Category: Ealing and Northfield

The local NHS body that runs Ealing and Northwick Park hospitals has clearly screwed up the implementation of its new £21 million A&E at Northwick Park. It was a mistake to close Hammersmith and Central Middlesex A&Es on 10th September and then open the new A&E as the winter pressure on the NHS was at its height. We have been let down by London North West Healthcare NHS Trust (LNW). The picture over the last few weeks has been clear and disappointing. The recent weekly figures charted below are official NHS statistics.

Overall North West Hospitals are doing poorly, only managing to get around 85% of patients moved on from A&E within four hours compared to more like 90% for the neighbouring Imperial Trust that manages Charing Cross and St Mary’s, or indeed the England average that is running around 90% compared to a 95% target. The Labour-run Welsh NHS was running at 81% throughout December. You can see the Welsh numbers here.

If you look more carefully at the numbers for Type 1 (major) cases the picture is worse.

England has been running around 85% over the last 8 weeks. Imperial and Wales at 77% and LNW has been running at an atrocious 64%, dipping to 54% just after the new unit opened.

The local paper on Friday had the headline “A&E waiting times at London North West Healthcare NHS Trust worst in England”. LNW has been one of the worst English hospitals for Type 1 (major) A&E waits for weeks now.

As it happens LNW wasn’t the worst in England the previous week. It was the second worst. Southport And Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust was fractionally worse. I guess second worst isn’t such a good headline.

Labour wannabe Rupa Huq has been quick to pounce. She says:

In Ealing and Acton we saw the price of a Tory-run NHS long before these figures were released. The Tories and Lib Dems are destroying our NHS. I’ve lived here for over 40 years now and I can’t remember a time when so many people talked to me about their fears for our health service and social care in later life.

As a mum I’ve first-hand experience of our health service and with my parents needing adult social care I understand the fear that threats to our local NHS services can bring. Local residents face a big choice in the election this year.

Note just emotional name calling from Huq. She used the word “fear” twice in the same quote. Classy. Not one shred of a policy. No promises to do anything different. Her comments about “the price of a Tory-run NHS” ring a little hollow when you consider the record of the “Labour-run NHS” in Wales. The Welsh record on A&E waits is considerably worse than the English record. In Wales in December almost 2,500 people waited over 12 hours. We are not hearing much from Labour about that.

We know winter is a hard time for the NHS and we also know that the local NHS has cocked up their change programme. What we aren’t hearing from Labour is how it would do anything differently. Until we do they might stop shroud waving and let the doctors get on with it.

The Labour candidate for the Ealing Central and Acton constituency is on Twitter and facebook this morning trying to use the NHS as a weapon in her campaign to unseat the current Tory MP Angie Bray.

As ever Huq has no answers. We all know that A&Es are under strain in the winter and that our population is ageing (thankfully) and that our behaviour as NHS users is changing. The mustn’t grumble generation is fading away to be replaced by the Boomers who are more demanding. We all dislike the disproportionate effect that local NHS changes have had on Ealing.

But what is Labour’s policy? We get no answers from Labour. Not from Rupa Huq, not Julian Bell, not Onkar Sahota. None of them propose any alternatives. Labour will not reopen any A&Es closed by the NHS and it will not provide any more cash than the current government or a future Conservative one. The £2.5 billion they talk about from the mansion tax is chickenfeed – 2% of current spending, which has already been matched by the Coalition. All three parties will sign up to Stevens’ £8 billion plan (which includes £22 billion of further efficiency savings).

Labour refuses to acknowledge that the closures we have had locally under the Shaping a Healthier Future programme would have happened under a Labour government, being as they are merely the delayed local roll out of Labour’s own £20 billion Nicholson Challenge programme kicked off by Andy Burnham in 2009.

The Labour campaign is built around the simple idea that if they lie big enough, consistently enough then they will win.

