Phil Taylor

In his rush to make political capital out of yet another cock up by the Council’s transport engineers Councillor Mahfouz has seriously misled the public. Splashed all over the front page of the Gazette this morning was this story: “Drivers to get box junction fines back.” The story goes on to say: “Ealing Council has set aside nearly £35,000 to refund motorists… About 600 people who paid for an ‘offence’ committed before April 30 will get their fine money back.” Their editorial goes on to say: “Ealing Council has pledged to reimburse eligible motorists…”.

This story is woefully incomplete and inaccurate. If you go the council’s website here you will find out that 7,609 tickets were issued for offence code 31J, Entering and stopping in a box junction when prohibited, between July 2009 and April 2010 at the junction in question. These would have been paid at either £60 or £120 depending on how quickly people paid. That is a liability of somewhere between £450,000 and £900,000.

The council’s press release is more carefully worded. It says:

The council will now be cancelling any unpaid tickets from the Otter Road/Greenford Road yellow box junction issued for offences before 30 April – the date the council suspended enforcement at the junction. The council will also refund anyone who received a ticket at that junction, but paid it after 30 April.

In other words only those who didn’t pay for tickets issued before 30 April and those who have had tickets since will get off. Tough luck on the 7,000 that did pay between July 2009 and April 2010.

I am angry that yet again the council’s traffic engineers have made mistakes with this type of junction. For the most part those that have had tickets would have deserved them however much they might grumble about the council’s incompetence. This kind of mistake though further undermines people’s trust in Ealing’s parking people – having spent three years trying to sort them out this is very frustrating for me.

It seems that in his enthusiasm to get his rather warped version of the story into the Gazette, Mahfouz will have opened up the council to a liability of many £100Ks. This is strange behaviour indeed for someone who is meant to be in charge. Mahfouz has not yet got out of the rock throwing habits of opposition. It seems also that the Gazette in its enthusiasm to endorse everything the new Labour administration is doing has lost its ability to ask hard questions. All round very poor.

The big talking point at the last council meeting was council tax. This debate is a proxy for financial management in general and control of spending in particular. Unfortunately the members of the new Labour group are particularly unsuited to the hard job that faces them over the next four years.

My Daily Mail front page above (click to enlarge) is only one piece of coverage for a report from Policy Exchange put out today. It found that public sector pay has risen by 33% in real terms between 2002 and 2009, at something like three times the rate of the private sector. Whilst private sector productivity increased in that time, public sector productivity fell leaving the public sector some 2/3rds as productive as the private sector.

These facts tell us simply how our council can square the circle of protecting services whilst dealing with tight funding rounds and freezing the council tax for four years the way it proposes to freeze councillors’ allowances for four years (quite right). The Policy Exchange paper proposes freezing public sector pay for four years. This is something the council should look at very hard although it would be appropriate to protect the lowest paid from this I feel.

A very senior officer of the council told me this year that he thought that the council could take 20% out of its cost base by merely equalising terms and conditions with the private sector, for instance only paying people a flat rate and doing away with layers of anti-social hours payments, etc. Add this kind of change to pay restraint and the council could withstand really quite eye watering grant changes and a long term freeze in council tax. There is no reason to cut services.

There is a big problem though. Our ruling Labour group is heavily infiltrated by unionism. 25 out of 40 Labour councillors admit to union membership in their declarations of interest. 10 of them belong to the largest union, Unite, which is currently doing its best to destroy airline BA.

The Gazette is reporting that after two years of council tax freezes delivered by the Tories, the new Labour administration is going to do the same again next year, see here. Good news.

Labour promised to freeze council tax next year in its manifesto, see here. One of their headline promises was:

Keeping your council tax low with a freeze in the first year.

One of the key objectives of the Tory opposition for the next four years is going to be to box Labour in and make sure that council tax is not allowed to spiral out of control after next year. We know their track record, they raised council tax by 48% in their last term of office. The Tory record by comparison was 1.9%, 1.9%, 0%, 0% or 3.84% over four years.

The new coalition government has offered to help local authorities to deliver freezes for two years running so we tabled the following motion for discussion at council on Tuesday:

This Council notes the administration’s manifesto pledge to freeze council tax levels for the 2011/12 budget year. The Council further notes the Government’s announcement of additional funding to enable councils to freeze council tax for the same financial year.

Council resolves to take advantage of this additional funding and pledges to freeze council tax levels in Ealing for the 2011/12 financial year. Council further resolves to use the money the administration has earmarked for next year’s council tax freeze to further freeze council tax for the 2012/13 financial year.

Labour voted against this motion and instead tabled and voted through this motion:

This Council notes and welcomes the Labour administration’s pledge to freeze the council tax levels for the 2011/12 budget year.

This Council notes that any monies we might receive from the coalition government in order to freeze council tax must also cover the cost of cuts we already know about, namely the £1.832m already announced last week and our next round of cuts on 22nd June 2010.

This Council makes a commitment that we will live within our means and make our major aim the protection of frontline services, despite the government’s draconian cuts which will affect the most vulnerable in society.

Note their change in language. Instead of “keeping your council tax low” as per their manifesto they are now saying “we will live within our means and make our major aim the protection of frontline services”. By “live within our means” what they really mean is their judgement of what they can take from you. Watch out!

On a lighter note one of the new Labour councillors picked up a nickname for himself on Tuesday. Maiden speeches are by convention heard in silence. The Tory benches could not help exclaiming when one of the new councillors for Southall Broadway ward, Cllr Mohammed Kausar, referred to his colleagues as “comrades” during his maiden speech.

