Phil Taylor

Two of the most controversial savings in Labour’s budget was the closure of the Albert Dane day centre in Southall which provides services to disabled adults and the LINKS project based at 133 Windmill Lane, Greenford which helps people with mental health problems. The LINKS saving is worth £279K and the Albert Dane £156K.

Albert Dane

The reason I am considering them under the capital side of the budget is that the revenue savings are modest and are not the real driver for closing these services. The real reason is the council’s Property Strategy. This is an officer led initiative to roll up a number of community assets and sell them in order to release funds to spend on the development of three shiny new council offices, one in Acton, Southall and Greenford. In addition to proceeds from property sales the project will consume £8.7 million of borrowing. The borrowing and proceeds from these two property sales are included in the budget papers.

LINKS Project

I can see that with the increase of personalisation, jargon for service users having their own personal budget for choosing their own service packages, there is scope for providing more flexible, customer-oriented services. To me this requires premises, probably run by voluntary sector operators. If the Labour cabinet was leading rather than being led, it might have wanted to think through how the current buildings could have been used by the voluntary sector to provide new services. They could have lost the revenue commitment by giving up the buildings. This would have meant a stronger voluntary sector and no new council buildings. So bad?

Having spent 12 days looking at the revenue (current spending) side of the budget I will now spend a few looking at the capital (investment spending) side.

I will keep repeating that to govern is to choose. The reason that the Conservatives opposed the Labour budget, in spite of being in favour of the council tax freeze and many of the proposals in the budget, is that in the very few areas where Labour had any room for manoeuvre they have almost always made the wrong decision. The decision to allocate £5.5 million to a car park in Southall is one of Labour’s worst decisions. Currently the council maintains 451 parking spaces in Southall in four car parks, see here.

As we can see from this week’s survey in the Gazette it is not an obviously popular policy. The reality is that the rest of the borough will look on in horror whilst large parts of the community in Southall will feel that this is a small acknowledgement of the transport problems that they have to face.

When council leader Julian Bell announced the car park with a flourish at the last but one council meeting I challenged him to tell us how many parking places he would get for our money. He didn’t know. He also didn’t know how many council parking places there were in Southall already. The fact is that this is not a policy based on research it is just a flashy promise.

Rather like the wasteful Grimebusters hotline this is another Labour politician’s shiny bauble. I would have no problem with there being more parking in Southall, indeed the previous administration tried to find private sector providers who wanted to make provision. But, if you are going to spend public money you do have to justify it to the public. Until the council has researched thoroughly who drives to Southall and why it is very silly to build a car park that will potentially increase journeys to Southall without making sure the roads can cope. My suspicion is that crossing the town hall junction is the key factor in journey times in Southall, not the availability of parking.

The council needs to prove its case before it spends the money.

Update: In spite of the Labour administration thinking of adding a car park in Southall the council’s own property strategy lists five car parks that should be closed and sold:

– Roslin Road, Acton
– Churchfield Road, Acton
– South Ealing Road, Ealing
– George Street, Hanwell
– Tentelow Lane, Southall

Many councils are seeking big savings from the concept of shared services. In London Labour councils Islington and Camden talked about sharing chief executive and senior management teams but this seems to have foundered, see here. They are still talking about sharing a number of services but have so far only agreed on saving £270K from procuring school dinners jointly. Conservative councils Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham are involved in a wide ranging service merger, see here. There is no doubt that such initiatives require a lot of work and are fraught with dangers.

Our council has been noticeably silent on this issue. If you scan the budget document you will see reference to one only one future, undeveloped, shared service proposition in the area of HR.

In Ealing the council’s chief executive is against the idea of sharing services directly, for instance merging identical benefits administration operations all following the same prescriptions from DWP. He does accept that jointly procuring externally provided services is a way forward and the current budget includes an inititative to save £1 million from the procurement of adult placements by doing this jointly with the West London Alliance (of west London councils). This initiative had to be driven forward in the face of officer opposition by the previous Conservatvie leader of the council. Plans to repeat the initiative in the area of childrens’ placements do not seem to be being carried forward with the same zeal.

