Stark Housing Choices

London is anticipated to grow from 8.5 million residents mid 2013  to 10.1 million residents within 22 years. That is a huge increase. It comes from the rise in births, fewer deaths and migration.

We can not house 10.1 million people in London without either making new builds in London significantly taller or expanding London’s footprint. In Southwark the Labour council is choosing to allow much taller buildings and many more of them. It is even proposing to remove the protection of suburban areas and allow skyscrapers to be considered in such places.

House prices are already ridiculously high. 2013 in Southwark the average house price was 9.67 x median earnings. Completely unreachable for most people. it means so many people live in substandard cramped homes. Blighting their life choices.

One proposal is to expand London by 1/2 mile in all directions. Slice off a little green belt land. This measure alone would enable 800,000 new homes to be built on top of normal house building in London. It would allow us to house the expected growth of London and some, so reducing house prices in real terms over time. Estimates that British house prices are 40% higher than those in the Netherlands which has a higher popularion density. Reducing house prices by 40% would see a huge rebalance of our economy. It would return hope to people that one day they could own their own home. Building 800,000 additional homes would be a huge economic fillup.

The alternative is to make inner London emulate Manhattan. I for one have not chosen to live in a city full of skyscrapers. And I don’t see why I should have a London Manhattan built around me when it fundamentally won’t solve house prices or give the scale of new homes needed.

If we don’t want skyscrappers and as a society don’t want to eat up a little green belt we would need to reduce the population of London.

How would you solve this problem?

 

 

Pupil Premium £22M Boost

Primary schools in England are to be handed an extra £22.5 million next year to help close the gap between the poorest pupils and their richer classmates, thanks to the Liberal Democrats. £390,000 will go to Lambeth and Southwark Schools on top of the existing £39M planned for 2015/16.

The Pupil premium, which was created and successfully delivered by the Lib Dems in Government, helps support disadvantaged youngsters from the time they start school, and stop them falling behind. The pupil premium funding for 2015/16 will help teachers support those children at most risk of falling behind their colleagues.

In total, primary schools will get £1,320 for every child who has been registered for free school meals (FSM) in the last six years, while pupils in secondaries will receive £935 each. All schools will still receive £1,900 for youngsters who are in care, or who have left care due to adoption or other reasons.

Evidence shows raising the attainment of pupils by the end of primary schools has a direct impact on future exam results.

I’m delighted that this will help every child reach their full potential, whatever their background. The whole class also benefits when fewer children are struggling.

 

Lambeth Living ALMO Banished

Liberal Democrats vehemently opposed the creation of the Lambeth Living ALMO when Lambeth Labour first proposed it moving council tenants to this quango.

Labour politicians had set up a dodgy poll of tenants and leaseholders promising a whole raft of improvements and cost savings. They also told tenants that voting for the ALMO would guarantee heaps of money from a friendly Labour Government that would transform their dire living conditions. Even this was not persuasive to perceptive residents, more of whom voted “No” and “Don’t Know” to setting the organisation up than voted “Yes”. Yet Labour ignored that verdict and ploughed on. In the event, not one penny of the promised funds arrived until the Labour Government was ejected from office.

The best news for Labour was that the ALMO they’d created meant none of their raft of elected councillors nor their run of expensive cabinet members had any direct responsibility to their tenants – still less to leaseholders – for the catalogue of housing disasters that ensued.

The management of leasehold properties has been a disaster, with millions being lost through mismanagement and homeowners forced to pay through the nose through overpriced contracts, while tenants have suffered misery from a failing repair service. Lambeth LIving’s first chair was even forced to resign after being arrested on fraud allegations and later convicted.

After the 2010 general election, the new Coalition Government announced that Lambeth was to be awarded £100 million, the highest amount of Decent Homes cash in the UK. And the Government has made hundreds of millions more available to Lambeth by reforming housing finance. Labour then cynically claimed credit for these funds – refused to Lambeth over a decade from their Labour colleagues in Westminster – at the same time as attacking the very government which made them available.

So with the coalition government changes Lambeth Labour are able to save money by closing their ALMO disaster. About time it was banished to.

Flight Noise Ghettos

South London has more than its fair share of aircraft flight paths – planes for Heathrow line up overhead and planes for City airport also fly over East Dulwich over a quarter of the time.

If you agree this is already a problem then you’ll want to respond to the London City Airport consultation that seeks agreement to make matters much much worse. The proposal is to deploy something similar to GPS to make aircraft very precisely follow set flight paths. This will really concentrate all those flights going into London City Airport. The deployment of this technology is a requirement of the Civil Aviation Authority. To make matters Tower Hamlets gave planning permission to increase flight paths to and from London City Airport from 80,000 to 120,000 each year. A huge increase which will be magnified if the proposals aren’t changed.

The consultation document shows that for 27% of the time East Dulwich, Dulwich, Herne Hill, Brixton will have a further concentration of flights with aircraft flying between 2,000 and 3,000 feet.

