Last week this years GCSE results A*-C with English and Maths for the Harris Girls Academy East Dulwich came out. The results had jumped 10% from the previous year. This bodes well for the Harris Boys Academy East Dulwich which is due to Open September 2009.

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.

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… 

After World War 2 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help countries in financial difficulties by lending money to tide them over. Laudable idea to give countries stability.

Unfortunately the conditions of such loans are often very painful. A recent study has shown 21 countries lent money by the IMF see an increase in deaths due to Tuberculosis. Kind of a measure of the health care systems in such countries.

The conditions are usually a drastic reudction in government spending on things like health care. This says to me that IMF conditions, programmes and ideology experiments on countries not taking into account the overal bigger impacts. Loosing large numbers of citizens in poor countries due to reduced health care provision is bad for economies. 

This could explain why the IMF is singulalry so unsuccesful helping poor countries succeed.

Last year for England crime dropped by 10% nationally but knife crime is still a problem. 22,151 reported knife crimes occurred with half of these in inner London, Manchester and Birmingham.

To help the East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team find knives before they are used to commit a crime the East Dulwich councillors are using Cleaner, Greener, Safer funds to purchase a metal detector wand so small it can fit in a shirt pocket. T

Hopefully this little device will work as hoped and help the local East Dulwich find any knives out their. Hopefully, they wont have any to find. Even finding one knife will be a huge success.

If this devices proves useful we’ll fund others.

Oxford has announced it is plannning to introduce Brtain’s first city-wide 20mph speed limit next year on all residential streets. Oxford is small city. Fitting considering the Cowley car factory history dominating the non academic side of the economy for so many years.

Ubiquitous 20mph in residential streets is exactly what we’re working towards in Southwark. East Dulwich latest 20mph zone is being worked on now centred around Friern Road.

I recently visited Portsmouth which I udnerstood to have implimented such 20mph zoning but spotted little evidence. Shame.

The next step will be considering implementing 20mph zones even where no speed humps and bumps have been built. Even doing this has just with 20mph signs has been shown to reduce average and extreme speeds.

Watch this space…

August 1908, one hundred years ago, the Liberals’ landmark Old Age Pension Act received its Royal Assent and became law. A little bit of Liberal Democrat heritage to be particularly proud about.

I find it hard to imagine our country before the civilising affect of a state pension ensuring all older citizens are able to retire. The value of that pension over the last two decades has rapidly declined compared to average wages. That is sad.

The number of retired people has also shot up. But the principle is still present. A pension. I often wonder if I’ll make it to retirement age - burning the candle at one end with a busy job, the other end having a young fmaily and in the middle being a councillor trying to make things better.

Happy 100 years of pensions.

I recently experienced the new St.Pancras station while travelling to Paris on business. A couple of weeks later I needed to travel via the new Thamesink station at St.Pancras as I was home from a work meeting in Leeds far later than planned and hadn’t brought bicycle lights. Yesterday I read St.Pancras had been given a RIBA London Award. My experiences are that it looks good and as a shopping mall it should win an award. But as a station it’s a failure. It delays passengers from arriving at the station to departing by train. This is the whole purpose of a station. I used to be a regular passenger travelling to and from Leicester University. It was always a faded station but it had soul. It is now bang up to date and superficially attractive but the customer requirements have been subsumed.

At the other end of the Eurostar journey Gard du Nord has not descended into shopping mall vernacular. It is a real station with the buzz of that purpose. Brussells midi is a horrible edifice. The St.Pancras architects have recreated that atmosphere in central London.

Sadly such awards for trash architecture reflect a loss of purpose for architects. The human scale has been lost. People are now merely consumers to be paraded past shops to generate revenue.

So how will the new London Bridge Station fair - will it be a glorified shopping mall or a station that helps passengers quickly arrive and depart by train? The architects have abondoned the current ramps and replaced them with numerous escalators and changes of level. It wont feel a smooth transition for arriving or departing.

This year the East Dulwich councillors Richard Thomas, Jonathan Mitchel and I have allocated £42,450 out of our £120,000 Cleaner Greener Safer funding allocation towards Crime Reduction. We’ve met the East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team Sgt. Duncan Jackson and agreed the initial spending. These monies are on top of the £35,000 last year and £15,000 the previous year.

175 Alertboxes - proven to reduce shop and busines crime by over half

2,000 Smartwater/Select DNA type property marking kits to make burglary pointless

New Neighbourhood Watch signs

Laser speed camera and mobile traffic calming message board 

When I was elected in May 2006 East Dulwich ward was 267th out of all 625 London wards, with 1st being best, for rates of crime per thounsand population.  We’ve helped improve this so that in East Dulwich we’re now 221st in London and improving. Roughly this means 130 fewer reported crime victims last year.