Category: Ealing and Northfield

Tonight’s cabinet meeting only really covers three topics but it will be nasty, brutish and short.

They will be talking about the budget again and considering another £1,437K of savings. This latest batch is dominated by savings to adult social care: a £287K cut in grants to the voluntary sector and a £1,050 saving achieved as a result of the move to personalisation. The budget report alludes to the ranger and envirocrime officers call-in, see Section 4.4, but says nothing else. Can we assume that they are going to ignore the call-in?

Their next topic is pressing on with their project to cut the health and social care grant budget by 35% and to cut the community grants budget by 30%. There has been no cost benefit analysis to see if the council gets better value for money through the voluntary sector than it does through its own directly provided services. Whilst its own services are seeing 25% reductions over three years the voluntary sector is looking at 30% and 35% in one. The council have sullenly ignored the consultation responses from the voluntary sector and are doing the opposite of what they have been asked to do by the government.

After that they are pressing on with putting up council rents 4.7%. The Tories warned tenants to watch out for big rent rises and here they come. The government’s main measure of inflation is CPI, which includes rents, and this was only 3.3% when the rent rise was set as opposed to RPI at 4.7%. The HRA paper shows £1.5 million costs of bringing the Ealing Homes people in house.

See papers here.

Update: Apparently at the meeting the cabinet put two of the rangers back in and limited grants cuts to 30% and spread them in time. No respite for council house tenants though.

It seems like every road in the neighbourhood is up right now. I go down Waldemar Avenue most days taking my daughter to nursery. Last week the council replaced all of the gullies. On Tuesday they took the surface off the road. On Wednesday they layed a new surface. At 8am this morning they were painting the lines and tonight the whole thing was finished. Stunning.

The Tories spent £25.5 million of your money on roads in 4 years. Previously Labour spent about £12 million in 12 years the picture below tells the story.

It will be interesting to see where Labour goes with its allocation of capital funds. Like the Tories their choices will be dictated by the need to spend money on schools. Will they keep up the road spending on which the whole borough depends? I doubt it. Their property strategy makes clear that they will prioritise building three new council offices.

The Ealing Labour group really do like to insult the intelligence of Ealing people. Today’s press release from Labour on council rents attempts to turn a bare-faced lie into an attack on the Tories. They say:

The Labour administration is proposing a real term freeze by increasing rents only by the level of inflation, which is currently 4.7%.

If you go and look at the National Statistics website you will find that RPI is indeed at 4.7% but CPI, which excludes some housing costs but not rents, is only 3.3%.

If Labour had tried to put up council tax by 4.7% they would have ensured their ejection in 2014. It seems they think that they can punish “their people” with a 5% rise though. Last year the Tories put up council rents by nothing, zero, 0%. It was a freeze, freeze. Not a lying “real term freeze”. You can see the cabinet paper here for details.

One of the major planks of Labour’s May 2010 local election campaign was the lie that existing council tenancies would be at risk under the Tories. This is still a lie today. The Labour voters who fell for it are now having to suck up a 5% rise in their rents – the Tory group warned that rents would go up under Labour and so it has proven. Back in May last year I pointed out that Labour had made no manifesto promises about rents and warned that council rents would “shoot up”.

It might be a little late in January to be doing reviews of the last year but the East Acton councillors did make me ask myself how many people had been visiting my blog lately. The answer is 30,909 different people (Absolute Unique Visitors) in 2010. That is about 85 different people every day. With these stats if someone is a repeat visitor they only show up once. I can claim a readership of 31,000. They may look only once but they are unique.

I know that the Labour councillors are big fans of the blog. There are few cabinet or council meetings that pass without a mention of the blog; good job too as I am now a back-bencher and I don’t get that many opportunities to speak nowadays. Council officers also keep an eye on the blog and frequently mention pieces to me. I also know that TfL Commissioner Peter Hendy is a reader. Boris knows me as “Phil the blogger”. The last time I met him he called me “Paul the blogger” but I figure that is near enough. I am terrible with names. I really shouldn’t be a politician.

