Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Mayor does not like the body that runs the London Fire Brigade. It is called the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority. The reason he does not like it is because he does not control it. If you want to know why LFEPA does not pay a contribution to the Londoner (see previous posting) it is because LFEPA told him to bugger off.

There are 17 people on the Authority, 8 Assembly Members and 9 councillors. Now that both the Assembly and councils are dominated by large Tory groups the Mayor knows that LFEPA will be even less controllable.

This is democracy at work but the Mayor is using his powers to frustrate it. The Mayor has turned down all the Conservative and LibDem nominations except for one Tory woman councillor on the basis that they are too white and too male.

It is a bit hard to know what to do about the Assembly Members on LFEPA. There are 8 places but only 2 BME AMs who are both Labour. The Mayor has approved one Labour BME AM, Murad Qureshi, but has left the other one on the bench. As much as the Tories and LibDems might want to nominate BME AMs the hard fact is that they have not got any. Is this the point the Mayor is trying to make? Why doesn’t he resign his own job as he is himself the classic white, middle-aged, male politician?

The Mayor is not being consistent. He is effectively in alliance with the Greens but he has re-appointed AM Darren Johnson to LFEPA in spite of the fact that the Greens are “hideously white” to steal a phrase from Greg Dyke. Check out their key people here.

Bizzarely he has also re-appointed Peter Hulme-Cross from One London. The two ex-UKIP Assembly Members are not only hideously white but also hideously male and middle-aged like the Mayor. Does the Mayor think that they will not get returned next May so he does not need to make a point with them or is he plotting to bring them into his Labour/Green coalition?

The Mayor is simply not entitled to tell the Tories and the LibDems who they think is best equipped to help direct LFEPA.

Here is the BBC London coverage.

Two stories in last tonight’s Standard show just how warped Transport for London’s priorities have become.

On the one hand 40 Underground ticket offices are to be shut. This move is apparently designed to increase use of Oyster cards. Make no mistake that although these might be convenient for some, even most, users the reason that TfL is pushing this change is to reduce its costs. TfL says it will not cut station staff but clearly it will be tempted to. Users want the Oyster but they also want a friendly face behind the ticket window, especially if they are from out of town. On the other hand Andrew Gilligan calculates that Bob Kiley, the ex-boss of TfL, will have cost us £4 million before he actually shuffles off the stage. This sum is dwarfed by the £78 million spent by TfL on advertising in 2005/6.

Given the choice between spending cash on bigging up the Mayor or making life easier for customers TfL chooses protecting the Mayor’s propaganda budget rather than services that customers value.

The Mayor is trying to use the Freedom Pass yet again to scare pensioners, bash councils and pretend he is the pensioners’ champion when in fact he is just trying to squeeze more money out of councils to cover the out of control costs of Transport for London, see his press release.

He is taking my name in vain again but that is really a small part of the story.

The Freedom Pass has a really frightening impact on council finances and they are right to fight to overturn the current legal situation that if London Councils and TfL cannot agree then the Mayor gets to impose a settlement, even though he can in no way be described as an honest broker. To get an idea of the financial impact look at Ealing’s own budget book. If you scroll down to page 23 you see will that the largest levy we pay is for concessionary fares, ie the Freedom Pass. This year Ealing bill will increase by £810K or 9.4% to reach £9.44 million. This is about the same amount of cash as we spend in Ealing on bin collections, street cleaning and recycling put together. This kind of rate of growth is simply not manageable and yet the councils don’t have the buying power they should command.

The real problem is TfL. They are a total shower. Recently they have:

• allowed bus costs to rise 8.2% in one year
• wasted £78 million on advertising
• spent £22K on two job ads in the Economist
• employed a staggering 821 people who earn more than £50K of whom 76 people earn over £100K
• wasted £27K on sponsoring an event and then pulled out because of a personal argument between the Mayor and Trevor Phillips.

The Mayor is responding to a press release yesterday from London Councils. Their position is well put in Daniel Moylan’s letter to the Mayor dated 31st May. Moylan is the chairman of the London Councils’ Transport and Environment Committee.

Having been told by the UK government that he can’t have his hugely expensive and wasteful “Waste for London” the Mayor has been reduced to grassing up UK local authorities to the European Commission. It seems he wants us to pay for an expensive London “embassy ” in Brussels and then he wants to use it to shop London councils to the EC in order to ensure that they pay an extra £150 per Tonne to dispose of trade waste. The man loves to hose your cash down the drain.

A complex scheme called LATS will be costing councils some £150 per Tonne to dispose of waste to landfill over the next few years. This works at the margin so that any amount over a certain limit is affected. The limits are being reduced each year and LATS will start to bite many councils in a couple of years. The Mayor thinks that some councils are getting rid of their commercial waste operations to ensure that they stay under the threshold. Stupidly this legislation only affects councils and not commercial waste operators.

In any case it is a bit strange that councils provide commercial waste services. There are a range of commercial services and it is something of a conflict of interest to enforce one set of legislation that requires all businesses to have a commercial waste agreement whilst selling the same service in a competitive market. As they are at a commercial disadvantage to commercial operators who do not have to pay the £150 per Tonne LATS tax it is not surprising that some councils would pull out of the business. It is a surprise to me that more don’t.

