Category: Ealing and Northfield

The Labour party paid for someone to push this through my door today whilst we were in the park, Walpole Park as it happens. Let’s take apart Labour’s spin and lies.

Let’s start with the “Investing” box. The council spends almost nothing on cycling. It merely rebrands the London Mayor’s spending on cycling as its own. The cycle hub was paid for by Transport for London, not the council. It would certainly have happened if the Tories were in power.

Not quite sure what they mean by “a new transport interchange at the station”. There is a modernisation of the railway bit of the station going to happen with Crossrail and a new frontage. Hardly a new transport interchange and all paid for out of the Crossrail project. Nothing to do with the council. The council might have insisted on escalators, an exit to the east of the station and a more sympathetic frontage but all three of these have slipped through it grasp. When the Tories were in power we kept a close eye on Crossrail with a scrutiny panel. I would hope we would have got a better deal for Ealing out of Crossrail than this council has.

The Walpole Park line particularly rankles with me as I kicked the project off in 2008. The early stages of these things take a while. It was a Conservative administration that allocated the council’s share of the money for this and I personally met the Heritage Lottery Fund to argue the case for this project, more here. It is great that the Labour council has continued this project (it was so far advanced it would have been hard to stop frankly) but to try to claim it as a uniquely Labour achievement is simply unjust.

Much of what happens in local government is uncontroversial. Good ideas prosper hopefully but take a while to work through the system. More than 4 years often. This kind of dividing lines nonsense is just another big Labour lie.

The current Labour administration has had little flexibility in capital spending, like ours before, due to the demands of school expansion. Where it has had latitude it has spent £2.5 million on an empty car park in Southall and £10 million on new offices for council staff. The car park really was their idea and one we consistently fought. The officers tried to interest us in building them new offices, we said no. Funny how these two don’t appear in the leaflets.

Looking at the right hand box, the local Tories also wholeheartedly approve of the Labour group freezing council tax for four years (like just about every other council in the country). It might be nice if Labour acknowledged the £20 million of council tax freeze grant it has pocketed from the government to pay for it in large part (which is why most other councils also did the same thing). We might have gone further but I am certain that we would not have put up the council tax at all at the very least.

The “Tories attack Ealing families” logo simply shows you just who is the nasty, name calling party in this borough at least. No-one is “attacking Ealing families” unless you call leaving Ealing’s roads unmended and dirty an attack on families. I wouldn’t use that language. I would say that the Labour party is lying to “Ealing families” on a massive scale though.

Ealing’s council leader, Cllr Julian Bell, has used his last opportunity in 2013 to write in the Gazette to return to the NHS and Ealing’s A&E closures. Labour has been trying to get away with its big NHS lie ever since the 2010 general election. This press release from Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma is typical. Labour’s big NHS lie was the basis of Onkar Sahota’s GLA campaign and it will get repeated all through the next 17 months until May 2015.

Bell used his New Year message to discuss a matter over which he has little if no control to the total exclusion of anything he has any responsibility for such as the poor state of our roads or the litter in our streets. All very dull bread and butter matters and nothing you can take through the courts on the public purse.

As I have explained before the NHS changes in Ealing follow on directly from Labour party policies that were spelt out in their 2010 manifesto. Anyone with any knowledge of NHS finances knows that the Shaping a Healthier Future programme is being driven by the Nicholson challenge – a programme put in place in 2009 by the then Labour Secretary of Health, Andrew Burnham. It is designed to take out £20 billion in efficiencies and put it back into new services in order that the NHS can deal with new demand within a flat real terms budget.

It is quite easy to prove that this is Labour’s policy – they wrote it down on page 4:3 of their 2010 manifesto:

This is the Nicholson Challenge in black and white in the Labour manifesto.

Labour’s big NHS lie is that it would all be different under Labour. Yet the policy constraints that have given rise to Shaping a Healthier Future were all put in place by the previous Labour government; the Nicholson Challenge and the 35 year PFI at the West Middlesex.