As we will see over the next few years there is a vast gulf between some of the reasonable positions that Labour took in its manifesto and the affiliations of some of its new councillors – more later!

Last night was the first real council meeting since the election and a noisy affair it was. It took us almost an hour to get through the oral questions. The new Mayor seemed to be particularly pleased that there were supplementary and second supplementary questions for all seven questions.

In one exchange on Labour’s housing manoeuvres the Tory group managed to establish that Labour intends to renege on its previous promise to give tenants a full ballot on all the options for the future of their homes. The Tory group put out the following press release last night:

LABOUR BREAKS PROMISE ON HOUSING BALLOT

Labour has broken one of its first promises as a Council administration by refusing to honour a pledge to offer Council tenants and lessees a ballot before making any changes to the way Council housing is managed in the Borough. Council Leader Julian Bell moved the following motion at a Council meeting on 20 October 2009:

Council agrees that before any change is made to who owns or manages council housing in the borough, tenants should be involved in full and proper consultation on the options and should have the right to decide on the best alternative in a ballot.

Less than eight months later, Labour has abandoned that pledge, and has now said it will force tenants and lessees to accept a return to in-house management against their will if necessary.

At tonight’s full Council meeting Conservative Housing spokesman, Cllr Colm Costello asked the Housing portfolio holder when the ballot promised by Labour would take place. He was told that Labour no longer had any intention of holding a ballot, and that the words of Cllr Julian Bell just eight months ago could not be taken seriously. Councillors were told that Labour would now do as it liked as it had won the election. Cllr Costello complained:

It is this sort of U-turn without any pretense of justification that really gives politics a bad name. Cllr Bell could not have been clearer before the election that he wanted Council tenants and lessees to have a ballot on how their housing is managed and run. Yet at the first Council meeting after the election he and the rest of the Labour Group totally overturned their promises of a few months earlier.

The future arrangements housing management is of vital importance to thousands of people in Council homes across this Borough. If they deserved a ballot before the election, they deserve one now. Labour are running scared by the fact that if people are given an actual fair say they may not pick what has already been chosen for them.

18 days ago George Osborne announced some £6.2 billion of in year spending cuts for the current financial year 2010/11. Yesterday the Department for Communities and Local Government spelt out where the axe would fall in individual local authorities, see their press release here.

It looks like Ealing is going to lose £1.8 million this year or 0.4% of its central government grant made up as follows:

Department for Education Area Based Grant (ABG) £1.496 million
Supporting People Administration ABG £172,000
Prevent ABG £102,000
Cohesion ABG £18,000
Home Office ABG £46,000

This will be a blow to the new administration in Ealing and it will cause some local services to change, probably for the worse in most cases. In year cuts are always awkward because they are unplanned. The Labour group in Ealing will no doubt jump up and down and tell us how terrible the coalition is to impose these cuts on Ealing but let us be clear where the blame lies…

… as confirmed by Liam “there’s no money left” Byrne and Lord Myners:

There is nothing progressive about a government that consistently spends more than it can raise in taxation and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred with respect to the current generation.

After the street cleaning announcement today came another one from the council on Southall Manor House.

This press release re-announced one from February here.

Again, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it seems like Julian Bell’s cabinet are busying themselves having photos taken in front of Tory projects rather than getting on with their own stuff.

Update: Ooops. Apparently I am wrong about Bell wasting time running around getting photos done. On closer inspection it seems that Acton resident Bell saved a little time and money here by getting himself Photoshopped into a picture of Southall Manor rather than actually going there himself.

It is good to see the new Labour council carrying on enthusiastically with Conservative policies. Today Bassam Mahfouz, cabinet member for Transport and Environment, announced that 52 miles of streets in the north of the borough, which have their rubbish collected on a Friday, will have their streets cleaned on a Saturday. Hooray!

Bassam said:

At the moment, rubbish can build-up across the weekend, which can be unpleasant for residents and their visitors. We’re committed to making Ealing cleaner and I think residents will really notice the difference. I’m keen to receive feedback from residents on how the service establishes itself across the north of the borough.

This is old news though. This policy was first announced on the 13th February by the old leader, Jason Stacey, at the Annual Streetwatchers’ Conference. Sue Emment, the old portfolio holder, used a supplementary question at the full council on the 20th April to confirm the 12th June as the starting date.

Labour’s election platform echoed the messages the Tories had been using for four years so in spite of not being in control the Tories can take some pleasure in the fact that Labour are happy to plough the same furrow – for now.

Nice picture of Bassam. Has he got a height thing? Why else be photographed so far in front of street cleaner Peter Richter? Or maybe there is some four legs good, two legs better stuff happening here?

Local MP Virendra Sharma has been even quieter than usual lately. Maybe as a fellow opposition politician I should have some sympathy, but hey! He stopped his Tweeting before the general election and has not been much in evidence since. He raised himself to ask a question about Pakistan on 2nd June, see TheyWorkForYou.com here.

Today the Daily Mail is really going for fellow Labour MP Keith Vaz about his involvement with disbarred lawyer Shahrokh Mireskandari, see here. They have totally nailed Vaz as a liar. You may remember that in June 2008 Sharma jointly signed a letter which Vaz wrote to a judge urging the High Court to delay proceedings against Mireskandari.

Rather pathetically Sharma said at the time:

I am a new MP. I will be more questioning before I sign a letter in future.

It was no coincidence that Vaz was on his selection panel when he became the Ealing Southall Labour candidate in 2007 so you have to assume there was mutual back scratching going on here.