Another London election coming up in May next year, another phoney fare cuts promise from Livingstone. But we’ve heard it before. Livingstone’s original “Fares Fair” campaign was 1981 – 30 years ago. Judge Livingstone on what he does, not what he says:
The Boris team have ripped off Livingstone’s own movie to debunk him point by point:
In this morning’s Sunday Telegraph there is a piece on councils introducing garden stealth taxes which mentions our own Labour council here in Ealing.
The current Labour administration wants to make garden waste re-cycling a chargeable service from 1st April next year, £40 per annum, reduce it to a fortnightly collection and stop it altogether during January. The Tories are campaigning to fight Labour’s pay-more-get-less garden tax.
The garden tax petition online is heading for the 600 mark this weekend not helped though by the council’s petitions system being offline for maintenance for 24 hours up until 8pm last night. How very 20th Century? We have the same number of signatures again on paper – I have collected 24 myself over the last week. It is not a hard sell!
When I was looking at the Ealing petitions site tonight I noticed that Onkar Sahota has started two petitions to “save” two local hospitals. Having started these on Wednesday last week Sahota had managed to get one mate to back him up by Friday. Two petitions with two signatures each. It doesn’t sound as if the Ealing Labour group really believes its own rhetoric. Maybe council leader Julian Bell should get off twitter and get his group organised. Most of them have yet to upgrade from their quill pens and ink pots.
Dr Onkar Sahota is Labour’s hapless candidate for the GLA Ealing & Hillingdon seat currently held by the ebullient Tory and Deputy Mayor, Richard Barnes. Sahota is a local doctor and Daddy’s boy, son of Gurdip Sahota, Chair of Ealing Southall branch. [Labour’s chief whip, Cllr Brian Reeves, recently told me that I had got this bit of the story wrong. He told me that my error was the source of some amusement in the Labour group. He didn’t have any further corrections for me.]
Sahota is yet another Punjabi Labour representative. Apparently only Punjabi’s need apply to represent Southall on behalf of the Labour party. The MP and all 15 councillors are Punjabi. There are Sikh Punjabis, Muslim Punjabis and Hindu Punjabis but Punjabis one and all. Now the GLA candidate is. At least Sahota is 2nd generation. The old guard keep a tight grip of Southall. Of the MP and 15 councillors only one councillor as far as I know is second generation, Cllr “Comrade” Kausar.
Sahota paid a visit to the first riots panel meeting on 17th October. He introduced himself as Dr Onkar Sahota and raised a point about the problem of closing GP’s surgeries early because of the riot. Fair enough. He did not introduce himself as a GLA candidate and if he had done he would probably have been booed into silence when he went on to make a nakedly political point and say that it was the “wrong time to have public spending cuts”.
I don’t see Sahota worrying Barnes unduly in May.
Let’s make sure that Livingstone stays in our past!
Council leader, Labour’s Julian Bell, is very slapdash with numbers. His tweets above seek to make political capital out of the riots. According to the police they deployed 16,000 on Tuesday 9th August.
The 14,000 number Bell quotes is a Labour party estimate which is of dubious provenance and in any case includes back office staff across the whole country.
Cllr Bell might like to comment on why the Met were only able to put 6,000 officers, out of a workforce of 32,000 warranted officers, on the streets on the night of August 8th. The problem on August 8th was not one of police numbers. It was one of police deployment and work practices. Bell does not like confronting wasteful work practices and has made no progress on the £30 million he could save by reforming Ealing council’s work practices, see here.
Furthermore, the bit of police spending Bell is in charge of has been reduced from £1.07 million to £660K, a budget cut of 38%. The number of officer is due to drop from 43 to 19 or 58%.
Bell is the biggest police cutter.
Council leader Julian Bell tells us he attended the topping out ceremony at Dormers Wells High School on Friday. He takes the opportunity to take a swipe at the Tories over the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. When he says “we save (sic)” presumably he means Michael Gove, Angie Bray and David Millican who all worked with the Labour administration to make sure that these two projects slipped through the closing door.
I have been looking at the James report into Education capital this morning. A heavy topic but it is the kind of thing I have to do to keep on top of Bell and Labour’s truth mincers. The James report says:
BSF was announced in 2003 with the, with hindsight, somewhat quixotic aim of rebuilding or refurbishing every secondary school in England by 2020. To date BSF funding has totalled £8.65 billion made up of £3.5 billion of conventional funding and £5.15 billion of PFI credits. In 2010-11 it had a total budget of £3.7 billion. This made it the Government’s single largest capital programme in any area.
The programme started with excellent intentions but the scale of it made it extremely difficult to implement with the initial structure. By the end of March 2006, BSF had spent £27 million but was materially behind schedule with no schools built. Following an overhaul of the procurement process, a new target completion date of 2023 was set for the programme. In addition, the estimate of the overall cost was increased from £45 to £55 billion, as the scope of the programme was increased. As of November 2010, around 8% of the planned renewal originally envisaged after seven years had been achieved. This was clearly well short of the original objectives, and a number of reviews of the process were launched from that time and have continued right up to the present day.
So the programme was huge – £55 billion. It was the government’s largest single capital programme. It was also really wasteful with a hugely top heavy management and financial structure, huge procurement costs that created custom-made, architect-designed but often impractical buildings. By March 2011 BSF had delivered 310 schools at a cost of £8.65 billion. An excruciating £28 million per school. The programme did not prioritise a school’s physical condition so it literally knocked down good buildings to deliver Gordon Brown’s grandiose vision and replaced them with expensive to run, designer schools with hard to manage and heat spaces.
