Last week the News Shopper carried the council’s excuse for four months
of traffic delays in Wickham Lane which skirted around the truth
to conceal their incompetence but this week the letters page gets to
the heart of the matter. Some idiot designed a roundabout that a bus couldn’t
navigate. At the weekend I mentioned this latest in a long line of Bexley
council fiascos to my friend the Transport Research Laboratory’s senior
consultant. He said that they produced some software several years ago (now
marketed by Savoy Computing) into which you enter the dimensions of your road
junction or roundabout and it will tell you what sort of vehicle can get round
it - and vice-versa. “Only an idiot wouldn’t use it”. But
unfortunately we are in Bexley and the council is in the grip of idiots.
Everyone’s favourite, councillor Craske, is still intent on penalising
residents who need to buy a parking permit. The News Shopper reports the growing
list of protest groups. Shouldn’t they be grouping together to stand up against
the little tyrant? I’m not against his basic philosophy
that services shouldn’t be subsidised, but only an idiot blindly accepts that
administration costs of £249 a permit doesn’t need to be urgently investigated
and reduced. Craske treats the council as a gravy train run for the benefit of
councillors and senior employees.
The News Shopper also reports that John Watson of Sidcup who requested a
reduction in the very high salary paid to the Chief Executive be discussed at
the next council meeting has had his request rejected because “under standing
orders it cannot debate staff’s salaries even when they are in the public
domain”. There was bound to be some excuse trumped up, secrecy is one of the
tools of corruption. The News Shopper’s website has today reported how
Bromley council is freezing its top executive’s pay at some twenty odd thousand
below Bexley’s; and guess which council has the lowest council tax. Not wasteful
incompetent mismanaged Bexley that’s for sure.
25 September - OFCOM takes an interest in community websites
Along with other London bloggers I was invited to a meeting today organised
by OFCOM and The London Civic Forum to discuss the impact and influence of
websites such as this one on the local community and borough authorities. It was
gratifying that so many of the attendees had seen Bexley-is-Bonkers and
remembered its name, probably because it is catchier than some. The conference
leader told me it was one of his top two interesting sites but I rather suspect
he may have said that to everyone. Much of the day long discussions were taken
up with how to run and moderate on-line discussion forums and how to subdue belligerent
political activists, none of which applies here because I decided I didn’t have
sufficient free time to manage a forum; however today’s comments suggest I may
have been over-cautious.
Perhaps the most interesting session was about the rôle of local websites within
the government’s Big Society agenda. It is possible that the government’s interest comes from
getting volunteers to ‘spread the word’ at little or no cost. A number
of examples were provided of council’s refusing to play ball with the
Coalition’s plan, all Labour controlled apparently, but no one produced an example of
any council of any political persuasion actually co-operating. They still don’t
accept that monetary cuts may compel them to relinquish some of their powers and
give up what was referred to as “tribal tendencies“. It is fair to say
that not a word was spoken in praise of any local authority for the whole day;
indeed it was said that some had offered monetary inducements to bloggers to influence their
output.
These
six photographs are pure self-indulgence on my part. From 1966 to 1968 I worked in the very same room as today’s meeting when Riverside
House (OFCOM’s H.Q.) was a Civil Service building occupied by G.P.O. Telephones. I
enjoyed the glorious views over the river and the city but by comparison with
the decor provided for OFCOM, the G.P.O. was drab and dirty.
24 September - Work-shy bin men. Useless officialdom part 4
Possibly the non-collection of rubbish in my street is too trivial to report here;
on the other hand problems with rubbish collection seem to be widespread across the borough.
A new problem (to me) is that the collectors are too idle to reach into the
bin when a householder has recycled so successfully that the small amount that
remains in the green bin is out of arms’ reach.
A request for advice made six weeks ago
produced an unintelligible response from Serge Poumo and when a neighbour fell
foul of the same laziness a month ago I repeated my enquiry. Serge Puomo did not
bother to reply. As a direct result of that non-collection the bin became
overfull and so wasn’t emptied at all two weeks ago. Then the foxes got busy and
spread the rubbish around.
