When, rather a long time ago, there were six people behind BiB - only
one now - we used to funnel all FOI requests through Michael Barnbrook. I don’t
remember why; perhaps it was to annoy Councillor Read who would fairly
frequently make speeches in Council about how much money was being spent on
answering him.
Eventually a Finance Director, while standing in for the Chief Executive, wrote
to the Information Commissioner to ask for permission to ban Michael from the FOI
process on the grounds that he was a racist. Somewhat ironic when his friends
knew that most of his spare cash was being lavished on supporting a
disadvantaged mixed race boy. But a dishonest Bexley Council and an equally
dishonest Information Commissioner had their way.
I fear the same will happen to @tonyofsidcup eventually because he has been at
it again; making Freedom of Information Requests again that is.
This time @tony was looking for progress on one of the bees in his bonnet, road
safety and crossings in particular. He asked if it was true that several
locations had been surveyed with a view to making them safer and if so what were
they, the criteria for selection and what was the result.
He was a bit premature as the survey has not yet been analysed and unlikely to be
for another couple of months but the sites were chosen mainly on the basis of
public requests.
The list is as follows and @tony is happy that it includes those of special
interest to him.
Site Operated by School Crossing Patrols
• Barnehurst Infant School / Barnehurst Junior School – Site: Colyers Lane j/w Bexley Road
• Bedonwell Infant School / Bedonwell Junior School – Site: Bedonwell Road o/s Bedonwell Infant
• East Wickham Primary Academy Junior – Site: Wickham Street j/w Central Avenue, outside Junior
• Haberdashers’ Aske’s Crayford Academy – Site: Iron Mill Lane j/w Barnes Cray Road
• Normandy Primary School – Site: Colyers Lane j/w Colyers Walk
• Old Bexley CE Primary School - Hurst Road j/w Parkwood Road
• St Fidelis Catholic Primary School – Site: Bexley Road outside school
• Upton Primary School – Site: Upton Road j/w Iris Crescent
Other Identified SCP Sites
• Bedonwell Junior School – Site: King Harold’s Way j/w Bedonwell Road
• Belmont Primary School – Site: Bedonwell Road j/w Belmont Road
• Belvedere Infant School – Site: Lower Road outside Belvedere Juniors
• Belvedere Junior School – Site: Lower Road outside Belvedere Juniors
• Burnt Oak Junior School – Site: Halfway Street j/w Burnt Oak Lane
• Danson Primary School – Site: Danson Lane outside Danson Primary
• Days Lane Primary School – Site: Days Lane j/w Fen Grove
• Days Lane Primary School – Site: Days Lane j/w Burnt Oak Lane
• East Wickham Primary Academy Infant – Site: Wickham Street j/w Central Avenue, outside Infants
• Eastcote Primary School – Site: Bellegrove Road j/w Eastcote road
• Haberdashers’ Aske’s Slade Green Campus – Site: Slade Green Road outside schools
• Holy Trinity Lamorbey CE Primary School – Site: Halfway Street j/w Burnt Oak Lane
• Hook Lane Primary School – Site: Hook Lane j/w Faraday Road
• Hurst Primary School – Site: Dorchester Avenue j/w Montpelier Ave
• Hurst Primary School – Site: Hurst Road j/w Dorchester Avenue
• Longlands Primary School – Site: Longlands Road j/w Woodside Road
• Northumberland Heath Primary School – Site: Brook Street outside Northumberland Heath School
• Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Primary School – Site: Days Lane j/w Fen Grove
• Pelham Primary School – Site: Woolwich Road j/w Pelham Road
• Sherwood Park Primary School – Site: Sherwood Park Avenue outside Sherwood Park School
• Slade Green Primary School – Site: Slade Green Road outside schools
• St Augustine of Canterbury CE Primary School – Site: Abbey Road j/w St Augustine’s Road
• St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School – Site: Manor Road j/w Church Hill
• St Paulinus CE Primary School – Site: Manor Road j/w Church Hill
• Upton Primary School – Site: Upton Road j/w Townley Road
• Birkbeck Primary School – Site: Alma Road j/w Hatherley Road
Other sites
• Willersley Avenue/Annandale Road
• Brook Street near cemetery
• Yarnton Way near Wolvercote Road
• Main Road / Marechel Niel Parade
• Station Road near Chastilian Road
• Mayplace Road East near Woodside Road
• Rectory Lane near Selborne Road
• Rectory Lane / Knoll Road.
28 March (Part 2) - Stop electing Idiots
YouTube is awash with anti-ULEZ comment and
former Bexley Councillor Gareth Bacon (M.P. for Orpington) is doing a fantastic
job of exposing Sadiq Khan’s dishonesty.
The subject was on Mrs. Bacon’s Places Scrutiny Meeting Agenda last week and Councillor
Cameron Smith was asked to update the Committee on his Bexley Impact Assessment. A Task
Group consisting of Councillors Brooks, Adams and Ogundayo is looking at the Impact
on the borough and the mitigations in place. A survey of businesses schools, care providers and NHS Trusts is underway.
The Council’ְs position on ULEZ is well known but the Task Group is examining whether the exemptions
and the scrappage scheme are good enough in the event of tradesmen and the less
well off being priced off the roads.
Councillor Ogundayo (Labour, Thamesmead East) said that the Group is working
well together despite some differences of opinion.
The subject took up almost 150 seconds of the close to three hour meeting.
