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?

Lost SPD millions?

Southwark Council has through planned inaction decided to have Council Tax Single Persons Discount amnesty. Officers have advised they can;t back date chasing people who’ve wrongfully claimed SPD by 12 months. So delaying by 6+ months considering doing this represents an amnesty costing £1.5m+….

30 April Audit & Governance committee http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/g4262/Public%20reports%20pack%20Tuesday%2030-Apr-2013%2019.00%20Audit%20and%20Governance%20Committee.pdf?T=10

Page 88 section 21 states:

“Single Person Discount Exercise – back dating request. Following initial discussions with the Assistant Director (Revenues, Benefits, FTSS), he wants to make further consideration of the scope for this, particularly in light of other key projects currently being undertake within his division. As such he will report back on in June.”

Effectively a statement of no action taken.

The previous committee 28 February

http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/g4261/Public%20reports%20pack%20Thursday%2028-Feb-2013%2019.00%20Audit%20and%20Governance%20Committee.pdf?T=10

page 3 of the January meetings minutes section 10 states “bring back further detail to the committee on whether it is possible and cost-effective to data match historical records for signs of possible council tax fraud”.

Page 38 sections 32 – 35 state 13,000 data matches about SPD has been found. That £1.5m has been recovered from wrong SPD claims.

At the time I asked why Southwark didn’t recover money for the past financial year. The data is present to show where SPD has been wrongly claimed for a prior 12 months. The 30 April report states officers have chosen NOT to try and recover another £1.5M+ and they they’ll announce their plans in June. At best this represents a delay of 3 months and loss of £1.5m/4. At worse they’ll try and quietly drop it.

I’m passionate about this as it was my idea that led to the matching exercise resulting in 13,000 matches and £1.5m. To procrastinate and lose potentially £1.5m+ if they quietly drop it as near an election is outrageous.

What do you think?

Sociable Spending

Some years ago the Lib Dems created Community Funds for each of Southwark’s 21 political wards to spend locally, £100-£1000 on local groups running local projects and events. It turns out we were onto something bigger and more meaningful than we ever imagined.

Various research projects of traumatic events have discovered that communities with more robust social networks coped much better with earthquakes, heat waves, etc than those without.  Even the day to day issues and problems are ameliorated by strong social networks. Importantly stornger social networks have a large impact on things like child health, school grades, teen births, adult mortality, social disorders and even amazingly IQ scores. Some have dubbed this the “enduring neighbourhood effect”.

The more community groups the great the “enduring neighbourhood effect” – lowers crime rates, less violence as well as the other benefits mentioned earlier. You name a parameter and its improved.

How to foster more community groups and networks?

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?

 

 

Even More School Supporters

With your support we’ve increased the East Dulwich Free School demand figures:  

243 families supporting two new local free primary schools (previous update was 225) with the following potential pupil numbers:

2014: 78 children (70 at previous update)

2015: 67 children (63 at previous update)

All this extra support is being forwarded to the Department of Education to make the case for two new local Primary schools even more compelling. 

 

Police Retreat From Dulwich

I should make it clear I’m from Police families. Both grandfathers were serving Police officers. One a Chief Super who in retirement chaired NARPO, the other an armed MoD Police officer who guarded the first UK atomic weapons. My father was born in a Police station, uncle chaired magistrate benches and I’m proud to still have all their policing medals and badges.

So I attended Southwark Police commander John Sutherland meeting to talk about his plans feeling supportive. We were told 24 June is the go live date for the Met Police “Local Policing model” with 4 clusters of local police teams. It’s effectively turning the clock back 20year to “Sector Policing” where centralised officers react to problems and chase their tails. Then the hugely successful safer team model with dedicated local teams came along with local bobbies.  Instead of a Safer Neighbourhood Team based in East Dulwich of 7 officers dedicated to our we will have less than two officers based in Camberwell.

The cross party councillor consensus is that we’re unlikely to see Police officers coming to Dulwich. When they do they’ll be in minibuses for a few hours and then called away. We expect almost all resources to never leave the Camberwell area. We’re even concerned at the future 999 response times.

This Policing retreat from Dulwich is based on a number of flawed concepts:

1. Low crime wards. The borough commander declared our area low crime. We’re low crime for inner London but have a higher crime rate than the English average.
2. Travelling time. The borough commander said it would only take 15-20 minutes to get from Camberwell to Dulwich. But basing them in Camberwell will see that area prioritised over Dulwich. When they ‘come over the hill’ south to Dulwich without a base then the slightest desk work or break will involve officers travelling back to Camberwell.
3. Increased hours of coverage. Centralising the SNT’s means they’ll be a Police officer on duty for more hours of the week. But as we don’t’ expect them to ‘come over the hill’ we’ll see the current hours in Dulwich reduce to next to nothing.
4. Named sergeant, PC, PCSO. Each ward will have name sgt. PC and PCSO. But as they’ll be based miles away this feels irrelevant.

A proposed Dulwich Police based was repeatedly rejected by the Police. It was repeatedly explained that councillors were proposing to completely pay for a new base if it made operational sense and would be used.

When asked what the prediction for policing hours effort each area would see I was told no such analysis had been done. We were told he didn’t have the spare operational hours to staff front counters. No operational impact assessment has been made. We were told the decision making process taken was more art than science.

We proposed that he consider five clusters adding one based in East Dulwich.

