Phil Taylor

Conservative councillor Colm Costello, representing Hobbayne ward, part of Stephen Pound’s Ealing North constituency, has started a blog this month and has made a strong start with a number of good posts. He focuses on ward issues, keeps local MP Pound in check and as the shadow housing spokesman covers this issue too.

Colm is a sound antidote to the on-message sloganeering of Islington council housing official, Ealing councillor and Labour housing spokesman, Hitesh Tailor.

Another Tory councillor has also been keeping up his blog, Cllr Benjamin Dennehy from Hanger Hill ward.

Links to both added to the list on the right panel here.

We know that new councillor Mik Sabiers is a Morning Star reader. The Ealing_Politics Twitter feed reports that Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma is too. He has just signed this Early Day Motion.

That this House notes the Morning Star is a national daily newspaper available in shops across the UK; further notes that it is the only socialist daily newspaper in the English language worldwide; further notes that the Morning Star and its management have strong links with the trade union movement; welcomes the different light it shines on news and current affairs from that of other daily newspapers; expresses concern that the Morning Star is rarely ever shown on or reported by the BBC on television and radio; and calls on the Director General of the BBC to ensure that the Morning Star is featured regularly and as a matter of course in broadcast newspaper reviews in the interests of fair and balanced reporting.

Eight out of the 14 far left MPs on the Socialist Campaign Group have signed too. Sharma has a record of going with these people, see here.

When council tenants get their rent bills in April and see that their rents have gone up by five percent Cllr Bell’s spin won’t sweeten the pill overmuch.

RPI in November was 4.7% so the council is using that as a hook to hang its rent rise on. CPI, which includes rents by the way, was only 3.3%. As it happens the council only needed to raise rents by 3% to meet its commitments. The extra 2% is a sandbag that tenants will have to pay unnecessarily.

Tonight, as a result of the call-in by both Tory and LibDem political groups supported by a number of residents’ groups, the cabinet has inched back on its cut to the ranger team from 23 to 9. They have put 2 posts back in. So the cut will be 52% rather than 61% in head count terms.

The Tories believe that this a key service in terms of delivering what residents, rather than what officers, want, and therefore have tabled the following motion for the next council meeting on 1st February:

This Council recognises the central role that parks and open spaces play in urban life and the crucial and enabling role of the dedicated team of Park Rangers in making our parks safe, clean, enjoyable and welcoming. Our Envirocrime Officers have an equally valuable role in keeping our streets clear of the effects of fly-tipping and taking action against the perpetrators. This Council therefore deplores the proposed cuts to both the Ranger and Envirocrime Teams, which will see the number of Rangers reduced from 20 to 4 and the Envirocrime Team reduced by 50%.

This Council welcomes and backs the strong public opposition to these proposed cuts as evidenced by the number of community organisations who spoke against the proposal at the 23rd December 2010 Overview and Scrutiny meeting, including the Friends of Blondin Park, Hanwell Community Forum, Brent River and Canal Society, Ealing Friends of the Earth and West Ealing Neighbours.

This Council therefore urges the Cabinet to rethink their decision to savagely cut these essential front line services.

If you want to make your voice heard then you may want to sign up to this petition. It was only put up on 19th January and by 22:52 tonight it had garnered 442 signatures. If it gains 1,500 signatures the matter will be discussed again at a future council meeting.

Labour’s transport and environment spokesman, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, has been caught out lying about the Taxicard scheme today. On the Ealing Today website he says:

The decision was made by officers on guidance given to them from London Councils but having been made aware of these changes we have taken the following steps …

This is just nonsense.

Anyone who went to the Boris event last week will have been puzzled by the questions to the Mayor on this scheme and indeed by the thread on Ealing Today. The scheme is not widely known about – unless you are disabled that is.

The Taxicard scheme has been hugely successful, growing by 18% during 2010 and allowing more and more disabled people to get around in London. The system does have growing pains though and the London Mayor signalled a couple of years ago that he would cap his contribution at £12 million.

