Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Mayor published his London Climate Change Action Plan yesterday. It is all cheerily endorsed by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Green Party. It is mostly outside the Mayor’s competence too if he was honest.

There are some things the Mayor can control and he really should focus on these. The funniest graph in his document was this one:

It seems if you jump in your car you often do so with other people, so average car occupancy in London is 1.6. This results in cars only pushing out 110 g/passenger kilometre compared to buses which push out only slightly less, 80 g/passenger kilometre. The figures show that cars are 37.5% worse than buses. The document points out that if there weren’t 1.6 people in each car then car emissions would be 60% higher. Yes, but they aren’t. The report does not point out in the same way that bus occupancy is 15 so if there was only one person in each bus then bus emissions would be 1400% higher.

Of course the Mayor is relying on journalists to only read the management summary of his document so the Evening Standard yesterday repeated this factoid from the management summary:

For the average Londoner, switching from driving to work to taking the bus will save 0.6 tonnes of carbon per year; taking up cycling instead would increase these savings to 1.1 tonnes.

This carefully phrased sentence inflates the carbon impact of cars by 60% above actual, delivered performance today by ignoring the extra 0.6 person in each car. When I saw the figure in the Evening Standard my first thought was that London’s buses are so empty that they are only 0.6 tonnes better than a car. The reality is that they are only 0.3 tonnes better. The Mayor is saying travel on my dirty, vandalised, wildly driven, inconvenient, stand-out-in-the-rain-waiting-at-a-bus-stop buses and save the planet.

One thing the Mayor can actually really do is to look at bus engine efficiency and occupancy. His action plan does not spell out what he will do to improve bus engines. His action plan does not spell out what he will do to improve London Buses’ low bus occupancy of 15, ie the average bus only has 15 people on it. Although the Mayor has no powers in this area the action plan does call for “support of car sharing to increase passenger occupancy”. The Mayor just wants to push out hot air rather than stick to what he can actually do.

According to the Sunday Times this morning our London Mayor, like our Prime Minister, is anxious about his legacy.

Apparently he is considering 6 monuments at the major entrances to London so that people know they have arrived. These would be situated where motorways hit the boundary of Greater London. Funny how our anti-car mayor wants to give motorists an eyeful.

The whole thing is being driven by the Mayor’s mini-quango Design for London, who come complete with their own website, their own brochure, etc, etc. They are based with the London Development Agency in the swish new Palestra building right. OK for some.

Since he has been mayor Livingstone has spent £100,000s of public money to play around with questionable pieces of public art on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square. Again it has its own website, etc, yawn, waste. We are due to have something new in spring of this year.

You may remember the Mayor saying in 2000 about the two generals, Napier and Havelock, whose statues adorn two of the remaining three plinths:

I think that the people on the plinths in the main square in our capital city should be identifiable to the generality of the population. I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did.

I imagine that not one person in 10,000 going through Trafalgar Square knows any details about the lives of those two generals. It might be that it is time to look at moving them and having figures on those plinths that ordinary Londoners would know.

What the Mayor probably does not get is that these two statues, like Nelson’s column itself, were paid for by public subscription. In other words the 19th century public had a choice and they voted with their wallets. Indeed it is said that by far the largest number of subscribers for Napier’s bronze were private soldiers.

If Livingstone wants his monuments he should test whether Londoners’ admiration for him runs to actually putting their hands in their pockets rather than the usual situation which is the mayor putting his hand in their pockets.

Follow this link to see 18 Doughty Street’s little movie about the Mayor.

It is meant to be a fun, attack ad style clip. It makes some telling points though about the company the Mayor keeps. I was pleased to see them take up my line (which they picked up from Victoria Borwick/CPS which they picked up from the Standard who were quoting me) about the Mayor spending £100 million to promote himself.

I am listening to the final budget debate and waiting for someone to ask the most obvious question. How can we sustain the drawing down of reserves at the rate of £436.9 million per annum?

Follow this link and go to the last page.

