Phil Taylor

You probably missed the council’s big press release on their cutting library hours by 9% this week. That will be because there wasn’t one of course. The council uses your council tax to pay a communications team to keep bad news from you and to only pass on pointless, good news puff pieces such as this patronising walk to school nonsense. Great photo Cllr Bell.

Last July after the Labour council retreated from plans to close four libraries they mapped out the way forward in a cabinet report. That report talked about curtailing library hours and delegated authority to make the changes to the executive director of Environment and Customer Services. The report mentioned 25 hours of cuts, bad enough. The number published this week is 57.5 hours, more than twice as much and a 9% cut in opening hours. Although the decision was delegated there is no way it was not discussed with Labour’s Cllr Ranjit Dheer who is in charge of this service and I am sure that he discussed it with council leader Julian Bell.

The change comes into force on 2nd July. It will see 20 library staff lose their jobs. Northfield library in my own ward will lose its two late opening evenings on Tuesday and Thursday. This really is a bad move. Notably the Labour administration has failed to explore new working practices, such as single handed working or using cheaper security guard type staff to manage any safety issues associated with single handed working. The managers stay in their back offices and the closed sign appears at 11 libraries.

The contrast between this library cut of 9% and unchanged union facility time and senior management costs which actually rose 2.2% last year stinks.

The changes are detailed in this spreadsheet. A much less frank piece from the council is here.

Update: I was mistaken. Apparently there was a press release but I missed it because it was hidden away rather than being put on the front page like Bell’s Abbey Road high jinks. Mea culpa. Of course the council’s press release and web page failed to quantify the cut in hours and failed to give current hours with new hours so that you could work it out for yourself. We pay these people to us half the story.

One of the features of the rubbish fiasco has been the downright dishonestly of its portrayal by the council. Council taxpayers pay council officers to be objective. They have failed.

A prime example is this notice which is featured prominently on the council’s website right now:

They say “Some of our trucks …”. They mean 88.5% of all dry recycling.

A more honest communication with the public would say something along the lines of:

Due to failures on the part of our contractor which the council has not been able to rectify the council is unable to deliver a kerbside recycling service. We can however take all of your dry recycling to an alternative facility which will take mixed recyclables and separate them. Therefore you do not need to sort your re-cycling for the time being. Please leave dry re-cycling unsorted in either your green box and/or white sack and it will all be sent for sorting by our contractor. When the contractor is able to restart kerbside recycling we will make an announcement.

What did the council do with the five months notice that it had?

Mistakes happen. Not everything always goes as it should. Should we give the council the benefit of the doubt over the rubbish fiasco? I don’t think so.

The council could see this coming. It seems that the council had sight of Enterprise’s mobilisation plan in October 2011, at least 5 clear months before the main part of the contract started (see answer to question 21). The council knew about the use of temporary vehicles in November 2011, at least 4 clear months before (see question 11).

One can only speculate about what happened when the council got this information. Did the officers and executive merely accept the assurances of the contractor that everything would be alright on the day? Did they cross their fingers and hope? The council had 4/5 months notice that this contract was going to go wrong. What did they do?

Note: The council finally published the answwers to the Tory group’s questions this morning, here.

When people phone or e-mail with a missed rubbish or recycling collection the council’s customer services people make a record. At the extraordinary council meeting to discuss Labour’s rubbish fiasco I asked about how many missed collections there were in April of this year under the new cleaning contract compared to last April.

Question 15:

How many missed collections were reported to the council in the month of April? How many were reported in April 2011?

Answer 15:

April 2012
8094 missed collection reports for domestic refuse and recycling.
April 2011
900 missed collection reports for domestic refuse and recycling.

I thought that the 900 number last year was too high. This year it has risen by a factor of 9. Totally shocking. To have over 8,000 people get in touch with the council over such a basic service is truly shocking. The council has been playing down the extent of the council’s rubbish fiasco.

The council’s street monitoring team keep an eye on the street cleaning undertaken by our cleaning contractor and keep them up to the mark. At the extraordinary council meeting to discuss Labour’s rubbish fiasco I asked about how they were doing in April of this year under the new cleaning contract compared to last April.

