Category: Ealing and Northfield

Today Ealing Council issued a press release talking about its excellent food recycling scheme. I am very happy to acknowledge that we inherited this scheme from the previous administration and have been enthusiastically moving it forward. The Council has been collecting residents’ food leftovers in green food caddies since 2006. In 2007 it began a six-month trial in partnership with waste management company Cawleys and BIOGEN. Cawleys handle the bulk collection of Ealing’s waste and deliver it to BIOGEN’s Bedfordshire based anaerobic digestion plant.

Seeing this and having Charlton Heston’s recent sad death in mind I was immediately reminded of his excellent sci-fi movie Soylent Green. The plot involved a future dystopia with food scarcity and a corporation manufacturing a food which turned out to be made of euthanased bodies. Maybe one day I will have to wangle a trip to the BIOGEN plant to check where our food goes.

The good news is that the usual post mortem movie season will allow us to see Soylent Green again sooner rather than later.

Yesterday the BBC picked up on the Hanwell lamppost saga also seen at Ealing Times here. This is a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

All the street lights in Ealing are due to be replaced with modern lighting over a five year cycle under a PFI deal signed by the previous, Labour, administration. There was little consultation on the original deal, any consultation being limited to conservation panels in conservation areas. In order to save money a small number of modern “heritage style” columns were procured under the PFI for conservation areas.

Bizarrely one of the places these new heritage columns went in was the post war Cuckoo Estate, a conservation area but one where Victorian style lighting was no use to anyone.

As the PFI got rolled out the new Tory administration was made aware by various residents/campaign groups that the loss of heritage street lighting was of concern to residents, notably the SEAL campaign. Council leader, Jason Stacey, has put a deal of effort into meeting residents and taking their concerns on board, see report of meeting with SEAL last year. As a part of the budgeting process the council have made funds available (£456,000) to save as many of the original columns as are salvageable. The concept we came up with was to concentrate these in a heritage area adjacent to Ealing’s central parks and Pitzhanger Manor. This would have the benefit of saving the lights and enhancing the council’s investment in Pitzhanger Manor.

Yesterday Ealing Times picked up my line about Cllr Sharma collecting £1,800 an hour for his appearance at Thursday’s Education, Leisure and Children’s Social Services Standing Scrutiny Panel, see previous posting.

A commenter calling themself “Idon’tlike cheapshots” left this comment:

I was under the impression that Cllrs were paid an allowance rather than a salary or attendance allowance. I was also under the impression that a large amount of a councillor’ workload was community engagement, helping with constituents casework etc.
If Cllr Taylor has any evidence that the Mr Sharma has not been working for the residents of Norwood Green then please tell us.

Whoever left this comment, my money is on Cllr Bell, really isn’t that clever. “Cheapshots” is a typical Bell phrase used to dismiss a valid point by implying it somehow belittles councillors to point out that one of their number is not giving good value for money. It is Sharma doing all the damage.

The phrase “community engagement” is also a total give away. Only political insiders, and only Labour ones at that, use this kind of junk language. Fess up Cllr Bell.

Cllr Sharma smiled gamely for my photo at the end of the Education, Leisure and Children’s Social Services Standing Scrutiny Panel tonight. It was his first appearance at a council meeting since 9th October when he turned up an hour late for a council meeting and hung around for about 5 minutes. Tonight he dutifully turned up at 7pm and stayed on until the end of the meeting at 9.30pm. By turning up 6 days before he was due to be struck off Sharma effectively earned £4,500 (the maths goes like this: the basic councillors allowance is £9,000 so six months worth is £4,500). That is the equivalent of £1,800 per hour. The only people who earn money like that are very spiffy barristers and Sharma really isn’t in that league.

I only turned up shortly after 8pm – I am not on the panel I was only there to harass my MP. I had hoped that Sharma would get some stick but I guess that there wasn’t much hope of that as this panel is chaired by Cllr Julian Bell who also happens to be on Sharma’s Parliamentary pay roll, working on his casework, etc – ventriloquists and dummies springs to mind.

Today the Ealing Conservative Group (of councillors) issued a press release saying:

Ealing’s streets continued to get even cleaner in March, with the best figures yet from inspectors being released today. The monitoring figures reveal that in March 2008, 94% of the Borough’s streets were cleaned to ‘Grade A’ standard. This is up from 81% in the same time last year, and just 58% when monitoring began in October 2006. The figures also show that every part of the Borough is very much cleaner than it was under Labour. Not a single ward falls below 90% ‘Grade A’ standard.

Continue reading “94% of Ealing streets Grade A”

Another Ealing Conservative Group press release – this time road and footpath resurfacing/replacement. In our first three years in power we will have spent more than Labour did in seven years on roads. And we have the roads to show for it!

