31 March - The month end moan

It may be laziness but I take the view that anything written on the last day of the month is a bit of a waste because it is immediately lost by the month roll over; and speaking of laziness you may have noticed a lack of enthusiasm for blogging this year.

On 17th January I indicated that I was going to get myself up to date with fibre internet all the way to my router, ditch BT’s analogue phones (and save myself best part of £40 a month) and update my 2006 vintage power guzzling plasma TV so that I could see what licence free video streaming was all about. In the event I went further and swapped the equally old amplifier to see if the hype surrounding Dolby Atmos was justified.

Saving £40 a month on a rarely used telephone is always going to be good of course but of all the upgrades the only one I am really pleased with is the Atmos audio. So called Hi-Fi has always been an interest after I made my own record player when I was 14 years old and remember that Dolby Labs first operated out of a building in Wandsworth Road. Today’s 14 year olds, courtesy of their mobiles and expensive ear pieces, have not got a clue about quality audio and the origins of Dolby is the sort of story which might find a home on The Maggot Sandwich rather than here.

Openreach ran the fibre connection to an inconvenient place which is how I came to lose an argument with a ladder but apart from that all was well. I just ran an Ethernet cable from the Openreach box to my router and it worked. My ISP contact came out next day to install a newer Cisco router which offered some advantage or other but I kept the old 80mb/s speed as it is quite fast enough for my needs and anything more would result in extra charges.

From that I progressed to VOIP telephones or Digital Voice as BT has decided to call them. To be honest I think it is an abomination but maybe I was given a poor telephone.

In 1962 two things happened in my life; my interest in Hi-Fi led me into building an FM stereo tuner using the American Zenith GE system which multiplexed the channel difference signal on to the mono for backwards compatibility purposes. (The same system as in use today.)

In my youthful ignorance I assumed that multiplexing was a new fangled idea but I joined the GPO the same year and discovered that they had been multiplexing voice signals since at least 1936. Voices were restricted to 3,300 cycles per second (Hertz had yet to be invented) to enable very large numbers of conversations to be in effect stacked one above the other on a single cable.

An upper frequency of 3,300 Hertz is a long way from Hi-Fi and in theory Digital Voice should be free of that restriction. Not a bit of it, the audio quality is muffled and pretty horrible. A matt black phone with matt black buttons is another abomination (the blue sticker is my idea) as is the fact that the buttons do not auto-repeat so scrolling down a list of numbers might take 20 presses or more instead of one.

There is no switch hook so if you begin to call a wrong number due to the inadequacies of the Directory system you can’t just slam the receiver down to stop it, you have to find the black Call End button in a dark room. Don’t even mention the crawling around in the roof space running new network cables for sockets in every room and supplying the Power Over Ethernet (POE); but I console myself with the nearly £40 a month saving!

Is this something that someone who has not been playing around with wires for 65 years is expected to cope with?

The other venture into the modern age was a Smart Meter. It was the only way to access the lower tariffs offered by some suppliers to electric car owners. It was installed on 24th February and still doesn’t work. I think it sends back my meter readings to Octopus Energy but the internal display operates according to @bexleynews rules. It lies.

The displayed electricity consumption may be correct but the price is not. The total cost over five weeks is £0.00.

The gas is inexplicable too. It shows consumption of between five and 30 kilowatt hours per day which is nonsense. I use very little gas and my boiler has been switched on on only five occasions in those five weeks. Maybe eight hours in total as an absolute maximum. Water heating is by solar power except on the dullest days.

Experimentally I have turned off the gas at the main stop cock and it still shows consumption up to 30kWh a day. The Smart Meter has been a total waste of time and Octopus Energy are stumped too.

But this evening I can blast away my woes courtesy of the late Dr. Ray Dolby’s inventive mind and there is no nagging Smart Meter to tell me how much it costs.

For the record my energy Direct Debit was £77 last October and running a small credit. From next month I am being asked to pay £178. Far too much of it down to Ed Miliband’s ill-considered 2008 Climate Change Act made steadily worse by succeeding Con-Socialist governments.

 

30 March - Fostering good practice

Some Scrutiny meetings may have limited appeal and for me that is true of Childrenְ’s and Adults’ Services, probably because I have no personal interest in them which partly explains why this report comes to you two weeks late. The principal Agenda item was Fostering Services. Covid impeded recruitment for the former but recent promotions have seen the approval of five new fostering households and more in the pipeline so five could rise to 18 by the end of the year.

Two foster carers each with ten years experience provided Councillors with a very brief insight into their experiences and Councillor Richard Diment (Conservative, Sidcup) had some questions. One was how did Covid impact them; what about the ‘churn’ in foster carers? The questions were answered by Council Officers.

24 households were lost over the past year and it was made worse by Covid. Seven of the 24 were long service (10 years plus) retirees and some have moved away from Bexley. Only two households were deregistered for reasons related to the standard of care.

Councillor Diment said he was interested in placement stability for those in care, he had heard from some children that stability was their biggest concern. He was told that in terms of those who have three or more carers a year, “Bexley does very well compared to national measurement statistics”.

Eventually one of the carers was allowed to answer Councillor Diment’s original question. Her biggest problem was the turn over of social workers and the need to educate each new on with the history of each child and the children themselves do not wish to be reminded of that history.

Councillor Lisa Moore (Conservative, Longlands) asked who was being targeted for being a foster carer and where are the new markets? She was told the most successful method was word of mouth; recommendations by existing carers, but events was a mainstay. In the Bexleyheath Shopping Mall, at BexFest and Farmer’s Markets for example.

