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News and Comment September 2023

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23 September - Yellow hypocrisy

Money grabbersI don’t like Facebook but I usually look at a couple of local groups each day. It was there that I picked up on the fact that there are new Yellow Moneybox junctions around the borough; but where?

The search facility on Bexley Council’s website has always been utterly useless. A search for yellow gives you yellow lines. A search for box will tell you about recycling boxes that we don’t even have any more and junction will lead to far too many road names to count. Yellow box junction in full will provide all of them in one go. 1990s IT standards in 2023.

Fortunately blogger Hugh Neal of Arthur Pewty fame gave me a clue in the shape of a Bulletin issued by Bexley Council which true to their form was not a lot of use except that it said that Cabinet Member Richard Diment had signed off on seven more camera enforced Yellow Moneyboxes.

The locations are however not revealed which is what one would expect when the object is to entrap motorists and raise money.

Don’t believe me? Then you have not been paying attention.

After one of Richard Diment’s predecessors had lied that Yellow Moneyboxes were installed for reasons of road safety, departing Finance Director Alison Griffin blew his case apart by revealing at the same 2017 meeting that the object was to raise £500,000 from the first of them installed in Welling and that figure was built into her budget calculations.

The first two Moneyboxes were raising only an estimated £300,000 a year by 2019 so obviously the answer is more Moneyboxes.

Bexley Council will have wasted at least £200,000 by the time it repays the little dictator’s legal bills after losing their ULEZ challenge in Court and regards the £12·50 a day permit to kill 4,000 Londoners a year as an unnecessary burden on residents. Yellow Moneyboxes are not quite the same of course as they can be avoided or you can simply hold up all the traffic until other drivers stop blocking your way, but the ULEZ suggestion that Bexley Council is the motorists’ friend is a long way from the truth. Bexley Council is nobody’s friend.

It is disappointing to find that Cabinet Member Richard Diment shows the same hypocritical tendencies as all his predecessors.

 

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