Will Food Poisoning Rise?

On Friday Southwark Council confirmed its Food Safety Business Plan for 2011-12.

Food poisoning can kill – lots of different horrible bugs, additives, etc. Ensuring the food chain in Southwark is good is critical to public health.

The strategy is to ensure the highest risk food manufacturers, shops, takeaways, etc are inspected at the MINIMUM recommended rate. Category C & D premises are takeaways, cafes and restaurants. It proposes that 324 of the 1102 Category C premises will be inspected at the MINIMUM rate of every 18 months. That ‘s around half the premises that should be inspected during the year. Category D premises should be inspected at least biannually but only 158/439 are planned to be visited. For Category E that should be inspected at least every 3 years 0 / 634 will be inspected. But the strategy does plan to visit all 301 unrated premises.

What’s really troubling is that without meeting at least the MINIMUM stated recommended inspection rate you can’t spot dodgy places that should be kept under closer more frequent inspection.

Inspection scores are made available via the wed – Scores on the Doors . Weirdly the strategy doesn’t promote the Apple of Android Apps that give very easy and GPS based access to these inspection ratings.

What feels odd though is that the Strategy also stated 12.5 council officers work in this arena. That should work out at around 2,600 available person days available per annum.

So why can’t they make at least the minimum recommended 1,796 inspections every year?

Thumbs up for St.Anthony’s primary school rebuild

I’ve just received notification that the planning application for St.Anthony’s was approved on the 9 September.

HOORAY.

I’m reassured that one of the conditions I requested when I stated my support for this application has been confirmed. I requested that a School Travel Plan must be agreed. This should help mitigate the effects of the expansion of this school whose pupils come from on average further away. So all going well it’s permanent expansion won’t negatively affect the local area.

W just need to improve Etherow Street to make a better school entrance….

Plot to rename bonfire night

Labour run Southwark Council have decided to hold a public bonfire event in Dulwich Park. Sadly they don’t feel they want to call it a firework display but have come up with a more politically correct name for the event – “The Colour Thief”.

They plan to spend £55,000 on this event Friday 4 November. They’ve confirmed to me they expect 2,000 attendees which works out at £25 a head!
To others they’ve said 3,000 – 5,0000.
They’ve said to the Friends of Dulwich Park that they have no choice it will happen whether they like it or not. At the Dulwich Community Council last week they said it will be decided via a public consultation.
To local Councillors they’ve said it’s not a rival fireworks event but to the press the Labour cabinet member councillor Ward has said “We have some great ideas for the fireworks night event, which includes our new Colour Thief display, and we are currently consulting local people about what they’d like to see”.

I think it’s safe to say local people would like some honesty. Dulwich already has numerous public firework events and doesn’t need another one whatever crazy politically correct names it’s given. Ideally the events budget would be devolved to local community councils to decide which local events to support.

Uninsured

This week it was revealed that 65 people are injured by uninsured drivers every week. 15 people were killed, 307 seriously injured, 3,085 injured during 2010. by uninsured drivers. That is an awful lot of people lives wrecked.

People willing to drive while uninsured (compared to insured drivers) are:

  • Ten times more likely to have been convicted of drink driving
  • Six times more likely to have been convicted of driving a non-road worthy vehicle
  • Three times more likely to have been convicted of driving without due care and attention

On average every insured driver is paying £30 more each year to cover the costs of the uninsured.

The last league table I could find from the Motor Insurers’ Bureau showed two Southwark postcodes as the 2nd and 10th worst in the country for having uninsured drivers – Peckham SE15 has 4.33 x the UK average level of uninsured drivers and Camberwell SE5 has 3.75 x the UK average level of uninsured drivers.

Police and insurers have estimated uninsured drivers as between 1 and 5 million people. Truly astounding.

So how many live in East Dulwich?

Gas leaks

Southern Gas Networks (SGN) have a 15 year plan of gas pipe replacement for Southwark. This is a hugely disruptive programme – Borough High Street, Denmark Hill, Lordship Lane, and Freirn Road – huge traffic congestion for months on end. In the case of Friern Road plans for 15 months work.

Picture to the left is Denmark Hill after two weeks of single lane 3-way traffic lights operation. Still obviously lots of work to be done at this rate.

But is it necessary?

Undoubtedlygas is leaking in tiny amounts from the 100yr+ cast iron pipes across Southwark and replacing them is the UK’s current solution. Natural gas or methane is 20 times worse than Carbon Dioxide as a global warming contributor.

But what if  leaks could be fixed without massive.y disruptive pipe replacement?

In the US a start up company called Picarro has developed a laser-based device (cavity ring-down spectrometer) that can take rapid measurements of gas concentrations down to the parts per billion level.  Its a car based system and can quickly survey a city as they’ve done for San Francisco and Boston already taking  just a couple of days.

Once you know where any leaks are occurring you can fix them, just them, and not need to replace the whole pipe.

Apparently cast iron pipes were sealed with jute which dries our over time allowing leaks. 

 A robot (CISBOT)  has been used to fix thousands of such joints in New York City alone. Currently is has to be inserted every 150m. These fixes can also take place while the gas pipes are kept operational making it much simpler to just get on with it.

So the next time you’re stuck in traffic and can see people working on huge yellow plastic pipes remember they could be working a lot smarter sensing gas leaks and using robots to just fix leaks and not replace whole pipes. They’d also be nearly halving their costs and take a fraction of the time.

