If you run an incompetent and sometimes dishonest outfit such as Bexley council, the Freedom of Information Act must be the bane of your life
as interested individuals strive to prise the truth out of an organisation
unfamiliar with the concept. So naturally Bexley council puts obstacles in the
way and their latest is to publish the names of applicants on its website. That
puts a legal FOI request into the same category usually reserved for fugitives
from justice and bus vandals. How long before the same technique is applied to
late library books or bin lids left slightly open?
Councillor Colin Campbell, cabinet member for corporate affairs is the bright
spark who has dreamed up this latest assault on democracy. He says that FOI
requests are costing more than the council leader’s salary. Perhaps he should ask
himself which provides the best value for the money.
Personally I’m not convinced that putting names on a website is much of a
disincentive and I hope that Colin Campbell’s authoritarian scheme fails.
Does anyone have any idea why so-called Conservatives are so keen to act like
left-wing dictators these days? I suspect that it’s not unconnected with the
party’s abysmal poll ratings. If the choice is between two sets of idiots you
might as well vote for the party which is the acknowledged expert in that field.
I’ve not yet found any FOI names on the council website even though they
are said to be there. My name won’t be included, I’ve not made any FOI requests.
The News Shopper which has just arrived reports Councillor Alex Sawyer
expressing justifiable concerns about the spread of CCTV across the borough. How
refreshing to hear a Conservative speaking like one and not as if he belongs to the
Labour Lite party. He also reminds us that the German electronics company Siemens
has been contracted to update Bexley’s CCTV system which causes me some concern.
Back in 2004 Siemens took over all the IT functions of the BBC, a responsibility
that extends from office systems to the transmission network - and as a bit of a
radio enthusiast myself I believe that to have been a disaster. BBC radio now falls
off the air far too often due to stupid errors that never used to happen when BBC
engineers were in charge. What sort of idiot puts the main system and its back-up
in the same room, so when one air conditioning unit goes down both systems fail at
the same time?
A close family member works at BBC White City and tells me that even the phone
system doesn’t work properly and that the unreliability is causing the BBC to
rethink its contract with Siemens. Trust Bexley council to get into bed with a bunch of
incompetents. For the record I have a large Siemens fridge and it came with a
bottle rack inside. 2 litre drink bottles are too big to fit and 75cl. wine
bottles are small enough to fall through the gaps. Fortunately my supplier agreed
the shelf was useless and obtained a standard glass shelf as a replacement free
of charge.
The electioneering has started;
a glossy leaflet from
Labour’s ‘Lesnes Abbey Action Team’ bearing the slogan ‘What
a load of rubbish’ has dropped on to my doormat. And they are not wrong. It
is certainly a load of rubbish. Apparently a Labour governed Bexley would
“reintroduce weekly refuse collection and a balanced approach to recycling”.
Have they forgotten that it is the Labour government that pushed councils into
degraded refuse services both directly and indirectly through massively increased
taxation on rubbish disposal? I suppose that the constant lying in high places within
the Labour party permeates down to every level and it just comes naturally to them.
And what does “a balanced approach to recycling” mean anyway?
The leaflet then goes on to say that they will restore the Meals on Wheels service
and complains about parking charges, promising to get rid of some altogether. They
imply they will increase expenditure on the Abbey ruins and complain about cuts in
street cleaning. They don’t actually say they will change those things, so it’s
nothing but the smoke and mirrors we’ve come to expect from Labour. The Labour
Party has a long and uninterrupted history of believing that all problems are solved
by throwing our money at them so maybe they are casting envious eyes back to the days
of the 17% tax hikes that they were proud to impose when they last ruled the roost
locally. But no; they say that they will freeze council tax. Heaven knows; the Tories
in Bexley have been a massive disappointment with their incompetence, corruption and
disregard for justice and the law but do we really want to swap that for the same sort
of Mickey Mouse economics with which their boss in Downing Street brought this
country to its knees?