The GLA bodies are expected to draw down reserves next year as follows:

To give some context this sum is about the same as the LFEPA and LDA budgets and three times the GLA budget.

Elizabeth Howlett, as a member of the MPA, did ask whether it was prudent to draw down their reserves to the tune of £4.0 million but in all the hurly burly of talking about bussing young people around the Mayor has managed to avoid talking about this massive hole.

In reponse to a question from Richard Barnes, one of the Tory assembly members, about which inflation rate he uses when he makes promises about the future the Mayor said:

whichever is the most favourable at the time.

It all very well being a cheeky chappie but this is taking the mickey.

Presenting his budget just now the London Mayor highlighted how the appalling ten year record of the current Labour government in caring for children had been shown up by Unicef’s report today.

The Mayor spent most of his short speech excoriating the Conservative group for their calling into question the Mayor’s spending of £55 million on young persons’ concessions.

Obviously he did not mention the actual expenditure. He simply talked about the 385,000 young people that receive the concession. In trying to shame the Tories he theatrically listed the number of young people affected in each Tory constituency in turn. In doing so he highlighted the fact that 9 out of 14 GLA geographic constituencies are Tory held as against only 5 Labour ones. 2 Labour members are elected by PR as are the 2 Greens, 5 LibDems and the 2 One London ones making a total of 25 GLA members. Under the GLA Act it takes 2/3 of Assembly members to over-turn the budget. As a result the Mayor has bought the 2 Green members with £47 million of green bungs so that 7 Labour members and 2 Greens can defy the other 16 Assembly members to push through a minority budget that will see the Mayor’s share of council taxes going up by 5.3%.

The Mayor has just released a press release quoting my blog and using tiny little snippets in the hope that lazy journalists will pick up what he is saying without any research.

The Mayor says:

Cllr Phil Taylor, prominent Ealing Councillor and deputy chair of Ealing’s powerful Finance and Performance Committee, argued on his website that the Freedom Pass should be “re-targeted” away from most pensioners to the “very old”.

Apart from the fact that we don’t have such a committee in Ealing and I am in fact the deputy portfolio holder for Finance and Performance (an honorary title that allows me to carry the portfolio holder’s bag) the Mayor is right. As a ward councillor I meet many old people marooned in their homes unable to leave. Freedom Passes are no use to them, they can’t even get out of their front doors, let alone onto buses. It is very poor targeting of limited resources to spend £213 million on over a million people, many of whom really don’t need this concession. It would make much more sense for the boroughs to free some of this cash up to spend on the really old who are amongst the most disadvantaged in society.

The Mayor is not protecting the old and disabled he is protecting his power. It is easy for the Mayor to posture in this area but the boroughs have real responsibilities for the care of the old and disabled. The Mayor is essentially saying he knows best in spite of having no responsibility for care, unlike the boroughs. Freedom Passes may bolster TfL’s budget but they are not necessarily the best way to help these groups.

The Mayor says:

Cllr Taylor went on to question the benefits of encouraging more Londoners to use public transport, calling it “quite mad.”

The Mayor is being typically mendacious. I said:

The other thing the Mayor needs to accept that this scheme covers over one million people. It is not green Mr Mayor to give a million people free travel. In fact it is quite mad from an environmental point of view.

If the Mayor is going to enter into the green debate he needs to be consistent and free travel is stupid from a green point of view. Walking and cycling should be free obviously, public transport needs to be costly to deter travel, car travel needs to be more expensive and we need stupid taxes like the Mayor’s over-large and fast-increasing precept to go away.

The Mayor says:

He adds: “There are few people who are in work or on good pensions who would strongly argue that they should be the recipients of this largesse.” 43,000 Ealing residents are beneficiaries of the Freedom Pass.

Just to be clear I was trying to say that of those people who are entitled to Freedom Passes there are a large number who are in work or on good pensions who would accept that they should not be a priority for public spending compared to older pensioners without means.

I will leave Roger Evans to speak for himself.

To see the original piece follow this link.