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With daily Blog entries becoming the norm it has become far too inefficient to require a whole year’s worth of blogging to be loaded just to read the latest entry. The Blog for 2010 has therefore been divided into monthly sections and the 2010 Blog and its ‘rolling month’ variant will be abandoned after today. To get to the latest version click here or use the Blog menu above which has been revised. The Blog pages have a new reduced menu system. From any Blog choose ‘Home’ from the menu to return to the main site. Your Favourites or Bookmarks may need to be amended.
Following my enquiry about the cancellation of The Central Library Roadshow
on Thursday the council’s communications officer Mr. Ferry rang to say
it was cancelled “because it was felt a lot of people might turn up” and went on
to say that the overpaid duo would prefer to meet individuals more casually. You
couldn’t make it up could you? They would prefer to engage almost by accident as
it were, with maybe a flustered mother doing her shopping accompanied by a fractious child
and with other things on her mind, than an audience who have prepared themselves with more probing
questions. Considering the calibre of Bexley’s senior staff and councillors I can understand their
preference. “Listening to you” but only if you’ve nothing to say.
I have received an acknowledgement to my
complaint to the local Standards Board
about councillor Craske’s abuse of a resident at the council meeting on 17th November.
In disregard of official guidance Bexley council has rigged their board in favour of councillors
and additionally excludes public scrutiny. It’s democracy Bexley style again. Those who have
trodden this path before say I should assume that the board meets in a lap-dancing club, drinks on
council expenses, makes racist jokes and rubber-stamps the complaints with ‘rejected’
and that way I won’t be disappointed. But I don’t see it that way. It is a
win-win situation. Craske went out of his way to humiliate a resident
asking a question that had been accepted by the council while the useless chairman, Mayor Val
Clark did nothing to prevent it. There was a public audience in excess of 20, nine of whom I have
managed to track down who will confirm the incident. It is probably recorded in the News
Shopper’s reporter’s notebook too and it is an open and shut case of abuse in contravention
of the Code of Conduct. If Craske is found to be innocent I have further evidence of Bexley council
corruption and if Craske’s behaviour is found to have broken the Code it is another black mark on
his record. Win win!
It’s hard to get away from the council’s principal villain, he has been writing to more residents
about the flawed arithmetic used to justify the near tripling by next year of parking permit prices. Another
Craske letter that has come my way claims two other complaining residents, one of whom has featured in the
News Shopper, agree with him. Why does the idiot think a resident who may never have heard of Nicholas Dowling
(the man named in the newspaper) is going to be impressed by the claimed agreement especially when
it’s only the bit we all agree on, that the CPZs should be cost neutral? Nicholas has now been sent a
copy of that letter and he, being more of an accountant than I am, says it gives yet more indications of
false accounting. One paragraph makes it clear that “the parking accounts do not represent the full cost
of on street parking”. Should the auditors be told? I don’t think we have heard the last of this.
It’s
not a lot over four months since every household in the borough was last given one of these extravagant glossy booklets
and once again it isn’t only Bexley residents who have received it, we have generously sent it all around Bromley again.
It’s right that such information should be available but why can’t it be
targeted more accurately and does it really have to be on the best quality
paper? I may have ignored it this time but only yesterday I noticed that the
very same council department is proposing to seriously
curtail library services.
So why does the ‘Courseworks’ booklet survive in such an extravagant form?
Maybe it’s because the wheels of bureaucracy grind far too slowly. At the
beginning of this month I asked the cost of the ineffective
fencing around Lesnes Abbey. The answer is
£74,995 which seems quite reasonable compared to the £2,500 I paid just a couple
of months ago to replace my own rather more elaborate 90 foot fence. But it remains a waste of money
nevertheless. Councillor Gareth Bacon
says it was authorised by the previous administration
and completed in 2009. Didn’t the Labour lot get kicked out in 2006?
Councillor Davey
made the same excuse last year about the Abbey Road fiasco;
all Labour’s fault apparently.
The Winter 2010 edition of the Bexley Magazine has council Leader Teresa O’Neill
saying “We will be meeting local people to discuss the issues with them”
(Page 8) and an attachment in an email from the Bexley Voluntary Service Council (B.V.S.C)
announces the first of nine “Roadshows” was to be in Bexley Central Library from 10.30 a.m.
to 12.30 p.m. yesterday. This ties in with information put out by the library over the
last week or so and confirmed by them in a telephone enquiry. So I took myself along
to listen to what Will Tuckley the C.E.O. and the Leader might say and more particularly what residents
might ask.
Arriving just before 10 - because that is the time advised by the library - I saw nothing
out of the ordinary happening. By five past there was a small audience awaiting the
entrance of the expensive pair but soon afterwards the phone rang and a librarian
apologised that the Roadshow was cancelled. Someone asked why and I drew the short
straw to call the council’s communications office to enquire what was going on.
There was no Roadshow it was explained, it was something that they had considered and may
at some time go ahead, but nothing was planned so far. One must wonder how B.V.S.C.
came to hear about it and why a cancellation
message come from the office I was speaking to just ten minutes earlier if there was no
Roadshow to cancel? “Ah,” said the communications officer, “you had better speak
to my boss who is out.” So I left a phone number and at the time of writing no
explanation has been forthcoming. I’m reluctant to use the word lie on this blog yet again but
something odd is going on even if it’s just a case of stage fright.
The Roadshows are probably a charade by a “listening council” that would like to claim that it
called on the public to respond and no one turned up. The B.V.C.S. email lists eight more dates
across the borough. The one in Blackfen library scheduled for
2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Friday 14th January, 2011 should be interesting; the shoppers and traders there that I
have spoken to are not exactly brimming with praise for the council and all its wicked works.
Something else that Leader O’Neill says in the latest magazine is “We’ve worked
hard to ensure that as many of the savings as possible involve cutting our costs
and improving how we work”. (Page 3.) Is this the same Teresa O’Neill who allowed
Craske to hike up the cost of a £35 parking permit to £100 in 2011 without once
looking at why it costs £250 a permit to issue them? Is it the same Leader
who advocated cutting the number of councillors for the benefit of a newspaper
headline but failed to discuss the issue at the council meeting? And is it the
same inadequate council Leader who sanctioned the C.E.O.’s £200,000 plus annual
salary and refuses to allow those that fund it to raise the issue? Cuts are necessary,
but they should be applied across the board and that includes senior staff and
politicians. These people are hypocrites primarily interested in their own well being and income.
This
was the scene last night when 100 people turned up to hear John Hemming-Clark
speak about the closure of Queen Mary’s A&E. John stood at the General
Election as the Save Queen Mary’s candidate but was out-manoeuvred by
the Conservative candidate who promised to keep it open - but didn’t.
Despite condemning the closure no Bexley councillor bothered to turn
up, thereby more or less proving my contention that most of them lacked any
sincerity at their meeting a month ago
and were merely going through the motions in the hope of looking good.
On the bus home I spoke to a nurse who explained to me how the knock-on effect of
losing A&E was causing wards to be closed and reeled off a list of four or five.
She said it was estimated that 30,000 patients a year would be turned away and some
of them would undoubtedly die as a direct result of management decisions.
The management and Streather in particular were “all liars”. With less than two
weeks notice she had been told she must transfer to either the Princess
Royal in Farnborough or the Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich. Since we were on a 229
heading for Thamesmead I was surprised to hear her say she had opted for the
P.R.U. and asked why. “Because you hear so many dreadful things about Q.E.H.”
she said. I can only agree and if you have half an hour to spare you can
read more.
Doctor Streather and Sawicka were both prepared to put their names to letters much of which were
pure fiction and showed them to have falsified their records. When that was proved they
blamed an unnamed doctor who could no longer be located. How convenient. That doctor was
excellent and the failures were wholly administrative but Streather and co. were
only able to blame others for their failures.
With
impeccable timing a leaflet announcing the ‘Temporary changes at Queen Mary’s’
dropped through my letterbox yesterday evening. It is graced with the emblem of the Plain English
Campaign and true enough, it is completely clear; it says the A&E will ‘temporarily
close’ and my dictionary defines Temporary as ‘effective for a time only; not
permanent’. So that’s OK then, surely there must be a plan for re-opening A&E?
Sadly there is not, the health authority’s chief executive, Dr. Streather, admitted
as much when questioned by the council’s Health Committee on 21 October.
Maybe the leaflet is not so Plain English after all. Maybe no publicly funded
executive is capable of telling the whole truth.
The entire six page leaflet may be read with the aid of the scroll bar.
As
predicted I took myself along to Blackfen yesterday, a place I had never set
foot in before. I’ve driven through it a few times but never stopped; which is
maybe a good thing because that could have earned me a parking ticket but it
also means that I have missed out on a little shopping centre which I found more
interesting than the council favoured Bexleyheath Broadway. One has to wonder why that
single shopping centre is so honoured by Bexley council, probably it is
self-interest as their staff can simply cross one road to do their own shopping.
I went to Blackfen because of persistent reports of harassment of shoppers and
traders alike by councillor Craske’s gestapo team and when the word got around that I was
there to report it here I was given free tea, offered a free meal in the cafe
and use of their toilets; there being none available in the street. I obtained
so much material that most of it will be held over for another day but meanwhile
here is a brief summary of the situation.
There used to be a free council car park behind the pub, but the council sold
it off leaving the 40 plus commercial premises to the east of the centre of town with just
seven on-street parking places; for which a charge of 40 pence for half an hour has now been introduced.
Are any other of the borough’s small shopping communities made to suffer in this
way? Selling off parking spaces is reminiscent of
Craske’s stupidity in Sidcup. It seems that Bexley council is intent on damaging
businesses. We’ve seen it recently in Albany Park
and in Pickford Lane. It was narrowly avoided in Nuxley Road,
Sidcup is a disaster zone and now it is Blackfen’s turn. Councillor Peter Craske the architect of all this misery
must be a truly evil man.
I quite often take a look at the blog
of our man at the London Assembly and I usually find myself in broad agreement with it. However on the 17th
November he came up with these words of wisdom…
100% Legal - How to avoid paying speeding and parking fines
“I’ve just discovered a great way to beat the system and not pay speeding or
parking fines. Just follow these simple steps to avoid handing over your money
to them! The best thing, it is 100% legal, they can’t touch you.
How to avoid speeding fines: Don’t drive faster than the speed limit.
How to avoid parking fines: Don’t park illegally or over-stay you
(sic) allotted time. There you have it! Simple!!!!!”
Perhaps I should declare an interest in case readers get the wrong idea. I gained my
full driving licence in 1962 after taking six one hour lessons - it was
relatively easy back then. Over the following 48 years I have had no accidents,
no speeding tickets and no parking fines. I try to observe clever dick James’
advice but to say it is simple as he has is stupid. Does your speed tend to
creep up down Gravel Hill (where there is a speed camera) with a 229 bus up your backside? Of course it does so
it’s not always easy to comply with the law. Do you expect to get a parking ticket
while driving if your wheel clips the kerb or if you are held in a traffic queue
that extends back to a bus stop? Of course not. But that is what happens in
Bexley. Later today if the weather is half decent I shall take a few buses to
one of these sites of injustice and see if I can make a report about it for later this week.
James. Stop being so simplistic. In a just society you may be right but please
recognise that many of us have to live in a borough that plays scant regard to justice.
Talking of over-staying your time, I have seen the evidence of how Lidl use
number plate recognition technology to time cars into and out of their car
parks. One unfortunate visitor had his pocket picked while at the nearby cash machine
before doing a big shop in Lidl, losing not his money but his keys. The theft and reporting it caused him to be 115
minutes in the Lidl car-park when their limit is an hour and a half. Result : a £90 fine.
There isn’t much from me today because I have decided to use my spare time on
a letter to Bexley council’s Standards Board. Just because I’ve been told it
will be a waste of time because it is rigged in favour of Conservative
councillors is not a good reason to accept defeat; and who knows, I may be
pleasantly surprised. The basis of my complaint will be that Craske deliberately
misled the council and public with his claim that there was no £4m.
contract with Parsons Brinckerhoff
when the council’s website says there is and he was just playing with words
over the subtle difference between a £4m. contract and a contract which may be worth £4m.
The fact he rounded off his denial with a personal attack on the resident who
raised his concerns about the £4m. will not go unmentioned.
if the council’s postbox gets loaded with complaints about the purple pygmy then
so does mine. Within the last couple of days I’ve been told of someone who bought a
residents’ parking permit by plastic card without realising the price had
doubled and immediately requested a refund. If you do that in a shop the
transaction goes back through the card terminal, but not in the supremely well
organised Bexley council. They couldn’t do that. It had to be recorded on paper
and a cheque had to be sent through the post, at what extra cost goodness only knows.
Another resident gave up on the permit system because she only used hers when
driving to the nearest shopping area and local friends which reminds me of my
similarly disabled daughter’s complaint. She says that councils rarely say if
her blue badge is valid in residents’ bays and without guidance on the web
assuming it is is dangerous. Almost needless to say, Newham passes that
test and Bexley doesn’t.
Finally, one of these two Craske complainers thought that bringing misery to
Bexley was his full time job. It is not as
this website will
reveal. You would think someone as deeply unpopular as Peter Craske would be a
little more careful about what he allows his employer to say about him. “…the
Golden Jubilee Bridges which cross the Thames between Waterloo and Charing Cross
stations – bridges he crosses every day on the way to and from the office”. Dark
winter evenings, a low parapet and all that murky swirling water below. Careful
Peter, get that bit removed. You don’t want the 0.92% of the electorate who put a cross
against your name at the last election to have to look elsewhere do you? Any other
reference to crosses would be a step too far.
0.92%. A figure sent to me by a supporter but not checked.
This site runs on hand-written html code; I don’t like the imposed
uniformity of blogging software and doing it myself allows it to be Google
friendly. It takes time but sometimes pays quick dividends. Councillor
Philip Reed’s diatribe about
predominantly black Christians which was on line three
hours after he delivered it was indexed by Google six hours later. Try a search
for ’Philip Reed Bexley’ and it is top of the list. John Watson followed suit
with his site
and within forty hours of its launch was on page 5 of Google with a simple
‘Bexley council’ search. Bonkers started life on page 9 before it got to sit
under the council’s official site. Three times in the last week people have said
to me “Bexley council must really hate/loathe you”. I don’t know;
understanding twisted minds is not my forté, but I
don’t suppose I have many fans there.
Reed’s tirade against the Labour party and religious groups was in my opinion
completely out of order, why did the Chairman, councillor and mayor
Val Clark not put a stop to it?
What is she there for? Why, for that matter did she allow Craske to let rip at a
member of the public and choose, if you can believe what is on the council’s own
website, to avoid answering his question by pulling a nonsense out of thin air?
Whilst I feel he should be made to answer for his outburst I am informed by
those in the know that a report to the Standards Board would be a waste of time.
Why? Because the council has it totally under its own control.
The soon to be abolished Standards Board for England offers guidance to the
effect that local Boards may be formed of a majority of lay-members, people
without vested interests, not councillors who will protect their well paid own.
Bexley of course ignored that and has a Standards Board which is far from
balanced and impartial. I am finding it very hard to find aspects of Bexley
council which are wholly honest and not tinged with corruption.
The code of conduct for Bexley councillors says that they must not “bully
any person; intimidate or attempt to intimidate any person who is or is likely
to be a complainant, witness, or (be) involved in the administration of any investigation
or proceedings”. Craske clearly failed that paragraph and them sat stony faced
and deep purple from hairline to double chin throughout the meeting’s 150 minutes.
Mr. Bryant, the resident publicly insulted by Craske on Wednesday evening has been in touch with a link
that answers my question. Has Craske been very economical with the actualité about there being no £4m. contract
with Parsons Brinckerhoff or did the newspapers get everything wrong? Judge for yourselves.
Read the
council’s press release (see page 6) and in case that ever disappears I’ve extracted the
relevant bit
to be read here. Nuff said.
Questions from the public are written down and not read out at the meeting which
is fair enough but question No.2 was answered so quickly that I was still making
notes about question 1 when we moved on to question 3. From the agenda I see
that question 2 asked the leader of the council “…by how much the council
will be reducing remuneration of employees and councillors in view of the financial
restraints…” and how much “such reductions will save annually”.
I am informed that the leader, Teresa O’Neill, merely answered that there will be no reductions. Can’t
say I’m surprised; just because the Prime Minister and his cabinet took a pay
cut and a five year wage freeze doesn’t mean our local fat-cats will act
responsibly too. Things have also gone very quiet about her proposal to cut the
number of councillors. A good headline for the newspapers but just idle talk. I’m still making up my mind about leader Teresa O’Neill
but at present I feel that even with the paucity of talent on display at
Bexley council they could have made a better choice.
The council launched its public consultation on ‘the cuts’ yesterday. It got a
mention on Wednesday evening: councillor Ball for example thought there was a danger that
residents might give biased answers. Maybe he was suggesting their answers
should be disregarded, I don’t know, but obviously consultations of this nature
are likely to be from individuals and opinions will likely be their own and to
that extent biased. Does the council have no one capable of making a balanced judgement?
Councillor Catterall perhaps who was the only representative of the people who
stood out on Wednesday by saying something that got straight to the point.
I have been asked my opinion of the council’s consultation procedure, sorry Tom,
I really haven’t had the time to get to grips with it yet, but when I visited
Bexley Talk 24 hours after
its launch I was put off by the need to register and nobody had joined its forum.
At 5 a.m. this morning the situation hadn’t changed so I thought I should do
my civic duty. Bexley-is-Bonkers is now registered. Maybe it will help
me answer Tom’s enquiry - on the other hand my first visit took me
to a “bad link”. Whoops!
Last night’s full council meeting could very nearly be described as a
civilised affair. Self-congratulatory, sycophantic, occasionally tedious, yes; but
civilised - except for a couple of Conservative clowns who were intent on
lowering the tone.
