Category: Ealing and Northfield

It is worth understanding one of the major constraints on Ealing’s capital spending – the burgeoning population in our schools. The previous Conservative administration made financial provision for 16 permanent additional forms of entry in our primary schools and 9 temporary forms. The total allocated by the end of our time last year was £71.4 million.

Getting these numbers right is a very tough judgement call and this year the new Labour administration has had to put an additional £45 million aside for an additional 8 forms of entry and more temporary places.

This will continue to be a huge issue for the borough and will roll through to secondary provision and be a significant constraint on what any administration can do on the capital side.

In today’s Guardian Labour’s most senior local government bod, Sir Jeremy Beecham no less, decries the council tax freeze achieved by the coalition government saying:

A freeze builds up financial trouble for the future …

This is the mindset of the lifelong local government functionary who has been highly paid all of his life to merely add up all of the costs in his organisation and pass them on to the public. The rest of us have to deal with financial trouble, trim costs, do things differently, re-prioritise, stop doing old stuff and start doing new stuff all of the time. It is high time that Beecham and his crowd learnt the discipline of not gouging the public year after year.

It is a stunning achievement by the government that not one council in all of England has dared to raise council tax. Under 13 years of Labour the average council tax across the country doubled.

In Ealing it means that council tax was frozen for two years by the Tory local government and for a third year by the coalition government who have given Ealing £3.1 million a year for four years to pay for the freeze.

One of the minor announcements in George Osborne’s budget on Wednesday was an additional £100 million to fix potholes in England on top of £100 million already allocated. Figures published by the Department of Transport yesterday, here, indicate that Ealing will get £323K.

We wait in vain for the council press release.

A major aspect of the capital budget is spending on our roads. Over the course of twelve years of the previous Labour administration the council spent about £12 million. By 2006 the borough’s roads were shockingly bad. In four years the all too short-lived Tory administration allocated £25.5 million of your money to fixing the roads outside your house. We thought that was a good use of your money and we spent twice as much as Labour in one third of the time. The graph below is – graphic!

Labour has always been more interested on spending your money on its own priorities. In the early noughties it was the £61.3 million Response programme. So much for the past. What about the future?

In the next four years Labour propose to spend £11.7 million on the roads. At least they have not gone back to their previous atrocious spending levels but it is a 54% cut, sound familiar? Yes.

As well as halving road spending Labour are back in the business of building council offices, £8.7 million net on three new council offices. Truly we are back to the future.

The Labour council has kicked off a consultation today on closing four libraries plus the mobile library. One of their justifications is that some of them need some money spending on them: Hanwell (£1,106,400), mobile library (£150,000) and Perivale (£527,500). Northfield library is recently refurbished and Northolt Leisure Centre is brand new. Labour seem intent on spending £5.5 million on a car park but libraries can close. The capital argument is just unsustainable. Labour is making the wrong choice here.

Labour’s revenue argument is also rubbish. The main way people use libraries is to borrow books. Cost per book has to be the key metric of how efficient and well used a library is. The council’s own figures below show how well used our libraries are.

Northfield, Northolt Leisure Centre and Perivale are three of the borough’s most efficient libraries. Labour’s revenue argument stinks too.

There is no mention in Labour’s consultation document and questionnaire of back office and management costs. That’s the place to look for savings. Watch this movie.

One of the largest items on the capital side of the budget is an £8.7 million allocation for “Building of new service centres in Acton, Greenford and Southall”. There is no further information. As we shall see the council’s capital spending is restricted by what we can afford but also by the requirement to prioritise building enough primary school places to cope with our burgeoning population. This was a constraint that the Tories had to live with for four years and it will constrain Labour too. With such little room for manoeuvre, why is Labour prioritising council offices?

There is a great case I think for the Acton regeneration scheme, taking in as it does a wide range of dilapidated public buildings that dominate the centre of Acton. If there is a need for some council offices as a part of that then this may be justified but I can’t help thinking that the Acton regeneration project will be simpler, safer, cheaper and more deliverable if any standard office space required in Acton is procured separately.

