Phil Taylor

One of Labour’s most controversial cuts has been in the area of park rangers. The opposition felt that the administration had gone much too far with this and called in Labour’s decision. The cabinet did relent and put back in two rangers but the cuts are quite eye-watering all the same and will lead to a material change for the worse in our parks I am afraid.

Labour will say that the Tories cut rangers too. They are right, but they are wrong. You can see the details here. Over three years ago, in the context of the Tories making £60 million of savings over four years we re-organised the rangers from four teams of five with four team leaders to two teams of ten with two team leaders. This change preserved the frontline labour force of 20 whilst making a sensible saving. It is hard to argue that the service was much diminished. The team leaders might have relished the chance to do some hands-on rangering rather than manage bigger teams but it was a reasonable ask. So in 2008 the rangers went from 24 to 22. Two team leaders and twenty rangers.

Since that decision an apprentice ranger post was added to the team leaving it at 23 at the end of the Conservative term of office.

The original Labour proposals published in November saw the team of 23 replaced with four area rangers and a conservation team comprising a team leader and four staff. So 9 people covering the same space. For the detail see page 8, 9, 21 and 22 of this document. It is worth noting that when the proposals were published all 22 ranger related posts were filled (although one was an agency worker). The only unfilled post was the apprentice. Now that two area rangers have been added back in you could say that the ranger team has gone from 23 to 6. It might be fairer to say that is has gone from 23 to 11 as the current rangers do conservation. This is a 52% cut in headcount terms. This huge priority for our residents has been treated much more harshly than areas such as comms, union facility time and service heads.

Whilst I have been methodically going through Labour’s budget line-by-line Conservative group leader, Jason Stacey, is extensively quoted in today’s Sunday Express lambasting Labour’s choices.

Councillor Stacey said at least £13million was being lavished on pointless projects. These include spending £5.5million on a new car park in Southall, just yards from an existing one which is never filled to capacity.

A further £3.6million is being spent on upgrading computers and £1million on shaving a foot off the length of desks to squeeze in re-located housing staff.

“You can understand why people are angry and upset,” said Councillor Stacey. “Spending millions on new computers can hardly be a priority when the day care centre is closing.

“How can you justify the fact that the top three tiers of management, some 98 senior managers, keep their jobs when 400 people are facing redundancy?

“As for spending £1million on desks, it seems nuts. It may not be a massive amount, but it is an example of the sort of decisions that are being made.”

Another area of council spending which has had a relatively easy time is the communications budget of £1,474K. You might think this would be an electorally popular cut to make and it certainly counts in the backoffice category rather than the frontline.

The cuts here have been a little opaque and in fact were stated twice and then withdrawn after I pointed it out to the chief executive. Labour will be taking out £250K or 17% from this budget – not 50% then like the frontline areas that Labour is targeting.

You can see why the Labour team want a buffer of comms people around them but this really was the time to change the council’s approach to comms. Rather than paying a team to mould the message we should simply be giving the portfolio holders’ mobile numbers to the press and letting them get on with it. I think that residents are past wanting to pay to help councillors look good. If they can’t handle the press, let’s find out.

In Northfield ward we are in awe of our envirocrime officer. He does a great job up to and including getting a criminal gang of fly-tippers put in jail. Up until now there has been a team of 23 envirocrime officers, one for each ward. This one-to-one correspondence between ward and staff has allowed them to form excellent working relationships with the police Safer Neighbourhood teams and the ward councillors, at least that is how it works in our ward I would assume it works similarly in the others unless something is badly wrong.

The original proposal for changes in this area involved reducing this team from 23 to 12 officers, a reduction of 48% in headcount terms. After much complaint, not least from Tory group, an extra officer has been put back in to take the group back 13. This still represents a cut in headcount terms of 43% and compares very poorly with the cut proposed in service heads of only 9%, see here, and the cut in facility time of only 20%, see here. Yet again we see a mismatch between the Labour administration’s priorities and residents’.