The meeting started with a long and somewhat repetitive petition by a
resident of Christchurch Avenue, Erith who said that her road had become a
dangerous rat-run for speeding lorries which had been involved in several
accidents and demolished a few parked cars. Several councillors asked questions
and 20 m.p.h. limits, speed humps and one-way systems were all discussed; one
could sense another Craske inspired road fiasco looming but fortunately councillor Catterall
was able to see the wood for the trees. He alone asked if the root of the
problem was the constant queue of traffic at the recently installed roundabout
at the end of Fraser Road and the consequent search for a short-cut by
frustrated drivers. The petitioner agreed that it was. Do we really have
only one councillor with sufficient intellect to analyse a simple problem?
The discussion disclosed that the ‘fish’ roundabout in Erith is to be extended
but no details were forthcoming.
Next a Mr. Bryant asked if the awarding of a contract to the international
transport consultants Parsons Brinckerhoff would result in a reduction in the
council’s own transport staff - the people who design roundabouts that can’t be
navigated and roads that are condemned by international experts. One would
certainly hope so. But councillor Craske merely replied “No” because there was
no contract. So either he lied last night or lied at an earlier meeting or the
reports in local newspapers were all wrong. As his answer was so short, Craske found time
to direct a stream of personal insults at Mr. Bryant designed to humiliate him.
Craske earned himself well-deserved jeers from the audience. A clear case for
the Standards Board I would have thought.
Another resident, Mike Barnbrook drew attention to the statement by the Minister
for Communities, Eric Pickles, that councils didn’t need both a full time Leader
and a Chief Executive. Bexley’s Leader merely said that the
government Minister was wrong. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mr. Pickles is
informed of Teresa O’Neill’s opinion.
Next up was Nicholas Dowling with a question to Mr. Craske about his price
hike for residents’ parking permits. Craske began with a cheap jibe directed at
Mr. Dowling and then launched into a long lecture on the state of the country’s
finances caused by the Labour Government. Well I think everyone knows all that,
what we wanted to hear is why it costs £250 to issue (along with overheads) a
single permit and what he was doing to bring those costs under
control. But as is to be expected from this clown, he didn’t get near the heart
of the matter. Filibustering was the only game he knew and the allotted time
expired with Mr. Dowling’s question remaining unanswered. The brainless sheep,
both Conservative and Labour, remained silent.
Bexley’s 280,000 residents are allowed a total of one whole hour per year to
formally question councillors and they want to close down other avenues for questions.
Nigel Bett’s attempt to crawl up councillor Campbell’s backside with a
question about curtailing Freedom of Information requests was not asked for lack
of time. Campbell was the only Conservative male member not wearing a tie. Rumour
has it that it had been used for gagging or hanging the whistleblower who was
abused by him this week.
Finally there was an interesting political debate on the parties’ approach to
churches in the borough, especially the new ‘ethnic’ establishments. I’m not
entering into that debate but it was noted that at one stage councillor Philip
Reed launched into an attack on the Labour opposition and via some ill-judged
musical metaphors called them rabble-rousers who had misled residents. Maybe the
Christians and other religious groups in the borough will take note that Mr. Reed
believes them to be a rabble. While ranting Mr. Reed failed
to see that it was he who was trying to arouse a rabble and was guilty of
committing every debating sin for which he was criticising councillor Ball and
co. What a cretin!
I first came across the name John Watson
at the end of September and subsequently bumped into him at a council meeting. He is a
man with a legal background who has accumulated a huge dossier of papers going back
several years - decades even - about wrong-doing at Bexley council. I asked why
he hadn’t put it on the web so residents could judge for themselves whether we
have a council run by crooks and criminals or not. He said he wanted to but had
been let down by someone he engaged to help with the technicalities, so I
encouraged him to do it himself. It is at a very early stage at present
but should expand rapidly. The
opening announcement
went on-line today. I fully expect
to nick bits from it from time to time and in all probability this site will continue
with its ‘News of the World’ tabloid style and John’s will be nearer
The Daily Telegraph Expenses Files which did so much damage to politicians in
Westminster.
Back to the every day stories of councillor folk; The News Shopper reports that traders in Crayford are having much the same trouble with Craske’s gestapo as the one
reported here two days ago. This time councillors
Seymour and
Lucia-Hennis are quoted as saying they
have “every sympathy”. Well that is nice to know as traders are forced
to the wall by Craske’s policies. Councillor Seymour said he would be asking the
parking contractors to adopt a “more proportionate response”. Why doesn’t
Seymour have a word in the blue faced midget’s ear and tell him straight that his
policies are turning shopping areas into ghost towns? For the time being I
shall assume that these two councillors have their hearts in the right place
even if their heads aren’t fully engaged. When their words prove to be hollow
you will read about it here.
There will be no new revelations today because my time over the past 48 hours
has been fully taken up with assisting one fellow resident to the detriment of
others who I should have got back to but haven’t. Sorry about that but the other
job has become urgent and I think it is worthwhile. Bexley council will really
really not like it and a lot worse is to come. I shall be very disappointed if
the first of many covers can’t come off this project by lunchtime tomorrow.
Apologies for the atrocious pun hidden in this message.
A correction. The letter to Craske about his
parking permit flawed arithmetic
dated 1st November wasn’t sent until the 5th and I assume re-dated, which means
that the ultimatum doesn’t expire until next Friday or even Monday. As of today
he hasn’t found the courage to reply.
I’ve realised there is way that the council could
kill this website other than by
‘going straight’. That’s to keep me on my telephone hot line all day
so I can’t get near a computer. Yesterday an as yet unsubstantiated tale was of
a business with a forecourt that has, along with its customers, received more than 1,300
parking penalties. Apparently a gang of Craske’s vultures stand around watching
him and wait for vehicles to come over his boundary with the footpath, however briefly,
and slap a ticket on it. He is slowly being driven out of business because his customers
are afraid to return and I have spoken to one who won’t. This is one of a long line
of instances where the council in general and Craske in particular do all they can to
damage local businesses - wasn’t it the Bexley Times that recently pointed out that
the council handed out very few contracts to local small businesses?
If my informant is correct this particular business has taken legal action
against Bexley council. Maybe it is for parking their gestapo permanently
outside his premises, but perhaps that is wishful thinking on my part.
I have heard also from a lady who phoned Craske about the hike in her parking
permit price but he doesn’t like to talk. She said she didn’t renew hers and
made other arrangements. When the council tried to make such arrangements for my
road they consulted residents and the general view was that if the council
wanted restrictions then it was probably a bad idea. But if the council
professes democracy in this area presumably the same democracy would allow the
withdrawal of the residents’ zones on request. On Craske’s figures this would save the
council a lot of money. In reality of course they won’t do it because CPZ’s are
a nice little earner that helps fill the expenses pot. Someone should try
calling Craske’s bluff on this one. Offer to save him a lot of money and watch him squirm.
One interesting telephoned suggestion was to set up an “I hate Craske” button on
this site which automatically sent Craske an email saying how much he is
despised. I’m not sure I want to stoop to that level and I suspect he would ask
the IT department to block this site’s IP address. Thanks for the suggestion
sir, and sorry to hear he has been attacking you too. If you want to see him in the flesh
the meeting at the Civic Centre on Wednesday 17th at 7.30 p.m. should provide an
opportunity. You won’t be allowed to speak to him but you can stare and
wonder how such a small man can contain so much evil.
To say I am not an enthusiast for the E.U. is something of an understatement but
when I walk along Abbey Road
as I did yesterday with the chairman of its road
and vehicle safety committee and hear him say “I just can’t believe how anyone
could be so stupid as to design this” I feel it is not entirely worthless. He
went on to express his annoyance at anyone who would use one of his company’s
reports to justify the idiocy when it does no such thing. This particular idiocy
was signed off by Craske of course but are any of his fellow scoundrels any better?
Researching and filtering the news that flows in my direction
is becoming a full-time job but one recent piece immediately stood out as
straight-forward and easy to publish, namely that Bexley’s wish to clamp
down on Freedom of Information requests has arisen again. Last time it was
councillor Campbell
who was worried about the tales of incompetence and
wrong-doing that were getting into the public domain; though he claimed he was
only worried about the expense. Campbell and the rest of the disreputable crew should
realize that the way to stop residents questioning their every move is to be as
transparent as they promise to be and to stop hiding things from auditors,
coming to the attention of the Crown Prosecution Service, breaking their own codes on
whistleblowing and generally feathering their own nests. Stop being furtive,
greedy and stupid and this website dies.
I thought councillor Campbell had come to his senses over F.O.I. requests but if
he has the virus has spread to one of his tawdry mates, one
Nigel Betts,
Conservative councillor for Falconwood & Welling. He reckons that “most of
this information is freely available on the Bexley website”; well if it was - and a bit easier to
find - that would be fine, but I have yet to see an on-line reference to which
items must be hidden from the auditors and which need not be and the itemised
costs associated with parking enforcement which would expose Craske’s email to
residents who queried the new charges he imposed as the falsehood it is.
It is all of course a put up job between Campbell and Betts. In the list of
questions to be asked at next Wednesday’s meeting, Betts is on record as asking
Campbell about the “vast” number of F.O.I. requests certain “gentlemen” have
been making. So it’s an attempt to resurrect the silly scheme to ‘shame’ those
who ask questions. Incidentally if these “gentlemen” have put in a “vast” number
of F.O.I. requests, then I have a vast number of fingers on my hands.
Not all councillors are tarred with the same brush, one told me he thought the
council should be held to account, but maybe he is the one with nothing much to
hide. Those that have may wish to note that the number of F.O.I. requests will
inevitably increase as more people join in opposing a useless council. Maybe
the man who deals with them will be grateful to the “gentlemen” who ensure
that his job is less likely to be cut; and presumably he is not so daft as to
proceed with an F.O.I. request for information that is readily available
on the web. If he isn’t then Betts is even more stupid than he looks and if
councillor Campbell’s reply to councillor Betts at next Wednesday’s meeting
is a lie it will be reported here within an hour or two of him lying. The
“gentlemen” referred to will all be there watching and listening.
There
was another case in this week’s News Shopper of Bexley’s rotten council
using a lie detector against a resident living alone
and it reveals that the operation is contracted to “a west Midlands based
company”. Interesting because you and I are generally prohibited from recording
phone calls without the other party’s permission but as I understand it the
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which so many council’s routinely abuse
allows councils to do it - but not a third party. Since when has a resident
living alone been a potential terrorist anyway?
I still don’t understand why anyone would agree to let the council talk to them
about the issue, especially after all the adverse publicity. Despite all the
restrictions on freedom introduced by Blair and Brown I do not recall a law that
says it is illegal not to answer a phone call. My phone is fixed so the bell
doesn’t ring if it doesn’t recognise the incoming number. Maybe that is why I am
still waiting for my lie-detector test.
When I attended the cabinet meeting on cuts
one of the expenses pot raiders took responsibility for this Nazi-like attack on residents
and luckily for him he was facing away from me and I didn’t catch his name; otherwise
I would have had a new entry in the Rogues’ Gallery.
Next Wednesday I shall be at the full council meeting with my note book and a report will be posted
here within hours of it ending.
The pictures of the Wickham Lane roundabout taken at 2 p.m. yesterday are deceptive. There were
long queues along each of the three entry roads but no traffic at the roundabout because of the long
intervals between ‘go’s’ that widely spaced three-way lights necessarily entail.
It’s not apparent from the photos and the ones taken two months ago
what has been changed. The first photo may show a wider carriageway but it may be an illusion caused by
the wide-angle lens. The roundabout appears to be the same size; maybe it has been moved. There was
nothing going on at the site, it was pouring with rain at the time and you can hardly blame the Conway
guys for packing up early on a wet Friday afternoon. So inconvenience to drivers by the thousand
continues daily plus the near-by residents who are suffering road closures, presumably to prevent
rat-running but reducing access to their own homes too. Don’t forget this wasn’t Bexley
council’s fault at all, I know because I
read it on their website.
Something else that hasn’t made much progress recently is the residents’ parking permit saga. A
letter was sent to Craske 13 days ago picking apart his false monetary claims and giving him 14 days before
legal action was to be commenced. Last I heard there had been nothing but a stony silence.
There
is a rather curious entry on the council’s
list of Listed Buildings
published last month; it is for The Harrow Inn on Abbey Road, curious because it was
demolished in 2009, a victim of the Labour government allowing imposition of
full business rates on unoccupied buildings and Bexley’s avarice in promptly
applying it. We now have the ‘bomb-site’ shown here. What is needed is a nice
modern building, something elegant and graceful to transform this run-down area
of town. Something light and airy, curved to fit the site and maybe lots of glass.
Well it could have been like that but Bexley council turned down the plans. Why? They said
the site was too noisy.
There are approved standards for noise in buildings and noise levels are graded into four
bands. The Harrow Inn site fell into the third category and a building there would need careful
and expensive sound insulation; the developer knew that and employed the services of
a leading specialist in the field, but the council was intransigent and said it
only approved buildings in areas graded in the first two noise categories. Like far too much
of Bexley council’s operation that wasn’t strictly truthful. The new flats at 16-72 James
Watt Way, Erith, when measured with approved equipment were 3db louder than Abbey Road
at its worst and fell into noise grade 4. Not surprising with a six lane road on
one side, five on another and the railway running alongside. Those flats were
approved by Bexley council just before the Abbey Road ones were rejected and when challenged Bexley council
claimed not to know anything about the earlier approval. Very suspicious.
My experience of making a planning application is limited and not in Bexley. It was turned down
in direct contravention of The Town and Country Planning Act which ensured the
decision was eventually overturned. When I subsequently discussed the matter with my
solicitor he said “Did you offer them something?”. On enquiring what he meant he
repeated the phrase and added, “you know; some money”. †
I have obtained a plan of the proposal for Knee Hill (see gallery) and when you next see
a rat scurrying across this derelict site and wonder why it is left as it is, blame Bexley council.
It could have been home to smart new flats and helped bring the area up and be good for local
businesses, but Bexley council imposed a noise rule they arbitrarily and inconsistently apply. At least
there was no under-hand business, well not at the Abbey Road site anyway.
† Mr. Wood, Clifford Cowling & Co. Fleet, Hants. Hart District Council.
I was rather taken aback to see this image on
another local site (and on Google Images) a
couple of weeks ago, maybe it is because I don’t know the new Conservative M.P. for Old Bexley
and Sidcup. I’m not usually squeamish when it comes to descriptions of our local politicians;
I have no difficulty labelling Craske a liar, because he has a long history of lying, most
recently over the issue of parking permits,
and similarly he can be called vindictive because of his reaction to Felix Akele’s mistake
but there is something slightly sinister and shocking about Brokenshire’s ‘tattooed’ image. For me it is reminiscent of the time when you
still saw elderly
people in the street with tattooed numbers from their days under the Nazis. Bexley
council may believe Nazi-like practices are acceptable but it doesn’t mean those
opposed to their regime should stoop to their level.
Mr. Brokenshire’s claim to fame is that he said if elected he would protect Queen Mary’s Hospital’s
A&E and maternity services. As we have seen, he allowed the hospital management to get one over him, and
closure of both is imminent. Goodness knows how Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s A&E will cope: when I had the
misfortune to be a patient at QEH
last January the medical care was decent enough while it lasted but the administrative stampede to get me dosed up with morphine and
out into the night before the four hour target with no money and no friends on hand to assist me in my drugged up
state I wouldn’t wish on anyone, Craske included.
I’ve less sympathy with Brokenshire’s stance on fat cat council salaries. When one of his
constituents asked him if he supported the Prime Minister’s cut and freeze on ministerial salaries and
the call by various ministers that local government senior executives should take the same path he couldn’t
actually bring himself to say that he agreed, preferring to shilly-shally around and imply it wasn’t his
business. He said there was a need to reduce the senior salary budget, that’ll be posts not salaries, but why
can’t he just say he agrees with his senior government colleagues? The correspondence may be read
here.
Six
weeks ago I attended an OFCOM sponsored meeting of London bloggers. You may wish
to look at this 52 second video by the coordinator of that meeting which neatly sums up what the OFCOM
meeting was about. He speaks of websites having “significant impacts on neighbourhoods and what the
implications are for local councils”. He says websites such as this one are bringing people together
and delivering on the government’s Big Society. Click the image to view the video.
Well ‘Bonkers’ has certainly brought people together but Bexley council’s stated wish to be
open and transparent is too far removed from reality to provide any optimism for an outbreak of honesty and
common sense in this neck of the woods. But it’s not all in vain, some of the ‘people brought
together’ are planning a website to complement ‘Bonkers’ that will cover the sort of
skullduggery that has been merely hinted at here. Whether anything will come of it I have no idea, I hope
they have a lot of spare time on their hands.
Something whispered in my ear suggests that
councillor Campbell has been active today and I suspect is busy
flouting the council’s stated policy on a particular subject. He is the man who doesn’t like Freedom
of Information applications and it is not hard to see why when he presides over so much wrong doing. With any
luck there will be more information leaking out - or maybe the police will take matters out of his hands.
This
website began as a protest against Andrew Bashford’s attempt to bamboozle me
with lies and lame excuses over the changes made to the B213 in 2009. He went
silent when he was caught out; as did councillor Davey who was exposed as two
faced. Lying is the norm at Bexley council but deeper corruption is not far
under the surface. I have long been aware of the
big-bullies blog
written by an ex-Bexley council employee, but I can’t make much of it
here because I don’t know whether it is true or not. Whilst I am always ready to
expose Bexley council for what it is and to paint an unflattering picture of their
constant failures, reports must be absolutely factual. I am rather proud of the
comment from a very senior council insider; received a while ago it is true,
that he/she thinks bexley-is-bonkers is “scrupulously
accurate” and “if only the press was as scrupulous”. That is why
I haven’t as yet been able to make much use of information from whistleblowers;
it’s very difficult to check its veracity and it’s not impossible that it could be a
set-up by Bexley council eager to trap me into making a mistake they could
capitalize on.
