30 September (Part 3) - A charmed life coming to an end?

It didn't take much effort to confirm that the Green council in Brighton has led it to near disaster but it was poking about on Brighton’s website that led to the big surprise.

Will Tuckley was appointed to be their Chief Executive back in March this year and the local newspaper refers to him as being the UK’s sixth highest local authority earner while in Bexley. (£260,000.)

Not bad when you consider that Bexley Council threw out a critical petition because it claimed a reference to £208,983, taken from Bexley’s own website, was a gross exaggeration.

Brighton is now looking to replace Tuckley but he has had a long and lucky career. He came to Bexley from Croydon in April 2008 and brought the police borough commander and deputy with him but left behind an ugly rumour. That he had accidently killed a homeless man sleeping in a car park and a bit of a cover-up followed it.

Tuckley dodged the Peter Craske obscenity issue by deciding it was a police matter but showed his hand later by participating in a meeting designed to get Craske off the hook along with his two tame policemen.

A year later the tables were turned thanks to the efforts of Michael Barnbrook when he persuaded Greenwich police to look into the goings on in Bexley and they sent a file on Tuckley and others to the CPS. The timing was embarrassing because the government had chosen Tuckley to take over a failing Tower Hamlets along with his favourite police commander and deputy and Mick did his best to make them aware of Tuckley’s CPS file.

Something had to be done to halt Mick Barnbrook so they fell back on the usual racist name calling and the CPS managed to lose the file. I had a secret meeting with Greenwich police and I was told how that result was achieved.

Tuckley came to my notice again after the police friends’ successors investigated a two million pound housing bribe and there were allegations that he had known about it six months earlier - but had done nothing about them. What caused Tuckley to flee to Brighton is not yet very obvious. Maybe it has something to do with Tower Hamlets’ new broom Mayor Lutfur Rahman; but hasn’t the longest serving Council Chief Executive in London done well for himself?

 

30 September (Part 2) - Two and two

According to The Romford Recorder, Bexley’s one time partner in oneSource, Havering Council is in a spot of financial bother as its reserves, like Bexley’s, head towards rock bottom.

It's probably a case of two and two make five but Bexley Council has decided that it needs to explain what its own financial monitoring processes are all about and the Deputy Director of Finance is going to explain all to a sub-Committee of eight Councillors next Tuesday.

The presentation is available as a PDF.

It might be interesting to those with an understanding of things financial, which excludes me, and in any case, until Sadiq Khan succeeds in his quest to make motoring in London unviable, Tuesdays see me in North London via the soon to be tolled Blackwall Tunnel.

According to an internet only friend in Brighton, his Council is in the same boat as Havering. Well if you must vote Green what else would you expect?

 

30 September (Part 1) - A nice round dozen

Another one.

No Councillor with a housing portfolio knows what is going on or, perhaps more correctly, is willing to answer a simple question.

Addresses announced for auction by a Bexley Housing Association…

53 Pengarth Road, Bexley
235 Iron Mill Lane, Crayford
Crayford Road, Crayford
52 Jenningtree Road, Erith
204 Ellenborough, Sidcup
50 Mallard Walk, Sidcup
56 Maylands Drive, Sidcup
30 St. Andrews Road, Sidcup
18 Burnell Avenue, Welling
39 Burnell Avenue, Welling

Note: The title was found to be a miscount when checked on 24th August 2024!

 

29 September (Part 2) - Into double figures

No need to say any more is there? On 22nd September three house sales were featured bringing the total flogged off by a Bexley Housing Association to nine. Another HMO in the making?

No explanation from either Labour or Conservative Councillors with a housing brief.

52 Jenningtree Road, Erith

Previously auctioned addresses…

53 Pengarth Road, Bexley
235 Iron Mill Lane, Crayford
Crayford Road, Crayford
204 Ellenborough, Sidcup
50 Mallard Walk, Sidcup
56 Maylands Drive, Sidcup
30 St. Andrews Road, Sidcup
18 Burnell Avenue, Welling
39 Burnell Avenue, Welling

 

29 September (Part 1) - Passing the buck

I don’t know how many residents are on the circulation list for Bexley’s weekly News Bulletin but it must be in the tens of thousands, any one of whom might use the contact addresses listed therein. I was one of them last weekend with a question 27 words long about Yellow Box Junctions.

It would appear that the Contact Officer sent it to the Freedom of Information Officer to be answered in a month’s time and in due course she would have to refer back to the Contact Officer to get the answer. One of many reasons why the Council Tax in Bexley is 25th worst in London.