One of the cuts that the Labour administration is making in the back office is in what is called union facility time. This is a legal entitlement for union organisers to use work time to organise. In many organisations it is considered more efficient if a few people do this full-time rather than many do it part-time. In Ealing the budget for this is £250K per annum this year. This is to be cut by 20% or £50K, but not the next financial year 2011/2, the year after.

When compared to frontline cuts of 50% in many areas valued by residents it seems strange indeed that union facility time should only be cut by 20% and that this should be delayed until the year after next. It seems to me that this is another example of Labour having the wrong priorities.

One of the areas that the government has asked councils to look at is the cost of senior management. In 2009/10 Ealing spent £9.7 million on the 98 people who comprise its top three layers of management. (See answers to questions 40-42 asked by Cllr Stacey at October council here). Roughly speaking we have 100 people who cost us £100K each, a total of £10 million.

The top two layers of the management structure comprises 21 people and cost £2.9 million per annum. There are plans in the budget to reduce this spend by 30% and save £0.9 million. It has to be said that these plans are backloaded and see the savings delayed for a year and then stretched out over three years. This is not the way to do it. It should have been done on Friday May 7th 2010 and not left to run until 2014. This cut does not affect the layer below, the 77 service heads.

At the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on 2nd December where we looked at the budget I challenged the council’s chief executive as to why we were seeing 50% cuts in some frontline services whilst management costs were largely unchanged. He explained that only 7 out of 77 service heads had so far been put at risk as a result of the current proposals. He also made reference to future changes to the management structure.

The saving so far banked from the service heads is only 9% in headcount terms compared to the 50% cuts we are seeing in some frontline services valued by residents such as park rangers, envirocrime officers and community centre staff.

On top of the senior management saving of £0.9 million being delayed there is a missing saving of £1.4 million here related to the service head layer of the council, 21% of the £6.8 million cost of the service heads. Whilst frontline cuts are frontloaded the cuts that residents might like to see are delayed or simply not even identified. Yet again we get the sense that residents’ priorities are not at the top of the list.

If you are going to call your opposition to account on numbers you need to at least understand your own budget. In this press release Labour accuses the Tories of making unfunded promises.

I am sure that our leader will be able to give Labour chapter and verse on how he would fund the services he would wish to see continue. My suggestions would be looking at the council’s generous Ts and Cs (worth a minimum of £10 million), shared services (which Labour has barely scratched as they haven’t the wit to push back at officers on this) and senior management costs (£10 million which has been barely touched by Labour). Easy.

They confess to taking £750K out of the police budget but their own budget papers, here, make it clear they are taking out £250K out of £1 million and leaving £750K.

Julian Bell should quit while he is behind. Frighteningly he is in charge.

I will come back to the financial implications of Labour’s decision to put a new car park in Southall in a later posting. Many people think that the decision is hard to justify in terms of user demand let alone anything else. In order to test this I have decided to do some mystery shopping.

As we shop is Sainsburys West Ealing quite regularly I will test how long it takes to drive to Southall and park up at the Herbert Road multi-storey car park (HRMSCP). I have been twice already:

Saturday 5th March, left West Ealing 2:54pm, got parked HRMSCP 3:12pm, 18 minutes including about 3 minutes to drive round car park until I found a space due to someone leaving. 2 disabled bays free on arrival but all other spaces filled. Considering this is totally peak time this was a doddle. The Southall Town Hall junction was pretty horrid in and out but otherwise very easy really.

Monday 7th March, left West Ealing 1:28pm, got parked HRMSCP 1:39pm, 11 minutes overall, over 100 free spaces including 4 disabled, all very easy and low stress except for Southall Town Hall crossroads which are always a trial. But one can vroom around with ease if your engine gives you the right horsepower and save you that office meeting you were late to. If it’s high time to change your car to a swanky new one, worry not for there are many sites which offer the best of the deals. Case in point, check out this Silverado for sale, and tell me there is a better place than that to buy cars.