I know it’s only August but if you are super organised you might like to consider buying your Christmas cards from the charity Kids Kidney Research which is dear to me personally and my family. Have a look and hopefully you’ll feel inspired….
Today East Dulwich cllrs Jonathan Mitchell and I (cllr Richard Thomas is on holiday), along with Greater London Assembly Member Caroline Pidgeon met with Southwarks Police Commander Malcom Tillyer along with other Police and MPA officers.
A very useful third meeting to discuss the future of East Dulwich Police Station.
We discussed the East Dulwich councillors proposals of how a Police station as we would see it could be kept on the current site, combined potentially with other council facilities, while meeting Police aspirations for new facilities commensurate with their requirements while obtaining capital receipts for the site.
Unfortuntely everything is on hold while the Metropolitan Police Authority reviews it property plans. Hopefully, in 4-8 weeks time we can continue these discussions.
Southwark Council and Southwark Police have been recognised for excellent partnership working. Hopefully we can deliver a role model in East Dulwich that takes such partnership working to an even higher level by sharing facilities and increasing how joined up services are for the general public. If successful this could be a model for other sites in Southwark and London as a whole.
Fridays South London Press had a story of how some local authorities are proposing to fund private loos in shops etc being made available to the general public.
My understanding is that this had been in place in Southwark for some time. My ward colleague cllr Richard Thomas while the executive member for the environment in Southwark had led this.
Weirdly Patrick Blunt the chairperson of Southwark Chamber of Commerce thought it ill conceived to expect businesses to participate.
it works like this. Businesses can agree to provide such public toilets under a planning condition - e.g. the Al Jamirah hotel on Blackfriars Road planning Section 106. They can be paid to offer this service to the community OR they can be public spirited.
For many residents and visitors to Sotuhwark they need to know that they can find a public toilet when they need one. Many have conditions that mean they can’t last as long as the rest of us. We allo know that public toilets in the old sense are poorly supervised and local authorities can;t pay for permanent supervisors.
So this type of scheme is the perfect solution. Little used private facilities are opened up and the owners receive a payment IF they choose to take part.
A European Directive means central government must be able amongst other things to provide noise mapping.
Gascinating site: http://noisemapping.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/noise/maps
Excessive noise is a serious pollutant which results in serious educational problems - people can’t concentrate with such noise around them.
It shows in East Dulwich that two of our primary schools Goose Green and St.Antony’s borders roads with noise issues. Fortunately St.Antony’s is more set back and probably no more affected than Heber or Goodrich.
Take a look.
30dB (decibels is a conversation in a private room), 55dB or above and people inside rooms will start to be seriously disturbed.
A recent Tory think tank report (Policy Exchange) recommends that Londons suburbs expand by 450,000 extra homes to house an extra 1,000,000 people. In essence this tory report suggests that rather than try helping to expand businesses outside London, especially in the North West, the nation should give up and encourage mass migration to London.
For Southwark we have already been set targets to build a huge number of extra homes (from memory 13,000). Such a proposal to add the requirement for an extra new 15,000 home build in Southwark is just weird.
In other countries they improve the infrastructure to attract or retain business. An alternate would be to make transport links from northern england to the SE so good little point in relocating to the south east. In France, Spain, Germany they have been rolling out high speed rail networks with this intention. They’ve been successful at spreading economic benefit and increasing national cohesion.
450,000 homes would cost minumum around £120bn to build without services or six times the price of a one high speed train line from Scotland to London.
We need a central government with more vision and humanity than mass migration from northern england to London. We need to start catching up with continental governments. Often these continental countries have lower per capita incomes than us yet they manage to fuind such transport schemes.
The East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team have requested that the East Dulwich councillors via our Crime Reduction fund buy two trial pocketable metal detectors. The beauty of these is that they can be carried easilly in a pocket. If/when officers stop someone and search them they can use a metal detector and reduce the level of intimacy of a manual search, reduce the time it takes and increase the likelyhood of finding any hidden metal items.
Even detecting one extra knife and taking it out of circulation will have made this funding worthwhile.
We await the results of this initial trial.
In America petrol prices have reached levels once considered unimaginable equivalent to 50p a litre! This price is double what it was for Amercians in 2004 and has resulted in swift dramatic increases in public transport of +10->15% in just one year. In some instances such switching has been far more dramatic +35% in Charlotte.
For the first time in 30 years Amercians drove less miles one year compared to the next. Down -4.3%.
So are such high oil prices hell? clearly not from an environmental perspective.
Ford have described the prices as having helped the car industry ‘reached a tipping point’ and the SUV 4 wheel drive vehicle as an ‘endangered species’. The American car industry are also describing how they need such high prices sustained over time to justify the huge investments required to move from large inefficient fuel guzzling vehicle manufacture to hybrid efficient car vehicle production.
So are such high oil prices heaven?
Real term increases in the price of motoring will see everyday decisions and choices being made where the car wont win as often. People are choosing to walk, cycle and use public transport more often. These are all good social and health enhancing choices. Personally I need the extra push.
But for those who have made big life choices based on cheap oil - living some distance from services and shops - it must feel like hell.
At the latest Womad world music festival, the 26th, they wanted to reduce litter. They used an old idea of a deposit. Their version being a 10p deposit for every paper cup beer was served in. Anyone who took their cup back received 10p. Some kids earnt over £60 a day tidying paper cups.
The organisers must have been chuffed as it was a complete success and it cost them nothing for this very tidying up. The only people to suffer were hardcore litterers who could’nt be bothered to recycle paper cups.
What can we learn from this in nomal high street terms we can use in East Dulwich. Returning to bottles having a deposit and return value would further improve current levels of recycling. Perhaps similar for cans.
We just need to persuade central government to implement such policies. With it current levels of unpopularity I see little chance of this.
Today Retail Price Index inflation is reported at 5%. Ouch!
National pay negotations for local government employees appear stuck around 2.45%. So a real term pay cut while they help councils deliver productivity gains ahead of national government ‘Gershon’ targets (while that same national government fails to meet its own productivity targets).
The same week it’s revealed that 26 London MPs voted themselves a 9.4% basic pay rise and Cabinet ministers a 4.3% pay increase. Which also means a mega pension increase when they stop being MPs.
Shouldn’t MP salaries be linked to average earning and pensions. They be very motivated to implement policies that boost wages and pensions.
The latest Key Stage 2 results for Southwark Primary Schools - key stage 2 - show fab results this year.
English +3%, Maths +4%, Science +2%.
Nationally, schools have improved on average by +1%, +1% and 0% respectively. So Southwark is catching up with the national averages. This years results build on several years of Southwark schools catching up.
WELL DONE - pupils, parents, teachers, assistants, governors and head teachers. What a great team effort must have been taking place
Still lots more to be done before every school in Southwark is better than the national average…