One or two things do check out. I have seen the papers that show that facts
relating to Ian Clement’s expenses and the credit card that everyone
claimed not to know about, were to be “hidden from the auditors”. And I have
seen the papers that show that Bexley police refused to accept a complaint from
a member of the public and that the responsible officer was subsequently admonished
by his superiors at Scotland Yard for attempting to protect the council. And I have seen
the papers that reveal that the only reason Bexley council has not been prosecuted
is because a prosecution is deemed not to be in the public interest. I have also noted
that when certain facts were presented to the council’s deputy director of legal
services she promptly resigned and no one at the council will talk about it. Strange
coincidence that.
The press has reported that down at the Bexley Thames Innovation Centre (TIC) in
Thamesmead, wholly owned and funded by Bexley council, the manager, Richard
Edwards is on bail after being arrested for having indecent images of children
on his computer. Now let me say straight away that it is all too easy for
someone to stitch up the manager in this way, so he is innocent until proven
guilty, right? But all is not happy down at the Centre and staff are frustrated
and want to talk. I can say nothing about the case against Mr. Richards for
legal reasons, but the information I am getting from sources that have convinced
me must be genuine is that mail going through TIC has been intercepted and money has mysteriously
disappeared from the accounts of a business within TIC. Not just petty cash either, more
than £100,000 has been mentioned, and the allegation is that the money has found its way
via close personal relationships back to Bexley TIC management.
As if that isn’t enough the scandal is said to extend to drug dealing,
and not just dealing, importing the stuff too. So why would a whistleblower want to
leak such a story to me and not report it to the bosses? Could it be because
they are bent too? The current whistleblower says the last one at the Innovation Centre
was summarily sacked by the very manager now under suspicion of paedophilia. No
wonder councillors and executives alike are so reluctant to speak to members of
the public. One whose responsibilities extend to the TIC is already on record as
wanting to gag enquirers. Probably they are all scared stiff of what might be revealed next.
Last
weekend a friend nearly got ensnared by the parking gestapo
after unwittingly driving into a parking bay in The Broadway and straddling almost invisible
white lines. I didn’t have my camera with me at the time and those taken later after dark didn’t
show how poor the lines are. Maybe the one on the left will do the trick. Many years ago it may have
said “DISABLED”. Just a car length away was a Bexley council gestapo car, they like to call
them MICE which I assume has something to do with them being operated by rodents. It didn’t seem to
be doing anything with its spying equipment, which is just as well because no warning camera sign was
in evidence anywhere and without it MICE operations are illegal. The odd thing about the situation
was that either the gestapo car or the one in front of it had squeezed into an already occupied
single bay as is clearly shown in the third image in the gallery.
Incidentally, my friend has said my description of the original incident is far
too generous towards Craske’s gestapo. They did, he said, give him the OK to
leave his car where it was, but he didn’t really trust them. Quite right too. No
one should trust Bexley council and tomorrow I will reveal more about just how
corrupt our council probably is.
I believe there are 24 people at Bexley council employed on traffic planning and
road design and they can’t seem to get anything right. My friend who chairs an
E.U. committee on the same subject thinks they are either malicious or
incompetent. I suspect it is the staff that is incompetent and the Cabinet
Member for Transport who is malicious - yes we are back to the utterly useless
Craske again.
With 24 idle minds to keep occupied it is more than likely that their primary
objective is to look busy and protect their jobs. One ploy is to make a change
which is silly and after a few accidents are caused, to undo it all again. We’ve
seen the tactic employed in Brampton Road. Two
jobs instead of the dole queue and a few dents in a few cars, maybe the odd stay
in hospital. It all makes sense if you are incompetent and unemployable outside
local government. Currently these imbeciles are obsessed by roundabouts.
Extend the pavement, make them difficult or near impossible to get by and maybe end up with
something impassable. Incidentally, have you seen
their excuse for the five months of chaos at
Wickham Lane? They blame their design consultant and credit themselves with
finding the problem. So who approved the consultant’s design? Craske’s
department. And if they are so damned clever how come their inspectors didn’t
notice the developing problem until the roundabout was almost ready for use?
Well not by buses obviously, but the inspectors didn’t notice until it was far
too late.
The first two pictures above are from their seven week operation to do not a lot
- but it is another job for the boys - to a roundabout in Thamesmead. But it isn’t
a big deal compared to the one at Ruxley corner. I wandered down there to see
how things had progressed since my visit on 25th July. There was lots to see and
marvel at. A couple of locals asked what I was up to and filled me in on some of
the history. One was even a reader of bexley-is-bonkers. It had been recommended
by a friend she said. But the blog doesn’t have the space for a
comprehensive Ruxley story, so you can get a slightly expanded version by clicking any image for
the photo gallery or go to a brand new section
listed under the Roads index.
The last time I reported on the cost of residents’ parking permits was
two weeks ago when Craske had gone into
ostrich mode as cowards often do when they have lied and lost the argument. But
he cannot hide from the courts or a Freedom of Information (FOI) request and a little
progress has been made towards extracting figures that might confirm his
estimates - or maybe not.
First a quick reminder of what the weasel has been up to. He has whacked up the cost of a
permit after estimating the cost of issuing 3,081 parking permits, including a variety of
overheads, at £783,200 or roughly £250 each. When challenged independently by
several long-suffering residents he sent them near identical emails and numbers he later
refused to justify. (Example).
Bexley’s website says that their Parking Control Account (PCA) has been filed at the
Mayor of London’s Office but in a phone call to try to get hold of a copy they
said they were still waiting for it. Why does Bexley council have to lie all the
time? Fortunately an FOI is not easily ignored. From that we learn that total parking fees
last year were £669,000 and fines (from Penalty Charge Notices, PCNs) were £2,306,000.
An income approaching £3m. Costs for the whole operation; that’s all parking and fining activity,
not just that relating to residents’ parking permits, was £2,257,00 - so parking services
overall run at a tidy profit. They allegedly spent it on “Transport Strategy”.
You won’t be surprised to learn that a council as vindictive and motorist hating
as Bexley issued 54,583 (revealed by FOI request) penalties in the year for which the overheads must be
considerable. They have a uniformed gestapo team going around on motorbikes and
in cars armed with cameras and computers checking on yellow lines all day long.
The yellow lines and notices are found throughout the borough. On the other hand
we have residents sending in payment for a permit who subsequently get one in
the post and the Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) infrastructure extends only across a few areas near railway
stations and shopping centres and operates for only two hours a day. Let’s be extremely
generous and assume that the cost of processing a PCN is the same as processing a
permit. Unlikely I know, PCN’s get challenged and result in appeals and
paperwork and residents just wait for the postman, but let’s give Craske the
benefit of the doubt. So now we have 3,081 permits issued and the best part of 55,000 PCNs.
It’s pretty close to being a 5%/95% split or to put it another way; of the £2,257,000
expenditure on parking services just £113,000 may relate to CPZs and parking permits.
The FOI provides a break down of costs. £49,000 is attributed to “Permit
Administration” and whilst the permit income is not revealed it must be well over £100,000
at the old permit price and Craske said in his email it is £170,000. He also said that
fines from parking in residents’ bays amounted to £275,000 whilst the FOI
says that the total of all fines was £2,306,000. So 12% of fines comes from CPZs.
If you assume, as seems likely, that it costs the same to fine a yellow
line offender as it does a CPZ offender, it leads to the conclusion that CPZ fine
collection costs are
about 12% of the total too. The FOI says that about £2m. is spent handing out and
subsequently processing fines so the CPZ element may be as high as £250,000. Quite a
lot, but Craske’s emails said that CPZ related fines were £275,000 and the income
from selling permits (at the pre-increase price) was £177,000. That’s a pretty big
profit even before the price went up. No wonder Newham says that a CPZ is self-financing.
Craske says “CPZs are very expensive to set up and maintain”. Has Craske been lying?
Does he ever tell the truth? Well let’s look at things a different way and compare his emails with
the FOI answer and the PCA. Then perhaps we can make up our minds.
• Craske says that the permits ran up £258,000 in staff costs. That’s nearly 60%
of the whole office - for about 5% of total activity.
• Craske says it costs £49,000 to produce the permits; implying printing only
because he separately lists the other costs. The FOI reveals that £49k. is the total
administration cost. Looks like someone is double counting with the intention to deceive.
• Craske says it costs £36,000 a year to paint white lines within CPZs but the
figure appears to be imaginary. It doesn’t appear in the Parking Accounts, or in
the FOI answer and other reports indicate no lines were painted last year.
• Craske says that on-street enforcement costs for CPZs is
£328,00 a year. That’s 45% of total enforcement costs according to the FOI answer -
for two hours a day maximum restrictions compared to all day outside the CPZs over a vastly wider area.
• Craske says that he spends £11,000 on computers and the like just for CPZ admin.
That’s exactly half the total office computer costs according to the FOI answer
- for about 5% of the total work.
• Craske says that accommodation overheads related to CPZ admin. amount to £71,200 and the FOI
says that premises costs for the whole office adds up to £110,000. 65% for 5% of the activity.
• Craske says that every cost related to residents’ parking permits adds up to
£783,200. That’s more than a third of the entire parking enforcement office to
deal with 3,081 permits and around 12% of the total PCNs issued. Craske is pulling our
legs isn’t he? I may not be an accountant (although one has come to a similar
conclusion to me) but all the indications are that Craske has been lying; until
he is blue in the face if Wednesday night is anything to go by.
This blog has been given a more permanent entry under the Roads
index to maximise the exposure of Craske’s attempt to deceive the population with his
unjustified price increases.
A friend gave me a lift into Bexleyheath last Saturday and there was a space in
the disabled bays just a bit west of ASDA - he has a blue badge. These bays are
both wide and long and as we got out and took stock of the situation the driver
spotted the fading dividing line which he was straddling. Two small cars had
parked at the opposite extremities of their bay and we had driven into the
middle! As it happened, two members of the gestapo team were close by so my
friend asked if he was OK to park where he was. They said that they “would judge
each case on its merits”. Well that may be an answer some would welcome but
I’m not at all sure that the judgement of one of these parasites is up to the
standard of normal human beings and in my view straddling a line however faded
was asking for trouble - so we drove off and parked elsewhere.
As we passed by the same spot a few minutes later another small car had taken
our place and - you know what is coming next don’t you? - yes it had been issued
with a Penalty Notice. OK, he parked where he shouldn’t but that is not the
issue here. The real issue is why the gestapo team did not say to my friend “No
you can’t park there” but instead encouraged him to park illegally.
This attitude comes from the top - Craske again, the purple faced arch villain.
One of his next tricks is to use the CCTV system lovingly installed by your
listening council for the protection of residents, to catch motorists in box
junctions and the like - so called moving traffic offences. It was among his
proposals in last Wednesday’s cabinet papers. Those papers were peppered with
the phrase “Maximising Income” but that would be illegal if applied to fining
motorists, so he has labelled it “Value for Money” instead. I was persuaded
recently that I shouldn’t call Craske a scumbag but you can see why I considered
it can’t you?
These photos were taken on Wednesday evening, the only time I’ve found the bays
free since last Saturday afternoon. I’ll try to get clearer ones of the lines but
it may not be soon.
I went to my second council meeting yesterday, a cabinet meeting to
discuss the cuts, along with about 15 other Bexley residents.
I don’t consider this website to be the place for formal reports of such events,
I’ll leave that to Linda Piper to report in the News Shopper or for the
council’s own website, but I must say I was totally unimpressed overall.
When I worked for a large multi-national I was never near being on the board,
but I was senior enough to sit in on a few meetings and address them
occasionally if my area of expertise was under discussion. It’s chalk and
cheese. These couple-of-hours-a-week-for-nine-grand-a-year-merchants would be
totally out of their league there and most were out of their depth in the
council chamber. Councillor Campbell
put his case clearly and with a degree of authority but
apart from that it was mostly waffle that added nothing but exposed the
shortcomings of the speakers. The women (I’ll get into trouble for this) were
all abysmal, councillors
Perrior, Bailey and
Slaughter in
particular couldn’t get beyond heaping praise on the council and
agreeing with what the other one said. Top expense
claimers too and utterly useless. Councillor Craske
(it really is pronounced crass!) spoke about transport issues. The Aunt Sally he had set up so
that he could ritually shoot it down and make him appear saintly, was duly shot
down. School crossing patrols will not be scrapped and lollypop men and women
are saved. I’d not seen Craske in the flesh before and he looked ill to me, his
face was the colour of a beetroot throughout. Whether it was the sight of me or
the parking permit campaigner in the public gallery I have no idea. Maybe he is
always like that but whatever the case I hope he is alright for without him I might
run short of idiocies to report.
Councillor Deadman several
times expressed his concern for the staff and their jobs and was rewarded with
polite nods from other council members and applause from sections of the
listening public. Teresa O’Neill
who went on public record recently to say reducing councillor numbers was an option,
surprise, surprise, did not mention the subject at all. Nor did anyone else.
One thing I was surprised to see is that Chief Executive Will Tuckley actually
does exist. I had begun to think he was one of those fictional individuals that
some companies use in advertisements. Names that represent the brand with no
danger of ever losing them because it is all a charade. No; scrap that idea, these
fictional people reply to letters and emails. Tuckley never does that. In fact
as I left the meeting I passed a small group that had waylaid
Tuckley and I heard enough to know that their complaint was that he hadn’t responded
to their enquiries. So that’s good, no one is going to notice when he gets the chop.
It’s Wednesday so it’s the News Shopper’s bash Bexley day. Page 11 is interesting, it highlights three residents who have been trying to squeeze embarrassing information from the council using the Freedom of Information Act. These must be the people that councillor Campbell tried to gag by making threats against them. Among the facts exposed is that council staff claimed £687,174 last year for driving around the borough. Except for the Northern tip of Thamesmead everywhere in Bexley is less than half an hour on a bus from the Civic Centre. 39 out of 70 senior council staff were paid bonuses on top of their salary in 2008/9. The News Shopper names the people responsible for the ‘monitoring’ as John Watson, Elwyn Bryant and Michael Barnbrook. Looking them up on Google reveals that it was Mr. Barnbrook who was instrumental in bringing down ex-MP Derek Conway for abuse of Parliamentary funds and he has others in his sights. He is a retired police inspector so he must be well used to chasing criminals; good luck Michael, you are going to be busy.
This blog is getting very large as tales of council incompetence and greed keep rolling in and it may not be very efficient for regular readers, especially if their net connection is slow, to load a whole years’ worth of comment just to read the latest. So from today, 2nd November 2010, it is also available in monthly chunks. The new bite-sized version is also available on the Blog menu above. Please note that if you leave the reduced Blog to follow one of its links to another page, any Return button on that page will take you back to the full Blog. Use your browser’s back button or the menu instead .
Exactly three years ago, Nick Johnson, the then Chief Executive of Bexley
council was so unwell he had to give up his job, poor thing. He was on £203k. a
year and we were lumbered with paying him £50k. pension a year for life. But he
wasn’t that unwell because just four months later he landed a £260k. job with
Hammersmith & Fulham council. The rules dictate that he should have lost some of
the Bexley funded pension when he suddenly found he wasn’t ill after all, but
with some carefully arranged financial jiggery-pokery he managed to hold on to
the lot. So he is now on £310,000 a year extracted from the mugs otherwise known
as council-tax payers. And as is still common in Bexley, these parasites are
hitched up to partners of a similar disposition. Johnson lives with the Chief
Executive of Notting Hill’s housing association and their house just happens to
be a flat only a few yards from Tony Blair’s grand mansion in Paddington. They
are all at it; milking the system that is.
This story is unashamedly nicked from last Sunday’s Mail on Sunday. For the whole sordid tale
click here.
I’ve
featured council neglect a couple of times recently, here’s another
example, albeit a fairly trivial one. This sign has been taped to a lamp post since the end of 2008 when
Thames Water were replacing a water main. It’s probably TfL’s
responsibility but councillors walk by it regularly. If they were really
interested in improving the environment and making Bexley look a little less
ugly and run-down than it is, then all it would take is a phone call. Why don’t
they do it, on ample expenses it wouldn’t cost them a bean? The reason is that councillors are too
often only interested in their own income. Some are getting close to six figure territory. I recently
added a page to the site (which will be augmented as extra information is researched) which you’ve probably not
discovered yet, but take a look at this for an
example of how we are being taken for fools by our councillors. It may not be illegal but it is certainly
amoral and not what one would expect from totally honest altruistic individuals in public life.
Perhaps they noticed what local (ex) MPs Conway and Austin got up to and got
away with. Not forgetting our illustrious recent council leader,
friend of the Mayor and expenses fiddler extraordinaire, Ian Clement.
The larger photo in the gallery provides the proof that the diversion sign is within Bexley borough.
I always find that new websites take a year or so to take-off and so it is with
bexley-is-bonkers. The Google ranking remains high (a page 1 result
for “Bexley council”) thanks to an increasing number of links from other sites.
A description of it being “terrific” on the News Shopper site will not have done
any harm either. I’ve only just noticed that, so a belated thank-you to whoever
put that there.
Last Wednesday’s News Shopper carried an announcement by
Bexley council to the effect that 160 roads within the borough are to have their
waiting and loading restrictions amended. That will be code for further
restrictions won’t it? With road and traffic matters under the malign control of
the vile councillor Craske it’s not going to be a token of generosity by a
benevolent council, that’s for sure. A further twelve roads not so far
subject to Craske’s tax raising megalomania are to be patrolled by the his S.S.
boys. The detail is said to be available at the council’s Contact Centre.
Two of the roads listed I pass along twice daily so I know that they are in one
case completely devoid of adjoining properties with space for about six cars if
they are parked considerately, and the other road has seven houses and six spaces, one
of which is ‘disabled only’ and three of which are very rare specimens, they are
within a Controlled Parking Zone but totally free of restrictions. What odds
would you give on them disappearing? There used to be four parking spots there
but six months ago Bexley council surreptitiously
extended the double yellow line by one car length.