In all her literature Huq calls herself Dr but fails to point out that she has a PhD in Cultural Studies. Her thesis was on Youth Culture. You can’t help thinking that she seeks to deceive people about her background. She never refers to herself as a sociology lecturer. Only Dr. What can she be trying to communicate in a campaign where the NHS is going to be the main issue she talks about? This is one of the three silly little lies of her campaign, but more on those another time.

I figured I had barely heard from Ealing Southall Labour MP, Virendra Sharma, recently so when I saw that the local Labour types had wheeled him out for a rare trip across the River Brent today I thought I might check up on him.

The theyworkforyou.com website keep track of what MPs do. According to them Sharma has only spoken in 9 debates in the last year which is well below average amongst MPs.

If you look at the list of things he has spoken in three of the nine topics were Kashmir, Tamils and the Golden Temple. So a third of his paltry output was a bit specialist for most people.

The equivalent numbers for the other two Ealing MPs are 27 for Angie Bray and 37 for Stephen Pound. The difference between these two is accounted for by Pound’s role as Shadow Minister, Northern Ireland, compared to Bray being a back bencher. Bray managed to speak 3 times more than Sharma and Pound 4 times more.

It is perhaps unfair to call out Labour candidate for Ealing Central and Acton, Rupa Huq, on this issue as this is endemic in Ealing Labour’s bent politics.

On Friday Huq looked characteristically ill-at-ease as she stood beside East Acton councillor Hitesh Tailor and head of East Acton Primary School, Helen Williams. The latter is paid the best part of £100K of public money to run this school and she is wasting her time doing photocalls with election candidates. At least Tailor is elected and represents the ward in which her school is located. Huq has no locus and I really can’t see why she is on the premises. If the head wants to run an event alongside the Unison funded Stars in our schools campaign to thank her support staff I am not sure why she thinks it is appropriate to invite only Labour politicians, and an un-elected one at that.

None of this is new. In January this year, in the run up the local elections, Labour produced a press release (that wasn’t taken up by anyone as I recall) with this picture.

It shows the head of Selbourne Primary School, Barbara Anne Smith, and a senior council education officer, Opal Brown, posing with the three Labour candidates (none were actual councillors at the time) for the Perivale ward. I complained to the council and the press release disappeared from Labour’s website. The officer in charge told me that Brown didn’t know who she was being photographed with! A reminder was issued “on expectations in relation to this” apparently.

It happened again in April when Steven Twigg pulled Huq along to a visit to West Twyford Children’s Centre.

The head Rachel Martin seems to think it is appropriate to broadcast her Labour affiliations but she is not entitled to do it in working hours.

Again I complained to the council and Twigg deleted his tweet. The officer in charge told me “The school has been reminded of the guidance in relation to conduct in the run-up to elections” and he arranged for legal guidance to be re-circulated to all schools as a reminder.

It isn’t just head teachers that are supporting Labour’s political campaigning. The council often does it too. Labour’s Onkar Sahota abused public resources mercilessly in his camapaign for the GLA in 2012. For instance, council leader Julian Bell used his Parliamentary e-mail account to promote Sahota, Labour councillor for Elthorne, Yoel Gordon, used his council e-mail address when he was campaigning for Sahota and Sahota repeatedly got himself in official photographs before he was elected.

Having been caught out misbehaving previously in April Huq should know she is cheating and abusing public funds. It seems she doesn’t care though. Huq is Bell’s preferred candidate as Sahota was. The culture of cheating infects them all.

I decided to name names above after having politely and discretely taken this matter up with council officers twice before. If this embarrasses teachers then my response is they should stop.

Letter to @Jeremy_Hunt to stop NW London A&E closures due on 10 September with @RupaHuq @Hitesh_T @DrAyshaRaza pic.twitter.com/M6wNhB2khh

— Onkar Sahota (@DrOnkarSahota) September 1, 2014

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The local Labour party was keeping up its mendacious NHS campaign yesterday by staging the delivery of a letter to Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt. They haven’t published their letter and much more importantly they refuse to say what they would do if they were in charge.