20mph for Grove Vale and Lordship Lane

I’ve just obtained a weeks worth of speed data for Grove Vale and Lordship Lane:

Grove Vale westbound vehicle mean average speed of 22.8mph,  85 percentile 27.7mph, total of 73642 vehicles.

Grove Vale eastbound vehicle mean average speed of 21.2mph, 85 percentile 24.6mph, 68540.

Lordship Lane (by Ashbourne Grove ) north bound vehicle mean average of 21.5mph, 85 percentile 27.3mph, 52036.

Lordship Lane (by Ashbourne Grove ) south bound vehicle mean average 19.9mph, 85 percentile 25.3mph, 51419.

To place 20mph speed limits on roads requires 85 percent of all existing traffic to be travelling at speeds of 24mph or lower. BUT both roads have planned measures to reduce speeds by several mph and having a 20mph speed limit lowers speeds by around 2mph.

So I’ll be pushing for 20mph speed limits. At the very least in the short term finding the minimum required to make this happen.

Do you agree?

Predicted flooding

No joke but on 1 April Southwark Council became responsible for flood prevention.

Initial work suggests the following areas are liable for a 1 in 100 year flooding event:

– Herne Hill area (i.e Half Moon Lane)

– Champion Park area

– Area between Peckham Park Road and Asylum Road.

– Area bounded by Willow Brook, Commercial Way, Southampton Way, Well Way and Saint George’s Way.

– Area bounded by Camberwell Road, Camberwell New Road and Wyndham Road.

– Dulwich Park area

– Belair Park area along Croxted Road

In theory it should mean that flooding events such as the Dulwich 2004 flooding of costing over £1M will be less likely if Southwark Council gets its flood prevention right and encourages us all to take simple but effective measures.

So I’m looking forward to Southwark Council quickly releasing its assessments and guidance of what Southwark Council will such as changes at Belair Park and what households and businesses can do.

Pilot ignored

I was saddened to discover that Labour councillor Barrie Hargrove has decided Southwark Council should ignore the 9month food waste pilot they initiated. This pilot has involved over 10,400 homes and largely been a success and we’re all working on fixing the issues.

It involved collecting food waste, metals, plastics, glass and paper recycling every week and everything else fortnightly. This difference between 1 week for recycling and fortnightly for everything else encouraged people to maximise their recycling to get stuff taken away. In the pilot area some week 53% has been recycled.

But the pilot has been ignored.

The pilot and 37,000 other homes in Southwark will have weekly food waste and fortnightly recycling and everything else collections. This is said to save £125,000 a year over the 47,000 homes or £2.65 per home per year. But it only has to result in 27kg of recycling from each home each year going into the wrong wheelie bin and this saving won’t be made. On average each Southwark home throws away more than 1,000kgs a year. More than 27kg per home in the wrong wheelie bin and it will cost more than keeping weekly rubbish collections. I could understand if for the first year only weekly recycling collectionswere made to get people into this virtuous habit but sadly this isn’t the plan.

I call on Southwark Council to maximise recycling from these changes rather than take the risk of a worse service costing council tax payers more.

Food waste recycling

Southwark Council has been piloting a food waste recycling scheme and fortnightly rubbish collections involving 10,000 homes for many months now. It has been undertaken on homes with direct access to its street and this type of waste collection has been undertaken – not much to learn from this. Unsurprisingly having chosen the keenest recyclers for the pilot its been a success.

At a review with the Environmental Scrutiny Committee it has been agreed to my proposals to try offering blue recycling wheelie bins – sadly only to homes in Crebor Street which feels like tokenism – and to extend the pilot to the Friern Road blocks of flats. The blue wheelie bins have been repeatedly requested from keen recycling families who generate lots of recycling and are sick of multiple blue boxes and bags. Flats because the vast majority of homes in Southwark are flats. So without including flats we’ll discover how to make a system work for such homes and never reach the doubling of recycling to 44% that the Labour administration have promised by 2014.

The other element I pushed for at that committee was to extend the pilot to all Southwark street properties ASAP. So I was delighted to see that this is now planned to happen in the Autumn to add 35,000 homes.

We then need to see how we can extend this recycling to all remaining properties.  Without these remaining properties they’ll never reach 44%.

Car Club revolution

Last week I met with Car Club gurus from Southwark Council and Streetcar (soon to be renamed Zip Cars to reflect a merger). I wanted to know how quickly we could help them expand in East Dulwich and Southwark to revolutionise car ownership and access to cars.

Fascinating to hear that Zip Cars is a largely north American company with 400,000 members across the states and claims to be the largest car club company in the world.

Every car club car has been shown over time to replace 22 privately owned cars. So short of draconian parking permits car club cars are one of the only ways to relieve car parking pressure. Car Club members tend to give up on ownership of either their primary or secondary cars. They tend to walk, cycle and use public transport more with car club membership.

So far Southwark has 115  car club cars with 23 in the Dulwich area – partly because we funded an extra 10 spaces via our East Dulwich Cleaner, Greener, Safer funding. Transport for London has provided funding to allow another 80 car club spaces over the next two year.

The only thing holding back further rapid growth is getting people to join. So far 7,750 members in Southwark but this is still short of the 15% of adults in Islington who’ve joined. In Southwark we’ll need to reach 35,000 to reach what some have called saturation. So still lots to be done.

If you have any big events coming up and would be happy for the Streetcar promo team to come along please do get in touch with me.