Category: Ealing and Northfield

Some of the more left-wing Labour MPs have been “commending” RMT and TSSA for their current strike campaign signing the following Early Day Motion (920) at the end of last month which says:

That this House condemns the Mayor of London’s proposals to cut 2,000 jobs on London Underground as a serious mistake which will damage passenger services and undermine safety; notes that he has broken a 2008 campaign pledge to defend local ticket offices and that his proposals have been denounced by a cross-party vote in the London Assembly; commends members of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers and the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, pensioner groups and transport campaigners in seeking to defend the Tube as a vital public service; acknowledges London Travel Watch’s severe concerns that the cuts will be keenly felt among the elderly and disabled who rely on help to buy tickets; worries that the job losses will lead to increased maintenance problems, more delays for passengers and increased risks as rigorous safety standards are reduced; believes these cuts would leave passengers feeling less secure and staff less able to cope in emergencies; and calls on the Mayor, as Chair of Transport for London, to withdraw the proposals and to agree with the unions’ reasonable and safe staffing levels right across the London Underground network to ensure that passengers continue to receive excellent service.

Our hapless MP Virendra Sharma has joined the list of sixteen signatories:

John McDonnell (Hayes and Halington)
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North)
Jim Dobbin (Heywood & Middleton, Greater Manchester)
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North)
Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall)
Martin Caton (Gower, Wales)
Mr Alan Meale (Mansfield)
Paul Flynn (Newport West, Wales)
Dennis Skinner (Bolsover)
Eric Illsley (Barnsley Central)
Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley)
Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and Falkirk)
Hywel Williams (Arfon, Wales)
Jim McGovern (Dundee West)
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland)
Jonathan Edwards (Camarthen East and Dinefwr)

McDonnell, Corbyn, Hopkins, Skinner, Campbell and Caton are Socialist Campaign Group fools and Meale is ex SCG. Only three of these jokers are London MPs. London MPs Corbyn and McDonnell are known extreme left-wingers who must feel more loyalty to their union buddies than their own constituents.

As a rule EDMs sink without trace so Sharma is unlucky that the BBC picked up this one. Maybe Sharma calculated that because large parts of his constituency are off the end of the Tube system he can afford to take part in this posturing along with his 13 colleagues who represent the far flung corners of the UK. That assumes that Sharma had the wit to calculate. I guess one of his mates asked him to sign and he did without much thought. Northfield and Elthorne ward residents will not be impressed. I am sure 100s if not 1,000s of Sharma’s Southall residents schlep into town on the train and will also be unimpressed.

Expect another strike from Sharma’s buddies on 29th November.

One of the written questions I asked at the last council related to mobile phones. The question was:

Can the portfolio holder quantify the number of mobile phones available for use by council staff and how much was spent on mobile phones in the last financial year. How much money was reimbursed by staff in respect of use of council phones for personal calls in the last financial year?

And the answer was:

1. There are currently 546 phones in use by employees.
2. The total cost for mobile phones in the last financial year 2009 – 2010 was as follows: Mobile Calls £235k, Mobile Rental £80k. Total cost £315k. It should be noted these figures include a number of handsets and associated calls have been supplied and are recharged to non-council staff (for example key suppliers e.g. Interserve).
3. It is assumed no private calls are made on these phones and staff currently do not reimburse the council in respect of personal calls.
4. In August 2010, The Executive Director of Corporate Resources commissioned an audit and review of all telephony management and costs.

For mobile telephony this review has implemented:

• Automatic blocking of access to overseas calls, and overseas roaming
• Blanket blocking of all access to make premium rate calls and premium cost data usage.

The review is also in the process of implementing:

• Further control over the deployment of mobile phones.
• Rigorous recovery of mobile phone handsets from staff leaving the Council.
• A policy and process to stop the non authorized moving of Blackberry SIM cards to personal devices (which has the consequence of incurring increased call and data charges by going outside the corporate rates).
• A process to enable the council to recover the cost of any private calls incurred.
• Detailed itemized billing by service area.

It is good to see council officers moving on this. The number of phones does not sound too big but the £48 per month cost does sound rather high – my own mobile costs £40 a month and I run a business, do my council work and personal life within that budget.

It is disappointing to see that there has been no reimbursement of personal calls. It is no doubt time consuming and expensive even to do this but it sends an important message to employees that the phones are strictly work phones and that the council prioritises value for money.

The following message went up on the council’s intranet (for its staff) on Wednesday after my question came out:

Mobile Phones
There will be a temporary stop on requests for new mobile phones (for business use) from 26 October.

An audit is currently underway to match all issued handsets to current members of staff and ensure that the data held by our mobile supplier is correct and up to date.

