Category: Ealing and Northfield

At yesterday’s cabinet meeting the council decided to raise parking charges in Ealing by £1.5 million a year and CPZ charges in particular by £683,000. Follow this link and scroll down to page 12 to see the details. Also see Gazette piece here.

Tonight we will be discussing CPZ finances and charges at the CPZ scrutiny panel. If you look at the papers here you will see that contrary to popular belief CPZs actually cost the council money. They are a cost centre, not a profit centre. See the key paper here.

If you would like to get involved in the discussion about CPZ finances and charges please come to the CPZ Specialist Scrutiny Panel tonight at 7pm in Committee Room 3 at the Town Hall, see agenda here.

The scrutiny meetings are not meant to be political – the purpose of scrutiny is to challenge the executive to ensure that decisions are sound and taken on the basis of facts. As chairman it will be my job to get to the facts and cut through the waffle. That said it is worth spelling out the political background to this decision. The previous Tory administration made a manifesto commitment in 2006 to freeze all parking charges as a result of a widespread feeling that motorists had been poorly treated by the council in the past. The new Labour council may well have a different attittude to car drivers, it also has to deal the current political and economic climate where we are due to have a very hard spending review which will result in large savings having to be made. In local government finance a saving can be a cut or it can be a rise in charges for services such as parking. The £1.5 million rise in parking charges is only a small fraction of the overall £53 million savings that the new Labour council reckons it will have to make over the next three years.

I just caught up with Ealing North MP, Stephen Pound’s, column in the Gazette.

Without any hint of contrition, given that his party has just ended a 13 year stint in power, he uses most of his space to essentially complain about how the state treated him when he went to do jury service.

One reason why I am delighted to be back at the gas-works is that I have just completed the most mindnumbingly tedious two weeks of jury service and, frankly, anything would be an improvement.

Good on Pound for not trying to wriggle out of it as many do but his whinging does make you wonder. Obviously Pound hasn’t tried to report a crime to the police recently. Or, apply for unemployment benefit. Does this man not have any idea how the state typically treats the citizen? Doh!

The average MP costs us £633K, see here. It is a shame that Pound did not use his time to think about how the system could be improved.

No mention in his piece about the Tube strike either. Of course that is because Pound eschews public transport and drives to and from work where he has the use of Parliament’s underground car park. His last line gives it away:

… there is much to do before I succumb to the lure of the westbound A40.

How the other half live and how pleased Pound is to be back in the warm embrace of our £500 million a year Parliament?

Our own council has already been very clear about their views of how the spending review will affect Ealing. The Council announced that Ealing would face having to make “savings” of £53 million at its cabinet meeting on 22nd June. This is a target that seeks to reduce by 25% the amount of funding the council needs from government – a sensible assumption. Savings can be “cuts” or price increases for charged services. If the Council could make these savings they could leave the council tax unchanged for the next three years. See the June cabinet paper here.

In their manifesto Labour promised:

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

After four years of Conservative rule Ealing residents know what low means. It means zero or the odd 1%. Not 3% or 5%.

Labour are clearly in a vice – a vice that was entirely to be expected and it is no use complaining that the manifesto was written without any foreknowledge that there would be hard times to come. It is worth noting that the deficit last year was £155 billion. In other words the Labour government borrowed £5,000 on behalf of each and every worker in the UK during the course of one year. That kind of death spiral had to be stopped.

During the course of the last four year Tory administration the Council achieved savings in the order of £60 million with pretty much no-one noticing significant changes to the services that they receive so it is not unreasonable to suppose that £53 million savings target will not be the end of the world however much the Labour council tries to blame the Coalition for its problems.

If you want to keep in touch with what is going on keep an eye on the cabinet agenda. The first £5 million tranche of savings are already online prior to next Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, see here.

Cllr Bell has been driving around the borough getting his picture taken again. This time at Gurnell swimming pool where the new Labour administration plan to put the skate park. Someone needs to tell Cllr Bell that beyond the age of 30 you don’t want to get photographed from below. Even some of the kids in this photo have double chins.