I try to be careful when accusing councillors and officials of law-breaking and
corruption and only do so when they have admitted it or it is only too obvious, but
a number of leaks from inside sources make me ever more confident that they are guilty
of both. A phone call from a council office threw some light on how there is little or
no chance of life in Bexley improving and the entire emphasis is on pain for residents, and
papers I saw from legal sources I could hardly believe such is the level of dishonesty by
high-ranking officials and councillors they portray. It’s not for me to steal the thunder of
others but I await their decision to go public with great interest. It would
appear we are being governed locally by crooks.
It is not as bad as it has been since the Spring but this is how the Vehicle
Activated Speed Sign on the B213 looked yesterday. Autumn has ensured it is no longer completely
obscured by foliage but is is still impossible to read from an approaching car.
For speeds under 40 m.p.h. it doesn’t even work, it simply displays three
horizontal bars. It is supposed to be a road safety measure but the Traffic and Road Safety
Group at Bexley council has ignored reports that it may as well be broken for all the use it
is. Actually another one a quarter of a mile to the West is also broken, it hasn’t worked at
all for at least a month. For the record, the white van triggered a 42 m.p.h. reading.
The major inconveniences placed on Bexley’s road users are nearly always said to
be due to road safety considerations, even when expert opinion is that Bexley’s
road planning is either malicious or incompetent. My suspicion is that big
schemes go ahead solely to ensure continuing employment for bureaucrats. If they
were seriously interested in road safety they would deal with the trivial end of
the spectrum too, like this pavement sign left unfinished for more than a year
or the hole in the pedestrian refuge reported yesterday. How is it that Abbey
Road was signed off as completed in 2009 when so many sections of it were not
properly finished? (See yesterday’s photos). It only confirms my view that
project management in Bexley is virtually non-existent. My contracting informant
tells me that Bexley’s idea of an inspection is to turn up in a car, sit in it
and eat a sandwich and go away again. At least we won’t notice the difference
when Teresa O’Neill cuts their jobs. Let’s hope she doesn’t make cuts the same
way as the Prime Minister ‘freezes’ our
E.U. contribution; by letting it rise by more than £400m.
For even more neglect view the photo gallery.
Long
term readers will know that this website began as a reaction to the changes
imposed on the B213 in Belvedere and
the incompetence, deceit and lies of the
responsible officer; the duplicity of councillor Davey and the gullibility, or as seems
more likely in retrospect, the sheer bloody-mindedness of the council’s transport
villain, self-publicist, expenses king and crass councillor, one Peter Craske.
The failure to complete the job more than 18 months after work began has been regularly
documented here, most recently on 31 August and more
extensively a few days earlier.
Last Monday a little bit more work was done towards final completion; why it has to be
done in dribs and drabs can probably only be answered by the tortured minds to be found
in Bexley’s planning departments - the very people who install
roundabouts that cannot be driven around. I don’t propose to
go into the details of the latest developments here but they are available as part of the
associated photo gallery. To avoid any possible misinterpretation of the accompanying photos
I should state that the first is a previously unused one from the blog of 31 August, the middle
pair is from Tuesday of this week, and the fourth was taken at 6.30 yesterday morning. The reason
for the differing dates is explained in the picture gallery. The latest work was carried
out last Monday, the day I had traded in my camera for another that arrived the
next day. Hence no picture of Conway’s latest little earner in progress.
You
may not believe it but three months ago we were gripped by a prolonged hot
and dry spell and the young trees in Lesnes Abbey Park which had been protected
from youthful vandals over several years were left to die. I reported on the
apparent neglect and waste of money on 6th August.
Soon after that an amateur arborologist told me that the trees had most likely
gone into a self-protect mode and had dropped their leaves to save themselves.
I only half believed it as the leaves hadn’t actually fallen off but gone
brittle and brown. But the prospect of me having to eat humble pie next Spring
has disappeared because Bexley council has replaced the affected trees and
encased them in nice new wire mesh. Wasting tax-payers money is the local
authority norm.
Council Leader Teresa O’Neill keeps warning residents of the forthcoming cuts
and asking our opinion on where the axe should fall. She was at it again in this
week’s News Shopper. All very laudable to those who have forgotten
that Bexley council usually ignores suggestions. I made a money saving one when the
Conservatives took over four years ago but my local councillor Dozy Davey said that
whilst he agreed with me his colleagues wouldn’t. He went on to be similarly
two faced over the ruination of Abbey Road.
I conclude he is untrustworthy; but back to the point. Councillor O’Neill needs
to look long and hard at how the council is run if savings are to be made. How can it
cost £250 to issue a resident’s parking permit for example?
When I was manager of a factory employing 1,300 people, quite a long time ago, I
went to the Union Rep. and said “Ray, I think I could lose a third of the staff
and have no real impact on the running of this place”. Ray, who was not from the
usual union mould replied, “Malcolm, if you let me choose
who should go we can lose two thirds of the staff and still run the place properly”.
And over a period of some years that is exactly what we did. I bet Bexley council is no
better and probably worse. When did you last see any of them act in a way that would
be applauded in private sector employment?
The council will be meeting next Wednesday evening to discuss cuts. The papers up for discussion are
available for download on the council’s website.
It’s Wednesday and the on-line News Shopper is
once again a rich source of stories about the “mob of nasty evil people”
that infest the Civic Centre. The issue of using
lie-detectors against single people rumbles on with another
case of someone who is being persecuted with unjustified tax demands for having the temerity
to be single. Unfortunately I have yet to be challenged this year by the judge jury and
executioner which inflicts “as much pain as possible”
on residents. Maybe they are scared that all correspondence and phone recordings will
immediately go on-line but I shall tip them off about something which
may encourage Bexley’s huge team of vindictive morons. I have a friend who lives
in Bromley and on just a handful of occasions each year we take a trip out
together. Sometimes she has come here in her working clothes with smarter ones
packed in a case. Sometimes she has left one set behind and I now have a
cupboard with a small selection of female garments on the rail. Some have been
there so long that I doubt they fit any more. So come on Bexley council, surely
that makes me guilty of tax fiddling?
Only yesterday I voiced my suspicions that Bexley council may be up to new
tricks, and very possibly illegal new tricks, in their enforcement of parking
regulations. At the site I pictured below a friend of a friend was stopped
within the marked bus stop by a driver who made an emergency stop in front of
him. He got a ticket for not swerving on to the pavement and killing someone.
Today’s News Shopper carries an identical story. There is no justice in Bexley
and the council is well deserving of the description “maggots and bags of filth” that
appeared in the News Shopper a few months ago. Today’s description is mild by
comparison. “Dick Turpin is alive and well in Bexley”.
Gayton Road Belvedere is not alone in getting regular visits from the council’s
gestapo car which they prefer to call a Mobile In-car Camera Enforcement vehicle (MICE).
When MICE are on site the driver puts up a warning sign as required by law but
two weeks ago a sign was taped to a lamp post as usual with no MICE in sight. I assumed that one of
the operatives had forgotten to remove it; but two weeks later it is still there and one must
wonder if it is intentional. Could it be that instead of sending a MICE to
occupy a parking spot and thereby displacing someone into the bus stop area so
as to better fund Craske’s expenses pot, they now use RATS (Remote
Attrition on Temporarily Stopping) to spy on offenders instead? With something over
a dozen cameras hanging over the area it could well be the case.
The sign was not facing the road today and on a windy day last week it had
somehow folded itself around the lamp post in a way that totally obscured every part
of the camera icon. If the RATS were really spying that day (or today) and issuing tickets
it would be totally illegal, not that that would trouble a corrupt council very
much.
I would ask the council to explain but they no longer reply to my enquiries. Mr. Puomo
(rubbish department) has remained silent since the middle of August and
Mr. Kiley (Road Safety) has not responded since I named his colleague
Rupert Cheeseman for mismanagement of the Abbey Road
death-trap project. Probably I shall have to
send a list of outstanding questions to the Deputy Director of Customer
Relations, who, to be fair has always been very responsive but not unreasonably
asked me to go through normal channels if I can. But if Serge Poumo and Gordon Kiley
are going to play silly-beggars then maybe I’ll have to lumber the top
brass. Either that or put in an FOI and incur the wrath of
another councillor who has lost sight of what democracy means.
Anyone who has been interested in photography for as long as I have will know
that the representation of a camera on the warning sign is of an old Rollieflex popular with wedding photographers until the late 1960s. They will also
notice that the one shown here is upside down. If a disabled person displays his
badge upside down he will get a ticket so surely Bexley’s warning sign, hanging
upside down is also illegal, even if it faced the road, which it doesn’t? One
rule for the council criminals and another one for the innocent?
If you have read this blog over several months you will know I am a frequent visitor to the neighbouring borough of Newham and that last month they extended their Controlled Parking Zones (CPZ) to the address I visit. The fee imposed on each resident for a permit to park their own car was zero - absolutely nothing, although there was a sting in the tail of the supplied documentation. It said there had been no price increase on any Newham parking services for several years and a review was due in October. That review has now taken place and the new prices are available. A resident’s permit to park will remain free although car park charges will rise. From observation it would appear that most of Newham is covered by CPZs and it’s almost certainly a far bigger operation than poorly managed Bexley’s who spend, if you can believe the fanciful figures that Craske plucked from the air, £783,200 on issuing 3,081 bits of paper. It would be interesting to know comparable figures from Newham. If Newham was a small town in Florida I expect the greedy little expenses king would take an exploratory trip to see how they do it, but because Newham Town Hall is no more than an hour away by public transport I expect he will prefer to bury his head in the sand; for that is what he has done recently. None of the CPZ campaigners I have heard from can get a word out of this useless representative of the people. He has no answers so he has gone to ground big time. From cowardice or shame? Almost certainly the former; shame would be an alien concept to Craske.
Friends I have made through this website have persuaded me that I should
attend council committee meetings and this evening I did exactly that and
attended the Health Scrutiny Committee meeting. I’ve not
followed the shenanigans at Sidcup hospital as closely as I might have done but
in essence the council is fighting a rear-guard action that it cannot possibly
win against the closure of Queen Mary’s Hospital’s Accident & Emergency
Department (A&E) and its maternity unit leaving Bexley the only London borough
without either. I listened to the health authority’s chief executive (Dr. Streather)
put his case to the council and I came to the conclusion that through
his mismanagement Queen Mary’s has failed to recruit enough staff and run up
losses of more than £40m a year and Streather now believes that the only way out
of trouble is to close bits of it down. To achieve this in the face of council
objections and a government moratorium on the closure he has ignored all public
comment by manipulating the cut off date for its submission and exploited legal
loop-holes to get around all official protest and
a promise by the local MP, James Brokenshire.
The council’s health committee chaired by councillor Ross Downing (Conservative,
Cray Meadows) put up a show of protesting when they did not in law have a leg to
stand on and with the notable exception of councillor Sharon Massey (Conservative,
Danson Park) no one put a question to Streather worth asking and certainly didn’t
get an answer worth listening to. The A&E closure will happen in November and the
maternity unit a month later and Bexley council is powerless to stop it.
I couldn’t help noticing the irony of it all. Here we have a public body that
ignored the results of consultation and played fast and loose with the law to
win its way over the wishes of a council who may be indignant and annoyed by it
all or might just be pretending to be. Either way it is an object lesson in
hypocrisy by Bexley council who ignore local residents and ride rough-shod over
them through a mixture of incompetence, profligacy, mismanagement and
lawlessness at every opportunity. If it wasn’t so serious it would be hilarious.
The committee chairman waffled on and off for nearly two hours, rudely cut off
questions from a member of the public who had been allowed to speak and provoked
whispers of “sanctimonious cow” from the listening public; ungallant but a fair
enough description. In two weeks time I shall attend a similar meeting on the
proposed council cuts. Based on councillor Downing’s performance tonight
chairing an aimless mess of a meeting that achieved nothing whatever I think I
know where my axe would fall.
Over recent weeks I have had the privilege of seeing some of the
correspondence the council is sending to residents who enquire about the
doubling of the cost of a residents’ parking permit.
It is as you would expect mainly obfuscation and evasion. By my calculation 23 separate
questions have been put over a period of six weeks and I don’t think any has been given a
fulsome answer, most questions have not been answered at all. It is clear, because he said so,
that councillor Craske has banned his Conservative colleagues from replying to their own constituents
because he claims the whole thing was his idea and he authorised this year’s increase -
to be followed by a similar one next year. Gagging his colleagues is exactly what you might
expect of a petty dictator.
I have seen his name appended to emails in which he absolutely refuses to answer
direct questions about the way this price increase came about, preferring
instead to take irrelevant swipes at the previous Labour administration. When
asked again to answer a question he replies in the time honoured way of someone
who has lost the argument “I have nothing to add to what I have already said”.
So the arrogant little tyke has banned his colleagues from replying to questions and he
refuses to do so himself. But dissecting all the council’s non-answers does reveal
a few things of interest.
It would seem that the original plan to double the price dates from
before the election but strangely absent from any election address. No-one
outside the council was consulted on the subject nor has anyone been allowed to
question any of the figures bandied about by Craske. None of the permit holders
were told of the impending price increase nor was it announced on the council’s
website until some weeks after its introduction - and only then in response to a
specific complaint. At least that might be construed as a rare example of
“Listening to you”.
When I examined the cost of operating the borough’s CPZs on 9th September (a
staggering £250 a permit in case you have forgotten) I based the cost of marking
out the bays on them being repainted every ten years, however it seems that none
were repainted last year. So that looks like £36,000 for nothing at
all - and if I am wrong on that blame it on Craske’s refusal to answer a
straight question. Another thing that Craske refuses to answer is whether anyone
has looked at why it costs so much to manage the CPZ operation. You would think
that £330,000 per annum would be enough to staff a fantastically efficient outfit
absolutely on the ball in every detail wouldn’t you? Such a sum must pay for something
like ten people (Craske typically refuses to say) even at the silly rates
of pay these people award themselves. But no, it’s a shambles. The council
admits it doesn’t know anything about who has a permit, whether some residents
have more than one permit, or even if they are entitled to hold a permit. It
is presumably why they cannot email out renewal notices (the council says most
people have purchased a permit on-line) and have to rely on notices placed on
windscreens they happen to notice. Just what are all those staff doing if the
scheme is so basic that all they do is take your money and send out a piece of
paper in the post? Presumably the department is run by rejects from the road
planning department!
So we have got to the situation where Craske and his Conservative cohorts decided
on the new price in the spring, introduced it in the summer and eventually announced
it on their website in early autumn. Didn’t consult anyone, won’t answer
questions about how their figures were arrived at and have removed (compared to what
was published last year) the breakdown of outgoings and income from their website to
make it even more difficult to check up on their maladministration and secretive
manipulation of figures they refuse to justify - probably because they can’t.
The only thing that Craske and the complainers seem to agree on is that no one
expects the parking permits to be subsidised but he refuses to see that the
point at issue is his refusal to stand back and ask himself “how in hell can it cost
£250 to issue a tiny piece of paper?”, especially when no attempt is made to do
anything more than the essentials - like bank the money and issue the damn things.
Maybe this disreputable undemocratic disgrace to the Conservative party would do well
to compare the cost of a parking permit with that of a car’s tax disc. The price
of a permit to maybe find a space to stop in Bexley is not very different to what it
costs a small car owner to freely roam the entire Kingdom. How can this cretinous
apology for a councillor ever come to believe that it should cost much
the same to run a scheme that requires him to maintain a few miles of white line
with one that maintains the road transport infrastructure for the whole country?
All his other claimed expenses; staff, permit production, safety schemes and
computers have their equivalents with car tax admin. The only difference is that
one pays for a few miles of white paint, the other pays for motorways and bridges.
Craske simply hasn’t got a clue about managing anything has he? Maybe he should be wearing a
Charlie Chaplin moustache not a blue rosette. A comedian and a dictator all rolled into one.
It is illegal for Bexley council to be aiming to make a profit out of its
CPZ operation and disregard for the law is something for which Bexley council is
rightly reviled. Do we need to be reminded of the cover-up over their recent
leader’s credit card activity, an offence for which he is now serving a
suspended prison sentence? I know at least one group campaigning on the CPZ
pricing issue is considering recourse to the law. I wonder if Craske would refuse to
answer questions from a judge too.
(Car tax isn’t all spent on roads, a lot of the income is creamed off for other
things; which makes Bexley’s Conservative councillors look even more like a bunch
of lying con-men - and women.)
One must wonder what the local paper would do for front
page headlines if it wasn’t for the twin bogeymen of the NHS Trust and the
would-be Nazis of Bexley council. For some months I have been aware that Bexley
council has been asking residents who claim the single person’s discount of 25%
off their council tax to justify their claim. I have been expecting a questionnaire myself
having completed them in some previous years and had them queried. I take the view
that I live alone and I am entitled by law to the 25% discount and if Bexley
council doubts my word it is up to them to disprove my claim, not for me to
prove it. When threatened with having the discount withdrawn I have nothing to
fear from a court appearance as there is no way the council could ever show my claim
was invalid and I would bring 100 witnesses, including a vicar, a Justice of the
Peace, and a couple of O.B.E.s who would testify accordingly. So far Bexley’s
gestapo team have always gone silent after I have resisted their threats.
However according to today’s News Shopper they are now tricking single people
into telephone interviews to which they attach lie-detector equipment. What
chance is there of someone from Bexley council being competent to operate such a
machine, which is in any case far from foolproof? They would find it difficult
to interview me by phone. Mine, a model unfortunately no longer available,
includes the facility to allow the bell to ring only if the number calling is on
my list of friends and contacts. For everyone else it remains silent and I
review the list of callers every so often and decide whether I want to call them
back on my free calls package. There are a few decent people still working at
Bexley council but even they are no more likely to be on my phone’s friends’
list than I am of being on our vindictive council’s friends’ list.
