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by Paul Scully | Dec 23, 2009 | News |
Angry residents have been hitting the phones this week with complaints to the Council reaching levels last seen when a £35 per bag charge was slapped on green garden waste collections. When the first snow arrived this week, the main roads were navigable as the gritting teams had enough warning to cover the ground. Side roads were a mixed bag.
Tuesday saw rain which had cleared much of the snow, suddenly freeze after a rapid drop in temperature. This caused chaos across the Borough with the main east-west A232 at a total standstill. People reported 2 hour journeys to get from Cheam to Carshalton. Side roads were treacherous.
Now, no gritting effort is going to remove every flake of snow and trace of ice from the highways but people have got every right to be angry when the short-sighted LibDem administration slashed the winter road maintenance budget by £20,000 AFTER last February’s snowfall which had a bigger effect than Copenhagen on people’s driving habits, as shown in the photo. This cut was made as £16,000 of taxpayers’ cash was spent on upgrading the air conditioning in the Council leader’s office.
A mere ten months later, snow returns, everywhere grinds to a halt. The gritting team have been working hard throughout. Theirs is a thankless task, working around the clock to cope and keep us moving but there is more that we can do. There are plenty of residents who would be prepared to help grit their pavements. How many grit bins would £20,000 have paid for. Whether emergency bins are put out when the warnings come or permanent ones are opened ahead of the snowfall, I don’t know. However if we are to trust people more rather than run everything from the warm and climate-controlled Council office, then we should help people to help themselves as well. Alternatively the LibDems could watch the roads freeze whilst they freeze the Council Tax just ahead of a difficult election campaign. Oh wait…!
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by Paul Scully | Nov 18, 2009 | News |
I’m not sure that I have been so appalled at a decision taken at Development Control Committee as tonight. After the fourth time of asking a planning application to demolish a perfectly good family house to build four houses in the back garden was approved after all bar one Liberal Democrat voted it through.
There were so many reasons why I feel disillusioned by the people that have run our borough for so long tonight after they demonstrated their total inadequacy tonight.
1. Two ward councillors from both political parties, both who know the area very well, spoke robustly against the application.
2. The person who has to live next to the site complained about having to live next to a 66 metre long, 8 foot high fence and four houses.
3. The back garden currently floods. This water will now be in someone’s front room.
4. If No. 38 decided to put up a fence, the sightlines from the new 4 houses would be totally obscured making the road a real hazard.
5. The houses are an over-intensification of the site. Planners refused to make the Poet’s Estate an Area of Special Local Character (ASLC). This is the result.
But there are three more reasons which makes my blood boil and should cause those who supported the application and let their own experienced political colleague down to hang their head in shame:
6. In May the same committee refused to take a decision on a similar application on the same site because they did not have full details of the levels of the sloping site, the flood risk, an ecological habitat survey, landscaping to the south, security, and maintenance of the drive. Today officers stated that they still did not have enough details on four of these six issues, yet the committee decided that they no longer cared enough about investigating these.
7. Both Conservatives and LibDems have made a lot of noise about opposing back garden development. The Conservatives in opposing the application showed that they meant what they say. The LibDems in surrendering to the application in an area that they have written off politically showed that they are more interested in collecting personal data in a petition rather than believing in the very issue that they are petitioning on.
8. Probably the most ridiculous comment of the night was from Councillor Simon Wales who represents Sutton West. After declaring that the flooding issue had been dealt with to his satisfaction, he stated that he would support the application because “we have seen what happens when we go against officers’ recommendation” referring to the about-turn that the council made which will ensure a tarmac recycling plant gets sited close to houses around Beddington Lane. We have some excellent planning officers who do a difficult job, often caught in the cleft stick that is our planning framework. However this comment signalled a simple derogation of duty.
Cllr Wales, you are elected to make decisions. If officers are left to decide what our borough looks like, then you are no longer required. Give your £10,000pa allowance back to the taxpayer and go and do something more worthwhile. If you decided that this application should be granted having considered the arguments then fine but simply to rubber stamp decisions which have been taken without giving you all the facts makes you redundant as an elected representative.
I have been to many planning meetings over the last 3 years where residents have left disappointed. As a member of the committee on many occasions, I know that tough decision have to be taken on occasion, this was not one of them. We just wanted an approach that was consistent with that of the committee just six months before. Tonight I saw residents leave whose area will be changed forever by the spineless, ill-informed approach of a few.
by Paul Scully | Nov 2, 2009 | News |
Outraged Sutton Conservative councillors have unearthed shocking plans from the Liberal Democrat-run Council’s finance chief to plunder 70% of money from a fund set up to help local businesses in order to plough cash into the controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre.