Shaping a Healthier Future came up with a solution for North West London (NWL) that was manifestly unfair to Ealing, a solution that was opposed by all local politicians. The NHS NWL bureaucrats came up with this not the government. The courts agreed that the NHS NWL proposal was reasonable and lawful. The Independent Reconfiguration Panel agreed with NHS NWL subject to a couple of caveats. The only decision maker who has done anything at all to mitigate the effect of the Shaping a Healthier proposals on Ealing is the Secretary of State, Jeremy Hunt.

Bell’s last paragraph make his intention clear:

Well now we know the truth and the people of Ealing have only one recourse left to them – to hit the government where it hurts in the ballot box at the local and European elections on the 22 May 2014 and at the General Election in May 2015.

Bell knows he is lying to you and that his party is not proposing to find another £20 billion to undo Nicholson. Bell, Sahota and Sharma really are that blatant.

I didn’t get a chance to speak last night in the NHS debate at full council. In my speech I wanted to explore the policy background to Shaping a Healthier Future (SaHF). A bit wonkish maybe but if you look at the history of this project and the policy environment it becomes clear quite how venal Labour has been over the future of our hospitals.

Anyone with any knowledge of NHS finances knows that the SaHF programme is being driven by the Nicholson challenge – a programme put in place in 2009 by the then Labour Secretary of Health, Andrew Burnham. It is designed to take out £20 billion in efficiencies and put it back into new services in order that the NHS can deal with new demand within a flat real terms budget.

It is quite easy to prove that this is Labour’s policy – they wrote it down on page 4:3 of their 2010 manifesto:

This is the Nicholson Challenge in black and white in the Labour manifesto.

It easy is to show too that this is the driver for Shaping a Healthier Future. Go to page 17 of the consultation document where it says:

So Labour’s own policy has led directly to NHS NWL needing to find £1 billion of savings in North West London and hence this programme.

Now you might well say that the Conservatives didn’t have to keep Labour’s policy and that is a fair criticism. I might add though that Labour isn’t proposing to find £20 billion to make Nicholson go away and that this sum is not far short of all council tax collected every year or all business rates collected every year. It is a truly large sum of money.

What is clear though is that if Labour had been in power the overall financial settlement for the NHS would not have been any better, indeed it might have been worse as the Conservatives have made keeping overall NHS spending rising in real terms into a totemic promise. SaHF would probably not have looked very different under a Labour government as it would have been the same set of managers working to the same set of constraints.

If it wasn’t hard enough for the health service managers designing a response to Nicholson they also had to contend with the fact that Labour’s Alan Milburn signed off on a 35 PFI deal for the West Middlesex Hospital in 2001. Against that fixed constraint Ealing Hospital for one was always going to lose out.

So Labour’s “Tories close your hospitals” line is pretty much upside down. It is rare that a policy is so clearly and easily traceable from its effects on the ground back to the original decision. The stage was set by Labour and the only person listening to our borough is Jeremy Hunt.

Ealing’s recycled plastic bottle Christmas tree has been causing a minor stir this week. No doubt Labour’s councillor Bassam Mahfouz, who holds the Transport and Environment portfolio, thought that it would be bracing and improving for residents to be hectored about re-cycling at Christmas. It is quite right for the council to promote re-cycling for many different reasons. It saves the council money and allows it to keep council tax low. It often provides high quality waste streams that can be used to displace new raw materials and save energy. All good stuff.

But Mahfouz’s Christmas tree is pretty insulting if you are a tax payer. It looks pretty enough at night to be sure but during the day it looks drab and the railings around it are reminiscent of road works. The insult is the mighty £12,961 cost of this project.

I don’t know how you get to a place in your head where you think this is a reasonable way to spend taxpayers’ money. The latest figures I could find (2011) for earnings of residents of the Ealing Central and Acton constituency where this tree has been placed state that the average (median) annual gross pay of residents is £31,198. With a personal allowance of £9,440 this tax year and all the rest of this income being taxed at 20% the average person is paying £4,352 of tax in the constituency. By my reckoning it took three Ealing taxpayers a year to pay enough tax to pay for this nonsense. Never again please.

