Graffiti at Brent Town Hall

Above is a picture of Cllr Ann John next to some graffiti actually in Brent Town Hall within a few yards of the Council Chamber. I first photogrphed it in December last year, and it is still there. If the Liberal Democrats and Tories can't be bothered with cleaning graffiti in their place of work, is it any surprise that there are so many compalints right across Brent?

Cllr Bertha Joseph: Formal Hearing

I understand the formal hearing into Cllr Bertha Joseph over her alleged breaches of the Code of Conduct will be held on 13 October.

Masons Arms Beer Garden

The Masons Arms beer garden is the key to its improvement over the past three years, and it also touches on a tricky area of enforcement in planning policy.

I recall the Masons Arms before the beer garden. The area was a disused car park, whose main distinction was being the site of a poster for Guy Ritchie's Revolver that sparked a controversy. There is no doubt that the change in use makes the pub much better, but the site has an advantage in terms of noise in that the neighbours are all fairly far away. Behind the beer garden is the dead area of Kensal Green Cemetary, and in front Hazel Road Open Space.

Another site on Neasden Lane is more typical. It is a cafe near residential housing, where the owner is trying to have an outside area for smoking purposes. Given that his cafe has hookah smoking as a key part of his business model, he is unlikely to accept the Planning Service's attempts to stop him from using the area. On the other hand residents strongly object to the noise.

At the moment therefore, the Planning Service are making efforts to close down the outside area, but the cafe owner is likely to keep on re-opening it to serve his business. How can such a dilemma be resolved?

Liberal Democrat U-turn on School Finance

I was interested to read in the press recently that the Liberal Democrats have now decided that an audit of Brent schools is needed. I strongly agree, and spoke in favour of a motion asking for precisely that at Brent Council's July meeting. You can see the minutes HERE.

You can also see that the Liberal Democrat Lead Member Bob Wharton spoke against, saying the idea was impractical. The Tories joined the Liberal Democrats in voting the proposal down. Now only a couple of months later, he is saying he is all in favour. What has changed?

Brent Council and Vaccination

After my earlier post on immunisation, it occurred to me that many people may not understand what local government has to do with the subject. There are countries, such as Finland, where local government has direct executive responsibility over health.

In the UK, we have a scrutiny function but no direct powers. The meeting I attended was a meeting of a scrutiny task group on the subject, formed because Brent has a very low rate of vaccination even by London standards. The fact that the NHS records are so poor means that that task group is likely to have great difficulty in coming up with recommendations.

The second function the Borough has is in emergency planning. This can mean all sorts of things from maintaining IT systems, to coping with the tornado that ripped through part of Kensal Rise, to trying to keep everything going even if there is a widespread outbreak of swineflu.

More Lib Dem Rubbish

More rubbish from the Lib Dems. I just came across this dumped mattress in Wendover Road, no doubt left by someone who did not want to pay Brent Liberal Democrats £25 charge for heavy items.

As chance would have it I passed Cllr Daniel Brown spreading another kind of rubbish, Sarah Teather's latest propaganda leaflet. He is supposed to be the Lead Member for Streetcare issues such as dumped rubbish, but he showed no interest in reporting this eyesore. Just walked straight past it. He and his Lib Dem colleagues simply don't give a damn about anyone in Kensal Green or probably Brent as a whole.

Sarah Teather and the Jubilee Line Refund

I see Sarah Teather MP is pursuing a populist campaign for a refund for Jubilee Line users. First thought of everyone is: "Money back? Great" but how would it actually work?

The petition says: "We the undersigned call on Transport for London to refund local people for not providing a 7-day Jubilee line service. We also call for the Metropolitan line to be allowed to stop at Willesden Green and Neasden stations and for more information to be provided to the public in advance of closures."

Who are the "local people" in this context? I use the Jubilee line sometimes, although my nearest Tube is the Bakerloo. Would I be sufficently local? What about people who live near the Jubilee line, but seldom use it? To qualify for a refund, would you need to produce an oystercard, or have recorded a certain number of trips using Jubilee line stations over a given period?