This technology could be used to vary flight paths to share the noise burden but London City Airport has no plans to do this. Shame on them.

I hope you’ll join me in responding to this consultation by emailing London City Airport lamp@londoncityairport.com and the CAA airspace.policy@caa.co.uk asking why they are allowing this secret consultation with no public meetings or leafleting or other promotion.

If aircraft noise annoys you then do consider joining HACAN East who campaign for more reasonable aircraft noise levels from London airports.

 

Labour Give Up on Bakerloo Line Extension

I was shocked to read the Southwark Council report about the Labour Councillors discretionary spending choices this year.

He plans to spend £30,000 on surveys about reopening Camberwell Station. Camberwell Station was closed along with Walworth Road and Borough Road stations during WWI. BUT they were doomed with the coming of the tram network which skimmed sufficient custom to ensure these stations were uneconomic. When the trams closed in the early 1950’s actual construction work had started to extend the Bakerloo line to Camberwell. But it soon stopped leaving a public transport void.

So choosing now, while purporting to campaign for the Bakerloo Line to be extended to Camberwell, to fund a survey for Camberwell train station to be reopened shows a lack of resolve to get the Bakerloo line extended. TfL will not support both. For over 100 years it has been an either or decision – train station or tram or tube.

I call on Southwark Labour party to use this discretionary spending to fund a study into extending the Bakerloo line to Camberwell and beyond.

IF they insist on funding this train station survey then please have the decency to state publicly you’ve given up on a branch of the Bakerloo line being extended to Camberwell so it can be debated.

Brunel Bridge

I was delighted that Simon Hughes MP and the charity Sustrans announced an architectural competition for the new pedestrian and cycling bridge connecting Rotherhithe with Canary Wharf.

I was first involved proposing this in 1996 when heavily volunteering with Southwark Cyclists. For several years we made this bridge a key request from the group. But the Olympics got in the way, then a focus on rides for novice cyclists and then the 2008 great recession. But behind the scenes Simon Hughes has started to make this happen.

Why? Apart from being a direct link for people walking and cycling it would ease the heavy congestion not just of the Jubilee tube line but also the Overground. Huge growth on the population of Canada Water are planned to exacerbate these pressures. So the new Brunel Bridge can’t happen soon enough.

Do you agree?

 

Street Cleaning

Despite organising a new mechanical street sweeping machine we’ve not yet cracked East Dulwich streets being kept pristine.

One of the problems is that frequency of street cleaning – one a month broom sweeping, 3 times a week litter picking of every street. PLUS a couple of times a month the mechanical street sweeping machine.

BUT the mechanical sweeping machine can only do flat surfaces. So it doesn’t get into the gutter to suck up leaves and litter and detritus.

So Cllr Rosie Shimell and I have asked officers whether if we organised an additional mechanical street cleaning THAT comes with a vacuum nozzle to suck stuff up from the gutters. If this machine can do the job then potentially we could return to daily litter picking/sweeping using these machines. Fingers crossed we can crack this problem.

Cleaning machine with vacuum.jpg

How do you think we could get East Dulwich streets pristine?

“Whims of here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians” damaging education

The Liberal Democrat Schools Minister David Laws has warned in a BBC interview of the “corrosive impact” of self-interested political meddling in schools policy in England. He seems to be spot on in his analysis. He is  calling for an independent body to set the curriculum content and measure whether standards in schools are really improving or declining.

The “whims of here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians” should not decide which books pupils study, Mr Laws said. The schools minister is setting out Lib Dem ideas saying parents and teachers would have much greater confidence in an education system with less “political interference”. Such an independent Education Standards Authority would:

  • Control curriculum content and prevent short-term political changes
  • Provide an objective measure on standards to stop politicians “marking their own homework”

The schools minister also said the Lib Dems would keep the academy school system, and allow more free schools to open. Without free schools and the freedoms academies now have we wouldn’t be solving our local school place crisis. So thisi s good new for Dulwich, Lambeth and Southwark.

Clearly we would still have politicians setting the overall national strategy and financing of the education system but the curriculum detail should be left to subject specialists who have sometimes been ignoredunder the current system.

David Laws also pointed out “Ministers float in and out of the department, often for quite short periods of time” which created “too much turbulence”. The one thing all organisations is stability.

This is clearly a swipe at the controversial re-writing of the curriculum under the previous education secretary Michael Gove, saying parts of the new curriculum have been decided “on a whim”. Barmy things like dropping American modern literature such as Arthur Miller, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and Harper Lee.

Mr Laws called for “realistic comparisons with other countries, based on evidence rather than bogus claims about the latest performance data, which are based often on a partisan assessment”.

“We’ll have a better education system if the degree of political volatility is reduced and policy-making is based more on evidence and less on what suits the politicians in control,” he said.

Mr Laws said independent schools benefited from being at a “greater degree of distance” from the constant upheavals in the state sector.