This picture taken from the James report shows the way capital spending in the education department changed under Labour. Does it look sustainable to you?
Can we remember who slashed the country’s capital programme? Ah yes, it was Alistair Darling on the occasion of the 2009 Pre-Budget Report, see here. Do we not think that the PBR affected the government’s single largest capital programme?
As it happens we are building all sorts of schools all over Ealing, with the help of government funds. Don’t expect Labour to tell you about it though. More on this later. BSF was a financial disaster. It was unaffordable. It often produced bad buildings. Darling effectively cancelled it November 2009. Bell is just playing games as usual.
There has been a good deal of debate in Ealing about the “cuts”. One thing we have not heard about is the Labour administration’s ideas about shared services. Today we have heard some early results of the Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham project – an ambitious programme that aims to save £33 million across the three councils by 2015/6. In particular the project aims to halve the number of middle and senior managers. As I pointed out last Friday Ealing’s bill for its senior management team is £8.9 million. Half of that would be well worth having.
The detail of the first £1 million of savings makes interesting reading:
All these savings involve taking out senior management roles; something that Ealing has signally failed to address.
A more detailed document is available here.
Michael Rowan, owner of cowboy business Rowan’s just by Kew Bridge has got his just desserts, having just been fined almost £9,000 for flyposting. His business’ signs have been a plague all over West London for years. It is great to see that Ealing council has finally caught up with him, see here.
From my earliest days as a councillor I have worked on this issue and Rowan’s antisocial business has been a feature all along. I blogged about Rowan’s in October 2006, March 2007 and June 2008.
Ealing Conservatives are livid about Labour’s propoal to impose a £40 garden tax on anyone who wants to use the council’s garden waste re-cycling service. Today they issued the following press release:
Free Recycling Leads to Massive Increase in Recycling Rates
Written Council answers have revealed that the tonnage of garden waste recycled increased by a whopping 103% after the Conservative Administration abolished the charges in 2007.
Cllr David Millican, Conservative Group Leader said:
“Prior to the charge being abolished, only 1,722 tonnage of garden waste was recycled. This jumped to 3,496 tonnage after the Conservative Administration removed the cost of the pink sacks and made the service free.
This whopping increase is a clear signal that most people are willing to do their bit for the environment as long as it’s free and easy to do so.
It is therefore disappointing to note that the Labour Administration will be charging residents £40 a year from April to collect their garden waste and reducing the collection to fortnightly. Many people get a cheap skip bin hire to throw away a lot of stuff. This is a massive step back in the wrong direction.
Ealing is a leafy Borough and many residents often tidy up the leaves from the street that fall/ blow into their front gardens. This saves the Council and helps to keep our streets clean. Many residents will probably stop doing this, as they will have to pay for taking pride in their neighbourhoods.
I intend to present a petition at the 13 December Council Meeting demanding that the Labour Council abolish the charge and keep recycling free and weekly.
The petition can be signed online:
http://ealing-consult.limehouse.co.uk/portal/petitions or by phoning: 0741 263 5228
The Ealing Tories are proud of their record of doubling re-cycling rates whilst we were in power.
Labour’s £40 garden tax will send this into reverse – even the council’s own reports says that re-cycling rates will drop by 1%.
That petition reads as follows:
We support waste reduction and recycling; and believe it should be kept free and weekly.
Therefore we demand that Ealing’s Labour Council abandons its plans:
• to impose an annual £40 garden waste tax and to collect garden waste fortnightly
• to withdraw the white sacks for plastics recycling collection
• for the option in the contract to collect waste and recyclables fortnightlyWe believe that these changes will increase fly tipping, reduce the rates of recycling and alienate the very people whose support is needed.
If you want to sign follow this link.
We all know that the council is having to manage its spending very carefully and make some big changes. Indeed last September council leader Julian Bell told us:
We are facing an unprecedented level of cuts in our budgets over the next four years given the coalition government’s ideological choice to slash public spending by unnecessary amounts and at a reckless speed.
For years many people have felt that the one obvious saving that most local councils could make is in the cost of their senior management teams. Unfortunately not the Ealing Labour group. Like babes in the wood they have failed to get management costs under control. They do not have the experience or confidence to demand that the senior management team at the council start saving at the top. Instead they have gone for frontline services, such as halving park rangers and the latest wheeze of introducing a £40 garden tax.
If you listened to Labour’s propaganda you might think that Ealing’s spending is being cut by 30% (it isn’t). Indeed, in their libraries consultation document Ealing council said:
Due to cuts to our government funding, Ealing Council needs to save £65million over the next three years. This is approximately 30% of the money that the council has available to spend on its services.
I complained at the time that these figures were mendacious but let’s take them at face value. You might expect the senior management team to be cut by 30%? No. 20%? No. 10% even? No. In the last year the council’s senior management team costs have been lightly pared back to the tune of 7.7%.
Last October the former council leader asked a series of 3 questions (40-42, here) asking how many and how much the senior management team at Ealing council cost. This year I have repeated the questions (15,17 and 18, here) to see how much Labour has saved on the senior management team in the course of a year. The answers are tabulated below.
This time last year the council employed 98 senior officers who essentially cost £100,000 each. Now this number is down to 90. I have to say: Big deal!
Phil Taylor 