Spending rather more time on the issue, @tonyofsidcup has had an FOI response
from Bexley Council which reveals that it has so far spent £18,003 on legal fees
on their ULEZ legal challenge and they have budgeted a total of £100,000 as a “worst case scenario”.
Four London boroughs, Bexley, Harrow, Bromley and Hillingdon together with Surrey County Council are
acting together in an attempt to stop the Mayor’s money grabbing move towards road pricing for everyone
at an estimated cost of £400,000.
28 March (Part 1) - The NHS. Does it still exist?
A quick reminder that tomorrow evening, 7:30 p.m. in the Abbey Wood
Community Centre on Knee Hill, campaigning Doctor Bob Gill will be giving his
views on the future of the NHS and I suspect some evidence that it is being
readied for privatisation. I am quite excited at the prospect as being in the
same room as a G.P, for the first time since February 2020. What a useless lazy
shower most of them have turned out to be.
On a personal note, if anyone cares; correcting the mistakes
made by my electrical contractor on a home battery installation is turning out
to be a massive job. Today I will be uprating the 100 amp cables on a DC line
which could peak at 125 amps. That by itself is not the main issue, he didn’t
see the point of fuses. For reasons too mundane to mention here I had to make
big changes to the layout of the equipment which has put me back nearly a week.
The Places scrutiny report was written only because I was too exhausted to do
anything else. A big battery weighs close to 100 lbs. There is a lot of Council
reporting to catch up on and goodness knows when it will be done.
The first part of this week’s Places Scrutiny meeting was about the rubbish
recycling services. Dare I say that the big paper bin near to me has fulfilled my
expectations and been declared contaminated again? The broken lid allows the worst of society to dump whatever
they like in it with the inevitable result.
The CCTV notices have not stopped mattresses magically appearing overnight.
Most likely everything will now go to landfill. The cost of replacing an unlockable bin must surely
be less than the accumulated landfill charges over the past two years.
CountryStyle appears to recognise the problem of unlocked communal bins because they
claim to be trialling new locks but fixing those broken two years ago is just a little too difficult for them.
5% of flats have had their bins removed due to persistent contamination. (How to
encourage more fly tipping without really trying!)
Fortunately one of the first things that the CountryStyle man said to the
Councillors was that issues are being addressed and equally fortunately that the
withdrawal of all services during the snowy period in December meant that no
staff were injured. “Risk avoidance is the priority” - so Bexley can look forward to more of the same.
(If risk avoidance is a priority why are footpaths allowed to be treacherous?)
The target is to collect missed bins within 24 hours but the repeatedly missed
bins suffered by some residents is still “work to do”.
Paper is sold to a mill in King’s Lynn and in 2021/22 raised £671,000. However
the price per tonne fell from more than £100 in the second quarter of 2022, to
£70 in quarter three and only £18 by the end of the year and has not risen since. High energy prices for
reprocessing is a significant factor.
Garden waste charges will go up by 20% next month while Bexley Council complains
about Mayor Khan increasing his precept by 9·74%. The Agenda recorded that “there has been a
noticeable drop in the number of garden waste subscribers.”. Cabinet Member Craske said they had “remained pretty constant”.
He more than once said that Bexley is cheaper than other boroughs but
omits to say that many remain free,
Councillor Slaughter (Conservative. Sidcup) said that the garden waste service was “extremely good
value and very reasonable” but CountryStyle is still guilty of leaving bins
haphazardly all over the place in her ward. “You said it was an issue that you
would get to grips with but it still happens.” Councillor Slaughter also thought the
Government should be pressured into allowing Councils to penalise residents who don’t recycle.
She was particularly critical of those who do not recycle food waste. It is the
most common contaminant and causes whole lorry loads of waste to be rejected at the processing plants.
Councillor Borella (Labour, Slade Green) said that some vehicles are too big for
some roads and result in missed collections. Apparently CountryStyle do use two
smaller vehicles but he also referred to vehicle accidents. If there was a response I did not hear it. (Someone didn’t
bother to get anywhere near to his microphone.)
Councillor Borella, like me, thought that facilities should be made available
for recycling electrical items, some of which include precious metals. He also
thought that hiking garden waste fees will make some people think it is a
service they can do without. He must have me in mind again, I meant to stop mine
this year but I wasn’t quick enough.
Councillor Frazer Brooks (Conservative, Falcon Wood & Welling) asked the most intelligent question of the night. With
all categories of waste collection reducing, presumably due to the strikes, “where did all that waste go?"
The most unlikely answer of the night was that people were eating out more although waste
collection is now on the up again.
It would appear that it was the indefatigable Councillor Nicola Taylor (Labour, Erith) who was behind
the last blog about the ill-fated Cob statue on
Bronze Age Way because she has given an update on the situation. Maybe she has
been nagging the relevant top brass who have foraged around and nailed it for her.
The information is that the insurance company has accepted that their policy
holder cannot steer, but after bridling at
the size of the bill, has pretty much agreed to pony up. The foundations will
have to await weather more amenable to replacing concrete footings so presumably
the best we can expect is that the reins will be taken up at a slow trot. However the eventual outcome
is now a bit of a shoe in and residents will not be required to be the Council’ְs tax fodder.
18 March - Making Bexley Even Poorer
It is very likely that the Conservative whip had ordered their Councillors to
say “Making Bexley Even Better” and “ULEZ” as often as possible during the
budget debate. Everyone who
featured in yesterday’s report and those who commented but with nothing worthwhile
to say, complied with the order. The MBEB slogan is perhaps the most fatuous so far; nothing that Bexley Council
does makes the lives of residents better and maybe that is inevitable given the financial climate.