“What does a typical foster carer look like?” asked Councillor Moore. “Were they retired people perhaps?” An interesting question to which there was no straight answer but Cabinet Member Philip Read said everyone was welcome to apply.

 

29 March - While Tories lie about the £150 Council Tax rebate, Capita plays it straight

Not everyone who rants about Bexley Tories when they lie is content just to email Bonkers, some take more direct action; like write to Capita (who administers CT for Bexley) about their missing Council Tax rebate. The one that the Conservatives’ propaganda channel would have you believe Bexley’s Labour Councillors don’t want you to have. (I would have thought the first rule of lying was to make it plausible.)

Capita’s response today is “Please be advised that this department has not yet received official guidance from central government concerning exactly how the rebate in question is to be administered and therefore at this time we are not able to advise. As soon as we receive the required information, we will make this publicly available on our website”.

 

26 March - Bexley’s liars are vote losers - or maybe just losers

I was pleased to see that I was not alone in finding the latest round of Bexley Conservatives’ lies…

a total electoral turn-off. (Two extracts from a reader’s email follow.)


The Government’s £150 rebate is not part of Bexley Council’s budget and Labour Councillors did not vote against it for the simple reason they are not MPs in Westminster.

As my correspondent notes, Bexley Council has no idea how to administer the rebate to those who do not pay by Direct Debit but my recollection of the Council meeting was that those in arrears will get the rebate. However the dreadful deceitful duo who besmirch the names of every decent Conservative Councillor and election candidate in Bexley have not entirely wasted their time, they have put paid to my wavering over where the X should go in May.

At both General and Local Elections I have for nearly sixty years only not voted Conservative when the alternative was a friend, and even then I did not always let heart rule head. This time all three of my Belvedere votes will go against the lying Tories. There is a total lack of honesty in politics and it has got to stop.

Maybe with Esther Amaning, Daniel Francis and Sally Hinkley standing in Belvedere ward I can just about use the ‘always Conservative except for friends’ line in future years.

 

24 March (Part 2) - Planning Sub-Committee goes doorstepping

I seem to have become a floating voter; how did that happen?

When Frazer Brooks introduced his trio of candidates to me a week ago I thought I would give the new Conservative faces a chance despite all the bad things that Tories do. Frazer is probably as keen on change as I am but then the realisation dawned that I couldn’t vote for Frazer however helpful he may have been in the past because he is the Falconwood candidate and I am in Belvedere. There was also the fact that one of the candidates, Christine Bishop, has been a Councillor since 2014 and has never done anything worthy of comment here.

Of the other two I know nothing, certainly not whether they back Bexley’s dishonest leadership or not which is by far my most important criterion for a vote.

What is the alternative? A party whose leadership is unable to say what a woman is? Maybe I should ask Councillors Sally, Esther and Daniel if they can provide an answer; but then I heard Rishi Sunak asked the same question on TalkRadio this morning and he refused three or four times to answer it. What will his billionaire wife have to say when he gets home?

What can one do? I have to fall back on my tried and tested favourite; that it is impossible to vote for a party that cannot stop lying.

Does anyone in Bexley really believe that our Labour Councillors are against the £150 Council Tax rebate handed out by the aforesaid Rishi? Of course not. Bexley Tories take us for fools.

A plan to blog about lies again required firing up my secondary Twitter account to see what Councillor Philip Read was saying. He too has been going on about the three Belvedere candidates but I couldn’t quite make out what he was trying to say.

The trio was “picking up on issues ignored by Labour Councillors”. Hang on a minute Philip, Belvedere is ruled by a Conservative Council and if there are issues in the ward it is the Conservatives who are failing to see them, may have created them and are certainly ignoring them.

Councillor Read’s comment is an admission of Tory failure. Maybe one day I will regurgitate all the failures suffered when the area was represented by Conservative Councillors.

Who remembers the campaign run by them against the opening of the Asda supermarket?

Then for no good reason I clicked on Philip Readְ’s photos and the third looked more than a little familiar. Wasn’t that the house I was passing when accosted by a bunch of hooligans?

And what has happened to Bexley’s favourite property developer’s ill-fated plan to extend 95a Woolwich Road? By a strange coincidence on the very day a Conservative Councillor who serves on Bexley’s Planning Committee was hobnobbing at his door, the latest planning application was published by Bexley Council. 22/00333/FUL.

 

24 March (Part 1) - Incompetence or corruption?

Yesterday I watched the Home Office Minister Kit Malthouse address an almost empty House of Commons following Tuesday’s report on corruption in the Metropolitan Police by the HMIC. He began by saying it was not all bad - whilst accepting that most of it was very bad.

Malthouse’s very brief defence of the Met included the words “[the report] found no evidence that the force deliberately sought to frustrate the work of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel”.

This is in itself evidence of corruption.

In 2013/14, soon after the DMIP began its investigation, Daniel’s brother Alastair told me that things were not going well. The retired judge who had been appointed by Home Secretary Theresa May to chair the panel had been colluding with the Metropolitan Police to ‘lose’ evidence on the grounds that putting it into the public domain would seriously undermine confidence in the police.

He was found out and left the Panel.

Obviously not something I could reveal here and except for a short reference in an obscure Welsh newspaper (extract below) there was no publicity at all.

Click image for source web page.

However the DMIP report did refer to the 2013 incident and the involvement of the Metropolitan Police and Cressida Dick. Dick went on to work elsewhere until Theresa May, who must have known about the earlier corruption, allowed her to be appointed Commissioner.

The DMIP report went further and made it very clear that following her return to the Met, Dick was again responsible for frustrating the work of the DMIP by refusing access to police files. Hence the verdict of Institutional Corruption.