The London Councils’ Transport and Environment Committee (TEC) runs this scheme and have been unable or unwilling to modify the scheme to cope with this explosive growth. Since May 2010 the TEC has been chaired by the Labour leader of Islington Council, Catherine West. Since then the committee has been Labour controlled and Ealing’s representative on the committee is none other than our very own Cllr Mahfouz. How on earth can Mahfouz claim no knowledge of the working of this committee when he himself sits on it? The answer, as you can see from the minutes here, is that Mahfouz failed to turn up on 14th October when the matter was discussed. He would have been briefed before and after this meeting so the idea that this all went on behind his back is just risible. If he could not attend the meeting he could have read the papers before the meeting and read the minutes after.

Unless something has gone very wrong Cllr Mahfouz needs to apologise to his officers.

Tonight’s cabinet meeting only really covers three topics but it will be nasty, brutish and short.

They will be talking about the budget again and considering another £1,437K of savings. This latest batch is dominated by savings to adult social care: a £287K cut in grants to the voluntary sector and a £1,050 saving achieved as a result of the move to personalisation. The budget report alludes to the ranger and envirocrime officers call-in, see Section 4.4, but says nothing else. Can we assume that they are going to ignore the call-in?

Their next topic is pressing on with their project to cut the health and social care grant budget by 35% and to cut the community grants budget by 30%. There has been no cost benefit analysis to see if the council gets better value for money through the voluntary sector than it does through its own directly provided services. Whilst its own services are seeing 25% reductions over three years the voluntary sector is looking at 30% and 35% in one. The council have sullenly ignored the consultation responses from the voluntary sector and are doing the opposite of what they have been asked to do by the government.

After that they are pressing on with putting up council rents 4.7%. The Tories warned tenants to watch out for big rent rises and here they come. The government’s main measure of inflation is CPI, which includes rents, and this was only 3.3% when the rent rise was set as opposed to RPI at 4.7%. The HRA paper shows £1.5 million costs of bringing the Ealing Homes people in house.

See papers here.

Update: Apparently at the meeting the cabinet put two of the rangers back in and limited grants cuts to 30% and spread them in time. No respite for council house tenants though.

It seems like every road in the neighbourhood is up right now. I go down Waldemar Avenue most days taking my daughter to nursery. Last week the council replaced all of the gullies. On Tuesday they took the surface off the road. On Wednesday they layed a new surface. At 8am this morning they were painting the lines and tonight the whole thing was finished. Stunning.

The Tories spent £25.5 million of your money on roads in 4 years. Previously Labour spent about £12 million in 12 years the picture below tells the story.

It will be interesting to see where Labour goes with its allocation of capital funds. Like the Tories their choices will be dictated by the need to spend money on schools. Will they keep up the road spending on which the whole borough depends? I doubt it. Their property strategy makes clear that they will prioritise building three new council offices.

The Ealing Labour group really do like to insult the intelligence of Ealing people. Today’s press release from Labour on council rents attempts to turn a bare-faced lie into an attack on the Tories. They say:

The Labour administration is proposing a real term freeze by increasing rents only by the level of inflation, which is currently 4.7%.

If you go and look at the National Statistics website you will find that RPI is indeed at 4.7% but CPI, which excludes some housing costs but not rents, is only 3.3%.

If Labour had tried to put up council tax by 4.7% they would have ensured their ejection in 2014. It seems they think that they can punish “their people” with a 5% rise though. Last year the Tories put up council rents by nothing, zero, 0%. It was a freeze, freeze. Not a lying “real term freeze”. You can see the cabinet paper here for details.

One of the major planks of Labour’s May 2010 local election campaign was the lie that existing council tenancies would be at risk under the Tories. This is still a lie today. The Labour voters who fell for it are now having to suck up a 5% rise in their rents – the Tory group warned that rents would go up under Labour and so it has proven. Back in May last year I pointed out that Labour had made no manifesto promises about rents and warned that council rents would “shoot up”.