James Barber

Some years ago a very dear friend was killed by a huge tipper truck (12 wheeled with 4 steerting wheels) turning left. The driver had been working 7 days a week for many months, 12-14 hours per day and being half term had a child in the cab. Whenever I see a truck in London I think of her. She will forever be young and beautiful.

What I’d never realised was how easy it is for a lorry driver when alert to find it hard to see a cyclists. A less alert driver through tiredness is even more likely to kill.

The following photo shows a cyclist in front of a lorry:

From above:

From the drivers position in te cab:

I found it quite shocking how he cyclists head of an average to tall man can only just be seen.

This afternoon the Olympics handover was celebrated by Southwark at Camberwell Green. The weather defied the forecasts and was reasonable.

The new portable running track was demonstrated. What a great piece of kit to enable the Community Games to set up shop with running races on almost any half reasonably flatish ground.

Southwark has a great Olympic heritage from the 1908 & 1948 games in London. Also quite a few Olympians have trained, lived and still reside in Southwark. A great colleagues cllr Columba Blango being one of these Olympians.

Its a shame none of the 2012 events will take place in Southwark….

The campaign group End Child Poverty has just compiled a new league table that reveals the best and worst places for the poorest students to go to school. It shows that Southwark is 21st best out of 148 education authorities in England, with 45.3% of children in receipt of free school meals obtaining 5 A*-C GCSE’s. The England average is 35.5% and London 44.6%. I was amazed to discover that London is outperforming the rest of England. The worst education authority is Nottinghamshire with only 22% on free school meals gained 5 A*-C GCSE’s compared to 59% of children who are not entitled to free school meals.The End Child Poverty group believe that London’s success is due to the London Challenge a £40m per annum program where authorities bid for money to give special extra help to poorer childrens education. I suspect its more complicated than this but either way such targetted extra spending to equalise life chances is exactly what we need more of.

Liberal Democrat policy is to dramatically increase this type of spending.

http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/news/press-releases/gcse-chances-of-poorest-are-a-post-code-lottery/24/113

I was shocked and deeply saddened to hear today that a Liberal Democrat colleague Councillor Anne Yates passed away this afternoon. She’d been in hospital for five week with a brief interlude at home for a few days.

What a very sad loss.

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…. 

http://kidskidneyresearch.org

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.