Labour’s favourite insult at the full council meeting last night is that the Conservatives are out of touch. Perhaps Mahfouz should look in the mirror.

Last night the council’s Property Strategy was due to be discussed at the council’s cabinet meeting. This title is code for selling council assets like day care centres to build three new offices for council staff in Acton, Greenford and Southall. In the event this element of the report was withdrawn without discussion:

To seek delegated authority to acquire 42 Lower Boston Road, Hanwell W7 2ND

It did seem to be out of place. It is a land acquisition to support the expansion of the adjacent St Mark’s primary school in Hanwell. Sure it is a property transaction but unrelated to the rest of the property strategy.

It is a matter of public record (go to Land Registry and pay £3) that this land is yet another part of Ealing’s GLA member, Onkar Sahota’s, extensive property empire, more here.

After council leader Julian Bell and Sahota’s dealing over his planning permission for Castlebar Road you might think that council would either be steering well clear of any transaction with Sahota or doing it in a totally transparent way.

It may well be that Onkar Sahota owns some land that St Mark’s needs. Given the history, the transaction cannot be waved through hidden on gold papers in an obscure corner of a cabinet report.

On Saturday afternoon the Ealing Central and Acton Constituency Labour Party selected Rupa Huq as their candidate to fight Conservative Angie Bray at the next general election. Rupa is a local girl to the tips of her toes – she lives in my ward Northfield, and a pleasant woman she is.

One thing I find slightly strange about the way she presents herself is her banging on about being “deputy mayoress”. Rupa even uses a photo of herself in the council chamber with her ribbon and badge on her twitter account. In a piece in the Guardian she said “I have become deputy mayoress of the London borough of Ealing”. This is a strange form of words. Cllr John Gallagher was appointed Deputy Mayor, being a long serving South Acton councillor. As he does not have a wife, he nominated Rupa to be his consort which is a slightly different thing from being deputy mayor.

In her Guardian piece Rupa burbled on about public service:

I’m talking about serving in local government, the selfless calling to represent your local community. The issue has become central to my own life: in recent weeks I have become deputy mayoress of the London borough of Ealing. The result has been an eye-opener as some of the vestiges of pomp, ceremony and patronage seem to be alive and well – despite our 13-year entanglement with the non-hierarchical, New Labour-induced New Britain.

Now I am sure that Rupa works hard as a university lecturer and is an all round good stick but she has never served in local government except to ride in the Mayor’s car and eat the odd vol-au-vent accompanying John Gallagher on his duties. Rupa did indeed try to become a councillor in 2010 but failed. You can see the results here. She got 1,754 votes.

Both Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma (1994/5) and Ealing North MP Stephen Pound (1995/6) were Mayors of the London Borough of Ealing so I guess Rupa feels that maybe she will get a boost too through her municipal connections but she might make her role a bit clearer.

I live in the Ealing Central and Acton constituency and I will be working hard over the next year and a half to get our excellent MP Angie Bray re-elected. I wish Rupa good luck but I will be making it my business to make sure that Rupa sticks to the facts.

Speak up for decency in British politics, and add your name to @Ed_Miliband 's – http://t.co/06cfacQoTr

— Sitarah Anjum (@SitarahAnjum) October 1, 2013

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Speak up for decency in British politics, and add your name to Ed Miliband's – http://t.co/hEwrXeWWmn

— Yoel Gordon (@ElthornePR) October 1, 2013

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I did not like the Mail story on Ralph Miliband. That said his son is being being entirely cycnical in using the interest that story has received as a tool for harvesting e-mails from the public. Local Labour councillors are joining in like good soliders. Apparently Labour has collected 10,000 e-mails. If you are foolish enough to follow the links above you will get to this webpage:

Not only is this ploy cynical but Labour is breaking the law. This line at the bottom of this is not sufficient for the Information Commissioner.

The Labour Party and its elected representatives may contact you using the information you supply. If you do not wish to be contacted, please write to the Communications Unit at The Labour Party, Labour Central, Kings Manor, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6PA.

