Category: Ealing and Northfield

At last night’s council meeting, see agenda here, the Ealing Labour group, en masse, made two really bad choices.

The first involved the closure of the Albert Dane Day Centre. I will go into the details of this in a further posting but the headline is that Labour voted against a Tory motion asking the cabinet to rethink its decision to consult on closing the centre. The LibDems voted with the Tories. The revenue budget for this service is £380K but the net saving achievable by closing this service after the costs of providing alternative services and redundancy is only £156K.

At the end of the council meeting there was not expected to be any discussion of a housekeeping paper on councillors’ allowances. The Tory group proposed a reduction of councillors’ allowances of 10% in recognition of the financial pressure that the council is facing. The Labour group voted against this whilst the LibDems supported the Tory motion. This proposal would have resulted in a saving of about £110K and would have covered 70% of the Albert Dane saving.

Labour made two very bad choices last night. Two recurring themes are emerging from Labour choices so far. One is “bash the customer” whether it is day care users or drivers. The second is “protect our own” whether it is allowances, staff perks or nice council offices. The hallmark of four years of Tory government in Ealing was “put the customer first”.

We have had three regular council meetings since the elections in May. I am now a back bench councillor and recently we have been having shorter debates. As a result I have not had the chance to speak since the election despite my frantic indications to the mayor. As I did prepare some comments on the Albert Dane Day Centre for yesterday’s council meeting I have reproduced them here to get them off my chest.

This afternoon by way of research I drove past the Albert Dane Day Centre. It looks like too many of the council’s “frontline” buildings. Old, tatty, unkempt. The comparison with overlit, shiny Perceval House is stark. For those who have not seen it recently Albert Dane is a single storey building of little charm on Western Road in Southall. But, what goes on inside the building is rather more attractive. Around 40 disabled adults at any one time enjoy a social outlet that allows them to get out of the house, mix with their peers and dispel dark thoughts.

This council does indeed face some hard choices over finance in the next few years. Unfortunately it is yet again taking the easy choices offered by officers rather than coming up with imaginative solutions of its own. This idea is not new. For four years in power, year after year, the Conservative administration had to turn down proposals from officers to close this day centre. The new Labour administration has crumbled the first time the proposal was put to it.

The papers presented to Cabinet on 14th September showed that the revenue budget for Albert Dane was £380K and the net saving envisaged was £156K. Let’s put the saving in some context. The proposed saving to be achieved is 0.3% of the overall savings the council says it needs to find. Another comparison is that this saving is only 14% of what we spend on councillors’ allowances. In its manifesto the Labour party said that it would: “Reduce the Council’s bloated communications budget and stop money being wasted on party political propaganda”. This saving is only 5% of the council’s annual publicity spending.

Quite rightly councillors opposite will ask: “What would you cut?”. My answer would be to look at the terms and conditions under which we employ the council’s own staff. This is not the time to go into details but simply by bringing our own staff into line with the norms of the private sector we could take something like 20% out of our labour bill and do most of the heavy lifting required to deliver the cuts whilst protecting frontline service such as the Albert Dane Day Centre. This approach does though require a certain courage to tackle some tough vested interests. Easier surely to pick on the weak?

The most telling line in the cabinet report that presaged this closure was the bit that said: “… disposal values will form part of the council’s overall Property Strategy”. For those that have not read the papers the council’s Property Strategy seeks to roll up a whole raft of council assets, many of which are precious to our communities, and use the funds released to build three new shiny council offices. This is the so-called hub concept that, again, is at the heart of officers concerns but not the public’s.

This council is in danger of appearing to be willing to punish the weak whilst being too cowardly to take on its own officers and producer interests. Watch out, you will get a reputation.

During the debate the protfolio holder Cllr Jasbir Anand was challenged to allow the voluntary sector to take over the site and indeed a solution where the site is leased to a voluntary organisation who can attract users spending their personalistion bucks may work very well if the council has the imagination to pursue it. Cllr Anand did not give a very convincing account of her contact with the voluntary sector. Cllr Anand only managed to turn up for one third of the council meetings she was supposed during the last council year (the third worst performance of all 69 councillors). I guess it will be too much to expect her to drive a tricky, hard-to-negotiate solution with the voluntary sector in the face of officer advice to neatly close the centre and sell the site for housing to fund smart new offices for council staff.

Sounds a bit dodgy but it isn’t really. This morning I attended a political speed-dating event at Dormer’s Wells High School. Thirteen councillors turned up to meet two different forms, one of fifteen year-olds, some doing some early GCSEs and one of sixteen year-olds doing their GCSEs next summer. It was a great morning. The councillors all sat in a circle and were interviewed by two students for five minutes before we all moved around one place. At the end the younger group were asked to choose one councillor in a ballot. The voting was just a bit of fun but it was interesting to see who did well – only the top three were announced to spare the blushes of the losers like me.