How much money will I get out of my refund? Sarah Teather says it is because users are paying for a seven day Tube, but only getting a five day service, so I assume that means a per diem figure of some sort. How much is it, and do I have to prove that I use the Jubilee Line on the weekend?

Sarah Teather says that 8 miles of the line were laid with the wrong kind of cable. She then goes on to say: "How on earth did they manage to lay nearly half the length of the Jubilee line with the wrong type of cable without anybody noticing?" Is the Jubilee line really only 16 miles? Does she want refunds from Stratford to Stanmore, or is she only asking for refunds along part of its length?

Finally, there is the point about reopening Willesden Green for the Met line as suggested some time ago by Simon Fletcher HERE. Well done Sarah for catching up. When Cllr David Clues raised this in Council, he was told that the platforms were not maintained at a sufficent quality to be useable, which I assume means that they are accessed for engineering, but there are health & safety or other reasons for the public not to get access. Still it may be worth pursuing.

Perhaps, Sarah Teather should actually use her position to pursue it with TfL like a proper MP, rather than just putting out leaflets making promises that she has no interest in costing or implementing.

Not Another Drop March

Along with many others I walked the 2009 Not Another Drop March last Saturday. Below you can see the candles lit by the Jubilee Clock in Harlesden High Street in memory of murder victims in Brent. There are more than 70 of them. The photographs are of Toni-Ann Byfield, the youngest.

Harrow Road NW10 Congestion

Apparently, the congestion on Harrow Road NW10 is caused by emergency works to the electricity supply. It is due to be completed by 9 October.

Brent Council's Diminishing Returns

As an addendum to the last post about the failure of Liberal Democrat leadership on Brent Council, it is worth looking at what PriceWaterhouseCoopers say about the poor quality of Council services in the Borough.

PWC were commissioned, at a cost of about £100K, to examine services across the Council. They say that 62% of Brent's performance indicators are below average and 38% in the bottom quartile. The proportion of Brent Council's own targets met has fallen from 52% in 2007/8 (the first year when the Lib Dem / Tory coalition could set their own budget to 46% in 2008/9. 57% of Local Area Agreement priorities are below average, with 39% in the lowest quartile. All this seems to indicate an organisation that has reversed its progress under Labour and gone into decline.

One mechanism that Councils should use to arrest such decline should be the scrutiny process. In particular the Performance and Finance Committee is supposed to track progress. Unfortunately, this is chaired by the egregious Cllr Anthony Dunn, who prefers to take it down eccentric by ways whilst ignoring major strategic issues.

Brent Council's Poor Use of Council Tax

Brent Council’s Chief Executive has launched a new plan to reduce costs across Brent Council.

The first thing I notice is that this transforming strategy is being promoted across the Council without having been in front of the Liberal Democrat and Tory councillors. In other words the local government officers are being forced to provide Brent Council with political leadership because the Tory / Lib Dem Executive members are simply not up to the task.

Secondly, the Chief Executive comments that there are “significant savings and efficiencies to be made.” That sounds like an admission that the Council has been wasting money under the Liberal Democrat / Conservative administration.

Gareth identifies two major areas of waste. He admits that the Council has too many managers, sometimes managing only one person. This is a criticism that Labour has been making for some time: that the Council is top heavy with highly paid managers and doesn’t spend enough on the people who actually deliver Council services. He also suggests the need to shed a number of jobs with a suggested number of about 300 jobs, about 10% of the total.

This must be a considerable embarrassment for the Lead Member for Resources, Bob Blackman. Even worse, the Chief Executive also identifies the need to be “One Council” as the key theme. This reverses the fragmentation approach that Bob Blackman adopted when he was leading Brent Council back in the 1990s.

Finally, the Chief Executive identifies the need to work with other partners, especially the NHS, closely. That implies an admission that the vicious confrontation over “cost shunting” that Liberal Democrat Leader Paul Lorber engaged in three years ago was a costly error.

Cafe Vive Iterum

Here is a quick photo from last night's party for Labour candidates at Cafe Vive Iterum in Hamilton Road (just off Dollis Hill Tube).

Left to right are Anita (who runs the Cafe), Dawn Butler MP, and Krupesh Hirani who is standing in Dudden Hill, and whose blog can be found HERE.