However Kit Malthouse has been suckered into believing that the HMIC could not find the evidence that the Home Office sponsored DMIP report had, with difficulty, extracted from the Met.

Corruption runs deep.

Note: Alastair Morgan was not informed of Kit Malthouse's statement, he found out about it only because of a tip off by former Erith & Thamesmead MP Teresa Pearce.

 

22 March - The truth, and nothing like the truth

You have to have been hiding under a stone not to know that the Chancellor of the Exchequer authorised a £150 rebate on Council Tax up to Band D this year but Bexley Tories have crawled out from under theirs to claim credit for it.

That may have been fair enough if doing so on behalf of their party but they have gone far further than that.

They imply that local Councils had a say in the matter when quite obviously none of them does but Bexley further claims that there was a local vote on whether or not the £150 should be paid out and that Labour Councillors attempted to deprive residents of Rishi’s largesse.

Frazer Brooks and his colleagues can be as nice as they like on my doorstep but how do they expect my support when it could so easily be seen as endorsement of the blatant liars currently in charge?

 

21 March - Beyond contempt. Beyond the rules

Every now and again Bexley Council issues a reminder that it is fundamentally dishonest.

On Thursday their Code of Conduct Committee will meet for the first time in a year, the main task being to appoint an Independent Person. Supposedly an independent member of the community to assist the Committee to reach decisions. It helps enormously if you are a Conservative, and preferably from a politically active family.

However the Agenda reveals that there were four new complaints against Councillors last year and as is usually the case every single one of them was dismissed.

The first on the 2021 list below is mine. The Code of Conduct says that social media blocking is not allowed unless the levels of abuse are exceptional. Councillor Philip Read Twitter blocked me in July 2013, on the 15th, the day I announced I had opened an account.

Obviously there had been no exchange between us although Read soon got busy streaming abuse in my direction. When Teresa Oְ’Neill reluctantly joined Twitter she opened with Bonkers on the block list. Obviously no comment from me again so both blocks were a blatant offence against Bexley Council’s own rules.

But Conservative Councillors are beyond criticism and to be fair it is more than likely that the complaint never got to the Committee but flung out by the Monitoring Officer of the day, someone not renowned for his impartiality.

Interestingly, maybe, this is the first time I have seen the result of my complaint. I was told that the response was so secret that I could only read it if I gave my email address to a private security company with which I had no relationship. I refused to do so and was refused a straight answer to my complaint.

When you vote in May please remember that certain Bexley Tories are dishonest, maybe even corrupt, and probably always will be.

Note: I was sent this link about Cressida Dick anonymously and passed it on to Alastair Morgan who was grateful because he had not seen it. He told me that tomorrow the Metropolitan Police are due to publish their response on being labelled ‘Institutionally Corrupt’ by a Home Office sponsored inquiry panel. They have already refuted that finding so tomorrow’s is sure to be a whitewash.

Alastair was promised an embargoed advance copy so that he can be prepared for press enquiries. It was not forthcoming.

 

19 March - Here we go again

Back on the hobby horse…

I forget how many times I have been around this loop but after seeing the lamentable performance of the refuse boss at Scrutiny this week I am not expecting a solution any time soon.

Once again CountryStyle has failed to empty the paper bin that serves the flats opposite my house but for the first time (including Serco) have left a note of the reason why.

It’s contaminated again; it is every week. What do they expect?

The bin is left facing the wall so the access slot is out of reach, flat occupants wrench it open thereby destroying the hinge and removing the lock so that the whole lid can be raised which in turn allows whole sackloads of rubbish to be thrown in.

Unlike an individual wheelie bin where its user can empty and rectify the situation no one is going to do it where a block of flats is concerned so the situation will remain as it is. Week after week the paper and cardboard will pile ever higher whilst Bexley Council ignores the basic problem. Due to CountryStyle operatives’ carelessness, the ten month old bin has been wrecked by the feckless, and no one at Bexley Council is interested in anything other than allowing history to repeat itself.

Note: The bin was emptied on 1st April.

 

18 March - Parking: Ticket machine broken? Send PCN, anything else is too difficult

Last week the Places Scrutiny Committee heard of more proposals for making parking in the borough even more difficult and stressful. There is revenue lost to Covid to be made up.

The pandemic struck Bexley’s 19 car parks hard and usage is down by around 23% in main town centres and 29% at smaller shopping parades compared to two years ago. Commuter car parks are still a long way from having recovered.

Councillor Cheryl Bacon (Conservative, Sidcup) remarked on Grassington Place being at only 22% of pre-Covid levels. (78% down.) Remarkably, the Council Officer had no idea why his by far the worst performer was being so little used.

Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) asked why the 20 pence service charge on phone payments was not simply included in the price and queried the official report’s comment that on-street restrictions of only one or two hours should be reviewed because “it allows people the freedom to park for free”.

He could not see how it would put commuters back into the car parks as the report suggested and asked why on-street car parking was recovering more slowly than car parks, to which there was no clear answer.

The Parking Manager said the one or two hour restriction used to ‘catch’ commuters working regular ‘office’ hours but flexible working may be defeating the restriction and complaints suggest it is adversely affecting residents, hence the review. There would be no change without consultation. Councillor Francis remained sceptical while Council Officers believed that the short restrictions were “not working as originally intended”. Did he mention reduced income? Of course he did.

Councillor Val Clarke (Conservative, Falconwood & Welling) was not happy about the proposal either. Neither was she happy about motorists getting parking tickets when the machine had failed and when there is no way of paying without a mobile phone which is not what had been the previously accepted norm.

Residents had reported to her that Arnsberg Way now demands the mobile app which she thought might be the reason for its usage falling so spectacularly, however her site inspection found the most prominent machines to be there but not working which amounts to the same thing.