Pickford
Lane has been closed all week. Signs at its extremities on Long Lane and Crook
Log tell drivers that the road ahead is closed and it is, totally, with side
roads blocked off too. And the reason for this council imposed inconvenience and
attack on local businesses? A simple resurfacing job. I assume the resurfacing
was essential; if it was anything like Abbey Road with its myriad
depressions, subsidence and ineffective drains
it would have been a nightmare for pedestrians hoping to avoid a drenching on wet days.
But why close the whole road instead of keeping one carriageway open with traffic
controls? To suit Bexley council’s convenience probably. With few of the staff
having the initiative to have ever managed a business and suited only to protected jobs
with gold-plated pensions they wouldn’t have a clue about trying to make an honest
living as a businessman. Much the same goes for the parasites who call themselves
politicians. Few would have a clue what it is like to live without the sugar coating of
endless expenses claims.
As
I left home at 7.30 this morning the thought crossed my mind that I should take
my camera with me every time I go out which turned out to be somewhat
prophetic because as I approached Fossington Road I spotted a van parked
across the cycle path and a man up a ladder. As I passed I guessed he might be
swapping the cycling signs which as I reported on
17 November last year, several were
mirror images of what they should have been. By the time I returned ten minutes
later the van had moved on to change the sign opposite Lesnes Abbey but as I
got close it drove off to the sign by the junction with Carrill Way. You can see
the sign there removed prior to replacement with a new one because I ran home to grab my camera.
Given the narrowness of the road, thanks to the idiocy of Conservative
councillor Craske, the man had little option but to park on the pavement while
he carried out council orders. If only Bexley council were competent and things
got done right the first time we would all be a bit richer. And if only the
numbskull Craske had not authorised Andrew Bashford’s flawed
case for narrowing the road without engaging what little brain power he
possesses, the council might not have to raise £1m. of extra taxes because it claims
to have lost out over government Freedom Pass funding.
For the record, on my minimum of two trips a day along this footpath, I have
so far this month not seen a cyclist. Councillor
Davey said the same.
Today’s
News Shopper provides a rich store of council related stories. The
front page tells us that aluminium panels are being stolen from lamp posts in
huge quantities and that the electrical components are left exposed and
dangerous. This is I suppose an extension of last year’s
gully thefts and I have seen one
or two lamp posts with exposed wiring. In future I had better let the council
know. Councillor Craske is quoted by the newspaper and for once it is hard to
disagree with him. It’s a pity that the comedian doesn’t follow his own advice
because the work he inflicted on Abbey Road has left the public exposed to bare
electricity cables for six months or more. (Photograph taken 19th February.)
Among the paper’s reports of Bexley council’s failure to fund community centres, failure
to clear snow and failure to deal with dog mess there is a report that a nationally renowned
sculptor has been commissioned to erect a public work of art in lower Belvedere, on a
roundabout near the industrial estates away from the residential areas. It will presumably
complement Erith’s fish and whilst Belvedere is certainly in need of some sort of
revamp after years of council neglect and worse, one must wonder in a time of austerity
whether the money could be better spent. At least the money won’t come directly from
your council tax but I bet the London Development Agency which is responsible for it filches
the money from us one way or another.
At the beginning of the year Bexley ditched Vinci Parking Services
in favour of NSL Services Group which now employs the traffic wardens patrolling our
streets. One of my contributors has today drawn my attention to the situation in other
London boroughs where the same company operates.
Press reports indicate they have warned wardens that they may be disciplined
if they don’t meet the company’s target of a minimum of 0·9 tickets an
hour. Kensington and Chelsea’s councillors are reported to have accused NSL
of “breaking statutory guidelines which ban target setting”. Soon after
the news broke nearby Westminster stripped NSL of their contract.
Here in Bexley we presumably suffer the same treatment as the Royal Borough. It
is perhaps to be expected that a council with a long history of paying scant
regard to parking regulations and which tops the
revenue raising league
tables, should cosy up to a company with similar habits.