 

28 September - Bexley Council ignores the law again

Yellow Moneyboxes seem to be even less popular than ULEZ if the BiB post box is any guide and thanks to loyal readers it includes the full list of blight sites. A link to the elusive document signed by Cabinet Member Richard Diment was also supplied; not from Chloe Wenbourne unfortunately who still cannot be bothered to email a simple URL.

The report claims that the object is to reduce congestion and the seven new Moneyboxes were chosen because they were said to be congested for 20% or more of the unspecified observation time.

Victoria Road, Erith and Jubilee Way, Sidcup were said to be congested nearly all the time.

Showing its usual scant regard for the law Bexley Council asked Richard Diment to put his name to a document which states in a weirdly constructed sentence, “The Cabinet Member is asked to consider the recommended seven sites for further parking restrictions of a box junction to be installed, alongside cameras so that Parking Services can issue a Penalty Charge Notice (PCNs) to any motorist that stops within the box junction.”

The law does not say that stopping within a box junction is an offence, it says that it must not be entered until the exit is clear. Putting a signature to an unlawful statement is something I always associated with Richard Diment’s predecessor, not the present incumbent of the Places post.

Ironically the signed statement acknowledges the fact that more Moneyboxes may increase congestion but the motivation, as always, is more money. You will no doubt note that whilst a short observation of a junction may have shown 94% congestion the less expensive option of a quick look on Google Earth (see below) would have shown there is none.

Station Road/Jubilee Way, Sidcup - Station Road, Crayford

Bellegrove Road (Central Avenue junction) - Bellegrove Road (Edmond Road junction)

Victoria Road (Erith) - Groombridge Close/Westwood Lane (Blackfen)

 

27 September - Wen do you think Chloe might reply? Wen do you think the Council might act?

Another Moneybox location has become known thanks to a BIB reader but Bexley Council remains officially silent.

I wrote seeking the information from Bexley Council at the weekend

Dear Ms. Wenbourne,
Could you please point me to the URL of the justification document that the Cabinet Member signed to authorise seven more yellow box junctions and their location?
many thanks,
Malcolm Knight
DA17 5RJ

But three days later the subject remains on the secret list.

One correspondent has already fallen foul of what was claimed to be a new junction, although the description leads me to suspect it was one from an earlier Council thieving spree. Fortunately the lady concerned was not so easily fleeced and successfully contested it on the grounds that her exit was clear when she moved into the trap.

An email from way back in 2016 said this (abbreviated)…

Well it finally arrived - a Penalty Charge Notice for Entering and Stopping in a box junction.
Bexley Council evidence is a short video clip. (Outdated link redacted). Contravention code 31 and vehicle No GN51XXX.
The video clip only starts after I am already half way across the box and after the black car has shot out of Danson Lane and taken the space which was available when I entered the box. If the clip was started a few seconds earlier it would show that when I entered the box my exit was indeed clear and hence no offence committed. Bexley Council though would rather edit the video to avoid showing this - issue a PCN and hope the recipient just pays up without argument. Not a chance with this recipient. Can I use your blog and photos of 9th October as supporting evidence?

A nice trick to edit the video to avoid showing the proof that the manoeuvre was not illegal but entirely typical of Bexley’s cheating Council. Unfortunately a shortened clip cannot prove that there was not a clear exit either so my correspondent won his case on appeal. The offence is entering a Moneybox when there is not a clear exit, not simply stopping in it.

Our old friend @tonyofsidcup took exception to my summary of July’s Transport Sub-Committee meeting, in particular the ninth item.

• No school has pressurised Bexley Council towards the installation of ‘Safe School Streets’.

I don’t always agree with @tony on road related issues but there can be no denying that he is a persistent campaigner. He is midway through writing to 80 plus school heads to see if Bexley’s claim is anything like true. He has shown me some of the early replies but requested that I do not report them in any detail at this stage. Let’s just say that some head teachers have a different perception to our complacent Council and received no response to the pleas they have made. Quelle Surprise!

Continuing with the road theme, the double yellow lines in Carrill Way have improved accessibility and the parking displacement has not been too severe because there were simply no nearby parking spaces into which displacement could occur; except for one. This happens to be right outside my own house. On some days my immediate neighbour is unable to access his own drive because of inconsiderate commuter parking as shown here.