Cabinet Member Craske said that some ticket machines were so old that replacement parts were no longer available but every car park is to be provided with a new machine.

The Council Officer said that during Covid, machines were covered to encourage use of the mobile app but his procedure now is to issue a ticket and expect the recipient to appeal because “blanket suspension of charges is extremely difficult”. I think he meant to say expensive. Motorist are expected to take photographs of broken ticket machines.

Maximising resident stress levels is presumably a priority and as Councillor Clark acknowledged, “some residents become so worried that they pay”.

The Council Officer came across as a mixture of ignorance and indifference to the pressure placed upon residents. He should expect a promotion soon.

 

16 March (Part 2) - Meet the team

A pleasant surprise at lunchtime today, the three Belvedere Conservative election candidates came calling accompanied by Frazer Brooks who Falconwood voters can back in May if they are so inclined.

The cynic in me says that Frazer was responsible for the door bell ringing as it was him who stuck his neck out last November by giving me his copy of the Agenda at a Full Council meeting and thereby risking the wrath of Teresa O’Neill. I liked that.

However that does not detract from the fact that the three candidates pictured here were all very friendly and pleasant and there isn’t a single obvious fib in their leaflet.

I was quite impressed really; maybe a vote for Belvedere Conservatives in May won’t be just another endorsement of the Leader and the lies that have been Bexley’s trademark.

On the other hand one of my neighbours told me not long ago that the candidates told him that Bexley is a low tax borough. Some things never change.

 

16 March (Part 1) - The long and the short of it

Yesterday’ Places Scrutiny Committee meeting was a long one at two hours and 38 minutes but you may be relieved to know that the blog will be relatively short.

The bulk of the meeting was taken up by two presentations by commercial undertakings, Thames Water and CountryStyle who are five months into their ten year waste contract.

Thames Water provided a few statistics such as 62 million litres of water a day supplied to Bexley’s 100,000 premises and it comes via the ring main from West London and the North of the borough uses more than elsewhere.

Councillor Nigel Betts opened a can of worms by referring to the numerous complaints received from residents about the mess left behind by Thames Water after carrying out works. “Why no pressure washing etc? Are there no standards to be observed?”

A big problem is the digging which follows the replacement of a leaking meter.

The problem was recognised and Bexley said not to be unique and yes there are standards to be applied and perhaps they are not.

Thames Water management would go to take a look at any reported, all day if necessary and sit down and discuss issues with Councillors.

CountryStyle was back after their initial baptism of fire. When taking over after the Serco strike there were 30,000 uncollected bins and it took two and a half weeks to catch up but the 200 staff transferred have provided a few problems, notably with absences. Long term sickness accounts for two whole crews and absences peaked at 17·3% even before Omicron struck - far higher than expected and the average of other boroughs.

The plan to have more rounds with smaller crews caused Councillors some concern because drivers will have additional responsibilities.

Councillor Val Clark (Conservative, Falconwood & Welling) said that the crews that serve her ward are “the awkward squad” and the assisted collection service is “unacceptable”. About 5% of collections fall into the assisted category.

 

15 March (Part 2) - Round 2 of the Budget grandstand

You would think that after spending best part of an hour denouncing Labour and their budget plans the Tory sheep would do what is expected of them and simply nod their own proposals through. Well yes they did but first there is the serious business of grandstanding to get on with.

First out of the traps was Councillor John Davey (Conservative, West Heath) and he immediately rounded on the opposition for their housing policy. “I thought we had some highly professional Housing Associations in Bexley and they don’t seem to be aware of this” and Council Tax “rockets” under Labour, just look at Sadiq Khan. “He has raised his precept by 43% while Boris cut it. Labour has no idea.”

Councillor Caroline Newton (Conservative, East Wickham) welcomed the “balanced prudent plan which residents should support in May”. She too castigated the London Mayor for his 8·8% tax raid and “his ULEZ proposals which were not mentioned in his manifesto”.

Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) said that last year the Conservatives “made extensive budget cuts which have had a real impact on services. They slashed staff numbers and claim there has been no impact on services and now claim to be budgetary heroes. If it is such a good news story, why are they still unable to reveal staff numbers to Councillors?”

“The question has been asked repeatedly since last July but still no answer. It is a budget that fully accepts to using one-off grants to balance the books with no certainty as to how the gaps can be plugged next year.” That is not “investment” as claimed. Children’s Services and Education are both cut. “It is double-speak.” On grass cutting we have agreed to pay more for services which are in the original contract.

Councillor Melvin Seymour (Conservative, Crayford) praised the new recycling contract and the £400,000 spend on road repairs this year. He thanked “the Dick Turpin Mayor of London” for raising taxes and charges in the month before an election.

Councillor Eileen Pallen (Conservative, Bexleyheath) spent three minutes relating a number of little anecdotes that had no relevance whatsoever to the budget but was applauded nevertheless.

Labour Councillor Nicola Taylor (Erith) said that the Conservatives were causing a cost of living crisis with their 54% energy price increase, National Insurance tax hike, the fuel price crisis and cuts to Universal Credit. “Our residents are squeezed in the middle”.

“You claim to work in partnership with housing providers but you do not work in partnership with those who come to us for help. Private landlords are not the answer. For our residents, in debt, no housing, reliant on food banks, this is a bread and water budget.”

Councillor O’Hare (Conservative, Blendon and Penhill) said he was “proud” to support the budget and to be double jabbed and boosted. “The Labour Mayor cancelled our Thames crossings while pillaging our pockets providing less, less, less.”