It would seem from the newspaper report that after one unfortunate and totally
innocent lady was pronounced a liar by the unskilled operator of an inaccurate
machine the council hounded her mercilessly with no supporting evidence that
they should be even slightly suspicious of her claim. How is it that everything
Bexley council does indicates a total lack of common sense? When next you hear them
claiming they are “listening to you”,
you will know that this trite and dishonest phrase is intended to mask the fact that they are spying on us and recording
us in the hope that they can find the slightest excuse to exercise their vindictive
and evil practices. With any luck, following the News Shopper’s exposé of Bexley
council’s underhand trickery, no more residents will have their lives blighted
by the nasty crew who run it.
Whilst I may not be on Bexley’s list of phone friends I may well be on their
list of email correspondents. Last week I was sent a confidential document
concerning the billing of commercial services that should have gone to a local
organisation and was absolutely none of my business.
A whole week with nothing new to report; now that is good news. Wouldn’t it
be nice if Bexley council was overcome by common sense and good management and
there was nothing bad to say?
After sitting in on a discussion about Bexley’s anti-business parking policies a
week or so ago I spent several hours observing what happens in practice in my
local shopping street. 20 years ago it was home to all the usual trades but now
it is reduced to little more than betting shops, taxi ranks, take-aways, hairdressers
and estate agents. I use the plural in each case deliberately. I have counted five
hairdressers but I am told there are seven.
The road has been disrupted by gas-works and I was told that before that
happened Greenwich patrolled their side of the street about once a month but Bexley returned every
hour penalising motorists for the most trivial of transgressions and
absolutely refusing to make any comment when asked about their activities. There
were no concessions to the much reduced parking capacity. I’m not sure why
anyone should be surprised at that. How many times do I have to repeat the News
Shopper description of Bexley’s staff and their desire to inflict as much pain
as possible on residents?
To my surprise my loitering in Wilton Road revealed no particular problem; a parking
space was nearly always available to visitors and everything was orderly and no
obvious problems came to light; maybe that is because not a single parking
attendant was in evidence while I was there. The flood which is pictured here
nearly 48 hours after the last rainfall further reduced parking capacity and has been a problem for the whole of the
24 years I have lived close by. Further proof if it be needed of Bexley
council’s incompetence.
Moving back to the issue of John Watson’s questioning of the Chief Executive’s
inflated salary, I hear that the council has conceded that the question is
acceptable on their agenda but have said that the answer could not be made publicly available
so there is no point in asking it. If only as much ingenuity was available
for running the borough efficiently as is available for protecting their own
jobs and deflecting legitimate questioning.
An insider has whispered to me that there was a site meeting today to discuss
the new Wickham Lane roundabout so expertly designed by Bexley council that
buses can’t get around it. And speaking of roundabouts it seems that there has
been another smash up at the silly little ones in Brampton Road, just a
week after a pedestrian was killed there.
I reported three days ago that John Watson had had his question about the obscenely high salary awarded to Bexley’s C.E.O. rejected on the spurious grounds that they just don’t talk about such things. John has since sent me a copy of his response to the attempt to silence him. It is good to see such challenges to the abuse of democracy and law for which Bexley council is renowned. Last night I sat in on a meeting of local traders who are unhappy about Bexley’s constant attempt to chase their customers away through draconian application of petty parking restrictions. I hope to make a more formal comment on proceedings after conducting a little more research of my own.
Last week the News Shopper carried the council’s excuse for four months
of traffic delays in Wickham Lane which skirted around the truth
to conceal their incompetence but this week the letters page gets to
the heart of the matter. Some idiot designed a roundabout that a bus couldn’t
navigate. At the weekend I mentioned this latest in a long line of Bexley
council fiascos to my friend the Transport Research Laboratory’s senior
consultant. He said that they produced some software several years ago (now
marketed by Savoy Computing) into which you enter the dimensions of your road
junction or roundabout and it will tell you what sort of vehicle can get round
it - and vice-versa. “Only an idiot wouldn’t use it”. But
unfortunately we are in Bexley and the council is in the grip of idiots.
Everyone’s favourite idiot, councillor Craske, is still intent on penalising
residents who need to buy a parking permit. The News Shopper reports the growing
list of protest groups. Shouldn’t they be grouping together to stand up against
the little tyrant? I’m not against his basic philosophy
that services shouldn’t be subsidised, but only an idiot blindly accepts that
administration costs of £249 a permit doesn’t need to be urgently investigated
and reduced. Craske treats the council as a gravy train run for the benefit of
councillors and senior employees.
The News Shopper also reports that John Watson of Sidcup who requested a
reduction in the very high salary paid to the Chief Executive be discussed at
the next council meeting has had his request rejected because “under standing
orders it cannot debate staff’s salaries even when they are in the public
domain”. There was bound to be some excuse trumped up, secrecy is one of the
tools of corruption. The News Shopper’s website has today reported how
Bromley council is freezing its top executive’s pay at some twenty odd thousand
below Bexley’s; and guess which council has the lowest council tax. Not wasteful
incompetent mismanaged Bexley that’s for sure.
Along with other London bloggers I was invited to a meeting today organised
by OFCOM and The London Civic Forum to discuss the impact and influence of
websites such as this one on the local community and borough authorities. It was
gratifying that so many of the attendees had seen Bexley-is-Bonkers and
remembered its name, probably because it is catchier than some. The conference
leader told me it was one of his top two interesting sites but I rather suspect
he may have said that to everyone. Much of the day long discussions were taken
up with how to run and moderate on-line discussion forums and how to subdue belligerent
political activists, none of which applies here because I decided I didn’t have
sufficient free time to manage a forum; however today’s comments suggest I may
have been over-cautious.
Perhaps the most interesting session was about the rôle of local websites within
the government’s Big Society agenda. It is possible that the government’s interest comes from
getting volunteers to ‘spread the word’ at little or no cost. A number
of examples were provided of council’s refusing to play ball with the
Coalition’s plan, all Labour controlled apparently, but no one produced an example of
any council of any political persuasion actually co-operating. They still don’t
accept that monetary cuts may compel them to relinquish some of their powers and
give up what was referred to as “tribal tendencies“. It is fair to say
that not a word was spoken in praise of any local authority for the whole day;
indeed it was said that some had offered monetary inducements to bloggers to influence their
output.
The six additional photographs in the gallery are pure self-indulgence on my part.
From 1966 to 1968 I worked in the very same room as today’s meeting when Riverside
House (OFCOM’s H.Q.) was a Civil Service building occupied by G.P.O. Telephones. I
enjoyed the glorious views over the river and the city but by comparison with
the decor provided for OFCOM, the G.P.O. was drab and dirty.
Possibly the non-collection of rubbish in my street is too trivial to report here;
on the other hand problems with rubbish collection seem to be widespread across the borough.
A new problem (to me) is that the collectors are too idle to reach into the
bin when a householder has recycled so successfully that the small amount that
remains in the green bin is out of arms’ reach.
A request for advice made six weeks ago
produced an unintelligible response from Serge Poumo and when a neighbour fell
foul of the same laziness a month ago I repeated my enquiry. Serge Puomo did not
bother to reply. As a direct result of that non-collection the bin became
overfull and so wasn’t emptied at all two weeks ago. Then the foxes got busy and
spread the rubbish around.
There is a language problem at the house in question. It is used by a succession
of people from Nigeria who stay for a couple of weeks, occasionally longer and
are then replaced by someone else. All perfectly decent people so far as one can
judge but they do not understand a system that gives them six different bins. If they can
be persuaded to use them at all the colour coding is ignored. Last year the
occupant merely threw all their rubbish out the door in the general direction of
the front garden until a small mountain of rubbish built up. The useless Serge Poumo
failed to solve that problem too and it fell to neighbours to get it taken
to the dump. Something similar has had to be done to solve the latest problem
too. The contents of the overflowing bins was redistributed among other nearby
bins. Due to the amount left behind following a month of neglect by Bexley
council it is quite possible that those doing the redistribution weren’t able to
observe all the usual rules relating to what goes where, but at least the bins
are all empty now. Serge Poumo, Bexley’s useless Recycling Advisor, is slowly
turning me from being an enthusiastic recycler into someone who rather enjoys
the thought that a group of people, fed up with having rubbish blown along the
street and into their gardens should fool the collectors into taking it away -
even if this week’s load is going to prove to be more contaminated than usual.
Speaking of useless publicly funded parasites brings me to the subject of Will
Tuckley, the council’s obscenely over-paid and utterly useless C.E.O. I hear a
group of Bexley residents has asked that his salary of around a quarter of a
million pounds a year be reduced to something close to that of the Prime
Minister’s £143,000 a year and failing that that his post be abolished
altogether. Would anyone notice his absence? The question should be, according to my informant,
on the Agenda at the council’s next meeting.
Someone in the know at F.M. Conway’s who do practically all the council’s road works has
called to let me know why the roundabout construction at the junction of Wickham Lane and
Oakhampton Crescent has been on hold for the last month or so. Apparently it has
been so beautifully designed by the council’s best brains that buses can’t get
round it. And you thought I was being a bit hard on Andrew Bashford’s road planning
department and cretinous councillor Craske? Shouldn’t they be made to pay for their costly mistakes?
The same source told me that the power cut last week was caused by someone working on the
Ruxley corner roundabout fiasco severing a very large cable.
Councillor Peter Catterall (Welling) is quoted in the press as saying “these latest
cuts reflect more problems with EDF Energy” but if he is quoted accurately, and there
is evidence that at the very least the words were taken out of context, it could more fairly
be argued that they reflect the total lack of project management skills by Bexley council. My
informant said that someone didn’t want to pay for the detailed plans and took a chance.
Lucky it didn’t kill someone, that sort of power can vapourise large chunks of metal.
Four weeks ago my green bin wasn’t emptied and Mr. Serge Poulo sent an excuse that didn’t make any sense at all; I have no idea what he was talking about. Two weeks ago my new neighbour had the same problem, only a small amount of rubbish in the bottom of the bin so the collectors were too lazy to reach in and remove it. I sent a complaint on her behalf which was acknowledged but no one bothered to reply or empty the bin. Today the lid of her bin couldn’t be fully closed but only because it wasn’t emptied two weeks ago. So the lazy bin men have left her rubbish behind again. But it is the management at Bexley council which is at fault. The problem can’t be unique to me and my neighbours but the council does nothing except organise the next round of pay increases.
The rising tide of opposition to councillor Craske’s greed over the matter of
Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs) and the exorbitant cost of residents’ parking permits
has brought forth comment from blog readers and a few interesting figures gleaned from council
sources. Apparently there are only 3,081 takers for residents’ parking permits in Bexley
and the costs of issuing each one works out at £84 in staff costs and £23 for their
accommodation and other overheads. On top of that ridiculous sum each ticket costs £16 to
print and post. ICT costs, whatever they are, but I assume computers and the like, adds another
(almost) £4 per permit. Then it is said that road marking costs £36,000 a year. Nearly
£12 per permit. It might be interesting to do some arithmetic on that.
If we assume that 3,500 cars have to be accommodated and are allowed a generous
20 feet each then that is just over 13 miles of painted line. If there is more
lining than that it is not really part of the CPZ but part of needing to
cater for normal parking activity, the casual comings and goings of daily life.
Why should residents in CPZs pay for general parking infrastructure when those
who live elsewhere don’t pay directly for any yellow line that may pass their home?
I know the lines close to my home haven’t been repainted in the ten years since
first installation, so if we assume that is the norm, then that’s not much over a mile
of painted line which has to be renewed each year, in fact only 7,000 feet. If that costs
£36,000 to paint it works out at just over £5 a foot. If the lines are repainted
less frequently the true figure might be eight or even ten pounds per foot. They are joking
aren’t they? Not just about the cost of painting a line but on the fact that every
single permit issued costs £139. The figure may in fact be nearer £150, because
according to the council they spend another £10 per permit on road safety schemes directly
associated with the provision of CPZs. I haven’t a clue what they can be and it seems like
another bit of Bexley figure fiddling to me so I shall exclude it. If I am wrong it makes the
waste even worse.
Some of that is offset by penalty charges but the cost of enforcement is irrelevant. The real
issue is how can a tiny scrap of paper cost that much to issue. You don’t have to
be an accountant and probably don’t need any qualification at all to know that there is
something seriously wrong with that. It is bureaucracy gone totally berserk. Someone should
get in there quick and sort out the inefficiencies that the idiot councillor Craske hasn’t
even begun to think about, cocooned as he is from the realities of life by his massive expense account.
A recent report into public sector workers said that on average they spend 68% of their time
farting about doing nothing but even if they were made to work twice as hard the staff costs per
permit issued would only fall to about £50. There must be simply too many of them and too
many fiddles going on with the line painting and printing contracts. Even four pounds a permit
to keep the computer database alive is silly. Bexley council is absolutely bonkers and needs
pulling apart from top to bottom to root out the incompetence, inefficiency and corruption.
Next Monday an address I frequently visit in East Ham (Newham council) will
be included in a new controlled parking scheme. The cost of an annual resident’s
ticket will be zero; absolutely nothing. A visitors’ ticket will be 30 pence a
day and their council tax remains low. Contrast that with the fees
set by the vultures who control high taxing Bexley. They have just doubled
the cost of parking to £70 a year (more in some streets) and visitors are
charged up to 30 pence an hour. Naturally the council
gave no prior warning to residents who are beginning to protest against this blatant
taxation increase and expenses funding operation. Meanwhile the same council has set aside
£4 million to pay a firm of consultants to improve the local roads. It’s almost
impossible to find any road in Bexley that has been improved in recent years, with one or
two exceptions all changes are for the worse. An instant improvement could be made by
merely reversing the “crass stupidity”.
Meanwhile, this week brings the usual crop of injustices by a council described
in the local paper as “taken over by a mob of nasty, evil people who seem to
thrive on other people’s pain and hurt”. They have fined a pensioner half his
weekly income because his blue badge was allegedly not visible and a fireman has
been fined for parking in a road he wasn’t in supported by a photograph of a car
that isn’t his. Our council is managed by heartless jobsworths or in the more
colourful language of the local paper, “worthless bags of filth”. Just a
reminder of who is Bexley’s transport boss. His name is Peter Craske, a so
called Tory councillor and king of their expense claimers. Suddenly the words
nasty,
evil, filth and maggot don’t seem to be over-the-top at all.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are building a new church in Sidcup, a town that has been dying of neglect and attrition by the mindless collection of ne’re-do-wells at Bexley council for many a long year. You can’t blame them for trying but the Witnesses asked if the free parking spaces in St. John’s Road could be made over to them in exchange for placing a sum of money into Bexley’s coffers. As the town is in such a desperate state with its shopping centre barely worthy of that title any more, Bexley council in its ‘Listening’ and ‘Working for you’ mode obviously said “No” didn’t they? Not a bit of it; an easy way of financing their expenses pot cannot be turned down whatever the consequences for local businesses and residents. What an appalling amoral bunch our councillors are.
I
had a phone call this morning to ask why I hadn’t mentioned councillor John Davey’s
appointment to the Board of Bexley Care (N.H.S.) Trust and the answer is that I really didn’t think that there
was anything exceptional about it. It is the height of naivety to believe that these appointments are not all part
of the cosy system of back-slapping and self-enrichment that pervades councils and quangos, but I was wrong to
ignore it and my caller was right. That a councillor who says one thing to his constituents and does the
opposite on Bexley council committees, and walks away when shown evidence of motorists being ticketed for parking
in a ‘prohibited’ place where Bexley council hadn’t bothered to put up signs, is deemed a fit person to sit on
the board of anything is alarming but sadly no longer surprising.
The press release about the appointment
is available on-line.
I expect his expertise in double-talk will come in handy if my experience of the N.H.S. is anything to go by.
I’m still waiting for an honest reply from them on why they came to throw me out of A&E to meet their
targets. Currently they have lied themselves into the position of having to admit they diagnosed a severe stomach
problem but gave me no treatment for it whatever. Eight months on and they are still looking for an explanation but
they are good at sending me holding letters to cover the delay. Councillor Davey should feel very much at home in his
new sinecure and the £8,000 he will get for it will augment his councillor’s expenses very nicely.
Six weeks ago reports came in that Wickham Lane was totally disrupted by the installation of a roundabout and I took some photos of the mess that Bexley council had created. Further reports say work has stalled so I drove by twice between 11 a.m and noon today and it’s true. I saw no sign of progress or anyone on site or indications that there may have been activity recently. Nothing! On my return trip I was sixth in line waiting for the lights and when the green came the first three vehicles and the fifth got through, the rest of us had to wait again. If that happens in the middle of the day, it must be every bit as bad in the rush hour as reports suggest. Let’s hope it gets finished quicker than the 18 months and more that it has taken Bexley’s incompetent contract managers to (not quite) finish Abbey Road. “Listening to you, working for you”. What a joke. “Laughing at you, wreaking havoc”; would be nearer the truth.
I spent
the weekend with a road safety engineer. He chairs E.U. meetings and appears as
expert witness in accident investigations and court cases and writes reports for
the Transport Research Laboratory. One of those reports was used by Bexley council
to justify their narrowing of Abbey Road, Belvedere.
I doubt they read the report let alone understood it, but they thought it would be an easy way
to fob me off when I complained about their antics. Probably they didn’t expect a mere
resident to read an expensive report on road design. But I must get to the point…
I told my friend about the latest accident on Abbey Road and I shall quote
his response verbatim. “It is possible to get traffic to slow down by making a road
narrower, through cross-hatching or raised platforms, but to make a road narrower by
bringing the carriageways closer together is crass stupidity”. I think you mean Craske
stupidity I replied, but the pun was lost on him. I don’t suppose the girl who
ended up in hospital a week ago would raise a smile either but at least we know
that an expert in the field condemns Andrew Bashford (Bexley’s road designer)
and councillor Craske as guilty of “crass stupidity”.
Today is a bit of a red-letter day. It seems that someone has at last been
spurred into action and concreted in one of the hole in the pedestrian refuges which has
been featured here so many times before. One more to go.
