27 September - Albion Road and Wilton Road, audited
I should be driving to the Audit Meeting at the Civic Centre right now but on Monday evening
I failed to unclick the Prime box while ordering from Amazon and because of that they promised to deliver today.
The box was too big for McColl’s Amazon Locker so I was stuck in from dawn
until dusk. The
package eventually showed up at a quarter to six and I had promised to speak to
some of the traders in Wilton Road today. By the time I got there some had already left for home.
The issue was the suggestion that there might be a public meeting on
Anti-Social Behaviour. Personally I can no longer see the
point, Councillors have woken up, the police now know there is a problem, most of the traders can see the
problem and the public have made their views very clear on both
Twitter and
Facebook.
What the answer is no one seems to know and a public meeting is unlikely to come up with one.
So
I have left it too late to go to the Audit meeting which is no bad thing
really. It’s going to be a public back slapping session. The auditors have found
only a couple of minor issues which can be put right and Bexley Council’s own
audit has found eleven people with blue badges and one with a single person’s
Council Tax discount who didn’t qualify for them.
This year’s favourable report from the auditor may well be justified but they
hand them out will-nilly anyway.
A couple of years ago they acknowledged - after someone else discovered - a variety
of malpractices in the parking department about which Bexley Council itself said the
Ombudsman was "likely to make a finding against the Council and publish the
decision nationally. The likely finding of maladministration against the Council
must be balanced against the payment to the complainant. Should the decision be
made to make a payment, as recommended by the Ombudsman, it would be essential
that the Council agree to review the practice of charging by bailiffs and
introduce procedures to monitor the charges (as recommended)”.
Even though Bexley Council had put its hands up to “maladministration” the
Auditor still refused to do anything about it and wrote to me, as one of the
complainants, asking me to fund a prosecution as they were not prepared to do so.
All in it together!
For the record, and by the miserable standards of Councils generally, Bexley
probably is quite effective and efficient. When Tory Councillors finally stop
the daily lying and abandon the most outrageous spinning, there may not be a lot left to complain about.
Not going to the Audit Meeting means I will not see the tail end of
the Albion
Road rearrangements, like every other Bexley resident I cannot see them as an improvement.
There is a new Press Release
but the map below gives a good idea how things will be from tomorrow.
