Phil Taylor

Sitting next to Rupa Huq on her sofa yesterday was Anthony Woods, one of the failed Labour council candidates for Northfield ward. Woods turned up to the Northfield ward forum on Monday with 40 other local residents. It was a good meeting although Woods made a fool of himself. Eager to make party political points Woods embarassed our Safer Neighbourhood Team sergeant by asking him what cuts would be visited on his team. The answer to this question is way above the sergeant’s pay grade. In the public forum section of the meeting Woods tried to ask the councillors what would the effect of cuts on Northfield. Frankly we don’t know and won’t know for some time beyond the schools announcement already made this week.

The question that Woods and the rest of the Labour party has to answer is how do we sort out the deficit without painful choices? It is currently running at £155 billion. In other words the government is spending £3 billion more than it raises in taxes EVERY WEEK. Put another way people in work are having the government borrow £5,000 a year on their behalf. Those same workers need to pay this debt off sometime.

It was entirely predictable that Ealing’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme would come to a crashing halt shortly after the election, see Gazette article here and Ealing Today here. No doubt we will hear lots from Labour about this “Tory cut”. It will all, of course, be total nonsense. In the 2009 Budget Report Alistair Darling signalled a halving, yes halving, of the government’s capital programme from £44 billion to £22 billion per annum from 2009-10 to 2013-14. The idea that BSF would remain intact in the face of that kind of contraction was always a fantasy. If Labour had won the last election it would only have been a matter of time before they were cancelling this programme themselves.

In his budget in June the Tory chancellor George Osbourne said he would not cut capital spending any further than Labour had done already but that the government would review everything. Quite right. The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was deeply flawed and was, ultimately, a con on the public.

BSF was fearsomely complicated. As Michael Gove said yesterday the programme produced buildings that are three times more expensive than regular commercial buildings and twice as expensive as Irish schools.

BSF made a really dumb pledge to rebuild every secondary school in the country regardless of need. Would it have been sensible to rebuild every road in the country? No. This was quite simply a grand scheme that sounded lovely but was in large part unnecessary. In areas where they got the BSF money early they knocked down perfectly serviceable schools and now some old buildings in other areas will have to wait many years to be refurbished.

It is a shame that no-one is going to be waving a magic wand over our schools anytime soon. The main job for the new administration in Ealing is to lobby for the new school in Greenford as a priority and to get our worst school buildings replaced on a sensible timetable. It is not quite as fancy as spending £300 million that the country hasn’t got but it sounds more like the real world. There will be new schools building programmes in the future but they won’t be as wasteful as BSF.

Only yesterday I got another picture of Cllr Bassam Mahfouz attached to a press release in my inbox. Between council leader Julian Bell and Mahfouz you may feel that you have seen a lot of these two recently.

This is at odds with Labour’s manifesto which promised that they would:

Reduce the Council’s bloated communications budget and stop money being wasted on party political propaganda.

This subject always gets a lot of people exercised (including me but not in relation to Ealing which is sensible on the whole in this area). If you look at the statement of accounts and search for publicity you will see that Ealing has consistently spent about £3 million on all aspects of publicity for eight years. Note this includes about £900K per annum for printing such documents as agenda papers, etc and £700K in recruitment advertising which is hard to avoid as much as many right thinking Tory types will rave about the monopoly of the Times Educational Supplement and the Guardian Society pages on a Wednesday. Any budget which stands still in cash terms for 8 years is probably not the biggest problem we face.

Labour’s manifesto promise is particularly disingenuous because when they were last in power, according to Grey CPAs, they used an accounting trick to put the council’s web services team on the Response capital budget to disguise their expansion of spending in the communications area. When the Tories came to power in 2006 we re-jigged the 2007/8 budget to put this right and in the process made a saving of £379K in marketing and communications budgets. It will be interesting to see if Labour can match this kind of saving. Not at the rate that they are going.

I thought that it would be interesting to see if Labour was going to match its manifesto promise with action so I asked this question at the last council meeting:

How many publicity photos have been taken by the Council since the election and how much did each one cost?

In the period from 6th May to 15th June the new council organised 17 photo shoots at a total external cost of £1,681, see here.

The full list below:

1. Team Ealing member – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
2. Team Ealing member – for a feature in Around Ealing. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
3. Children enjoying the maze at Brent Lodge Park – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
4. Cllr Bassam Mahfouz in Ealing Broadway – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
5. Cllr Rajinder Dheer outside Ealing Town Hall – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
6. Cllr Rajinder Mann at home – for a feature in Around Ealing. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
7. The clean up of the canal at Greenford involving the Council Leader Cllr Julian Bell – for issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
8. The launch of Saturday Street Cleaning involving Cllr Bassam Mahfouz for issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £150.
9. Walk to School shot involving the Council Leader Cllr Julian Bell. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
10. New Cabinet Members (group shot) for initial issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £205.
11. Head and Shoulder shots of all newly elected Council Members for the Council website and special leaflet issued with Around Ealing. Professional photographers used. Cost £686.
12. Southall Manor House featuring the Council Leader Cllr Julian Bell for issue with a press release. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
13. Offender doing community payback at the Brent Lodge Park for issue with a press release. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.
14. Cllr Bassam Mahfouz at Otter Road for a press release re Yellow Box Junctions. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
15. Southall Broadway shop front improvements. Professional photographer used. Cost £40.
16. Photography of the Mayor making commissioned by the Mayor’s Office. Professional photographer used. Cost £400 (422 images).
17. Cllr Julian Bell raising England flag at town hall. The photographer was a council officer. Cost £0.

