Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Yesterday the Mayor reconfirmed the price rises for London’s public transport due on 2nd January. The headline should have been “Fares up 33%”.

Instead the Mayor came up with “Travel in London is cheapest with Oyster”. Yes, of course it is cheapest to use the Oyster card, TfL are trying to get rid of cash which makes life much easier for them. Ealing Times seems to have got the story about right.

Just to be clear cash fares for buses are going from £1.50 to £2 and tube fares are going up from £3 to £4. Oysters are fine but how often do you forget yours? I know I am often in situations where I want to travel but have no Oyster.

I commented on these fare rises in September (see previous posting). The most weasely bit of the press release is where they talk about tube fares rising by RPI + 1% and bus fares rising by RPI + 3.8%. Shame our salaries and benefits are not rising so fast. Don’t forget Brown usually increases benefits by CPI which is typically 1% lower than RPI so pants-on-fire Livingstone is telling porkies even when he pretends to be talking straight.

The Mayor’s huge media operation has got itself into a lather today over the Evening Standard’s claim that he is going to spend £2 million on celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution in 2009. His press release is really funny, take this quote:

With regard to environmental issues one thing that is very striking is that everywhere you go the Cubans have installed energy saving light bulbs.

In Cuba there is no free press and political parties other than the communist party are banned and the Mayor notices that they have a lot of energy saving lightbulbs. Talk about condemned by your own mouth.

If Livingstone ever talked about the cost of his pet projects then people would have no scope to make up their own estimates. Doh!

I received a letter today from the London Mayor apologising for a misunderstanding relating to his swanking around at a charity auction earlier in the year. When I first wrote to him to ask where the £10K was coming from he said it was coming from his charity account. Now we find out that only £5K is coming from there and £5K is coming out of the Londoners’ budget. Whilst I think the Londoner is a waste of our money I would prefer that the Mayor made up the shortfall from his own pocket.

Is the Mayor a porky pie teller or is he just bad with money? The sequence of events is:

• Mayor bids £10K of our money at a charity dinner on 12th September
• Evening Standard reports it 22nd September
• I write to Mayor 2nd October to challenge him to reveal where the money is coming from
• Mayor cynically uses full 20 working days service standard to delay response for a month
• I get a response on 2nd November (see previous posting) explaining that the £10K will come form the Mayor’s charity account
• on 25th November it becomes apparent that the charity account did not have enough cash in it to cover the whole £10K and only £5K had been taken out of it (see previous posting). I write again
• Mayor cynically uses full 20 working days service standard to delay response for the best part of a month
• I get a response on 23rd December apologising for the misunderstanding.

Maybe the Mayor thought that he could fob me off with a glib answer when I first asked the question. Now he is apologising for the misunderstanding. Either way I wish he would spend our money on valuable stuff we want not on posing as a big philanthropist. He can do that with his own money.

The Mayor today reconfirmed, in answers to Angie Bray AM, that he would seek amendments to the bill currently going through Parliament to allow him to take over London’s waste disposal and create a pan-London waste disposal authority.

This of course would be a disaster for London. The Mayor sees the ultra-wasteful and expensive Transport for London as a model. The LFEPA model, with its strong representation from London Boroughs, is one that the Mayor will not countenance.

The cost of waste disposal to council tax payers is already set to spiral out of control due to the Labour government’s land fill tax and the EU land fill directive. We can guarantee that allowing Livingstone loose on this subject with our chequebooks will be excruciating.

The Mayor today announced a 29p a week increase in council tax today. Being a serial dissembler (liar to you and me) he opens his press release with some irrelevant waffle about the Olympics tax not changing and then slips in that the precept will go up 5.2% next year. Most people express rises in percentages so that they are comprehensible. Not the London Liar who uses the “29p a week” construction to confuse you.

Just to recap in 1999/2000, the year before the Mayor came into being, I was charged £129.07 for the Met and £45.95 for the London Fire Brigade. Next year the bill will be £506.03. So the Mayor’s charge has gone up 2.89 times in eight years. Does this mean 2.89 times more police? No.

For press coverage follow link.

It looks like the Ealing Times comes at some issues from the same direction as our beloved Mayor. They reported yesterday that Roger Evans, Tory transport spokesman on the London Assembly, is in hot water for an unguarded comment on his blog about free bus passes for young people on London Buses.

Evans said:

Given the cost of this concession, the levels of antisocial behaviour and the lack of control over the issuing and checking of passes, I will be recommending abolition – if asked.

The Ealing Times article fails to mention the cost of the scheme. These concessions have cost £55 million a year which is an awful lot of money that is not targeted at the poorest in society. The Mayor loves to trumpet these give aways without honestly talking about their costs. The costs have to be winkled out in questions because the Mayor only ever talks about benefits, not costs.

In addition to the cost many people feel intimidated by freeloading youngsters on the buses and the Police are finding that young criminals are using the bus system to do more crime as a result of these free passes. At the very least there should be a 9pm curfew for them. We pay twice if we let young people on our buses for free and then they scratch every window on the top floor with graffiti.

Only yesterday I had to restrain myself from leaping out of my car to remonstrate with a youngster who threw a bottle out of the top floor window of a double decker. The Mayor’s taxi bill is so large I can well believe that he rarely has to deal with foul mouthed youngsters on buses as I had to in Greenford recently.

I don’t suppose the Ealing Times has made the connection with their own story the previous week.

On September 17 this year, a 22-year-old man from Hayes was punched and kicked to the floor by a 30-strong gang on the 207 bus in Ealing, at 5.30am. His nose was broken, he suffered a deep cut to his eyelid which required nine stitches and he needed a further eye operation. The victim was off work for three weeks and on prescription pain medication for a month.

All the members of the MDP gang who attacked the man were eligible for free bus passes.

London Buses are subsidised to the tune of £100 millions. Again the Mayor keeps talking about buses but refuses to honestly address the subsidy we all pay. There is no way you can read TfL’s Statement of Accounts and work out what the bus subsidy is.

This year the Mayor increased his charge on us by 13.3%. For me this means that the Mayor’s charge is £481.02 this year. In 1999/2000, the year before the Mayor came into being, I was charged £129.07 for the Met and £45.95 for the London Fire Brigade. So the Mayor’s charge has gone up 2.75 times in seven years. Can you afford this Mayor?

Sir Rod Eddington’s transport report is published today, follow link.

It is a joint veture between the Treasury and the DoT. Beware the Treasury’s involvement. Eddington gives the thumbs up to road pricing although not as wholeheartedly as you might expect. He does give a wholehearted endorsement of economically sensible investments in transport so hurray for that. But back to road pricing.

Contrary to the Mayor’s spin the London Congestion Charge has a £60 million deficit after three full years of operation. Follow link for details.

Transport for London, the shower responsible for the Congestion Charge, are also taking the lead in London-wide congestion charging. They reckon to be able to collect £3 billion in charges. This would be OK too if some other tax was reduced by £3 billion but read a quote from Michele Dix, director of congestion charging at TfL: “It would generate £3 billion gross and net revenue of between £1 billion and £2 billion.” It is a shame that she can’t refine her cost estimates more accurately than to the nearest £1 billion. Why does she think that it is acceptable to tax people to this extent and then lose anywhere from a third to two thirds of the money in collection costs?

It is all very well moving to road pricing if it is an effective and cheap to collect tax like fuel duty that allows us to lower direct taxation. But if its costs go barmy it just adds up to terrific waste.

If TfL is capable of wasting every penny of CC income then the same thing is likely to happen with a London-wide or national road pricing scheme.