If you agree we need an East Dulwich Police base then please urgently sign our petition – http://eepurl.com/sPKmf

Dodgy Letterboxes

I’m perplexed to see that new fire resitant front doors have been  installed with very low letterboxes e.g. Friern Road blocks 100 flats. GReat that theyre getting more fire safe front doors but if they’re messed up on part them have they messed up anything else.

I know from the Communication Workers Union (CWU) campaigns (I’m an ex.member) that they recommend letterboxes adhere to the British Standard and European Standard (EN13724) based on it. This is due to over 3,000 postal workers suffering injuries a year from low letterboxes. Indeed NHBC also recommend this.

As a CWU official and the cabinet member for housing I’m amazed Cllr Ian Wingfield has not ensured council officers are aware of these standards and ensure they’re followed?

The particular East Dulwich iteration of this problem is Friern Road blocks where they’ve all been install 500mm high but the recommended height is 700mm-1700mm high for individual letterboxes. This doesn’t sound important until you think of a postie day in day out having to deliver to such dodgy letterboxes. With 40,000 tenanted and 12,000 leasehold properties eventually that’s an awful lot of back ache that will be created.

Come on Ian please do both your jobs properly.

GP Complaints and Praise – how to?

I’ve had a number of negative comments about local East Dulwich GP practices. I’m sure a number of complements are also out there.

Since 1 April 2013 to make complaints about NHS health care:

If you have a comment or a complaint about a GP, dentist, pharmacy or optician contact the London office of NHS England at england.contactus@nhs.net. You can also contact NHS England on 0300 311 22 33. There is more information available at http://www.england.nhs.uk/contact-us/complaint.

If you have a comment or complaint about a hospital, mental health or community trust please contact the respective organisation directly.

If you have a comment or complaint about any other local health service please contact NHS Southwark Clinical Commissioning Group, via the South London Commissioning Support Unit at SLCSU.complaints@nhs.net or telephone 0800 456 1517

If you need support in making a complaint please contact VoiceAbility who provide NHS complaints advocacy at nhscomplaints@voiceability.org telephone 0300 330 5454, Textphone Number 0786 002 2939 or fax 0330 088 3762

More information on the website: http://www.southwarkccg.nhs.uk/GetInvolved/Pages/PALSandComplaints.aspx

Abstractions

Sadly the East Dulwich ward dedicated Safer Neighbourhood Team have’nt been so dedicated for some months now.

This table shows when the team members were sent away, or abstracted, to other non East Dulwich tasks:

October 2012 November 2012 December 2012
Sergeant

  • 1 x Royal Visit

PC

  • 1 x Local Demo.

PCSO

  • 3 x Op Oconto
 PC

  • 2 x Aid (Off Borough)
  • 1 x New Years Eve
  • 5 x Op Oconto
  • 2 x Op Dragonet

PCSO

  • 4 x Local Control Room
  • 3 x Op Dragonet
 Sergeant

  • 1 x Op Dragonet
  • 1 x Local Control Room
  • 1 x New Years Eve

PC

  • 2 x Op Dragonet
  • 2 x Local Demonstration

PCSO

  • 4 x Op Oconto
  • 3 x Training

So of the 20 shifts in October 4% lost out of the area, of 20 in November 14% lost and of the 19 in December 12% lost from East Dulwich. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t show annual leave.

What bothers me is that the trend is to spend decreasing amounts of time in Dulwich. The trend is almost identical in Village and College wards the other Dulwich wards.

Council Rents

Council tenants in Southwark would see their rent CUT under new plans put forward by Liberal Democrats.

We put forward proposals to reduce council rents by 1% in all council-owned homes in the borough, in contrast to the 4.85% increase being added by the Labour administration – a saving of £285 per year for the average council tenant.

Why? because for a number of years the last Labour government made local councils increase rents. If they didn’t they were penalised. The coalition government has stopped tihs coercion.

So the Lib Dem group have worked up the proposals using spare cash from the Housing Revenue Account (HRA), which makes an annual surplus of more than £7m because the amount of rent collected is higher than the money being paid out for upkeep of homes. We say that the extra money that has been collected from tenants should be given back in the form of a one-off rent cut.

The HRA is a separate budget from the general ‘Revenue Account’ of the council and can only be used for housing-related spending rather than general services. Councils were previously obliged to increase rents in line with a government formula, but rule changes brought in by the Coalition mean councils now have power to set their own rent levels without facing financial penalties.

Labour’s 4.85% rent increase will add £231.92 to the annual rent bill for the average council property (£4.46 per week), set to begin on 1 April. The Lib Dems’ 1% cut would reduce rents by £47.84 per year, saving the average tenant £285 in 2013/14 compared to Labour plans.

The rent cut policy comes on the back of income tax cuts to low income households pushed through by Lib Dem ministers in government, which will see the basic income tax threshold rise to £10,000 in this Parliament, saving many households up to £700.

Our leader Cllr Anood Al-Samerai said:

“The Lib Dems know that many people are finding it tough at the moment, which is why we want to put money back into the pockets of those who need it most.”

“Rather than imposing an increase in council rents, we would actually cut rents to give people a helping hand. Along with the income tax changes brought in nationally by Lib Dems in government, our rent cut would be a welcome boost for residents throughout Southwark.”

“We will be putting this proposal to full Council Assembly and asking Labour councillors to back it. It will be interesting to see if they vote to cut rents to save people money, or if they stick to the party line of increasing rents by almost 5% when they know people are suffering financially.”