Phil Taylor

Last Thursday councillors had first sight of the officers’ ideas about the income (and expenditure) that could be expected from the new car park in Southall.

The modelling they have done to-date assumes that the car park will have 90 paid for places (plus some free Blue Badge spaces) with the same hours and rates as the existing Herbert Road multi-storey car park. The results are horrendous, see spreadsheet reproduced below.

The council’s officers predict that with the pay by phone mode of payment the car park will produce a net income of £25.64 per month – how wonderfully spurious those 64 pence are? We know from the Hambrough Road experience that this will not work. Putting in one pay and display machine and maintaining it every month will wipe out that “profit”. In the past the council has stated that the car park will cover its costs. What they are saying is that they will borrow £5.323 million at an interest rate of 3% currently, or £160K per annum, and make nothing from it. Council taxpayers will have to repay this over 10 years with no help from the car park itself.

It is understandable that the Council’s officers are gun-shy after they have seen the appalling performance of the temporary car park in Hambrough Road. That temporary car park gives decision makers a chance to change their minds. Will they take it?

In May 2010 Labour included “A new car park for Southall.” in their manifesto. This does not give them the right to provide one. They still need to demonstrate that the decision is a reasonable one, based on sound policy making. The performance of the Hambrough Road car park and the projections for the final version of the car park show conclusively that the decision is not reasonable.

The Labour members of the scrutiny committee last Thursday did not want to hear this. Their basic position is that might is right. They cannot argue that the decision is financially sound so they argue instead that it will provide benefits to Southall traders that are unquantified anywhere in the reports. Southall traders have not been consulted about this scheme.

Indeed the most telling exchange of last Thursday evening was when Cllr Jason Stacey for the Conservatives asked Biljinder Thakher from Southall Traders Association whether he would choose a new car park on the cattle market site or wider use of dual use CPZs which allow both residents parking and pay and display (like our neighbours in Hammersmith & Fulham and much of the rest of south west London). In spite of Labour councillors trying to shout down the response he clearly stated that as a representative of Southall traders he would go for dual use CPZs.

What is happening in Southall is quite straightforward. There is a widespread perception, shared by the councillors, that Southall is congested and has a parking problem. This “problem” is acutely felt by the traders who would love for the Council to give their businesses a boost by providing extra parking. Meanwhile residents don’t want to see shoppers competing with them for on street parking. The councillors want to keep everyone happy so £5.45 million of everyone else’s money looks like a good solution. In the meantime there has been no attempt to research driver/shopper’s behaviour, no attempt to redesign Southall town centre, no attempt to signpost the existing parking facilities, no attempt to come up with park and ride type facilities.

There was general agreement at last Thursday’s scrutiny meeting that the congestion and parking issues in Southall needed to be addressed. The previous Tory administration made two attempts to tackle the problem. Labour’s answer is to throw a headline grabbing but essentially wasteful lump of cash at the problem. £5.45 million worth!

At the end of the evening the committee split down party lines with the Labour councillors welcoming the report and recommending that the council proceeded with this daft “investment” and the opposition councillors voting against.

The numbers prove that a new car park won’t solve Southall’s congestion problems. Labour have dug themselves into a hole. Time to stop digging? The Hambrough Road car park should be shut and the site used for housing and the whole car park idea shelved. In the meantime maybe they should spend a small amount of money on signposting the existing car parks and trialing some dual use CPZ bays.

Council leader Julian Bell is keen to big up the large amount of school capital spending that is going on in the Borough right now. He is less keen to explain why we need all of the new schools or to be honest about where the money is coming from. Cllr Bell’s tweet points to this press release from the council which says:

An additional £80million has been earmarked over the next four years for the borough’s schools. This includes projects to expand schools following a massive surge in primary school applications as well as improvements to special needs education.

The largest part of this money is coming from the Tory-led coalition government. If you add the £14.8 million for high priority school improvements to address condition issues the total is £95.3 million of new schools capital (as confirmed in section 4.14.2 of the budget report).

If you dig around further in the appendices of the budget report (appendix 6b, page 70 – simply add up all schools items marked with a G) you will find that £79.1 million of this money is due to come from central government grants. For all of Labour’s huffing and puffing about cuts, and about the end of Labour’s wasteful BSF scheme, 83% of this new spending has been provided by the Tory-led coalition from centrally collected funds.

Don’t expect Labour to explain that.

This photo shows members of the Unite union protesting this morning opposite the building out of which Ealing’s CEOs (traffic wardens in old money) operate. They are in dispute with their employer (NSL, not the council) over the alleged unfair dismissal of CEO and Unite shop steward Parveen Bhardwaj.