Hazel Road Update

By now people in the streets round Hazel Road (near Kensal Green Tube Station) should have received a letter about some of the activities that have been going on down there to counteract anti-social behaviour. Unfortunately, all sorts of rumours have been going around; in some cases being spread by people who should know better.

The police have engaged in a lot of pro-active activities, including extensive use of stop and search to gather intelligence on who precisely the perpetrators are. The hedge at the side of Hazel Road Open Space has been trimmed to improve visibility. It is possible that there will be other physical alterations to discourage loitering as well as police action.

What I am keenest on is improving the Youth Centre. LEAP currently operate the Youth Centre as a standalone unit out of their own pockets. Brent Council Youth Services have been in touch and we are hoping that there will be lots of opportunities for joint working. As part of Neighbourhood Working, the Kensal Green councillors have agreed a very substantial investment to divert young people into more purposive activities.

This seems to me to be a more rounded response than the kneejerk dispersal zone that some people have wanted. Firstly, the previous dispersal zone in Hazel Road did not solve the problem. That is why we are still talking about it. Secondly, the Courts have tightened up the use of dispersal zones that unless you engage with these wider activities such as youth work, they don’t grant you a dispersal zone.

I am sorry that all this has taken so long to bring about, and it is undoubtedly true that mistakes have been made, but I believe the situation is on the way to being turned around for good.

Immunisation in Brent

A few days ago, I went to an interesting meeting on immunisation with a speaker from the NIBSC. Brent has a pretty low rate of immunisation even by London standards. I was shocked to be told that the database on child immunisation is so poor that it is holding back any major efforts to improve the vaccination rate. Apparently the cuts to the number of health visitors, together with the use of a paper based system, meant that a lot of the data simply did not get recorded. Another case of unintended consequences.

However, the NIBSC speaker spoke more generally on the suspicion that many people have over vaccination. As well as the MMR example of a few years ago, he cited a seventies scare about pertussis (whooping cough). Essentially, whooping cough outbreaks slid strongly downward as a result of a vaccination programme until about 1975. In that year, there was a scare that the vaccination caused babies to suffer permanent neurological damage. The scare led the take up of vaccination in England to drop from about 80% to about 30% over three years. Naturally, this was followed by a sharp rise in whooping coughs and a number of children died. Scarily, it took about 15 years for the immunisation rate to recover. So, like the MMR scare, a rumour was started fairly easily, caused tremendous health problems, and those problems took a huge time to recover from.

The worry is that these scares seem to be ignitable out of very little, and the actual arguments don't seem to matter very much.

Dr Wakefield's research was pretty ropey scientifically, but his assured manner seemed to count for more. Many people seem to have an ingrained distrust of medical experts, surprising given the popularity of the NHS. There also seems to be a fear of taking official medicine that sits bizarrely with peoples' willingness to consume all kinds of other things. The argument that taking your MMR doses all at once would overwhelm your immune system suggests that the number of things in a slice of Camembert should finish you off for good.

In Brent, we also apparently have rumours spreading in from other parts of the world. In 2005, some predominantly Muslim parts of Nigeria had a movement to stop the polio eradication programme, as it was thought to be a western programme to sterilise people. As a result there was an outbreak of polio that quickly spread across several countries. I have been told that similar rumours have circulated in some Brent Mosques.

It is difficult to see how these fears can be countered by rational argument, since they are inherently irrational. The two ways I can think of to improve the immunisation rate would be engaging health and education workers, and peer groups through the Children Centres. However, I still don't see these as total solutions.

Localism?

Brent's Chief Executive Gareth Daniel has a Local Government Chronicle piece HERE on the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA). As well as the standard local government compliants about the length of time and resource it takes to report to government inspectors, it raises an issue over accountability that has been troubling me for some time.

The idea of the CAA and local strategic partnerships is that the Council co-ordinates various partnership agencies which agree a common strategy. It doesn't take much account of the differeing priorities of the partners. It also removes priority setting from elected members. There is currently very little oversight by elected members in this process. It also cuts directly against the push to make local authorities more responsive to residents, either directly or through their councillors. The danger is that the agreed priority of the partnership and the Audit Commission will carry on independently of attempts by the public or members to influence it. I am not sure what the solution to that is, but all political parties need to recognise the problem if there really is going to be any kind of new "localism".