If you feel your request for a new phone is business critical, please contact xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, email: xxxxxxxxx@ealing.gov.uk. You will need to provide a business case that has been approved by your director.

Putting down written questions for council is a relatively badly understood accountability mechanism in our council. The activity is normally one undertaken by opposition councillors trying to work out what the administration is doing. It is pretty unusual for councillors from the party in power to ask written questions, it might look like washing dirty laundry in public and in any case you can just ask your colleagues on the cabinet.

At every council we have seven oral questions from councillors, three from the two main parties and one from the LibDems. These get answered by the Leader or cabinet member as appropriate. Notice needs to be given but councillors can ask follow up or supplementary questions without notice and so can one other councillor. There is a bit of a dance around oral questions with the party in power using them to highlight issues and make announcements and the opposition parties trying to probe problems and ask tricky supplementaries that put the cabinet on the spot.

It is not well known but residents and local business people can also ask oral questions in person at council meetings to both the Leader and cabinet members. You need to give two days notice but you get to speak for up to 3 minutes and ask a follow up question which can be for clarification or a curved ball as you please. No notice needs to be given of the supplementary. You can’t be vexatious or ask something that has been asked by someone else recently. You can’t ask about specific planning or licensing issues either. The public are allowed up to five questions per meeting but I don’t recall any such questions since I was elected in May 2006. If you want to have a go contact the clerk of the council meeting, Paul Jeffries, see here.

On the council meeting web page they also publish the answers to written questions. These are typically attempts of opposition councillors to probe the inner workings of the council. It is like a game of battleships – you lob the questions over and try to score a hit. The officers won’t lie to you but they may wriggle around an awkward question if it is not well drafted.

This table show who asked what questions since the start of 2008. The LibDems, only 3 members in the last council and now swelled in numbers to 5, manage to keep up a constant harassing fire of questions. In the last council when the Tories were in power they only asked 2 questions in two and a half years as you might expect. In the last three meetings, in opposition, the number has jumped up to 94. Unfortunately this is another area where Labour are very poor performers. As well as being poor attenders at meetings the Labour councillors typically haven’t got the wit to ask questions. In two and a half years of opposition they only asked 29 questions, one quarter of what the 3 LibDems asked. Lazy and unengaged.

I will be doing a few postings arising out of our questioning campaign over the next few days.

Yesterday Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, who is responsible for parking in the borough, backed down from his ludicrous proposal to make CPZ visitors festoon their car with dozens of 50p an hour vouchers in order to park outside their friends and relatives houses when they came to visit for a day or two. They have now introduced the idea of a £3.50 a day voucher – still horribly expensive, but a small victory for common sense. The current fee is £1 a day. Mahfouz wrote as follows to councillors yesterday:

Dear Cllr Shital Manro,

Re: New parking charges for 2011

As you know, at its meeting in September, Cabinet approved changes to parking charges including the range of permits for controlled parking zones. The level of charges was based upon reducing the current financial subsidy of controlled parking zones, estimated to be £750,000 a year.

At the last meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee I was grateful for the unanimous support across all parties for the proposals that were called in. Your committee did resolve that I look again at the cost of visitor vouchers within controlled parking zones with long operating hours.

I can inform you that we were already looking at introducing a cap or daily maximum charge for such vouchers and am grateful for the views of OSC.

Ahead of next week’s meeting I wanted to feedback to yourself and the committee on the outcome of the work that has been conducted in this area.

I am pleased to be able to inform you that the maximum daily visitor voucher charge will be capped at £3.50 per day. The cap and other changes to parking charges and services such as the introduction of direct debit will commence in January 2011.

It will be of interest to yourself and the panel that the CPZ Scrutiny Panel will be looking at options for other annual permits such as for carer’s at their next meeting.

I hope you will not mind but given the interest in this issue and for the benefit of openness and transparency, I am sending a copy of this letter to all other councillors within the authority.

Should you have any questions then please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Yours sincerely,

Cllr Bassam Mahfouz
Cabinet Member for Transport & Environment

There is a good deal of BS in this note, especially the line: “At the last meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee I was grateful for the unanimous support across all parties for the proposals that were called in.” Mahfouz got a good kicking from the Tories on the committee and the opposition spokesman Will Brooks scored some good points. In particular I suggested that the proposed scheme would make the borough a laughing stock and I proposed the retention of a daily voucher. The committee did see the sense of this proposal and it accepted the proposals with the proviso that this issue be addressed. The minutes say:

Upon Councillor Mahfouz leaving the room, a further short discussion took place amongst Members, during which Councillor Young proposed, and it was unanimously agreed, that the Committee uphold the original Cabinet decision, subject to the Cabinet portfolio holder giving further consideration to the proposed visitor vouchers charge, in particular the likely resulting impact on residents within Controlled Parking Zones with long operating hours.

