Category: Ealing and Northfield

The Southfield ward, the part of Chiswick which comes under the London Borough of Ealing, has had a terrible roads deal under Labour.

Pictured right we have one of our Southfield candidates Patrick Barr on the repeatedly patched Shirley Road.

No footpaths will be renewed in the 2011/2015 period during which the current Labour council has been in charge of deciding road spending.

Only three short stretches of road are being resurfaced:

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. Southfield has only had £232K. Southfield has lost £529K.

The Southfield LibDem councillors cannot protect Southfield from the depredations of a Labour council. The only people who can make sure that Southfield gets its fair share are the Conservatives.

We know that Labour has cut road spending by a third (which is £8 million). As well as this huge cut the distribution of the remaining money has been very uneven. I commented on this last year but the pattern remains the same this year.

If you analyse where the roads and pavements have been worked on there is a marked divergence between each of Ealing’s three Parliamentary constituencies.

Ealing Southall has lost out, getting only 1/4 of the money rather than the 1/3rd it might have expected – and down a third at the outset too. Ealing Central and Acton has done even worse, getting less than 1/5th of the overall spend. Meanwhile Ealing North has had over half the money, more than the other two constituencies combined.

You might expect some ebb and flow from year to year but to see such a notable distribution over four years seems strange indeed to me. I reckon that Ealing Southall is down about £4 million compared to when the Conservatives were in power and Ealing Central and Acton is down £5 million. The lucky people in Ealing North are £1 million up even in these straightened times. It is incredible to see one constituency getting 3 times more than another over four years.

Street drinking is an issue across the Borough. It is a problem in otherwise very law-abiding Northfield where I am currently a councillor. It is a very visible problem around the Mount in Acton but more generally across Acton too. It is a problem across the wards of Northolt, Greenford and Perivale where every other alley is used for drinking or as a toilet. It occurs in many of our parks. I have heard this complaint on the doorstep in every ward in the Borough.

The whole borough is a controlled drinking zone so the police do have some tools to deal with it. There is not enough evidence that they are using them consistently and effectively. Street drinking is not a priority for the police – it should be.

A Conservative led council can provide political leadership. It can use the council’s communications tools such as Around Ealing to explain in a measured way that this behaviour is not acceptable. It can task its community safety team on this issue. It can use the licensing laws to track down misbehaving businesses and councils have had success in voluntary agreements not to sell cheap, high strength products.

We don’t think that this will be remotely easy. It will require a consistent approach over time. We cannot change behaviour that has been tolerated for a long time by the wave of a magic wand. We can start the journey though and we can change the behaviour over time.

Too many of our roads are in a poor state. The photo above is Valetta Road in East Acton, the ward where I am standing on 22nd.

The chart above shows the Borough’s own road spending this century on the Borough’s own roads. For 12 years from 1994 to 2006, Labour neglected our roads terribly. In 12 years they spent £12 million. This is ridiculous for a borough of our size. It got so bad that in 1999/2000 our borough spent nothing on its roads.

When the Tories came into power in 2006 we realised that we had a huge problem. We immediately put £500K into the roads in the current year and then put in £25 million.

When it came into power Labour thought that it could again skimp on roads but it didn’t quite go back to its bad old ways. They thought that they could get away with spending £15.5 million over four years (a 40% drop) but after a constant campaign from the Tories they recently found an extra £2 million to put in. Interestingly for all of Julian Bell’s talk of “unprecedented cuts” this extra cash came from an underspend on revenue spending. So the final figure is £17.5 million, a drop of just under a third (31%).

RT @itvlondon:What did your council spend on repairing #potholes last year? Ealing came top with a bill of almost £1m http://t.co/dCqIiALa2O

— Julian Bell (@juliangbell) March 31, 2014

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Rather stupidly Labour leader Bell has been bragging recently that our borough has London’s largest spending on pot holes. This is merely an admission that we have underinvested in our roads. This is why the Tories will prioritise road (and pavement) spending. It makes it safer for pedestrians. It makes life easier for cyclists. It hugely improves the environment that people live in – the same people who are paying the council tax. Our philosophy is that your money should be spent on your doorstep and not on new car parks and doing up the Town Hall. There is less money to go around so it should not be spent on distant municipal projects.

For three years running Labour has increased parking charges in the borough. This year, election year, they have given us a year off. For four years the previous Conservative administration froze these charges. The Labour administration has set out to double its income from these charges as a part of its efforts to add £10 million a year to the fees and charges it collects from the public.

Parking permits in the 2/3 hours zones are £50. For four years they were £25. They have doubled (100% increase).

Parking permits in the all day zones are £80. For four years they were £45. Again they have almost doubled (78% increase).

Hourly visitors’ vouchers in the 2/3 hour zones have gone up 50%. They were 40p for four years. Now they are 60p.

It is a lot worse in the all day zones. They used to get 3 hours for 40p. Now it is 60p an hour. A 350% increase. The all day visitor’s vouchers were £1 for four years. They have gone up 350% to £4.50. We intend to do something about this particularly egregious rise but more on that another day.

These charges far exceed the cost of administering and policing the controlled parking zones. By the time the council has finished it will have at least doubled its income from these charges. In just the first year of Labour’s rises income from parking charges rose 43%.

