Good Riddance to the Racist Vans

Just a quick post to welcome the good riddance to the racist vans put out by the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.  Our society is cleaner without them.

God and Mammon Meet in the Credit Union

I understand that the Bishop of Kensington, the Rt Rev'd Paul Williams, has enrolled in Your Credit Union (YourCU) as part of the Church of England's efforts to compete payday lenders out of existence.  YourCU mainly covers Kensington, but also covers Kensal Green and Queens Park.

I am impressed by the way the Church of England is taking this issue to heart, and making a major national promotion across thirty dioceses.

English Language Difficulties in Brent

One of the sets of stats in the report on the Public Realm contract that I have not seen before related to the numbers of people in the Borough who have difficulty with English communication.  It is broken out by ward below:

	Cannot Speak English Well	Cannot Speak English	Total	All Categories	% with Language Difficulties
Alperton	1,592	342	1,934	13,455	14.4%
Wembley	1,442	307	1,749	14,116	12.4%
Welsh Harp	1,054	197	1,251	13,103	9.5%
Dudden Hill	1,042	195	1,237	14,355	8.6%
Harlesden	1,269	220	1,489	16,154	9.2%
Queensbury	1,099	253	1,352	14,565	9.3%
Sudbury	1,129	188	1,317	14,251	9.2%
Tokyngton	1,102	243	1,345	14,509	9.3%
Dollis Hill	938	147	1,085	12,783	8.5%
Fryent	866	146	1,012	12,850	7.9%
Kensal	929	169	1,098	14,149	7.8%
Preston	1,023	187	1,210	14,793	8.2%
Stonebridge	1,008	200	1,208	15,998	7.6%
Willesden	1,046	180	1,226	14,885	8.2%
Barnhill	918	181	1,099	15,058	7.3%
Kenton	630	143	773	11,761	6.6%
Mapesbury	716	108	824	14,888	5.5%
Brondesbury	477	111	588	12,525	4.7%
Northwick	547	112	659	12,398	5.3%
Kilburn	580	112	692	16,230	4.3%
Queens Park	457	89	546	14,554	3.8%

The average is 8%, although the total of all the wards does not add up to the total population of the Borough.  I assume that this is because some people did not answer the census question.

These figures are actually somewhat lower than I imagined that they would be.  Lack of Engl;ish tends to be a major problem in my experience, and I thought it was more widespread than this.  There isn't any magic bullet to deal with it.  Not least because we have such a variety of languages.  In somewhere like Tower Hamlets, the non English language is generally Bengali.  In Brent, you can easily find half a dozen languages in the same street.

Wembley Library The First Quarter

I mentioned before that Wembley Library seems to be a big success compared to the former Town Hall Library, but it is worth looking at the figures for the first quarter of operation for this.

The figures for visitor numbers are:

	2013	2012	% Change
July	49,769	20,689	140.6%
August	54,222	21,028	157.9%
September	42,376	17,539	141.6%
Total	146,367	59,256	147.0%

The figures for book borrowing are:

	2013	2012	% Change
July	16,549	9,489	74.4%
August	20,205	10,652	89.7%
September	15,262	8,466	80.3%
Total	52,016	28,607	81.8%

These are both impressive jumps in numbers, but I think it is also worth thinking about the qualitative differences.

Some people, like Phil Bradley, see the future of libraries as helping people to cross the digital divide and become more familiar with the latest information technologies.  You can get a sense of this in Wembley with the staff regularly helping people with the PCs and the fixed ipads available.  Less obvious is the ipad lending service or loans of energy meters, and training in things such as how to construct a web site. 

Incidentally, Wembley Library also features an impressive list of writer events, including Martina Cole on Wednesday.  You can find more Brent libraries events here.

Social Value and Procurement

The new Public Realm contract is the first really big contract that Brent has had with the Social Value Act in place.  I have expressed concerns before about how Brent Council can reconcile the need for financial savings, service performance and the desire for greater "social value" than before. 

Despite my skepticism, I have to admit, that the new contract does do a good job of improving environmental outcomes, and goes some way to help economic outcomes by providing apprenticeships and the possibility of the London Living Wage.  However, those who see Councils as just a pool of employment are likely to be disappointed as the greater efficiency which is inescapable in the current financial circumstances makes Spanish practices impossible even if they were desirable. 

It is also worth noting that the area of greatest difficulty in terms of low pay and lack of career progression is in adult social care contracts, and there seems next to no possibility of there being improvement there.

Carbon Emissions in the Brent Public Realm Contract

One of the innovations in the new Public Realm contract is a specific target to reduce carbon emissions, which I don't believe featured in the 2007 contract it replaces.  The target refers to emissions from office buildings, other operational buildings, vehicle fuel and "non-vehicle" fuel.  The intention is to cut emissions from 2,717 tons of CO2e per year in 2014/15 to 2,690 in 2016/17.