The two A&E closures that come into force on 10th September will be a worry for people but I suspect that the NHS will navigate around them safely. It is after all the NHS’s own plan and they will have to pay the legal bills if things go wrong. The original plan was that four A&Es should close to bring the area into line with the Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s guidance that sustainable A&Es require a catchment area of 500,000. It is quite right that Conservative Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt ordered that Ealing and Charing Cross A&Es should remain in some form. For all the noise coming out of the local Labour crowd on this subject the only actor in this drama who has done anything for us is Hunt. The courts said the consultation was sound and turned down the council’s judicial review request. The Independent Reconfiguration Panel said that the whole programme was sound.

Bell, Sahota and the rest of the Labour crowd know they are being venal. They know that this programme is the local roll out of Labour’s own £20 billion Nicholson Challenge programme kicked off by Andy Burnham in 2009. They know it wouldn’t have been any different under a Labour government. This programme was on page 4:3 of their 2010 manifesto.

Indeed it might have been worse under Labour. Whatever you think of the Tories they have honoured their pledge to maintain NHS spending in real terms (as even Alistair Darling kept repeating in the recent Scottish debate). Labour made no such pledge and it is unlikely a Labour government would have been able to increase health spending.

Local Labour types have been painfully careful not to make any promises on the NHS. It is only 8 months to go before a general election when Labour might win power. Ed Balls has said there will be no new NHS cash from increased National Insurance or a new social care charge on death. The current programme will most likely roll on in its current form whatever government comes in in 2015. No government is going to find £20 billion (a year!) to undo Nicholson.

Local Labour politicians think they can blame their own policy on the Tories and get away with not making any promises of their own. Maybe they are right.

To repeat myself the only person who has done anything for Ealing so far is Jeremy Hunt who ordered that only two A&Es would close of 10th September not four. Labour sullenly refuses to make any promises.

Yesterday the online version of the Gazette published the latest opinion piece from Labour council leader Julian Bell. He rightly points up the opporitunities facing Ealing but makes too much of the dreaded cuts. He says:

Over the last four years we have already cut our budgets by £87m and things have been tough.
To have to find another £96m of cuts over the next four years is near on impossible.

Bell’s claims about cuts are exaggerated to say the least. He says that: “we have already cut our budgets by £87m”. This is a very misleading statement and forward looking statements by Labour and the council officers can be discounted as being equally misleading.

The reality is that total spending by the core of Ealing council increased by about £10 million in cash terms in the 2010-2014 period of the last council. If the council hadn’t been packing away underspends into reserves or using them to pay for capital projects spending would probably have been maintained in real terms in the core of Ealing council.

I asked Question 41 at the end of the last financial year:

Please state the council’s revenue spending for the following financial years: 2009/10, 2010/11, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2013/14.

If figures for the last financial year are not available please use the latest forecast out turn figures. Please separate out education spending and housing benefit spending. Everything else can be lumped together unless there are other large items that distort the figures.

The council, typically, did not answer my question as straightforwardly as I might like, in a way that is easily comprehensible by the public. That is because they are embarrassed by the gulf between the story they have been telling and the truth.

In the four year period education spending increased from £203.3 million to £259.7 million, a rise of £56.4 million or 28%. Generous indeed and well above inflation.

In the four year period housing benefit spending increased from £236.8 million to £271.3 million, a rise of £34.5 million or 15%. Certainly a real increase after inflation.

The council received a totally new public health grant to take on responsibilities from the NHS. It was much more generous than they were expecting at £21.4 million and council officers are convinced they will be able to manage this money much more effectively than the NHS and make it go further.

Spending on council housing rose from £65.1 million to £69.0 million, a modest rise of £3.9 million or 6%. Maybe a slight fall in real terms but more or less flat.

Finally, we get the everything else column which is a net figure for the core of Ealing Council. In other words they have taken total spending and already subtracted that part of it which is covered by income from fees and charges so the actual spend is many £10 millions larger than this. They don’t want you to see the whole picture because it makes the “cuts” look rather more manageable.

