Get Britain Cycling

The All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group have produced a report titled Get Britain Cycling.

I’m chuffed to say that thE Liberal Democrats have adopted all 18 of the recommendaitons.

The key components being:

–  government providing funding of £10 per person each year for cycling. That this amount rise to £20.

– cross -departmental cycling action plan be produced

– appoint a national cycling champion

– raise the target proporiton of all trips by bike from 2% in 2010 to 10% by 2025.

These actions owuld produce a heatlhier, happier and richer country.

Carmageddon

It has been reported that one of the coalition minister Tory Eric Pickles wishes to relax parking restrictions. He fear local authorities are “anti-car”.

We’ve had our own local issues around Lordship Lane and the bus lanes being zealously enforced but what would happen if Mr.Pickles had his way?

Through a weird quirk of fate an full scale experiment along the dogmatic lines Mr.Pickles proposes has taken place in Aberystwyth.

Due to a mix=up between the police and Aberystwyth local authority they’ve had no parking enforcement for exactly 12 month.

These extracts from 1 June Daily Mail describe the chaos Mr.Pickles wishes up the rest of the country…

“For the last 12 months, citizens have been free to park wherever they please, without fear of prosecution. And any faith in human nature, that people might act responsibly and observe the restrictions anyway, is quickly dispelled by a visit to the town. Forget Armageddon – this is Carmageddon. Everywhere you look there are cars parking where they shouldn’t be: on single yellows, on double yellows, next to bus stops, on pavements , and – most brazenly of all – in just about every disabled parking space available.”

“As the residents of Aberystwyth are discovering, the iron is that when,  in theory you can park anywhere, you can’t in reality find anywhere to park.”

“With allocated loading bays being blocked by family saloon, frustrated delivery drivers are simply stopping their lorries in the middle of the street with queues of he-up motorists honking in frustration and demanding to know when they will be moving on.”

Loony Left Returns?

I was agog at the 20 month energy price freeze Ed Milliband announced yesterday. He stated he will freeze energy prices from May 2015 to January 2017.

There is no such thing as a free energy price freeze.

Surely he can’t have thought this through. Energy companies have little control on the prices of the raw materials they use while maintaining their legal responsibilities to shareholders – most shares being held by pension funds and insurance companies.

They can’t control their costs without incurring risks and extra costs. If they hedge costs by buying raw material options ahead of need, guessing future raw material prices, they can get this seriously wrong. This risk has to be paid for. That means higher prices for consumers.

A price freeze takes retail pricing out of the energy company hands leaving limited options for them. If their input costs rise above some level they can absorb they can either withhold and not produce and sell energy potentially leading to blackouts. More likely they’ll hedge raw material costs and pay for this either before the freeze with extra price rises between now and the 2015 general election or borrow and pay for the borrowing by post freeze additional price rises. Considering Ed Milliband also talked about breaking up the energy companies the latter option wont be practical. So we should all expect ot see exttra prices between now and May 2015 as energy companies prepare for the freeze.

There is no such thing as a free energy price freeze.

Street Lighting

Southwark has a great street lighting team. They’ve very patiently walked all the streets of East Dulwich late at night explaining what we have technology and options for upgrading it. It helped me fulfil a 2006 election pledge in 2010 to make all East Dulwich have universal modern street lighting. It took five years of concerted effort to make this happen.

I remember trying to deliver named letters to residents before then and frankly it was near impossible on some streets to read the print.

The latest progress on the borough wide street lighting improvements is that electricity demand is still declining from efficiency saving while getting better more modern replacements. But with electricity price rises the overall bill has stayed flat at around £1M pa.

But Southwark still has 61 different types of street lights making up 36,821 different assets.

If you have any thoughts about street lighting please do get in touch…

Fuel Poverty

In the UK we have nearly 5 million households of the 25  million UK homes in fuel poverty.

In Southwark we have 10,139 or 9.2% of our 109,674 homes in fuel poverty.

In Dulwich and West Norwood we have 4,627 or 11.1% of the 41,748 homes in fuel poverty.

