The next Northfield Ward Forum Meeting will be at The Log Cabin, 259 Northfield Avenue on Thursday 25 February 2010 starting at 7.30pm.
The agenda is available here.
If you don’t know where the Log Cabin is it is just behind Northfield library next door to Northfield tube station. We look forward to seeing you there.
If you click on the Customer Services category link on the right hand menu you will see that I regularly check the performance of our Customer Services organisation.
I was a bit anxious after my last visit to Customer Services on 18th January so I went back today to check up on them.
It took 6 seconds to get a ticket timed at 11.21am. I saw a parking agent two minutes later. There were less than 40 people waiting in the whole place and there were two cash windows open with a queue of one person waiting for a free window. There were six people working on parking so there were only two people queueing for this service.
All in all everything seemed to be as it should.
Just saw this headline on Ealing Today. Chaos? What a disaster? See article here.
The headline is:
Pothole Problems Cause Road Chaos
The sub headline is:
Northfield Avenue is ‘collapsing’ say locals
That all sounds very bad. The report is written by a “local resident”. No doubt. But Ealing Today fails to identify Toran Shaw as one of the LibDem candidates for Northfield ward in the forthcoming local elections in May. [Note: ET have since updated the story to identify Toran as a candidate.] Maybe disaster is not imminent as feared?
His Twitter bio(graphy) says:
Writer. Researcher. Liberal Democrat candidate for Northfields ward. Brentford FC & Formula 1 fan. Libertarian. Linguist. Social media geek. Pagan.
Toran doesn’t mention that the pothole crews were out in Graham Avenue (off Northfield Avenue) and adjacent roads all this week.
He doesn’t mention that the current administration has spent more on new roads in the last four years than Labour spent in 12.
He doesn’t mention that 18 Northfield ward roads have been resurfaced this year alone.
Funny that. Chaos indeed.
If there is a problem in your road call 020 8825 6000. It will get fixed quickly as Toran has found.
The planning application for the proposed Elthorne Skate Park has been submitted and local residents should already have seen consultation notices. You can see the application here and make your own comments.
The proposals have been found to be popular with 69% of the 1,134 people who responded to the consultation, see details here. Clearly they are not popular with everyone and it is understandable that near neighbours will be anxious that their immediate environment will be degraded by this new development. It is up to the planners and Ealing’s parks people to come up with a workable, credible solution that addresses the concerns that have been raised in the consultation process. Now is the time for residents to make their issues known to the planners so that a sensible solution can be found. The planning consultation period ends 19th February.
We had a long, long cabinet meeting last night – over three and half hours. The meeting was dominated by discussion of whether or not we should outsource our Civil Enforcement Officers, these are the people that we used to call traffic wardens. See paper here.
About 30 of these staff turned up to hear what was going on. Previously they had been protesting outside the town hall chanting “In-house, in-house”. I went to talk to them outside before the meeting but it was hard to find actual CEOs amongst the union reps, Socialist Worker sellers and other hangers-on.
Frankly these staff have had every right to feel neglected over the last few years and we all understand why they would like to stay where they are for the time being. When the Conservatives took over in 2006 the parking contractor which employed them was called Vinci and the nature of the contract they had struck with the previous administration, which incentivised them to give out more tickets, caused us to review this contract and award it to Apcoa. Since then the council has given out about 2/3rds of the tickets it used to.
Apcoa pulled out of this business at very short notice at the end of 2008 leaving us in a bit of a bind and we bought these staff in-house temporarily. We have now come to the end of an exhaustive process of evaluating potential providers of this style of service and last night we decided to go with the market leader NSL. It is very understandable that the staff do not like the prospect of working for the fourth employer in four years and losing the possibility of having their terms and conditions harmonised with those of other council employers which would mean that ultimately they had to work fewer hours to earn the same income.
Unison rep Adam Smith (unfortunate name for a man of the left!) spoke very well on behalf of the CEOs who would have liked the service to remain in house. He talked about how this is “not a broken service”. I agree with him and I, and the rest of the cross party parking specialist scrutiny panel, agreed with him in spring 2008 when the CEOs were being managed by Apcoa. The panel’s report, see here, made 17 recommendations to cabinet as to how to improve the parking service but not one of them concerned CEOs. Our parking service still has a way to go before we can say we have put it right but for some time now the main focus of improvement has not been the people on the streets. It is in the back office, where we do the admin and consider appeals, where there is still work to be done.
Outsourcing the CEOs lets us keep focussed on the tasks that still need to be done. This is a good deal for the council as it ensures that this task is undertaken by a large and capable contractor and it is a good deal for staff who will be working for a market leading company that will give them good opportunities for training and progression which we can’t at the council.