An unthinking Bexley Council has designed-in this nonsense and always refuses to do anything about it. They will not issue a PCN because strictly speaking there is no offence and they will not allow my neighbour’s drive to be registered as a dropped kerb because they won’t accept shared drives for registration.

Although they accept end on parking on the other side of the road which occasionally blocks the road, they refuse to see WG10 TKX as an end parker and fine him for being more than 50 centimetres from the kerb. It is Catch 22 from every point of view.

@tonyofsidcup never ceases to chide me privately for my support of Cabinet Member Richard Diment and until he posts on-line obscenities about me like his predecessor did, I will probably remain suitably biased, but until Chloe Wenbourne tells me his reasons for justifying another set of Yellow Moneytraps I shall have to wonder if @tonyofsidcup has a point.

Note: The new location revealed by the BiB reader is said to be by the Methodist Church in Bellegrove Road, Welling.

 

25 September - From bad to worse again

There is an Audit Committee meeting on Thursday and I was toying with the idea of attending but it looks to be a waste of time. The problem is that the public is going to be excluded from the embarrassing bit. Item 9, the bad debt situation.

I was under the impression that penny share company Capita handled debt chasing for Bexley Council but if that is correct they have made a pretty poor job of it. As of two months ago debt had reached the staggering total of £73 million.

We are owed money by the NHS (£618,000), Sadiq Khan (£501,000) Bromley Council (£438,000), Havering Council (£360,000), Newham Council (£283,000) and well over half a million by retail landlords. Council Tax payments are missing more than £40 million. Add in Business Rates and the debt rises to £44 million.

How come Bexley’s former oneSource partners are allowed to hold out on us? You would think Bexley’s Finance Director who used to work there would have a few useful contacts to lean on. He was a Capita employee in Barnet too, maybe he and his colleagues recruited there continue to retain a sense of misplaced loyalty.

Bexley negotiates its bad debts with friendly Councils, for anyone else it’s the bailiffs.

Unrecovered parking fines total £2·7 million over two years, perhaps that is why motorists need to be fleeced at the new Yellow Moneybox junctions. How can anyone claim they are a road safety measure when almost by definition they raise no money except when traffic is snarled up and moving at walking pace?

Our aspiring Chief Executive Paul Thorogood has written off £661,475 of parking penalty revenue so far this year. Fortunately for him, Cabinet Member Richard Diment is doing his level best to make up for it.

Maybe I should not have been so dismissive of the anonymous insider message that said Bexley would be the next Birmingham, but I still don’t believe it. All the figures shown above are taken from the Agenda for next Thursday’s meeting. (PDF)

 

24 September - From bad to worse?

An email has been sent to Ms. Wenbourne at Bexley Council whose name appeared as contact point on the oh so brief Yellow Moneybox announcement. It asks where is the document that justifies Cabinet Member Richard Diment’s poor decision and where are the seven traps placed?

Meanwhile this email turned up yesterday…

Hi Malcolm
There’s a new box junction in Bexley Village, at the entrance to the car park by the railway bridge. There’s absolutely no need for it as there was never a problem before.
Martin

Another reminded me that the Conservatives were elected in 2006 on a promise to get rid of an unnecessary bus lane and that maybe there is scope for Labour to reverse the trick.

A correspondent who does a lot of name dropping but whose information appears to be just a little out of date takes a very pessimistic view of the situation inside Gestapo HQ which suggests being in charge is not a job that anyone would want. Let’s hope he is a pessimist.

Jacky Belton leaves. Nick Hollier leaves, a sad farewell to the Chief and her [former] Monitoring Officer.
When are the other rats leaving the sinking ship? It’s an ominous time with the money running out. Maybe a few more will be taking their golden goodbye. But what does that matter? It’s only your money.
Your children’s education is failing. (†) Your parents are still waiting for their carer and your children have little hope of their own home. Maybe that is more to do with Sunak’s economy than BexleyCo.
Never mind, we have Paul Thorogood (Director of Finance) who is desperate to be Chief. So maybe it’s not all bad news, at least until the Government send in a taskforce to run Bexley.

Are things really that bad? Richard Diment must have thought so when he decided that Bexley residents should be fined as often as possible for merely trying to go about their usual business.

† Bexley claims the best OFSTED record in London. As with most of their claims the truth has been spun and the OFSTED report refers to Children’s Services, not Education.

The names of the leavers are not actually new.

 

23 September - Yellow hypocrisy

I 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.