Tory Colm Costello came in 3rd. He is a charming and unfailingly kind Irishman so quite understandable. Labour’s Shahbaz Ahmed came 2nd. Shahbaz always stands out as Mr Nice Guy. The winner was another Tory Justin Anderson, looking dashing here in his Harrington jacket. Justin always has a smile, a handshake and a joke for all fellow councillors of whatever party.

I was very interested in the students’ questions. The top issues were:

• crime – meaning their own personal safety really
• things for young people to do – youth clubs, skate park, etc
• cleanliness of Southall
• young people’s benefits – meaning concerns about higher university fees, loss of EMA and travel concessions

There was a policeman standing at the gate of the school at lunchtime when we left and certainly there have been problems with mobile phone robberies at the school in the past. I was sorry to hear crime rising to the top of the students’ concerns but maybe it is not surprising as crime is usually at the top of adult concerns too. If you look at the Ealing residents’ survey cleanliness is also ranked second by young people as an issue. Although young people are often assumed to be the cause of much litter they are also get fed up with it like everyone else.

Forgive me if I make a party political point. Eight out of the 13 councillors were Tories representing leafy Ealing wards. That is a third of the Tory councillors. Cllr Rose turned up for the LibDems, he is one quarter of the LibDem group. Four Labour bods turned up, two from Greenford, one from Perivale and one from Acton. This is only 10% of the Labour group. No Southall councillors turned up to hear local kids in a Southall school complaining about personal safety and public cleanliness in their wards. Truly rubbish. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that Southall would be safer and cleaner if it had some better councillors?

I have been off air for ten days whilst I visited the in-laws in the US. Tonight I was in the excellent Right Wing Tavern in Woodstock, GA. They do have a very good selection of beers and the whole right wing thing is strictly tongue in cheek. Back on Thursday.

Meanwhile checking my e-mails I note a motion for council next Monday tabled by the trained economist, AKA Cllr Bell, leader of the council. It is somewhat long and rambling:

On 20th October the Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce the results of the comprehensive spending review.

The review will announce significant reductions to our budgets and the budgets of our partners in the borough.

Council resolves:

Council resolves to agree with the need to reduce the structural deficit that resulted from the previous government’s successful response to the international financial crisis.

Council resolves to disagree in principle with the deficit reduction strategy that the coalition government has proposed. The cuts that are being proposed are too severe and are being taken too quickly. They will dampen growth at best and will cause a double dip recession at worst and cost the country more money in the long run.

Council resolves that we must be responsible and balance our budget and to do this we must find savings from within our budgets. Whilst doing this we promise to prioritise the following principles:

We will make every effort to protect elderly, disabled, children and young people who are the most vulnerable residents of the borough.

We will make every effort to protect front line services by seeking to cut out waste, we will also seek to share services and share procurement.

We will consult on difficult decisions.

We will seek to mitigate the impact any savings will have on employment within the council and the borough by reducing the use of agency staff and contractors and offering voluntary redundancy to our staff.

We will seek to distribute any cuts as equally as possible so that no one group has to unfairly bear the burden.

Given that we believe that cuts are too deep and too soon we acknowledge that we will have to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise choose to do. The fault for this lies with the coalition government.

Yet again, in the first line of his resolution, Cllr Bell demonstrates that he does not know what he is talking about. The structural deficit is that part of the deficit that is not to do with the financial crisis. The cyclical bit is the bit that most economists agree will sort itself out by itself. The structural bit is the spending your kids’ inheritance bit of the deficit that will not go away once the crisis has passed. Bell is wrong in terms.

The Darling plan involved halving the deficit. The Osborne plan involves eliminating the structural deficit. Bell’s motion tops and tails some motherhood with an attempt to blame the Coalition for the structural deficit which is squarely the fault of Gordon Brown. No-one buys it Cllr Bell.

It is a week since the new Labour leader was elected and tomorrow is the start of the Tory conference so I will leave them to their own devices for a while after today.

I was struck though by the voting of the local constituency Labour parties in Ealing, you can see all of the CLP voting here. Local Labourittes must be really browned off with the result. They voted overwhelmingly in favour of David Miliband. The result across the three constituencies was:

Abbott 6%
Balls 6%
Burnham 4%
MiliD 53%
MiliE 30%
Spoilt 1%

The combination of AV and the unions robbed them.

Another interesting piece of information this data reveals is the relative size of the local CLPs:

Ealing Central and Acton CLP 562
Ealing North CLP 356
Ealing, Southall CLP 1206

Ealing Southall is the largest CLP in the country on these figures. Ealing North can return a Labour MP on 356 members but Ealing Central and Acton is 58% bigger but can’t. With over 2,000 foot soldiers in Ealing you can quite see how Labour won the council this year.