Councillor Richard Diment (Conservative, Sidcup) said that budgeting is never easy “but this budget looks right”. He too referred to Sadiq Khan raising his precept by 43% in five years while Bexley’s levy has increased by slightly less than that in 16. (True.) “This budget will make Bexley even better.” (Doubtful.)

Councillor Howard Jackson (Conservative, Barnehurst) took much the same view. (Sadiq Khan is such an easy target.) “And Council houses are not what our residents want.”

Councillor Brian Bishop (Conservative, Barnehurst) went down the same road with a little bit of Labour bashing along the way. Councillor Peter Reader (West Heath) accepted that his speech largely repeated what has already been said - but without the Labour bashing.

Councillor Christine Catterall (East Wickham; well you have heard it all before.

Stefano Borella (Labour Leader) said it was surprising that Conservatives are very willing to talk about the Mayor of London’s budget but less so their own. The May election will be a verdict on this Council’s cuts programme and this Council has opposed every Amendment in support of affordable housing. He took Councillor Taylor’s line with the cost of living crisis and reminded everyone that it was Labour that put Bexley at the top of London’s recycling league in 2005 and in the 1990s it was the Conservatives who put up Council Tax by 41% over two years (as opposed to Labour’s 40% in four).

Stefano attacked an easy target too by ridiculing the claim that cutting staff numbers by 304 had no effect on services. “To claim that this is an investment budget is a nonsense.”

For Councillor Sybil Camsey’s (Conservative, Crook Log) contribution please refer to Eileen Pallen’s speech. Interesting maybe but irrelevant to the budget debate.

Council Leader O’Neill said that ְ“once again the budget delivers for our residents” and took the obligatory swipe at Labour. She accused Councillor Francis of not sending her a promised email and an ill-tempered high decibel Mayor claiming to be acting on legal advice would not allow him to protest the allegation. Councillor Francis almost immediately posted the email to Twitter (see below) to prove her wrong yet again. As yet the Leader has not posted an apology.

The sheep voted unanimously for their budget.

 

15 March (Part 1) - Beautiful Belvedere. Huh!!

Belvedere translates to “Beautiful view” and parts of it struggle to live up to that reputation.

When Serco ran the bin collection services I always found myself out on a limb by saying that they were reliable and invariably tidy in my street and if you can believe Councillor Craske - does anybody? - I am out on a limb again by saying that CountryStyle and Rubbish are two inextricably linked words. The nearby communal paper bin is again inaccessible because its opening is placed against a wall.

Why are the plastics and glass bins never affected? Presumably served by a more thoughtful collector.

Maybe my opinion of CountryStyle is not totally unique because a petition aimed at ending their ten year contract has popped up at change.org. If you read on you will see it covers a multitude of other subjects including Orbit housing and Network Rail so its intent is not what one might call focused.

It begins by alleging that CountryStyle are particularly bad in Slade Green, Erith and Belvedere and goes on to suggest that “people are generally more respectful in Bexley, Sidcup and Albany Park”.

The petition starter, named as Aaron Burtt, may have a point. ‘My’ paper bin contained a large plastic sack yesterday filled with I know not what. If the lock and hinge was not left broken it would not have been possible for it to get there but someone living close to me has no social conscience.

I despair about the lack of respect and pride in anything commonly encountered in this neck of the woods and maybe elsewhere. When my neighbour of eight years moved out last August they left their place in such a state that it was two months before the house could be reoccupied.

As the new family moved in a child’s toy dropped on to their front path and it lay there broken for a month or two before it annoyed me sufficiently to pick it up and put it in the bin. Maybe I should explain that the garden layout is such that their path looks as though it could be mine and I see it every time I leave the house and could use it as a short cut.

It was me who showed them, a family of six, how to apply for a bigger green bin and until it arrived they used a black plastic tub as an overflow. Before Christmas it blew over and rolled into my garden and I left it there to see how long it would be before it was retrieved. After another two or three weeks another wind took it down the road never to be seen again.

However the lid remains where it first lay and is passed every day by its owner who simply couldn’t care less. The grass you see is my neighbour’s but only I have cut it since 2006. That is a fact.

Yesterday morning their sewer blocked again and I spent half an hour prodding bloody sanitary towels with a hose pipe. It seems I am condemned to live next to an open sewer because Thames Water have no legal sanctions in their armoury and some people are happy to live uncivilised lives as long as someone else cleans up after them.

Aaron Burtt definitely has a point, Belvedere does seem to have more than its fair share of the irresponsible. 

 

14 March - Full Council budget meeting. (Round 1, the Amendment)

Five Councillors were missing from this meeting, Louie French being occupied these days in Westminster and not drawing his allowance but three other Tories and the Independent for Thamesmead East absented themselves too.

The Leader opened proceedings with a reminder “that the last two years have not been easy and she was not sure that the reserves would be sufficient to cover the financial impact of the pandemic”. (In the event, thanks to the cuts, it was.)

She said that the Government’s Fair Funding Review was delayed and with it the hope for a fairer distribution of grant settlement. “Next year Bexley will receive £40 million whereas neighbours Greenwich will receive £110 and Southwark will get £152 million. That £70 million difference (with Greenwich) would equate to a near 70% reduction in Bexley’s Council Tax bills.”

The Mayor’s increase of 8·8% to his Council Tax precept and the announcement of an intention to extend the Ultra Low Emission Zone to Bexley was given the criticism it deserves.

“Housing services are being transformed and moving those in temporary accommodation to housing associations is good for them and taxpayers. We continue to invest in the services that matter to our residents”

Cabinet Member David Leaf said the budget “would make Bexley even better with more than £400 million of additional investment”. He said that the 2·99% Council Tax increase will mean a lower rate in real terms than in 2006. (This is true!)