There is a language problem at the house in question. It is used by a succession
of people from Nigeria who stay for a couple of weeks, occasionally longer and
are then replaced by someone else. All perfectly decent people so far as one can
judge but they do not understand a system that gives them six different bins. If they can
be persuaded to use them at all the colour coding is ignored. Last year the
occupant merely threw all their rubbish out the door in the general direction of
the front garden until a small mountain of rubbish built up. The useless Serge Poumo
failed to solve that problem too and it fell to neighbours to get it taken
to the dump. Something similar has had to be done to solve the latest problem
too. The contents of the overflowing bins was redistributed among other nearby
bins. Due to the amount left behind following a month of neglect by Bexley
council it is quite possible that those doing the redistribution weren’t able to
observe all the usual rules relating to what goes where, but at least the bins
are all empty now. Serge Poumo, Bexley’s useless Recycling Advisor, is slowly
turning me from being an enthusiastic recycler into someone who rather enjoys
the thought that a group of people, fed up with having rubbish blown along the
street and into their gardens should fool the collectors into taking it away -
even if this week’s load is going to prove to be more contaminated than usual.
Speaking of useless publicly funded parasites brings me to the subject of Will
Tuckley, the council’s obscenely over-paid and utterly useless C.E.O. I hear a
group of Bexley residents has asked that his salary of around a quarter of a
million pounds a year be reduced to something close to that of the Prime
Minister’s £143,000 a year and failing that that his post be abolished
altogether. Would anyone notice his absence? The question should be, according to my informant,
on the Agenda at the council’s next meeting.
Bin Diary
13 August - Green bin put out with very little rubbish in it.
Not collected. Told council that bins with very little in them were not being emptied
as it is a long reach for their men and asked how they might be persuaded to reach in
and do their job. Serge Poumo, Waste and Recycling Advisor replied as
follows… “Thank you for contacting our department. Your property is on Enhanced
Recycling Services and your green bin should be emptied on a fortnightly basis.
As you are not really producing a lot of waste, we do not see a reason for why
your collection frequency should be changed.”
27 August - Green bin again left unemptied because there was not much in it and
reaching in is too much bother for collectors. Repeated enquiry to council. It
was acknowledged but Serge Poumo lacks the intelligence to find an answer and prefers to remain silent.
10 September - Bin slightly overfull due to no rubbish collected in previous
weeks. Bin men refuse to empty it. Foxes redistribute it.
23 September - Various people decide enough is enough and find spare capacity in
other householders’ bins both green and brown, and fill them with the
uncollected rubbish arranging the contents so that any misplaced rubbish is not visible.
24 September - All bins emptied. Serge Poumo the so called but totally
ineffective Waste and Recycling Advisor who has no advice at all for those who
are doing their best to recycle encourages them to dump their rubbish where they
can. If he cannot give advice what is he for? Presumably just another council parasite wasting our money.
13 September - Another massive Bexley council cock-up
Someone in the know at F.M. Conway’s who do practically all the council’s road works has
called to let me know why the roundabout construction at the junction of Wickham Lane and
Oakhampton Crescent has been on hold for the last month or so. Apparently it has
been so beautifully designed by the council’s best brains that buses can’t get
round it. And you thought I was being a bit hard on Andrew Bashford’s road planning
department and calamitous councillor Craske? Shouldn’t they be made to pay for their costly mistakes?
The same source told me that the power cut last week was caused by someone working on the
Ruxley corner roundabout fiasco severing a very large cable.
Councillor Peter Catterall (Welling) is quoted in the press as saying “these latest
cuts reflect more problems with EDF Energy” but if he is quoted accurately, and there
is evidence that at the very least the words were taken out of context, it could more fairly
be argued that they reflect the total lack of project management skills by Bexley council. My
informant said that someone didn’t want to pay for the detailed plans and took a chance.
