Phil Taylor

The big question at tonight’s council meeting was: car park in Southall or libraries? Labour got a right pasting and at one point Labour’s leader Julian Bell was sitting with his head in his hands. No wonder. Normally councillors Bell and Mahfouz tweet through cabinet and council meetings. Both were silent tonight.

The softening up process started with a petition from 575 pupils of Hobbayne Primary School presented by a Mrs Rowena Vestey of the Hobbayne PTA. She spoke very well and was followed by the redoubtable Carolyn Brown of Hanwell Community Forum fame, asking a question on Hanwell library. Both pointedly juxtaposed the library cuts currently being consulted on with the idiocy of the Southall car park.

I got in the third, fourth and fifth blows. First I asked Cllr Bell how many spaces he would be buying with our £5.5 million. I have asked this before but this time I got a rough answer 100-200. Southall already has 451 under-used council car park spaces so we are talking about a 22%-44% increase in council parking spaces at a price of £5.5 million. I then asked Cllr Dhindsa, who is in charge of libraries, how much he would save by closing various libraries. The answers I wrote down were:

Hanwell: £83K
Mobile: £101K
Northfields: £89K
Northolt Leisure Centre: £75K
Perivale: £83K
TOTAL: £431K

During the day my colleague Cllr Scott had asked the chief finance officer how much it would cost to borrow the £5.5 million required for the Southall car park. The answer was £515K. I asked Cllr Dhindsa if he was aware that by cancelling the Southall car park he could save all of the threatened libraries.

I have to say that Cllr Dhindsa did somewhat lose it at this point. He talked about “robbing Peter to pay Paul” and “taking from the poor and giving to the rich”. He said: “We have taken the needs of all the people of the borough into account and we have decided to prioritise the needs of the people of Southall above the needs of library users”.

This was only the preamble to the evening. We then spent about an hour debating “Save our 13 public libraries”. It was a debate that had Labour on the run all the way through. Even in the next debate, in the last speech of the evening, my ward colleague David Millican suggested that Cllr Dhindsa “would get eaten alive” if he repeated his comments in Northfield when he comes on Wednesday 13th April with the council leader Julian Bell and finance head Yvonne Johnson.

Come to Northfields Community Centre at 7pm on Wednesday 13th April. I am sure there will be no actual cannibalism, merely some light torturing I think.

I don’t see either of these two decisions sticking.

I paid a visit to Perivale library on Friday afternoon. You have to choose your time – it is only open 33.5 hours a week compared to the 48 hours which Northolt Leisure Centre Library is open, 43% more. It was quiet with only two people in but it was just before 5pm on a Friday afternoon which would be a quiet time in any library. Notably one on a library PC and the other using the quiet to work on his laptop.

Perivale library is an attractive interwar building with some nice features. I would be pleased to have it as my local library but it looks slightly tired and is subsiding – it needs a lot of concrete under one corner, a big job. The council calculate that it needs £527,500 spending on it. I quite believe it, but you could do this job 11 times over for the money the council wants to spend on the Southall car park.

Perivale is the 4th ranked in terms of cost per book actually borrowed so is very efficient for such a small library. It only has two staff. In terms of cost per visitor it was 2nd worst in 2009/10. But if its few visitors are actually borrowing books then OK with me. On a positive note visits look set to increase 47% in 20010/11 so the situation is much better even on that measure.

It is all very well the council producing maps showing how Perivale people could travel further to get to other libraries but the maps ignore the geography. Perivale is cut off from the rest of the borough by the A40 to the south and Horsenden Hill to the North. Closing this library would leave a large number of people more than a mile from a library.

We had 139 turn up and sign our petition in an hour and a half this morning. Thanks to all who attended.

People are confused and angry. They don’t understand why a very cheap to run facility is being threatened. With three schools nearby people cannot understand why they should be forced to go to the central library.

Hopefully we will get some answers on Wednesday 13th April. Both the Labour finance chief, Cllr Johnson, and their libraries head, Cllr Dhindsa, will be at Northfields Community Centre, 71a Northcroft Road, Ealing, W13 9SS at 7pm to explain themselves.

Clearly Labour’s council leader Julian Bell is hoping for electoral payback as a result of last December’s dubious Armenian motion at full council. Ealing doesn’t need this.

Tomorrow the rubber hits the road. At national and local levels the unwinding of Labour’s huge spending splurge starts to bite. It will be painful. No-one is enjoying it.

As someone who has felt that government spending has grown too fast throughout most of the last ten years I am relieved that the coalition has faced up to the deficit, the rate of increase of our debt. It was unsustainable.

As a Conservative I cannot escape some share of the responsibility for what happens locally. But, if our government grant and local spending are only pegged back to levels seen as recently as 2007 or 2008 it will not be the end of the world.

Our council, the administration, the Labour group, the people in charge now, need to take responsibility for the out-turn. Although they have seen a 28% cut in their main grant this is only some 5% of the overall revenue expenditure of the council which was £1,031 million in 2009/10.

Labour has chosen to make sure the cuts hurt. This is a political decision. The graph below shows how Labour consciously decided to target some high profile services to drive home their point.

I have shown how Labour does not have the foresight, the skills or the will to think through and confront issues such as organisational change, senior management costs, staff terms and conditions and shared services.

On the capital side of the budget where Labour has some room for manoeuvre, albeit limited by schools spending, it has made the wrong choice every time. £5.5 million for a car park whilst road spending is reduced and libraries and day centres are closed and the parks are left to lie fallow. The biggest area of spending after schools is the £16.3 million that the council will spend on itself.