 

22 September (Part 2) - Broken Britain

So which idiot Tory Minister though it would be a good idea to privatise the Royal Mail? Oh, it wasn’t a Conservative Minister was it? It was a Lib Dem, Vince Cable in 2013.

Since then we have lost the second postal delivery, the latest collection time is usually around 9 a.m., lots of postcodes only get a weekly delivery as Royal Mail concentrates on parcels, the price of a first class stamp will have gone up by more than 25% this year and there is a move to cease Saturday collections.

And now Abbey Wood has lost its post box.

I suppose I shouldn’t moan because I vowed never to post another letter after the stamps I had bought for Christmas were first declared invalid from last January (with an extension to July) and so far I have got away with it. Never yet have I bought a new style stamp and I hope to keep it that way.

Meanwhile Royal Mail thinks it is acceptable to allow the only letter box with a late collection to be closed off without warning.

Never mind, the Chairman gets more than half a million a year with an annual bonus taking his pay close to £700,000. Nothing much else matters in billionaire Sunak’s Britain.

The old Post Office which couldn’t be saved is to become yet another block of flats. It should be noted that the Post Office and Royal Mail are entirely separate organisations.

 

22 September (Part 1) - Diesels, Dames, DVDs and Disposals

Is there any Bexley news worth reporting right now? Probably not. There is no significant Council meeting to report until 5th October and BiB is reduced to noting that crime levels in Bexley have fallen to the point where the police who park illegally have nothing better to do than arrest van drivers who park perfectly legally next to TfL ULEZ cameras. Presumably if you report a burglary or stolen car they will respond immediately and shoplifters will no longer loot stores safe in the knowledge that they are immune from prosecution.

Yesterday I buckled to Khan’s ULEZ tyranny by arranging a lift into Bexleyheath for a diesel driver and, separately, a Councillor reported how he had to sell his Euro 5 car and unnecessarily spend money on a second hand Euro 6 compliant diesel. That’s the second such Councillor I know of who has had to dispose of a perfectly good car and thereby save 4,000 lives a year.

I briefly considered debunking some of the nonsense that circulates about electric cars. It is really annoying to be told that I am polluting the air with my brake dust while the truth is that I rarely use the brakes. It is fun to demonstrate to sceptics how one can travel across town and beyond while never touching the brake pedal. The motor in regeneration mode is good enough for all but an emergency stop. After five years the brake pads show insignificant wear and the battery health still registers 100% but the naysayers would have you believe I will be shelling out £15,000 for a new one any day now.

There have been no fuel costs at all (solar and Sainsbury’s powered) over the last 3,000 miles but unfortunately the rip off insurance companies more than offset that saving so I fully accept that EVs are not for everyone.

What else for a rant?

Not being well up in the realm of popular culture I did not really know who Russell Brand was but he is in law an innocent man. Yesterday Dame Caroline Dinenage who is some jumped up Tory MP no one has ever heard of, ignored Magna Carta and told the Media companies to cancel him. That single act undid, for me, all the good Rishi Sunak did with his Green speech the day before. Why has he not sacked her from Chairmanship of his Culture, Media and Sport Committee? As gutless as I have come to expect.

In an attempt to educate myself on this Brand character I grabbed a 2008 DVD off the shelf (†) and watched it last night. From what I have learned of Brand it would appear that he was playing himself. The film was given a 15 certificate but included full on willy waving - literally, but not Brand’s - and titties galore. I am not averse to such things but it was the context and dialogue that got to me. It was cringe inducing and embarrassing to watch even though I was alone. (My mother once told me off for showing her Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise’s Rain Man on tape.) If that is Brand’s life he is likely to be guilty. But it was fiction; at least I assumed it was.

Can we get to the point now?

Why are the housing associations flogging off their property at a rate of knots? What do young renters think about it and why are all our Councillors silent about it?

Three more to add to the six already reported over the past four weeks.

Image 1 - Rightmove website
Image 2 - Rightmove website
Image 3 - Rightmove website

† For the perverts, the film was Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Rain Man contained one use of the F word.

 

20 September - The need for Speed

Some might call it clickbait but there can be little doubt that a degree of controversy and provocation is the way to attract readers. Monday’s blog did its job admirably and the hard of thinking rose up against it.

The message was that although it is preferable to get in the way of a slow moving vehicle than one going faster, the issue is really much wider than that. Most road accidents are the result of stupidity and ignoring that by slowing everything down indiscriminately costs money. Less money ultimately means life is impoverished in every sense of the word.

