Phil Taylor

I have been meaning to repeat my Southall car park mystery shopping for a while now so when I saw Labour council leader Julian Bell’s tweet and the accompanying photo just now I jumped in the car to check his facts. He is either mendacious or lazy.

It took me 9 minutes to drive from Sainsbury’s in West Ealing to the Herbert Road multi-storey car park. This is my standard journey. The park time was about 30s and I found an empty space on level 2. Although the lower levels were full the car park got emptier as you went up and the top floor was totally empty, see my picture below timestamped at 11:55am, half an hour after Bell’s. In all I counted 6 disabled spaces free and about 140 regular spaces. Bell clearly does not want to see beyond the end of his nose.

On the way home I looped into the Conservative Club car park which is available to the public. There were about 50 empty spaces there.

Parking in Southall is easy most of the time. At the busy times it will still be rammed. There is no business case for Labour’s £5.5 million car park.

There will be big excitement tonight if Justin Ribbons, chief executive of Empire Cinemas, attends the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting tonight at 7pm in the Queen’s Hall. The venue has been changed to accommodate the large numbers of the public that are expected to show up.

At Tuesday’s cabinet meeting the cabinet gave officers permission to proceed with a compulsory purchase (CPO) of the cinema site in the event that building work does not proceed. Typically of Cllr Mahfouz he is trying to get on the right side of this issue and put his opponents on the wrong side. In reality this is a totally non-political issues and politicians of all sides, council officers and the public have all been working hard on this issue since the cinema was knocked down in November 2008.

Whatever Mahfouz or anyone says the council was only ever in a position to talk about a CPO until Empire’s planning permission runs out in November 2011. Property case law in this country is such that a CPO would not have got anywhere in the courts until the planning permission had ran out and it would be unusual if a property owner did not go to law when served a CPO in these circumstances. So nothing was ever going to happen or will happen until either Empire starts work of its own accord or the day Empire’s planning permission runs out in November of this year.

The only person who seems to have got to meet Empire’s elusive chief exec face-to-face is Conservative MP for Ealing Central and Acton, Angie Bray, see here. The rest of us will be interested to hear what he has to say this evening.

The council is hiding rather a lot of your money under the mattress. On Tuesday the cabinet considered a report on the council’s Revenue and Capital Outturn and Statement of Accounts for the last financial year, see here. The first recommendation of the report was:

1. Notes the general fund revenue outturn that shows an underspend of £70k after the establishment of reserves (as set out in Appendix 1).

You might think from this statement that the balance between the council’s income and expenditure was finely balanced with only a £70K surplus out of a spend of around £1 billion.

If you take a peek at Appendix 1 you will find that the council’s net underspend was £9.47 million so the £70K was the highlighted figure and £9.4 million was hidden away in reserves for a rainy day. I thought that it was raining? Clearly the council has some wizard ideas of how to spend this £9.4 million of your money that it didn’t need this year. They don’t want to share it with you though. Now run along.

The Conservative group issued the following press release today – looks like Labour are going to trash the excellent re-cycling system they were bequeathed.

Labour Recycles Weekly Collection Pledge

At 26 July Cabinet Meeting, the Labour Administration decided to award a new contract for Waste and Recycling Collection, Street Cleaning, Grounds Maintenance, which included provisions for a fortnightly collection, charging for garden waste collection and the phasing out of white sack for plastics.

Cllr Tony Young, Shadow Portfolio for Environment and Transport said:

Labour has priced in their new Waste and Recycling contract an option to move to fortnightly collection of household waste, recyclables and garden waste. In the 2010 local elections, Labour promised residents a “guaranteed weekly collection.” It would appear that Labour is planning to recycle their manifesto pledge.

A Conservative Administration firmly supports a weekly collection and further believes that Labour sneaky plans to phase out the white sacks for plastics will lead to more people not bothering to recycle. Most households fill their white sacks each week; they will not have room in their green boxes.

There is also the issue that the green boxes are uncovered, which means that the plastics are liable to be blown everywhere. Whilst most people are keen to recycle, they won’t want the hassle of cleaning up their plastics down the street.

A Conservative Administration would never make these foolhardy changes.

Cllr Bassam Mahfouz demonstrates what a lightweight he is in this tweet.

The council’s executive bonus scheme, called the Leadership Incentive Programme (LIP), and notionally worth £366K, was inherited from the old Labour administration by the new Tory administration in 2006 and largely left alone. We had work to do in our time in office and demotivating the top team wasn’t really on our agenda. We did toughen the criteria for achieving the bonus. Either Mahfouz is a liar or he doesn’t know his facts. I am not sure which is the worst sin. At least if he is a liar you would credit him with some animal cunning.

Labour are pleased with themselves for eliminating the scheme in the last budget round. £366K in £85 million does not amount to much. The real strategic challenge for the Labour administration is to change its terms of trade with its own labour force – this is worth up to £30 million, see here. I described how out of step the council’s Ts & Cs are with the those enjoyed by the private sector. Councils such as Southampton and Shropshire have gone to the wire to renegotiate Ts and Cs with their workforces. We have heard nothing from Labour in Ealing.

A real player, which Mahfouz ain’t, would have kept the LIP and a decent cut in councillors’ allowances as chips in the negotiation with the unions on significantly changing Ts and Cs. Labour are constrained by their own backbenchers who will not tolerate a cut in allowances and their close ties to the local government unions.

Children. Unfortunately the children are in charge so we will lose services whilst council staff (wo)manfully work their 35 hour weeks.

I have just heard from Brentford councillor Ruth Cadbury that the Reynard Mills developers wil be sent packing. She says:

On Thursday I met our senior planning officer. Many residents of north Brentford will be pleased to know that the applicants will be asked to withdraw their application, on the basis that it represents significant overdevelopment on the site. If they insist on pursuing it they would be refused planning permission by officers under their delegated powers. This means that it won’t be coming to the planning committee.