I reported last week that Councillor Sharma, the Ealing Southall MP, needed to turn up to a council meeting by the 9th April if he wasn’t to be booted out of the council. It looks like he has developed a sudden interest in Education, Leisure and Children’s Social Services. It seems he will be substituting for Cllr Bagha who has manfully stepped aside to allow Sharma to turn up and claim his £4,500 for another six months of “service” – the council’s rules effectively say you will be struck off if you don’t attend a meeting for six months. Sharma hasn’t turned up since a five minute appearance at a council meeting on 9th October last year. According to a revised agenda I saw today, reproduced below, Sharma has been officially substituted for this meeting. He is very brave – he will get roasted.

Yesterday the Ealing Conservative Group (of councillors) issued a press release pointing out that Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, has only got two weeks to attend a meeting before he gets chucked out of the council for not attending meetings. They say:

Cllr Virendra Sharma MP is just 14 days away from being forcibly ejected from the Council for non-attendance.

The Ealing Southall MP has attended just five minutes of one Council meeting during the eight months he has been a Member of Parliament.* Despite his failure to attend Council meetings he has continued to claim his £9,000 councillors’ allowance.

The last meeting he attended (in part) was Full Council on 9 October last year. He now has just two weeks – until 9 April – before he disqualifies himself from sitting on the Council. Ealing’s constitution says that any Member who does not attend a meeting for six months automatically ceases to be a councillor.

ENDS

*Cllr Sharma has not attended the following Council meetings that he was scheduled to attend since his election to Parliament on 19 July 2007: Southall Area Committee on 19 September 2007, 27 November 2007 and 23 January 2008; Transport and Environment Scrutiny panel on 17 October 2007, 19 December 2007, 30 January 2008 and 13 March 2008; Full Council on 11 December 2007, 19 February 2008 and 4 March 2008; Planning on 17 October 2007 and 30 January 2008.

Sharma has been claiming his £9,000 a year basic allowance for being a councillor but the only thing he has turned up for was a few minutes of a council meeting on 9th October. He was an hour late and only stayed for a few minutes.

If you look at the council’s meetings programme there is not much going on over the next couple of weeks. The only thing for the rest of this month is the Adoption panel on 31st March. It would be pretty inappropriate for him to turn up there to claim his £9,000. The next week there is the Cabinet meeting and two scrutiny panels. As well as having no reason to be there Sharma will know that he will get a lots of stick from Conservative members if he turns up there. I guess that leaves the Shadow Cabinet meeting on 7th April. If he only turns up here for a few minutes he can stay on as a councillor for another six months without lifting a finger and pick up another £4,500 of allowances. Maybe a few people will turn up at Shadow Cabinet for once to give him a bit of a welcome.

In February it became apparent that Ealing is set to lose 8 Post Offices and a further 3 will close near to the Borough boundary, see previous posting. Whipped men one and all, our three local Labour MPs Stephen Pound, Virendra Sharma and Andrew Slaughter all voted on Wednesday in favour of the closure programme.

On the night the government’s majority was slashed to only 20 but the Ealing three were not up for rebelling, see BBC coverage.

At least two of our MPs have been trying to have their cake and eat it. Sharma made gnomic noises to the Ealing Times last week and Andrew Slaughter was lambasted by Richard Barnes in the Ealing Times today. I guess Sharma is too busy with his foreign trips to do any actual campaigning.

One of the worst offenders is the witless Karen Buck, MP for Regent’s Park and Kensington North, who the day after she voted to close the Post Offices was blaming it all on the Tories in her blog, see here.

The Conservatives claim to be fighting to save local Post Offices, but without putting in a penny of extra subsidy. Before 1997, the Conservatives did not subsidise the Post Office. We have put in £2 billion and will be spending more than £1 billion between now and 2011, but only 4,000 Post offices- less than a third of the total- pay their way, and 4 million people fewer used the service last year, compared with three years ago. It is absolutely right that we should subsidise this important service, and I am fighting very hard to maintain it locally.

Indeed, we just won the battle over the Harrow Road crown Post Office in Queen’s Park. What we must now accept is the argument of an opposition which closed Post Offices in the 80s and 90s, offered no subsidy and are not promising any more money themselves.

Let’s deconstruct this. The Tories are not in power so are not in a position to subsidise anything. She does not admit that she voted to close the Post Offices the night before. She admits that the Tories could run them without subsidy but Labour subsidises them and still manages to close them – so you have to pay for less service, at least with the Tories you didn’t have to pay. Doh! Apparently there has been a big slump in the number of customers over the last three years – because the government took a number of tasks away from the Post Office network.

Boy, is this woman dumb.

Karen Buck has Ealing Central and Acton candidate Bassam Mahfouz working for her as her little helper – hopefully he is a bit brighter than this.