Two weeks ago my green bin wasn’t emptied, it rarely is when there is not much in it, and the council’s response was absolutely useless. For today’s collection I hooked my small amount of rubbish to the bin lid so that the poor dears didn’t have to over-reach themselves. Success! I also put out my new neighbour’s bin (moved in this week so probably doesn’t know the collection day). She wasn’t so lucky, her two small bags of rubbish were left at the bottom of the bin. Laziness and lack of pride in their work may be the almost acceptable norm for binmen but the real disgrace is Bexley council’s failure to address the problem.
Today
marks the first anniversary of the demolition of the keep left bollards
in Abbey Road, otherwise known as pedestrian refuges. This one has never been
restored to service although a half-hearted attempt was made to reconnect the
electricity supply six weeks ago. The green plastic barrier
used to protect the hole in the pavement still lies forlornly on the path but
the sign remains unlit.
When I last spoke to a council official about this dangerous neglect I was told
it had not been forgotten and maybe it hasn’t, but what possible reason can
there be for leaving a gaping unlit hole in the road for a whole year? I think
the time has come to name the council official who has been overseeing this
ridiculous and unwarranted delay. He is Rupert Cheeseman and the same man I
decided not to name on 18th September last year
when numerous cars were ticketed for parking after he stupidly placed temporary prohibition signs
outside the restricted area. When shown the problem he had created he merely shrugged and
walked away.
Contrast that attitude with a report I made today of a drain cover which had
lifted proud of the road surface and posed a minor hazard to traffic. Within
nine minutes my email was acknowledged and in rather less than three hours the
drain had been repaired. If the ‘Northern Area Manager’ can go out of his way to
care for motorists and the residents of Bexley, why is that useless individuals
like Andrew Bashford
and Cheeseman are allowed to treat them with total contempt?
We
don’t know which of Bexley’s many idiots said that
but we do know that it was a lie. Today the sound of poorly silenced exhausts and the smell
of two-stroke oil filled the woods at Lesnes Abbey for much of the day. This rider was
travelling at high speed along narrow paths occupied by walkers and families with dogs. It
is difficult to estimate his speed but it must have been at least 40 m.p.h.
The extensive fencing also seems to have created a ‘Forth Bridge’
scenario requiring constant attention with preservatives. The short section fronting
Abbey Road took two men at least three days to paint last week and that is only a small
part of the entire folly and with the shortest posts. It’s a waste of money from every point of view. When
a car ploughed into the fence last year
and ripped it up, it was obvious that posts which appear to be in good condition were rotten below ground.
I
was returning on foot from a bit of shopping this afternoon when I saw a young boy cross
Abbey Road using the refuge opposite Carrill Way;
the one that has remained unlit since the road was turned into an accident black-spot last
year. He misjudged the speed of a passing car and was lucky to survive unscathed. Well not
entirely unscathed, he got a good telling off from his mother and since the lad couldn’t
have been any more than three I was inclined to think it wasn’t him who needed the talking
to. I’d not been home for more than 15 minutes (it was 5 p.m.) and I heard rather too
many emergency sirens for comfort and sure enough, this time there had been an accident.
It was obvious to anyone with more than half a brain that there were going to be
accidents on Abbey Road once the recovery space for drivers to take avoiding
action had been removed by the numbskulls who run Bexley council. I asked a
Transport Research Laboratory consultant to take a look and he confirmed it.
Today’s incident was a text book example of the accuracy of his prediction.
Quite recently I said it was inevitable after seeing near
misses during the Easter school holidays.
Fortunately the young girl who I believe came off her bike in front of a car
(a policeman’s initial verdict, not mine) will live to tell the
tale. Meanwhile Andrew Bashford and councillors John Davey and Peter Craske will
be basking in the praise heaped on them by
the cycling lobby on whom
they wasted half a million pounds of our money. The bloody scars on the road are
a small price to pay for political correctness.
As is always the case with accidents a small crowd gathered to watch events
unfold and there was just one topic of conversation. The speeding traffic and
the fact that Bexley council made things worse through their ineptitude.
For absolute accuracy I should add that councillor Davey thought narrowing the
road to benefit cyclists was a silly idea but despite being the vice-Chairman of
a Transport Sub-Committee he nodded it through to please fellow politicians and
thereby proved himself to be two-faced and in his own small way, corrupt.
Note. The cars shown in these photographs were not involved in the accident.
My green bin wasn’t emptied last Friday, an occurrence too frequent to be
worth mentioning here each time. The problem is that I don’t produce much
rubbish and a couple of supermarket carrier bags are not easy to reach at the bottom
of the bin, so it’s easier to walk on by rather than reach in or hitch the bin
to the van and get the hydraulic lift to do the job. It’s not a huge problem but
we pay nearly the highest taxes in London for a sub-standard service and I thought it
might be worth seeking advice from the council.
“My bin wasn’t emptied again last week and I am asking your advice on the best
way of persuading your men to empty it. The problem arises when there is not
much rubbish in the bin which lies at the bottom out of easy arm’s reach. What
do you suggest to overcome this persistent problem? Obviously such a small
amount of mainly cellophane wrappers can be kept another fortnight but it
doesn’t seem right to me that I pay for a collection I don’t get. Have you any
suggestions? The bin doesn’t need an emergency collection but it ought to go on
your record of misses.”
Next day I had a reply from Serge Poumo, Waste and Recycling Advisor.
“Thank you for contacting our department. Your property is on Enhanced Recycling
Services and your green bin should be emptied on a fortnightly basis. As you are
not really producing a lot of waste, we do not see a reason for why your
collection frequency should be changed.”
What’s that all about? I didn’t ask for more frequent collection and if I
want a reduced service I’d put my bin out every six weeks instead of two. What I
would have liked to know was whether there was anything I could do to help the
bin men overcome their fear of doing their job properly. It would make it easier
for them if I left my supermarket bag on the pavement but we know what they
they would do then! I corresponded with Mr. Poumo over a long period a
couple of years ago when someone in my road who didn’t speak English and came
from a country that probably didn’t understand the concept of refuse collection
always threw theirs out of the door on to the street. Mr. Puomo achieved
nothing over many months and eventually neighbours got together and took the huge
heap of rubbish to the dump themselves. How is it that councils attract so many useless employees?
Today’s newspapers report that several councils in London are thinking of
switching off some traffic lights at night to reduce delays and save
electricity. I suspect that may be a good idea.
Almost the only time I use my car is for a fortnightly late night trip to north
London. I used to return via Blackwall tunnel and with a clear road in the early
hours of the morning and observing all the speed limits the journey time was
entirely dependent on one’s luck with the traffic lights. None of them were in
Bexley but on a bad night they could add eight minutes to the journey.
After Boris Johnson reneged on his electoral promise to open Blackwall Tunnel
to two way working and then compounded his stupidity by closing it southbound
for six nights a week I’ve had to return home via the bridge at Dartford which
is a longer but faster route. At 1 a.m. there are just two sets of lights which
appear to be useless, both are in Bexley. The lights on the roundabout at the
junction of Thames Road, Northend Road and Perry Street (Slade Green) are a
minor inconvenience. I’ve been stopped there on about half my dozen journeys
over the last six months but only once to give way to another vehicle. All the
other stops were to satisfy the unintelligent controlling computer program.
However the junction of Queen’s Road and James Watt Way in Erith is something
else. Just once the lights went green as soon as I stopped there but on the
other eleven occasions I’ve been stuck on red for several minutes and never once
has anyone emerged from or go into the shopping area served by James Watt Way. What
else would you expect at one o’clock in the morning? Those lights really are a
waste of electricity. I imagine that as soon as councillor Craske realises that
switching off a few lights will help refill his expenses trough all sorts of lights
will be put out.
A
report in the Erith and Thamesmead Chronicle made me dig out the Summer issue Bexley magazine
first commented upon on 30th June for the dubious claims made for the
fencing placed around parks. “The new fencing has eradicated the problem” of
motorcycling in parks according to the fantasist who masterminded the expensive assault on
the wheel-chair bound. Anyone who lives close to the park will tell you this is the worst
year for motorcycle invasion for as long as can be remembered. The noise of badly silenced
bikes is heard almost daily.
The Chronicle highlights more magazine misinformation; that dumping rubbish on private ground
is punishable by a £50,000 fine. It reports that when a couple in Welling tried to get
something done about fly-tipping in their private back alley, even identifying
the culprit, Bexley council “did not want to have anything to do with it”. When
councillor John Waters (Danson Park ward) became involved he also washed his hands of the
matter. A council spokesman said “The article in the magazine is not incorrect”
which is tantamount to the council spokesman calling John Waters a liar but despite what
the Bexley magazine might say, that their website repeats, and their spokesman parrots, an
examination of the Environment Agency’s website and a number of anti-litter
websites reveals that it is councillor John Waters who tells the truth and the
council’s magazine and website which are wrong. How does Bexley manage to attract so
many incompetents to its midst? The Erith Chronicle devotes a page to the number of Bexley
snouts which are stuck deeply into the tax-payer filled trough and the massive pay increases
they have recently awarded themselves. So that’s how they do it. Rich rewards for total
incompetence and the occasional bit of corruption thrown in for good measure.
I
don’t often use Alsike Road in Belvedere even though I can see it from
home; it’s the wrong side of the tracks. However 31st July was an exception and
I saw that every drain gully was missing and covered by a traffic cone. The
following Monday I spoke
to Tony Hughes at Bexley’s Works Direct about it and understandably he was
more than a little upset by the loss of 30 gullies in one night (more in
Greenwich apparently). It is certainly an appalling crime. I went to look again
last Saturday and nothing had changed except that some cones were now down the
drains rather than marking them. However nearly every lamp post was adorned with
a notice from Bexley council saying that Alsike Road would be totally closed (licence
valid 18 months from today) for drain “inspections”. Probably that is necessary
but once again we see Bexley council taking the easy option and maximising public
inconvenience (not forgetting the bus operator too) rather than exercise some traffic
management skill - I fear I have answered my own implied question there!
Guessing that the road would be closed from dawn I went there soon after 7 a.m
to find business as usual and the lamp post closure notices gone.
It seems unlikely that the council would remove their notices over the weekend but
perhaps it is significant that the bus stops did not say they were out of use. Maybe
they never intended to close the road today but equally possibly it’s
another Bexley council cock-up and they forgot to notify TfL. Meanwhile there are 30
open man-traps and vehicle wrecking holes in just one street.
Late in the afternoon I contacted Mr. Hughes to ask if he knew what was supposed to happen
and when. He said the notices must have been removed by vandals and that the work had gone
ahead today anyway. I took a look at 5.30 p.m. and there was no sign of any
activity and no new gullies. I took another photo (see gallery) but did manage to find two
Bexley closure notices in fairly obscure places. I suspect there must be a simple explanation,
Mr. Hughes is not from the usual Bexley council mould and won’t be deliberately
misleading anyone.
Following the incident with the No Entry sign where I saw a
suspicious looking scrap truck nearby I now carry a small pencil and a scrap of
paper in my back-pocket to note down the registration number. If we are to
tackle this potentially life threating crime perhaps everyone should do the same.
Bexley’s
parks usually get favourable comment from me (except when their
‘Chief Works Officer’ implied I was a racist
for suggesting that the foreign language signposts - since removed - were discriminatory)
but things have gone badly wrong in recent weeks. The young trees in Lesnes Abbey park
which the council have nurtured and protected from the vandals at some expense have all
been allowed to wither for lack of water. The irrigation system has fallen into disuse and
after a few weeks without significant rainfall the trees have withered and probably
died. Bexley’s vandalism has been worse than that of the nocturnal visitors.
Never mind, it’s only your money they have wasted.
The larger photos provide a clearer view.
It’s been mentioned before that one of Bexley council’s new and inconvenient habits is to show contempt for those who pay their wages by completely closing roads whenever a minor repair is required. The old way of closing just one carriageway at a time seems to have been abandoned. The latest such closure reported is of The Grove, near Danson Park, which has both entrances closed.
Yesterday morning I was at Abbey Wood railway station around 6.30 and saw
that someone had pulled a No Entry sign and its pole out of the pavement on the
Bexley side of the borough boundary. It left a little pyramid of dislodged paving stones with a
circular hole in the middle and the pole was gone, possibly the latest example
of scrap metal thieving. I reported it by email to Bexley’s ‘Works Direct’ at
06.53 and at 11.51 received a reply to say the hazard would be attended to. This
morning I noted that the paving had been repaired and a new stone installed
where the hole used to be. I don’t think I’ve had to say a bad word about Works
Direct; how come they have a different attitude to most other departments?
While I am handing out accolades, I noticed on my trip down to Ruxley last
Sunday that a speed indicator had been installed just before the speed camera on
Gravel Hill. I imagine this fine example of common sense is the work of Mr. Filey who
looks after that department and who responded so well to my enquiry about the
Abbey Road speed indicators. One
odd thing I’ve noticed about all Bexley’s indicators that I have driven past is
that if I have my speedo on exactly 30 m.p.h. they register 31 but if I do
the same in any neighbouring borough they register 29 or even 28.
If Bexley council was all like my experience of Works Direct and of Mr. Filey this website would
quickly die but while we have malicious and idiotic councillors like Craske, Davey
and Campbell, incompetent Team Leaders like
Andrew Bashford and loons like Miss L. Cairns who twice threatened prosecution of
someone who couldn’t find an open bank on a bank holiday, then it seems I
won’t be out of a job any time soon.
Reports
came in this week, liberally peppered with the word “idiots”, of massive traffic queues in North Cray Road so I nipped down
there at 7 a.m. this morning to take a look. Sure enough, Bexley council
has been up to its usual carriageway reduction tricks. I am not familiar with
that junction and the last time I came down North Cray Road and turned left must
be more than ten years ago. It looks as though it has been very easy to make
that turn and clear the road quickly for following traffic and now it will
inevitably be much more difficult and possibly result in queues. Bexley council
loves queues. On the other hand the road must have been very wide for a pedestrian
to cross. What is indisputable is that a lot of money is being spent at a time when
everyone is supposed to be hard up. But when did Bexley council ever care about
wasting your hard-earned?
My journey to Ruxley corner was circuitous because the whole of Bexley village
had been cordoned off by the police so I returned via Sidcup and Welling. In
Upper Wickham Lane I stumbled across yet more road disruptions and closures. A
roundabout was being installed. To me it didn’t look as though it was placed
where it was most needed. There are some photographs in ’the gallery’.
Today’s News Shopper describes Bexley council as having been “taken over by a mob of nasty, evil people who seem to thrive on other people’s pain and hurt” and someone in the care department as “swine”, “a vulgar little maggot” and “a worthless bag of filth”. And I thought describing councillor Craske as a “malicious weasel” might be pushing the boundaries. The only time I came in contact with the council’s care department resulted in these pictures and some bragging that disadvantaged people needed to be punished.
Last
week the road was dug up alongside the unlit pedestrian refuge in Abbey Road, a conduit
installed , and the road surface left in a poor state. Over the hot weekend the pipe
drooped across the carriageway already too narrow for buses to pass each other
safely. I had thought that the bollard might not reach its first birthday in an
unlit state but Bexley council’s continued negligence may prove me wrong.
Today I watched the traffic swerving to avoid the conduit so I have secured it in the
hole behind the exposed kerb stones.
Quite often I read about proposals to end A&E services at Queen Mary’s
Hospital, Sidcup and to my shame, probably because I’ve rarely been there, and
never to A&E, I’m not sure I know exactly what is going on. I believe that the
proposals include shunting A&E patients to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich,
and yes I can understand why people may not like that! Six months ago
exactly I briefly mentioned how I was taken by ambulance to Q.E.H., where
they filled me full of morphine and saline and told me I would have to be kept
there overnight. Then they threw me out five minutes before the Labour
government’s four hour admissions target leaving me to writhe in agony on their
waiting room floor without any treatment whatever.
Not unnaturally I complained and although they commented on various aspects of
my treatment they neatly omitted any mention of my principal complaint.
i.e. Targets before patient care. So I complained again and a mere four months later
they replied. Along the way my times at A&E have been falsified when I and
friends know exactly what my admission and throw out times times were. Other
lies have led to the hospital’s letters being contradictory so there is plenty of scope to
complain again. This time, because the contradictions have naturally led me to it,
there is a more specific question about why I received no treatment at all for the condition
diagnosed with the help of X-ray, beyond ever more powerful morphine shots. For anyone
interested in the performance of Q.E.H. A&E I have put
the correspondence
on site. But don’t bother going there unless you have half an hour to spare and an
interest in our health services. In another four months I may have another instalment to report.
Anyone still stuck with a dial-up connection may wish to know that the
correspondence page amounts to about a megabyte of data.
I see that councillor Craske is keen to persecute motorists again. He is
raising the price of a resident’s parking permit from £35 to £100. The excuse is
that the price of “non-core services” must be increased to cover their costs.
Now I am totally sympathetic to the view that non-core services should not be
subsidised by little old ladies living alone or any other tax payer for that
matter. If that means paying more for a DVD borrowed from the library or to have
an old fridge taken away, then so be it, it is the price we pay for Gordon Brown’s
mismanagement of the economy. But parking outside your own house isn’t even a
service. The permit is a penalty charge for having the misfortune to live close to a
popular amenity.
It is as often as not the council’s idea to restrict parking to residents
which is not always a bad thing but how can it cost £35 a year to issue them with
a piece of paper to stick on their windscreen let alone £100? The restrictions
are already just a money-making scheme through extortionate parking fines. One
neighbouring borough that imposes far lower taxes than Bexley - I suppose that
covers all of them but this one is across the river - doesn’t charge for
residents’ parking permits at all, but then they do not have the expenses king
Craske to contend with. If the malicious weasel was serious about cutting costs he
would make the permits valid for two years and halve the cost of administering the
schemes at a stroke. But we all know that such a dramatic increase in price of a
paper permit is just a cynical ploy by the nasty little runt to help finance the
ever-deepening expenses trough into which he can plunge his greedy snout.