Bexley
councillors have complained in the past about the lack of a tube line in the borough,
but there are eight London boroughs without a tube station. What makes Bexley almost
unique and the complaint more valid is that it has no DLR, no TfL Overground and no
Tramlink either. Soon Crossrail will be added to the list but how ironic is it that
the council complains about its poor transport links while its own priorities appear
to be dismantling the system we do have and campaigning against plans to improve links
across the Thames? The photos show the changes currently being inflicted on Pickford Lane.
On 30 November last year roads throughout Bexley were affected by a vehicle
fire in Blackwall tunnel and its
subsequent closure and now the tunnel is
again set for overnight closure starting next Monday for three whole years. It can’t be much more
than a couple of years since the southbound tunnel was fully opened after several years
of refurbishment and overnight closures and I had expected that sooner or later ‘the
northerners’ would suffer the same problems getting home while their homeward
tunnel was upgraded as we south Londoners did for such a long time. But that would be too
simple. Mayor Boris blasted Johnson has dictated that his favoured north cannot be
inconvenienced but it is OK to bash south London dwellers again. His promise to
reintroduce the tunnel contra-flow proved to be another of his lies so there is no prospect of
keeping both traffic flows running through the night and he blithely tells us to get
ourselves down to Dartford instead. I bet the highly educated imbecile won’t ever be put
to that massive inconvenience, let alone every night, as will countless shift and night
workers who try against the odds to keep London ticking over.
I confess to being absolutely furious about Boris’s crass decision; all my London based
relations live in the East and North East and I visit them at least weekly and return late.
It’s an impossible journey by public transport which as a Freedom Pass holder I am keen to
use whenever I can, and doubling the journey time so late at night is not really a practical
proposition, especially for three long years. The previous closure was bad enough but at least
it wasn’t every night. A similarly affected friend thinks Boris should be publicly strung
up for his sins against south Londoners, and I’m not surprised because the tunnel is not
only impassable southbound, it will be restricted to 20 m.p.h. for the ‘lucky’
northerners.
If Bexley’s stupid Conservative council hadn’t be so keen on short term political
expediency and if it wasn’t totally devoid of road planning expertise we might have had a
new Thames crossing to look forward to in just a couple of years time, instead
all we will have is average speed cameras in Blackwall tunnel and toll-booths.
Blackwalltunnel.com. What others have to say about it.
The
News Shopper came late this week so I’ve only just
noticed the latest announcement from that nasty piece of work, councillor Craske. It has
been possible until recently to deal with parking issues in a variety of ways; on
line, by phone, by post, with cash in Erith or in person at the ‘Parking Shop’ in Bexleyheath
Broadway. However on 29th January the shop closed. According to the council the reduced access to
parking services is to “make services easier to access” and Craske, the council’s
transport motormouth reminds us that, “Instead of having to go to pay their penalty
charge notices, motorists can now do so from the comfort of their own home”.
Notice how Craske’s statement implies that paying parking penalties is a
civic honour that we should be proud to be paying, but even on the most optimistic
interpretation of the council’s own statistics one in six tickets are issued
wrongly, and that’s only counting those who decide to challenge them. How
is Craske’s grand plan going to help that one in six? Things can only be made more
difficult by the total loss of face to face contact. Emailing and writing is fraught with
difficulty because Bexley council cannot resist
lying and law breaking. For Craske to present
this change as an improvement illustrates only too well why he is not fit for office.
The photographs above come from a resident of Northumberland Heath and show the
council’s gestapo car parked on a yellow line last week while videoing
anyone who stopped for a moment. They are supposed to put up warning signs when
doing this but in my experience only one sign is ever displayed. I can’t see it
in either
photograph but I expect one is around somewhere. When
I spoke to the driver
last December she said the car didn’t monitor yellow line offences,
only bus stops and school zig-zags etc.
It is interesting that the car is still emblazoned with the Vinci Parking
Services logo when Bexley’s website says that they were ditched in favour of NSL
Services Group at the end of last year.