The Mayor’s campaign to expand his empire to include a waste quango is all well and good but it seems he is prepared to stitch up London councils that are just trying to do the right thing in order to achieve his objectives.

Today BBC London News is reporting that youth bus crime, crimes committed by the under-16 age group, have gone up by 56%.

The BBC says:

Reported youth crime on buses has shot up by 55% since the introduction of free bus travel for under 16-year-olds.

There were 5,701 reports in the year since the scheme went live in September 2005 compared with 3,666 in the previous year, official figures show.

The Transport for London (TfL) figures were obtained by BBC London under the Freedom of Information Act.

TfL tries to belittle these figures by suggesting that “the figures represent less than one crime report for every 250,000 journeys”. They are dead wrong. The figures represent 16 crimes a day and TfL undermine their own argument by spending £70 million a year to deploy 1,200 police community safety officers (PCSOs) on the bus network. I assume they are spending £70 million because there is a problem.

I am not a fan of giving all kids free travel at all times. To go to school maybe, but anyone travelling on the buses today sees too many insolent kids treating drivers and fellow passengers appallingly.

It is a shame that the BBC has to winkle these figures out of TfL with the Freedom of Information Act. Don’t expect to see the Mayor’s expensive media machine to address these figures directly.

Yesterday the London Mayor’s bloated press office seemed somewhat conflicted.

Whilst they were keen to highlight the Mayor’s involvement in the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in New York they cannot explain how transatlantic beanos and flying 10,000 Americans to London for an NFL game fit into the Mayor’s green agenda.

As the Mayor himself said in his speech yesterday:

We do not have to live less well but we do have to live less wastefully.

Yeah, but the first thing to go has to be the first class travel, five star hotel, big entourage style that the Mayor loves so much. Binning the NFL game would be a good second step.

The NFL announcement has scaled down the number of fans crossing the Atlantic back down to 10,000 from 15,000. Apparently the two teams will be offsetting their flights. Like that makes any difference. Clearly the Mayor thinks there are votes in this game as he announced it in January, February and now again in May. Bread and circuses Mr Mayor.

Apparently the Mayor is telling the other 39 cities how great the Congestion Charge is. I don’t suppose he is telling them how pretty much all of the £927 million collected over the four years has been wasted on out of control costs and that its main effect is to displace emissions and congestion from central London to outer London.

The London Mayor checked into the Essex House Hotel on Central Park in New York yesterday. I have been there and can confirm that it is a top notch five star hotel. I did not stay obviously – it was just a suitable landmark at which to meet an American friend. Today the Evening Standard is reporting that Mayor Livingstone had a beastly, first class plane trip that we paid £999 for.

Obviously he did not go on his own. The list of hangers-on include John Ross and Joy Johnson, neither of whom are conventional civil servants, more hard-left fellow-travellers.

This C40 meeting in New York will not cost us any less than £20K. For the Mayor’s version follow this link.

The Mayor, and TfL’s Michelle Dix, are showing typical economic illiteracy in their announcement of the London Emission Zone today.

They use environmental benefits to sell a scheme which does not stack up in economic terms.

If you want the health benefits described you could have them more cheaply by spending the cash on health rather than persecuting people who run commercial vehicle fleets.

Livingstone says:

In a modern world city, people should have the opportunity to live and work without fear of being poisoned by the air they breathe. Thousands of Londoners suffer ill-health from pollution released by traffic fumes.

All good polemical stuff but 90% rubbish. TfL’s own document says:

The proposed LEZ is not expected to have a major impact on the levels of ozone.

It is not anticipated that the proposed LEZ would have a significant impact on CO2 emissions.

The document talks about how particulate emissions (PM10) would be reduced but:

Given the overall decline in air pollution [that is occurring anyway], the LEZ would effectively bring forward air quality standards, by up to three or four years.

In other words the LEZ will drive down PM10 but this will happen anyway as new vehicles are introduced that comply with up to-date emissions standards. A similar outcome could be expected for NOX.

The temporary environmental benefits of the scheme, which bring forward emission levels that would be in place anyway in 3 or 4 years, will have temporary health benefits which are to be welcomed. The Mayor values these at £250 million. Great. But, by the Mayor’s own figures, this scheme will cost TfL, ie us, £120 million over its life. It will also cost vehicle operators £200 to 300 million. You may not worry that vehicle operators will pick up most of the bills but don’t think that you will not pay. You will pay more council tax for councils to replace vehicles early and higher prices in London’s shops. TfL’s own document shows that this scheme is not worth it. £250 million of health benefits bought for £420 million. £170 million wasted.

Michelle Dix, so-called Director of the London Low Emission Zone at TfL, has previous for economic illiteracy. She was the one who said about a London-wide congestion charging scheme:

It would generate £3 billion gross and net revenue of between £1 billion and £2 billion.

Apparently she can’t refine her cost estimates more accurately than to the nearest £1 billion. Why does she think it acceptable to tax people to this extent and then lose anywhere from a third to two thirds of the money in collection costs?