We would expect that if they want to redevelop the site they would return with a much reduced scheme, with much less impact on the local area.

This issue has given us one of the biggest “post-bags” we have had on a local issue for a very long time, so I hope people can rest assured that whatever happens on that site, we will ensure that it is in scale and keeping with the local area.

After I pointed out last night that Labour transport spokesman Bassam Mahfouz had failed to sign the petition he launched on Tuesday I note tonight that he has indeed put himself at the top of the list. Well done. Mahfouz is one of three people that have signed up after two days.

At the start of June developers put in an application to build a massive 315 new homes on the site of the old Reynard Mills industrial estate on Windmill Road. Although the site is in the Brentford ward of the London Borough of Hounslow the impact of the development will be keenly felt by the residents of Northfield.

The Northfield councillors have been extremely active on this case, led in this case by my colleague Mark Reen. See his excellent objection letter below. We have all lodged our own objections and Mark has ensured that Ealing residents were consulted on this Hounslow scheme. We have leafleted the area so that people are clear about what is being proposed.

The application will be considered on 30th August. The deadline for submission of objections has been extended until 26th July. To object simply follow this link.

Mr Smith,

I would like to register my objection to the proposed development.

Overdevelopment

Having consulted Table 3A.2 of the London Plan the development (the scheme having a PTAL rating of 2) should have approximately 150-250 habitable rooms per hectare and 35-65 units/hectare given the average of 3.75 habitable rooms per unit across the development.

According to my calculations the proposed development equates to a hr/h figure of 414 and 131 u/hectare- over double the London Plan Guidance and clear evidence of a scale and built form that is locally unacceptable – both in size and in context with the current residential layout.

This is clearly overdevelopment on a massive scale and it will ill serve Hounslow to approve it.

Parking Provision

From the Ealing side the underprovision of car parking relative to the allowable limits will spill out onto the roads in and around the development – these roads are all in Ealing – currrently uncontrolled and already congested by displacement parking from the CPZ on the Hounslow side of the border and the TVU. This development will have a further detrimental amenity impact on Ealings residents and also is in contravention of those aspects of the London Plan that suggest schemes should be considered with regard to their impact for parking across the whole neighbourhood.

Traffic

It is my view that the key local junctions for the residents of the proposed development – Windmill Rd/A4 and Little Ealing/Popes Lane/South Ealing Rd are already at capacity during peak hours. The effect of the additional car use from the development will impact Ealings residents by first encouraging rat-running along Darwin, Carlyle and Murray Rds onto the A4 and South Ealing Rd – further congesting an already clogged residential road network. This is a detrimental to the amenity and safety of the road network on the Ealing side of the border.

It is also inconsistent with London plan policies that says that developments should seek to minimise car trip length.

I note that although the scheme is entirely in Hounslow the traffic amenity effects will almost all entirely be in Ealing – in a neighbourhood which is already under great stress at peak periods.

Residential Amenity

Ealings UDP would suggest that for the development over 2000sq metres of amenity space should be povided (UDP guidance 75sqm per 5 flats). The development indicates that there will be a small communal garden. This is unnaceptable development and will mean that the nearest parks (Boston Manor in Hounslow and Blondin in Ealing) both over 6/800m away on foot would be the only open space available to residents in an area not well served.

The development should therefore contain much more communal space/child play space for it to be acceptable development the development is in contravention of London Plan Policy 3D.13

Overall

The development is overbearing, unneighbourly in size and form and is correspondingly out of character with the largely edwardian/victorian character of the local streetscene.

It will contribute to parking spill over into Ealing, rat running along Ealing residential streets and strain an already over-parked local road network.

The scheme makes no allowance for the increase in child population, no provision for amenity space for residents with regards to communal space and will dominate its surroundings to an unacceptable extent. The lack of social infrastructure alone is reason for refusal.

I ask you to refuse the application as inconsitent with London Plan policy 3A.2 as this does not constitute sustainable development.

Regards,

Cllr Mark Reen
Shadow Portfolio Holder – Finance & Performance
Representing Northfield ward

Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, Labour’s transport spokesman, used the occasion of a friendly question from his colleague Cllr Rennie last night at council to announce that the council is working with Network Rail to improve Ealing Broadway station – about time too. See Labour’s petition here. Somewhat humiliatingly they have no signatures a day after they launched it. Maybe Cllr Mahfouz could have signed it? Cllr Rennie? Anyone?

Central Ealing and Acton MP, Angie Bray has been working hard on this issue for years, well before she was even elected. See here, here and here.

The LibDems have been trying to promote the Hammersmith model of an integrated transport hub, see their petition here. As of tonight they have 102 signatures. This idea was essentially picked up from Save Ealing’s Centre, see here. Mahfouz ridiculed this notion as costing £75-85 million.

SEC are collecting signatures as well. As of tonight they have 485 signatures. They still seem to be hung up on the idea of spending £10 millions on “a fully integrated modern public transport interchange”.

We the undersigned call on Ealing Council to take the initiative to ensure the rebuilding of Ealing Broadway Station includes a fully integrated modern public transport interchange with improved access and lift and escalator links between buses, cycles, taxis and trains, and does not impinge further on Haven Green.

There is a sensible job of work to be done to improve Ealing Broadway Station. It is good to see the administration pick it up and run with it. Persuading Ealing Council, TfL and Crossrail to work together to spend a few £ million to make sensible improvements to Ealing Broadway would be very desirable. Spending £50 million plus on replicating Hammersmith isn’t going to and shouldn’t happen. To my mind it is plain silly to build a massively expensive warehouse for buses over the railway line at Ealing Broadway. We need more schools, better parks and roads resurfaced first.