Question 17:

How many streets were graded A, B, C by the street monitoring team in the month of April? How did this compare with April 2011?

Answer 17:

The following are the number of transects monitored this April (2012) with last April (2011) in brackets.

• Grade A 2960 (12,750)
• Grade B 790 (444)
• Grade C 681 (313)
• Grade D 7 (0)

These figures are not very transparent. According to another answer to a question the number of monitoring officers employed by the council has gone down from 7 to 5 (Question 18) but the number of transects (bits of street) monitored has been reduced by 2/3rds. At first sight this looks like a productivity disaster although I am prepared to accept that the officers may have been helping to sort out the problems with the Enterprise contract.

What we can do is compare the proportions at each grade, see below.

Last year only 5% of all Ealing’s streets were less than A grade. This April it is exactly one third. The new contract promised same day cleaning after the bin men had raced around making an awful mess as they have traditionally always done, whoever runs the contract or is in power politically. Last year the street cleaners reliably came around the next day and cleared up after their colleagues. Now it has all got a bit random. Sometimes they come before the collections. Sometimes days after. As a result the place is looking scruffier – one third of the borough looks scruffy according to the council’s own monitoring officers.

The answers still don’t seem to be up on the council’s website. You can download them here.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of what happened with Ealing’s rubbish and recycling contract last month the Tory group on Ealing council asked a slew of 34 written questions at last week’s extraordinary council meeting on 8th May to discuss Labour’s rubbish fiasco.

The answers are required to be provided within 7 working days so councillors got an e-mail timed at 11.09pm last night. As it happens the attached pdf file was corrupted so it took until 8.28am this morning to get hold of something readable. The answers are still not up on the council’s website – anyone would think that the council does not want you to read them. You can read them here.

11 different Tory councillors asked questions. The 5 LibDem councillors had no questions as did the 40 Labour councillors – maybe they think that everything is fine.

Not all the Tory questions hit the mark, it is a bit like a game of battleships, but many did. The most telling question I think was question 14:

Question 14:

Can you please confirm the weight of dry-recycling that Ideal processed in April on behalf of Ealing? Can you also confirm the average monthly dry-recycling handled by Ealing in the last financial year?

Answer 14:

1062 tonnes were processed via the Ideal MRF in April 2012 according to data provided by the MRF. Whilst dry recycling kerbside tonnages average at about 1200 tonnes a month, the Ideal figure does not include collection data from the first week of the new contract when materials were sorted at the kerbside or data from the 4 kerbside sort rounds that have supported the comingled service over recent weeks. The overall collected dry figure is projected to be in line with steady state.

To clarify, normally the council collects 1,200 Tonnes of dry-recycling every month which is all carefully sorted and put out by our residents. In April almost 90% of this was chucked in the back of a lorry and driven to Kent. The council have tried to maintain that kerbside re-cycling has been continuing throughout their fiasco. It has, but on a tiny scale. 90% of residents’ hard work sorting out their recycling has been discarded in April. The council has let down residents badly.

The campaign to get Onkar Sahota elected as an Assembly Member has been previously criticised by Mark Wallace for misusing public resources (in this case Parliament). Wallace reprinted an e-mail regarding a Sahota fundraiser sent by Virendra Sharma MP’s researcher Julian Bell who used his work e-mail address. As Bell works part-time as Sharma’s researcher in Parliament it was an official parliament.uk e-mail address he used. This might be judged a relatively minor offence but it demonstrates a contempt for the niceties on the part Bell.

Yesterday I went to the Town Hall to check the nomination papers of the candidates that took part in the election for the Ealing & Hillingdon GLA seat. I found more misbehaviour by Labour.

Ealing councillor Yoel Gordon acted as the agent for Onkar Sahota’s campaign. Again we see the casual contempt for the rules. He has used his council e-mail address for his own party’s political business. He is simply not allowed to do this.

Sahota himself spent a lot of time earlier this year jamming himself into official photographs, again breaking rules about misusing public resources for campaigning. Labour politicians in Ealing think that public resources are theirs to use as they like.