It is time to do another of my reviews of the past six months, starting with waste and recycling. The new recycling system appears to have confounded its critics, and led to a substantial improvement in recycling. This saves the Council money, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and appeals to most people as a more rational use of resources. Of course, there is still ongoing work in terms of getting landlords to educate their their tenants better, cracking down on trade waste and dealing with house of multiple occupation in particular. One of the big projects for the next six months is to start designing a new contract for waste, street cleaning and grounds maintenance. This will replace the current contract held by Veolia, which runs out on 31 March 2014. That may sound a long way away, but the procurement timetable is actually quite tight.
Ancillary to this Is a whole saga around the doings of the West London Waste Authority. However, as with the giant rat of Sumatra, this is a tale for which the world is not yet prepared.
We also had the Olympics, which passed off without any major hitches. This is easy to take for granted, but the complexities of maintaining the Borough's day to day operations were really quite complicated. Things like cleaning, rubbish disposal, keeping transport flowing needed a lot of planning. There will also have to be a lot of follow up work in services like Trading Standards, and of course the sports service.
The third controversial issue of the past six months was the final implementation of the Libraries Transformation Project. Although the old buildings were closed in October 2011, we only got full access to the bookstock in late May, and the various strands of the project have only really started to come into their own during the past six months. These include: the Summer Reading Challenge, the Kilburn Library refurbishment, home delivery improvements, the school library card scheme, free legal advice, homework clubs, our first artist in residence scheme, online courses and so on. It will be interesting to see how the success of our service compares to authorities that have gone down different avenues.
We have also seen lots of progress on less high profile issues. Falling carbon emissions is perhaps the most obvious, especially given the recent experience with Hurricane Sandy. Gearing up for the move to the Civic Centre is probably helping us achieve this. We have also seen the Dollis Hill House saga finally end, a new food growing strategy, a minor variation in leaflet regulation that led to accusations that I was Stalinist, progress on animal welfare in Brent, the start of work on a new park in Chalkhill and the approval of outdoor gym equipment in some Brent parks.
In the ward, there have been a number of issues. These include the installation of artwork in Hazel Road Open Space, improvements to Station Approach (at last), the successful resolution of another longstanding issue at the former Willesden Social Club, progress on The Green Man, further work on the redevelopment of Harlesden Town Centre (especially dealing with the waste and street cleaning issues), and road safety improvements at Princess Frederica School. Best of all, we have the opening of the Roundwood Youth Centre, that almost didn't happen as a result of the Tory/Liberal Democrat government.
2 comments:
For some of us in Kensal Green Ward the issue is still the library.
Not the only one certainly, but an important one.
Do you hear Cllr Powney? We think that the fact you closed our library is an issue.
Getting your workers to be less rude, in the Recycling dept., ending their emails when you communicate with them with, 'Thank You', and their manager to ignore you when you complain about it, might also encourage more people to embrace the subject of recycling more fully. I used to be a very enthusiastic recycler, but now, in view of their appalling behaviour, I couldn't give a ****!
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