Bakerloo Line Extension

For over 100 years London has talked about extending the Bakerloo line south. Extending it even started in the 1950’s but stopped after 18 months of building work.

The Mayor of London and Transport for London have released their London Infrastructure Plan 2050. It includes a Bakerloo line extension with little relationship to the past 100 years of historic proposals. Their proposal is to extend via the Old Kent Road via Lewisham to Beckenham and Bromley.

They are consulting on this extension please do respond.

Liberal Democrats have always said we want the Bakerloo line extended. For some time we’ve suggest it have two branches – one via Camberwell to Tulse Hill and terminating in Streatham and the second branch along the Old Kent Road to Lewisham and beyond. That each branch have 15 trains per hour of the maximum 32 possible in the central section of the Bakerloo line.

The Plan also shows clearly how poor public transport is in the Dulwich and West Norwood area proving the need for a Bakerloo branch. That road congestion will rocket between now and 2030 by 25% and ultimately London population increase by 2050 to something between 9.5 and 13.4 million people. Staggering growth.

Paedophilia Iceberg

Reflecting on the appalling Rotherham long-term child abuse, Jimmy Saville decades of abuse, many other public figures accused of casual child and other abuse, child abuse rings uncovered in Derby, Oxford, Rochdale, Telford and this week a paediatric haematologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital convicted of child abuse. Other systemic appearing abuse from religious leaders. The scale of child and adult abuse is colossal but increasingly what we’ve become aware of appears just the tip of the iceberg.

It is clear that for decades child abuse was ignored and covered up country wide. That suspicions were ignored. Victims ignored and worse – often the victims punished.

A number of separate enquiries have taken place essentially showing at best complacency on epic scales.

I’ve had a casework involving historic abuse and the police dealt with it sensitively and promptly.

We need every local authority and public body needs to assume that such abuse has occurred until they prove differently. We need to assume every public body is guilty of harbouring this historically. That every such body needs a systemic review of all the people ever in their charge confirming they didn’t receive abuse. That all Police reports need to be trawled to assess which ones abuse was not recorded but lesser crimes if any recorded and wrong police reports corrected and investigated where the victims wish this.

When we’ve purged our society of historic abuse and ensured all new allegations are properly investigated will we be truly fair and just society.

If you believe abuse is or has taken place whether you’re an adult or child get advice from the NSPCC   0808 800 5000, help@nspcc.org.uk or text 88858.

Ensuring Proper Dulwich School Provision

Southwark Council is about to embark on the journey towards a new Southwark Plan.

We have three local problems around the planning designation we need to resolve to ensure proper state school provision in the Dulwich area.

I have formally requested the councillor Cabinet member for Regeneration who is responsible for this mark.williams@southwark.gov.uk please let him know if you agree with me and copy me. Without these changes we will not have enough primary or secondary places in the right cirumstances and places:

1. Dulwich Hospital. After new health care provision that the remainder of the site, circa 18,000-20,000m2, be allocated for a new secondary school. Without such a planning designation change the government DfE will be unable to afford this much land as the cost would be more than £60m. (The East Dulwich Police station was sold for £6M and is 1/10th of the space because it wasn’t in planning terms protected as a site for eudcational use).

2. 520 Lordship Lane (former Harvester pub) That this be designated for education use. This would enable the Harris Primary school looking for a home to be placed there. Without this it seems likely that the new Harris Primary school will be placed at the Dulwich Hospital site OR they will apply to build on the East Dulwich Harris Girls Academy Metropolitan Open Land. Both of these options are much less desirable than 520 Lordship Lane.

3. 62-68 Half Moon Lane. The Dulwich Estate carved the absolute minimum space from the former Kings Biological Sciences centre for the Judith Kerr Bilingual Free School that opened 2013. Effectively they provided the main building and a tiny tiny playground – fencing off most of the site for future residential use. The lease includes a condition that the school must never talk about the minimal space leased to them. Ideally the whole site would be designated for educational use helping to push the Dulwich Estate towards being more charitable and the whole site being made available for the Judith Kerr Bilingual School. Effectively the Dulwich Estate have carved 2/3rds of the site for future residential building so that they provide more subsidy for private schools more over the state provided free school pupils having reasonable outside space.

To see the full email comunications – Dulwich Education Planning Status Request Email 26 August 2014

What other planning designations do we need changed?

Lib Dems Bring Greater Fairness For Council Leaseholders

One of the biggest problems is local councils out of the blue charging council leaseholders huge amounts for general maintenance. Often this appears to come from councils just not professionally planning ahead.

I’m proud to say that A cap has just been introduced to limit the amount local authorities and housing associations can charge leaseholders for repairs to council homes.

The new directions limit the amount authorities can charge for future major repair, maintenance, or improvement works when they are wholly or partly funded by the government.

Outside London the maximum amount residents can be charged for repairs on a property will be £10,000 in any five-year period. In London, the cap is £15,000 over the same time period.

If repair works cost more than the set limit, authorities will have to pay the rest.