While this is welcome, it is small beer compared to the benefit of cutting the waste sent to landfill.  Landfill is a huge generator of methane as food waste rots in the grounds.  Even though modern landfill sites such as the one in Calvert in Buckinghamshire that West London uses, burn the methane for electricity it is still a major greenhouse gas contributor.  Thus, the reduction in actual waste is likely to be a more important factor than the direct carbon emissions of the vehicles.

Smaller Bins in Brent

I pointed out before that the new contract for waste is progressive in encouraging waste reduction.  Part of this is adopting 140 litre bins.  I recall this coming up during the consultation on introducing the blue top bins, and many people were quite keen on it.  I assume that the existing protocol around shared bins for (for instance) flats in a converted house would remain the same, but this is a point I need to clarify.

Food Waste

The huge waste of food world wide is covered here.  West London is pioneering food waste reduction as I mentioned a few days ago.  However, I find it ominous that the company building the power plant to dispose of WLWA's waste has done a lot of research and remains confident that at least 50% of the fuel they are supplied with will be food waste.

Measuring Library Performance

My Sunday blog on library performance suggested that our standard measurements are rather old fashioned.  The basic logic is that book borrowing is the core activity of libraries, and that all the other activities can be broadly captured by visitor numbers.

That is maybe a workable model for 1990, but hasn't the game changed by two big technology changes? I am thinking of the Internet and of wireless technology.

To some extent, libraries are used to the Internet, but our measurements still tend to assume that everyone goes to a building to access library services.  I often point out that many traditional library activities _ reading newspapers, borrowing books, searching a catalogue _ can be done online.  The amount of stuff this covers is much more extensive than people generally think.  Despite ebook borrowing being much slower to take off than I anticipated, getting on for a quarter of Brent's book loans occur without someone going to a library.  Therefore our footfall figures simply don't capture a lot of what libraries do, even by proxy.

The second big change is the rise of wireless.  Libraries are getting used to this.  All Brent libraries are wireless foot example, but we don't really capture it in measurements.  Of course, a lot of it is still quite new.  iPhones were launched only in 2007, and iPads only in 2010.  Whereas a few years ago, a library could monitor its IT activity via the log ons at desk bound computers, there is now a growing trend to bring in their own devices, which drives the growing use of soft furnishings rather than desks in library design.

We need to find ways of tracking all this activity, so that policy can be determined by evidence about how modern libraries actually work rather than childhood anecdotes.

Brent Libraries Gold Award

Congratulations to Brent Libraries for getting a Gold Award for its Six Book Challenge for the second year running!  We had 163 completes this year, compared to 157 before.

The scheme is run by the Reading Agency to encourage adult reading.

Curtilage Collection and the New Recycling Contract

Although I think the overall contract for waste and street cleaning in Brent is very strong, one area that troubles me is the proposed changes to curtilage collection. 

The Present Collection System
At present, residents simply leave their bins and the contractors collect it, returning the empty bins to somewhere in the front garden.  They are supposed not to leave it in the way of anyone coming in or out of the house, although I have often heard people say that this requirement is often ignored.  There is a special assisted collection service for people who are infirm for one reason or another.

The Proposed Alternative System
The proposed alternative is that people will be expected to leave their bins at the edge of the property or they will not be collected.  This effectively happens already in some parts of Brent, and I have been told in other parts of London, but I am not sure that people will take to it in southern parts of the Borough with lots of houses in multiple occupation, high rates of transition and poor knowledge of English.  The attraction is of course that it makes it much easier for the bin men, and therefore represents a significant monetary saving.

I would be interested in hearing what other people think.

Street Gritting and the New Brent Contract

Street gritting tends to get forgotten most of the year, but reappears as soon as it snows.  The new contract plans that the contractor will provide a new salt barn in Brent, as well as more equipment to move the salt around.  The inclusion of parks staff under one contract means that there will be more people to actually do the gritting than at present.  I assume that the contractor will continue to use the excellent weather forecasting service, which I am told already saves significant sums in unecessary salt usage. 

I have never heard this officially, but I assume lower salt usage is also helpful in terms of biodiversity, as a lower amount of dissolved salt eventually drains off into the ground.

Summer Reading Challenge in Brent Libraries

A recent blog on public libraries news mentions Brent's Summer Reading Challenge figures.  The target for this year was 4,431 children as joiners, and the service actually achieved 4,483 joiners.  The target for finishers was 2,360, and the actual figure was 2,401.  This is an even better performance than last year. 

Brent Libraries First Half Performance

I have got into the habit of tracking Brent Library figures here, so it seems like a good time to look at the half year performance.

Up to the end of September, we had 751,850 visits compared to 680,333 in the same period in the previous year.  That is an increase of 10%.  The book loan figures have more modest growth.  The year so far had 485,949 loans, compared to 483,073, growth of 0.6%.

