4 October (Part 2) - Barbarism at the Public Realm meeting
When I first went to a Public Realm meeting I was looking forward to seeing councillor Craske in the chair but he takes a back seat and is often to be seen staring into space and looking very bored indeed, not that anyone could reasonably blame him for that. Cheryl Bacon is the barely adequate chairman; maybe the “barely” could be dropped if she learned how to use the microphone, as it is she can be close to inaudible. She should take lessons from Jane Richardson, the council’s Deputy Director of Strategic Planning and Regeneration who is something of an expert in the field, every word comes across perfectly.
As
is becoming the norm, I knew every one of the people in the public gallery by
name. All eight of us; soon reduced to seven as will be reported later.
Councillors Downing, Sawyer and Read were also in the audience but they didn’t remain
until the end, the twit Read had an urgent appointment with his Twitter account
to be kept. By the time the meeting ended at 21:50 only three members of
the public had stayed the course.
Councillor Cheryl Bacon began the meeting by reminding members of the public
that Bexley council is intent on defying government guidelines and that no form
of recording was permitted. She was so keen on restricting that aspect of
democracy that she repeated the message half way through the meeting. A “barely adequate” chairman
shouldn’t be expected to favour a permanent record.
Councillor Bacon’s chairmanship did not get off to a good start.
Councillors Tandy, Malik and June Slaughter all objected to the way she was
unwilling to listen to possible issues with the minutes of the last meeting. She
wanted them signed A.S.A.P.
Not for the first time Munir Malik was the only councillor asking sharp
questions. He asked why the preface to the draft Parking Report compared Bexley with
the very different boroughs of Camden and Newham and his colleague Brenda
Langstead asked why it compared Bexley’s parking charges with the only nearby
one which was dearer, namely the central tourist area of Greenwich. Mike Frizoni,
Deputy Director of Public Realm Management excused the deceptions in the preface
by saying that a table buried within the report provided more comparisons.
Far from sharp was the questioning of councillor Colin Tandy who was mugging up on
road safety with a copy of The Highway Code by his side. He was concerned that
ice-cream vans were parking on yellow lines and thought
that the enforcement contractor should be alerted when it happened. Something along
the lines of John Major’s ‘Cones Hot-line’ presumably.
Councillor Tandy was so anxious that the ice-cream
problem should be licked that he raised the issue twice. Or maybe he isn’t anxious
at all and the repetition should be taken as a warning of impending senility.
Councillors Brad Smith and James Spencer were both interested in why the “myths”
about Bexley’s draconian parking regime circulated so widely when, or so it was
implied, Bexley is such a paragon of humanely administered benevolence. No
answer was forthcoming from anyone.
With the debate centred on ice-cream and myth it was left to councillor
Malik to demonstrate yet again that it is not mandatory for Bexley councillors to be
ineffectual. The Thamesmead Tiger got into his stride…
Why is the parking regime in Bexley “barbaric”? Why are Bexley’s mobile camera
cars displaying the wrong sort of warning sign on the wrong side of the road?
Why (following the introduction of telephone parking I assume) are roads that
were full of cars now less than 25% full? Why is pavement parking so severely
frowned on when in many cases it is the sensible thing to do? We need “to play fair” he said,
and “be more friendly to users of our streets”. Mike Frizoni conceded that
parking revenue was indeed down but councillor Craske; are you
ready for this? was sympathetic to Munir’s remarks about pavement parking. Maybe
he hadn’t fully woken up at the time because he went on to attempt a
justification for comparing Bexley with Camden.
Councillor
Malik wasn’t finished. He claimed that “parking revenue was being
used to keep down council tax” and both he and councillor Smith didn’t seem
to like the implications of 6,459 penalty notices being cancelled on appeal. 841 cases went
to the Parking Adjudicator and in 413 of them Bexley
council was found to be at fault. Their point was that too many PCNs were issued
incorrectly. Mr. Frizoni seemed to think that didn’t matter because the
contractor didn’t get paid for such cases. Councillor Malik’s thoughts were with
the several thousand Bexley residents a year who are put through unnecessary
trauma and stress by Bexley’s “barbaric” parking regime. It is for that reason
that five of the eight members of the public present were our motorcycling
friends from Notomob, including Martin Peaple who
Bexley council set their
lapdogs on, Bexleyheath’s bovver boys in blue.
Among other things noted was that both councillor Malik and Deputy Director
Frizoni had both met with Greenwich council over
the County Gate issue
- whether together or separately was not made clear - and that Greenwich promised to
conduct surveys of nearby roads last month. Whether they did so or not is
unknown. A possibly interesting statistic provided was that NSL (the parking
contractor) is contracted to work 52,800 hours a year on behalf of Bexley
but achieved only 48,995 hours. There was no talk of a penalty or rebate being
imposed only that they hope to do better next year. Well it’s only taxpayers’
money wasted.
Something else that has so far proved to be a waste is the CCTV network. It was grossly
over-specified because there were hopes that the spare capacity
could be sold off to other local authorities with Bexley monitoring towns both far
and near. At the time of writing none of this has come to fruition.
Despite councillor Read’s Tweet shown above I have no note nor any
recollection of any councillor talking about parking in Northumberland Heath.