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News and Comment January 2012

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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.


Harassment of Bexley council

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.


Moving sign offence

Bexley sign in GreenwichYesterday 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.

 


Welling Corridor
Welling Corridor plan

Building materials Shoulder of Mutton GreenA 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.

 

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