29 December - Arrogant lying law-breaking cowards? The view from Sidcup
@tonyofsidcup has discovered the secret of not having an introductory comment added to his guest blogs. Not submit them until the day of planned publication. Cunning! All I have to say about this one is that @tony always appears to be utterly amazed when he comes to the conclusion that Bexley Council is run by law breaking liars. When will he learn that It is what they do? Wake up Tony!
3. Liar Liar
Pedestrian safety - especially safety of school children walking to school - has been an interest lately.
Bexley council is actually not that bad in this regard - because the neighbours are even worse.
Labour-run Greenwich built only one pedestrian crossing in five years.
Tory-run Bromley is
doing a decent job analysing collisions, but then spends money to protect motorists. Bexley builds a
zebra crossing now and then, but the decisions seem to be driven by lobbying from influential
councillors - for example, the Blackfen and Lamorbey bunch - not by any fair and systematic process.
(By failing to have that systematic process, the council appears to violate a legal requirement - but
the council that has been ignoring the legal requirement to develop an Air Quality Action Plan since
2007 clearly views legal requirements as recommendations anyway).
Then in 2023, the council announced a survey of locations near the borough’s schools, with a view to
improving pedestrian safety there. Great news! Unfortunately, the plan was undermined by poor
execution, and, in my opinion, wasted an opportunity and council money.
One questionable aspect of the exercise was never involving the schools themselves. Ironically, the
council paid people to sit for hours and days next to a school and count passing pedestrians and cars
but a council officer never stepped inside a school and talked to a headteacher about their
road-safety concerns. “All appropriate people have been consulted”, Cabinet Member Diment
declared in response to a public question at a council meeting, in Bexley’s trademark display of
arrogance covering up for incompetence.
How do I know that the survey’s organisers never asked schools? Because I wrote to Bexley’s 80+
schools and asked them, getting around 70 responses. Seventy headteachers agreed on two things.
First, nobody from the council has asked them about their road-safety concerns as part of the survey.
Second, nobody from the council has asked them about their road-safety concerns before the survey.
On matters of road safety, there has been no proactive contact from the council. Nada. Zilch. Bupkis.
Wait a minute - that’s not what the council had told me!
BiB: This FOI response dated 24th October 2023 is from the same individual who lied about Abbey Road in 2009 and caused BiB to be created.
I made the following FOI request:
In response to an earlier FOI request, Highways team advised that the council … has (a) “an advisor
to support schools in updating their School Travel Plans”, (b) a "Pedestrian Skills Officer". Can you
please provide the list of these two officers’ engagements with schools since January 2021. I am
looking for a list of format “year / officer (one of the two above)/school”.
The council responded with… a list of 58 schools, saying they did not have any further information.
“Really?”, I asked in the internal-review request, “Do council officers not maintain records of their
contact with schools?” A month passed, and the internal-review deadline came and went on
November 25. Then on December 1, the request was dismissed as “vexatious”.
The council tells you they have been busy advising and supporting schools. Seventy schools tell you the opposite. Who do you believe?
News Shopper report.
Note: @tony supplied the list of 58 schools which Bexley Council claimed it had consulted.