Council leader Julian Bell really lets himself down with this nonsense. Labour are touting this £66 million cuts number. Included in this number are a whole range of measures including price rises and shuffling things off onto the NHS and schools. The real cuts are much smaller.
One of the truly silly wheezes that Labour is employing is to blame the government for “cuts” which are caused by spending increases – if you are in a zero sum gain then spending increases in one area have to be paid for by cuts elsewhere.
If you dig into the details of Labour’s budget some £7.3 million of growth has to be paid for by savings elsewhere. They had originally budgeted for £2 million of growth so have simply added £5 million of “cuts” to their headline number to take it to £66 million and make their sums add up.
Inconveniently for Labour the previous Tory administration quietly and calmly took out some £60 million in savings. In four years there was about £40 million in growth, some for new things we wanted to do such as street cleaning and additional police officers and some for things we had no choice about. We did not moan about cuts and include the £40 million in some hideous Labour government cuts number.
Local government is a bit of a money go round. Old activities get stopped (cuts or savings) and new things get started (growth). There are always new things. If you did not stop doing some things every penny we earned would be spent by the state. This creative cycle is very natural in the private sector but causes endless hand-wringing in the state sector.
The current government cuts are taking total government spending back to 2007 levels in real terms. It is not the end of the world as uncomfortable as it will be for many people.
I have just seen the shocking news that the roof has been blown off the flats at the end of Carlyle Road, facing out on to South Ealing Road. It seems to have been a gas explosion. Two people were hurt. South Ealing Road closed. Building unsafe. Click on image to read BBC story.
Tim Coates, who has run the Waterstones chain, gave the presentation above on the Isle of Wight at a public meeting on Tuesday and to councillors on Wednesday. Coates really knows about the book trade trade, but also public libraries as it happens. In a very understated way he lays out the kind of thinking that allows an old-fashioned public service to be radically changed, saving a lot of money and actually improving the service.
I was in charge of libraries in Ealing for two years, the last two years of the previous Conservative administration. When I was in charge I was very keen to pursue just the kind of changes that Coates proposes in the video. Indeed a package of changes that took £400K out of the back office and saw the closure of the old hut in Perivale Central Sportsground was put in to place two years ago as a part of the budget setting process. £100K was used to fund redundancy costs (which should be coming free again soon), £185K was re-deployed to the front office, ie more staff and longer opening hours in libraries, and £115K was released as a saving. This was in the context of a massive £3.8 million staff budget, 125 FTE, in 2008/9. At the time 23% of staff costs were in the back office.
In 2008/9 it was clear that there was much further to go in this process and Tim Coates’ presentation underlines that for me.
The future of Ealing’s libraries is currently in question, as is the case all over the country. I attended the protest at Ealing Central Library on 5th March after which the current Labour portfolio holder, Councillor Kamaljit Dhindsa, cabinet member for customer and community services, said:
We are reviewing the library service and no decisions have been made on any closures although we are looking at the option to have fewer but better buildings.
This month we will start to talk to residents about possible changes to the service. No decision will be made until the review and consultation are complete.
This is code for “we are going to close old libraries”. The libraries in the firing line are Hanwell and Perivale. In the Tory manifesto in 2010 we promised to:
Modernise Acton, Hanwell, Perivale and Southall libraries.
The reason we did this is because we were committed to libraries, we had never closed a library in four years, and these were the libraries that had been left unmodernised. Southall is probably safe as it is at the centre of five safe Labour wards. Acton will get rolled up into the whole Acton regeneration programme which the current administration sees as being a must deliver promise. That leaves Hanwell and Perivale. Looking closely at the budget strategy document to be agreed at cabinet on Tuesday it is clear that there is no new capital for libraries over the next four years.
When I spoke at the event on 5th April I told the small group there that there was no excuse for closing libraries. Although there is a hard revenue squeeze there is still fat in the libraries back office and management structure to go for. Add in some devolution of power to local libraries and maybe some volunteering and it could get a lot worse before you had to close libraries.
The capital crunch is arguably less severe than the revenue one. The council plans to spend £13.3 million over the next four years improving its own premises and £5.5 million on a new car park in Southall but there is nothing for libraries. These are Labour’s choices. The fact that Hanwell and Perivale libraries are underinvested will be used as a pretext for closing them, but it is Labour’s decision not to invest that drives their decision to close. Wait until you hear they are rolling up capital receipts from the sites into their property strategy to help fund shiny new offices for council staff and compare and contrast with the improvements delivered by the Tories at Ealing Central and Northolt libraries to name two.
If any libraries close it is because Labour wills it. No other reason.
PC Paul Madden and PCSO Piotr Dolata, the two officers who were stabbed during an attack in Ealing’s centre on the 15th December, have now both returned to work.
