Category: Ealing and Northfield

It was entirely predictable that Ealing’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme would come to a crashing halt shortly after the election, see Gazette article here and Ealing Today here. No doubt we will hear lots from Labour about this “Tory cut”. It will all, of course, be total nonsense. In the 2009 Budget Report Alistair Darling signalled a halving, yes halving, of the government’s capital programme from £44 billion to £22 billion per annum from 2009-10 to 2013-14. The idea that BSF would remain intact in the face of that kind of contraction was always a fantasy. If Labour had won the last election it would only have been a matter of time before they were cancelling this programme themselves.

In his budget in June the Tory chancellor George Osbourne said he would not cut capital spending any further than Labour had done already but that the government would review everything. Quite right. The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was deeply flawed and was, ultimately, a con on the public.

BSF was fearsomely complicated. As Michael Gove said yesterday the programme produced buildings that are three times more expensive than regular commercial buildings and twice as expensive as Irish schools.

BSF made a really dumb pledge to rebuild every secondary school in the country regardless of need. Would it have been sensible to rebuild every road in the country? No. This was quite simply a grand scheme that sounded lovely but was in large part unnecessary. In areas where they got the BSF money early they knocked down perfectly serviceable schools and now some old buildings in other areas will have to wait many years to be refurbished.

It is a shame that no-one is going to be waving a magic wand over our schools anytime soon. The main job for the new administration in Ealing is to lobby for the new school in Greenford as a priority and to get our worst school buildings replaced on a sensible timetable. It is not quite as fancy as spending £300 million that the country hasn’t got but it sounds more like the real world. There will be new schools building programmes in the future but they won’t be as wasteful as BSF.

Only yesterday I got another picture of Cllr Bassam Mahfouz attached to a press release in my inbox. Between council leader Julian Bell and Mahfouz you may feel that you have seen a lot of these two recently.

This is at odds with Labour’s manifesto which promised that they would:

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

This subject always gets a lot of people exercised (including me but not in relation to Ealing which is sensible on the whole in this area). If you look at the statement of accounts and search for publicity you will see that Ealing has consistently spent about £3 million on all aspects of publicity for eight years. Note this includes about £900K per annum for printing such documents as agenda papers, etc and £700K in recruitment advertising which is hard to avoid as much as many right thinking Tory types will rave about the monopoly of the Times Educational Supplement and the Guardian Society pages on a Wednesday. Any budget which stands still in cash terms for 8 years is probably not the biggest problem we face.

Labour’s manifesto promise is particularly disingenuous because when they were last in power, according to Grey CPAs, they used an accounting trick to put the council’s web services team on the Response capital budget to disguise their expansion of spending in the communications area. When the Tories came to power in 2006 we re-jigged the 2007/8 budget to put this right and in the process made a saving of £379K in marketing and communications budgets. It will be interesting to see if Labour can match this kind of saving. Not at the rate that they are going.

I thought that it would be interesting to see if Labour was going to match its manifesto promise with action so I asked this question at the last council meeting:

How many publicity photos have been taken by the Council since the election and how much did each one cost?

In the period from 6th May to 15th June the new council organised 17 photo shoots at a total external cost of £1,681, see here.

The full list below:

1. Team Ealing member – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
2. Team Ealing member – for a feature in Around Ealing. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
3. Children enjoying the maze at Brent Lodge Park – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
4. Cllr Bassam Mahfouz in Ealing Broadway – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
5. Cllr Rajinder Dheer outside Ealing Town Hall – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
6. Cllr Rajinder Mann at home – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
7. The clean up of the canal at Greenford involving the Council Leader Cllr Julian Bell – for issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
8. The launch of Saturday Street Cleaning involving Cllr Bassam Mahfouz for issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £150.
9. Walk to School shot involving the Council Leader Cllr Julian Bell. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
10. New Cabinet Members (group shot) for initial issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £205.
11. Head and Shoulder shots of all newly elected Council Members for the Council website and special leaflet issued with Around Ealing. Professional photographers used. Cost £686.
12. Southall Manor House featuring the Council Leader Cllr Julian Bell for issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
13. Offender doing community payback at the Brent Lodge Park for issue with a press release. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
14. Cllr Bassam Mahfouz at Otter Road for a press release re Yellow Box Junctions. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
15. Southall Broadway shop front improvements. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
16. Photography of the Mayor making commissioned by the Mayor’s Office. Professional photographer used. Cost £400 (422 images).
17. Cllr Julian Bell raising England flag at town hall. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.

You may feel that £1,700 is small beer (although that figure ignores the hidden cost of having council officers trailing around taking photos). One the other hand someone has paid council tax for a year to pay for these photos. What is clear is that our new cabinet are spending a lot of time and money having their photographs taken.