The Conservative group don’t agree with ramping up parking charges but by opposing effectively we have managed to make Labour change one of the stupider aspects of their policy.

In his letter yesterday Cllr Mahfouz continues to maintain the administration’s misinformation regarding parking charges. They are ramping them up outrageously before they make any attempt to control costs.

Work done by the CPZ scrutiny committee, see key paper here, that I lead established that CPZs are being subsidised to the tune of £550K. The administration uses a tenuous argument to inflate this figure to £750K and then uses this as a justification for ramping up charges. They have ignored the work done by the committee that demonstrates that there are many savings to be made in the same area. I don’t suppose we shall hear that charges will go down in future as these savings work their way through the system. Labour are having their cake and eating it.

The Labour cabinet agreed to increase parking charges overall by £1.469 million at their meeting on 14th September, see key paper here. This number is twice their fig leaf number and almost three times the real number they allege to want to cover. Even this number understates the rise in charges.

At the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on 30th September I challenged the service head, Kevin Hagan, to state the extent of sandbagging in the CPZ figures. He stated that it was £885K. This amount was an estimate for the extent to which the higher charges would dissuade people from buying permits and vouchers. It is utterly incredible to me that take up of permits and vouchers will be depressed by the 30% or 40% assumed. Adding the sandbagging to the published saving you get £2.354 million which is over four times the actual subsidy of the CPZ system.

By the council’s own estimate £1.24M of revenue is the equivalent of 1% on the council tax. Labour’s £2.354 million hike in parking charges is therefore the equivalent of a 1.9% rise in council tax. The twist is that this rise will only be borne by drivers and that it comes in three months early on January 1st.

It seems that ex-Labour leader of Tower Hamlets council, Lutfur Rahmen, has been elected as the new executive mayor of Tower Hamlets, see here, standing as an “independent”. Not independent though of Islamic Forum of Europe which seems to want to take over Tower Hamlets. This is just another awful chapter in the weird and often downright nasty story of local government in Tower Hamlets.

Andrew Gilligan has been almost alone in covering Tower Hamlets for years and today he reported on events overnight here.

Labour Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone has yet again shown himself to be a divisive scuzz in going to Tower Hamlets at the start of the week. In breach of Labour party rules he defied new leader Ed Miliband and supported the sectarian Rahmen. Livingstone is spitting in Miliband’s face and, yet again, pandering to an extremist Muslim minority.

One person who will be glad to be well off out it today is Ealing council’s own chief executive, Martin Smith.

He came to Ealing as a refugee from the laughable misrule of Tower Hamlets.

Yesterday the ConservativeHome blog published this piece from me. It looks at the savings that our council will have to make in the
context of overall council spending and suggests that the terms and conditions under which the council employs people will be a fruitful source of savings over the next four years, don’t forget we have a lot of time.

Today’s news that Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham are looking to merge all of their services shows the way to another fruitful source of savings that will not impact the frontline. This will, it is reported save £50 million to £100 million across the three councils. Ealing is already a big council, over 300,000 people and the 2nd biggest in London. This new super-borough would be almost twice as big as Ealing and effectively the third largest city in England after Birmingham and Leeds, just ahead of Sheffield. Whilst it may not be appropriate to merge our already large council with one or more of our neighbours there are huge opportunities to share services with other boroughs.

All we have heard from our council so far is lots of attempts to blame Gordon Brown’s structural deficit on the banks and Tories and this rather desultory list of £5.265 million cheese paring savings and service charge increases. One third of these “savings” are increases in charges (mainly parking but others too). I do hope we see something a bit more imaginative and strategic soon.

Today the Chancellor announced that council grants would be reduced by 7.1% per annum for four years. This will be excruciatingly hard for our council and other councils to work with. At the same time most ring fences (pesky central government meddling by another name) will be removed which should make the transition a lot more manageable for councils.

In June the council did a piece of work to look forward at its financial position and assumed a 10% cut in grant for three years and no increase in council tax. This gave rise to a 27% central government cut over three years, a sensibly harsh assumption at that time, which gave them a £53 million savings target to tackle over the same three year period.

It looks like the government will be asking for slightly less in four years rather than three. The council can at least now plan for dealing with this transition. It should think long and hard. The changes it needs to make must be strategic and must focus on the back office not the front line.

The first tranche of the council’s savings looked uninspiring and tactical. The Albert Dane decision that the opposition challenged last night was typical of how not to do it. Rather than mindlessly slashing the council needs to work out how to re-provide services. It has the time to do it.