Apparently Ken Livingtone is in Ealing tonight to listen to the views of Ealing people but this event is not really for you. It is pretty much a closed Labour love-in that will not be interested in hearing your questions. Labour has made no attempt to advertise this event in advance and setting the start time at 6pm might mean that the old boy can get home in time for his Horlicks but most working people will either be at work or on their way home. The Ealing Today website is carrying a piece on it today, published today which is not any kind of notice. Ealing Labour similarly used Twitter this morning to announce the event.
Not many, if any, real people will be there. If you do go ask the old boy when he last came to Ealing. It is some time ago I think! Maybe ask him what the cost of his cheaper fares will be and who will pay. Someone has to. Don’t expect an answer.
The Ealing Times piece just regurgitates the Labour press release. It makes a lot of the cancellation of Labour’s wasteful BSF programme. It fails to mention that it was Alistair Darling who slashed the capital programme, not George Osborne. BSF always was a swindle.
We spent almost an hour tonight at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting discussing the Ealing Arts Centre plan again. Although there was a good deal of constructive critical input from council officers, Thames Valley University and Questors, there was a general agreement with the principle of using the Town Hall for the arts. John Hummerston from EAC stressed that he had tried to take the politics out of this and had got agreement from all three main parties in Ealing for the project.
The committee agreed that we should set up a scrutiny panel which will pull together EAC, TVU, Questors and other players to make progress with the EAC proposal. The vice chairman suggested that we went further and endorsed the proposal in principle. The Conservative members plus the one LibDem voted in favour. The Labour councillors all voted against.
The guilty parties were Cllrs Ahmed, Dan and Kate Crawford, Gordon, Manro, Padda, Varma
I have commented before to the Labour leader that some of his councillors might make a contribution at scrutiny meetings. Tonight Cllrs Gordon and Ahmed managed to remain mute throughout.
Fresh from their victory in delaying the Elthorne Park skate park for 18 months and moving it Gurnell Labour’s child catchers have now stopped another childrens’ facility.
Astonishingly at last night’s planning meeting the Labour group members voted en bloc against a council project to renew and expand the existing childrens’ playground at Churchfields Recreation Ground.
The apparently guilty parties are Cllrs Sitarah Anjum, Swarn Singh Kang, Shital Manro, Karam Mohan and Edward Rennie. Planning meetings are meant to be apolitical and certainly not whipped but this looks distinctly smelly. What has happened here is that the Labour councillors sided with two near neighbours who were making complaints against clear evidence of the desirablity of the project. 75% of people consulted were in favour. There is little point in the council sending out 883 consultation leaflets and 152 local residents going to the trouble of filling them in if the planning councillors are just going to ignore them. What a waste of effort? This is bad government. But, the planning councillors are just the tools of the real child catchers.
Apparently Hobbayne councillor Wendy Langan made a hand-wringing speech supporting Carolyn Brown and her one woman organisation Hanwell Community Forum against the new playground. We can nail this idiocy on Brown, Cllrs Langan and Ray and Lauren Wall. They think they own Hanwell and don’t like children. Child catchers one and all.
The playground at Churchfields Recreation Ground is looking past its best and the council has consulted widely on its replacement, getting 176 people to respond to its consultation, see here. The council is being coy about publishing the results of the consultation, I don’t know why.
The results, which I have found and uploaded to my blog here, make it clear that 75% who answered the question were in favour of the renovation of the play ground and 62% were in favour of extending it. This is a pretty clear cut result.
The planning report, here, makes it clear that the design of the new facility has been extremely careful to ensure that the near neighbours do not have their enjoyment of their homes reduced. This is not a new facility and these people bought homes next door to a RECREATION GROUND. The name gives it away!
Rather like the looney car park announcement of Tuesday this will be seen as a huge unforced error on the part of this Labour council.
Update: I know that at least one of the Labour planning councillors thinks I was a little harsh here. The Labour councillors did seem to be repeating the same arguments. I can add that LibDem Jon Ball also voted the scheme down on a technicality. A little strange. Trying to have his cake and eat it?
I guess that Cllr Hitesh Tailor was doing his day job as an employee of the housing department of Islington Council when he wrote this unpleasant message.
I have sometimes accused people of lying on my blog. It is not something I do lightly and I always ensure that what I say is backed up with solid references. Cllr Tailor uses the “L” word casually to describe facts he finds uncomfortable.
Labour’s use of the phrase “real terms freeze” is doublespeak. It is very strange for someone using such a mendacious term to accuse others of lying. If you go and look at the National Statistics website you will find that RPI for November was indeed at 4.7% but CPI, which excludes some housing costs but not rents, was only 3.3%. If you are going to use the phrase “real terms” you need to choose an index that includes the thing you are indexing. Rents are in CPI.
Last year under the Tories council rents were left unchanged, frozen in plain English. Cllr Tailor and the Labour group hate this and try to claim virtue from the fact that they only raised rents by 4.7% in the face of a government recommendation to rise them by 6%. Funnily enough last year the Tories left rents unchanged in the face of a Labour government recommendation to raise them by 1.3%. Try and get a cigarette paper between those!
Phil Taylor 