I was very surprised to see this story on ealingtoday.co.uk this morning. In half an hour of talking to at least five of the staff on strike not one mentioned quotas. Their issues were that they felt that NSL was taking a hard line with staff on the old terms and conditions which they enjoy following their transfer under TUPE legislation from employment by the council. I fear that ealingtoday.co.uk’s one woman band, Annemarie Flanagan, has only told the headline worthy half of the story.

Unite regional officer Richard Gates told me that 59 out of 94 staff are Unite members and therefore out on strike today and tomorrow. This means there will be less traffic enforcement in the borough but there will be some so behave out there.

A typically unpleasant and context free tweet from Cllr Tailor last night. Rather than discussing the budget last night a number of Labour councillors, and even Cllr Steed from the LibDems (who has a reputation for being more left-wing than most of the Labour group), objected to the leader of the Tory group on the council making a reference to immigration during his budget speech. I thought that we had got to the point where we could discuss the influences on our society in a dispassionate way without the left screaming “race” every time someone tried to discuss immigration.

The context in which Cllr Millican was speaking was the schools capital budget. If you read the budget documents you will see that fully two-thirds of all of the council’s general fund capital spending, some £291 million out of £427 million over the five years from April 2011 to March 2016 (Table 15, page 28), is being devoted to schools capital. This money is not being spent for fun. In the main it is being used to build new school places. Although young families not moving out of the borough is a secondary driver for this change the biggest influence is new arrivals and the children of new arrivals – immigration.

Cllr Millican pointed to an answer to a Parliamentary question answered by ONS for MP Nicholas Soames, see here. This spells out that 77.2% of the 4,526 babies born in Ealing in 2010 had one or both foreign-born parents.

Labour councillors last night objected that this statistic was not relevant to the debate. They don’t want to discuss the major driver for almost £300 million of capital spending. If one is being generous one might assume that they feel that there is nothing that the council can do about this immigration so we should simply get on with it. The question arises though how much longer can we go on dealing with this kind of disruption to our town. Are we not even allowed to discuss this fundamental transformation?

There are lots of things we could spend capital on. Improved parks. Better roads. Arts venues. You name it. But, the council has a legal duty to provide school places first and Labour’s uncontrolled immigration means that there is no money left for much beyond schools. What little room for manoeuvre that the local Labour party has is being spent on new council offices and a car park in Southall.

If we cannot use official ONS statistics to illuminate a debate on the budget in Ealing then the lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

Council leader Julian Bell turned up at the end of the Borough’s Youth Conference today to take a photo. He could have been there from 11am if he had really been interested in “listening to our young people”. Instead he was prioritising door knocking in Northolt.

Like many of the capital projects that have been completed recently the Westside Youth Centre was kicked off under the previous administration when Cllr Ian Gibb was in charge of childrens’ services. The youth conference was initiated under Ian and he made a point of leading it. The focus of Labour’s capital programme after schools is council offices, IT and a car park in Southall.

Meanwhile the current person in charge of childrens’ services, Cllr Patricia Walker, was also late. She pushed into the lunch queue ahead of me and various young people at 1:20pm (Four legs good, two legs better!). Instead of listening to young people she had been out getting votes for Ken Livingstone in Central Acton this morning. She had previously accidentally sent out an e-mail saying:

I am required to do a campaigning session that day but will try to come by about one o’clock.

The photo above taken by Labour activist Josh Blacker and tweeted @jkblacker at 12:44pm on Saturday.

Every year the one of the most eagerly awaited cabinet papers is that laying out the annual road resurfacing programme. Labour has halved this budget, this year it will spend £3.5 million, or about £10 per head of population. You can see the papers here, here and here.

Shockingly the Labour councillor in charge of this budget, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, has awarded 27% of the entire Borough budget, some £938K, to his own ward of Northolt West End. In contrast Northfield, the ward I represent, will get one footpath done for £65K. Mahfouz’s ward is one of 23 so you might expect it to get about 4% of the budget on average.

It looks like Labour is seriously favouring its own areas with this budget. Last year the five ward of Southall (22% of wards) got 52% of the budget. This year Northolt with 2 wards (9% of wards) got 51% of the budget. The wards that have been starved of new roads and pavements are the eight wards held by the opposition (central Ealing plus Southfields). Last year these wards only got 13% of the budget in spite of being just over one thirds of all wards. This year their share collapsed further to 7% – this is one fifth of the share they might expect if the spending was evenly distributed.