As it happens £10 million of the “cuts” Bell talks about are increases in charges for everything from parking to paying for carers. So the bit you can’t see got £10 million larger but they are not admitting to it. No wonder they say local government finance is opaque.

The figure for “All other spend net of fees & charges” was level rising from £337.2 million in 2009/10 to £337.3 million in 2013/14. This is a real terms drop but it is not so bad due to the extra £10 million from increased charges which is hidden in this presentation of the sums.

This picture doesn’t even tell the whole story as the council packed money away into reserves by underspending over the last four years. If the council had wanted to maintain spending in real terms it could have done by not underspending. The modest real terms cut has only arisen because the council chose to underspend on the current account.

Overall the council has seen flat or growing spending in some areas and only suffered a real terms cut to its core because of underspends. Julian Bell, and the council officers who maintain the fiction of cuts, really should be ashamed of the way they misrepresent the facts.

Yesterday Labour’s Bassam Mahfouz was bigging up the Borough’s recycling last year – 44%. This is an improvement on the administration’s previous three years which showed only a very slow improvement in recycling rates after they doubled under the Conservatives.

When the Concersatives were in charge recycling doubled from 19% to 38% in four years. Under Labour the rate of increase has been much, much slower. Recycling rose from 38% to 44% in the last four years.

Mahfouz refers to “inventive communications”. He maybe should have said “expensive communications”. The council has spent £300,000 talking about recycling over the last year. Most of it was spent in the run up to the local elections – ten times what Labour was allowed to spend on leaflets during the election campaign.

Labour keeps changing its mind on the idea of achieving 50% recycling of household waste in the Borough.

Avail the services of professional waste management agencies and hire a skip bin in Sydney to manage waste efficiently.

At a council meeting on 16th December 2008 Cllr Mahfouz proposed that the council went for a target of recycling 50% of domestic refuse by 2010. This was easy to say in opposition.

At a cabinet meeting on 17th December Labour proposed to spend £700,000 to achieve a target of 50% by 2020 – backed by a massive advertising campaign that just happened to coincide with a local election. £300,000 of this cash was spent on advertising.

You might think that Labour would stick with this target having pledged £700,000 of public funds to get this idea across. But, only a month later, on 20th January the Ealing Labour party launched a pledge card that talked about 50% by 2018.

The benefit of Labour’s latest target is that it does coincide with the electoral cycle. Within days of the end of March 2018 we will know whether the council has achieved the target.

In his last chance to lay out Labour’s case for the local elections this Thursday Labour leader Julian Bell had nothing positive to say. No new ideas. No policies to explain. Instead he laid into the local Conservatives.

He first talked about proposed changes to the NHS. He blames the “Tories” for these changes without mentioning that the driver for “Shaping a Healthier Future” is Labour’s own £20 billion Nicholson Challenge programme which was kicked off in 2009 by Andrew Burnham. Labour’s attempt to rebrand their own policy has been going on for four years now. The proposals we are having to endure were dreamt up by NHS managers in response to a financial constraint that was built into the NHS already in May 2010. None of us like their donut solution which leaves our borough with an A&E hole. But, the courts agreed the process was sound when the council took it to judicial review. The Independent Reconfiguration Panel agreed with NHS North West London’s proposals. The only actor in this whole drama who has given Ealing any relief is the Secretary of State, Jeremy Hunt. Bell and Labour may denigrate Hunt’s promise but it is the best we have had so far. What you will not hear is any Labour politician saying that Ed Balls is going to spend £20 billion undoing Nicholson. Come on Cllr Bell – if Labour is going to undo these changes let’s hear about it. So far we have a promise from Hunt and nothing from Labour.

Bell then goes back to the cuts chant he has been repeating for four years. His argument is rather undermined by council questions (questions 41 and 42), formally answered by council officers, that show that the council is spending much more money than it was in 2010 and is employing the same headcount pretty much. After “unprecedented cuts” the council is the same size as, or even bigger than, it was in 2010. Once you get out of the local government finance hall of mirrors you are left with a huge organisation that is still huge.

