£10 gift

The Lib Dem GLA team have submitted their amendments to Boris’s budget. Lots of useful suggestions to save lots of money from what appears wasteful or overly generous staff perks – such as free housing for senior Police officers to free travel for TfL friends and family.

This budget would see £10 less taken from every London family every year while providing the following extras:

  • Reinstate the 150 sergeants -I’d hope we’d get our East Dulwich sergeant back again.
  • One PCSO within each Safer Neighbourhood Team to work with young people.
  • Fund  more Safer London Foundation to boroughs with the highest levels of gang crime.
  • Improve cycle safety including vital junction safety improvement works.
  • Better and fairer fares package: the One Hour Bus Ticket to allow passengers to change buses and only pay one fare; part time Travelcards to stop the discrimination faced by those who only work part of the week; reintroduce a Zone 2-6 one day Travelcard to save people having to pay Zone 1 fares when not required; and to help those often low income earners, we will introduce an ‘early bird’ fare for the Tube, TfL rail and DLR.
  • Promote walking.
  • Ensure continued operation of the London Fire Brigade Museum and develop a ‘Blue Light Museum’.
  • Protect environmental projects and speed up the rate at which London’s buses and taxis become cleaner and develop a central Clean Air Zone where pollution is worst.
  • Guarantee the roll-out of easy-to-install energy efficiency measures.
  • Tackle rogue landlords establishing minimum standards for private rented housing.
  • Take effective action to build more affordable housing in London.

All in all a great budget amendment to make London a better place.

What would you do to make London work better?

21 school disruption

Every election day 21 schools are used as Polling Stations in Southwark. Southwark Council has just reviewed all its Polling Stations and has decided that it still wants to use those 21 schools.

This is a real missed opportunity. Hosting a Polling day sounds easy but talking to some teachers it really disrupts not just the day but the whole academic week. That can’t be good for those children’s education. And we have elections nearly every year what with local, London, UK, Europe elections as well as last years AV referendum.

Of the 21 schools two are special schools, one is on special measures, six are satisfactory and about to receive a lot of extra focus and reclassified as “requires improvement”:

Southwark school polling stations

In my own ward Heber School is used – a good school with last value added score of 99.7 – is arguably doing OK hosting Polling days but does it really help and add to the childrens education? Clearly not added to which it also disrupts parents childcare plans.

I’ve looked at many of these schools and alternative polling stations appear readily available.

Come on Southwark stop disrupting our children’s education.

Primary School places

Early last week the deadline for reception class applications passed. A difficult set of choices that always stresses out parents – it certainly stressed me.

The pressure is even higher at the moment with so many extra, until recently, unforecast extra children chasing the available places. Southwark Council has arranged extra bulge places:

  • Albion, Bellenden, Bessemer Grange and Ivydale will all take an additional 30 reception pupils
  • Charles Dickens, Grange, and Robert Browning will each take an additional 15 reception pupils

These extra 195 places will help. They have made it even more complicated for parents trying to choose a school.

Past forecasts predicted that the bulge in pupil numbers would start to diminish around 2014/2015. The latest forecast I obtained in a response to a council assembly question I wrote (submitted via the Dulwich Community Council) is that in the Dulwich area we permanently need another 60-75 school places from 2014/2015. A new primary school.

We think a new school on the vacant part of the Dulwich Hospital site is the best option. Do you agree?

If you do or don’t agree with us please complete  our survey.

Turkeys Voting Against Christmas

This week we’ve heard that a committee of Lords and MP’s have rejected reducing the House of Lords from nearly 800 ‘working’ Lords to 300. Apparently they think 450 are needed.

Weirdly other western democracies find everything from 69 to 321 members of second chambers work perfectly well:

Australian Senate – 148, Canadian Senate – 104, French Senat – 321, German Bundesrat – 69, US Senate – 100.