“Members opposite have spent the last 16 years talking down our borough, praying for failure, opposing investment and showing nothing but contempt for sound financial management. Bexley residents have trusted us since May 2006 and I am confident will do so again in two months with more Conservative Members.”

Stefano Borella (Labour, Slade Green) put forward an Amendment which was unfortunately not made available to webcast viewers. It was about housing and School Crossing Patrols. He wanted BexleyCo to provide up to 50% affordable housing and using Redrow’s Howbury Section 106 money (£2·93 million total, £1 million from Howbury) which has been unused for the past eight years to be spent on the Sidcup Library site. “That was ֧pretty disgraceful”.

The Labour Leader referred to “Tory leaflets claiming to take school safety seriously while planning to abandon School crossing Patrols. Scandalous.”

Councillor Francis (Labour, Belvedere) added that the road safety team has been reduced despite the Cabinet Member’s written reply to Councillor Hinkley stating that Bexley has not cut the road safety team, “the staff merely left to take other jobs”. The Road Safety Sub-Group will contradict the Cabinet Member when it reports next week and the Chairman confirms that all Council funding has been withdrawn. The remaining Lollypop staff remain under threat of redundancy.”

The Leader made it clear that she did not want to consider any part of the amendment and Cabinet Member Munur said that Labour’s attitude was “scary, absolutely irresponsible and quite, quite disgusting. Theirs is a knee-jerk reaction.”

Cabinet Member Craske said that the Amendment represented “sheer hypocrisy”. Labour, he said, is on the record opposing affordable housing for the whole of the past three years and had failed to mention that it is Sadiq Khan who has stopped paying for School Crossing Patrols.

Cabinet Member Leaf continued in similar vein and said that Council housing is not the answer. In Greenwich there are 1,000 Council households with arrears of over £2,000 each and that is not something that Bexley wants to see. “Labour are reckless and their Amendment has the stench of hypocrisy. The Redrow S106 money would not exist if Labour had their way, they opposed the Redrow sale.”

“Labour wants to use funds they have objected to receiving to give to a company they would not have set up to pay for homes on a site they rejected for housing.”

Councillor Richard Diment (Conservative, Sidcup) said that “Social Housing may seem to be appealing but the reality is that the concept is neither financially viable nor realistic in the current culture. Labour’s was a last minute Amendment to a budget that has been worked on for months and Greenwich (20,000 Council houses) has 31% of its tenants in rent arrears and following Court action at risk of eviction”.

The Tories unanimously voted against, in Labour’s words, “dealing with the Tory housing crisis and protecting children going to school”.

The Labour Group subsequently sent out a Press Release explaining their position.

 

12 March (Part 2) - Pay more, get less. Taxes up while the housing crisis goes unchecked

Bexley's Labour Group's plans for more affordable housing were thwarted once again last week. Here they have their say about it.

And the school crossing patrols may go the way of so many other services.

It was bound to happen sooner or later; Councillor Craske first proposed getting rid of school crossing patrols in 2010.

 

12 March (Part 1) - Taxes up

Believe it or not, I found the time to listen to last Wednesday’s full Council meeting at which next year’s Council Tax was jacked up by as much as is legal. A number of things struck me as worthy of comment but the intervening days have faded my recollections. I seem to recall that Councillor Richard Diment made his points in a reasonable fashion while the usual suspects were mainly interested in playing politics

The spare several hours which writing a formal report would take has eluded me, bogged down as I have been by reinforcing the house with more copper. Fortunately the Labour Group has put out a Press Statement which can be a stop gap report. It will be posted as a separate blog so as not to allow my waffling to detract from its importance.

The recabling was a a bit of an ordeal. Over many years, every time I redecorated a room I installed wired network access points. 29 of them in total although only eleven are in regular use. My mistake was not to allow POE (Power Over Ethernet) to be a simple and easy choice.

20 years ago I did not know what POE was and in later years the price of the equipment required was a disincentive. Making it available at selected outlets on a hard wired system presented challenges not helped by the fact that my detailed notes and graphics of how the cabling was originally set up had gone AWOL.

In retrospect it would have been easier to throw away an expensive switch and buy the POE version so that the power could be switched on in software rather than my cost free but time consuming solution. I must have been up and down stairs 100 times while sending a test signal up one cable to see where it emerged; and again when it didn’t.

The new VOIP phones work too, after I worked out what Session Initiation Protocol pass through was and disabled it. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

There are two unidentified cables left over. Sooner or later I will find something that no longer works but for now it will have to do.

 

9 March - Addicted to lies and deception

Bexley is a Council built on lies and over time, with increased public scrutiny, more sophisticated lies. Gone are the days when Cabinet Member Peter Craske would deny at Public Questions that he had placed a £4 million contract with a firm of transport consultants when he quite obviously had and I was getting anonymous messages from that company with a Batman theme. The spin machine has been improved almost beyond recognition.

In her address to Conservative Home yesterday, Council Leader O’Neill continues with the oldest lie of all; that Bexley is a low tax borough. Relative to other London boroughs Bexley is in a worse place now than when Labour lost control in 2006.

She complains that Greenwich gets a bigger grant and has made savage cuts but omits to mention that Conservatives have been in power both nationally and locally for the past twelve years but that wrong is not yet righted. Bexley residents suffer the consequences of that neglect. Hundreds of pounds annually for every household year after year after year.

She also fails to mention that Bexley has suffered more savage cuts. The 304 jobs that were lost last year are unworthy of a mention.

Another lie is that Labour Councillors always vote against the so called improvements when the truth is that they vote for more. Why they choose to vote against a lesser improvement I have no idea. A strange strategy when it is always used against them later.