The case for Greenford and Southall is very hard to make in the current circumstances. Shiny new council offices or investment in parks? Shiny new offices or a better road outside your house? Shiny new offices or buildings to support the voluntary sector? Labour’s inclination seems to be to look after its own rather than residents.

In order to understand what Labour are doing you need to understand the officer-led Property Strategy, see here. The Property Strategy gobbles up day centres, community centres, school and nursery sites and small car parks in its voracious maw and spews out three council offices. The £8.7 million allocation in the budget is only a net figure. The gross cost of these three hubs, a concept thrown out by the Tories in 2006, is more like £30 million.

More shiny baubles? Oh yes. Don’t forget that these are the same people that brought you the £61.3 million Response programme.

Two of the most controversial savings in Labour’s budget was the closure of the Albert Dane day centre in Southall which provides services to disabled adults and the LINKS project based at 133 Windmill Lane, Greenford which helps people with mental health problems. The LINKS saving is worth £279K and the Albert Dane £156K.

Albert Dane

The reason I am considering them under the capital side of the budget is that the revenue savings are modest and are not the real driver for closing these services. The real reason is the council’s Property Strategy. This is an officer led initiative to roll up a number of community assets and sell them in order to release funds to spend on the development of three shiny new council offices, one in Acton, Southall and Greenford. In addition to proceeds from property sales the project will consume £8.7 million of borrowing. The borrowing and proceeds from these two property sales are included in the budget papers.

LINKS Project

I can see that with the increase of personalisation, jargon for service users having their own personal budget for choosing their own service packages, there is scope for providing more flexible, customer-oriented services. To me this requires premises, probably run by voluntary sector operators. If the Labour cabinet was leading rather than being led, it might have wanted to think through how the current buildings could have been used by the voluntary sector to provide new services. They could have lost the revenue commitment by giving up the buildings. This would have meant a stronger voluntary sector and no new council buildings. So bad?

Having spent 12 days looking at the revenue (current spending) side of the budget I will now spend a few looking at the capital (investment spending) side.

I will keep repeating that to govern is to choose. The reason that the Conservatives opposed the Labour budget, in spite of being in favour of the council tax freeze and many of the proposals in the budget, is that in the very few areas where Labour had any room for manoeuvre they have almost always made the wrong decision. The decision to allocate £5.5 million to a car park in Southall is one of Labour’s worst decisions. Currently the council maintains 451 parking spaces in Southall in four car parks, see here.

As we can see from this week’s survey in the Gazette it is not an obviously popular policy. The reality is that the rest of the borough will look on in horror whilst large parts of the community in Southall will feel that this is a small acknowledgement of the transport problems that they have to face.

When council leader Julian Bell announced the car park with a flourish at the last but one council meeting I challenged him to tell us how many parking places he would get for our money. He didn’t know. He also didn’t know how many council parking places there were in Southall already. The fact is that this is not a policy based on research it is just a flashy promise.

Rather like the wasteful Grimebusters hotline this is another Labour politician’s shiny bauble. I would have no problem with there being more parking in Southall, indeed the previous administration tried to find private sector providers who wanted to make provision. But, if you are going to spend public money you do have to justify it to the public. Until the council has researched thoroughly who drives to Southall and why it is very silly to build a car park that will potentially increase journeys to Southall without making sure the roads can cope. My suspicion is that crossing the town hall junction is the key factor in journey times in Southall, not the availability of parking.

The council needs to prove its case before it spends the money.

Update: In spite of the Labour administration thinking of adding a car park in Southall the council’s own property strategy lists five car parks that should be closed and sold:

– Roslin Road, Acton
– Churchfield Road, Acton
– South Ealing Road, Ealing
– George Street, Hanwell
– Tentelow Lane, Southall