Campaign launched

We had a great pre-campaign dinner in Surbiton last night, mainly for candidates and friends in the Kingston and Surbiton constituency. The largest dining room in the building in Surbiton Crescent was packed. We had warm-up speeches from Kevin Davis, our Leader, and Tony Arbour of Richmond borough and the GLA. Our main speaker, Steve Norris, was unable to make it for family reasons, but his place was filled extremely well by our newest Member of the European Parliament, Syed Kamall. His main theme on the Conservatives as a party of achievement and opportunity was a good reminder to us all of why we are in politics - to help people achieve things for themselves and their communities. Let's hope that in our own small way in Kingston we can do do this in the next four years.

Client state?

Two emails have reached me in the last two days which put the finger on one of the biggest problems currently strangling enterprise and efficient local and national government in the UK. I refer to the bloated state of the public sector.
We know that more than half the jobs 'created' under 'New' Labour since 1997 have been in the public sector and many of them administrative, not delivering services, not wealth creating and often of highly doubtful utility in growth areas such as the various inspectorates set up to monitor the achievement of Brown's 'targets' - the modern version of Stalin's five year plans and just as distorting of effort as they were. And of course we have the ones tackling various 'problems', whose whole career structure depends upon ensuring that the 'problems' should never be solved but that ever more 'problem' areas should be identified requiring ever more solvers........and so on ad infinitum.
The latest local government enormity I heard about in the emails, one of which came from the Sustainability Officer(sic) of the Council was of the existence of a Council Travel Awareness Officer, supposedly encouraging bus travel and discouraging car use.
So all you people paying the highest Council Tax in London and/or being means tested for the cost of domiciliary care can rest easy in the knowledge that your Liberal Democrat Council is making good use of your money on such schemes and personnel as this.

Private Sector Housing Forum

This is intended as an interface between the Council and private sector housing providers. It met last night.
Subjects for discussion included the new Tenancy Deposit Scheme and the Local Housing Allowance.
The TDP is supposed to come into force on 6th April, but not all the Regulations are as yet in place, so there is some confusion as to how it will operate and how landlords and tenants are all to be informed about it. Landlords' organizations such as the National Landlords' Association will do sterling work, but there are reckoned to be 750,000 landlords in Britain, the vast majority of whom belong to no organization at all.
The LHA would be funny if it were not so tragic. The ostensible intention of the Government is to make 'vulnerable' households (means in this context families in receipt of Housing Benefit) more financially responsible by paying the benefit to them instead of, as with current Housing Benefit, direct to the landlord (thus avoiding rent arrears and consequent eviction). The LHA is also differently calculated, using a formula (as I understand it) based on family size>no. of rooms required x median cost of renting said number in the local housing market. One flaw is that half the available accommodation will cost more than the median and in many cases much more. Families will be free to rent fewer rooms than the family size formula indicates they should have. This might mean they get accommodation for less than their assessed LHA. They will be free to pocket the difference.
All of this seems to me to be a recipe for

• rent arrears, to avoid which
• landlords will be less than ever inclined in high demand areas like Kingston to rent accommodation to people on benefits, while
• such people will be encouraged to go into overcrowded accommodation as well.

The government has been trialling the scheme in half a dozen 'pathfinder' (sic) areas - not Kingston. It has produced a glossy booklet finding that such prognostications as the above are not justified, though, reading between the lines, there is an element of back-pedalling. Times for introduction have been lengthened and there are signs of nibbling at the edges of the scheme. But basically the Government is desperately trying to persuade itself that the scheme is good and well thought out. It didn't succeed last night in convincing anybody else, except, perhaps, the one Labour councillor present........

Davey gets a new job........

Sir Menzies Campbell, having been elected Leader of the Liberal Democrats, has moved our local MP, Mr. Edward Davey, from his Education portfolio to the front bench spokesmanship on the Department of Trade and Industry. Just a few months ago the Liberal Democrats were wanting to abolish this Department outright.
So is Sir Menzies' move a promotion - or a demotion - for Mr. Davey?
Time will tell.

What a waste...........

