Category: Ealing and Northfield

No really. Over the last week or so the Ealing Southall Labour team have been delivering a leaflet to the constituency. Only they are doing a poor job. Last week I was in Lawrence Road, Ealing Park Gardens and Birkbeck Road delivering a leaflet to that part of the Northfield ward. Labour really don’t get it. We got elected in 2006 partly because Ealing was such a mess and needed cleaning up and they are making a mess trying to get re-elected. Doh! Talk about missing the point.

I was laughing to myself in Lawrence Road when I saw that the Labour deliverers had failed to push the leaflets through the letter boxes. I was really quite angry on behalf of our residents when I saw their leaflets thrown around in Birkbeck Road and Ealing Park Gardens.

You may remember this slogan from the Tories at the last local elections in 2006. In Ealing we can truly say that we have delivered on that promise – or at least our brilliant residents have.

At last night’s council meeting Cllr Clifford Pile asked the Cabinet Member for Environment and Street Services, Susan Emment, for the latest recycling figures for the borough. The answer is 38% for last year. This is fully double the recycling rate that the Tories inherited four years ago.

In our 2006 manifesto we had a long section on recycling:

RECYCLING

Conservatives in Ealing are committed to raising the amount of our waste that we recycle. We believe that the key to achieving this is ensuring that any recycling scheme is accessible to everyone, easy to use and free at the point of use for all residents.

It is the simplicity and ease of the Green Box recycling scheme that has made it such a successful scheme. Conservatives support the retention of the Green Box scheme and we would expand it by including the recycling of cardboard.

Ealing Council is also in the process of partially introducing the Kitchen Waste recycling scheme. We support in principle the new Kitchen Waste recycling scheme and we shall be closely watching to see how successful it is. If is does prove effective, we shall continue the roll out of this scheme across the whole borough.

Residents have also told us how useful they find the recycling stations across the borough, but often these are badly designed and sometimes difficult to access. We will therefore implement a programme to improve the design of all our recycling stations; making them cleaner, easier to access and free from unnecessary clutter.

Conservatives believe, however, that the existing ‘pink bag’ scheme for the recycling of garden waste does not meet the key requirement of a recycling scheme being accessible to everyone and free at the point of use. We believe that the burden involved in ordering the bags as well as the 50p charge per bag actually serves as a disincentive for residents to recycle their garden waste.

We will therefore abolish the ‘pink bag’ scheme and replace it with a more user friendly scheme that is free to residents at the point of use.

We have more than delivered on this adding plastics and drinks cartons to the list of items you can recycle and pushing recycling facilties out to blocks of flats. It was hard to put numerical targets on recycling when we were in opposition. In our new manifesto we promise to achieve 40% recycling by next year and then on to 50%.

A couple of weeks ago the Telegraph published a letter from me on the jobs tax – yet more increases in Employer’s NI proposed by the Labour government and opposed by the Conservatives.

Yesterday at full council Cllr Joanna Dabrowska asked the council leader Jason Stacey what the cost of Gordon Brown’s jobs tax would be to Ealing Council. The answer was £1.14 million per annum. When asked to put this in some context Cllr Stacey pointed out that this sum would add 1% to council bills. Alternatively, the council could cut the 50 new street cleaners we have added to the workforce since we came into power, or cut the 50 new PCSOs we recruited or get rid of 32 social workers. Another approach would be to cut every day centre in the borough plus a couple of libraries.

The opposition leader Julian Bell blithely asserted that he could cap the council tax for another year and protect services and swallow the loss of £1.14 million. Thank heavens he is not running the council.

Yesterday the last Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ken Clarke, came to Ealing to launch the national manifesto and to urge the local Tory group on. We also took the opportunity to publish the Ealing Tory group’s manifesto for our borough. To download it click here.

I have reproduced council leader Jason Stacey’s introduction below:

A record of action, a promise of more

In 2006 the residents of Ealing elected a Conservative administration to run Ealing Council. After 12 years of Labour misrule at the Town Hall, residents elected a Conservative council with a message to bring about change.

There were many factors that brought about the change in administration but there were four issues that stood out from the others. Residents told us they wanted:

• The borough to be cleaner
• An end to the year on year high council tax increases
• The borough to feel safer
• To stop the proposed West London Tram

Since 2006 the Conservative administration has made a number of significant changes to the way the council is run. The Council’s finances are now in a much stronger position, investment has been made in key services and improvements have been noticed by residents across the borough. In the 2009 resident survey, 81% of residents believe the council to be doing a good job – an increase of 16% since 2006.

However, there is no room for complacency and there remains a significant amount to do. This manifesto sets out what has been achieved in the past four years and what a re-elected Conservative administration will seek to achieve over the next four years.

In particular, our manifesto focuses on the following:

• A pledge to continue to deliver further improvements in our local environment – Ealing is no longer one of the dirtiest boroughs in London but now we want to make it one of the cleanest.
• To continue our work with the Police to deliver safer communities across the borough.
• Holding down Council Tax levels as low as possible.
• Create a sustainable transport system; overseeing the development on Crossrail and improvements at a number of key stations across the borough and developing a logical and integrated transport network.
• Providing the highest quality social care to the most vulnerable residents in our community whilst enabling them to live full and independent lives.
• Developing new opportunities for young people and broadening their choices to give them the best start in life.
• Regenerating our town centres and shopping areas to restore economic vitality and make them a place where local people want to go and shop.
• Regenerating our housing estates to deliver modern and fit for purpose housing for the residents of the borough

This is a challenging programme especially when set against the difficult economic times in which we find ourselves. However, the past four years has shown a Conservative administration that is committed to change and determined to bring long term improvements to our borough. At the forthcoming elections I ask you to support your Conservative candidates and help us continue to deliver this change.

Cllr Jason Stacey
Conservative Leader on Ealing Council

If you are on the electoral roll (ie entitled to vote) in Ealing you should have seen a polling card through your letter box in the first week of April. If you haven’t you may have a problem and you need to sort it out now.

You need to be on the electoral roll by 20th April and if you want a postal vote this needs to be sorted out by the same date too. Follow this link for more.

The Labour candidate for the Ealing Central and Acton constituency has got himself into trouble according to the Daily Mail today, see here.

In Andrew Pierce’s Gaffe of the Day spot they have:

Wannabe Labour MP Bassam Mahfouz, who tried to ingratiate himself at a dinner for the UK’s Lebanese community by urging them to vote for him so he could become ‘the first Arab MP’.

Hushed silence followed before a high-profile Lebanese politician stood up and said: ‘We are not Arabs. We are Lebanese.’

Anyone who knows Bassam knows he is a regular Londoner. We all come from somewhere. Maybe he should concentrate on where he is going rather than where he came from.

Today the council published the list of local election candidates. Click here to find the candidates in your ward.

Apparently the local Labour candidates feel the need to go around in pairs when they knock on doors. I guess if you were representing one of the most unpopular governments in history you would be wary of knocking on doors on your own. Hilariously Walpole candidate Rupa Huq today published two photos of her colleagues knocking on doors on her blog here. It seems they have not got the hang of this canvassing thing yet. In Northfield we have been knocking on doors for four years now. We cover a lot more ground on our own!