Phil Taylor

Apparently Ken Livingtone is in Ealing tonight to listen to the views of Ealing people but this event is not really for you. It is pretty much a closed Labour love-in that will not be interested in hearing your questions. Labour has made no attempt to advertise this event in advance and setting the start time at 6pm might mean that the old boy can get home in time for his Horlicks but most working people will either be at work or on their way home. The Ealing Today website is carrying a piece on it today, published today which is not any kind of notice. Ealing Labour similarly used Twitter this morning to announce the event.

Not many, if any, real people will be there. If you do go ask the old boy when he last came to Ealing. It is some time ago I think! Maybe ask him what the cost of his cheaper fares will be and who will pay. Someone has to. Don’t expect an answer.

The Ealing Times piece just regurgitates the Labour press release. It makes a lot of the cancellation of Labour’s wasteful BSF programme. It fails to mention that it was Alistair Darling who slashed the capital programme, not George Osborne. BSF always was a swindle.

Tonight’s Labour cock up at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee was Labour’s third unforced error of the week.

• Tuesday: Labour’s leader promised to spend £5.5 million on a car park in Southall
• Wednesday: Labour planning councillors went NIMBYtastic and turned down a popular proposal from the council’s own parks service
• Thursday: Labour scrutiny councillors voted against Ealing Arts Centre

We spent almost an hour tonight at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting discussing the Ealing Arts Centre plan again. Although there was a good deal of constructive critical input from council officers, Thames Valley University and Questors, there was a general agreement with the principle of using the Town Hall for the arts. John Hummerston from EAC stressed that he had tried to take the politics out of this and had got agreement from all three main parties in Ealing for the project.

The committee agreed that we should set up a scrutiny panel which will pull together EAC, TVU, Questors and other players to make progress with the EAC proposal. The vice chairman suggested that we went further and endorsed the proposal in principle. The Conservative members plus the one LibDem voted in favour. The Labour councillors all voted against.

The guilty parties were Cllrs Ahmed, Dan and Kate Crawford, Gordon, Manro, Padda, Varma

I have commented before to the Labour leader that some of his councillors might make a contribution at scrutiny meetings. Tonight Cllrs Gordon and Ahmed managed to remain mute throughout.

Fresh from their victory in delaying the Elthorne Park skate park for 18 months and moving it Gurnell Labour’s child catchers have now stopped another childrens’ facility.

Astonishingly at last night’s planning meeting the Labour group members voted en bloc against a council project to renew and expand the existing childrens’ playground at Churchfields Recreation Ground.

The apparently guilty parties are Cllrs Sitarah Anjum, Swarn Singh Kang, Shital Manro, Karam Mohan and Edward Rennie. Planning meetings are meant to be apolitical and certainly not whipped but this looks distinctly smelly. What has happened here is that the Labour councillors sided with two near neighbours who were making complaints against clear evidence of the desirablity of the project. 75% of people consulted were in favour. There is little point in the council sending out 883 consultation leaflets and 152 local residents going to the trouble of filling them in if the planning councillors are just going to ignore them. What a waste of effort? This is bad government. But, the planning councillors are just the tools of the real child catchers.

Apparently Hobbayne councillor Wendy Langan made a hand-wringing speech supporting Carolyn Brown and her one woman organisation Hanwell Community Forum against the new playground. We can nail this idiocy on Brown, Cllrs Langan and Ray and Lauren Wall. They think they own Hanwell and don’t like children. Child catchers one and all.

The playground at Churchfields Recreation Ground is looking past its best and the council has consulted widely on its replacement, getting 176 people to respond to its consultation, see here. The council is being coy about publishing the results of the consultation, I don’t know why.

The results, which I have found and uploaded to my blog here, make it clear that 75% who answered the question were in favour of the renovation of the play ground and 62% were in favour of extending it. This is a pretty clear cut result.

The planning report, here, makes it clear that the design of the new facility has been extremely careful to ensure that the near neighbours do not have their enjoyment of their homes reduced. This is not a new facility and these people bought homes next door to a RECREATION GROUND. The name gives it away!

Rather like the looney car park announcement of Tuesday this will be seen as a huge unforced error on the part of this Labour council.

Update: I know that at least one of the Labour planning councillors thinks I was a little harsh here. The Labour councillors did seem to be repeating the same arguments. I can add that LibDem Jon Ball also voted the scheme down on a technicality. A little strange. Trying to have his cake and eat it?

I guess that Cllr Hitesh Tailor was doing his day job as an employee of the housing department of Islington Council when he wrote this unpleasant message.

I have sometimes accused people of lying on my blog. It is not something I do lightly and I always ensure that what I say is backed up with solid references. Cllr Tailor uses the “L” word casually to describe facts he finds uncomfortable.

