20 February - Shock horror! One of Craske’s figures may be right - not that it helps his case much
Six
months ago councillor Craske was excusing his blatant and illegal profiteering with a
list of figures he emailed to any resident who complained about his plan to
triple parking charges within Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs). Since then his
figures for permit cost production, linings and markings, IT and staff
accommodation have all been shown to be wrong by Freedom of
Information (FOI) requests. His £30,000 cost of “Traffic and Road Safety Schemes”
has been shown to be the spending of the profits of the residents’ parking
scheme and not expenditure on the scheme at all. Craske is now shown to be a
liar through and through but one of his figures has gone unchallenged - until now.
Craske claimed the staff cost of running the scheme was £258,000 per annum, a
figure which given the high overheads of employment costs these days I assumed
would mean six or seven full time posts. With about ‘a half’ off sick, one
on holiday it leaves around five to send out 3,000 permits each year, some penalty
notices (PCNs) and deal with a few telephone calls from irate motorists and the
odd appeal to be fought with the adjudicator. How many is ‘some’? I can find no
exact figure but the chart taken from a council report shows that just over
5,000 PCNs were issued in residents’ bays last year. (The third column.) So with about 240
working days a year that’s 12 permits and around 20 PCNs a day. Not a lot is it
for five or six people even if they do waste a lot of time having their
ear chewed off by motorists and having their knuckles rapped by the adjudicator?
There will be other things to do no doubt, but if these people are employed
solely on CPZ related things what else is there to do but issue the permits,
issue the PCNs, process them and take the occasional phone call? They don’t
do enforcement, Craske accounts for that separately.
So what did the latest FOI reveal? Nothing new except that my estimate of six or
seven employees based on Craske’s £258,000 a year is wrong. The true answer is
ten. Not ten individuals but the equivalent of ten people based on the fact that
a larger number share CPZ and non-CPZ work, but the FTE works out at ten. (Full
Time Equivalents). Cushy little number isn’t it? So roughly speaking each of
them issues a permit once a day and deals with a couple of PCNs. We all know
that councils are inefficient but this is ridiculous. Perhaps they
do their jobs meticulously and with loving care and
attention? Doesn’t look like it.
Buried in the council’s expenditure record for November 2010 is the fact that
they paid a six figure sum to Vincipark Services, their payment for enforcement
services. But wait a minute; Bexley has not used Vincipark for nearly a year,
they lost the contract to NSL. So that doesn’t look very efficient does it? On a pedantic note, in
a previous analysis of Craske’s figures, I estimated the
proportion of parking admin. work that comes from CPZs to be 12% of the total. On that
basis it could be calculated that Craske had grossly exaggerated his figures,
some might say he lied. The most recent developments, FOIs etc., have
shown the true figure to be a little under 10% (just over 5,000 against 54,583
PCNs). So it seems that Craske is even
further from the truth than I thought he was.
If you think Craske’s perpetual dishonesty merely brings misery to residents who
have to cough up an inflated fee, think again. A lady called in to say that because
he has convinced himself and his parasitic pals that the CPZ scheme is losing money
he won’t install a new one even where residents are desperate to have it.