I had
planned to feature a first birthday event for the unlit pedestrian refuge in
Abbey Road but it seems the council has beaten me to it by five weeks. This
morning was marred by the sound of a nearby pneumatic drill and when I found time
to take a look just before 2p.m. I found the road dug up and a plastic
conduit installed. Unfortunately the hole and been filled in with wet concrete
and the traffic allowed to run through it. No workmen were in attendance and
every passing vehicle sent a resounding thump through the ground.
Seeing me with a camera the nearest resident rushed out and told me he had
phoned the council four times about the thump shaking his foundations and been
given the run-around. Apparently no one knew of any work going on in Abbey Road.
The resident told me his lunch time glass of beer had jumped off his
table when a bus went by and it, the beer that is, went all over his carpet. I can
well believe it, even small cars were making quite a thud. While we were talking a
council man turned up and said he had come to investigate and he hoped the problem would be fixed
before the day was done. It would have made more sense if he had supervised the
earlier work and ensured it was properly done.
He was evasive when asked why it had taken best part of
a year to address this safety problem but claimed it hadn’t been forgotten.
If it wasn’t forgotten doesn’t that make the council’s failure wilful and
therefore a worse bit of negligence?
By 5p.m. nothing had happened but by six a Conway lorry and a single man showed up.
To attempt to repair the road with no protection would be foolhardy and I
watched from a distance as he made a phone call. Immediately afterwards he
backed his lorry alongside the refuge and blocked the road. No traffic warning signs
were put out and the rush hour traffic had to directly face that coming in the opposite
direction. I don’t blame the man, he had been sent out totally unequipped to
tackle the job and chose to take his life in his hands to try to stop the thumps rather
than go home as he might have been justified in doing, leaving nearby residents
with little chance of any sleep.
By 7p.m. a temporary resurfacing had been completed and Conway had gone. Totally
unprofessional it might look but it was surprisingly effective at suppressing
the thuds. Will it still be intact in the morning?
The unlit refuge was previously reported on 17 February and
28 January and last year on
18 December and
1 December.
On
30 June I mentioned that Bexley council were bragging in their magazine about putting
metal railings around Lesnes Abbey woods (and several other parks in the North of the borough) in a vain
attempt to exclude motorcyclists. They are ugly and do not comply with disability law
and similar fences in Bromley have killed motorists who collide with them. If the fences fail in their
objective then this massive expenditure has to be a total waste of taxpayers’ money as well as being a
considerable inconvenience to the law-abiding. Would any sensible person ever believe it is possible to allow
most people free access to a park but exclude others without installing military style security permanently
patrolled by armed guards? Of course not, but Bexley council is not noted for common-sense or logical thought.
This afternoon I was strolling through the woods with a friend who was carrying his video camera. As these two lads
passed by he had the presence of mind to press the record button. The images are not perfect but they capture the
registration number well enough. LX05 XKD. Look at the larger images to see for yourself.
A
beautifully produced booklet has dropped through Bexley’s letterboxes this
week and the vast majority, mine included, is headed straight for the recycling
bin. Goodness knows what the cost is especially as my friends in Bromley tell me
they have all received copies too. Obviously some sort of catalogue of adult
education classes has to be produced but why can’t it be more carefully
targeted? One to every household in the borough, and Bromley too apparently,
seems grossly extravagant.
When I first moved to this borough some 23 years ago, when Bexley’s council tax
(rates) was the third lowest in London and not almost the highest as it is now,
the adult education booklet was produced entirely on telephone directory grade
paper and served its purpose just as well. There is no need for such a
publication to look as though it has come off the same presses as Vogue or
Cosmopolitan. Such muddled thinking and downright profligacy by Bexley council
goes a long way towards explaining why local taxes are five times as high as
they were 20 years ago.
The
Summer 2010 issue
has just arrived and compared with the other two London council magazines I regularly see
it is far less like a propaganda sheet. Bexley’s magazine under the previous
Labour administration seemed to be little more than an ego trip for
councillor Ball with his face peering out from innumerable pages. The current
issue is guilty of no more than peering through rose tinted spectacles. Take the
article (page 4) headed “Cheaper rail travel for Bexley residents”. It says
that “Bexley residents using an Oyster card to travel by train can (save) up to
40% particularly during the off-peak period”. No mention that the saving is
made because off-peak travel cards have been withdrawn and evening peak
hour restrictions have been introduced.
Maybe some people do benefit but I know of a young family who no longer get to
London as a little treat for the children because it has become far too
expensive. And twice I’ve heard of an occasional traveller who has loaded her
Pay As You Go Card with £20 for a day in London and become marooned when the
card has run out of money. It makes me realise what a boon my Freedom Pass is.
Another example of ‘rose tinted spectacles’ is the feature (page 14) on fencing
in Lesnes Abbey Woods which I mentioned on 1st May. Bexley
council boasts that it keeps out motorcyclists. As I said, I’ve never
actually seen any in the woods though I accept that they sometimes visit because
I can hear the noise from home. I’ll admit to having heard them over recent hot
summer days and even seen them heading off, generally ‘sans helmet’,
in the direction of Lesnes Abbey. So all the indications are that the huge
expense of installing the ugly and dangerous barriers has been another abject
failure by Bexley council.
I’m sure the tall thin man I saw wriggling in sideways through the narrow access
point at the foot of Knee Hill would agree that the scheme is totally stupid and
does nothing positive apart from line the fencing contractor’s pocket. It
would be interesting to hear what the disabled think about it.
I am getting quite seriously worried about the number of injustices and
illegal acts by Bexley council that are reported to me. Yesterday evening I had
another left on my answering machine. Unfortunately the message becomes so
distorted after the first sentence that I only caught the lady’s name and the
words Bexley council and if I heard correctly, a mention of offences against the
Data Protection Act. Everything else was so badly corrupted by what I imagine is
a mobile telephone connection that I am in the dark as to what it was really
about and don’t have a phone number.
At present all I can do here is report the stupidity and law-breaking of Bexley council
in the hope that when the list of shameful activity gets big enough someone may see fit
to try to curtail it. I haven’t the highest of hopes as the mismanagement and
persecution of too many residents has been going on for at least twelve years to my
certain knowledge, through administrations of both political persuasions. Legal advice
cannot be given except perhaps that two people concerned with parking issues have been
in contact to offer help. However their expert advice is already available elsewhere
on the web.
Because of the expense of running the site’s
telephone contact arrangements I have
had to modify the conditions a little.
Earlier this week I reported that Bexley council were
delaying responses to parking appeals so that the appellant would have to pay a
higher fine. Whilst I am slowly getting used to the idea that Bexley council is the
epitome of bad practice and management by spite, a bit of me still finds it hard to
believe, so I have been searching around the web for whether what they are doing is
legal or not.
The parking adjudicator’s website says “Please note, challenging the PCN before
the end of the 14 day period may, in some cases freeze the discounted rate but this is
not always the case - you need to check with your individual council”. So
it seems that councils who believe in fairness will say something like
“Currently we are unable to specify a date for our response but during this time
the case will be placed on hold to stop it progressing any further. You will not
be disadvantaged by any delay on our part. Please accept our apologies for any
inconvenience this delay may cause you.” and councils intent on being evil
bastards at every opportunity will penalise you for having the temerity to
exercise the legal right of appeal. Given that choice it’s pretty obvious what a
dictatorial council which doesn’t really believe in democracy will do.
Perhaps Bexley should be played at its own game. If the fine is doubled because
Bexley council contrives to take longer than 14 days to respond there is
absolutely no reason not to take the case to appeal. The fine cannot be
increased, but it is further deferred and it helps keep the nasty individuals
who infest Bexley council bogged down in extra paperwork. Best of all, the
parking adjudicator won’t be happy with Bexley council if the number of appeals
keeps rising.
As if to confirm Bexley council as being fundamentally corrupt I have overnight
received another catalogue of their malpractice detailing lies,
cover-ups and
refusals to fulfil statutory obligations. I have a feeling that this
particular case is far from over and could possibly find it’s way to court so I
have decided it might be best to put publication on ice for a while. I once had
a council blatantly ask me for a back-hander to look favourably on a planning
application and was astounded when my employer (a multi-national company) was
asked for the same and simply didn’t know how to handle the situation, but I
have never before known a council to be so keen to declare war on its residents as
Bexley appears to have done.
This week’s News Shopper reports that Thamesmead’s new M.P., Teresa Pearce made her
maiden speech in the Commons
pleading for retention of the Crossrail line to Abbeywood.
Well done Teresa; my relatives in east London are all spoilt for choice of fast railway
connections to central London and we have nothing but an expensive Southeastern trains
connection which is 20%-25% slower than it was 20 years ago.
If anything is to be cancelled it should be Crossrail’s Shenfield branch.
The Shopper also reports Bexley’s councillor Bacon stating the obvious at the
London Assembly; that the way to get people recycling is to make it easy for them,
not fine them. Quite right too Gareth. I manage to recycle almost everything and
as you might guess, it’s nothing to do with a love-in with Bexley council;
it’s because it is as easy to recycle as it is not to. Easier in
some respects. It doesn’t stop the bin men finding any excuse not to empty a
bin though, I see many warning tags on bins when taking my early morning walk to Abbey
Wood station on bin day. What the ‘offences’ are I don’t know.
A reader’s letter says that the road planning clowns have made a “ridiculous
mess” of Faraday Avenue in Sidcup. I must pop down there with a camera.
P.S. It seems it was tempting fate to complain about the lack of alternative rail
routes to London from this area because I reached London Bridge at nine o’clock
tonight and decided I couldn’t be bothered to run for the 9.01 as there was a
faster train due in a few minutes. Bad mistake. The 9.01 and the following train
were the last to leave London Bridge today. Someone fell under a train at New
Cross and that following train heading for Lewisham blocked the Deptford
junction. After an hour’s worth of announcements which couldn’t give much
advice to those wishing to travel past Greenwich. I decided that the Jubilee to
Canning Town, DLR to Woolwich and a bus was the only alternative. Three hours from
Farringdon to Abbey Wood station. Crossrail, if it is ever built, would be
a quarter of an hour. Southeastern’s website was still showing no trains to or
from London Bridge at midnight.
A
recurrent theme of correspondence, apart from the regular complaints about bad
road design, concerns the arrogance of far too many Bexley council employees
and their enthusiasm for going out of their way to be as obnoxious as possible.
Presumably that tone is set from the top. Certainly we have councillor Craske who
delights in making the worst possible decision
if he can in the process blight someone’s life and bank balance, and
councillor Davey who speaks with a forked tongue and would rather see residents
unfairly fined than stand up for
justice. I could also mention the social services department who believe in
punishing the mentally disabled for being difficult to handle.
Miss Cairns, jobsworth extraordinaire, who
twice threatened to prosecute when a council tax payment was delayed solely by a bank
holiday. And did I mention the undersized parking bays
and Bexley’s retort that they could do pretty much what they liked and if you didn’t
like it challenge the parking fine in court?
The latest episode to come my way is another concerning a parking fine. Due to a
medical emergency while transferring an elderly lady to hospital a driver had
to pull over and stop for a few seconds, well under a minute. The road was
congested because someone had inconsiderately parked in an awkward place so the
driver stopped with his wheels up the kerb so as not to congest the road
further. Unfortunately the awkwardly parked vehicle was Bexley’s
moron-mobile which photographed the brief incident.
A few days later the penalty notice arrived in the post.
The driver decided to appeal against the fine on the grounds that it was a very brief
transgression, there was a medical emergency to deal with and the problem was largely caused by
the council’s gestapo camcar. Despite a number of emailed ‘chasers’ the
council did not bother to reply for more than a month and as one might expect
from such an obnoxious bunch of sub-humans they rejected the appeal.
By this time the fine had doubled and Bexley council simply didn’t care that the delay
was entirely of its own making. These so-called public servants unreasonably insisted
that the driver had to pay extra for the dubious privilege of appealing against being
forced up the kerb by the council’s own vehicle. Contrast that appalling attitude
with a letter issued in similar circumstances by a nearby borough.
“Currently
we are unable to specify a date for our response but during this time
the case will be placed on hold to stop it progressing any further. You will not
be disadvantaged by any delay on our part. Please accept our apologies for any
inconvenience this delay may cause you”. What a refreshing change from the
diabolical attitude Bexley council has on any matter involving roads or money.
The doubled fine was paid on the day the appeal was rejected. The receipt came
back with the words “To avoid incurring further charges please do not send any
further correspondence as it may not be responded to, however, it may result in
further recovery action being taken.” What is that nonsense doing on a receipt
for payment in full? My correspondent thinks it is “just another of their snide
digs”. It almost certainly is another of their attempts to hound residents
whenever possible, like when my bank made one error after 20 years of perfectly on time
council tax payments, I was given two days to pay or be prosecuted.
It not only adds to Bexley council’s reputation for being
bloody-minded but
confirms their total incompetence too.
The spycam shown here is for illustration purposes only. This one is
delaying buses and causing mayhem in Northumberland Heath; not the site of the
incident reported above.
Today’s Times repeats the report from The News Shopper dated 26 May about pubs
in Bexley being willing to serve amateur thespians who were acting drunk. When I
first saw the story ten days ago I decided it didn’t have a strong enough Bexley council
connection to be featured here but I have had my arm twisted by regular readers who have
pointed out that the performance was re-enacted at Bexley’s civic offices so the
council’s fingerprints are all over this crime against common-sense too. To send
am-drams into pubs and get them to slur their words was a mad scheme likely to be
ridiculed and it is good that The Times thought it sufficiently idiotic to give it space.
It surely cannot be in any way illegal, even after the 3,000 odd new ways to be a
criminal introduced by our last government, to serve someone who is pretending to be
drunk? Just imagine what any half decent barrister would make of that if the
police or Bexley council took action against any licensee because he was serving
alcohol to someone who was completely sober.
Embarking on stupid and totally over-the-top courses of action has become the
hallmark of too many public bodies. It was revealed this week that Bexley
council has used anti-terrorist powers against residents 13 times in the last
two years, none of whom were ever suspected of being terrorists. Allowing a dog
to foul a park is most definitely anti-social behaviour but it is not in the
same league as packing your shirt full of explosives and getting on a bus.
Bexley council, intelligent as ever, seems to think it is.
Reports
have come in from the south of the borough complaining yet again of Bexley council’s constant
unnecessary fiddling with road layouts. Albany Park and Steynton Avenue is not an
area I am very familiar with, having been there only once before today, but it
is a very pleasant and busy village-like shopping area outside Albany Park
railway station. Road works were still in evidence today as were the new
one-way
street signs. As a stranger to the area it didn’t look so very bad to me but
neither could I see any benefit the scheme should have introduced; and this is the
point of the complaints that have come my way. Everything worked well enough
before Bexley council splashed our money around at a time when budgets are supposed to
be cut. The only conceivable reason for it is to keep themselves in work.
It is said that the road, a loop leading to and from the station, has been as it is for
longer than anyone can remember and because it is a little on the narrow side,
locals tended to use it as a one-way system. Not good enough for the control
freaks who infest Bexley’s road planning department! They had to place traffic
orders and enforce one-way traffic and just to show who was in charge they reversed the
natural flow direction adopted by the locals. Naturally, because they are Bexley
council with their reputation for hammering struggling businesses whenever they
can, they reduced the car parking facilities outside the shops.
It is hard to get inside the head of a bureaucrat just as it is difficult to
understand the mind of any other lunatic but I am coming to the conclusion that
road planning is solely driven by job creation and the justification thereof. If
bureaucrats left well alone we would have much less need of them, so they manufacture
unnecessary schemes to make themselves look busy. The phoney industry goes beyond that,
having installed something for no good reason at all they have automatically created
something that can be legitimately removed a few years down the line.
Brampton Road is the latest such example and even with the
million pound nonsense inflicted on Abbey Road,
its incompetent designer, Andrew Bashford, admitted to it being a stab in the dark that
may have to be reviewed later. Why can’t Bexley council employ people who aren’t
just in it for themselves and are sufficiently skilled to get things right first time?
The fourth photograph is another illustration of Bexley council’s contempt for
the population. Whenever they need to resurface a road they close it completely.
This example is within a couple of minutes walk of Albany Park station. On my
way there I encountered the effects of another, a stream of double deck buses in
Brampton Road diverted by the complete closure of Pickford Lane;
for resurfacing works again.
It
seems from discussions with neighbours that none of us got a copy of this year’s
recycling guide. Maybe someone used the same circulation list as Andrew Bashford did when
he conducted his sham consultation
on his Abbey Road desecration. My copy came from the Recycling team last Monday so I’ll
post the calendar here so my neighbours (and half the borough!) can check it easily.
If they compare it closely with last year’s issue they will see that the recycling of
cooking oil which was new for 2009 is new for 2010 too. What I’d really like to see is the
recycling of a greater variety of plastic. It’s not easy to tell one type from another.
I
didn’t get a copy of the recycling guide this year, the one that includes a calendar
of the scheduled fortnightly collection dates. A copy kept near the front door is a useful
reassurance when a neighbour puts out their bins on what I think may be the wrong day. So I
emailed the appropriate department via the link on the council website and was told within
hours that the 2010/2011 issue had been popped in the post for me. As I have said before;
why can’t all of Bexley council be as helpful as the recycling people?
Something else that happened today is that another bus shelter was
moved in Abbey Road after council works left it marooned in the middle of the pavement.
Actually it’s a completely new and bigger shelter. Maybe Bexley council should move
the lamp posts which have been left in the middle of the pavement too. Perhaps they will
do it when they get around to wiring up the keep left bollard which remains a
hazard to night time traffic nine months or more after it was moved
as part of the wrecking of Abbey Road.
Finally I see that today’s News Shopper says that Bexley council, having taken
over some aspects of parking control from Vinci Parking Services, is no longer bothering to
remind residents when their yearly parking permits expire so that more penalty notices
can be issued. I suspect another crafty little scam by Craske.
Brampton
Road is one of the main North-South thoroughfares across the borough and being straight it
may be too much of a temptation for impatient drivers and being narrow it may
over-stretch
the skills of some. Having said that I used it regularly for more than 15 years and never
saw an accident until Bexley council installed three closely spaced mini-roundabouts.