This photo shows me, as Cabinet Secretary for Environment four years ago, surrounded by some of the 'fridge mountain' created by the EU's directive on CFCs and (moreso) by DEFRA's tardy and totally inadequate response to it.

In Kingston, thanks to some excellent work by the Environment Contracts manager, we were able to be just about the first local authority to make adequate arrangements to cope with the disposal problems the Directive created. Our success showed that 'where there's a will, there's a way'.

By the time I left office in 2002 we had nearly finished work on a complete waste management strategy, on which an all-party group of councillors had been working for years, with extensive meetings that seemed to make little tangible progress. After I took on the portfolio, the lead officer and I pushed things forward considerably by devoting whole afternoons to the issues involved so as to cut down the time spent in the working party. The whole thing was nearly complete by March 2002. Then we had a change to single party Lib Dem control and the strategy document seemed to disappear from view, the final version not appearing until 2004/5. One thing that emerges from this is that the volume of waste recycled in the Borough appears to be less now than 4 years ago. We had added tins, plastic bottles and textiles to the paper recycling scheme we inherited from the Lib Dems and they have since replaced textiles with glass.

Even so we are not recycling anything like enough and it's costing us about £1m in landfill tax each year. That's why we proposed at Budget Council to introduce a weekly recycling collection, the cost of which would be substantially offset by savings of landfill tax by encouraging people to recycle more and put less in the dustbin. The idea was - to coin a phrase - rubbished by the Lib Dems. I hope they might change their minds - or Kingstonians might change them for them.

The A3 Bus Gate

Visited the A3 bus gate referred to on www.pauljohnston.info with Priyen Patel our researcher. We met Paul Saunders and other residents. Paul has a very impressive archive with photos and press articles from years back detailing the dangers posed by this bus gate when it was opn in the past. Priyen and I took some of our own while we were there. We witnessed a near concertina collision as a couple of cars had to brake sharply as a bus slowed dramatically to get through the gate. The approach to the gate is obscured by a pedestrian footbridge and any driver behind a bus would believe themselves to be on a 50mph (80kph) 6 lane dual carriageway and would not expect a bus to take a sudden lurch to the left, apparently through the crash barrier that runs along the full length of the road.

We observed buses going down the slip road, completely occupying an advisory cycle lane. Any cyclist using it would have no chance against an oncoming bus. The only 'safe' place for cyclists is, thus, the footway.

One bus overshot the gate completely (it was going far to fast to make the turn) and carried on down the A3. It still managed to stop at the same stop it would have used if it had used the gate.

This is a piece of arrogance by TfL who refuse to listen to the people who know. My hope is that someone doesn't end up paying for it with a limb or even their life.

Budget Council - the Outcome

It was a long Budget Council, reminiscent of the days of 'no overall control' - surprising when there's an Administration with an overall majority of 12! At the end of the Leader's speech we finally got to see what the Lib Dems had been cooking up. Instead of a 4.7% council tax hike, they are going for a 3.59% rise financed largely by raiding the Reserves to the tune of £800k, regardless of the Director of Finance's strictures against this in paras 59-62 of his Report to Executive. There are some lame and uncosted proposals for raising extra money in the Leader's motion, but essentially no fundamental issues are tackled and this was a 'vote now pay later' Budget.
We Conservatives put forward a reasoned and costed amendment which would have produced a CT increase of just under 2% and introduced a weekly recycling collection instead of the present fortnightly one. This has to be done if we are serious about increasing the amount of recycled materials from households. It's just too easy at the moment for householders to put tins etc in the dustbin rather than have them hanging about the house for up to a fortnight.
Our proposal did not find favour with the Exec Member for Environment, partly, one thinks, because her side hadn't proposed it. If such a scheme works it would significantly affect the recycling rate and significantly reduce our liability to pay Landfill Tax, currently just under £1m per annum.

