24 December - The last word on ULEZ?
It was bound to happen; @tonyofsidcup has jumped back on to his ULEZ hobbyhorse for the latest in his promised ten part critique of Bexley Council. I might have posed a counter-argument but I can’t, what he says below is entirely true. I am sure Councillor Smith would argue that his Group was rendered superfluous by rapidly developing events but why no one would discuss things with @tony and even denied its existence I have no idea other than it’s Bexley and it is what they tend to do.
8. The Lady Vanishes
As the Bexley council’s finances are sliding into a multi-million hole, the £147,853.20 spent by Teresa
O’Neill and her minions on the Tory PR exercise known as “ULEZ judicial review” increasingly looks
like small potatoes, but the partisan waste of public money still rankles.
The vast majority of Bexley residents who are not themselves liable for the £12·50 will be pleased to
hear that they are not paying the ULEZ charges through their council tax: a FOI response from
November indicated that in the first two months of the ULEZ expansion, the council’s ULEZ bill was
£0. The small minority of Bexleyites who do have to pay may be wondering - was the judicial-review
exercise the only thing that Teresa and Co. did for them? After all, Labour-run Merton and
Wandsworth councils each set up a £1-million scrappage scheme. What did the Bexley council do?
It set up a ULEZ Task and Finish Group, composed of four junior councillors (Smith, Adams, Brooks
and Ogundayo) and asked to develop mitigations of ULEZ expansion’s impact on Bexley residents.
The group got off to a flying start, with Cllr Ogundayo boasting of sterling bipartisan work at a Places
OSC meeting. Then, after just a few weeks, the ULEZ Task and Finish Group vanished.
One could be forgiven for thinking that “ULEZ Task and Finish Group” was a sexually-transmitted
disease. When asked about the group’s output in a FOI request, the council initially denied it existed!
Both Tory and Labour representatives of the group refused to talk about it. (Only the chairman, Cllr
Smith, responded at all).
A batch of four FOI requests obtained correspondence between the four councillors, and revealed (a)
a plan to set up an online survey, (b) a draft document with the most tantalizing section, “Proposals”, blank. That’s it.
I believe that Bexley did not provide the full correspondence of the ULEZ Task and Finish Group - for
example, there was never an email announcing its demise, which is odd - but I feel pretty confident
that Cllrs Adams, Brooks, Smith and Ogundayo just did not do a whole lot of work on the project, and
were embarrassed to admit it. (Cllr Ogundayo’s refusal to answer questions was especially
disappointing - so much for Labour being different!) If you are paying ULEZ charges, please do know
that both local Tories and local Labour have done nothing for you. Bexley Tories used the hopeless
judicial review as an excuse not to do anything else. Bexley Labour… simply were their usual lazy
selves, using Bexley Tories as their excuse.
Bexley Council’s ULEZ report.
On reflection I should perhaps have removed the word ‘small’ from the second paragraph.
Among my neighbours the proportion of affected vehicles was nearly half.
The existence of Councillor Smith’s Group was reported
here in March and again in September.