Labour’s lack of forethought and their inability to come up with a strategy beyond ask officers what to cut and accept their ideas mean that Ealing is being short changed. Rather than hearing how Labour will do things differently all we are hearing is the head-banging insistence that less must mean less.

Online in the Gazette today council leader Julian Bell said:

The scale of the cuts to Ealing Council’s budgets is unprecedented.

Over 30% of its controllable budget is being slashed by the Conservative led government over the next 3 years. This means £66m is being axed from our coffers with more to follow.

Put aside the fact that a large part of his “cuts” are growth items next year and that the council spends over £1 billion per annum so maybe 6.6% does not sound quite so horrible you have to agree that the council has a large challenge in front of it. I would suggest that the majority of individual decisions in this budget would have been made in the same way by a Conservative administration. In the last few days I have tried to draw out some of the areas of difference. I have dwelt rather on the detail. A huge point of difference has to be the overall strategic approach taken by Labour.

Labour have not had a strategy. They have merely reacted. As we saw yesterday they are not inclined to tackle the marked disparity between their own staff Ts and Cs and those generally enjoyed by the majority of residents in the borough. Surely such a change in funding was the obvious opportunity to change the council’s terms of trade with its own labour force?

There is no sign of fundamental service redesign in this budget. One of the biggest challenges facing the council is how to stop duplicating contacts with the same people, especially those that misbehave. The person who fly tips, gets involved in anti-social behaviour, noise nuisance, dog fouling, etc is often tackled many times over by different “silo-ed” council services, each with its own staff and databases that don’t readily talk to each other. Layer in local health services and police repeating the same interactions and you can immediately see how massive efficiencies could be achieved. Not a peep in this budget about such fundamental service design even though its horizon is three years. When will the council start getting smarter?

In the same way ward focused resources such as ward forum co-ordinators, envirocrime officers, park rangers, cleansing monitoring people and community safety could have been similarly aligned with wards and police Safer Neighbourhood teams rather than being ripped up altogether by Labour. Add in the local knowledge and skills of councillors and the enthusiasm of residents and you could achieve amazing things by localising these services. Push the budgets out to the wards and the priorities will be seen to quick enough. You can only assume that both the Labour cabinet and the officers don’t see the ranks of Labour councillors as being capable of leading that kind of change. Far better in their minds to keep the centre strong and slash the frontline.

In the last nine days I have looked at six areas where I think the Labour administration has been unwise to cut and three areas where I don’t understand why they have gone easy. It is always important to say where you think the money should come from if there are areas you want to protect. If I wanted to protect the £1.5 million of spending that I have identified here’s how I would do it.

There is at least £10 million to be found, not immediately I will grant you, in bringing the council’s terms and conditions for staff into line with the kind enjoyed by most of the people who actually pay council tax. I would point out that the Labour administration has had 10 minths to look at this and happily ignored it unlike councils such as Croydon and Birmingham, the London Fire Brigade and the police.

For instance, council staff work a 35 hour week, they get 27 days paid holiday which rises to 30 after five years service and 33 after ten. In addition staff receive special payments of £1.8 million. The value of the 35 hour week compared to the 37.5 that most work is £23 million. The value of the extra holiday if you reckon that the terms are at least 4 days too generous is £6.2 million. The total value of these concessions to the workforce is £31 million. See blog here.

If we could just negotiate one third of this, £10 million, we could start to unwind some of the frontline cuts that Labour have made. Sure it would be a hard negotiation to have with council staff but if it meant more frontline services for residents I am sure they would want to talk at least – and we are after all only asking for one third of the difference between their terms and those enjoyed by the rest of us.

The council’s scrutiny function is not well understood by many residents but plays a significant role in the council. Scrutiny meetings challenge the executive and hold it to account. It is also the way that new councillors learn their way around the council.