It
has taken fewer than four months for this site to become the first choice at both Google and
Yahoo for searches for ‘Bexley council’. Top that is apart from the council’s
own site which is almost certainly top because they use your money to buy that
position. Being placed directly beneath the council’s own site means
that everyone who Googles for Bexley council has the opportunity to see what a useless
bunch of incompetent petty dictators they are. The high ranking presumably explains the
steadily rising number of contacts being made. One thing that strikes me about the contacts,
sometimes consisting of no more than a handful of words of encouragement, but occasionally
including documents and photos, is the almost universal disdain for cretinous Craske, the so
called Cabinet Member for Transport, the post that rakes in more than £20k a year in
expenses alone.
My labelling of him an obnoxious little twerp seems to have gone down
particularly well although in the interest of fairness I must report that
someone objected on the grounds that I had failed to provide evidence that he
was little. That may well be true although I might claim it was a reference to
his intellect. But if that excuse is not accepted I shall have to refer to a publicity shot of all
the Conservative councillors standing in a group in which Craske’s presence is not immediately
obvious. However a pair of eyes peer over the shoulder of the second
shortest woman in the front row and they look as though they could belong to the face that never
tires of getting itself into the pages of the News Shopper.
I made an almost unbelievable blog entry on 17 January which said that Bexley council threatened to prosecute a resident for not paying his council tax instalment due on 1st January 2010 until the banks re-opened on the 4th. You’d think it was one of those damn-fool mistakes and errors of judgement for which the borough is famed, but apparently it’s not that simple. Their response to a complaint says they will graciously restore the instalment plan which the original letter summarily withdrew but they still insist that payments must be made on the first of the month even when it falls on a bank holiday (or, by implication a weekend) and that if it isn’t prosecution will surely follow. I was expecting an apology for the mistake but there is no sign of one, they simply cannot get their thick heads around how silly this makes them look. I have documented a bit more detail on a new council tax page and I think the perpetrator of this ridiculous piece of idiocy, one Miss L. Cairns, deserves the honour of a listing on the Bexley Hall of Shame, don’t you?
I rarely produce much rubbish, don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m not an
enthusiastic shopper so don’t accumulate all that useless cellophane and plastic
but it seems to lead directly to my bin not being emptied. There were only three
Tesco bags of rubbish nestling at the bottom of my green bin this morning and one of those
was only half full. Although the bin was placed alongside those of two neighbours,
mine alone wasn’t emptied, though the bin had been moved. My guess is that a
Tesco bag at the bottom of a bin is beyond arm’s reach and it’s not worth
taking a near empty bin to the lorry and engaging the hydraulic lift; so they take a leaf
out of the useless councillor Davey’s book and walk idly by as he does
whenever he sees a problem or one is reported to him.
A missed collection doesn’t matter much to me though it’s galling that the only
useful service Bexley council provides for my £1,500 a year is the refuse
collection and it makes me wonder how many bins are missed. The last failure at
my address was as recently as last November
so failures are two out of six collections. 33%!
If
you read the Woolwich Road or
Penhill Road reports you will see
that Bexley council witters on about protecting pedestrians crossing roads which
is all very laudable except that their incompetence leads to unforeseen
consequences - consequences that their meagre intelligence can’t
predict anyway. In Abbey Road their attempts to do the same is
resulting in
pedestrian injury because the central refuges bring them to within inches of
traffic that can only just squeeze by on what carriageway remains after they
spent half a million pounds of our money on turning a previously safe road into
an accident black spot.
But implementing stupid plans is not enough for Bexley council, they have to implement
them badly. Here is the scene in Abbey Road three
months after the contractor supposedly finished the job. Unlit pedestrian refuges. So much
for Bexley’s vacuous claims to be making things safer for pedestrians. The first of
the photographs is at the junction with Carrill Way where there isn’t even an
electricity supply and the second by Fossington Road where the danger is compounded by
the fact that the nearby street light hasn’t worked all year. Your caring listening
council! What a joke; they’d rather risk your life than get off their fat arses.
