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by Paul Scully | May 15, 2008 | News |
There were several interesting questions asked at the Full Council meeting on Monday:-
Philippa Stroud asked about housing after the resignation of the Chief Executive and Chairman of Sutton Housing Partnership. This was after the failure of the organisation to get the two star rating which would have secured funding to bring our houses up to scratch. We have the second worst housing in the capital and need some £120m to bring it up to a basic standard of decency. Philippa highlighted a case where a single mother was living with her four children in one room.
Philippa also asked why more than 90 girls could not find secondary school places in Sutton. We know how many children enter primary school each year so we should be able to predict secondary school demand with a reasonable level of accuracy. The LibDem lead councillor shrugged this off with the comment that “sometimes the figures don’t add up.” Although thirty places have been made available in Carshalton Girls, sixty children will be left high and dry for sometime to come. Cllr Tim Crowley asked what advice should be given to parents such as one sat in the audience whose daughter had no place for next September. The resident was left disappointed when no answer was forthcoming.
Carshalton resident Paul Kelly, asked what the council was doing to support small businesses and shops in the outlying parts of the Borough like Worcester Park and whether cutting parking charges and increasing spaces would help. He had noticed an increase of boarded up shops and noted that 450 small business had closed in the Borough over the last year. Lynn Gleeson, lead councillor for Economic Development explained that because more women were obliged to work to pay their mortgages, they did not shop in the same way. Whereas it is true to say that shopping patterns are not what they were, Cllr Gleeson failed to explain what the Council was doing to reinvigorate our High Streets in the face of such changes. You may not be surprised to hear that she did not believe that parking charges were too high.
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by Paul Scully | May 13, 2008 | News |
Another full Council meeting last night. The questions threw up some interesting exchanges but I’ll concentrate on the main business for this post.
We discussed two corporate documents, the Sutton Strategy and the Sutton Plan. The former is agreed by the Council and partner organisations such as the NHS Primary Care Trust and the Police. The latter is supposed to translate the LibDem manifesto into actions.
This is all well and good in theory and much of this was required to tick another box for national government in order to get funding but they both highlighted one fact. The documents explained what the Borough was like now and targets listing what they would like to do but there was precious little about how to do any of it. The section detailing implementation ran to a single page with even an Ethnic & Diversity Statement running to five. It clearly demonstrated the fact that the Liberal Democrats have become an unneccesary adjunct to the council; the Borough’s appendix if you will, with officers pushing on with running the show despite the LibDems rather than because of them.
The officers should be there running the day to day administration but the lead councillors are there to give political leadership, setting out their vision and keeping officers on the path to delivering this vision. The case in Sutton is that the majority party have run out of steam, hanging onto the coat-tails of the officers and the council’s partners.
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by Paul Scully | Mar 23, 2008 | News |
Having consulted on a council budget based on a council tax increase of 4.9%, the ruling Liberal Democrats eventually bowed to our pressure by restricting themselves to 3.4% extra. Each year the Conservative Opposition highlight innovative approaches to reducing the tax burden around London such as Hillingdon where they are freezing tax for pensioners. Each year Sutton’s tax continues its relentless increase with little extra in return for residents.
This year’s increase was pegged back after the intervention of David Dombey’s impassioned plea on behalf of pensioners. I notice that in a recent Sutton Guardian (6 March), Mrs Dombey is campaigning to stop the demolition of a public toilet in the ward represented by her daughter, a deputy leader of the council. Maybe they can succeed where other politicians have failed in getting the Lib Dem administration to listen instead of their traditional ‘consult, consider, ignore’ approach.
Ruth Dombey responded when her father told her how to spend the pounds. Will she act now her mother has told her how to spend a penny?
by Paul Scully | Mar 16, 2008 | Carshalton Central, News |
On Wednesday night, my colleagues and I heard Ken Andrew speak at the Carshalton & Clockhouse Local Committee about the issues around the proposed changes to Westmead Road. He presented a petition which attracted significant support from residents that would be most affected by the proposals. I was pleased to see a good number of residents at the meeting to tell us their views.
At the meeting, Ken articulated concerns about the changes to the Hail and Ride bus service and the introduction of speed humps. No-one could disagree with making our roads safer – hence my support for the introduction of the two mini-roundabouts and other limited changes as called for in the petition – but the rest of the scheme appears to address a problem that is not there. Lower Road has an accident record that requires some action. However the plan affects the entire length of Westmead Road and unduly affects bus users and drivers.
As previously reported, when this scheme was first presented to me and Eric, we both queried why speed humps remained in the proposal after being clearly rejected in the consultation. We were told that residents only objected to humps because of possible loss of on-street parking and since no places would be lost, there was no reason to remove them from the scheme. This explanation was derived from the comments that a few residents had written. We were not satisfied with this as we believed that there were insufficient comments to jump to this conclusion and so demanded that speed humps were removed from the design.
With many of these schemes council officers come under pressure to push through plans in fear of losing the funding at the end of the financial year. The choice that we had on Wednesday was described as “take it or leave it”. Councillors unanimously voted to leave it, rejecting the proposal. It is unfortunate that we did not have the option to pick and choose the parts of the scheme that residents believed would have most benefit to them, due to the cumbersome bureaucracy of Transport for London.
Ken Andrew and local resident Paul Kelly did a great job in organising the petition and I was pleased to see how well supported it was. We often take this Council to task for not seeking and responding to residents’ opinions and I am pleased that in this instance, residents have grouped together effectively to ensure that their voice is heard. Eric and I will continue to do our utmost to reflect your views and concerns about Carshalton.
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by Paul Scully | Mar 4, 2008 | News |
The Council Tax increase has been confirmed at 3.4%. Only the LibDems could consider this a good news story, yet they gamely tried to justify it.
We were told that each of the neighbouring councils had bigger increases. This is true, though not the whole picture. Residents in Croydon, Merton and Surrey – all Conservative Councils – still pay far less that we do here in Sutton. One neighbour, Kingston not only had the third highest rise in London but retains the crown of having the highest tax burden of any London Borough. I’ll leave you to guess who runs that Council (clue: same party as Richmond, the second highest tax bill in London).
Croydon residents know what they are getting for their extra money. £1.5m is being invested in extra policing and £4.75m is going into recycling initiatives including recycling facilities for every block of flats in Croydon, something we have failed to do in this Borough which sells its green virtues at every opportunity. Excluding flats means that a massive proportion of the residents in Sutton simply cannot recycle very easily. It also pushes the onus onto householders to meet targets that the Council sets.
This budget is merely treading water offering nothing new for residents except bigger bills. At the same time residents in Hammersmith and Fulham are seeing their bills cut by 3% for the second year in a row, there is a freeze for pensioners’ bills in Hillingdon. Wandsworth and Westminster residents continue to pay just one-third of the amount than we do.
There were several interesting questions asked at the Full Council meeting on Monday:-