On paper cuts to scrutiny look proportionate. £55K out of £193K or 28%. The reality is much worse as one of three officers is going but the manager role will look after all of the committees from now on, not just the scrutiny committees. As a result the number of scrutiny panels will reduce from 9 to 5 or 44%.

This might seem like a technical change but it means that the council and councillors will both be worse by a long way. The Labour back benchers have been obdurate in their unwillingness to see their allowances cut. This change will mean that not only do they not want to share the pain but also they will have less work to do. They already have a reputation for not turning up to meetings, now they won’t have to.

One of the important questions the Tories asked when they came into power in 2006 was why if we were paying to have our streets cleaned were they not clean? The answer was that the street cleaners were not checked. We might have hoped that they might check themselves, which was clearly the old Labour administration’s hope, but the contractor simply weren’t doing it. Rather than hope we spent your money on a team of cleansing monitoring officers to measure what was actually happening. The streets got cleaner when we had the evidence to manage our contractor with.

Recently Labour have been happy to boast of this team’s achievements. Unfortunately Labour think that they can get away with doing less monitoring. In November they proposed to reduce the team from 6 to 2. After lobbying and re-negotiation the team has ended up being 3.2 people (some are part-time). This is a 47% cut in this service.

At the last council meeting council leader Julian Bell boasted that Labour had met 64 of its 101 manifesto commitments. Time will tell. Bell was clearly confusing making budget provisions with actual achievement on the ground.

One promise that Labour have been very proud of is their 24/7 Grimebusters hotline. Their manifesto listed it as one of their top five key pledges:

According to opposition leader Jason Stacey each of the 122 calls received in the first three months of the scheme has cost £182, see here. The hotline is a typical Labour politician’s shiny bauble. Looks good in a manifesto. Costs a lot of money.

Cllr Jason Stacey, Conservative Group Leader, said:

Even with all the fanfare and publicity surrounding the Grimebusters Hotline theses figures show that it has been a complete flop. In the current economic climate there can be no justification for a simple phone call to report graffiti and fly tipping costing taxpayers £182.

It is ironic that the Labour administration has wasted this money on a hotline very few are using at a time when they are cutting the number of graffiti teams operating in our borough. I would have thought residents would much prefer money to be spent on having the teams in place to actually remove the graffiti rather than wasting it on a gimmicky reporting scheme that has fallen flat on its face.

Another of the frontline cuts that Labour is implementing is in the area of community centre staffing. In this paper, pages 2 and 3, it outlines how the community staffing would have dropped from 18 to 9. Not all of the old roles were full-time. They were the equivalent of 14.78 FTE.

After a lot of protests and some work with the community centres themselves, they have committed to paying higher rents, some of these savings have been put back. Instead of being cut back to 9 people the workforce is being cut back to 10.5. So the cut in this area is 14.78 to 10.5 or 29%. Not quite as eye-watering as some of Labour’s cuts but far worse than the areas that Labour is protecting.

Cllr Hitesh Tailor, Ealing Labour’s housing supremo, is getting himself a reputation for being extremely partisan and not really being that bothered with the truth.

The tweet above is derived from one paragraph in this article:

Ms Payne also conceded there is a lack of research to support ministerial claims that private sector landlord will reduce rents once local housing allowance caps are imposed.

You can use basic laws of supply and demand to argue that if LHA is capped rents will have to drop. You don’t need research. What research can you do? Any landlord with time to answer the question would tell you that they would never lower the rent. Every landlord with a void would take what is on offer. LHA rents tend to be higher than market rents in many areas in any case, certainly in Ealing. This article makes pretty eye-watering reading, describing how Labour’s LHA system has been abused.

Maybe Cllr Tailor can tell us how many people lost their homes as a result of Labour’s James Purnell limiting LHA to the five room rate in April 2009 as a result of the Acton Afghan case. Just find one family Cllr Tailor and I will write it up councillor.

On Saturday Cllr Tailor was trying to keep Labour’s 2010 local election campaign lie alive. It might work for the base but it doesn’t cut any ice with most voters.