Phil Taylor

Putting down written questions for council is a relatively badly understood accountability mechanism in our council. The activity is normally one undertaken by opposition councillors trying to work out what the administration is doing. It is pretty unusual for councillors from the party in power to ask written questions, it might look like washing dirty laundry in public and in any case you can just ask your colleagues on the cabinet.

At every council we have seven oral questions from councillors, three from the two main parties and one from the LibDems. These get answered by the Leader or cabinet member as appropriate. Notice needs to be given but councillors can ask follow up or supplementary questions without notice and so can one other councillor. There is a bit of a dance around oral questions with the party in power using them to highlight issues and make announcements and the opposition parties trying to probe problems and ask tricky supplementaries that put the cabinet on the spot.

It is not well known but residents and local business people can also ask oral questions in person at council meetings to both the Leader and cabinet members. You need to give two days notice but you get to speak for up to 3 minutes and ask a follow up question which can be for clarification or a curved ball as you please. No notice needs to be given of the supplementary. You can’t be vexatious or ask something that has been asked by someone else recently. You can’t ask about specific planning or licensing issues either. The public are allowed up to five questions per meeting but I don’t recall any such questions since I was elected in May 2006. If you want to have a go contact the clerk of the council meeting, Paul Jeffries, see here.

On the council meeting web page they also publish the answers to written questions. These are typically attempts of opposition councillors to probe the inner workings of the council. It is like a game of battleships – you lob the questions over and try to score a hit. The officers won’t lie to you but they may wriggle around an awkward question if it is not well drafted.

This table show who asked what questions since the start of 2008. The LibDems, only 3 members in the last council and now swelled in numbers to 5, manage to keep up a constant harassing fire of questions. In the last council when the Tories were in power they only asked 2 questions in two and a half years as you might expect. In the last three meetings, in opposition, the number has jumped up to 94. Unfortunately this is another area where Labour are very poor performers. As well as being poor attenders at meetings the Labour councillors typically haven’t got the wit to ask questions. In two and a half years of opposition they only asked 29 questions, one quarter of what the 3 LibDems asked. Lazy and unengaged.

I will be doing a few postings arising out of our questioning campaign over the next few days.

Yesterday Cllr Bassam Mahfouz, who is responsible for parking in the borough, backed down from his ludicrous proposal to make CPZ visitors festoon their car with dozens of 50p an hour vouchers in order to park outside their friends and relatives houses when they came to visit for a day or two. They have now introduced the idea of a £3.50 a day voucher – still horribly expensive, but a small victory for common sense. The current fee is £1 a day. Mahfouz wrote as follows to councillors yesterday:

Dear Cllr Shital Manro,

Re: New parking charges for 2011

As you know, at its meeting in September, Cabinet approved changes to parking charges including the range of permits for controlled parking zones. The level of charges was based upon reducing the current financial subsidy of controlled parking zones, estimated to be £750,000 a year.

At the last meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee I was grateful for the unanimous support across all parties for the proposals that were called in. Your committee did resolve that I look again at the cost of visitor vouchers within controlled parking zones with long operating hours.

I can inform you that we were already looking at introducing a cap or daily maximum charge for such vouchers and am grateful for the views of OSC.

Ahead of next week’s meeting I wanted to feedback to yourself and the committee on the outcome of the work that has been conducted in this area.

I am pleased to be able to inform you that the maximum daily visitor voucher charge will be capped at £3.50 per day. The cap and other changes to parking charges and services such as the introduction of direct debit will commence in January 2011.

It will be of interest to yourself and the panel that the CPZ Scrutiny Panel will be looking at options for other annual permits such as for carer’s at their next meeting.

I hope you will not mind but given the interest in this issue and for the benefit of openness and transparency, I am sending a copy of this letter to all other councillors within the authority.

Should you have any questions then please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Yours sincerely,

Cllr Bassam Mahfouz
Cabinet Member for Transport & Environment

There is a good deal of BS in this note, especially the line: “At the last meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee I was grateful for the unanimous support across all parties for the proposals that were called in.” Mahfouz got a good kicking from the Tories on the committee and the opposition spokesman Will Brooks scored some good points. In particular I suggested that the proposed scheme would make the borough a laughing stock and I proposed the retention of a daily voucher. The committee did see the sense of this proposal and it accepted the proposals with the proviso that this issue be addressed. The minutes say:

Upon Councillor Mahfouz leaving the room, a further short discussion took place amongst Members, during which Councillor Young proposed, and it was unanimously agreed, that the Committee uphold the original Cabinet decision, subject to the Cabinet portfolio holder giving further consideration to the proposed visitor vouchers charge, in particular the likely resulting impact on residents within Controlled Parking Zones with long operating hours.