The Ming Emperor

The Lib Dems have now ditched troubled but youthful Charles Kennedy and replaced him by veteran Sir Menzies ('Ming') Campbell. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/02032006/325/campbell-named-liberal-democrat-leader.html.
Before I'm accused of ageism I must say that I've been feeling a bit upset since Michael Howard went that all the party leaders were younger than me. In DC's case considerably so. So well done the Lib Dems for giving us one leader again who is a War Baby and my senior by at least 3 years.
Of course you're as old as you feel and I'm taking time to get accustomed to the fact that people don't think of me as 'young Johnston' any more. But Ming has a bit of an air of Alec Douglas-Home about him - basically decent, a cultivated Scot, quite an expert on foreign affairs. Sir Alec was one of the nicest men I ever met in politics but he wasn't an election winner. I don't think Ming will be either. Only time will tell whether he's as nice as Sir Alec.
There is, though, one important question both the Lib Dems and Labour will have to face (assuming Brown succeeds Blair): in post Devolution Britain, can a Scottish MP be a credible Prime Minister?

Budget Council

Tonight should see the culmination of a rather bizarre process. The Administration will finally reveal its Budget proposals for the coming year. For some reason the budget process this year has been different from all the previous years I have been on the Council.

• Because of delays Overview Panels were not able to comment on the draft policy budget as it concerned them, so members specialising in areas of Council activity have had no chance until today to discuss in public the Administration's proposals. There must have been discussions inside the Lib Dem group, one feels, but the rest of us (and the public) don't know what goes on there.
• Overview Panel chairs did get to attend a meeting of the Community Leadership and Resources OP (see My Other Blog at www.pauljohnston.info) but time was necessarily restricted and only three Executive members turned up. Where were the other four?

Whatever, it looks as though we may well end up with the largest rise and the highest Council Tax in London. Doubtless some of the Lib Dem bloggers will find a way of presenting this as a cut. We shall see!

Bird Sanctuary in Oakhill

Went with Janet Bowen-Hitchings, Christina Gardiner, Marie-Claire Edwards and other officers to look at the bird sanctuary and open ground in Oakhill yesterday morning. The actual bird sanctuary at the top of the slope is protected by a formidable pallisade fence but the area below is in grave danger of becoming overgrown with brambles, elder etc and we might lose some of the specimen trees there if we're not careful. Some local residents have also complained about nefarious activities (unspecified) by individuals being carried out there.

The outcome of our deliberations was that we should carry out a species audit of the 'public' area with a view to an ecologically sensitive management programme, starting probably in 2007, after consultation with nearby residents. This will involve clearing some of the undergrowth and crown-lifting some of the trees so as to let more light in. The bird sanctuary should be left very largely alone.

Deceitful 'Voice'

Have received a Lib Dem publication calling itself the 'Voice'. It abuses 'statistics' in a way which calls to mind the saying about 'lies and damned lies'.

• The Lib Dems came to office and power in 2002 with the biggest majority anyone has had since 1982 at least (LD 30 C 15 Lab 3). Since then the Council staff have increased from 3750 to 4518 - 500 of that increase in the past year alone. They are NOT all extra teachers and care assistants by any means.
• The Band D Council Tax has, in the same time, soared from £1060 to £1471 - yet the 'Voice' claims the Lib Dems have kept it down.

They draw grotesquely distorted comparisons between the 'brave new world' they would like us to believe we live in now and the previous period of Tory 'control'.

• From 1998-2002, when the Conservatives formed a minority administration in a Council of 21 Conservatives (from 2001 18 Cons and 3 Independents) 19 Liberal Democrats and 10 Labour.
• The Lib Dems and Labour refused to form a coalition and even when the Lib Dems became the largest party in the summer of 2001 they refused to take office.
• The Lib Dems and Labour imposed their own choice of Mayor in 2000 and 2001 and controlled the Overview Panels.
• The budgets of 2000 and 2002 were most emphatically theirs not the Tories'.
• They exercised 'power without responsibility and were keen to keep it that way.

The Tories have not actually controlled Kingston since 1994, and then only by the Mayor's casting vote between 1990 and 1994.

The voters of Kingston gave the Lib Dems an unparallelled opportunity in 2002 and they have done remarkably little with it.........hence the 'Voice's' rather strangled, desperate distortion of the past and the present. Sad, really.