30 June - Miscellaneous meanderings
It’s been a quiet month with
just one council meeting to report and even that
wasn’t real business, more like another excuse for self-congratulation.
A few snippets of information arrived by email during the last few weeks which might
not have merited comment at the time but with the June blog about to slip from
view a quick round up may not be be totally out of order.
Bexley
council’s website has never been well organised which must contribute to maintenance problems. Not only are
councillor details still wrong
three weeks after they were given new jobs but an eagle-eyed
reader noticed that visitors are still being directed to the old Broadway site. The image shown was
extracted from the council’s meetings calendar this morning. It’s not a
one-off, all scheduled meetings show the same old address.
Following the report that Director of Environment and Wellbeing, Peter Ellershaw
and his wife Toni run a building company
whilst raking in a quarter million from Bexley taxpayers, I was told they weren’t the only ones.
It was alleged that Director Mike Ellsmore runs a music business in Faversham,
which seemed a little far fetched to me. It’s true that a Mike Ellsmore is
mixed up with the music scene in Faversham but I have yet to find a positive
link with the Bexley one. If you know better and have proof…
To my mind the business links of the recent
Isle of Man immigrant
Mark Charters are more interesting. He came to Bexley from Northampton County
Council in July 2007 and promptly hired a firm of consultants called
Ophira Ltd. By some enormous coincidence Ophira was founded in 2007 and
comes from Northampton. Bexley’s website doesn’t say much about Ophira but
the company website is more revealing; it lists the contracts they have managed
to attract. Job one, Bexley, job two Bexley, job three Somerset and nothing
since. Why would Bexley’s new Director of Education pay money to a new company with no track
record whatsoever who happened to come from his old home town? Old Pal’s Act perhaps?
There have been emails about
the illegal strip show at councillor
Lucia-Hennis’s Charlotte pub in Crayford but only to
confirm that Bexley council is not doing anything about her licence breach.
Anyone who complains gets the official brush off. “Unfortunately, you are not a
concerned party into any current investigation into the Charlotte Public House
and, therefore, any details are confidential.” Did anyone expect otherwise?
An estate agency boss told me that according to
one of his trade papers there are only twelve houses for sale in Bexley that
could be considered affordable by someone who can only scrape together
an 18% deposit which is apparently the average for a first time buyer. It’s a
shocking figure made worse by the fact that twelve affordable properties is the best
figure of any borough in London.
I am still taking Google’s Data Protection message with a pinch of salt; all the best BiB pages
featuring certain Bexley people are still indexed. If that changes it wouldn’t be difficult to
retitle the pages, perhaps edit them and park them somewhere else. New pages get
indexed by Google very quickly, sometimes only a matter of hours.