11 October - No news is good news?
A whole week with nothing new to report; now that is good news. Wouldn’t it
be nice if Bexley council was overcome by common sense and good management and
there was nothing bad to say?
After sitting in on a discussion about Bexley’s anti-business parking policies a
week or so ago I spent several hours observing what happens in practice in my
local shopping street. 20 years ago it was home to all the usual trades but now
it is reduced to little more than betting shops, taxi ranks, take-aways, hairdressers
and estate agents. I use the plural in each case deliberately. I have counted five
hairdressers but I am told there are seven.
The road has been disrupted by gas-works and I was told that before that
happened Greenwich patrolled their side of the street about once a month but Bexley returned every
hour penalising motorists for the most trivial of transgressions and
absolutely refusing to make any comment when asked about their activities. There
were no concessions to the much reduced parking capacity. I’m not sure why
anyone should be surprised at that. How many times do I have to repeat the News
Shopper description of Bexley’s staff and their desire to inflict as much pain
as possible on residents?
To my surprise my loitering in Wilton Road revealed no particular problem; a parking
space was nearly always available to visitors and everything was orderly and no
obvious problems came to light; maybe that is because not a single parking
attendant was in evidence while I was there. The flood which is pictured here
nearly 48 hours after the last rainfall further reduced parking capacity and has been a problem for the whole of the
24 years I have lived close by. Further proof if it be needed of Bexley
council’s incompetence.
Moving back to the issue of John Watson’s questioning of the Chief Executive’s
inflated salary, I hear that the council has conceded that the question is
acceptable on their agenda but have said that the answer could not be made publicly available
so there is no point in asking it. If only as much ingenuity was available
for running the borough efficiently as is available for protecting their own
jobs and deflecting legitimate questioning.
An insider has whispered to me that there was a site meeting today to discuss
the new Wickham Lane roundabout so expertly designed by Bexley council that
buses can’t get around it. And speaking of roundabouts it seems that there has
been another smash up at the silly little ones in Brampton Road, just a
week after a pedestrian was killed there.