They have overseen a doubling in car parking charges which now peak at £7·50 an
hour (minimum period 2 hours). The Conservatives introduced a charge for garden waste collection
and very quickly more than doubled the fee. A less than perfect waste contractor was
swapped for beginners who had never done the job before. Yesterday they emptied
my brown bin but ignored my neighbour’s as is very nearly the norm.
There are fewer parks now than when the Conservatives took office and Sites of
Scientific Interest are under threat. The Council Tax take is up by 61% in ten years
due in part to more houses etc.
Band D taxpayers are paying £475 a year more. (Figures from Councillor
Daniel Francis at the meeting,)
While condemning ULEZ as nothing but a money making scam they Install largely unnecessary motoring traps
across the borough in the shape of Yellow Box Junctions, the sole reason being
to fleece motorists. The previous Finance Director made the admission when a
yellow box junction failed to meet expectations.
Their current claim to be Making Bexley Better is the new Sidcup Library,
less than
half the size of the old one and closed almost immediately for repairs.
Nevertheless a succession of Councillors trotted out the same line at the Budget Setting Council Meeting.
Councillor Caroline Newton
(Conservative, East Wickham) said she had promised herself not
to mention ULEZ but did so only 40 seconds after first opening her
mouth. Labour Councillors should “oppose pay per mile charging”.
Councillor Rags Sandhu (Bexleyheath) related how his plumber has only just finished paying off
a three year finance deal on his van which will become virtually worthless
thanks to Sadiq Khan. No one wants to buy the old van and the price of newer
ones has escalated rapidly. His business cannot continue and “he may have to get a job somewhere”.
Chris Taylor (Crook Log) said that the planned Domiciliary Care Service improvements may be “wiped out by ULEZ”.
I had lost count but Councillor Anna Day (Labour, Slade Green & Northend)
helpfully commented at this point that 13 Conservative Councillors had so far
spoken against the ULEZ tax which she strongly supported. The Conservatives “are
blasé about it, maybe because the air quality in their areas is OK”.
Councillor Howard Jackson (Barnehurst) said he didn’t own a car so would refrain
from commenting on the four letter word.
Steven Hall (East Wickham) dutifully said that “ULEZ expansion is a money raising venture by Sadiq Khan
dressed up as improving air quality in Outer London. His own pollution data does
not support him, neither did the consultation. We stand by our residents while
Labour supports higher taxes and bus service cuts”.
Kurtis Christoforides (St. Mary’s & St. James) said that when door knocking, ULEZ is residents’ number one concern.
Leader O'Neill said that ULEZ is the biggest risk to vulnerable residents in
Bexley. Care providers have begged the Council to fight it. Education providers
are terrified at the prospect of losing both staff and pupils. She is aware of individuals who now
have worthless vehicles they cannot afford to replace. Some will no longer be able to lead a normal life.
So there you have it. Vote Labour for a daily tax on leaving home or vote
Conservative for higher parking charges and more unnecessary traps for the
unwary that just like ULEZ are nothing but money making scams.
17 March - Higher taxes augmented by poor quality insults
Much later than hoped for, the promised report on last week’s Council meeting, although it could be argued that all
the exciting stuff has already been covered.
Council Leader Teresa O’Neill began with a pretty good summary of the difficulties facing the borough but marred somewhat by her ridiculous claim that
the Conservatives were “overwhelming re-elected” by residents last May when the truth is that they gained only 50·4% of the vote.
More money will be spent on road and footpath repairs (6,000 potholes fixed each year according to Cabinet
Member Leaf) but the shopping centres are still suffering from Covid and on-line shopping.
The Fair Funding Review (of Government grants to Councils) has been deferred beyond the next General Election.
Bexley will get £42·1 million this year while Greenwich will get £116·2 million
and this impacts badly on Bexleyְ’s Council Tax rate. The Mayor of London has
increased his precept by 9·74%. He delivers “less buses (sic), less money
for roads and less police for Bexley and plans to charge residents more to drive their cars”.
Khan did not mention an Outer London ULEZ in his Manifesto and residents are
angry. “Key workers in Care, Health, Education and Police” who live beyond
our borders “are actively considering whether they can afford to continue to deliver vital services”.
“ULEZ sends a very clear message, you can pollute the air if you can afford to do so.
It is good that our Labour MP agrees with us as do some Labour Councils.”
For Labour, Councillor Wendy Perfect, said that
she and her ward colleague Baljeet Gill had been working with Northumberland
Heath shop owners to support their high street and the issue upon which everyone agrees is the
need for an hour of free parking. “High parking charges are resented by residents
who may not have change or be able to use a card or work out how the machine works or what
to do when it doesn’t. Supermarkets do not provide free parking because of
altruism but because it encourages trade. Older people in particular are put off
of visiting high streets by these problems and the risks of cracked footpaths.”
(May I interject here by saying that my 52nd Amazon delivery of 2023 has just dropped on to my doormat?)
Leader Teresa O’Neill rejected all of Labour’s proposals without even a moment of consideration
and Cabinet Member Peter Craske, ignoring everything that Councillor Perfect had
said, came out with the nonsensical “Labour only wishes to run down our borough”.
Cabinet Member for Growth, Cafer Munur, said that Labour’s proposals were “a hash”
and Richard Diment (Education) said it was “a mismash”. Cabinet Member Leaf, as
you might expect, came out with a much longer series of gratuitous insults, of
which “clueless” was just one.