It must have been six or more years ago that the council put up a sign saying there had been
32 accident casualties in Brampton Road over the previous three years which they used as an
excuse to build obstacles at several road junctions and a year or two later amended the
figure to 44 and built three mini-roundabouts. Did it not occur to them that the increase
might warrant removal of obstacles designed to force vehicles into the path of on-coming
traffic? The roundabouts always look very dangerous to me and to be approached with great care.
The demolished wall and damaged car shown here may indicate that not everyone
takes the care needed to safely negotiate the danger points and exposes the
Achilles’ heel of Bexley’s lamentable road planning. It frustrates careful
drivers and disregards the reckless to whom obstacles present a challenge.
However the other pictures suggest that the planners may have recognised their
own stupidity and the dangerous obstacles placed at junctions are
on the way out; they show the new kerb and where the old one was defined by the black patch and
the double yellow lines. Both may be seen more clearly in the ‘photo gallery’.
A correspondent in Welling has reported something that didn’t make the local
newspapers as far as I know. A quad-bike rider hit and demolished his neighbour’s
garden wall and may have demolished his own neck and spine too. The ambulance
crew said it was too dangerous to drive the seriously injured rider to hospital
because of all the speed humps and had to call out the air-ambulance from the
London Hospital in Whitechapel. What extra costs did Bexley cause the NHS? I’m
told that last July a near identical situation arose close by.
Do speed humps really save lives? There have been
reports that they damage tyres
and kill more people through high-speed
blow-outs than they can ever save by
encouraging slow speeds. More enlightened councils have removed speed humps.
Barnet council removed its speed humps and found the accident rate dropped by 14.9%.
But the words enlightened and Bexley council are not often seen in the same sentence.
The vice-chairman of their Traffic Scrutiny Committee no less, councillor John Davey,
has said that Bexley’s road planning is bonkers, and it most certainly is.
Most
mornings I walk along Abbey Road around 7 a.m. but this morning I was 30
minutes early and I could hardly believe the amount of traffic using it. Westbound
vehicles were nose to tail and those heading towards Erith were at a standstill
due to buses not being able to pass each other on the narrowest sections; they
wait for each other to clear the bottlenecks before proceeding due to the design
errors made by Andrew Bashford.
Four hours later things had not improved and I looked for the reason.
The News Shopper website told me that a lorry had overturned on Eastern Way, Thamesmead,
blocking the junction with Yarnton Way. The situation wasn’t helped by Transport for London
(TfL) who had unluckily chosen today to reposition the bus stop opposite Lesnes Abbey. Something
made necessary by the almost unused cycle track foisted on us last year by Bexley council following
its carefully rigged and dishonest consultation. So we had all the traffic from Eastern Way
from about 5 a.m. and the road restricted to a single track due to the bus stop works and the
lorry-mounted hoist that was needed to move it. I saw three 180 buses and a 401
in convoy all held up so I decided it might be worth photographing the unusual
routing. Within minutes I had collected my camera and started snapping away at
the half demolished bus stop and some of the buses.
I was then confronted by one of the TfL workmen who told me that photography in
the street was forbidden. I told him it wasn’t. He then asked why I had not
asked his permission to photograph him. I told him that was unnecessary in a
public place and in any case I had been careful to ensure that no one would be
identifiable in the photos. He then told me that it was illegal to photograph TfL
staff. I told him he was wrong and suggested that if he thought it was he should
call the police to report a crime.
Why is it that people in public service are almost always jobsworths who like to
throw their weight around? Something to do with their lack of intelligence I
suspect. As soon as I got home I loaded all the photos on to a web-server as a
precaution but I didn’t expect to hear any more and I haven’t.
Additional photos and information is available by clicking any of the images. The
180 and 401 buses were still using Abbey Road at 3.30 in the afternoon.
At 6 p.m. Bexley council’s website was still reporting “counting in
progress” for the local elections held yesterday.
Later… Pretty much unchanged. Labour have picked up the lone independent’s seat
and another in Erith; the Mayor’s, Bernard Clewes. The Tories took one from
Labour in Belvedere; that of Daniel Francis
who wanted me labelled a vexatious correspondent back in 2000 when I queried the imposition of a
bus lane which the council admitted did not satisfy the
criteria for one. In Lesnes Abbey ward the lowest scoring Tory beat the Labour candidate by only
six votes. One of them was mine!
…of election literature that is. Over the past month or thereabouts I have
received 12 different items about the general election from the Conservatives
and none at all from Labour. I’ve also had one each from the BNP, Christian People’s
Alliance, English Democrats, Greens, an Independent, Liberals and UKIP. Weird
that nothing came from Labour; I was a “don’t know” when the election was called
but Labour seems to be complacent in Erith & Thamesmead this time around. Just by
chance I’ve bumped into rosette wearing Conservatives three times in as many weeks while
walking around locally. No others.
I think I found the Christian People’s Alliance leaflet the most interesting
read but there are more important things at stake than their complaints and the
Independent candidate rather blew it for me by picturing himself alongside the now
deceased former MP, Bernie Grant. I used to work on the same job as Bernie Grant and
his brother in the 1970s. One was a hard working and decent man and the other
was a rogue who was eventually dismissed for dishonesty. You can guess which one
went on to become an MP.
With two days to go I’ve still not managed to find out anything useful about
all the local election candidates. I know the names of the three Labour candidates
from the only communication
I have from them. It is two months old and tells me almost nothing about their plans.
I also know the names of the Conservative candidates because they piggy-backed one of the
parliamentary leaflets, but what I’d really
like to see is the policies of all the candidates. The council website says there are eight candidates in the Lesnes
Abbey ward (but doesn’t divulge their parties) and two of those names don’t appear on the main party lists.
viz. Nicola Finch and Peter Townsend. Google eventually told me that Nicola represents the BNP
but I drew a blank with Peter Townsend.
Mr. H. who told me on 30 April that councillor Craske helped him “overcome
some serious problems” has emailed again but failed to let me know the page on which he alleged I had boasted
about being cleverer than Craske and instead complained about me replying to his first email. Surely if you
don’t want to get involved in a conversation you don’t start one?
One
of the few redeeming features of Bexley is the public parks. I am fortunate to
live near to Lesnes Abbey and Bexley council does a pretty good job of making it
a pleasant place to visit. Opening the public toilets would improve matters but
on the whole one cannot complain. But why is Bexley council so keen to restrict
access and how can it justify the enormous expense of several miles of barriers
at the same time as complaining about money shortages when they raised council
tax yet again last month?
The main justification apparently is to deter motorcyclists. Bit of a
sledge-hammer to crack a nut isn’t it? In my 23 years of daily walking around
the abbey grounds I have only once encountered motorcyclists and that was when two
policemen on council-funded bikes stopped to ask me and two other ‘senior
citizens’ what we were doing. Pretty obvious I thought but I suppose they have a job to
do. On a handful of occasions I have heard motorcyclists in the woods but I
doubt it amounts to more than a handful of times a year; so why waste so much of our money
putting up obstacles that exclude the disabled and those blessed with a less
than sylph-like figure and create an objectionable eye-sore?
A friend from Bromley has told me that the same sort of fence was put around
Bromley Common a couple of years ago but was withdrawn after two motorists were
killed by the unforgiving scaffold bar when their cars ran off the road.
For more details and photographs click on any of the images.
I had an email today from a Mr. H. who said that councillor Craske had helped
him “overcome some serious problems”. Glad to hear that; up until now only his
detractors have seen fit to make contact maybe because the website doesn’t look for
stories that affect only single individuals except perhaps if they are featured in the
local news media too. Naturally Mr. H. went on to rudely accuse me of boasting about
my own superiority and I am absolutely positive he is making it up. I’ve asked
Mr. H. to provide me with the offending page(s) and if he is right or anywhere near
right they will be removed pronto.
Perhaps the first pro-Craske message justifies repeating why this site is here. A year ago
I was in correspondence with Bexley’s Traffic Department and councillor John Davey.
Mr. Davey started off by being helpful but as my research progressed and showed the
council in a bad light and acting not a little dishonestly the correspondence dried up. I
told Mr. Davey that I had in mind a website to highlight the council’s failure if he
continued to dodge the issues and if that course was taken he should expect to be portrayed
negatively whenever possible. He chose not to reply. Councillor Craske had put his signature
to the scheme I and an expert in the field had shown to be ill-judged; hence those two being
regularly featured here. There are no plans to dig the dirt on any other councillor, unless
of course evidence is handed to me on a plate. e.g. councillor Colin Campbell
who seeks to restrict residents’ use of the Freedom of Information Act.
The site is just a pastime to me. I don’t care if no one reads it, though I am
amazed at the number of hits it gets and its Google ranking. I won’t deny that
if it irritates my favourite two councillors and Bexley council as a whole when
they do silly things I’ll regard it as a definite bonus but most of my satisfaction is
derived from taking the photos and tinkering with the computer code. Sad but true.
I shall make unflattering comments whenever the opportunity arises but it is
only possible when Bexley council provides the ammunition; it’s not me who makes up the
stories, most can be found elsewhere too. I collect them together, not invent them,
and I’m prevented from straying too far from the straight and narrow by a friend who
used to “legal” contributions to the BBC’s website. I’m told I sometimes
offend against OFCOM rules but I am not a broadcaster and that in the world of on-line
blogging I am really rather mild.
This
week’s News Shopper contains the perfect illustration of the sheer wickedness of
Bexley council staff and the evil little runt, councillor Craske. It would seem
that Mr. Felix Akele from Northumberland Heath was misled by Bexley council into
thinking that any contractor could lower the kerb outside his house after he
obtained permission to have a pavement crossover installed. In fact, Bexley
council insists on the contractor being one they have approved but that wasn’t
made clear to Mr. Akele. So he hired a contractor to do the job for £600. This
may or may not have been Mr. Akele’s fault but whoever was to blame the solution
was obvious. Get an approved contractor to strip out the allegedly substandard
work and replace it with something more to Craske’s liking. The work involved
would be the same as working from a ‘clean slate’, less perhaps if the
original job wasn’t good enough and came apart easily. But such a solution does
nothing to assuage Craske’s rage and constant need to throw his weight
around. Perhaps he has read too many history books about Germany’s S.S.
Craske’s solution was to restore the pavement to its original condition and
charge Mr. Akele £550 when any sensible public servant, even one with
his snout in the expenses trough to the tune of £22k a year, would have spent that
£550 on modifying the work already done to create a crossover that met the
council’s standards.
Craske; you really are a stupid little man. How much damage has your idiocy
done to the Conservative party a week before the election?
I’d
expected to see more election literature through my letterbox by now; a neighbour received an A3
sized leaflet from Labour but a copy didn’t reach me and I have had to wait to see
anything other than the criticism of local council tax increases and recycling policies from
Labour’s parliamentary candidate delivered to me on 3rd March.
Bexley’s Conservative council, blessed as it has been with incompetents and criminals
should be an easy target for Labour’s prospective M.P. but to not mention national matters was idiotic.
Today’s Conservative election leaflet looks to me a very much more professional
affair than Labour’s effort, saying and claiming all the things you might expect
in defence of Bexley council but naturally omitting their failures, their
assault on motorists, their tax-payer funded meals for girlfriends and expenses
for long absent councillors. What really spoils it for me is the fact that it is
“promoted” by councillor John Davey, the man who said Bexley’s road planning was
“bonkers” but as vice-chairman of the Traffic Scrutiny Committee does nothing to stop the crazy
schemes. And then there is the fact that he stood idly by when parking fines
were levied in circumstances he knew to be dishonest, misleading and almost
certainly illegal. When you know the man is as useless and unscrupulous as that
you just can’t vote for him can you?
You can see the Conservative’s lavish A3 double-sided leaflet by clicking on the image
and for completeness and balance I have belatedly put the whole of the
Labour party’s leaflet
on line too; previously only the first page was available. They haven’t
even named the constituency, what did they think they were playing at? There are other Labour
leaflets in circulation but that party has a long-standing habit of ignoring my letterbox,
possibly because it is at the end of a cul-de-sac and represents too long a walk for them.
Of
all the comments I am sent about Bexley council, complaints relating to roads
and traffic are by far the most numerous. I know from correspondence sent to me
by Bexley council that they are perfectly happy to break the law if the result is
additional fines and I know that councillor Davey supports the fining of
motorists even when shown evidence that the signing is illegal. Just around the
corner from where I live is an example of Bexley council’s neglect and cynicism
when it comes to motoring matters. For a long time there has been a single yellow
line in Fossington Road, Belvedere that allowed residents to park there at any time
without fear of a penalty. It was only big enough for one car but this week it has been
changed to a double yellow line. No notices announcing a change to the traffic regulations,
just out with the paint brush and to hell with any legal niceties. The central photograph
shows where the double line used to end and how it has been surreptitiously extended.
Not far away is a parking bay with an adjacent yellow line. It is in such bad condition
that you can only guess where the line ends and the parking bay begins. For the record,
the only visible part of the bay marking is the white blob in the middle of the third
photograph.
A message reached me today to the effect that in a further assault on motorists,
Bexley council has reintroduced a summer season charge for parking within Danson Park and
employs two men to collect the cash. Now that’s really efficient isn’t it?
Paying staff to stand around collecting money and wide open to any opportunist
thief. My correspondent says that there were four security men not far away but they were
too busy talking and smoking to be much use in the event of any trouble. It’s not very
friendly to discourage people from enjoying the recreational facilities by introducing a
charge when we already pay the third highest council taxes in London and there is
no justification for it. On-street parking restrictions are justified by the need to
maintain traffic flow and paying for the enforcement, even though it is all too often a
council lie, but money grabbing in a park is nothing but exploitation of motorists,
particularly the elderly and infirm who could not otherwise get there - and
these jokers will expect to be shown our gratitude with a vote for them in two weeks time!
Apparently the charge was only £1 last year but what’s a 50% rise when you can
help yourself to £20k and more a year in expenses? Cretinous Craske strikes
again presumably.
Getting
pages to the top of Google is a black art and even when a page does get there it
tends to change a bit on a daily basis. However it is gratifying, especially
with an election approaching, to see that the crazy antics of our vindictive
council are still
readily available to be read by anyone who cares to put “Bexley politics” into a major
search engine.
The last few days have provided some welcome sunshine while the children are
still off school bringing many of them to the Lesnes Abbey park and playground.
Nice as it is to see them enjoying themselves, the number congregating on the
pavements of Abbey Road is frightening
as vehicles speed through the obstacles installed by Bexley council acting on
the advice of the incompetent Andrew Bashford. He promised his political masters
that making the road more dangerous would cause traffic to slow down. A few
minutes spent by the speed indicator sign will show that few drivers observe the
speed limit, around a quarter are exceeding 40 m.p.h. and 50+ is not all that
uncommon. There is no more than a couple of feet margin to spare as vehicles pass
pedestrian refuges some of which have been engineered to be mid-way between two
changes of direction. We will be fortunate indeed to get through the summer without
the addition of someone’s tiny mistake to Bexley’s huge one resulting
in disaster.
Before 8 a.m. this morning the police were out in force on Abbey Road, four
vehicles and twice as many coppers. It looked like a speed trap but they told me it
wasn’t. They were simply pulling people in at random, checking their paperwork
and breathalysing them. A policeman explained that too many people have too much to
drink on a Saturday night and are still over the limit in the morning. It was all
very low-tech. I thought that these days a number plate recognition camera linked to
the D.V.L.A. database signalled which vehicles should be pulled over but there was
none of that. It’s been a long time since I saw any police activity in local
roads; maybe they should come back and bring a radar gun with them next time.
Lesnes Abbey park provides a wonderful opportunity for some well-needed exercise so
I went for a stroll this afternoon among the picnickers, dog exercisers and
children’s game playing. As I climbed the hill and the abbey ruins came into
view I slowed down so that I could read the tattoos that despoiled the body of the
young woman in front of me. By her side was a lad of about six years who enquired
about the ruins. “It’s an old castle; it got bombed”. “When was
that?” said the boy. “I think around the 1700s or 1800s” came the reply.
“Was it bombed by a jet?” “I dunno what sort of plane it was”;
replied mother. Should I be shocked? They don’t teach pre-Victorian history in schools any
more do they?
It transpired later that the pair were climbing the hill in search of the public
toilets having followed the sign at the park
entrance. Needless to say the toilets were shut.
The election campaigns have kicked off in earnest and for the first time
ever I have not decided who I should vote for, nationally or locally. I shall
have to pay special attention to what the candidates say. A communication received
yesterday is from Teresa Pearce, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Erith and
Thamesmead. In it she berates Bexley council and omits to mention national
issues at all. Nothing about Gordon Brown’s achievements, the economy, the EU,
immigration or any number of issues worrying people. Perhaps she has forgotten
that she is trying to become an MP not a local councillor. More likely she is
trying to confuse and deceive her electorate.
It’s easy to understand why a Labour politician would want to overlook the
present government’s record in office but criticising Bexley Conservatives for
raising council tax by 9% over four years smacks of desperation. The previous
Labour administration raised taxes on average by more than that amount every
single year they were in office and their leader told me personally that he was
proud of that record and wished he could spend even more.
Bexley’s Tory council has proved to be a grave disappointment in many ways and
has the whiff of corruption around it; surely a Labour candidate anxious to
avoid talking about the mess the country is in should be able to criticise
Conservative councillors for something more serious than doing four times better than her
own party did?
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 as if he is not ashamed to be one. He
also reminds us that the German electronics company Siemens has been contracted to
update Bexley’s CCTV system which causes me some concern. Howard Dawber (Labour
candidate for the Bexleyheath and Crayford Parliamentary constituency) has some
interesting things to say about the Siemen’s contract and how much money it is likely to waste.
Read it here. (Link to his blog, the
Siemens page is no longer available - October 2010).
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 transmission
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 zigzags 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.
TThe 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.
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