There are a dozen peaks in the graph, click on picture to enlarge, when stories get picked up by big blogs such as ConservativeHome or Iain Dale and I have listed my five biggest stories of the year below:

January 11th Andrew Marr paper review a farce
1,529 unique page views

March 18th Would you use your child like this?
855 unique page views

May 10th One in sixteen votes lost
1,198 unique page views

Nov 25th BBC gives wrecker Soloman a platform
991 unique page views

December 14th Jody McIntyre is not telling the whole story
2,292 unique page views

East Acton’s Labour councillors have been scratching their heads wondering why 100 people have looked at their facebook “fan page” in the last week. The reason is because I linked to it when I did my review of Labour’s use of social media, see here.

6th January

During the election most of the Labour ward teams had joint ward facebook accounts. It was not a particularly successful approach as you can see by visiting the East Acton one which is the only one still in operation. There are only 4 posts since May so pretty dormant. On 19th November an Ealing Labour Twitter account was started up so it looks like they think that this is the way to go.

Oh! That explains it. Keep up boys and girls.

With lots of news lately about rampant petrol price rises, councils pushing up prices of services, train and Tube fares going up, etc it is reassuring that even the Communist Party of Great Britain supporting Morning Star is not immune to the realities of hard times and market forces. According to South Acton councillor Mik Sabiers his copy of the Morning Star bought on Saturday morning has gone up from 60p to £1, a rise of 67%. Sabiers produces one of the funniest Twitter feeds.

Today I complete my round up of what Ealing’s councillors get up to on social media with the Tory councillors.

There are no Tory twitterers. I am not sure why the Tories are so Twitter averse. Maybe you are entitled to be tech laggards if your party name implies leaving things well alone! I guess that Twitter became popular whilst the Ealing Tory group were in power and it was not obvious to any of the then Tory councillors that it made sense to make a fool of yourself with Twitter. As I have found myself it is not hard to have your words taken out of context with blogs. The scope with Twitter, which is more spontaneous and offers less context, to cock up is probably greater than it is with blogs.

As well as myself there is one other Tory councillor blogger, Benjamin Dennehy, one of our new councillors.

Benjamin has gone to the trouble of getting his own domain name and setting up a very slick website. It does sometimes have a hint of the Alan B’stards about it. His blog has some interesting posts but has not been updated since 9th December. Keep up Benjamin!

Cllrs Millican, Stafford and I have done pieces for the ConservativeHome blog.

The Tory councillors are relatively confident compared to the other groups about posting on the EalingToday forum. Between them Cllrs Dabrowska, Dennehy, Costello, Millican, Popham, Stacey and I have posted hundreds of times, most often trying to respond to those “Look what the council has done now?” type postings. It’s old tech but hey!

Continuing my round up of what Ealing’s local politicians are doing with blogs and other social media here is what the LibDems are doing. Two out of the five LibDems on the council are active online.

New councillor Nigel Bakhai has his own domain name and website, an artefact of his standing as the LibDem Parliamentary candidate for the Ealing Southall constituency. Bakhai has a blog component of his website, it comprises an excruciating list of appointments. “It is a blog Jim, but not as we know it.”

Bakhai is a relatively new twitterer with 110 tweets to his name to-date. His tweets are not much more exciting than his blog.

As candidate for Ealing Central and Acton Cllr Jon Ball had a blog up until May last year which is still up but has not been updated since. Ball has managed 26 posts in five years which does not say much for his work rate.

Ball is also a twitterer with over 2,600 tweets under his belt so maybe he compensates with his Twitter account. It is all a bit inane though.

Both Bakhai and Ball have commented a few times on the EalingToday forum. It is creditable that 2 out of 5 LibDem councillors are out there but they are both dull, dull, dull.