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.

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.

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… 

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…

Southwark is one of two local authorities in the country taking part in an average speed camera trial. Barry Road was recently considered for this trial. I have had a number of East Dulwich residents complaining about excessive speeding and so have my Liberal Democrat ward colleagues cclr Richard Thomas and cllr Jonathan Mitchell.

Barry Road over the last three years has had two people seriously injured and 28 slightly injured so clearly lots of pain and suffering.  Barry Road at its junction with Underhill Road had six, four around Etherow Street and the school, seven at the junction with Eynella Road.

The requirements to consider a road for the trial included producing speed stats of the current situation. 63,527 travelled along Barry Road between 12 and 20 March. 1.49% exceeded the 40mph speed limit. The average speed was 25.7mph but 20% of vehicels travelled greater than 30mph.

So average speed cameras to enforce the 40mph aren’t really necessary. But changing the speed limit to 30mph to reflect the reisdential nature of Barry Road would seem long overdue.

The latest board paper on Food Safety for the Foods Standards Agency shows that during the period 2000-2006 food safety did not improve. In fact has been getting worse. The most deadly, literally, issue is E.coli 0157 H7. This bug kills under 5’s and seniors roughly 10% of the time. Those not killed often suffer marginal to total kidney function lose and other issues. 

Many people think councils collect a bit of rubbish, run a few schools and why does council tax so much for this?

One service that is never thought about unless things go wrong is Trading Standards. One particular area they are responsible for is ensuring all public scales weigh things correctly. One aspect that hadn’t occurred to and is now a national project by the trade body for local government trading standard is that hospital and other health service scales should weigh people and things correctly. Get it wrong and a child is given more or less radiation than they need for their body mass to fight cancer. Get it wrong and a 2g prescription of drugs is perhaps incorrectly 1.5g or 2.5g given and could be fatal. 

The deadline for applications for Cleaner, Greener, Safer funding was midnight last night.

With the support of my Liberal Democrat ward colleagues cllr Richard Thomas and cllr Jonathan Mitchell I’ve applied for various schemes to help reduce emissions in East Dulwich.

The main application is for a home visitor project to talk residents through how they can reduce emissions, reduce fuel proverty and if eligible where to apply for funding. 

More symbolically I’ve also applied for a landmark windturbine for East Dulwich. We just need to find the best possible public building that would like one!  

Yesterday was the deadline for Cleaner, Greener, Safer funding applications. This flagship Southwark Liberal Democrat policy sets aside around £120,000 for each ward for capital projects and circa £5,000 for revenue events type projects.

As with previous years I’ve applied for funding to help reduce crime and the fear of crime. Previous years I’ve led on getting Alterboxes into East Dulwich shops. They’ve helped participating shops reduce shop crime by over 50% and engendered a more local shop community spirit.

East Dulwich ward was slightly better than average for crime being 274th/625 wards in London - 1 having the lowest crime rate in London. For Southwark East Dulwich has 2nd lowest crime rate out of 21 wards.  During the last year East Dulwich has improved slightly and is now 236th/625 wards in London but still no.2 in Southwark. So each resident in East Dulwich has a 8.5% chance of being affected by crime each year that they report to the Police. Still rather depressing. 

So this year I’ve applied, supported by my Liberal Democrat ward colleagues cllr Richard Thomas and cllr Jonathan Mitchell for things to further help reduce crime in East Dulwich. My personal aim is to help East Dulwich become a truely low crime ward, not just compared to other wards in Southwark but compared to London as a whole. To achieve this we will need to halve rates of crime in East Dulwich.

In about 6 weeks time we’ll know which applications won. The real work then begins.

 If you’d like to get involved the East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team next meeting is 23 April contact me for further details.