The turnout figures are pretty stunning too. Ealing Central and Acton 75%, Ealing North 70% but Ealing Southall 42%, the fifth worst in the country. Maybe some of the Southall members don’t actually know they are Labour members! Overall only 1,177 of Labour’s troops actually voted so luckily Ealing’s Red Army is not quite as large as it might be. Phew!

Labour’s housing supremo, Councillor Hitesh Tailor (AKA Councillor Withani), was showing signs of feeling the pressure at last night’s Overview and Scrutiny committee. He is no longer allowed out on his own by the Labour group so their chief whip Brian Reeves sat next to him and held his hand. Withani was not at the last cabinet meeting where again Reeves spoke for him. Maybe if he can’t do the job Labour should re-appoint?

Last night Withani was challenged yet again about Labour’s madcap scheme to bring the management of its council housing stock in-house after the demise of the lamentable Ealing Homes, a move that will lead to higher rents and service charges than would have been the case under the old Conservative administration’s proposal.

In his summing up Withani referred to the Tory’s work over the summer to get 1,724 borough residents to sign their housing petition as:

…lies and underhand tactics.

Very strange. I was one of the people who collected signatures. I don’t see which bit of our petition was a lie, see text here:

We the undersigned demand that the Ealing Labour council, honour their pledge to give us a proper say on who manages our homes, and that they tell us how each option will affect the rent/service charge we pay, so that we can make an informed choice, before a final decision is made.

Do you? What is underhand about knocking on someone’s door and asking for their support? Maybe Councillor Withani means that we should have asked Labour’s permission before we ventured on to “their” estates.

Councillor Withani then ended his rant by referring to the now defunct Tory plans:

It’s about ending council housing.

Now that really is a lie. The same old lie that Labour peddled around the estates before the election.

The trained economist is whinging again. According to his piece in the Gazette yesterday:

The Labour administration at Ealing Council is between a rock and a hard place.

It is not like he was unaware of the financial climate earlier this year when he wrote his party’s manifesto for Ealing. He said then in relation to Labour’s approach to council tax that they would be:

Keeping your council tax low with a freeze in the first year.

Presumably if the Coalition is the “rock” he referred to, then the “hard place” is his own manifesto commitment. Ooops. The previous Conservative administration refused to make that same commitment precisely because we understood fully the financial storm to come as Jason Stacey pointed out in his Gazette column last week.

As we see with the proposed increase in parking charges, the equivalent of a 2% rise in council tax to be bought in three months early, we know that Labour’s instinct will be to cut frontline services and to ramp charges rather than to look at the council’s own internal costs which are largely dominated by labour costs.

Bell goes on to say:

We are facing an unprecedented level of cuts in our budgets over the next four years given the coalition government’s ideological choice to slash public spending by unnecessary amounts and at a reckless speed.

It seems our own trained economist is at odds with the IMF’s latest assessment:

Economic recovery is underway, unemployment has stabilized, and financial sector health has improved. The government’s strong and credible multi-year fiscal deficit reduction plan is essential to ensure debt sustainability. The plan greatly reduces the risk of a costly loss of confidence in public finances and supports a balanced recovery. Fiscal tightening will dampen short-term growth but not stop it as other sectors of the economy emerge as drivers of recovery, supported by continued monetary stimulus.

Bell finally goes into a deficit denying rant:

Finally and most importantly we will make it very clear who is responsible for these cuts – the Conservative LibDem coalition. The local Tories (and the largely irrelevant local LibDems due to their miniscule size) are trying to pretend that they are the protectors of local services and that the coalition government is nothing to do with them – a ludicrous and deeply dishonest position.

If they really want to protect local services they should either persuade their national parties to stop swinging the axe with such gusto or disassociate themselves from them by going independent or even crossing the floor and joining Labour.

The local Conservatives fully accept the Coalition’s programme and also recognise that these hard choices are driven by the nation’s need to control the budget deficit which was £155 billion last year and will be £149 billion in the current year. Our borrowing requirement in just the month of August was £15.9 billion or £545 for every worker in Britain. This is Gordon Brown’s poisonous legacy of debt.

Bell is out there with the likes of Ken Livingstone and the unions in taking this extreme deficit denying line. Even his new leader on Tuesday said:

Let me say, I believe strongly that we need to reduce the deficit. There will be cuts and there would have been if we had been in government. Some of them will be painful and would have been if we were in government. I won’t oppose every cut the coalition proposes. There will be some things the coalition does that we won’t like as a party but we will have to support. And come the next election there will be some things they have done that I will not be able to reverse. I say this because the fiscal credibility we earned before 1997 was hard won and we must win it back by the time of the next general election. I am serious about reducing our deficit.

We know who to blame and it is not the Coalition.