Postage Stamp Secondary School

Since starting the secondary school debate and campaign in East Dulwich the key has always been where to put it. The only obvious space is the two-thirds of the Dulwich Hospital site that are no longer required for health facilities.

So the site for both secondary schoo,l campaigns is key.
I’ve written an open letter to Southwark Council Leader about this – Open Letter to Southwark Council Leader Peter John 25 July 2014

As things stand with Southwark Council marking out most of the Dulwich Hospital Site for housing the land values are so extremely high only a tiny portion of the site will be affordable for a new secondary school.

Southwark Council need to explain how it will avoid this situation, or as I’ve previously requested change the planning expectations for the hopsital site.

So far instead of practically trying to sort this out they’ve been raising the spectre of a Harris primary school also going on the site.

Without the council leader getting a grip, apart from the universally agreed replacement health provision, we will have both a secondary school and primary school on ridiculoulsy squeezed postage stamp sized spaces plus housing.

Harris ED Free Primary School – Temp site

Last night the planning application submitted in May was finally granted planning permission for the temporary site to house the Harris East Dulwich Free Primary School. The planning application was submitted 23 May and should have been decided by 16 July but Southwark Council didnt wanted to give planning permission to a Harris school and was using Metropolitican Open Land as a reason to consider resisting.

At the planning committee Labour councillors repeatedly haranged the agent about a late application – when the lateness was caused by Southwarks own officers. Even the planning chair admitted she was blaming the wrong messenger.

Weirdly Southwark Council has approved numerous uses of MOL for private schools but their hate of all things Harris is even more consumnig than their hate of private schools in Southwark!

Eitherway we now have the temporary site needed until such time the permanent school can open on the former East Dulwich Police Station. Well done Harris and EFA for reaching this point but even more so to the parents who children will start school there on the temporary site on Homestall Road in just 6 weeks time.

 

Southwark Says Economy On The Up

Southwark Council has to record all the risks it is at risk from.

The latest report from Southwark Council officers to the Audit & Governance Committee I sit on stated that risk from the economy have dropped from 8% to 6%. That’s a big drop and good news of how council officers responsible dispassionately for judging risks now see the economy seriously picking up.

Southwark Businesses Owed £39M

Reviewing Southwark’s draft 13/14 accounts (page 138) they show a financial provision estimating that Southwark businesses with appeals against the Business Rates (NNDR) are expected to win £39M !

30% of this will come from Southwark Council and 70% from the Great London Authority and the Government. This is a result of the pickle of the Business Rates review in 2005.

The backlog created by appeal in 2005 is taking a very long time to resolve. Amazingly businesses typically have been waiting 8-9 years for their appeal with the Valuation Office Agency to be decided. It really is not clear when this huge backlog damaging Southwark businesses will be cleared.

Think how many extra jobs could be created if those businesses had that money sooner rather than later.

So at Southwark Councils Audit & Governance committee on Monday evening I asked, and the committee agreed, that we invite the VOA to attend our next meeting in September to explain how they will fix this and what Southwark Council can do to help resolve this.

Empty Homes Myth

We have a housing crisis. Things are so bad that we’ve recently had very high house price inflation.

One cause has been suggested as the number of empty homes for than one year. But over the last four years the number of empty homes has fallen by one-third. In Southwark since I was first  elected when we had 5,500 empty properties it halved. Partly this is the coalition government allowing councils to double council tax and partly because properties are so much more valuable now. This Southwark halving of empty properties has been repeated London wide and represent 0.64% of homes.

For England the empty property number have declined from 2009 316,251 down to 216,050 in 2013 (the latest figures). With 23.236 homes the empty ones equate to just 0.93%.

If you count empty homes empty for just 6 months – repairs, bereavement then the proportion rises to 1.74%. Not a huge proportion.

So if the housing problems aren’t being caused by empty properties – we need to either increase supply or decrease demand….

 

Think again!

Southwarn News editorial 26 June 2014…

“Only in politics could you have someone take up a new position, only to pronounce that it was pretty much a waste of time.

And the comments by the new chair of the council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee (OSC) are so far off the mark you have to wonder how or why he was handed the job in the first place.

For many years, council assembly was a proper debating chamber, where the key issues of the day were hammered out in front of the public and the press. This was then effectively neutered when the Lib Dem/Tory coalition moved decision making to Cabinet meetings.

You can argue that this led to less theatre, more proper decision-making but what it also did was remove the element of debate.

As such, the role of chair of the SOC became of paramount importance – and this paper argued consistently that it should always be occupied by a member of the opposition.

We argues this when there was no overall control of the council – how much more important is it when one party now enjoys a huge majority?

Cllr Gavin Edwards rightly declares that the public doesn’t care. That’s a problem he and his political colleagues should be addressing But he then goes on to suggest that ‘[people weren’t missing much’. That is only true if it doesn’t matter to them what decisions are made about their children’s education, the homes they will live in, the services and benefits they rely on and all that a local council does.

Cllr Edwards should at least be promising to hold his party to account in his new role – rather than rubbishing it. But in truth, the body that scrutinises these massively important decisions should not be controlled by a member of the party that is making them. The administration badly needs to think again.“

NB. The change to a cabinet