I suspect 450 has more to d0 with maintaining the atmosphere of the UK House of Lords being a fine gentleman’s club with only enough work for members to need to attend part-time. But we know what happens when politicians have to go touting for work elsewhere. Either they rarely attend and of the near 800 ‘working’ Lords only 400 are apparently regulars or they get caught asking for cash for questions.

I really do hope the coalition government ignores this self serving report. We need a proper professional chamber that will not be prone to the corruption we’ve witnessed from the Lords. Equally the Houses of Parliament should not remain a club of entitlement pontificating about the welfare state while clinging onto their very own gilt-lined version of it.

They also think more of the future Lords should be appointees not being happy with the outrageous 20%. More jobs for the boys without the bother of convincing the electorate. Please, this really wont do in the 21st century. We can’t purport to be a democratic western country while maintaining the absurd anachronism of appointed Lords.

Vaclav Havel RIP

I feel really sad that Vaclav Havel has passed away.

I was fortunate enough to spend a month cycling back to London from Warsaw across Poland, Czechoslovakia, West Germany and Belgium a few months after the Iron curtain came down. It was an amazing month with a dear friend from University. The highlight was our time in Prague soaking up the atmosphere of a newly liberated capital and nation. The buzz was astounding. I could have stopped there permanently.

Vaclav was the defining figurehead along with Lech Walesa from that period for me. Vaclav really did appear true to the Velvet revolution he created and inspired his whole life and what a life. So to hear he’d died and was buried yesterday is particularly poignant for me. It reminds me of my youth. It also marks for me how Europe’s democratic youth has now passed.

Will Europe get away from the the pleasures of its youth and settle down into grown up institutions? Dull but necessary for long term stability.

Vaclav Havel achieved so much peacefully. And as a politician inspires me on my small local scale to keep true to my roots – play a straight bat.

So much for representative democracy

I was saddened to read that big money appears to have stomped all over another aspect of representative democracy.

I recently sat on the main Southwark Council planning committee which heard the Eileen House planning application. After a long session hearing evidence for and against this scheme the committee voted 5 against with the chair abstaining. The reasons for refusal were many (I’ve added the parentheses for clarity):

“The proposed development is contrary to strategic policy 10, saved policies 3.20 (Protection of Amenity), 4.2 (Quality of Residential Development), 4.4 (Affordable Housing) of the Southwark plan, strategic policies 5 (Providing new homes), 6 (Homes for people on difference incomes) and 7 (Family homes) of the Southwark Core Strategy, and policies 3.5 (quality and design of housing developments), 3.11 (definition of affordable housing) and 3.12 (Affordable housing targets) of the London Plan.”

It was a rubbish scheme versus Southwark and the London Mayoral policies. I’ve never read a report whose recommendation was so at variance with the body of the report. Stupid things like the applicant not properly taking into account Cycle Superhighway 7 going along Southwark Bridge Road.

Personally it looked like the ugly younger brother of the council housing block at the southern E&C roundabout. Southwark has surely had enough of such blocks to want to avoid having more built. And I’m not a luddite having voted to approve other better designed supertall buildings at other locations.

So why would Boris call in this planning decision for a relatively small scheme of 335 flats that fails to conform to his policies and is not strategic?

My hunch is that the developer has somehow encouraged this. Whatever Boris decides it speaks volumes for his view of representative democracy. It also seems a strange scheme for the first time ever for these powers to be used by Boris against Southwark’s residents.

Dormitory London?

London house prices are predicted to rise by 20% over the next five years. 20%!

This is driven partly by lack of house building, which in turn is constricted by an inability to borrow, and also more demand with a planned rapid increase in London’s population y one million people. A triple whammy for any Londoners wanting to stay in London over the long term. We need a London full of Londoners making long term commitment to work towards making London a better place for them and their families and friends. Not a dormitory London where most people pass through towards cheaper housing somewhere else, making commitments to other places in terms of civic pride and social involvement – building that elusive social capital elsewhere.

The government ‘Build now, pay later’ scheme to provide land for developments now for free and helping with their cash-flow is a great concept but I fear it will be take a long time to get started and wont have the scale needed to really make a difference to London.