Again, you will not hear any Labour politician promising to unwind the tighter financial settlement being imposed on councils.

Labour is trying to scare voters with stories about how extravagant the Conservatives’ pledge card is – at least ours makes some promises unlike Labour’s which is not exactly tangible. In reality our promises are very modest and affordable.

Three years of council tax freeze are already built into the council’s medium term financial strategy (MTFS). The MTFS assumes that parking charges will not rise. The garden tax pledge will cost about 0.15% of the council’s total spending. The roads promise is a choice – there are lots of things we won’t do but we will prioritise the road outside your house. Labour found the money for a useless car park in Southall. Any spare money will go on the road outside your house if the Conservatives are in charge.

Julian Bell and the Ealing Labour party have lost the argument. They are left with cheap insults and scaremongering. The fact is that everyone is talking about the Conservative offer and they like what they see.

The current Labour administration has got the balance wrong between commuters and residents with its latest changes to Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) parking charges.

On the one hand Labour has put up all day visitors’ vouchers three times in three years. They were frozen at a £1 for four years under the Conservatives. Since 2010 they have gone up to £2.50, then to £3.50, and finally to an excruciating £4.50 a day to allow your visitors and tradesmen to park near your home in an all day CPZ. The Conservatives propose to cut this charge to £2.50 as soon as they are elected in May.

On the other hand Labour is rolling out a £2 a day charge for commuters in CPZs in Acton and Ealing, but notably not in Southall. CPZs are only ever introduced as a result large scale commuter or long term parking problems. They are put in near town centres and transport nodes to prevent commuting. Over the last couple of years Labour has allowed commuters to park near Willesden Junction station, near Ealing Town Centre and Northfield Tube station for only £2 a day and most recently it has allowed commuters to park by Ealing Cricket Club just near Ealing Broadway train station.

I reckon that Labour’s Bassam Mahfouz has misjudged this badly. He has got his CPZ pricing wrong. Charging residents’ own visitors, most often their own family, more than twice as much as commuters to park in a CPZ is just plain wrong. The Council’s first priority should be accommodating the needs of residents over commuters.

The Conservatives will reduce the £4.50 visitors’ voucher to £2.50 as soon as we can after 22nd May. This change will cost very little as sales of these vouchers have slumped since their price went through the roof. We will sell many more cheaper vouchers and the cost of this change will be minimal.

The £4.50 charge applies to all day visitors’ vouchers in all day CPZs:

Zone A: Central Ealing
Zone B: Bedford Park
Zone C and D: University of West London
Zone DD: Bollo Bridge
Zone EE: Brentvale
Zone H: Home Zone
Zone K: Acton Central
Zone KK: The Vale
Zone L: Southall
Zone LL: Southall 5
Zone M: Acton Green
Zone MM1: The Drive
Zone R: Southfields (until it moves to two hours of operation)
Zone S: South Ealing
Zone T: The Vale
Zone T1: The Vale
Zone U: Green Man
Zone V: Southall 2
Zone X: Valetta Road

Full details of CPZs can be found here.

The photo above is Valetta Road in East Acton, the ward where I am standing on 22nd. It could easily be Spencer Road in Acton Central or Bollo Bridge Road in South Acton. Acton has had a terrible roads deal under Labour. At first sight this seems surprising as Acton has 9 Labour councillors and the leader of the council, Julian Bell, lives in Acton. Although Labour has committed almost a £1 million to Acton’s roads and footpaths during the 2011-2015 period that they have been in charge this still leaves Acton £1.3 million short.

The following roads and footpaths will be resurfaced in the 2011/2015 period:

As I explained on Thursday Labour is only spending £17.5 million on roads in the current four year cycle, a drop of one third compared with the previous Conservative administration.

If this cash had been shared equally between all 23 Ealing wards they would have got £761K each. East Acton has done least badly but is still short £287K. South Acton has lost £486K. Acton Central has fared worst losing £534K. Across Acton that adds up to £1,307K.

Why has Acton lost this money? Because it has been diverted to Ealing North.