The history of the skate park up until May was one of transparent and sensible government. It was originally planned for Elthorne Park and two thirds of people adjacent to Elthorne Park supported it when they were asked in a consultation in June last year. It should have been operating right now, this autumn. Instead thanks to the machinations of local Labour activists the plan was held up by a spurious village green application and finally killed by the new Labour council administration.

The council’s press release today says:

Good news for skateboarders

Ealing Council is inviting residents to have their say on proposals to build a new skate park and outdoor play area in the grounds of Gurnell Leisure Centre.

The Council’s current administration reviewed initial plans to build the facility in Elthorne Park and this week announced the alternative location next to Gurnell Leisure Centre in Ruislip Road East.

Good news indeed as long as you don’t mind an eighteen month delay. Some of the young people in the photo with Cllr Bell will be at uni before this thing gets built.

Cllr Bell goes on to say:

We are really excited about the new plans and want to involve local people throughout the process. There are already a number of fantastic sports facilities in the north of the borough and we are hoping the skate park will add a new dimension and help support our long-term vision to promote the area as a sports hub in time for the 2012 Olympics.

It does seem strange to me that yet another sports facility is being added to the north of the borough. Couldn’t have anything to do with Labour’s calculation of where their voters live could it? If the skate park does finally get built and your kids end up having to commute to Gurnell you know who to blame.

The Telegraph today picked up the TaxPayers’ Alliance story about the unions receiving £85.8 million per annum from the state. Much of this, some £67.5 million, is “facility time” whereby union reps in government employment still get paid when they are on union business.

In their report the TPA were told by Ealing council that they allow the equivalent of three full-time equivalents (FTEs) for facility time for Unison and GMB reps. The TPS value this time at £81,251. I would say that was an underestimate. For middle ranking staff and taking into account their total cost of employment the sum would be well over £100,000.

We have all heard, not least from council leader Julian Bell himself, that the council faces hard choices. I would rather see the council lose these 3 FTE than 3 social workers say. It’s all about priorities.

In the next two paragraphs Cllr Bell talks about Ealing’s funding from central government.

Cllr Stacey during his four year tenure as Leader of the Council was in the happy position of receiving generous levels of funding from the Labour government and so did not have to face the unprecedented cuts to the Council’s budget that we are now facing or the difficult decisions we have to make.

We are facing 25 to 40 % cuts in our government grant over the next three years – on the lower figure this will mean £53m cuts to our budget, an unprecedented reduction of a quarter of our spending from 2011; we are already dealing with a £1.8m in year budget cut as a result of the coalition government’s emergency budget that also snatched away a further £3.5m in funding that we as a Council had earned.

First of all Cllr Bell tries to make the case that during the time of Cllr Stacey’s Conservative administration it was easy-peasy. The figures do not bear him out.

When Labour ran Ealing the Council (1994-2006), it enjoyed average annual increases in government grant of 5.4%, half a percent above the England average. RPI averaged 2.6% and CPI averaged 1.4%. In other words, Labour were getting increases in government grant at twice the level of inflation and still putting up Council tax by around 10% each year.

During the Conservatives’ regrettably short period in office Ealing’s grant plummeted to well below the England average and below any measure of inflation. In those four years the council made some £60 million of savings, rather more than the £53 million that Cllr Bell is talking about. So we can see that Cllr Stacey did not have it quite so easy.

Again in the next paragraph Cllr Bell has got his numbers totally wrong. If he looks at the council’s statement of accounts for last year he will see that the council spent over £1 billion on the revenue account. His £53 billion of savings is only 5% of total expenditure. He fails to point out that he has the freedom to increase certain charges that the council makes so much of his £53 million savings target will be made by price rises rather than dreaded “cuts”.

So Bell’s target is less than what Cllr Stacey already achieved and is only 5% of total expenditure. There are many residents who would say that whilst this will be a challenge it will be eminently achievable.