Lucky it didn’t kill someone, that sort of power can vapourise large chunks of metal.
10 September - Work-shy bin men. Useless officialdom part 3
Four weeks ago my green bin wasn’t emptied and Mr.
Serge Poulo sent an excuse that didn’t make any sense at all; I have no idea
what he was talking about.
Two weeks ago my new
neighbour had the same problem, only a small amount of rubbish in the bottom of
the bin so the collectors were too lazy to reach in and remove it. I sent a
complaint on her behalf which was acknowledged but no one bothered to reply or
empty the bin.
Today the lid of her bin couldn’t be fully closed but only
because it wasn’t emptied two weeks ago. So the lazy bin men have left her
rubbish behind again. But it is the management at Bexley council which is at
fault. The problem can’t be unique to me and my neighbours but the council does nothing
except organise the next round of pay increases.
9 September - Profligate Bexley council impoverishes residents to protect their own jobs
The rising tide of opposition to councillor Craske’s greed over the matter of
Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs) and the exorbitant cost of residents’ parking permits
has brought forth comment from blog readers and a few interesting figures gleaned from council
sources. Apparently there are only 3,081 takers for residents’ parking permits in Bexley
and the costs of issuing each one works out at £84 in staff costs and £23 for their
accommodation and other overheads. On top of that ridiculous sum each ticket costs £16 to
print and post. ICT costs, whatever they are, but I assume computers and the like, adds another
(almost) £4 per permit. Then it is said that road marking costs £36,000 a year. Nearly
£12 per permit. It might be interesting to do some arithmetic on that.
If we assume that 3,500 cars have to be accommodated and are allowed a generous
20 feet each then that is just over 13 miles of painted line. If there is more
lining than that it is not really part of the CPZ but part of needing to
cater for normal parking activity, the casual comings and goings of daily life.
Why should residents in CPZs pay for general parking infrastructure when those
who live elsewhere don’t pay directly for any yellow line that may pass their home?
I know the lines close to my home haven’t been repainted in the ten years since
first installation, so if we assume that is the norm, then that’s not much over a mile
of painted line which has to be renewed each year, in fact only 7,000 feet. If that costs
£36,000 to paint, it works out at just over £5 a foot. If the lines are repainted
less frequently the true figure might be eight or even ten pounds per foot. They are joking
aren’t they? Not just about the cost of painting a line but on the fact that every
single permit issued costs £139. The figure may in fact be nearer £150, because
according to the council they spend another £10 per permit on road safety schemes directly
associated with the provision of CPZs. I haven’t a clue what they can be and it seems like
another bit of Bexley figure fiddling to me so I shall exclude it. If I am wrong it makes the
waste even worse.
Some of that is offset by penalty charges but the cost of enforcement is irrelevant. The real
issue is how can a tiny scrap of paper cost that much to issue. You don’t have to
be an accountant and probably don’t need any qualification at all to know that there is
something seriously wrong with that. It is bureaucracy gone totally berserk. Someone should
get in there quick and sort out the inefficiencies that councillor Craske hasn’t
even begun to think about, cocooned as he is from the realities of life by his massive expense account.
A recent report into public sector workers said that on average they spend 68% of their time
farting about doing nothing but even if they were made to work twice as hard the staff costs per
permit issued would only fall to about £50. There must be simply too many of them and too
many fiddles going on with the line painting and printing contracts. Even four pounds a permit
to keep the computer database alive is silly. Bexley council is absolutely bonkers and needs
pulling apart from top to bottom to root out the incompetence, inefficiency and corruption.
8 September - Bexley continues with its vicious anti-motorist agenda
Next Monday an address I frequently visit in East Ham (Newham council) will
be included in a new controlled parking scheme. The cost of an annual resident’s
ticket will be zero; absolutely nothing. A visitors’ ticket will be 30 pence a
day and their council tax remains low.