Councillor Mabel Ogundayo (Labour, Thamesmead East) said that the 2021 30% hike in
parking charges had contributed to the adverse effect on Council revenues and
the Conservative message is to “double down on those and increase them again.
Extension of CPZs and reviewing their hours of operation, more box junction
cameras and increased level of fines. We need more innovative ideas.”
Councillor Ogundayo made it very clear indeed that she supports extra taxation
on those who cannot afford to change their cars regularly.
Councillor Kurtis Christoforides (Conservative, St. Mary’s & St. James), with a degree of honesty that will get him into trouble,
said that he recognised that “Labourְ’s objectives were reasonable and should garner
cross-party support in isolation”. ULEZ excepted.
His ward colleague Cameron Smith was similarly able to see some merit in the
Labour amendment, particularly regarding car parking charges but like Councillor
Christoforides would not offer his support for it. Cameron produced some interesting ULEZ data
from the Mayor’s own report. The impact on trade in Bexleyheath alone is
estimated to be £800,000 a year as shoppers stay away. Eternal optimist Smith
hoped that Labour Members would use their influence on Sadiq Khan to benefit Bexley residents.
Cabinet Members Read and Seymour both said that ULEZ would have a devastating
effect on care workers with so many of them living beyond the border with Kent.
Bexley will notice when their services become unavailable.
Leader O’Neill summed up the debate with “Labour is once again talking down our
borough, what a shame” and returned to her “overwhelmingly” claptrap. On firmer
ground she ridiculed Labour’s pro-ULEZ stance while their MP Abena
Oppong-Asare had more sense.
The Labour Amendment was rejected along party lines and the Conservative
proposal to increase Council Tax by the maximum permissible by law was accepted. 100% along party lines again.
Spending a penny; 16,700,000 of them
Last November
a Sidcup resident who lives close to Sidcup Place discovered that the park’s (closed) public toilets had been acquired by the Cabinet Member for Growth and
implied that it was all a little too suspicious for his mind.
However a deeper dive into the facts revealed nothing untoward; the Cabinet
Member merely responded to a For Sale notice in the Estates Gazette. He may have
been tipped off that the toilets were for sale or perhaps he had his eye on the
ball anyway; either way it is not much of a scandal by Bexley’s historical standards. Not a scandal at all.
Another Sidcup resident noted that the car park area had been fenced off as well as the toilet block and
in friendly correspondence with Bexley Council confirmed that it was included in
the toilet sale. It also slipped out that the price paid by our entrepreneurial Cabinet Member was £167,000.
A bunch of well paid amateurs
I
called in a Bexley Council Trading Standards Officer soon after I moved into the borough.
I was used to building work at my previous address so when I ordered two cubic
yards of sand from a long gone builder’s yard by Abbey Wood station I could
easily judge I had been seriously short changed. Thirty odd years ago sand didn’t
come in a canvas bag but was tipped out of the back of a lorry.
The Trading Standards man sorted everything out
and that was the last time I had any dealings with them, I am surprised we still have any. When the Tories
came to power there were 20 TSOs and the number was reduced to six and then two by 2014.
I suppose if you are down to two then one will be Junior and the other his
Senior but most people would expect the latter to know quite a lot about the job. But apparently that is not necessary in Bexley.
It is a bit like the most senior legal officer not being either a solicitor or a barrister which was tolerated for several years.
Bexley Council has made it clear that it is content to pay £40k. for inexperience. Blind leading the blind? That would explain a lot.
Needless to say Bexley Council did not have an answer to the obvious question.
9 March (Part 3) - Labour’s budget statement
Bexley’s Labour Leader Stefano Borella has issued a Press Release (PDF) explaining his party’s view of the Tory budget with favoured amendments.
9 March (Part 2) - In a nutshell
I managed to listen to last night’s budget setting Council meeting without
once dozing off; the object of the meeting was to ensure that Bexley kept its prized position of 25th worst place to
be in London from a taxation and charges point of view. I see no chance of
making a more fulsome report until at least next Sunday (dentist, family
business, fiddling with cables etc.) so this brief summary is more or less what
Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) said two and a half hours into the three hour meeting.
You need only know that Labour had submitted a fully costed variation to the
Conservative proposals. (See below.) It had been approved by the Finance Director for
which sin the Council Leader later admonished him. Cabinet Member Craske, aided and abetted by others,
went on and on and on about it being too brief. Craske thought 100,000 plus
words would have been appropriate and criticised it being made public without sufficient notice.
Bexley Labour was the worst opposition in history
Councillor Francis began by saying care workers in Bexley had not been given a
pay rise for between three and six years (dependent on contractor) and “Members
opposite don’t really care and now we see another budget from a Council that has
run out of ideas. The revenue position is unsustainable”.
“Some Members like to talk about the past but let’s look at their record.
Council Tax up 61% in ten years.”
Turning to Budget Amendments… “From 2003 to 2005 all Conservative Amendments
were presented on the night and comprised 36 words, 41 words and even Councillor Craske’s
submission was only 76 words in length and he didn’t even attempt to make any spending amendments.”
They will not say what impact the avoidance of the Capitalisation Order has had
and will not even give a list of posts that have been eliminated. They blame
Covid but the Section 25 statement preceding the pandemic says otherwise,
detailing services that would have to go.
