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.

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.

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.

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.