This graph shows UK house prices over time. Plotting a London version would see an even steeper curve.

With the VAT increase coming out of inflation figures shortly the underlying real rate of inflation will be shown to be low and house price increases being real increases above and beyond inflation.

What will stop this?

We need half a million extra London homes just to cope with government led migration into London. Doubling that to a million extra homes might get house prices down to sensible levels….

What do you think should be done to make family homes affordable for people to buy?

16,000 Southwark council tax cheats?

Lambeth Council has produced a report suggesting more than 15,000 Lambeth residents are fraudulently claiming 25% Single Persons Discount council tax out of the 50,000 . These people will be challenged and they suspect 90% will be proven fraudulent – 13,500!

Southwark Council has 53,145 residents claiming Single Persons Discount.

So how many Southwark residents are fraudulently claiming Single Persons Discount? If at the same ratio as Lambeth that would be around 16,000 – 10% = 14,400.

But as Lambeth recognise investigating such claims costs on average £1,000, taking a resident to a magistrates court £1,800.  This clearly shows that Council Tax is a very messy system and expensive to police. One day we’ll have a local income tax instead.

Lambeth is considering issuing £280 penalty fines using civil law on a “balance of probabilities” test. What should Southwark do to resolve this?

The first thing I’ve done is ask for Southwarks Audit & Governance Committee to have a similar report to Lambeth. Lets see where this takes us…

Wedding rip-off?

Wedding and civil parntership fees up by 27% from 21 October in Labour led Southwark council for non statutory fees.   27%!

This during the week the Labour council leader proclaimed his adherence to traditional values. So why is he effectively taxing weddings so much more?

The council report studiously avoids stating percent increases. It also doesn’t include all London authorities in its comparisons. It does state that they should charge sufficient fees to cover costs “The cost of service provision has therefore also been a consideration in arriving at the proposed fees” and adhere to the Medium Term Resource Strategy (MTRS) 2010/11 – 2012/13.

So why have Southwark increased its fees by this amount when 90%+ of its registry staff costs are salaries, Local Government has a pay freeze and the service is meant to be self funding?

Labour Southwark are penalising people for falling in love. Rather than saying “I do” couples will be saying “I’m sorry but I can’t afford it.” It is a heartless move from a mean spirited Labour Council who would rather squirrel away millions in their reserves than help people celebrate the happiest day of their lives

The statutory minimum fee will still be £40 but if you want to use the Garden Room for the ceremony you’ll be charged  an extra £180 up from £140 or 29% increase. If you want to have the ceremony at another approved premise elsewhere then the new cheapest wedding fee will be £335 (up 27%)  versus £160 in Wandsworth and £70-£125 for the equivalent of Southwark’s Garden Room in Kingston-upon-Thames or £270 for an approved premise wedding fee.

What’s so weird is the Approved Premises fees just cover a few hours times of a Registrar or assistant Registrar. Hence why more efficient boroughs can charge so much less.

It seems clear that the law should be changed so any Registrar can lead the service at any Approved Premise. This would create real competition between Registrars and ensure couples who want to demonstrate the commitment and love they feel are not being ripped of in Southwark going forward.

Planning changes who gains?

I have serious reservations about the coalition governments plans for reforming the planning system. I doubt many MP’s have ever sat as a councillor on a council Planning Committee or for that matter been a developer promoting a scheme. I’ve done both and the current system is biased towards big developers.

The system isn’t perfect but it does balance many competing wishes in a relatively fair way. If anything the present system, due to concerns by councils about potential to lose appeals and have costs awarded against them, already have a tacit presumption in favour of developers. If anything objectors should be able to appeal against a planning application granted permission – they can’t currently.

So I’m hopeful that the fuss caused by the National Trust, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Friends of the Earth and others is successful in getting any changes to be balanced. Even better would be abandon these anti resident and community changes.

After all leading tory politicians were only to happy with the current system when major developments were proposed in there backyards and they used the system to block applications they didn’t want.