One of the smaller, but no less important to those living nearby, issues we discussed last night is the 94 bus stands at Acton Green, see Gazette report here and report considered at last night’s cabinet here.
A local resident, a Mr Watson I think, attended to give a first-hand account of the problem and certainly it seems that TfL have increased the service without considering the impact that this is having on residents. My screen grab from Google Street View shows three buses lurking.
Harvey Rose, LibDem group leader and councillor for the Southfield ward where this is happening was fairly relaxed about the whole situation. He said: “Quite a lot has been made of relatively small inconveniences”. It sounded a lot like: “Let them eat cake”.
Heads will roll!
This morning our joint Elthorne and Northfield Conservative local election team met at the excellent Cafe Gold by Hanwell clock tower before we went off canvassing. There was a good turn out, there were ten of us. We were approached by an older man who had spotted that we looked like political types out on manoeuvres. He asked us what party we were from and we told him we were the Conservative team. He congratulated us and wished us well and introduced himself as Serge Lourie, the LibDem leader of Richmond council.
Lourie didn’t seem too crestfallen that we weren’t fellow LibDems. He was very sweet considering that it all gets a bit bloody between the Tories and the LibDems in Richmond, see here.
I did think about harassing him over his council tax but it seemed a little unnecessary after he had been so gracious. That doesn’t stop me doing it here though! LibDem Richmond is second only to LibDem Kingston as being the most expensive borough in London. Band D council tax in the three boroughs are:
Ealing £1,369.75
Kingston £1,630.78
Richmond £1,597.21
Ealing is way down at 16th on the list. You need to be wealthy to be able to afford a LibDem council.
Our tech-savvy local MP is a regular Twitter user. The report above is what he was doing yesterday according to him.
He is not telling the whole story off course. He also voted to take an additional seven working days holiday in February. Andrew Slaughter also voted for it and Stephen Pound wasn’t there so I guess he was taking his holiday early.
All Tories and LibDems voted against. All Labour for. List of shame here.
If you click on the Customer Services category link on the right hand menu you will see that I regularly check the performance of our Customer Services organisation.
I did one of my mystery shops late on Friday morning. I did my usual thing of checking into the queue for a parking permit at 11:53am. It only took a couple of seconds to get past the meeters and greeters who were cheerful and efficient. There was quite a buzz in the place as there were about 50 people in the various queues but numbers were being called out so quickly it all seemed pretty smooth. There was a queue of 3 for the cash office but there were three windows open so no problem there really. Everything was calm and clean and it looked like most people were having a reasonable experience.
The only problem was the queue for parking permits which stood at 14 when I arrived and it took until 12:31pm to be seen. 38 minutes. Way too long. I had a brief chat with the officer. There were only three people working on parking permits, one was training and one was on lunch.
Mondays and Friday are usually busier days and lunchtimes are best avoided for a short wait – pretty much the same advice you would give somoene going to the bank! It was clear from the length of queue when I arrived that there would be a long wait so I had the chance to bail out if I wanted to. I have taken this incident up with senior officers so I expect that this situation will not recur. We’ll see.
Recently a lot of people have been asking why the Council does not grit residential roads and pavements. There are a number of reasons, the foremost being cost. A couple of days ago the council leader, Jason Stacey, explained that we grit 250Kms of main roads. Residential roads and pavements would run into many hundreds of kilometres and be prohibitively expensive even if we could find enough plant and/or day labourers to do the job at very short notice. Obviously there is a limit to how much expensive plant and storage space we want to have idle in case we have a once in ten years snow event.
There also comes a point where putting even more salt on the roads is going to play havoc with trees and gardens – they don’t like salt water. In parts of the world where they have more regular snow events they don’t recommend common salt (sodium chloride) as a snow melting agent. They go for calcium or potassium chloride as less environmentally damaging agents.
If this cold snap goes on much longer we will be glad we did not use all our grit on pavements – hopefully we will have enough left to allow us to keep food getting to shops.
I have visited Massachusetts in the winter and there most counties have local ordinances that demand that home owners keep the footpaths adjacent to their properties clear. Indeed it snows so often that people often have snow blowers for this job. Most of the work is done by homeowners with shovels. As a visitor I set to work to help my host meet her obligations. Unfortunately she had a corner house so it was double the work.
I did a quick scout around on Google and found this page from the Cambridge, MA’s Department of Public Works. It is their summary of owner responsibilities above, click to enlarge. If we decided to follow this model we could, as a community, deal with the problem for ourselves. It would take some culture change I suspect.
Phil Taylor 