Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Keeping up the roads

This weekend I have travelled on two of Ealing’s worst roads.

On Saturday we were canvassing on Montague Road in Hanwell. Many of the residents were complaining about it quite rightly. I was able to explain to them that the new Conservative administration has spent twice as much in a third of the time as Labour did on road resurfacing capital projects (Labour liked to spend your money on making Perceval House nice and buying the freehold). We have allocated £25.5 million on roads in 4 years. Labour spent about £12 million in 12 years the picture below tells the story. This is though no consolation if it is not your road getting done.

Today I used Elderberry Road in Ealing Common ward. Another atrocious road. We have spent £19 million in the last three years so it shows you how badly things were left to slide if after that investment there are still roads like Montague and Elderberry.

On Tuesday the Cabinet will sign off another £6.5 million of spending in the 2010/11 financial year, see papers here, Item 21.

The good news is that both Montague and Elderberry will be resurfaced in the next financial year which starts in April. £60K for Montague and £83K for Elderberry.

I was glad to see though that as bad as these two roads are they have both been extensively patched in recent days to keep up with the damage caused by the recent bad weather.

The good news for Northfield ward is that another eight of our roads will be done with a further two on the reserve list (if they don’t make it next year they will almost certainly make it the year after).

Balmoral Gardens
Blondin Avenue
Cardiff Road
Christopher Avenue
Clitherow Avenue
Haslemere Avenue
Jersey Road
Occupation Lane (reserve)
Ridley Avenue (reserve)
Temple Road

The current Tory administration believes that the roads are vital to all of our prosperity (whatever you think about alternatvie forms of transport we still need roads) and that keeping them up is a basic duty. In any case most of our residents take a pride in their homes and want to see the streetscape around them kept up too.

Categories
Northfield Ward Forum

Northfield Ward Forum – next Thursday

The next Northfield Ward Forum Meeting will be at The Log Cabin, 259 Northfield Avenue on Thursday 25 February 2010 starting at 7.30pm.

The agenda is available here.

If you don’t know where the Log Cabin is it is just behind Northfield library next door to Northfield tube station. We look forward to seeing you there.

Categories
National politics

A night of desperation

Having been interested in politics all of my life I can tell you with confidence that I shall be watching Desperate Housewives tonight. As parents of a young child many of our nights are spent in, in front of the telly. I did not even start to imagine I might inflict an hour of Gordon Brown on my wife this evening. If GB’s interview with Piers Morgan is politics it is politics of the lowest sort. The yuck factor is high.

Categories
Communications disease

Even the BBC has spotted Brown’s 43% comms surge

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/external/player.swf

It was good to see that the BBC has finally picked up on the story that under Gordon “end of spin” Brown government ad spending went up 43% last year. The package above was shown on the Politics Show this lunchtime.

I picked up the story in July last year. The Telegraph spotted it in January of this year.

The main figure is straight from the Central Office of Information annual report, here. The image below is the key table from page 6, click to enlarge.

You can use old annual reports on the COI website to build up a history of their spending back to 1993. I published this graph in July last year when the figures came out.

coi-spending-2009

As you can see Gordon Brown has eclipsed even the Blair governments’ propensity to spin. Brown’s “end of spin” claim is just another of his lies. There is clearly no John Major pre-election splurge in 1997. On the other hand you can see two Blair election peaks in 2001 and 2005 and then when Brown gets his hands on government it all goes crazy in the run up to the election that never was in autumn 2007 and on. There really is not a good reason why you couldn’t take at least £300 million out of this budget – that is what it costs to run three hospitals the size of Ealing’s.

Categories
Communications disease

Gazette takes its share

The wall of government money being thrown at the media as a part of Gordon Brown’s £540 million “end of spin” campaign is trickling its way down to our own local media. This Friday the Ealing & Acton Gazette carried the following large display ads:

1/3 page DWP – Build a better future
1/3 page HMRC – Tell tax credits your news
2/3 page Community Payback – Have your say
Full page – WRAP – Love food hate waste

The last one is particularly pernicious as it is not government branded and has a .com domain name.

Categories
National politics

Down the plug hole

In today’s Telegraph Jeff Randal gives a fairly comprehensive analysis of Gordon Brown’s economic record.

The bit on the stock market is particularly telling:

Under Labour 1964-70, the stock market’s real return (adjusted for inflation) went down by 13 per cent. Under Labour 1974-79 (which included Denis Healey’s grovelling to the IMF), it went down by 11.5 per cent. Under Mr Brown, the London stock market’s decline in real return is more than 20 per cent.

The full article is well worth a read if you want to get some perspective of the Labour government over its entire term.

Categories
National politics

How not to pay for social care

In today’s Guardian it is suggested that the government is considering a £20,000 levy on estates to pay for social care. This is just another unfair Labour tax which looks like simple confiscation compared to the Tories’ proposals for a voluntary national scheme that allows people to pay a one off premium of £8,000 to pay for social care when they retire. Labour really have no idea beyond grab, grab, grab.

According to Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Philip Hammond:

Gordon Brown has a track record of saying ‘no new taxes’ before an election, and then raising them by stealth after it. Labour are now secretly planning another tax – a death tax – to pay for this unfunded, ill-thought out plan for social care. When you die, a Labour Government would take £20,000 from what you leave to your children and family. For those with the most modest savings Labour’s plans could leave them with nothing. In contrast we want to help people in old age so that they can leave as much of their lifetime’s savings as possible to the next generation. We will offer people the chance to pay a one off premium of £8,000 into a voluntary scheme to cover the cost of residential care in old age. So under our plans no-one would be forced to sell their home to pay for care.

