6 June (Part 2) - Police, Fire or Ambulance (or Coastguard in appropriate places)
Notices
have been going up across the borough reminding people to
dial 999 in an emergency. Don’t most four year olds know that? Why does Bexley Council
put up signs across the borough when they are supposedly skint and recently had
to borrow £10 million to get by?
The sign pictured here went up at the end of my road about a month ago but it
took a neighbour to nudge me into seeing how stupid it is.
The QR code (enlarge image and scan it) routes to the Safety Partnership’s website but maybe it would be more useful
if I overlaid it with one that led to Bonkers.
Everyone knows the emergency code 999 but when I managed my first telephone exchange (one of four in the City) 999
was only 27 years old and nine years newer than the actual exchange. (MANsion
House opened in 1928, the second automatic telephone exchange in London. HOLborn was first.)
Back then in the age of telephone dials (if you were not still on a manual exchange) people were still asking why not 111
which would be marginally quicker to dial than 999. There were two reasons. Signaling
(dialling) was by a loop interrupt system. One line break indicated dialling a 1
etc. but rattling the receiver on its ‘hook’ also broke the connection which
could easily generate a spurious 1 and occasionally a triple 1.
To avoid false calls from a triple rattled receiver the GPO played safe by choosing 999
which could not reasonably be generated accidentally. It was also advertised that
in the dark a 9 was easy to find. Put two fingers at the end of the dial and
drag it around from there. That could not be done with a number like 555 and 111
would, as stated, give rise to too many false calls. 999 was probably a better
choice than the American 911 which was also chosen to prevent the spurious 1 problem.
For technical reasons, in London it had to be a three digit code but in most
places the third 9 was redundant though no one let on about that because of the
inevitable confusion. Probably that doesn’t apply any more; I am far too out of touch nowadays to know.
If
these Safety notices are a waste of money it is at the lower end of the waste spectrum. Reform UK
is being asked how they might save millions in Bexley when/if they take over in 2026.
Tom Bright, Reform UK’s recent election candidate, is getting the hang of how Bexley
Council operates. There is as he no doubt suspects, total secrecy wherever possible with an eye on currying favour
with the Leader and the lucrative jobs she is able to hand out.
To my mind, secrecy is Bexley’s biggest failing and the lying whenever it suits their
agenda. Very few Councillors are truly competent as anyone who has listened to as many
Council meetings I have will know. As long as they can claim to be no worse than
other Councils who have more money to spend, everyone other than residents are happy and rests on their laurels.
I can identify with Tom’s X commentary; the Councillors are squabbling among
themselves and the more talkative ones will admit that the standard of
recent appointees has been “scraping the barrel”.
The X conversation continued with a question for Tom from a resident.
Where is he going to save the money?
Answering questions from the public completely first time around might be a good
start. Bouncing bad faith responses around the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Courts
costs plenty, as does not dealing with SEND issues correctly. Looking after
children at £16,000 a week EACH is an outrage.
And then there are the ridiculously high salaries. If/when Reform UK takes over
across a wider area there may be an opportunity to force them down across the board
so that salary inflation is not necessary to attract the requisite skills. It is
not very obvious that the present racket has achieved that.
There have been senior officers in Bexley who by playing musical chairs have
been able to earn £40,000 a year over several years from Golden Goodbyes alone. Salaries extra.
Is there corruption to be sorted out? Almost certainly.
A year ago
Bexley Council more or less admitted that their management is poor.
Extremely poor. There is plenty of scope for a new broom and a clean sweep.