This is clearly too many. The governments Green Deal is meant to deal with this. It effectively enables people to borrow money for insulation etc to reduce their bills against the savings they’ll make.

But I still think we have a big gap where basic loft and cavity wall insulation needs to be made free for everyone. Many don’t have the skills to jump through the hoops required if they’re already entitled. Others just don’t need to individually. But nationally we need to reduce our dependence upon fuel imports and the national security issues it creates.

Does you loft need insulating – what’s stopping you?

 

 

 

Green Machining East Dulwich

Many residents have been telling us how messy our streets have become. This is one of many pictures residents have recently sent me.

Dirty street picture

 

 

But the council is telling us our streets have never been cleaner since they’ve reduced the street sweeping to once every four weeks and litter picking to every other day – which is right, tell us what you think?

 

Out of 10 how clean is your street with1 being  terrible and 10 being fabulously clean – tell me at james.barber@southwark.gov.uk?

Locally in East Dulwich we’ve allocated £20,000 from our Cleaner, Greener, Safer annual capital budget to buy a Green Machine 400 series motorised street sweeping machine.

414rsa250

With this machine the same number of staff can sweep all our streets THREE times every four weeks. This should really make a difference to getting our streets cleaner. We just need to persuade people to drop less litter…

What other ideas should we pursue to make keep our area smarter?

Lordship Lane – Hometown

Ever since standing as a councillor many residents in East Dulwich have been very clear that they agree we should ensure our shopping streets don’t become clone zones.

The New Economics Forum have come up with a method to measure this.

This methodology involve counting the number of independent stores versus the number of shops and the different types of shops.

We’ve surveyed Lordship Lane northern main shopping area, Lordship Lane around Dulwich Library and Grove Vale. The measures is that areas 0-50 are called Clone Towns, 50-65 Border Towns and 65-100 Home Towns.

Lordship Lane (northern/main area) = 73 — largely affected by estate agents

Lordship Lane (Dulwich library area) = 75

Grove Vale = 78 — but vitality affected by number of takeaways.

Walworth Road = 61

To make Lordship Lane more of a Home Town we’d need more variety of shopping – we don’t have electronics, sports/cycling store, music/games. We also have a very large number of chain estate agents and food stores.

We’ll be using these survey results to inform the Dulwich planning bible currently being prepared.

What do you think would help preserve and increase the shopping vitality of Lordship Lane?

 

 

Take part in the Big Energy Switch

Local councils in London are running a scheme – The Big London Energy Switch – to help you make a quick and hassle-free switch to a cheaper energy provider.  The more people that register for The Big London Energy Switch, the greater the buying power will be, and the lower the price that may be offered.
 
A number of similar collective switch programmes have been set up by organisations such as the consumer group Which? and by local authorities including Cornwall Council and South Lakeland District Council.
 
How to register? You can register your interest in taking part by going to www.biglondonenergyswitch.org.uk and leaving your details.  When the auction is ready to go live, we will contact you – only at that point will you need details of your energy supplier and a recent bill.  There is nothing to lose by registering and you can change your mind at any time.

East Dulwich highways renewal

The plans for Southwark highway and street lighting maintenance have been issued pending a cabinet councillor decision:

http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/mgIssueHistoryHome.aspx?IId=50000667&Opt=0

For East Dulwich it’s proposed to:

– Barry Road resurface between Lordship Lane and Goodrich Road 22m costing £32,460

– Peckham Rye resurface and renew pavement between Barry Road and East Dulwich Road 400m costing £89,931

– Landcroft Road resurface 400m costs £57,912 – this appears to have been rolled over from this financial year with no explanation.

– Silvester Road resurfaced between Landcroft Road and Crystal Palace Road 200m costing £70,671

– Goodrich Road resurfaced between Landcroft Road and Hillcourt 418m costing £91,375

– Worlingham footway renewed 280m costing £12,930

– Dunstans and Goodrich Road replace defective lamp posts

– Install Pigeon mesh at various bridges across the borough to control pigeon mess.

Do you think this makes sense for East Dulwich and Southwark – let us know what you think?