Labour’s use of the phrase “real terms freeze” is doublespeak. It is very strange for someone using such a mendacious term to accuse others of lying. If you go and look at the National Statistics website you will find that RPI for November was indeed at 4.7% but CPI, which excludes some housing costs but not rents, was only 3.3%. If you are going to use the phrase “real terms” you need to choose an index that includes the thing you are indexing. Rents are in CPI.

Last year under the Tories council rents were left unchanged, frozen in plain English. Cllr Tailor and the Labour group hate this and try to claim virtue from the fact that they only raised rents by 4.7% in the face of a government recommendation to rise them by 6%. Funnily enough last year the Tories left rents unchanged in the face of a Labour government recommendation to raise them by 1.3%. Try and get a cigarette paper between those!

There was a slightly strange exchange at last night’s council meeting about councillors’ allowances, more details of the scheme here. Cllr Costello asked the Labour leader why he wasn’t cutting councillors’ allowances as part of the council’s spending reductions. It hardly sets a good example to the council’s staff if the councillors don’t take their share of the pain.

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 actually cut allowances by 10%. From Cllr Bell’s tweet you can see he knows he has to move on this but he has a problem – his rank and file councillors, of which there are many unfortunately, will not give up any of their allowances. Cllr Bell’s choice of words is evidence that he has a problem.

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 so that the administration gets less hassle and their back benchers don’t have to turn up to so many meetings, we know how they hate that! As Cllr Costello pointed out last night the Labour back benchers want to do less work for the same allowance whilst everywhere else the council is demanding more for less.

The current structure of allowances was agreed in 2006. Labour have often accused the old leader, Jason Stacey, of taking a big rise at that time. Cllr Stacey is too polite to point out loudly that he gave up a full-time job to be a full-time leader of the council and gained great acclaim in doing so. What Labour don’t point out is that they negotiated good rises for their own front bench at the time. If Labour wants to have a go a special responsibility allowances then either Cllr Bell should give up his two days a week working for Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma or he should give up 40% of his allowances. That’s £16,560 in the pot straight away. Cllr Bell is taking a full-time allowance and doing a part-time job.

The Labour group does have a problem with actually turning up for things, as we know from Cllr Mahfouz’s cock up last week. One day it will lose them a vote.

At full council last night all of the 24 strong Tory group turned up. All of the 5 strong LibDem group turned up. 5 of the 40 strong Labour group no-showed. This may be bad luck, perhaps a cluster of illnesses or bereavements struck the Labour group, but it does look to be part of a pattern I am afraid.

Tonight council leader Julian Bell was pleased to use the opportunity of a question from a member of the council to announce that the new Labour administration wants to spend £5.5 million on a car park in Southall. No doubt this will be popular in Southall. The rest of the borough, the rest of London indeed, will look askance. Town centre regeneration 1970s style.

I had the chance to ask a question of my own and I asked Cllr Bell how many parking places he would get for his £5.5 million (well yours actually). He didn’t know. I shouted across the chamber to ask if he knew how many parking places the council provided in Southall already. He didn’t know that either. The answer is 451.

So, Cllr Bell is pleased to spend £5.5 million buying an indeterminate number of parking places to solve a problem he hasn’t quantified already. I don’t know who thinks that the answer to congestion is to provide more parking places in a town centre.

Local councils have very little flexibility right now to set their own priorities. Ealing Labour’s are dead weird I have to say and it is absolutely shocking that Cllr Bell has no conception of the problem he is trying to solve. I can’t wait to see the business case for this car park. It is going to be pure fantasy.

Yesterday Ealing Council left it to the last possible moment to publish details of its expenditure on items costing over £500 as required by the new government. They were required to do it by 31st January and just managed it after close of business yesterday, see here.

The presentation of the information is slightly confusing. The spreadsheets relate to quarter 1 and quarter 2 of the 2010-11 financial year which started in April. So this data covers mainly April to September 2010 but there are a large number of transactions pre-dating the period and a few from after!

I am surprised that they think that they can get away with a four month lag in the publication of data. I am sorry but this shows a sod you attitude on the part of the Labour administration and the Council’s officers. I might accept a one month lag but they really should be able to put up the last quarter’s data within a month of the end of the quarter.

You are entitled to be a bit confused as to why the Ealing Labour group have come forward with motions for tomorrow’s full council on the VAT rise and London’s public transport fare rises. Both of these measures came into force at the start of January and it seems a little late to be discussing these in February.

To have any impact these measures should have been raised by Labour at the December council meeting at the very latest. Back then they were keener to raise their sectarian Armenian motion so VAT and public transport fares took a back seat.

The VAT campaign has been going around since Harriet Harman raised it in the summer as a stick to beat the LibDems with. It is indicative of Ealing Labour group’s work rate and competence that it has taken them seven months to jump on board a national campaign.

I have still not heard any Labour figure explain why the 2.5% rise in VAT was wrong in 2011 but Labour’s 2010 VAT rise of 2.5% was perfectly OK. Still less has anyone from the Labour party explained how they would replace the £13 billion of lost revenue.