SEN transport applications will be throttled, the same for Adult Social Care,
road gritting reduced, less gully cleaning, more on street parking charges,
restrict limited waiting bays, more CPZs, paint more yellow box junctions and
look at parking charges for Hall Place. And as if that is not a big enough
attack on residents, a 20% increase in garden waste charges, 10% on cremations and
similar across other fees. Before he could go on the Mayor put a stop to
Daniel’s catalogue of failure. It was a well filled five minutes.
Bexley Tories are not ‘Making Bexley Even Better’ as was claimed many times throughout the meeting.
Several Conservative Councillors only managed to criticise the use of the outdated term Road Tax instead of Vehicle Excise Duty. How very clever of them.
They unanimously rejected the Amendment.
9 March (Part 1) - Abbey Goodwood
From today’s Daily Telegraph…
D.T. “Images have emerged that show four cameras in Abbey Wood in Greenwich, that appear to have had their wires cut.”
Can anyone tell me how it is that people like
@tonyofsidcup believe Sadiq
Khan’s claim that people are dying like flies, 4,000 Londoners a year, from poor air when it
has been admitted that he conducted his sham and fiddled consultation several months after buying the cameras?
The man has been a disaster for London and will not only stop care workers
from doing their jobs, as widely reported at last night’s Council meeting, but
will in many cases stop local people being visited by friends and relatives
who live away from London. Me for example.
8 March - No drinking, no browsing, no use
With spare time in short supply (see below) BiB will fall back on answering a couple of readers’ questions…
No singing
No, Belvedere’s Great Harry Pub
featured on Hugh Neal's blog last Sunday has not been acquired
by the developer closely associated with Bexley Conservatives.
23/00433/FULM
for those who need to know all the details.
No History
Bexley Council’s record on preserving its history has not been an especially
good one, they don’t destroy it but may have an inclination to hide it from
public view. Ten years ago the proposal was to
hide their artifacts away in a cupboard in Bromley to save a few bob; £41,000
to be precise and when questioned said that the Impact Assessment confirmed all was OK.
How local residents could drop in easily and take a look was not explained and
one must suspect that the Philistine in charge at the time didn’t care. The
Labour Leader asked where the Impact Assessment could be seen and Teresa O'Neill
was forced to admit there wasn’t one.
The Philistine’s departure five years ago has coincided with Bexley Council
becoming less dishonest which may or may not be coincidence.
Fortunately a local historian, Penny Duggan, came up with a much better plan
which did not involve a lengthy trip on the 269 bus and the silly Bromley idea was dropped. It is
perhaps noteworthy that Councillor John Davey said that everything was going to be digitised anyway.
Last week an observant reader reported that the website that hosted Bexley’s
historical photos had been down for several weeks. I asked Ms. Duggan if she knew why.
She said that the contract with the site host had expired and Bexley Council had
not renewed it, adding that only nine London boroughs continued to use it. Researchers will have to go to
https://www.bexley.gov.uk/discover-bexley/archives-and-local-history in future.
Note. ‘Time in short supply’. Six months ago I contracted a company to add storage
batteries to my solar panel system. They did a couple of hours work on each of
two separate days and pronounced the job done. The system did not work and could
not work. One vital cable was missing and another was connected to the wrong
place. I corrected those errors (one involved burrowing under the front drive) and the system began to work after a fashion but the control system didn’t.
The company came to fix it and agreed with my diagnosis that the comms unit was
faulty. They promised to return within the week to replace it. That was six
weeks ago and I have seen no one since.
I have given up on them. I am now engaged in replacing everything with something
that meets my five kilowatt specification. The unit they fitted peaks at 2·5kw
and the cabling is not adequate for very much more.
I doubt that J&G Solar Maintenance of Wickford Essex will be seeing any more of
my money and probably a trip to the Small Claims Court will become necessary.
This is the same company that left me with
no central heating in December.
Council meeting reports may appear here when working outside in this weather gets to be too cold.
In the early part of this millennium Bexley Council was not afraid of
consultations and I remember two of them clearly because the results affected
me. In 2008 the Cabinet Member for Transport, one Peter Craske, decided it would
be good to put pedestrians in conflict with cyclists and motorists in conflict
with each other. On 15th February he issued a document entitled “Abbey Road -
Abbey Wood to Erith - Proposed Footway widening and Cycle Route Improvements”.
It specifically said that that there would be “No changes to the existing yellow
line restrictions” which as you might guess turned out to be a bit of a Craskism.
The document referred to a four week consultation carried out in November 2007
which was news to me as a resident living about 100 metres from Abbey Road. I
asked for details of that consultation and discovered that households on
Abbey Road and Elstree Gardens which has a direct connection to Abbey Road were consulted.
Two more roads (Shortlands Close and Manorside Close) without a direct
connection to the narrowed section of Abbey Road were also consulted but Carrill
Way and Fossington Road which lead directly to the narrowed section were not.
Moving further afield Bright Close was consulted but Sampson Close which is its
mirror image on the other side of Carrill Way was not. But apart from that the
whole of the 1987 development sometimes called Priory Gardens was consulted as
far away as Haliford Drive but Coptefield Drive which has much more direct access to Abbey Road was not.
All very strange. There was no logic to Craske’s decision.
Abbey Road residents opted 52% in favour of Craske’s plan and the more
distant roads averaged 76% in favour. All the objections were dismissed, £400,000 was spent and
the result was a series of accidents and one fatality just as my
son (who was at the time a consultant to foreign governments on such matters) had predicted.
He provided me with copies of the official government road planning guidance to prove his case.