You may feel that £1,700 is small beer (although that figure ignores the hidden cost of having council officers trailing around taking photos). One the other hand someone has paid council tax for a year to pay for these photos. What is clear is that our new cabinet are spending a lot of time and money having their photographs taken.

Tonight at the tediously titled Overview and Scrutiny Committee we discussed a call-in of the new Labour administration’s decision to bring housing management of 18,000 council houses in-house. You may have read my previous postings about this highly political manoeuvre, here.

This management is currently done by Ealing Homes, a so-called ALMO, one of those weird, over-complicated, unaccountable products of our previous government. The new Labour administration proposes bringing this function in-house. The Tories wanted to outsource this function to competing external providers so that council house tenants and leaseholders had some power to choose supplier rather than having to accept what they were given which is standard Labour practice.

We didn’t change the decision but we did at least get some background to the woefully thin paper that Labour used to justify its decision, here. Labour leader Julian Bell has been claiming that their move will save £5 million. It emerged tonight that this saving was a four year saving, so only £1.25 million a year then. Bell uses the same double (quadruple) counting trick that got prime minister Gordon Brown the reputation for being a liar. Bell’s modest saving ignores the benefits of outsourcing. It appears that any savings will be driven by the re-tendering of the repairs and maintenance contract – a saving that will apply to any end solution. He reckons that council can save £1.25 million a year by cutting through the ALMO red tape. Great.

We also established that the Ealing Homes management fee of £12.8 million will effectively be in-sourced. Outsourcing this function to a competitive market, I think the council had 12 or 13 responses from not-for-profit housing associations to provide these services, should have resulted in a saving in the order of 25%, or £3.2 million per annum, in the long run. This amount represents a £180 per week saving for Ealing’s council house tenants on top of what Bell’s saving would deliver. Ooops. Labour really would rather be ideologically pure than help council house tenants.

The man defending the indefensible tonight at the overview and scrutiny committee was Labour housing cabinet member, Hitesh Tailor, otherwise known as Councillor Withani. Way back in the eighties, in the days of Thatcherism and the loony left, it was a recognised problem that too many Labour supporting people would work for one council and get elected as a councillor elsewhere, entrenching producer interests. I know that the eighties are quite trendy nowadays but it is unedifying to see Labour appoint a housing officer from Islington Council as their cabinet member for housing in Ealing. Yuck!

We are going to hear a lot about money over the next few days. Yesterday the Conservatives laid out the appalling financial legacy that Gordon Brown left for our country, see here, it really is worth a look. Last Thursday we had Danny Alexander’s announcement of cancelled and delayed capital projects. The cancelled projects were the bouncing cheques being returned to drawer that Labour had written in the run to the election. On Tuesday we will have what is expected to be a very painful budget.

It will also be a big numbers day on Tuesday locally when the council’s cabinet will be discussing the statement of accounts for last year and the budget process. The contrast between the terrible national legacy left by Labour and the sound finances left by the Tories locally could not be more stark.

It is worth looking at who is now in charge of the cash in Ealing. Cllr Yvonne Johnson is a charming school teacher who is no-one’s fool, and a longstanding, experienced councillor. She is cabinet member for finance and performance and a South Acton councillor. It appears that fellow South Acton councillor and newbie, Mik Sabiers, is her bag carrier, a role I had myself four years ago. Whilst Johnson chairs the pension fund panel, Sabiers is there too. Sabiers has also been made the chairman of the boring but exceedingly important audit committee. It might have been wiser for Labour to put someone a little less close to Cllr Johnson in this role, it should after all be driving the audit process ultimately. Isn’t there any need for distance between the executive and the audit process? Maybe someone with some experience of local government and/or finance?

You can follow Sabiers on Twitter here. Of the pension fund panel Sabiers says:

Now in council pension fund meeting, loysa figures to discuss

Mmm, yes Cllr Sabiers. Lots of figures. His Twitter biog describes him as:

Labour councillor for South Acton, journalist, socialist, sometime egoist, helper, friend and occasionally foe

His register of member’s interests entry lists him as being a member of three unions: Unite, GMB and NUJ. His day job is being a “journalist” working for Unite. I think internal comms person is a more usual description for people who write internal comms newsletters. On the side Sabiers does music reviews for the Morning Star. Yes, really. Oh dear.