Tonight at the tediously titled Overview and Scrutiny Committee we discussed a call-in of the new Labour administration’s decision to bring housing management of 18,000 council houses in-house. You may have read my previous postings about this highly political manoeuvre, here.

This management is currently done by Ealing Homes, a so-called ALMO, one of those weird, over-complicated, unaccountable products of our previous government. The new Labour administration proposes bringing this function in-house. The Tories wanted to outsource this function to competing external providers so that council house tenants and leaseholders had some power to choose supplier rather than having to accept what they were given which is standard Labour practice.

We didn’t change the decision but we did at least get some background to the woefully thin paper that Labour used to justify its decision, here. Labour leader Julian Bell has been claiming that their move will save £5 million. It emerged tonight that this saving was a four year saving, so only £1.25 million a year then. Bell uses the same double (quadruple) counting trick that got prime minister Gordon Brown the reputation for being a liar. Bell’s modest saving ignores the benefits of outsourcing. It appears that any savings will be driven by the re-tendering of the repairs and maintenance contract – a saving that will apply to any end solution. He reckons that council can save £1.25 million a year by cutting through the ALMO red tape. Great.

We also established that the Ealing Homes management fee of £12.8 million will effectively be in-sourced. Outsourcing this function to a competitive market, I think the council had 12 or 13 responses from not-for-profit housing associations to provide these services, should have resulted in a saving in the order of 25%, or £3.2 million per annum, in the long run. This amount represents a £180 per week saving for Ealing’s council house tenants on top of what Bell’s saving would deliver. Ooops. Labour really would rather be ideologically pure than help council house tenants.

The man defending the indefensible tonight at the overview and scrutiny committee was Labour housing cabinet member, Hitesh Tailor, otherwise known as Councillor Withani. Way back in the eighties, in the days of Thatcherism and the loony left, it was a recognised problem that too many Labour supporting people would work for one council and get elected as a councillor elsewhere, entrenching producer interests. I know that the eighties are quite trendy nowadays but it is unedifying to see Labour appoint a housing officer from Islington Council as their cabinet member for housing in Ealing. Yuck!

We are going to hear a lot about money over the next few days. Yesterday the Conservatives laid out the appalling financial legacy that Gordon Brown left for our country, see here, it really is worth a look. Last Thursday we had Danny Alexander’s announcement of cancelled and delayed capital projects. The cancelled projects were the bouncing cheques being returned to drawer that Labour had written in the run to the election. On Tuesday we will have what is expected to be a very painful budget.

It will also be a big numbers day on Tuesday locally when the council’s cabinet will be discussing the statement of accounts for last year and the budget process. The contrast between the terrible national legacy left by Labour and the sound finances left by the Tories locally could not be more stark.

It is worth looking at who is now in charge of the cash in Ealing. Cllr Yvonne Johnson is a charming school teacher who is no-one’s fool, and a longstanding, experienced councillor. She is cabinet member for finance and performance and a South Acton councillor. It appears that fellow South Acton councillor and newbie, Mik Sabiers, is her bag carrier, a role I had myself four years ago. Whilst Johnson chairs the pension fund panel, Sabiers is there too. Sabiers has also been made the chairman of the boring but exceedingly important audit committee. It might have been wiser for Labour to put someone a little less close to Cllr Johnson in this role, it should after all be driving the audit process ultimately. Isn’t there any need for distance between the executive and the audit process? Maybe someone with some experience of local government and/or finance?

You can follow Sabiers on Twitter here. Of the pension fund panel Sabiers says:

Now in council pension fund meeting, loysa figures to discuss

Mmm, yes Cllr Sabiers. Lots of figures. His Twitter biog describes him as:

Labour councillor for South Acton, journalist, socialist, sometime egoist, helper, friend and occasionally foe

His register of member’s interests entry lists him as being a member of three unions: Unite, GMB and NUJ. His day job is being a “journalist” working for Unite. I think internal comms person is a more usual description for people who write internal comms newsletters. On the side Sabiers does music reviews for the Morning Star. Yes, really. Oh dear.

In his rush to make political capital out of yet another cock up by the Council’s transport engineers Councillor Mahfouz has seriously misled the public. Splashed all over the front page of the Gazette this morning was this story: “Drivers to get box junction fines back.” The story goes on to say: “Ealing Council has set aside nearly £35,000 to refund motorists… About 600 people who paid for an ‘offence’ committed before April 30 will get their fine money back.” Their editorial goes on to say: “Ealing Council has pledged to reimburse eligible motorists…”.

This story is woefully incomplete and inaccurate. If you go the council’s website here you will find out that 7,609 tickets were issued for offence code 31J, Entering and stopping in a box junction when prohibited, between July 2009 and April 2010 at the junction in question. These would have been paid at either £60 or £120 depending on how quickly people paid. That is a liability of somewhere between £450,000 and £900,000.

