Category: Ex-Mayor Livingstone

It is Mayor’s question time again on Wednesday of next week and one of the sillier Labour GLA members, Murad Qureshi, has tabled the following question to the Mayor:

“With your campaigns to encourage a civic identity of being a Londoner, is it not time for a London flag similar to that which you see in Devon and Cornwall?”

The Mayor spends £100 million a year promoting himself. The last thing he needs is a flag. Or, maybe a flag would be cheaper?

In the spirit of public participation AM Roger Evans is asking on his blog for the public to forward him ideas for questions to ask the London Mayor.

My suggestions to Roger are:

Building on the answers from the Mayor about TfL’s £78 million comms spending and its breakdown I would like to have a complete breakdown of all comms spending across the GLA and all the GLA family including LSCP, the Olympic bodies and so-called “programme budgets” within the LDA and the GLA itself for 2005/6 and budgets for 2006/7. This should include anything that has a London or London Mayor logo on it. The LDA for instance pay their £500K contribution to the Londoner from programme budgets not overheads. I suspect there are other bodies buried in the programme budgets.

Another question I might ask the LDA is to categorise their programme budgets as follows for last year and the budgets for the current year:

• hardcore economic development spending
• bread and circuses (eg Tate extension, Londoner, etc).

The Association of London Government distributes about £30 million in grants on behalf of London local authorities. For our borough this means broadly that we distribute about £1 million in grants and give another £1 million to the ALG to distribute on our behalf.

Since May this year when the London local elections changed the majority on the ALG, the ALG has been discussing the distribution of these grants. Most boroughs do not like having these decisions being taken out of their hands and would like to see this cash repatriated to the boroughs. The overhead of grants administration at the ALG is way too high as well.

The people that receive these grants are obviously up in arms and Mayor Livingstone sees this as an opportunity to get his hands on the cash. He loves using our taxes to buy our votes and here is another £30 million worth. According to a press release his PR army issued on Friday he has written to Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, to ask for the transfer of voluntary grants funding to the Mayor’s Office “in order to protect London-wide grants now under threat from cuts”. In other words give me the cash and I will spend it on buying votes like I did when I ran the GLC.

The Mayor’s dim press people make the mistake of putting a link to the list of grant recipients in their press release. The list goes a long way to destroying the case for this kind of central distribution. For one thing many of the recipients have the names of boroughs in their name – why can’t they be funded locally? For another too many are arts groups that need to sell tickets to real punters.

You might imagine that Livingstone’s congestion charge is making a surplus. Er, no.

In their 4th annual monitoring report published on 29th June they claimed “£122m being raised, in the financial year 2005/06, to invest back into London’s transport system”. This is highly misleading as it does not consider the capital costs of the scheme, which are currently being doubled by the Western Extension. The numbers also show just how poor their cost control is.

The scheme started in February 2003 and has appeared in the last four TfL annual reports as a note to the accounts. These figures are tabulated below (click to enlarge):

The first observation to make is that their management control/monitoring systems must be pretty weak if they can publish a document in June saying that the surplus will be £122 million and then publish figures 3 months later that are significantly worse at £106 million. Where did £16 million go? Uncontrolled costs?

On these numbers Livingstone has taken £677 million off Londoners in charges and wasted 72% of it in costs whilst returning 28% for spending elsewhere. The real figures are much worse.

In an answer to a question raised on 13th September by Conservative AM Andrew Pelling the Mayor gave some background on the capital costs of the scheme. The original scheme cost £161.7 million to set up. The Western Extension is costing £123.1 million – this cost is already committed and can be considered sunk.

Of the figures in the table above the “Financial assistance/deferred charges” and “Depreciation” lines are accountants’ adjustments so we can discount these for the purpose of this analysis. As at the end of the last financial year the Mayor had collected £677 million from Londoners, £452 million had been spent collecting the revenue leaving a surplus of £225 million which is less than the committed capital costs of the scheme (£285 million). The Mayor still needs to make a surplus of at least £60 million in the current year just to break even. The Mayor has simply spent the whole lot in costs. NO SURPLUS has been created yet.

Will things get better in the future now we have got over the initial period (over three years!)? No.

In another question Pelling has found out that costs are increasing steeply. Expenditure for 2004-05 in the area of toll facilities was £120.8 million. Expenditure for 2005-06 was £143.5 million and projected expenditure for 2006/07 is £155.1 million. In other words a 19% increase last year and another 8% projected for this. Most commentators agree that the Western Extension will not result in a large increase in revenue – it may even reduce revenue as those in the Western area are able to avoid the charge.

This is not the worst of it though. Yet another answer to a question from Conservative AM Angie Bray reveals a major risk to revenue. 30% of it comes from penalty charges. In other words if Londoners smarten up and stop incurring fines this whole stupid scheme will never wash its face. Aaaaaaaagh.

The Standard reports today that the Mayor spent £10K of our money at a charity ball in support of the Variety Club. I really want him to leave my money alone. I have lots of charities I support and I really don’t see how it is right for him to take my money and give it away on my behalf. If he wants to write a book when he is voted out of office in 2008 he can then go to charity balls and take part in auctions and spend his royalties.

The Standard used some of my stuff today, with my permission. In an article about the congestion charge they said:

“Phil Taylor, a Tory councillor in Ealing who has been investigating TfL’s use of public money, said the congestion charge was a “terribly inefficient way of turning our money into things we actually want”.

He said: “TfL’s highly-paid managers cannot run a tax system let alone a transport system. The extra £3 a day motorists are paying is not funding public transport improvements. Instead they have just vanished in costs”.

Click below for full article.

I have just found TfL’s figures for this year. There was no accompanying press release so I guess TfL is trying to bury the bad news. The pants-on-fire Mayor can announce three new TfL directors today but does not see fit to comment on the organisation’s figures.

The first thing that jumps out is Bob Kiley’s £1.7 million severance package. Not bad for 10 months work.

Apparently the Chief Financial Officer of TfL, Stephen Critchley, signed these figures off on 28th June but it takes almost 3 months for them to appear, without fanfare, on a public website.