Phil Taylor

The tweeting Labour cabinet members in Ealing were notably quiet during tonight’s cabinet meeting. Maybe they have come to the realisation that it is unseemly to be diddling with their smartphones during public meetings?

The most important report tonight was the Budget Strategy 2012/13 and the most important element of this was the stunning £131 million of new general fund capital expenditure outlined by the council. Where is the money coming from you might ask? The answer is that £85 million is coming from central government mainly to be spent on providing additional primary and secondary school places. This council has been silent on the wall of money coming to Ealing from central government to help us tackle some of our most pressing problems.

It is worth looking at some of these programmes in detail, in Appendix 4 of the report here.

The biggest item of expenditure is maintaining and improving Ealing’s primary and secondary schools. Some £95.240 million of schools capital spending has been added to the capital programme. Of this £79.063 million (or 83%) is government grants. For all of Labour’s bluster about the ending of the wasteful BSF programme the government is providing vast sums of money to support the expansion of the Borough’s schools system.

Looking across the existing capital programme and the money outlined above some £291 million is currently programmed to be spent on the Borough’s schools of which some £185 million (or 64%) is coming from the Tory-led government as Labour now likes to call it. Don’t expect Labour’s lacklustre education lead, Dr Patricia Walker, to explain this to you.

The council’s new capital programme, outlined here, makes it clear that Labour is going to maintain the system of ward forums set up under the previous Tory administration. The new programme provides two more years of capital funding for 2014/15 and 2015/16, see page 3, item 12.

I was concerned that Labour would be be tempted to dismantle this system and I am glad that it will remain for a few more years. Personally, I would like to see the system expanded to give local people and their councillors more power to set priorities at a ward level.

Labour’s Bassam Mahfouz is evidently pleased with his appearance on the Sunday Politics TV programme in Sunday, click here and move the slider to 44:20.

Cllr Mafouz mentioned LED lighting.

But on top of that we are looking at moving forward by installing energy efficient LED lighting right across all of the streetlights that we have in the Borough.

As it happens we were discussing this programme with council officers last night at the Conservative group meeting. If you look at the Budget Strategy Report 2012/13, Appendix 4, page 3, row 14 you will see that the council is planning to spend £6.8 million on this apparently commendable venture. When officers were challenged on the payback period for this “investment” the answer was 12 years. The lights are only due to last 15 years so they will only be “above water” or “in the money” for the last three years of their lives.

There is no way that a business would expend scarce capital on a project with such a long payback period. Although the council’s cost of finance is lower than most if not all businesses it is very strange that the council wants to take on £6.8 million of debt on such a shaky project. Apparently officers are trying to model future energy prices to make the payback period look better. Sounds like post justification of a poor decision and warped priorities to me. No business would speculate on far distant energy prices to justify such a decision. On a philosophical note examples like this show how government “crowds out” businesses – people would rather lend to governments to do stupid things than companies that would potentially invest in more useful things for the economy.

Once such LED streetlights become more common their price will plunge. We should not be an early adopter. When the payback period gets down to 2 or 3 years at current energy prices we should jump in. In the meantime there are better things to do with the money – even if only to leave it in the hands of residents. They could certainly find some projects with better payback than 12 years.

It has been a disappointing few days with regard to the cinema. Last Tuesday I drove past the cinema first thing. It appeared that some work was going on but it was only men taking scaffolding down. This caused a bit of a stir of excitement that something was happening with the cinema. It wasn’t. They were merely making sure that no-one could access the site.

On Thursday we had Overview and Scrutiny Committee (OSC). We had invited the chief executive of Empire cinemas, Justin Ribbons, to come and give us an update on progress with Ealing cinema after his appearance in the summer. Ribbons did not turn up but sent the e-mail apology below to the OSC officer Keith Fraser at lunchtime on the day of the meeting.

OSC recommended that the council’s cabinet press ahead with its compulsory purchase order of the cinema site. This will not make Empire quake in their boots but hopefully it helps keep up the pressure on them.

After so long residents will be disappointed and cynical about another delay. Ealing Central and Acton MP Angie Bray has written to Justin Ribbons today to take him to task, see below, click to enlarge.

Empire are not covering themselves in glory here in Ealing. I am not quite sure why Ribbons is so unwilling to communicate clearly. We all know these are hard times for businesses as well as individuals. We might have some sympathy if problems were explained. The silence from Empire makes us think the worst of it.

I do think that Labour’s top councillor, council leader Julian Bell, is to be admired for his hard work and tenacity in the face of a highly challenging environment. On top of dealing with truly unprecedented post war cuts to local government grants and the August riots Bell has an incredibly weak team behind him and visibly has to do most of the work himself. Labour are too quick to accuse Tories of enjoying the retrenchment that local government is currently undergoing. Before the May 2010 local elections the Conservative group in Ealing were truly in awe of the challenges that faced us in the years to come if we were to be re-elected (whoever came into power nationally). Bell is doing a tough job and is due some measure of respect for keeping the wheels on.

Bell is aided in his task by the officer group within the council who are naturally very conservative (in the sense of being risk averse). Like most bureaucracies they prioritise the preservation of the machine that they work for. This can be seen in the council’s response to the cuts in government grant. The grant cuts total some £56 million or 12.5% of total council spending. By the time that this has passed through the council’s system of financial padding this becomes £85 million – an extra £30 million added in the process. In the last financial year the council underspent its budget by £9 million and budget papers reveal that it intends to continue to underspend budgets in the process of taking £85 million out of them.

On the one hand the council suggests that it is being cut by 30% (a lie as the true figure is in fact 12.5%) on the other it keeps unearmarked (unallocated) reserves of £30 million. You could take 30% out of these if you really were 30% smaller! This financial conservatism is bad for current residents and service users but ensures that the council will remain a financially strong organisation into the future.

The officer team have their own priorities, which include themselves, their directly employed labour and the environment that they work in. Hence, in the absence of vision, leadership bandwidth and organisational experience on the part of the Labour political leadership, the officers’ priorities have become Labour’s priorities. The top officer team have been hardly touched by cuts, see here. Directly employed staff have not suffered extensive redundancies and overall staff spending is largely untouched as reorganisations allow the council to avoid a pay freeze by extensive upgrading of staff. The vast bulk of the council’s non-schools capital spending is being spent on the council’s own stock of buildings.

Labour’s main weakness as an administration is the lack of skills amongst their councillors. Even the small cabinet (8 out of 40 councillors) only has four really capable people in it. Bell is a hard worker and prepared to be out there taking the knocks. He had to personally lead the council’s humiliating libraries consultation in April this year and does by far the most speaking on all issues including finance. Labour’s finance chief, Cllr Yvonne Johnson, is a witty and engaging council chamber performer but shows little evidence of being anything more than a safe pair of hands. Johnson is not notably available leaving more weight for Bell to carry. Cllr Bassam Mahfouz in the Transport and Environment portfolio is a capable public face when he remembers not to get into fights with residents. Chief whip, Cllr Brian Reeves, is a schoolmasterly bear of a man who one imagines is quiet capable of keeping internal order. As an insider he is another who doesn’t project himself much. Beyond these four the rest of the cabinet are clearly out of their depth. Outside the cabinet there is a stunning lack of ability or even visibility amongst the Labour councillors.

Cllr Bell is having to work incredibly hard but he is keeping the wheels on at least.