The council’s press release is more carefully worded. It says:

The council will now be cancelling any unpaid tickets from the Otter Road/Greenford Road yellow box junction issued for offences before 30 April – the date the council suspended enforcement at the junction. The council will also refund anyone who received a ticket at that junction, but paid it after 30 April.

In other words only those who didn’t pay for tickets issued before 30 April and those who have had tickets since will get off. Tough luck on the 7,000 that did pay between July 2009 and April 2010.

I am angry that yet again the council’s traffic engineers have made mistakes with this type of junction. For the most part those that have had tickets would have deserved them however much they might grumble about the council’s incompetence. This kind of mistake though further undermines people’s trust in Ealing’s parking people – having spent three years trying to sort them out this is very frustrating for me.

It seems that in his enthusiasm to get his rather warped version of the story into the Gazette, Mahfouz will have opened up the council to a liability of many £100Ks. This is strange behaviour indeed for someone who is meant to be in charge. Mahfouz has not yet got out of the rock throwing habits of opposition. It seems also that the Gazette in its enthusiasm to endorse everything the new Labour administration is doing has lost its ability to ask hard questions. All round very poor.

The big talking point at the last council meeting was council tax. This debate is a proxy for financial management in general and control of spending in particular. Unfortunately the members of the new Labour group are particularly unsuited to the hard job that faces them over the next four years.

My Daily Mail front page above (click to enlarge) is only one piece of coverage for a report from Policy Exchange put out today. It found that public sector pay has risen by 33% in real terms between 2002 and 2009, at something like three times the rate of the private sector. Whilst private sector productivity increased in that time, public sector productivity fell leaving the public sector some 2/3rds as productive as the private sector.

These facts tell us simply how our council can square the circle of protecting services whilst dealing with tight funding rounds and freezing the council tax for four years the way it proposes to freeze councillors’ allowances for four years (quite right). The Policy Exchange paper proposes freezing public sector pay for four years. This is something the council should look at very hard although it would be appropriate to protect the lowest paid from this I feel.

A very senior officer of the council told me this year that he thought that the council could take 20% out of its cost base by merely equalising terms and conditions with the private sector, for instance only paying people a flat rate and doing away with layers of anti-social hours payments, etc. Add this kind of change to pay restraint and the council could withstand really quite eye watering grant changes and a long term freeze in council tax. There is no reason to cut services.

There is a big problem though. Our ruling Labour group is heavily infiltrated by unionism. 25 out of 40 Labour councillors admit to union membership in their declarations of interest. 10 of them belong to the largest union, Unite, which is currently doing its best to destroy airline BA.

The Gazette is reporting that after two years of council tax freezes delivered by the Tories, the new Labour administration is going to do the same again next year, see here. Good news.

Labour promised to freeze council tax next year in its manifesto, see here. One of their headline promises was:

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

One of the key objectives of the Tory opposition for the next four years is going to be to box Labour in and make sure that council tax is not allowed to spiral out of control after next year. We know their track record, they raised council tax by 48% in their last term of office. The Tory record by comparison was 1.9%, 1.9%, 0%, 0% or 3.84% over four years.

The new coalition government has offered to help local authorities to deliver freezes for two years running so we tabled the following motion for discussion at council on Tuesday:

This Council notes the administration’s manifesto pledge to freeze council tax levels for the 2011/12 budget year. The Council further notes the Government’s announcement of additional funding to enable councils to freeze council tax for the same financial year.

Council resolves to take advantage of this additional funding and pledges to freeze council tax levels in Ealing for the 2011/12 financial year. Council further resolves to use the money the administration has earmarked for next year’s council tax freeze to further freeze council tax for the 2012/13 financial year.

Labour voted against this motion and instead tabled and voted through this motion:

This Council notes and welcomes the Labour administration’s pledge to freeze the council tax levels for the 2011/12 budget year.

This Council notes that any monies we might receive from the coalition government in order to freeze council tax must also cover the cost of cuts we already know about, namely the £1.832m already announced last week and our next round of cuts on 22nd June 2010.

This Council makes a commitment that we will live within our means and make our major aim the protection of frontline services, despite the government’s draconian cuts which will affect the most vulnerable in society.

Note their change in language. Instead of “keeping your council tax low” as per their manifesto they are now saying “we will live within our means and make our major aim the protection of frontline services”. By “live within our means” what they really mean is their judgement of what they can take from you. Watch out!

On a lighter note one of the new Labour councillors picked up a nickname for himself on Tuesday. Maiden speeches are by convention heard in silence. The Tory benches could not help exclaiming when one of the new councillors for Southall Broadway ward, Cllr Mohammed Kausar, referred to his colleagues as “comrades” during his maiden speech.

As we will see over the next few years there is a vast gulf between some of the reasonable positions that Labour took in its manifesto and the affiliations of some of its new councillors – more later!