The lie about achieving every manifesto pledge since 2006 has already been comprehensively debunked by me and others (Twitter) several times. The lie about Labour being opposed to high quality affordable housing is ludicrous in the extreme. Not a single meeting goes by without Nicola Taylor (Labour, Erith) banging the drum for more affordable homes and Cabinet Member Leaf going on at length about why she cannot have any.

At a simpler level the Leader says that Council Tax will rise by 1·9% but when the bills arrive in a couple of weeks time you will see that the increase is twice that. She says that Bexley Conservatives “understand the challenges facing the organisation with clear commitment to manage the medium term financial resilience of the organisation” but fails to mention that it was one of only eight Councils in the country which misunderstood the financial crisis they faced to the extent they had to apply for a Government bale out, a facility that they just managed to avoid using by applying even more draconian cuts.

Extract from Conservative Home.

 

7 March - New names but nothing changes

The image to the left is not the best copy of the Bexleyheath Tories fibbing their way to victory in May 2022 but will have to do for now. Their leaflet bears the same message as did Belvedere’s but with different faces attached. New faces look like being the norm in Bexley unless Labour can work a miracle in the borough.

The name Sandhu rang a bell with me and the reason was not hard to find. In 2014 that acknowledged and proven liar who somehow became Prime Minister picked out Ragbhir Singh Sandhu for special praise after he organised a booze up for Bexley Conservatives. It was obvious then that the Mobile Bar Hire company was not picked at random or by competitive tender but because of who owned it. Where have we heard that story before? (N.B. It is unlikely to have been a Bexley Council bar booking in which case tendering would not apply.)

There were strong suggestions backed by a Councillor that there was a Sandhu family link to the Independent Person on the Code of Conduct Committee. There is nothing straight forward about Bexley Council.

Ragbhir is no longer a director of the company that plied Boris Johnson with drink in 2014.

 

6 March - The end of an era

On 25th February I broke - pension excepted - my last link with BT; the company I joined in 1962. Not the wrench it might have been, my loyalty to it has gradually been chipped away by price increases and the sort of poor service my last boss warned would happen if the company continued to pursue the course that even 30 years ago it had embarked upon.

I could then have told you all sorts of reasons why BT was technically better than the cheapskate upstart companies, many relating to network resilience under load but the constant pressures of competition has led to BT becoming yet another cheapskate company but one that charges premium prices.

My phone bill just for the landline was heading in the direction of £40 a month and the various discounts once offered have not been seen for several years. Once the fibre came all the way into the house the copper line could be abandoned and VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phones could replace the analogue ones.

If you have been reading the letters page of the Daily Telegraph you will know that people are not happy about the enforced move to ‘Digital Voice’. There are definitely pros and cons and there is no doubt that the change has caused me a great deal of work.

Analogue phones would happily work in a power cut because the basics ran on a 50 volt battery at the telephone exchange. You could also run several phones over the same internal wire. Mine came into the upstairs ‘office’, through two bedrooms, down to the lounge and out to the hall where the line used to enter the house. I reversed it so that it served the router first.

Telephones could be plugged in anywhere down the internal line. Not so with digital, each is a distinct computer requiring its own line back to the router. I had provided eight such lines into my lounge but the AV takes up six of them and the remaining two are just where you don’t need a phone to be. Twelve years ago I never considered that a phone would need a LAN port.

I have been in the roof and up a big ladder outside for two days on the trot.

Other downsides which don’t affect me is that services such as Bexley’s Emergency Link Line currently rely on a traditional phone line and I know of no devices tailored to the deaf, like a Taxi Rank bell to alert them to a call or a phone which can go especially loud.

On the other hand VOIP phones can be powered via the data cable but I hadn’t made provision for that. Another job that has taken me away from Bonkers. Fortunately my router has a back up battery big enough to keep the internet running all day.

As with all phones it is a right old faff to enter your contacts’ phone numbers into a phone but my friendly ISP has helped out with an easily edited webpage which downloads the names and numbers into all my phones and accessible only from my fixed IP address.

I suppose I could have simplified things with a DEC phone - no I don’t know what that stands for - but I hate the things.

Everybody has this landline threat hanging over them and I suspect many will give up and rely totally on their mobiles. I can’t see that doing BT a lot of good. Like that other off-shoot of the GPO, the Royal Mail, they seem to be keen to kill off the old services. Postage up to 95p a stamp! Don’t expect any Christmas cards from me this year.

 

3 March - No censorship here

With other things to do today no blog was planned but I woke up to see headlines to the effect that the UK Government has taken Russia Today off air.

I don’t think this is strictly true and the impression that our Government has indulged in censorship should be nipped in the bud.

Russia Today is beamed up to the Astra Satellite by SES in Luxembourg and redistributed by Freeview and FreeSat in the UK.

The European Union decreed that Russia Today must be taken off air; Luxembourg is in the EU, so there is no RT satellite feed to distribute to UK viewers. Nothing to do with Liz Truss or Nadine Dorries.

Out of interest I skirted close to breaking the licensing laws by tuning in directly to the satellite feed, thereby bypassing FreeSat. It was transmitting a blank screen and an audio test tone. FreeSat has intercepted it and put up their own logo.

It would not be technically possible for the UK to unilaterally block RT while the Astra satellite transmits it (from a foreign country). You don’t actually need Sky or FreeSat to watch satellite TV.

 

2 March (Part 2) - Bexley Council. The home of spiteful and vindictive tyrants

I don’t suppose I will be very popular among Bexley’s trading community but in all my 35 years as a Bexley resident I have never once paid to park in the borough. On a handful of occasions I have paid for someone else to park on a very rare joint trip into town but basically I refuse to give Bexley Council a bean.