Guidance from the Information Commissioner says:

Organisations must not make it difficult to opt out, for example
by asking customers to complete a form or confirm in writing.
It is good practice to allow the individual to respond directly to
the message – in other words, to use the same simple method
as required for the soft opt-in. In any event, as soon as a
customer has clearly said that they don’t want the texts or
emails, the organisation must stop, even if the customer hasn’t
used its preferred method of communication.

All you will get for “adding your name” is Labour junk mail.

Back in April last year when a new contractor, Enterprise, took over the Borough’s street cleaning contract it fell apart spectacularly. A year later and a larger group called Amey took over Enterprise on 8th April 2013. 17 months on and we are still not getting the service we should be getting.

This graph shows the progress that Ealing has made with street cleaning over those 17 months.

In its last year of running the contract, even when it knew it had lost the re-tendering competition, May Gurney got 88% of our streets clean first time. Their contractual target was 90%. At this level our street cleaning wasn’t perfect but it was good. The Conservatives were glad that our legacy of a clean borough had been maintained.

Enterprise/Amey has had a very patchy record. After the initial bags-in-the-street crisis of last April the service went off at the the end of last year and again this spring. It has improved since its May nadir of 65% clean first time to 72% in August. On average over the first 17 months of the contract 30% of Ealing’s streets have been unacceptably dirty across the whole borough every month for 17 months.

The Enterprise contract requires the contractor to get at least 95% of streets grade A clean. The original concept of the contract was that this would happen on first clean. Instead Enterprise has consistently only managed 70%.

There is a similar story with missed collections. May Gurney consistently got the number of missed collections down below 1,000 per month for the last year of its contract. Enterprise/Amey has averaged 4,000 missed collections per month over 17 months and has never got them below 2,000. That is a lot of phone calls from miserable residents that go like this:

To report a missed refuse or recycling collection press 1.

All of this leads me to question does the council really care about this? Has it concluded that a bit rubbish is better than a lot rubbish? Has Amey no interest in this contract? We certainly have not heard anymore about Cllr Mahfouz’s spot checks. Has he done any lately? If he has they haven’t achieved very much.

This graph compares PM10 particulate pollution on Horn Lane to the Western Avenue and the Hanger Lane Gyratory since Angie Bray went to visit the Horn Lane goods yard on 12th July to find out first hand why this area is so badly polluted. The picture shows that apart from the fact that the Horn Lane monitoring site was broken down for a couple of weeks in late July and early August Horn Lane is often 4 times worse than these two very busy roads and even spikes up to 6 times.

Today is the first bi-monthly meeting between residents and operators. These meetings were one of the actions coming out of the first session in July. The graph shows that we still have a long way to go.

Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, Labour’s Transport and Environment man, often makes statements that defy reality. Today’s is another. In response to my suggestion that the council is taking liberties with CPZ charges Mahfouz says:

Our figures show that, even when taking into account the most recent increase, the cost of administering residential parking is still more that the income generated. The difference is subsidised by council tax payers, many of whom don’t even own a car or live in a CPZ.

This is quite unbelievable. Can the council really be that inefficient? When it charges £80 or £50 for a parking permit does that activity really consume all of that cash? When you have to keep £30 worth of 60p visitor’s vouchers in a drawer in case a tradesman calls the council isn’t making any money out of that? The £4.50 paid for a daily voucher really just disappears in a puff of smoke as soon as it reaches the council’s grasp? The permits have doubled in price. Some of the vouchers have gone up by 350%. Meanwhile the council’s costs have gone down. They withdrew costly face-to-face transactions in February. The CEOs now enforce CPZs on motorbikes. The new phone service saves money and offloads the payment charge on to the customer. The vouchers have been standardised saving inventory and admin costs. I could go on.

There are three possible explanations for Mahfouz’s statement:

– Cllr Mahfouz is telling a lie
– Cllr Mahfouz really doesn’t understand the numbers and is just talking nonsense
– the council is so wasteful that that the £3.24 million a year it collects from CPZs is all used up on operational costs.

I have asked that these numbers are laid out in detail at a meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee so that Mahfouz’s silly assertion can be tested. Note that Mahfouz chooses not to back up his argument with any numbers. He is talking nonsense.