There is a case that both these measures are rather old fashioned and we need to find different benchmarks.  For instance, it has been true for a very long time that many people access libraries not to borrow books but to use computers.  It is also true that many people use Brent Library services without actually going into a physical library.  Brent Library users can now search the catalogue, borrow books, read periodicals, and borrow ebooks without setting foot in an actual library.  This makes the traditional footfall measure much less useful than it once was.

Dunning Kruger Effect

An aside here.  I have only recently come across of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome. This is defined as:

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance. As a result, such people remain unaware of their incompetence and accordingly fail to take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence.

What a useful concept.

The New Brent Contract and the Waste Hierarchy

The report into the new waste contract coming up on Monday is written in terms of improving Brent's recycling rate, but I think it is more interesting in terms of its relations with the waste hierarchy as a whole. 

The contract is quite forward looking in having explicit waste reduction targets.  Traditionally, we we have tended to focus too much on upping the recycling rate.  The introduction of the blue top bins led to a big jump in recycling.  The package of measures introduced in April this year should hopefully raise the recycling rate to 50%.  As the rate gets even higher, pushing it higher still; becomes more and more difficult.

I think over time, we will need to think more in terms of landfill diversion, by reduction or other means.

Indefensible Council Tax

I am assuming that people may be a bit maxed out by the number of posts I have been doing on the new waste and street cleaning contract.  It is just that, having pursued the issues for so long, it is good to see the final stages comping up.

Instead of blogging on it today, I thought I would look at a story on Council finance north of the border.  Thus, I leap from one source of glamour and excitement to another.  COSPA, which is the Scottish equivalent of CIPFA (i.e. the main public finance association).  They point out that the Holyrood policy (which Holyrood shares with Eric Pickles) of freezing Council Tax for a small government grant is unsustainable.  It gradually erodes the proportion of income that the Council itself controls.  Incidentally undermining the localism rhetoric that Eric Pickles has used to cut central government grants in general. 

I am not sure of the figures, but it sounds as if the Scottish figures, of only 14% of Council income coming from Council Tax, is even lower than in England.

It is tempting to try to change this by going back to the past and giving greater freedom over Council Tax levels to local authorities.  Aside from the problem of this quite likely leading to massive "catch up" rises, the Council Tax taxbase has not been revalued since the early 1990s.  Hence, the valuation bands have less and less connection to the reality on the ground. 

I was recently reading The Poor Had No Lawyers by Andy Wightman, which is about Scottish land reform.  Believe it or not, it is really quite interesting.  His suggestion is introducing a Land Value Tax that taxed land, rather than the buildings on top of it.  The political challenges to making that happen would be huge, but something as radical as that is probably needed.

Street Cleaning and the New Contract

One of the most common complaints about the environment in Brent is about street cleaning.  Therefore a lot of attention was paid to this aspect in the new contract.  The older contract focuses on the number of cleans per week, where3as the new one (on street cleaning and other things) is more concerned with outputs.  Rather than demand the contractor clean a street (say) once a week, they are required to meet a Keep Britain Tidy standard of cleanliness. 

The grades they need to meet will be either A (clean) of B (with only small items).  Obviously, this is easier to say than achieve.

Of particular interest to people who live near town centres such as Willesden High Road or off Kilburn High Road is an apparently arcane change in zoning.  The old contract had five zones, with most of the Borough regarded as "residential" and getting fewer cleans than town centres.  This sounds fine in principle, but provides problems for areas such as Wendover Road just off Harlesden High Street.  Here litter blows off the High Street and more litter is dropped by the high number of people going through to Willesden Junction.  The effect is that Wendover Road needs more frequent cleaning than most of Brent's streets.  The old contract did not have the flexibility to deal with this.  The new contract is intended to give greater flexibility by making the relationship between need and resource much stronger.

Communications and the New Street Cleaning Contract

One of the key changes in working practices of the new waste and street cleaning contract is in the greater role the contractor will have in communications.  This is a definite shift from the current situation which is much more led by Brent Council officers.

The new arrangement commits the contractor to various waste reduction targets, and gives it the responsibility for communicating with residents to achieve them.  Hence there are targets for attending road shows and events, the contractor will be expected to be more pro-active in producing recycling materials and there is expected to be more scope for anti-litter campaigns.

Incidentally, isn't it odd that most of the conversations that I have with people about littering seem to blame the people picking up the litter rather than the people who dropped it in the first place?

Brent Libraries Newspaper Service

Brent Libraries have now introduced a new newspapers service, which anyone with a library card can access online.  It has a vast range of newspapers from the UK and around the world.  Most of the major UK titles are there, with the exception of the Murdoch press (no bad thing in my view).

When we did the consultation exercise in 2011, just over half of respondents said that they used Brent libraries specifically to access periodicals, so the new service should be a winner.