Why is Britain's Political Debate so Immature?

I hope the Party Conference season will clear ground for some actual policy debate. Currently, all the political parties aren't really addressing the balance sheet problems of the government, or what will be needed over the next Parliament.

Normally, I would go into a diatribe about how Brent Liberal Democrats stand for nothing at this point, but instead lets look at David Cameron.

In the run up to the 1997 election, I well recall how Labour was questioned over and over again about its spending plans. Details like the Yacht Britannia were picked over. Now, Cameron seems to get away with nothing very much.

His speech on cutting the cost of politics (which dressed up a number of measures designed to help the Tory party, like reducing the number of seats) came up with only two sets of proposals. The cost cutting package was worth only £120 million, hardly a significant contribution to the budget deficit, but he wasn't really pressed to come up with more.

The other scheme, cutting ID cards, is also an old Lib Dem standby. I have always thought it rather odd,as I understood that each ID card would be distributed on receipt of a fee, like getting a passport. If you have abolished the ID cards, presumably you can't charge people for getting them. So where is the saving?

All three parties need a media that really does it job of scrutinising their policy proposals instead of concentrating on gossip and personal indisgressions.

Boris Johnson's Emissions Failure

Simon Fletcher has a post on Boris Johnson backtracking on the Low Emissions Zone (LEZ) HERE.

I have a question on this at the next full meeting of Brent Council. From a Brent perspective, Boris' view gets even stranger. The Tory / Lib Dem administration in Brent is mooting demolition of a number of properties on the North Circular Road at great expense because the pollution is so bad as to make them virtually uninhabitable. Certainly, the pollution is linked to respiratory diseases in that neighbourhood. Most of the pollution is caused by vehicles going through Brent from elsewhere i.e. the vahicles that might be affected by Boris Johnson imposing a LEZ.

It seems that the right hand doesn't know what the further right hand is doing.

Baroness Scotland

I don't have much time for the attacks on Baroness Scotland. She seems to have committing some fairly minor errors in failing to photocopy documents.

Admittedly, she might reflect that if it was so easy for the Attorney General to fail to comply with the law she herself introduced, perhaps other might have trouble, but all this talk of resignation seems vindictive. If it were a private businessman making this sort of mistake, would we really have newspapers and politicians claiming that a £5,000 fine was not enough, and that they should be forced to resign from their company? Given the shortage of talent in Parliament, do we really want to force someone of proven ability out over something they may not even have directly dealt with themselves?

Brent Council: Lower Emissions in Transport?

Cutting carbon emissions has been made a major priority by the Labour government. So far Brent Council doesn't seem to have many new ideas on how to do this.

However, there is a big opportunity in Brent's Transport fleet. The Council has a fleet of about 120 minibuses that are used either to take adults to Day Centres, or children to school. These have traditionally been bought on a ten year period before being replaced, but the Council is now thinking of switching to a seven year period for each vehicle. This would mean that a large proporition of the fleet would have to be replaced in the next year or two.

Why not replace them with alternative fuel vehicles that would cut carbon emissions.? They usually have a very short route (inside the Borough). If there is a need for a depot supplied with the specific fuel concerned, they normally do a round trip. They might even be cheaper to run. So far, the Liberal Democrats in Brent have rejected even considering the idea, but I hope to wear them down over time.

It is the kind of thing an ambitious Council would jump at, and the kind of thing that the dullards currently in charge of Brent would not.

Dumped Rubbish and Streetcare

Should you see dumped rubbish on the streets in Brent, you can report it to streetcare on streetcare@brent.gov.uk or by phoning 8937 5050. If it is on the public Highway (either the road or the pavement), Brent Council has to remove it for free, as they did with this furniture I found on All Souls Avenue.



Of course, before the Liberal Democrats and the Tories took over Brent Council, the Council would also have taken it away from your garden for free. Once the Lib Dim / Tory coalition was formed, they introduced a £25 charge for taking your old furniture away from your house. Could this possibly be linked to furntiure being dumped on the streets?