In making this budget Labour has demonstrated that its priorities are wrong. The council itself, its senior managers and its staff are put before residents.

Labour and the council are triumphantly tweeting the end of Ealing Homes at the end of this month.

The official Labour party statement that “This week Ealing Homes returns in house which will save the council millions” gives the game away. The council does benefit, but tenants do not.

After a rent freeze last year from the Tories they get a 4.7% rise from Labour this year. But it is OK people, the council will be fine!

Notably in the council’s press release comments about the savings that the council will accrue are confined to Cllr Withani’s quote:

Although Ealing Homes did a good job in delivering Decent Homes, this was a good time to take a fresh look at the service. We drew up plans to bring the service in house last year, but the final decision rested with tenants and I’m delighted they backed our proposals.

This will give us significant opportunities to end duplication and save money, instead of having two different housing divisions – one in the council and one external. These are challenging times for housing with government funding cuts, yet over the course of the next four years we expect to save more than £5million.

To repeat this is not a recurring annual saving, it is the total over the course of four years. If you look at the cabinet paper savings are wiped out next year by the cost of bringing the service in house. What is really pernicious is that rents were raised to cover the one off costs of ending Ealing Homes, some £1.53 million, but the council intends to pocket the recurring £1.98 million saving. Don’t you just love Labour? Heads we win, tails you lose.

What residents get is higher rents and a Hobson’s choice management service from Ealing council. The Tory alternative was competing providers who you could have kicked out if they did not do a good job.

One relatively minor, but extremely controversial, aspect of the council’s finances is councillor’s allowances. You can see them all here. Last year in 2009/10 the council paid out just over £1 million in allowances to 69 councillors.

As a part of the budget councillor’s allowances have been reduced by £127K or 11% over three years.

In their manifesto Labour promised: “A freeze on councillors’ allowances”. This always seemed to us to be a inadequate offer and back in October when allowances came up both the Tory and LibDem groups voted together to cut allowances by 10% immediately.

Labour’s solution is to have a go at what are called special responsibility allowances and in particular to do away with a large number of scrutiny panels and their chairmen. These panels are the basic training ground for new councillors and the place where councillors get to understand issues in detail and hold the officers and executive to account. They are often a lot of work. The Labour solution is to ditch these panels, along with a couple of cabinet and shadow cabinet roles, so that the administration gets less hassle in the form of scrutiny and their back benchers don’t have to turn up to so many meetings, we know how they hate that! The Labour back benchers want to do less work for the same allowance whilst everywhere else the council is demanding more for less.

Yesterday I popped into Northolt Leisure Centre Library (NLCL). This is one of the five library services that the council is currently looking at closing. NLCL is a cracking success. It is probably the exact model that the council will copy in Acton when it re-provides a library and leisure centre there.

The council has set four criteria by which it will judge if a library should close:

• Location and range of services available – where libraries are and what they offer in relation to other libraries.
• Investment – financial investment already made or required into buildings, vehicles and stock.
• Number of service users – how well the services are used.
• Running costs per user – what it costs to provide each service.

As NLCL is brand new the 2nd criteria does not apply but the other three could have been chosen to specifically target this library.

As the chart below shows NLCL is the cheapest of Ealing libraries if you count costs per book actually borrowed as your measure. Let’s face it the one unique thing a library does is lend people stuff. On this measure NLCL costs £3.17 per loan as opposed to the borough average of £5.17.

Why close the cheapest library? NLCL is the third best library in terms of costs per visitor. The council seem to be looking at the number of active borrowers, the lowest at 871. Apparently the council wants to ignore the fact that NLCL’s loyal users actually go there regularly and borrow books.

The council is also ignoring that NLCL is cheap whilst having very long opening hours. Because NLCL is based within the leisure centre it is open 48 hours per week. Northfields, Pitshanger and West Ealing are open 37.5 hours per week. Hanwell, Perivale and Wood End are only open 33.5 hours per week.

Again, because the library is co-located with the leisure centre it does not suffer from ad hoc closures in the same way that our other small libraries do.

Finally, the argument that this library is too near Northolt library does not hold water either. The people in Northolt Mandeville ward, who live on the north side of the A40 are well served by this library. They shouldn’t have to cross the A40 to go to the library.

Why is Labour attacking Ealing’s cheapest library?

Cllr Mahfouz’s Grimebusters hotline is getting less than two calls a day so he will appreciate some support from his cabinet colleague Cllr Tailor.

Having spent 8 days looking at Ealing’s capital programme it is time to move on, but let’s review.

The capital programme is necessarily dominated by schools building, notably £71.4 million already allocated to primary school building by the previous administration and now another £45 million.

The next biggest category of capital spending is the £16.3 million the council wants to spend on itself. Much of this may well be necessary and will lead to a more efficient council. It does look though as if the balance is too skewed towards the council’s own needs and away from residents’ priorities.

Labour wants to be seen to spend money in Southall and has alighted on the notion of spending £5.5 million on a car park of indeterminate size in Southall to tick this box, even if it makes Southall more congested.

There is no money to refurbish day centres so their sites are being sold to pay for new council offices (the Property Strategy). Spending on resurfacing the road outside your house is to be halved.

Labour is not interested in the parks so parks capital is dropping from £4.8 million this year to £1 million over the next four years.

Labour is not interested in libraries so there is nothing for them over the next four years.