Back
in Labour’s time (2002 to 2006) Coptefield Drive was not left out of the
consultation processes. Did we want a Controlled Parking Zone?
The majority of residents, including me, said no and as a result the CPZ boundary
remained west of the Green Chain Walk footbridge. See diagram below.
Probably Coptefield Drive residents have come to regret that although the near 20 year old
proposals look to be a little inadequate now. Only the recessed parking bays
were to become residents’ bays and drivers would remain free for most of the day to park on blind
corners and block roads as they do now.
To combat the current Elizabeth line problems double yellow lines are required at all junctions, and
not just some of them as presently the case, and in turning circles as envisaged on the original Priory Gardens planning consent.
The three recessed bays should be marked so as to prohibit end on parking which
sometimes forces traffic on to the footpath. It would stop vans blocking junctions too.
Bexley Council could fix these problems very easily, it requires a Traffic Order
and some paint. Carrill Way is scheduled for resurfacing soon. That would be a
good time for Bexley Council to show that it still has a modicum of interest in serving residents.
Note. With thanks to another Elizabeth line victim who filed his
CPZ papers more carefully than I did. The observant may notice that three out of four Free bays south of the railway line have gone.
Pedants viewing on a very large screen may smile at Bexley Council’s inability to spell Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
I have said before that I turned towards the Conservative Party in my formative years because I could see that it was always
the Left that indulged in bad behaviour, usually limited to slogans on walls in
those more genteel days. I could have gone either way, my mother from a very
much working class family (crane drivers and bricklayers) favoured Labour and my father who had been brought up
overseas with a servant in the house was very much Conservative.
Nothing much seems to have changed. It is the Left that threatens to throw acid,
it is the left that throws milk shakes and it is the Left that vandalises
buildings from banks to Conservative Constituency Offices. I cannot recall
anything like the reverse and before you remind me of John Prescott punching an
egg thrower in 2001; Craig Evans was a farm worker unhappy with the way that
Labour’s foot and mouth policy was impacting his job. There is nothing to
suggest a Welsh farm labourer was a Tory voter.
In Bexley last week it was the Conservatives’ Old Bexley & Sidcup office that got the paint treatment.
Old Bexley & Sidcup Labour didn’t condemn the vandalism, far from it. They used
it as an excuse to attack the Conservatives knowing full well that there was no fear of retaliation.
I
have no idea why Labour supporters think it is clever. It may appeal to fellow ne’er do wells but fence sitters must surely find
it a turn off. Despite the calamity that is Sunak’s Government I am currently less
inclined to vote Labour than I was last May. Three Labour votes in Belvedere which I am beginning to regret.
Nevertheless I wouldn’t claim that Labour Councillors take the same view. Not all that long
ago I asked one the obvious question following a similar stupid Tweet. I am not going to repeat the answer
because that might lead to them becoming even more remote than they are already
but I think it is fair to say that our views were closely aligned.
I’ve never got to know any of the local Bonkers era Labour leaders particularly well but none would give cause for any
concerns if they moved in next door to me. My brushes with some of their supporters suggest the opposite.
It is my understanding that @bexleynews is the product of two Cabinet Members
but @Sidcup_Labour is run by people who have in the past been happy to call me a
Brown Shirt Fascist and report me to the police for condemning violence. Apparently it is OK in certain circumstances.
2 March - Inflation and deflation
I continue to find the rising cost of living very worrying, not for myself, I
can get by, but I hear far too many stories of hardship through Twitter and the
like. One thread I followed featured a mother who was £1,300 in
debt to British Gas. She had a new born to keep warm. That led to other people reporting up to £3,000 of debt. To
my mind they are using far too much energy and probably someone should be
advising them on a one to one basis but meanwhile they are in big trouble.
Before mitigating factors (†) my energy bills are between £20 and £30 a week on
electricity; charging the car swings it towards the higher figure. Usually under £20
for gas, but I am active during the day and don’t put the central heating on
until evening unless I am expecting a visitor.
Mitigating factors I will not bore you with bring the total cost down to about £100 a
month, maybe just a little bit more, but I haven’t got a baby in the house.
What can be done? Fortunately <sarcasm> we have a Chancellor who recognises the problem
and has responded by reducing the energy price cap by more than the wholesale price
is coming down. The result is that what you pay will increase by around 20% in only four weeks’ time.
What Hunt doesn’t want to talk about is that the £67 a month subsidy is coming to
an end so most customers will see a 20% price hike plus £67 a month.
The official inflation rate is total nonsense for poorer people because they
only buy essentials. I replaced a 16 year old TV last year and the price has
since reduced by just over 20%. The blu-ray player is down by 11% but I don’t buy a new TV every week.
Such reductions have an impact on the inflation rate.
My weekly trip to Sainsbury’s has revealed many items that have gone up by 50%
over the past year. That must really hurt some people.
I was hurt this week too.
On
28th January while driving on the M25 with more than 250 miles in front of me
the tyre pressure warning came up on the dashboard. As luck would have it
Clackets Lane was only a mile ahead so I pulled in and pumped up the tyre from
its 25psi to 42 expecting it to deflate again with a call at every Service Area in prospect.
The tyre never deflated again. Then last Sunday while parked with the front
wheel turned hard left I spotted a shiny thing in the tread. It was the worn down hexagonal head of a bolt.
I booked a puncture repair for Tuesday but the hole was bigger than the biggest
available plug. The tyre had cost £146 on 8th September 2022 and replacing it with an
identical item at the very same place cost £216. Partly explained by a
discount when I bought four but I think I may have been ripped off.
