Category: Ealing and Northfield

The new council leader, Julian Bell, was interviewed in the 16th-31st July edition of Maya News recently. Maya targets the Indian expat community in the UK. The picture and quote below are taken from the article.

During the election campaign the Labour party went around council estates telling a pack of lies about the Conservatives’ proposals to make sure that council tenants got some decent services. You might have thought that now Bell was leader he would show a bit of dignity and stop lying. Bell knows full well that every single prospective bidder for outsourcing the housing service was a non-profit making housing association. Time for the lies to stop Cllr Bell.

We had a long meeting at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee tonight – almost three hours long. It was not without its drama though, however fleeting.

The Conservative opposition “called in” a couple of cabinet decisions from the cabinet’s 22nd June meeting. One of them was the decision to go out to tender for repairs and maintenance of council housing. See here.

For the second month running Labour’s housing spokesman, Hitesh Tailor, was having to defend Labour’s housing policy. The council hopes to save 10-15% from its £7 million repairs and maintenance contract. The Conservative group is suspicious that the new administration will try to justify its decision to bring housing management in house with savings it could have made regardless of who did this job.

In his presentation Tory group leader Jason Stacey asked to what extent Labour would use this opportunity to deliver on two of its manifesto promises:

A revamp of the [council house] repairs service with additional craftsmen to do the repairs and less bureaucracy to reduce delays.

Firm support for the London Living Wage for all Council staff and contractors.

Cllr Tailor’s answer evaded these two points so I pressed him on them when my turn came. Tailor refused to commit to the London Living Wage for this contract and Pat Hayes, the officer responsible who had turned up to baby sit Tailor, explained that the selection criteria would include issues such as local labour, apprenticeships and the proportion of work that can be subcontracted.

So, it seems that Labour’s promises of more craftsmen working on council house repairs is being translated into apprentices working at minimum wage levels. Oh dear!

As I pointed out yesterday if Labour’s manifesto promises did not make it into the “Immediate Priority” box then they ain’t happening. Tailor’s answer today proves that the London Living Wage promise is worthless.

The main order of business last night at the council meeting was discussion of the council’s corporate plan, see here. As Labour have just got into power the document is essentially a rehash of the Labour manifesto, see here, with some topping and tailing by council officers. Or at least that is what it looks like at first glance.

It is always worth reading the financial section of such reports. Here it talks about:

… a small number of priority project, which have been funded from within current budget allocations …

If you look again at corporate plan you will see that the only things that are going to get done in this plan are those in the “Immediate Priority” boxes unless perhaps if they are things that will cost nothing. Everything else is unfunded and can therefore be considered kicked into the long grass.

Yesterday afternoon before the council meeting I spent a couple of hours going through the 114 promises made by Labour in their manifesto. How many do you think made it into the Immediate Priority boxes? 100? 90? 80? No, only 22 or a mere 19% of Labour’s manifesto promises made it through this first encounter with reality. We can safely ignore 92 of Labour’s promises because they ain’t going to happen any time soon.

If you look at page 3 of Labour’s Manifesto they made 5 key pledges. How many of these survived the cull I wonder? Answer one and a half out of five. Under crime they talked about more uniformed officers which made the cut but CCTV didn’t. Schools investment didn’t make it. 3,000 affordable homes didn’t make it. 24/7 Grimebusters didn’t make it. Thankfully the council tax pledge did get through. But still, a shocking case of promising more than you can deliver – the age old Labour disease.

One notable manifesto promise has disappeared altogether in the process of turning Labour’s manifesto into the corporate plan. In their manifesto, under the heading Value for Money, Labour said it would:

Reduce the Council’s bloated communications budget and stop money being wasted on party political propaganda

In their first month in power the Labour cabinet attended 9 photoshoots and spent £1,700 on photographs. I think we can assume that this promise is a dead parrot. Ho hum!

Back in May I published a letter from David Milliband to the old Tory leader, Jason Stacey, congratulating him on winning Ealing Council – I wish. Apparently David Milliband still does not know his back side from his elbow.

Local Labour activist and failed local council candidate for Walpole ward, Rupa Huq, breathlessly reported on her blog yesterday that she has hosted a “house meeting” for Milliband the older. The audio linked by Huq has Milliband describing Huq as “Councillor Rupa Huq, the Deputy Mayor of Ealing”. Huq is clearly not a councillor although she was appointed to be the Deputy Mayor, Councillor John Gallagher’s, consort.

Interestingly Huq describes the meeting as “a grassroots community bottom-up initiative in conjunction with the London Citizens campaign” whereas Milliband calls it “12 Labour party members”. I have to say that I always considered London Citizens to be a Labour front organisation.

Sitting next to Rupa Huq on her sofa yesterday was Anthony Woods, one of the failed Labour council candidates for Northfield ward. Woods turned up to the Northfield ward forum on Monday with 40 other local residents. It was a good meeting although Woods made a fool of himself. Eager to make party political points Woods embarassed our Safer Neighbourhood Team sergeant by asking him what cuts would be visited on his team. The answer to this question is way above the sergeant’s pay grade. In the public forum section of the meeting Woods tried to ask the councillors what would the effect of cuts on Northfield. Frankly we don’t know and won’t know for some time beyond the schools announcement already made this week.

The question that Woods and the rest of the Labour party has to answer is how do we sort out the deficit without painful choices? It is currently running at £155 billion. In other words the government is spending £3 billion more than it raises in taxes EVERY WEEK. Put another way people in work are having the government borrow £5,000 a year on their behalf. Those same workers need to pay this debt off sometime.