Bexley is a London Borough bordering the county of Kent. Like most London boroughs it has its good bits and its bad bits. The banner image above is from the northern end of town; the place where the council permits, and is too often forced to permit, warehouses, industrial sites, sewage works and rubbish incinerators. It may look quite nice to a town-dweller but it can smell very bad.

Another thing that smells bad is the stench of incompetence and dishonesty. It doesn’t seem to matter which political party runs it; little changes. Officials break the law when they think they can get away with it and pursue a policy of widespread hatred towards residents which is presumably condoned by its self-serving councillors. Currently Bexley council is run by 54 Conservative councillors, eight Labour and one Independent plus 5,000 staff under its Chief Executive Will Tuckley. Like most of Bexley’s staff his email address is firstname.lastname@bexley.gov.uk but in my experience he never responds in any way to emails. One is tempted to ask if he is anything but an expensive (£180,000 a year when appointed in 2008) waste of space.

The council used to have a slogan, “Working to improve your quality of life”. If only! Almost everything they do makes life more difficult and ever more expensive. While the slogan existed I used to write asking in what way their latest bright idea was in tune with the slogan . Not once could they reconcile the two and eventually the slogan was dropped, though you can still find remnants of it hidden away on their website. I’d like to think I played a small part in its abandonment.

Twenty years ago, Bexley’s local taxes were third lowest in the capital, beaten by neighbouring Bromley, but not by much, and putting the Loony Left then controlling nearby Greenwich to shame. Taxes are now among the very highest in London, higher even than Greenwich.

Bexley Conservatives’ proud boast in 2009 is that taxes rose by only 2%. “2%, Bexley’s lowest Council Tax increase for 15 years” is added to every conceivable communication. It’s true, but the average rise for London this year was close to 1%, so even now Bexley is busy raising taxes much faster than the majority of London boroughs. I have questioned my own councillor several times about the latest slogan and whether bragging about being 10th highest spender out of 33 London boroughs makes any sense, and if it is wise to reveal so starkly the fact that being beaten by 23 other boroughs is the best performance in 15 years. Why is the fat not being cut out? Why does the old habit of raising taxes at twice the rate as the rest of London continue unabated? But he is not bright enough to see the point. Why do people vote for that level of intellect?

2010 promises more misery for Bexley council taxpayers. The Evening Standard newspaper reported on 2 November 2009 that whilst the Tory Chairman of London Councils which presents the 33 boroughs said “Conservative councils should either be cutting, freezing or getting very close to zero”, Bexley has so hopelessly mismanaged its affairs again that it can only aspire to getting close to Retail Price Inflation.

The bad situation exists in part because of the previous Labour administration’s spendthrift policies and because central government is corrupt, spreading their largesse mainly to their own supporters. But Bexley council wastes money because of the total incompetence of too many of their staff to do their own jobs adequately or care at all about the consequences of their malpractices on the everyday lives of the residents of their rotten borough. The councillors whom one might expect to take an interest in the perpetual assault on citizens do nothing, declaring their officials’ actions to be “absolutely bonkers” and then walk away and act dumb when the full extent of the mismanagement is exposed.

And what do all those 5,000 staff do? Refuse services, tax collection and the parking gestapo are all contracted out so you might well ask that question. Even the council’s on-line services show signs of the same thing, their web site was redesigned in June 2009 and is now much more difficult to navigate with a near useless search facility, and the weekly email newsletter now comes from an independent source and arrives days later than before with little of interest in it. And in the event of a widespread power failure all their web services go down because of the council’s total failure to do any strategic planning on what might be needed in such an emergency. Like not being so stupid as to think hosting their services within the borough is a good idea.