Budget papers set to go before the Council’s Executive tomorrow morning (Tuesday 3 November) show plans to take £181,000 from the £256,000 ‘Local Authority Business Growth Incentive’ Grant (LABGI) to cover start-up costs for the Sutton Life Centre. If approved, the measure will leave only 29.3% (£75,000) of the fund left to spend on measures to help Sutton businesses through the recession.
The Conservative Opposition’s Finance and Value for Money Spokesman, Councillor Tim Crowley, has slammed the Lib Dems’ finance chief by calling the raid on the LABGI fund as a betrayal to local businesses favouring pet projects over helping people through the recession.
Conservatives are also voicing their concerns that despite committing over £8million of taxpayers’ money to the Life Centre, the Lib Dem administration is allowing the cost of the project to swell and to impinge on other council budgets. The plunder on LABGI is causing particular anger among Conservatives because the fund could prevent local businesses from going under thus preventing further increases to Sutton’s unemployment. Official figures show that Jobseekers’ Allowance claims in Sutton have risen by 88% over the last year.
Councillor Crowley commented: “The Council’s Lib Dem finance chief is hoping to plunder a fund set up to help local businesses so he can pay for the controversial Sutton Life Centre’s start up costs, leaving only 29.3% to be spent on its original purpose.
“With the UK economy still in recession and its impact being felt in Sutton, this is an act of betrayal because the LABGI fund should only be spent on what it is intended for – helping local businesses, not propping up vanity projects. This shows contempt for business locally – if elected next year, Conservatives will never take business for granted like this.”
![Council’s Winter Cuts Add To Icy Chaos]()
by Paul Scully | Nov 2, 2009 | News |
Sutton’s Liberal Democrat administration is under fire for spending the equivalent of two households’ annual council tax on a pint-sized version of the controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre.
Hot on the tail of our Value for Money motion at Monday night’s Full Council Meeting, forensic questioning forced the project’s supremo, LibDem councillor Graham Tope, to reveal the cost of promotional material for the Sutton Life Centre. Conservative councillors and residents in the public gallery were aghast to discover that a scale model for the infamous pet project cost the taxpayer £3000.
The costly model now features in pride of place in the Civic Offices, St. Nicholas Way, ironically situated next to a new machine designed to make paying council tax easier!
The scale of the model looks like 1:100, unfortunately even at the sum of £3,000, the scale of the cost of the model is something like 1:2,800. It’s quite incredible how far the ruling Lib Dems will go to squander local taxpayers’ money. Two Band D households’ worth of council tax has paid for this scale model and we think this sends out entirely the wrong message.
In all seriousness, the model might be small but the principle is not, town hall bosses must stop treating the public purse as a plaything. When we debated value for money on Monday, our message was clear: a Conservative-run Council will cut waste, move heaven and earth to ease the burden on household budgets, and demand that every penny of council expenditure justifies itself.
This is the Conservative model for Sutton Council and all it will cost residents is a vote.
by Paul Scully | Oct 19, 2009 | News |
Sutton’s Liberal Democrat administration has finally caved in to the Conservative Freeze The Tax Campaign in a shock announcement that Sutton Council will freeze the council tax for the first time in its history.
In a panic-stricken departure from its high-tax approach, Sutton’s LibDem town hall leadership has buckled under Conservative pressure to follow Boris Johnson’s example of freezing the tax burden in a time of economic hardship.
Now in a period of deflation, Conservative councillors are defying the Lib Dems’ finance boss to go one step further and to actually cut the council tax in Sutton to reflect the fact that the cost of living is going down nationwide.
Earlier this year in February, Conservative councillors launched their campaign for a tax freeze arguing that the Lib Dem Council should have made a real difference to hard-pressed local taxpayers worried about their jobs, mortgages, savings and rent.
We have welcomed the Lib Dem Council Leader’s U-turn following his comments in The Evening Standard, only a year ago, when he said that a council tax freeze was “a quick fix now with years of misery to follow” and that “this could only be achieved by cutting vital services”.
Councillor Tim Crowley, our Opposition Spokesman for Finance and Value for Money, said: “We welcome the fact that the LibDems have finally caught up with our thinking, namely that Sutton Council should move heaven and earth to ease the burden on household budgets via lower council tax.
“It is a shame that it takes a looming election for them to do so. I am delighted that the LibDem Council Leader has U-turned on his opposition to a freeze in council tax. Now if they’re really serious about easing the tax burden, they will go one step further and cut the council tax. We will campaign for a cut.”
Councillor Crowley concluded: “After sixteen years of relentless council tax increases, Sutton taxpayers will see straight through this announcement and not be taken for mugs by the ruling LibDems.”
Angry residents have been hitting the phones this week with complaints to the Council reaching levels last seen when a £35 per bag charge was slapped on green garden waste collections. When the first snow arrived this week, the main roads were navigable as the gritting teams had enough warning to cover the ground. Side roads were a mixed bag.