But better than a blow out on the motorway. The good news is that my driving
licence will be 60 years old in a couple of months time and it is only my second puncture.
† The £20 and £30 energy figures above make no allowance for any
government subsidy or for the fact that I am on an Economy 7 style tariff. They
have been recalculated for a standard capped tariff. In practice my electricity
bill is close to being negative. You can blame that on idiotic government
policies. Started by Milliband for Labour, made worse by a succession of blue buffoons.
1 March - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 5
No one can doubt the amount of work that has gone into @tonyofsidcup’s contribution to the ULEZ debate but I feel that it is a little short on democracy.
The extended ULEZ was not in Khan’s manifesto. He said he would be mindful of
the consultation but he wasn’t, even if you overlook the disappearance of 5,000 probably dissenting voices.
The timing isn’t right. There is a cost of living crisis and car pollution
levels are rapidly declining. It is a money grab and the expenditure can only be
justified if it is the precursor to road charging which we now know it is.
It wouldn’t be fair to attempt to systematically destroy Tony’s input after offering
him the opportunity to make his research more widely available but even if I accept everything
he says it still comes across as something that might have been written by someone who was schooled in the
U.S.S.R. rather than what used to be a Western democracy.
My own view can perhaps be most simply made clear by this photo montage.
All five of Tony's essays are available here.
Thinking about ULEZ, Part 5 - Gone Girl
Meet Geoff, an up-and-coming YouTuber who has found an enthusiastic audience - 34,700
subscribers and counting! - by recording videos against ULEZ, road charging, LTNs and all that woke
nonsense. In his recent video, Geoff holds out an article by the Centre for London, “London’s
independent think tank”, alluding to the dangers of air pollution. Geoff is not impressed. “As we well
know from Sadiq Khan’s recent actions, he just makes the numbers up as he goes along”, says Geoff,
“If he wants to think that 40,000 people have died from air pollution, then that’s what he says. But
there is no evidence to back it up!” Geoff has evidence of his own, an official document which says,
in black and white: “There was 1 death registered in London in the period 2001 to 2021 which had
exposure to air pollution recorded on the death certificate”. Khan’s lie is spectacularly busted, and Geoff moves on.
We shouldn’t. One thing we can do is put a face on the “one death” statistic. It is the face of a
nine-year-old child, Ella Kissi-Debrah, who lived in Lewisham - five train stops from Sidcup - and died
in 2013, after thirty hospital admissions, where her lungs would fill up with fluid and, on five occasions, collapse.
It
took seven years and two inquests - not to mention incredible perseverance by Ella’s mother
Rosamund - to officially establish the reason for Ella’s deterioration and death. The following
paragraph comes from the coroner’s “Report to Prevent Future Deaths”:
“Ella died at the age of 9. She had severe, hypersecretory asthma causing episodes of respiratory and
cardiac arrest and requiring frequent emergency hospital admissions. On 15 February 2013 she had a
further asthmatic episode at home and was taken to hospital where she suffered a cardiac arrest
from which she could not be resuscitated. Air pollution was a significant contributory factor to both
the induction and exacerbations of her asthma. During the course of her illness between 2010 and
2013 she was exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in excess of World Health
Organization Guidelines. The principal source of her exposure was traffic emissions. During this
period there was a recognized failure to reduce the level of nitrogen dioxide to within the limits set
by EU and domestic law which possibly contributed to her death”.
Ella’s was a landmark case: air pollution was recorded on a death certificate for the first time in the
UK, and possibly for the first time in the so called “developed world”. This happened in 2021, the
latest year mentioned in Geoff’s document, so we don’t know if any more air-pollution-linked deaths
have been recorded since. I think we can be pretty sure that deaths like Ella’s had happened before - we just don’t know about them.
It doesn’t particularly matter. Ella’s case was extreme, with a fast, terminal decline of a happy child
living in London - next to a busy road - and a medical history showing correlation between asthma
attacks and Lewisham’s air-pollution levels. In the vast majority of cases, air pollution - especially
particulate-matter pollution, which can pass through the lungs into blood - steals life slowly,
sometimes affecting victim’s respiratory tract - think asthma and respiratory cancers - but as often
producing disease not obviously linked to breathing, such as non-respiratory cancers, heart attacks and strokes.
In 1992, UK’s Department of Health established a scientific advisory panel named Committee on the
Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, or COMEAP. Over the years, COMEAP has investigated toxic air’s
links to specific conditions (for example, bronchitis and dementia), and attempted to quantify its
health impact, focusing on the two key air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. Several
reports published by COMEAP have suggested the UK-wide annual “mortality burden” (we will
discuss this later) of about 40,000 deaths.
This is where Geoff gets his “40,000 deaths” number. However, it is an estimate for the whole of the
UK, not only for London. The latter can be found in a 2021 study by scientists from Imperial College,
who applied the latest COMEAP methodology to 2019 data for Greater London’s 600-plus wards.
The ICL study has a special significance for Sidcup, as it named Sidcup Ward, jointly with the
neighbouring Bickley Ward of Bromley, London’s worst in terms of mortality burden. (To the relief of
local estate agents, Sidcup is not explicitly named in the paper. I made a FOI request to TfL to get
ward-level numbers, which identified Sidcup and Bickley as the joint Number 1). Three more Bexley
wards - Bexleyheath, Crook Log, Blackfen and Lamorbey - made it to Top 20. (One would think that
the esteemed News Shopper takes note. Nope. Maybe it’s the estate-agent lobby after all).