Lesnes
Abbey Conservatives poked their latest newssheet through my letterbox today. It doesn’t
really say much, full of trite platitudes which steer a careful non-controversial course
designed not to upset too many people and try to convince us that Conservatives spend our money
more wisely than the last administration - which shouldn’t have been too be difficult. Naturally
it glosses over the fact that Bexley’s taxes have still been rising faster than elsewhere in London.
One bit did catch my eye however and that is that the big-spending Tories have thrown money at the
Metropolitan Police so they can go around spying on the populace where no fixed C.C.T.V. cameras operate.
Presumably that explains why a police van was parked outside my house for much of the afternoon of 7th
January. It was marked with the words ‘Police C.C.T.V.’ and that it was working for Bexley
council. Goodness knows what they were expecting to find. It parked at the end of a cul-de-sac where
nothing happens all day long once the postman has come and gone and being a cul-de-sac there are few
homes to be looked at. The only trouble we ever see is the occasional yob who takes a short cut
across a neighbour’s garden, hops the fence and sometimes damages it in the process. It makes
the journey to Abbey Wood station a bit shorter. However my neighbour already has the fence under 24/7
C.C.T.V. recording so if the police were taking an interest it was a bit of a waste of time and money.
And surely there must be higher priorities for the police than parking in a quiet cul-de-sac looking
out for a minor misdemeanour that might happen twice a week or less?
You can see the police snoopercam above the driver’s position. At one time there were two vans,
even just one of them being enough to totally block access to the drives and parking spaces of nine
dwellings. But when did the police or Bexley council ever care about legal niceties?
It’s
not only Abbey Road that has had accidents engineered into it by the arrogant, undemocratic and
incompetent Bexley council. A traffic calming exercise - putting obstacles in the way of motorists
may be a more accurate description - immediately resulted in accidents in nearby
Woolwich Road.
Our once near accident free B213 has suffered yet another smash up. I
don’t know the reason but I have seen the remains of a Ford Focus and the debris
on the road. I can imagine that the morons responsible for making so many
changes to Abbey Road are already
planning humps, more chicanes and 20 m.p.h. speed limits when they should be
looking into mirrors for the culprits and resigning.
A consultant at the world renowned Transport Research Laboratories told me he
regarded the plan for Abbey Road as a recipe for head on collisions. Barmy
Bashford of bonkers Bexley council was sure he knew better when in reality he is
a clueless wonder. He probably expects the world to beat a path to his door
seeking advice and be chosen to chair safety meetings in Brussels as it does for
those who really do know better.
I have just failed by a few weeks to get through two thirds of a century without being rushed into hospital by ambulance feeling very unwell indeed. My destination was Q.E. Hospital, Woolwich and what a murderous outfit that is! Presumably other Bexley residents suffer a similar fate daily. I’ve no complaint about the medical staff but what sort of administration can have you on drips and morphine for three hours and fifty five minutes but as their four hour target looms disconnects the lot and dumps you back in the waiting area with no money to get home, no one available to get you home and lets you lie collapsed on the floor unattended and in desperate need of more pain killers? Full report.
Today I received documents to confirm something I first heard about a week
ago. The specific case involves a couple of pensionable age who like many of us
were due to make their last council tax payment of the current financial year on
1st January. As almost everyone must know, 1st January is a bank holiday and
this year it fell on a Friday. It does not take a lot of intelligence to work
out that business life was not likely to start again until Monday 4th January
and on that day the final tax instalment was paid. On the very same day Bexley
council sent the couple a letter saying no payment had been received by the 4th
of the month and as a result the agreement to pay monthly had been cancelled.
Payment in full was demanded by the 14th on pain of court action and costs of
£95.
Whilst the arrival of this letter must have come as a shock to someone who had
paid promptly and not had any previous communication on the subject it was
nothing like as offensive as one I received in 2007
but it remains completely unforgiving for a first letter. What if a lack of payment has
been caused by death? How insensitive can the imbeciles who run Bexley council be?