Interestingly Labour is calling our pledges “costly promises”. If they reckon that freezing these charges after they have been ramped so steeply is “costly” I can only imagine that they intend to double parking income again in the next four years if they get back in.

The council used this graphic earlier in the year when it froze council tax for the 6th year running. It makes clear that the Ealing council tax freeze started back in 2009 when the Conservatives were running the show. We froze council tax in 2009 and 2010.

Since then the Labour council has frozen it for four years. Great. This is really good. Council tax is typically people’s 2nd largest bill after their rent or their mortgage (computed with VA home loan calculator). For the last four years the council tax freeze has been paid for by £20 million of council tax freeze grant from the “Tory-led Coalition”. Shame that the council only makes passing mention this grant its press release. When the Conservatives were freezing there was no council tax freeze grant, but that is another story.

Ealing Labour is promising to freeze the council tax again in 2015/16 if it gets back into power again. Good again. The Ealing Labour group doesn’t mention the additional £5 million of council tax freeze grant that makes that possible.

After 2015/16 Labour are silent. After 2015/16 the government runs out, as does the grant (the “Tory-led Coalition” will have given the council £25.2 million in council tax freeze grant by then).

Ealing Conservatives say that council tax should be frozen for the full four years of the next council.

Labour says it reserves the right to hike the council tax as it pleases as soon as the council tax freeze grant runs out.

It is worth remembering that Labour hiked council tax by 47% in 2002-2006. In 2003 they hiked it by 26% in one year. You can’t trust Labour with money.

The second thing that people have been telling us time and again on the doorsteps over the last two years is that they resent Labour’s £40 garden tax. When we came into power in 2006 the old Labour council was charging 50p a bag for pink biodegradable plastic sacks – they were excruciatingly expensive for the council to buy. The collection was on alternate weeks so people often left these sacks out on the wrong day. In 2006 the Borough’s recycling rate was 19%. Our approach was that recycling should be easy and free. We got rid of the 50p charge and made the collection weekly. Due to this and other changes we doubled the Borough’s recycling rate in 4 years. When we left power in 2010 it was 38%.

When Labour proposed its £40 garden tax 5,000 people signed a petition against it but Labour carried on with its plans anyway.

Labour took us backward – charging £40 for the garden waste service and making it bi-weekly again and completely stopping it for weeks over Christmas. In 2012/13, when the new contract was introduced, the constant increase in recycling rates we had been used to halted. The administration is hoping to achieve 43% this year (we haven’t seen the final figures yet).

This chart shows the annual recycling rate as published in the council annual performance report.

Under the Conservatives recycling in the Borough doubled from 19% to 38%. Under Labour it has gone up a very modest 5% from 38% to 43%. We believe that a free, weekly garden waste service is key to getting recycling going again and we will make this change when we are elected. The change is relatively inexpensive, especially when you consider the high number of garden waste fly-tips we are experiencing.

Local Conservatives have put cleaning at the top of our pledge card. This is the issue most commonly raised with us on the doorstep. We cleaned up the Borough in 2006 and now we need to clean up the Borough again.

Meanwhile the fourth pledge on Ealing Labour’s flimsy pledge card is “We will make Ealing cleaner”. Labour knows that cleaning is an issue or it would not have included this pledge on the card. They really shouldn’t have to make this promise. In 2010 they inherited a clean borough. Cleaning worked.

Since Labour appointed Enterprise to take over the cleaning contract two years ago in April 2012 cleaning has been broken. It has been broken for two years and is still not fixed.

The facts are clear. In the last full year before the previous contractor May Gurney gave up the contract they achieved a first time cleaning rate to the required standard of 88% on average. You might have expected them to slacken off at some point knowing that they had lost the contract, but no, they did a great job until the end.

Amey/Enterprise has on average, over two years, across the whole borough left 29% of the Borough’s streets unacceptably dirty. After two years they are just shy of the level consistently achieved by their predecessors and they are still nowhere near the required service level laid down in the contract.

The picture with missed collections has been equally dire.

In the year before May Gurney lost the contract they managed to get missed collections down to an average of 972 per month. The average over the last two years has been 3,617, almost 4 times as many. Amey/Enterprise has never been able to get missed collections below 2,000 per month. Over two years an additional 60,000 calls have been made to the council to report missed collections. To this day when you dial the council’s help desk you still get an autoresponder that says “Press 1 for a missed collection”.

The Conservatives know how to clean up the Borough. We did it before. When we took over in 2006 Ealing wasn’t just dirty – it was the dirtiest London borough.

The Ealing Labour party is prepared to lie and cheat to keep power in Ealing.

They have just launched a new leaflet that uses imagery paid for by the council as a part of the cross party campaign against A&E closures in the Borough.

The banner shown here was produced at public expense. The graphics are all owned by LBE. How did the Labour party get hold of this banner for their purely political photoshoot? They really should have known better. They really do not care if they misuse public property as a part of their campaign. The people behind the banner are a Labour GLA assembly member, two MPs and the leader of the council. They know they are cheating and they just don’t care.

Labour needs to stop cheating. The leaflet is a pack of lies to but more on that later.