Last month’s fairly modest Credit Card statement was 100% on-line purchases. This month the bill wandered well past the four figure mark and another 100% spent outside the borough. The Debit Card tells the same story. Nothing spent in Bexley and part of the reason is a certain amount of paranoia about Bexley’s draconian parking regulations. In 59 years of motoring I have never had a parking ticket and have no intention of starting now.

Rob Burns fell foul of Bexley’s Petty Putins when he misidentified two adjacent car parks. I suppose that is technically an infringement but Bexley Council is a heartless money chasing monster.

Note:This story is stolen from Twitter. There has been no contact with Rob Burns.

 

2 March (Part 1) - Little action, no plan

Before getting into today’s subject, two little comments…

The neglected paper bin opposite my house was emptied yesterday and it has been left facing the right way. Good, because I have accumulated rather too many Amazon boxes in recent days. And that Ukraine flag on the banner may have caused the odd bit of bother. The years old code that overlays images on the banner assumed they would be square and the flag isn’t. A new bit of code was added to cope with it.

Unfortunately some browsers, Firefox on my PC and Chrome on the mobile, picked up the new image OK but ignored the new code resulting in the flag overflowing into the Menu area. If a page refresh doesn’t fix it you may have to play with clearing some history.

At Monday’s Public Cabinet Meeting David Leaf found time to take a dig at Councillor Nicola Taylor (Labour, Erith) for her non-stop campaigning for the homeless which seems like an excuse to return to the subject.

In recent days and weeks Cabinet Members Gower, Leaf, Munur and O’Neill have all claimed in various ways that the housing situation in Bexley is good. Cafer Munur in particular. He denied that Bexley had failed the Government’s Housing Delivery Test; so in case he is still in denial, and I will confess the gov.uk site doesn’t make things easy, here is a section of the list of failures. Bexley is not the worst but maybe it will shake Councillor Cafer Munur (Conservative, Blackfen & Lamorbey) out of his complacency.

It is Bexley’s ostriche like tendencies which have led to it being a high cost borough in decline.

 

1 March - How did things get to be this bad?

Bexley’s Cabinet met last night to agree to recommend the maximum possible (1·99% + 1% Social Care) Council Tax rise for the next financial year. The Government grant has been increased by a paltry £742,000 which will do little to redress the balance with neighbouring Greenwich and failed to prevent the maximum allowable increase.

It’s not unlike the national situation where years of mismanagement by both parties has led to there being no realistic alternative to more taxes. Nationally the Net Stupid policies, trying to rely on green energy, ridiculous subsidies on solar panels and the like, banning fracking, closing gas storage facilities, stalling on nuclear energy have all led us to a very bad and expensive place.

Then there are the lamentable blinkered policies which result in an under-equipped defence force that wouldn’t fill a big football stadium and running down the health service so that it operates close to 100% of capacity for most of the time. We have been governed by brainless ninnies for far too long.

By comparison Bexley Council has not done too badly. It held back on growth for far too many years and totally messed up the housing requirements while raising taxes by more than 20% in the past four years and is nothing to be proud of but better than the London Mayor’s record which has been catastrophic. His failure to recognise that London was the money generating powerhouse of the UK and trying to close it down by attacking commuters and vehicle movements on all fronts will stifle enterprise. Maybe it is part of his Socialist Dream

An 8·8% tax precept at a time when most people are about to suffer a 54% increase in energy costs, 10% higher National Insurance Contributions, reduced pensions and the price of my favourite jam going up by a factor of 2·08 over a month or two.

In April most people will be in for a rude awakening and, Covid apart, any damn fool could have seen the problems coming 15 years ago.

The Cabinet meeting last night was about one thing only; money, and how to extract as much as possible from those who suffer the 25th worst Council Tax rates in London.

There wasn’t a lot new by way of statistics. The Council underspent on housing by £1·5 million this year and the Leader said that “was good”. Whether those sleeping in shop doorways agree was not recorded. The forecast is that the underspend will get bigger.

The Capital Budget is even more adrift from the forecast of £69·5 million. It is underspent by £25·7 million. The cut backs have been very severe.

73,669 households will benefit from the £150 reduction in Council Tax mandated by the Government.

Cabinet Member David Leaf went into one of his lengthy (33 minutes and 48 seconds) political speeches and among the few highlights is that Bexley provides “a high quality waste and recycling collection service which continues to be the best in London”.

Street Services, parks, open spaces are all improved and “keep our borough looking beautiful”. He did not believe that lower parking charges would attract more users as had been suggested at the Budget Scrutiny meeting.

Cabinet Member Read spoke for only eight minutes but he too failed to come up with anything new. It was not really relevant to budget setting but Cabinet Member Craske revealed that Bexley lost 160 trees in the recent storms.

Labour Leader Stefano Borella said the election in May will be a verdict on Bexley Council not the Mayor of London. His main point was that the figures set out on the Finance Director’s report did not add up properly. (Look at the year 2024/25 where £1,688·76 plus £213 09 is said to total £1,620·11.)

Further down the same page Council Tax was said to be going up by 21%. (Compare 2023/24 with 2024/25.)

How can it be that the man with verbal diarrhea doesn’t notice the “Bombshell” tax increase but the Council’s train spotter can?

The Finance Director was asked to comment but he had failed to find the offending table. The Leader said that only Labour administrations have 21% Council Tax rises. Ironically 21% is pretty much the increase the Conservatives have introduced, albeit over four years.

The Finance Director was unable to answer Councillor Borella’s mathematical queries during the course of the meeting.

Councillor Leaf restarted his political diatribe but fortunately gave up after a minute or so.