The first bullet point in the study’s “key findings” says: “In 2019, in Greater London, the equivalent of
between 3,600 to 4,100 deaths […] were estimated to be attributable to human-made PM2·5 and
NO2, considering that health effects exist even at very low levels. This calculation is for deaths from all
causes including respiratory, lung cancer and cardiovascular deaths”.
The calculation hangs on estimated “hazard rates”. Broadly, a hazard rate answers the question “How
much more likely is one to die if exposed to bad thing X?” A hazard rate “embeds” a specific time
horizon (e.g., one year), and, in the case of air pollution, is defined with regard to a specific
concentration of a specific pollutant. (Things get tricky when two or more pollutants “overlap”).
Notably, a hazard rate deals only with life and death; a temporary or permanent impairment of one’s
quality of life - consider living with asthma - is out of the picture, as long as one is alive.
What Geoff wants you to believe is that for air pollution, that hazard rate is essentially zero: with a
single death in two decades, in a city as big as London, there is really nothing to worry about!
Scientists have a very different view, and guess an about 05%-2% boost in one’s “natural” risk of
death over 1 year per 10 micrograms-per-cubic-metre (let me abbreviate this to “mgcm”) of nitrogen
dioxide, and an about 4-8% (6% is a popular number) boost in one’s “natural” risk of death over 1
year per 10 mgcm of fine particulate matter (PM2·5). The numbers come from several large
international (mostly American) epidemiological studies, and this is the closest we come to
“evidence” demanded by Geoff. It is not the kind of evidence that one can touch, but in science, this is not unusual.
(Is 10 mgcm a realistic level experienced by a Londoner - in particular, an Outer Londoner living far
from Zone 1? Consider Bexley’s Belvedere, where an air-quality monitoring station located in a
residential area registered on average 8 mgcm for PM2·5 and 23 mgcm for NO2 for 2023. So yes, 10
mgcm of PM2·5 or NO2 is not a high bar for London, Inner or Outer. It can be double, or triple, or
quadruple that - and that means multiplied risks!)
With hazard-rate estimates in hand, one can estimate the expected number of deaths assuming a
particular air-pollution level. Consider two points: the current air-pollution level, and the air-pollution
level assuming no human-made air pollution. Say, 200 Sidcup Ward residents are expected to die in
the “high pollution” scenario, and 190 people are expected to die in the “low pollution” scenario.
The difference (10) is the estimated mortality burden. Summed across London wards, one gets 4,000
premature deaths. (Not all of them are preventable. To calculate how many deaths a particular
clean-air policy can prevent - or rather postpone to their “normal” times - one needs to make a
forecast of the policy’s impact on air quality and use the resulting air-pollution level for a separate calculation).
In the end, there are no 4,000 death certificates with “air pollution” written on them. “4,000 deaths”
is an estimate made by a scientific study that used an accepted national methodology and
mainstream quantitative assumptions. As any estimate, this one can be off the mark, in either
direction. However, it is scientists’ best guess. Sadiq Khan and clean-air campaigners do not mislead
the public when they talk about 4,000 Londoners dying every year due to air pollution. Geoff and
people like Geoff - sadly, including Conservative politicians on the Bexley council, on the London
Assembly and in Parliament - do mislead the public when they discount the danger that air pollution
presents. Much worse, they (excluding Geoff this time) fail to act when inaction costs lives.
And speaking of Parliament… Ten years after Ella’s death, the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill,
nicknamed Ella’s Law, sits on the waiting list at the House of Commons,
after approval by the House of Lords. It may get to a vote in late March. Which way do you think our MP
Louie French, who records anti-ULEZ videos and declares that “ULEZ is not about air quality” -
and was Bexley’s Cabinet Member for Growth while the council ignored its responsibility to develop
and act on an Air Quality Action Plan - is going to vote? I encourage you to email Louie at
louie.french.mp@parliament.uk and ask, before he jets off on another expenses-paid fact-finding journey. Some
facts worth finding, like Sidcup’s top spot in a grim league table, are right here.
Health impact of air pollution is a complicated subject, and this essay could only scratch the surface.
If you wish to learn why the World Health Organisation and the British government agree on air
pollution being the top environmental health hazard of our time, you can Google COMEAP and WHO
reports. In the next post, we will look at ULEZ’s ability to improve the situation.
Links
Ella Kissi-Debrah
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/16/ella-kissi-debrah-mother-fight-justice-airpollution-death
Rosamund Kissi-Debrah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosamund_Kissi-Debrah
Coroner’s “Report to Prevent Future Deaths”
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Ella-Kissi-Debrah-2021-0113-1.pdf
Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP)
https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/committee-on-the-medical-effects-of-air-pollutants-comeap
COMEAP again
https://ukwin.org.uk/resources/health/committee-on-the-medical-effects-of-air-pollutants-comeap/
COMEAP, “The mortality effects of long-term exposure to particulate matter
air pollution in the UK”, 2010
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/comeap-mortality-effects-of-long-term-exposure-to-particulate-air-pollution-in-the-uk
Imperial College London, “London Health Burden of Current Air Pollution and
Future Health Benefits
of Mayoral Air Quality Policies”, 2021
http://erg.ic.ac.uk/research/home/resources/ERG_ImperialCollegeLondon_HIA_AQ_LDN_11012021.pdf
Ella’s Law
https://ellaslaw.uk