get to what was planned to be spent last year by looking at the budget for last year here. If you scroll down to the table on page 14 and look at the column titled “TOTAL EXPENDITURE” you get the total amount that was planned to go out of the council last year. Surely this is the correct divisor for the that ratio we had yesterday?

If so it would destroy the Labour council’s exaggerated claim of 30% cuts. 6.7%! Flesh wound. Nothing to see here, move on please. Why did you sack half the park rangers?

Some of this money does pass straight through the council without touching the sides. One council officer used Alan Sugar’s memorable phrase “prune juice” to describe these amounts. Let’s have a look at these.

Last year the council planned to receive £215,505K of Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG). DSG comes in from government and goes straight out again untouched. So this part of the council’s spending should mostly not be in the divisor. There are instances where the council will dip into this is some convoluted way. For instance, they are planning to take £120K off the schools system by removing discretionary business rates relief for faith schools. A long story but just to prove that DSG is not as inviolate that the council might suggest. It would be fair to subtract this sum from our divisor.

The second big straight through is income of rents and service charges from council tenants and leaseholders. This was planned to be £33,699K last year. This is held separately in the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) and is ringfenced from the rest of the council’s finances. This barrier is fairly tight but sometimes things leak across, for instance the council has cut the police contribution of £70K from the HRA and this responsibility now falls on the general fund. So again the barrier is not as tight as the council might claim. Still it would be fair to strip this amount out of the divisor.

Finally, housing benefit is the third straight through item. Last year this was planned to be £250,622K. Although the council spends about £3.6 million administrating housing benefit it acts as an agent of the government and the housing benefit payments come from central government and go straight to recipients. This £250,622K should also sensibly be subtracted from the divisor.

Taking these three amounts off the total leaves £465,431K as our new divisor and a new ratio of cuts to expenditure of 14%.

Is this the right number? Even when being entirely fair-minded it is less than half the 30% that the Labour council is claiming. Is 14% fair? Only if you believe the Labour council’s story on the cuts. Labour have misrepresented both its spending (the divisor) and the cuts it is dealing with. More tomorrow.

In shock news today I have found out that the “money that the council has available to spend on its services” will rise by 2.7% this financial year compared to last. This does sound strange but is true if you believe the pyramid of nonsense being built by the Labour administration (and supported by officers) to dramatise the cuts.

When this statement:

Due to cuts to our government funding, Ealing Council needs to save £65million over the next three years. This is approximately 30% of the money that the council has available to spend on its services.

appeared in the library consultation document I challenged the council’s finance officers that they had stopped being objective and that this was nonsense. It is based on at least four nonsenses as you will see during the course of the next few posts.

To get to this 30% number the council (Labour members and officers in perfect agreement apparently) divides the current savings target of £65 million by a rather arbitrary figure that they call “net controllable budget” for the previous year. When you hear Labour spokesmen using this rather elaborate terminology it is to help prop up their pyramid of nonsense.

The net controllable budget is a bit weird as it is the amount you get when you take each service in turn and subtract its income from its expenditure and add all of the net figures together. For instance, last year the budget for off street parking was expenditure of £4,088 less income of £4,918K so the figure that contributed to the net controllable budget was minus £830K. So the “money that the council has available to spend on its services” includes minus numbers (profits or surpluses on some services) and the more money the council makes the worse it gets. In fact when the council makes a saving by increasing parking charges by £1.47 million they called it a cut AND used it to DECREASE the divisor of their ratio. There is no way this illuminates the debate on the size of our budget cut. All it does is to allow Labour to wildly exaggerate the size of the cuts and to unnecessarily worry and inflame people.

Anyway the really funny thing about the net controllable budget is that it is going to be larger this year than last. Ooops. If you want to check my reasoning go to the last page, 195, of the appendices of the budget report and look at the line titled “Total budget for services”. The revised number for 2010/11 was £213,347,000. The number for 2011/12 is projected to be £219,032,000 – an increase of 2.7%.

I will come back to this hilarious hole that Labour has dug for itself tomorrow.

After the budget in March I noted that the government had given the council £323K to fix potholes, see here. I wondered if this was enough so I asked the question at the last council meeting, see here.

Question 38:

During the winter how many potholes were identified on the borough’s roads? How many were fixed? How much did this cost? How does this compare with the previous year?

Answer 38:

Highways are still in the process of finalising the figures for the 2010/2011 Winter programme, however it is estimated that an additional 4578 potholes were identified as a result of the Winter that we experienced and the estimated cost will be £355,481.00

Last year a total of 13,427 additional potholes were identified as a result of the Winter that was experienced in 2009/2010 and the cost of repairing these was £825,000.00

So apparently our potholes were pretty much covered then. On a serious note if you do see a road, or any other bit of stuff that the council is responsible for, in bad condition call 020 8825 6000. Most things will get fixed pretty quickly you will find. If not hassle your councillor.

I have taken Labour to task for slashing the borough’s policing spend by one third at a time when public safety is the main worry for residents, see here and here. Labour are reducing the police numbers funded by the borough from 43 to 19 and the amount spent from £1 million to £660K, a 34% cut.

This week I discover that they have eliminated another two police posts on the quiet.

At the end of March I wanted to write about the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) and Labour’s prized £5 million saving over four years, see here. As I dug around the depths of the relevant cabinet paper trying to work out what Labour was doing I found this intriguing reference to policing on page 17:

Non staffing savings: consultants fees, audit fee, Company secretary, surveys, inspection fees, absence management, Giro charges, the Police patrol service, contingencies.

Most of this £759K per annum saving sounded like things you might want to save money on, but policing? No. I therefore asked a written question at the next council meeting, which took place last Tuesday, and the answer was published earlier this week.

Question 39:

What was the value of the Police patrol service included in the HRA account but cut in this budget? What did the service involve and how will it be replaced?

Answer 39:

The Cost of the two full time equivalent police officers posts was £70,000 pa, which was paid from the delegated Ealing Homes budget. The budget was part of the £2m savings identified in the HRA this year. This level of savings was necessary to ensure a balanced HRA and in view of the rent increase being below the Government’s guideline of 6%.

Aspects of the service involved assisting with tenant home visits and evictions, responding to crime enquiries. The work that was carried out by the HRA funded police officers will be carried out by police/council officers that form part of the police partnership model as detailed in the report agreed at Cabinet on 22nd March.

So translating this into plain English, the borough has lost another two police posts that were funded by the HRA at a time when public safety is residents’ chief concern. It also looks like some housing responsibilities have been moved off the HRA (paid for by council tenants’ rents) on to the general fund (paid for ultimately by council tax payers).