David Laws said the Liberal Democrats were making a “cradle to college” spending promise to protect budgets from pre-school classes through to the 16- to 19-year-old-age group.

In contrast, he warned the spending plans of the Conservatives beyond the election would leave education services unprotected and at risk of being cut.

He said the Liberal Democrats in office had delivered the pupil premium to support disadvantaged pupils and free meals to infant pupils.

Mr Laws also said he wants to extend free meals to all pupils in primary school.

There is divergence with their coalition partners over allowing Ofsted to inspect academy chains.

“I think it’s inevitable – and most people in Parliament think it’s not defensible in the future to have a different system of accountability for academy chains and local authorities,” he said.

And there is no ruling out more free schools.

With the right sponsors and in the right areas, he said: “We’re certainly not saying that we couldn’t have any more free schools.”

Bonfire Night Top Tips

Many thanks to the RSPCA for these top tips for Fireworks night.

Fireworks night can be a lot of fun, but for animals, it can be terrifying. Take a look at some of our tips to help your furry friend through the fear.

Top tips for cats and dogs
1. Make sure your dog or cat always has somewhere to hide if they want to and have access to this place at all times, e.g. under some furniture or in a cupboard.
2. During firework seasons, walk dogs during daylight hours and keep cats and dogs indoors when fireworks are likely to be set off.
3. At nightfall close windows and curtains and put on music to mask and muffle the sound of fireworks.
4. If your pet shows any signs of fear try to ignore their behaviour and leave them alone unless they are likely to harm themselves.
5. Never punish or fuss over your pet when it’s scared as this will only make things worse in the long run.
6. Make sure your cat or dog is always kept in a safe and secure environment and can’t escape if there’s a sudden noise. Have your pet microchipped in case they do escape.

Top tips for dogs (before the firework season starts)
1. Talk to your vet about pheromone diffusers. These disperse calming chemicals into the room and may be a good option for your dog, in some cases your vet may even prescribe medication.
2. If either of these options is used they should be used in conjunction with behavioural therapy. We would recommend asking your vet to refer you to a clinical animal behaviourist or using the ‘Sounds Scary’ therapy pack (www.soundtherapy4pets.co.uk).
3. Before the firework season starts provide your dog with a doggy safe haven, this should be a quiet area so choose one of the quietist rooms in your home. It should be a place where the animal feels it is in control, so don’t interfere with it when it’s in that area. Train your dog to associate the area with positive experiences eg. by leaving toys there but not imposing yourself at any time. Use a variety of toys and swap them regularly, putting them away when not in use so that your dog doesn’t become bored with them. With time your dog can learn that this place is safe and enjoyable. So when fireworks happen it may choose to go here because it knows that when it is here, no harm will come to it and so it’s more able to cope. It is important that your dog has access to its doggy safe haven at all times even when you’re not at home.

Top tips for dogs (when the fireworks start)
1. Close any windows and black out the ‘doggy play area’ to remove any extra problems caused by flashing lights.
2. Each evening before the fireworks begin, move your dog to the play area and provide toys and other things that they enjoy. Make sure that there are things to play with so that your dog isn’t left alone.
3. Ignore the firework noises yourself. Play with a toy to see if your dog wants to join in, but don’t force them to play.
4. If you know a dog that isn’t scared by noises and which gets on well with your dog, then keeping the two together during the evenings may help your dog to realise that there’s no need to be afraid.

Top tips for small animals
1. If your pets live outside, partly cover cages, pens and aviaries with blankets so that one area is well sound-proofed. Make sure that your pet is still able to look out.
2. Provide lots of extra bedding so your pet has something to burrow into.

I hope you have some great times with family, friends and neighbours.

Medicalise Drug Users

Britain has a long history of criminalising drug use. The war on drugs is a well documented failure. It has created a huge criminal community where the profits are so huge that violence to maintain them takes place.

A new Home Office report comparing the UK’s approach to drug misuse with that of 13 other countries concluded that drug use was influenced by factors “more complex and nuanced than legislation and enforcement alone”. It then explains that Portugal where drug users are treated as a health problem has seen a considerable improvement in drug user health. Portugal has taken this approach since 2001. So it’s well established. For Portugal decriminalistion has clearly worked saving many many lives.

The report also believes there is “no obvious” link between tough laws and levels of illegal drug use. That’s a pretty damning indictment of a huge anti drug user industry we have in Britain. This means we have a huge misallocation of precious national resources. Wasting billions of £’s each year which means we don’t have nearly enough cash to help drug users get better and kick addictions. The only people to benefit from the war on drugs are drug barons making huge illegal profits. We need to concentrate on those Mr.Bigs.

I’m proud that Lib Dem Home Office minister Norman Baker said the report, comparing the UK with other countries, should end “mindless rhetoric” on drugs policy. He made it clear the Tories have been suppressing this report for months.

We need a grown up policy about drug taking. One that is based on real evidence rather than hysteria. One that will help our country be better.