It is my understanding that local taxation is contracted to the company
popularly known as Crapita and I’m not sure why we are expected to deal with
such a shower. We don’t have to write to Serco (the current waste contractor) when our
bins get missed or to the electricity company when street or traffic lights
fail. However the couple have replied to Capita’s Erith address and in due
course we may see what excuse they come up with.
The Taxpayer’s Alliance has once again singled out Bexley Council for their ‘biggest bunch of money wasting idiots’ award. Their first of 2010. It seems Bexley wants to recruit a biodiversity charlatan. I do wonder what sort of graduate would be attracted to a post paying only £15k a year. I know things are hard on the employment front but surely the best candidates would be looking for something better than that? Perhaps the final salary index linked pension is the attraction - remember those? Or maybe it goes some way to explain why Bexley council operates so inefficiently. Could it be monkey and peanut syndrome? But let’s not be too negative, Bexley council has won an award! Well done the innumerable profligate clowns who run Bexley and who are intent on pushing up our taxes relentlessly. More.
The local news media has been reporting that the obnoxious little twerp, Craske,
is planning to spend £1.8 million on traffic improvements for Sidcup. These plans
include a reduction in the number of traffic lights. Councillor Peter Craske (cabinet
member for transport), as far as we can tell, has no qualifications whatever in road
design or safety and has a track record of gullibly accepting everything his
incompetent staff put in front of him for signature; the changes to
Abbey Road, Belvedere being a recent example.
If Craske does for Sidcup what he has done for lower Belvedere then look forward to a
year of traffic chaos followed by regular accidents.
I rarely go to Sidcup any more but I do get a report from someone who drives
through it twice daily and it claims the situation is much improved after some
of the earlier council idiocies were removed, such as the traffic lights it was
so keen on in the first place. When, around ten years ago, Bexley council (under
an equally stupid Labour administration) first decided to interfere with traffic
flow in Sidcup I took my Transport Research Laboratory consultant friend around
town for his verdict. I remember his response well. He said “whoever did this was
either malicious or incompetent”. I have been able to quote that to a
number of Sidcup residents over the years and without exception they have come back
to say the verdict was wrong. Those Sidcup residents thought that Bexley council’s
road planning department was “malicious and incompetent”.
All the evidence points that way.
The only possible justification for the council’s vandalising of Abbey Road in Belvedere was that cyclists would be safer, albeit at the expense of pedestrian safety, motorists who have since suffered far more accidents and residents who complain about the predicted increase in damage to their parked cars and property. However in the current icy conditions it seems that even the cyclists are put at extra risk. Their path is covered with ice and the road is clear so naturally they use that. But the road is ten feet narrower than it was so they are at even greater risk from motorists contending with the poor conditions than they were before.
An inch of snow fell overnight and unlike last month’s two snowfalls when untouched roads were left to develop into ice rinks, Bexley council managed to get its gritters out. At 7am the B213 from Abbey Wood to Erith was entirely free of snow and ice.
Yet
another road accident in Abbey Road. Reports are that a driver
lost control at the bend opposite Elstree Gardens, missed the people waiting at the bus stop and ran away
from the scene. What caused the accident is unknown; probably the lack of gritting didn’t help and
presumably the police will be investigating. However we do know that a Transport Research Laboratory
consultant said the plan to narrow Abbey Road was a recipe for collisions and that Andrew Bashford, the
road planning clown who takes pride in making Bexley’s roads difficult for motorists, was aware of
the likely consequences. We also know that our cretinous transport supremo, councillor Peter Craske,
approved the plan and took no notice at all of any of the wise words of dissent from residents. And we
also know that the local ward councillor John Davey thought that the plan was without justification but
decided to do what he is does best; standing idly by doing nothing at all. We can only take consolation
in the fact that so far no one has been killed by their total lack of common sense and that there is to
be an election soon.