Categories
Customer Services

Customer Services humming

If you click on the Customer Services category link on the right hand menu you will see that I regularly check the performance of our Customer Services organisation.

I was a bit anxious after my last visit to Customer Services on 18th January so I went back today to check up on them.

It took 6 seconds to get a ticket timed at 11.21am. I saw a parking agent two minutes later. There were less than 40 people waiting in the whole place and there were two cash windows open with a queue of one person waiting for a free window. There were six people working on parking so there were only two people queueing for this service.

All in all everything seemed to be as it should.

Categories
Policing

Go your own way

I saw this headline in the Telegraph this morning:

Police complain orders to patrol alone puts them in danger

I think their story was a rehash of a Daily Mail story with a somewhat more forthright headline:

Whining bobbies in Facebook campaign against single police patrols

Both newspapers demonstrated why they will be going out of business sometime soon – they refused to provide a link to the Facebook page they were writing about. Linking has been the whole point of the web since it was created by Tim Berners-Lee 20 years ago. The Facebook page is here. The 1,000 people that have signed up seem to be a mixture of PCSOs, retired policemen and their families. They are wrong.

They say “ban single patrols of police”. This position is as silly as one that says all police patrols should be single handed. I would not want to go out on my own in many parts of inner city London at night. Similarly, most of London during the day is safe enough for a single PCSO to patrol. Otherwise we would have to advise the public in general to stay at home unless they had an escort.

The campaign seems to be the work of a woman called Angi Butcher-McDermott from Kent who said she is unwilling to apply to become a PCSO if made to patrol alone in dangerous areas. That is reasonable. Banning single patrolling isn’t. As a man of a certain age I might be forgiven for suggesting that if she wants to do a man’s job and earn a man’s wage she should take the same risks. Has 40 odd years of feminism really passed this woman by?

The new Met chief Sir Paul Stephenson has suggested that there should be more single patrolling. He is right. If it is not safe for coppers to go out on their own most of the time in most of London then we might as well just give up. Single patrolling means that coppers have to talk to the public and can’t just chat to their buddy and ignore us. It makes them more approachable by definition as they have no-one else to talk to! Single patrolling has to give us more bang for our policing buck. That said there are many occasions when double patrolling is appropriate and this can only be an operational judgement of the chain of command.

The double patrolling mindset that Stephenson is trying to overturn was demonstrated in one of the Safer Neighbourhood Team adverts the Met themselves put out three years ago. Their own ads (see picture at top) show two coppers doing the work of one. One talks to a woman whilst the other just goofs around.

Update: Now picked up by Standard here. They are leading on it – certainly online.

Their editorial says:

Sir Paul is right. His detractors show more concern for their convenience than the public they are meant to serve.

Categories
Localism National politics

Scrap the Audit Commission

The Audit Commission has made it onto the front page of the Sunday Times this morning. The commission is not the most exciting bit of government but superficially at least they look like an important bit. They started off as in-house auditors for the government but under New Labour their role in performance assessment has come to the fore as they have been used by Labour to try to drive their agenda through to the local level. They started off under the Thatcher administration, created as a result of the 1982 Local Government Act, as a tool to impose some financial discipline on local councils from the centre.

According to the Sunday Times:

ENGLAND’S local government spending watchdog has paid a lobbying firm with links to Labour for advice on how to undermine Tory frontbenchers who challenged its activities.

The Audit Commission, which is supposed to be politically neutral, paid nearly £60,000 to the lobbyists, who advised it to “combat the activities of Eric Pickles”, the Tory party’s chairman.

The story is essentially how ex-GLC Labour councillor head of the Audit Commission has been illegally using £60,000 of public money to pay a Labour insider public affairs company to lobby the government. Why? The reason is organisational self-preservation. The Tories see the Audit Commission as being largely unnecessary and will certainly curtail it, if not destroy it entirely. The organisation employs 2,000 people and costs £216 million per annum to run, see their annual report and accounts here. Most of their income comes from fees they levy on public bodies so it is easy for the central government to dictate an increasingly onerous oversight regime on local government as they don’t pick up the bill – councils and the NHS pay. This all means that the red tape is paid for by ordinary people in the form of higher council tax or worse services.

If you go to Ealing statement of accounts (page 27) here you will see that Ealing spent £533K last year and £681K the year before on audit costs. If you compare with the private sector you will see how costly the Audit Commission is. Take WH Smiths. Their turnover is £1,340 million, compared to Ealing’s £1,107 million. But they only spent £200K on audit last year and £300K the year before. It is straightforward to argue that our one council is paying a premium of over £300K for the Audit Commission’s “added value” service over regular plc auditing practices. (If anyone wants to argue that local government accounting is more complex I would merely say let’s make it simpler and more comprehensible for everyone involved!) This is not the only cost of the Audit Commission. It costs us at least the same again to jump through the Audit Commission’s hoops, to collect the metrics they want, to prepare and take part in their assessments, etc. The total bill for the whole central control mindset imposed by the Audit Commission is in the order of £500-1,000 million per annum. Losing this cost is one of the main points of the Tory’s localism agenda.

Laughably in their annual report the Audit Commission claim to be the 5th biggest audit firm in the UK. You wonder how big they would be if they had to compete with real audit firms?