The Conservative group don’t agree with ramping up parking charges but by opposing effectively we have managed to make Labour change one of the stupider aspects of their policy.

In his letter yesterday Cllr Mahfouz continues to maintain the administration’s misinformation regarding parking charges. They are ramping them up outrageously before they make any attempt to control costs.

Work done by the CPZ scrutiny committee, see key paper here, that I lead established that CPZs are being subsidised to the tune of £550K. The administration uses a tenuous argument to inflate this figure to £750K and then uses this as a justification for ramping up charges. They have ignored the work done by the committee that demonstrates that there are many savings to be made in the same area. I don’t suppose we shall hear that charges will go down in future as these savings work their way through the system. Labour are having their cake and eating it.

The Labour cabinet agreed to increase parking charges overall by £1.469 million at their meeting on 14th September, see key paper here. This number is twice their fig leaf number and almost three times the real number they allege to want to cover. Even this number understates the rise in charges.

At the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on 30th September I challenged the service head, Kevin Hagan, to state the extent of sandbagging in the CPZ figures. He stated that it was £885K. This amount was an estimate for the extent to which the higher charges would dissuade people from buying permits and vouchers. It is utterly incredible to me that take up of permits and vouchers will be depressed by the 30% or 40% assumed. Adding the sandbagging to the published saving you get £2.354 million which is over four times the actual subsidy of the CPZ system.

By the council’s own estimate £1.24M of revenue is the equivalent of 1% on the council tax. Labour’s £2.354 million hike in parking charges is therefore the equivalent of a 1.9% rise in council tax. The twist is that this rise will only be borne by drivers and that it comes in three months early on January 1st.

It seems that ex-Labour leader of Tower Hamlets council, Lutfur Rahmen, has been elected as the new executive mayor of Tower Hamlets, see here, standing as an “independent”. Not independent though of Islamic Forum of Europe which seems to want to take over Tower Hamlets. This is just another awful chapter in the weird and often downright nasty story of local government in Tower Hamlets.

Andrew Gilligan has been almost alone in covering Tower Hamlets for years and today he reported on events overnight here.

Labour Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone has yet again shown himself to be a divisive scuzz in going to Tower Hamlets at the start of the week. In breach of Labour party rules he defied new leader Ed Miliband and supported the sectarian Rahmen. Livingstone is spitting in Miliband’s face and, yet again, pandering to an extremist Muslim minority.

One person who will be glad to be well off out it today is Ealing council’s own chief executive, Martin Smith.

He came to Ealing as a refugee from the laughable misrule of Tower Hamlets.

Yesterday the ConservativeHome blog published this piece from me. It looks at the savings that our council will have to make in the
context of overall council spending and suggests that the terms and conditions under which the council employs people will be a fruitful source of savings over the next four years, don’t forget we have a lot of time.

Today’s news that Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham are looking to merge all of their services shows the way to another fruitful source of savings that will not impact the frontline. This will, it is reported save £50 million to £100 million across the three councils. Ealing is already a big council, over 300,000 people and the 2nd biggest in London. This new super-borough would be almost twice as big as Ealing and effectively the third largest city in England after Birmingham and Leeds, just ahead of Sheffield. Whilst it may not be appropriate to merge our already large council with one or more of our neighbours there are huge opportunities to share services with other boroughs.

All we have heard from our council so far is lots of attempts to blame Gordon Brown’s structural deficit on the banks and Tories and this rather desultory list of £5.265 million cheese paring savings and service charge increases. One third of these “savings” are increases in charges (mainly parking but others too). I do hope we see something a bit more imaginative and strategic soon.

Today the Chancellor announced that council grants would be reduced by 7.1% per annum for four years. This will be excruciatingly hard for our council and other councils to work with. At the same time most ring fences (pesky central government meddling by another name) will be removed which should make the transition a lot more manageable for councils.

In June the council did a piece of work to look forward at its financial position and assumed a 10% cut in grant for three years and no increase in council tax. This gave rise to a 27% central government cut over three years, a sensibly harsh assumption at that time, which gave them a £53 million savings target to tackle over the same three year period.

It looks like the government will be asking for slightly less in four years rather than three. The council can at least now plan for dealing with this transition. It should think long and hard. The changes it needs to make must be strategic and must focus on the back office not the front line.

The first tranche of the council’s savings looked uninspiring and tactical. The Albert Dane decision that the opposition challenged last night was typical of how not to do it. Rather than mindlessly slashing the council needs to work out how to re-provide services. It has the time to do it.