Phil Taylor

Tony Palmer shows himself to be an ignorant man if the piece I saw on Ealing Times this week is any guide. Moreover, he is a rude man. Just read his piece and make your own mind up. He is rude to Ealing and its people, rude to the council, its councillors and officers, rude to an MP and he patronises Save Ealing Centre calling it “well meaning”.

When I call Palmer ignorant it is not a casual insult it is a judgement I can stand up very easily. Palmer is ignorant of both the political and economic implications of what he is saying.

His first target is the council’s work on the Local Development Framework (LDF). Mr Palmer is not the only person to find the LDF process unexciting. The council is legally required to follow this process. Hopefully the new Coalition government will give councils some freedom in this area soon. It is a bit of a red herring though.

Palmer is fixated on the station. He says:

Clearly the station and its redevelopment is the key, and why the Council therefore has such a golden opportunity. The only thing that can be said about the present station is that anyone arriving there now is so horrified that all he or she wants to do is get straight back onto the train and get the hell out of here.

So we need a station that is gateway to our Borough, something so spectacular and welcoming that it would attract the very people we need – businessmen, entrepreneurs, artists, residents who are happy to arrive and not flee in panic.

Perhaps he sees the new Birmingham New Street station as a model? If so he needs to explain where the £600 million is coming from. Not from Crossrail. Although I am certain we should be arguing to get a better station at Ealing Broadway out of the Crossrail project it is quite understandable that the Crossrail programme is not going to weigh itself down by trying to re-engineer every station on its route.

He talks about levelling our town centre and calling it a piazza without explaining where the £100 millions would come from. He fails to explain how a concert hall would compete with Wigmore Hall, half an hour away on the Central line, or the Albert Hall, half an hour away by car – and you can park for free on a single yellow line if you time it right. You wonder if he ever goes to these venues. The reason we have no concert hall in Ealing is the same reason that we have no department stores in Ealing – there is too much truly world class competition nearby. Palmer suggests underground car parking (horrendously expensive). Has he been to Springbridge car park lately? I have never not been able to find a space there.

Palmer’s la-la land vision fails to explain how one of the busiest roads in London just disappears. The 207 bus route running along the Uxbridge Road is reckoned to be the busiest bus route in Europe. It just ends at Palmer’s piazza. We may not love the Uxbridge Road but designing around it is a huge challenge.

What Palmer is suggesting is that the Council should spend money it hasn’t got to buy a site it cannot afford so that it could then borrow some £100 millions to develop it. The kind of work required to move major roads and build a public transport interchange are in the £100 millions territory too. Palmer’s vision has a price tag in the order of £500-£1,000 million. It is unaffordable nonsense.

If he is interested in the financial realities of local government he might take a look at the budget set by the outgoing Conservative administration which is still in force, the next budget being tabled for discussion next week. If Palmer looks at Table 13 he will see that the total capital programme over four years amounts to £250 million of which £110 million is dedicated to school building, mainly primary schools. Palmer makes his living around classical music and he may want the council to build him a concert hall but the council is legally obliged to provide school places first. Once it has done that it will hopefully want to follow the Tory lead and prioritise road repairs and improving basic amenities such as parks.

It is self-evident that Palmer is rude. It is not hard to prove that he is ignorant into the bargain. According to the piece Palmer has been a local resident six years. I suggest he finds somewhere else to live.

Reading the budget papers I am profoundly dismayed at how tactical and downright myopic the Labour thinking is. There is no evidence whatsoever that the council is moving to do things better. This budget is the equivalent of cutting off each finger, each toe, your nose and ears and sticking pins in your eyes in order to “distribute any cuts as equally as possible”. It would have been better surely to lop off a hand or a leg?

There is no evidence that the council is using this opportunity to do things better. Where is the talk of shared services? I don’t think I have spotted one shared service proposal in this budget. Where are the proposals to tackle the council’s terms of trade with its labour? If we have to have less staff they may as well work the kind of hours that most of their customers do. 35 hour weeks are simply unacceptable. This one change alone is worth £23 million. On its own the council’s top team costs £9.7 million, £100K each for 98 people. Changes here look minimal.

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 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, cleaning monitoring people and community safety could be similarly aligned with wards. Add in the 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 to keep the centre strong and slash the frontline.

Dumb and Dumber are in charge.

The big local news today is the publication of the council’s budget proposals on their website. They include proposals for £28.6 million worth of savings and outline plans for an additional £20.9 million of further savings.

The council’s press release uses the “c” word (“cuts” obviously) but fails to mention that the council’s pledge to hold council tax at the same level for the third year running will be funded by central government, some £3 million a year for four years.

You can see the papers here. There is a lot of detail here which I will go into in more depth over the next few days before the cabinet meeting on 30th November where this will all be decided.

The most newsworthy change so far seems to be the re-organisation of the ranger service to the point of destruction, see here.

I know that the term Socialist Worker is an oxymoron but the latest front page of their magazine shows their contempt for the law.

The front page headline is: “The student revolt shows how to fight”. I guess the “workers” think that destroying property and terrorising people is justified. The reason that Stalin and Mao could murder tens of millions is because they could argue that the ends justify the means. SWP still think the same.

According to one of the articles inside the magazine one of the Ealing Labour councillors spoke at a hard left meeting last Thursday along with bully boy Bob Crow of the RMT. According to this piece:

Cuts meetings in Exeter and Ealing

Anti-cuts meetings are taking place across the country. Ninety activists in west London agreed to establish the Ealing Alliance for Public Services on Thursday of last week.

A local Labour councillor and RMT union leader Bob Crow both spoke at the meeting.

The group now plans to organise meetings and protests.

Sixty five people also attended a defiant anti-cuts meeting in Exeter on Tuesday of last week where there was enthusiasm for a united fight against government cuts.

So, a local Labour councillor and RMT union leader Bob Crow both spoke at the meeting. I wonder who the local councillor is? I don’t suppose that they will rush to broadcast their hard left credentials to Ealing council tax payers.

Don’t forget that these are Gordon Brown’s cuts and that we need to put another £5,000 on every real worker’s credit card every year just to pay for Gordon Brown’s deficit madness.

Facility time is one of those strange parts of our politics/law that is not talked about much. Probably because it is hard to justify. Apparently Scout leaders volunteer. Lifeboatmen volunteer. School governors volunteer. Lots of people give their time for others without reward. But, trade unionists have won paid time at work to do their union business. It is called facility time. Trades union types get very huffy when people question this arrangement so are quite happy that it is kept quietly hidden from view.

Earlier this year the TaxPayers’ Alliance estimated that this facility time was worth some £85 million across the UK state. They asked government bodies how much staff time was allocated. Ealing council answered 3.0 FTE. The TPA used a figure of £27,083.69 to cost this labour and thus came up with a figure of £81,251 for Ealing. At the time I suggested that this was an underestimate and that the figure was rather higher. Little did I know.

At the last council meeting the leader of the Conservative group on the council, Jason Stacey, asked the following question:

Question 43:

Could the Cabinet Member for Finance and Performance please give the figure for the budget for Trade Union facility time?

Answer 43:

Non teaching employees Trade Union Facilities budget (including non teaching unions in schools)
£112,400

Trade Unions facilities budget for Teachers
£138,500

So the total bill is £250K. This kind of money would buy you six to eight experienced teachers or social workers. Instead the council is paying union reps to organise at work. Can’t they do this in their own time?