Contrast that with the fees set by the vultures who control high taxing Bexley. They have just doubled
the cost of parking to £70 a year (more in some streets) and visitors are
charged up to 30 pence an hour. Naturally the council
gave no prior warning to residents who are beginning to protest against this blatant
taxation increase and expenses funding operation. Meanwhile the same council has set aside
£4 million to pay a firm of consultants to improve the local roads. It’s almost
impossible to find any road in Bexley that has been improved in recent years, with one or
two exceptions all changes are for the worse. An instant improvement could be made by
merely reversing the “crass stupidity”.
Meanwhile, this week brings the usual crop of injustices by a council described
in the local paper as “taken over by a mob of nasty, evil people who seem to
thrive on other people’s pain and hurt”. They have fined a pensioner half his
weekly income because his blue badge was allegedly not visible and a fireman has
been fined for parking in a road he wasn’t in supported by a photograph of a car that isn’t his.
Our council is managed by heartless jobsworths or in the more
colourful language of the local paper, “worthless bags of filth”. Just a
reminder of who is Bexley’s transport boss. His name is Peter Craske, a so
called Tory councillor and king of their allowance claimers. Suddenly the words
nasty, evil, filth and maggot don’t seem to be over-the-top at all.
6 September - Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah to the last free parking space in Sidcup
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are building a new church in Sidcup, a town that has
been dying of neglect and attrition by the mindless collection of
ne’re-do-wells at Bexley council for many a long year.
You can’t blame them for trying but the
Witnesses asked if the free parking spaces in St. John’s Road could be made over
to them in exchange for placing a sum of money into Bexley’s coffers. As the town
is in such a desperate state with its shopping centre barely worthy of that title any more,
Bexley council in its ‘Listening’ and ‘Working for you’ mode obviously
said “No” didn’t they?
Not a bit of it; an easy way of financing their expenses pot cannot be turned down whatever the consequences for local
businesses and residents. What an appalling amoral bunch our councillors are.
4 September - It’s only the froth that you find at the top
I
had a phone call this morning to ask why I hadn’t mentioned councillor John Davey’s
appointment to the Board of Bexley Care (N.H.S.) Trust and the answer is that I really didn’t think that there
was anything exceptional about it. It is the height of naivety to believe that these appointments are not all part
of the cosy system of back-slapping and self-enrichment that pervades councils and quangos, but I was wrong to
ignore it and my caller was right. That a councillor who says one thing to his constituents and does the
opposite on Bexley council committees, and walks away when shown evidence of motorists being ticketed for parking
in a ‘prohibited’ place where Bexley council hadn’t bothered to put up signs, is deemed a fit person to sit on
the board of anything is alarming but sadly no longer surprising.
The press release about the appointment
is available on-line.
I expect his expertise in double-talk will come in handy if my experience of the N.H.S. is anything to go by.
I’m still waiting for an honest reply from them on why they came to throw me out of A&E to meet their
targets. Currently they have lied themselves into the position of having to admit they diagnosed a severe stomach
problem but gave me no treatment for it whatever. Eight months on and they are still looking for an explanation but
they are good at sending me holding letters to cover the delay. Councillor Davey should feel very much at home in his
new sinecure and the £8,000 he will get for it will augment his councillor’s expenses very nicely.
3 September - The traffic chaos goes on and on
Six weeks ago reports came in that Wickham Lane was totally disrupted by the installation
of a roundabout and I took some
photos of the mess
that Bexley council had created. Further reports say work has stalled so I drove by twice
between 11 a.m. and noon today and it’s true. I saw no sign of progress or anyone
on site or indications that there may have been activity recently. Nothing!
On my return trip I was sixth in line waiting for the lights and when the green
came the first three vehicles and the fifth got through, the rest of us had to
wait again. If that happens in the middle of the day, it must be every bit as
bad in the rush hour as reports suggest. Let’s hope it gets finished
quicker than the 18 months and more that it has taken Bexley’s incompetent
contract managers to (not quite) finish Abbey Road. “Listening to you, working for you”. What a joke.
“Laughing at you, wreaking havoc”; would be nearer the truth.