12 January (Part 1) - Catching up with the news
Some of you will know that I am getting horribly behind with my correspondence, some is still outstanding from last weekend and I will soon be guilty of underperforming Bexley council. If you are owed a reply from before that then a reminder might be in order. To try to catch up with recent reports I shall summarise those I can remember below…
Liverpool Echoes discontent with Bexley
I don’t really know what this is all about and have no time to research it, but the Liverpool Echo is reporting that its blue badge holders are having to phone “a council in London” when renewing and are facing unacceptable delays. The council in question is said to be “Bexleyheath”. Are we flogging off our own sub-standard services now to unsuspecting Scousers now?
Sheltered housing for the elderly
Last month someone from Bexley’s care home management tipped me off that wardens were likely to be sacked at Christmas following budget cuts by Bexley council. From one Avante run home that has since been confirmed. The warden has been put on three months notice and from April some vulnerable people will lose one of their life-lines. It almost certainly applies to other homes too. When asked, Bexley council professed to know nothing about it.
Bexley council must rue the day they prevailed on Will Tuckley to bamboozle
Bexleyheath police into issuing a Harassment Letter for criticising councillors.
A lot of questions have been asked since then. Out of the blue from an interested,
or maybe annoyed, Bexley resident came evidence that Nick Hollier, Bexley’s Director
of HR, has admitted that he has no evidence of harassment of Bexley council by
myself and has fallen back on the lame excuse dished out to Mick Barnbrook - the
small section of the
harassment letter reproduced
two days ago. Mr. Hollier did however acknowledge that
he does not consider that “criticism and harassment are synonymous”. That is
progress of a sort, his boss, Will Tuckley and his police friends were unable
to make that distinction.
In similar developments the police have been asked to confirm the correct
procedures for the issuing of Harassment Letters; I’ll say no more about that as
you cannot trust anyone not to fiddle the books retrospectively if they know
where the enquiries are going next.
Yesterday
I warned about councillor Craske’s plan to monitor parking offences from the
fixed CCTV system and provided a photo of one of the many new signs that have
been springing up around the borough. A reader sent me a photograph of another.
What is special about his you might ask except that he took it in daylight? The
answer is that he took the photo in Greenwich. The sign is outside the Abbey
Arms public house in Abbey Wood. Craske gets everywhere.
If the sign made clear its true purpose; to warn motorists of the cameras zooming
into their registration plates, it might be welcome. However Bexley council is
telling people the CCTV is being used for public safety reasons. The appearance of
the sign on a Greenwich lamp post close to the Bexley boundary more or less proves that
its true purpose is to provide some sort of legal notification that motorists
are entering a Craske-zone but the benign wording about public safety more or
less proves that Craske is intent on deception. Plus ça change!
Click image for the bigger version.
A
reader in Welling has offered to provide a picture diary of work being
done on the so-called Welling Corridor.
Bellegrove
Road is to be improved from the Greenwich boundary to just east of its Brampton
Road junction. Most of us will be hoping that the four million pounds worth of
advice from consultants Parsons Brinckerhoff will pay dividends because there
are far too many instances of Bexley’s own planners messing up everything they
touch. The rearrangements currently causing chaos in Sidcup are putting things
back to close to what they were ten years ago. Overall it should be an
improvement but how much money was wasted on the interim scheme?
The photo is some of the materials dumped in preparation on the Shoulder of
Mutton green. A new item will appear on the main menu leading to the new
feature. Meanwhile click either image to see all the photos.