When Stephenson managed to kill an MP (an exaggeration, he was there but not his fault) on the first day of the Liverpool & Manchester railway exactly 197 years ago, perhaps we should have given up on railways instead of learning from one MP’s stupidity. (Ironically the train was doing less than 20 miles per hour.)

Is it really a good idea to increase the Abbey Wood to Cannon Street train’s running time from 21 minutes to 35 and have National Rail Enquiries recommend the Liz and change at Whitechapel for something quicker? How stupid is that? What an indictment of Southeastern! Personally I would prefer the old faster trains even if you would get your head swiped off if you stuck it out of the window before the Woolwich tunnels. Only stupid people did that and only stupid people think that longer train journeys are a good idea.

One of those who took issue with me over the 20 m.p.h. limits simply wouldn’t see that there might be more to it than the casualty count. Even one death is bad, obviously, but to get the number nearer to zero requires movement to be ever more tightly controlled, which is perhaps what some people are aiming for. Stupid again.

I got fed up with the demands to prove that speed had been beneficial to society over the years. I thought it was self-evident. Why did our forebears ride horses and invent the wheel? Should such Luddites go back to 56k modems (my first was 1·2k!) and shun fibre? Faster speeds have driven the economy forward without any exceptions that I can think of. Why else would humanity have always striven to go faster? There may occasionally be consequences but they must be managed, not allowed to be the dominating factor.

Maybe we should revert to tuning knobs on TVs because once in a while the remote control disappears down the back of the sofa or the batteries go flat thus effectively killing the TV. With a tuning knob no TV ‘dies’ְ. The ‘accident’ rate is zero but it is probably stupid.

Eventually I tired of the argument that the only thing that mattered in the speed debate was speed itself. The Twitter/X Mute button came into its own.

Even more annoying was the repeated request for chapter and verse on the economics that may prove that reduced speed has consequences.

Family connections occasionally provide me with an insight into what is going on in the road transport industry but even if I fully understood the oddments I hear about, it would not be appropriate to spill all the beans here.

Consultants do not study and measure things for months and produce reams of expensive reports for their clients and expect the conclusions to be made public without permission - which is why I know so little of the specifics.

A few such studies have gone public in the trade and occasionally the main stream press. Among them is the safety of lorries in convoy with a single driver in charge. Autonomous buses on the streets of London, whether bus lanes do more harm than good. Are pods such as those trialled in Greenwich ever going to be a practical proposition? Do cyclists die under the wheels of lorries due to their own stupidity, or not?

Would increasing the Motorway speed limit to 80 benefit the country overall or not? Is it sensible to regulate vehicle speed via an electronic link from speed limit signs or sat nav? Do public bodies waste millions on the wrong sort of vehicles because they think they are experts when they are not?

Is it better to let a bus driver injure a single pedestrian or jump on the brakes and injure a busload of passengers? Will cameras directly monitoring driver behaviour translate into a better understanding of accidents and in turn to safer driving?

Our governments and those in the EU and beyond (plus vehicle manufacturers) need to know the answer to such questions and are prepared to pay dearly for it. Occasionally I pick up an indication of which way an investigation is heading but never in intimate detail, just the general drift of things if I am lucky. I remember what the 80 Motorway limit conclusion was but of course the Luddites in Green are allowed to stand in the way of improvements to the economy and instead we get 50 limits even on EVs to allegedly cut pollution levels. The arguments are much the same for 20 limits randomly sprinkled by unthinking Lefties except that it will increase pollution. Restrictions are fashionable and allow authorities to issue monetary penalties but are they right? Politicians versus science and engineering that has heaped huge benefits on society; which side would you back?

I have no access to the detail of unpublished road safety reports but I have been able to question at an inevitably superficial level what sort of conclusion they may have reached and occasionally allude to it here.

Those who will not accept that BiB cannot publish the conclusions of expensive confidential reports and do no more than take up a position based on a modicum of inside knowledge on matters already in the public domain have been Twitter/X blocked, possibly temporarily. A first for BiB; but persistent impossible Twitter questions are not unlike persistent FOIs from certain quarters and inexorably lead to the vexatious conclusion so beloved of Councils.

Such people will never be satisfied by answers that do not fulfill their prejudices. There is no argument that being hit at 20 is better than being hit at 30 but even that is not a simple scenario. In nearly every case there would be an emergency stop and the argument is more often between 7 m.p.h. and 4. And the more the experts probe the more the complications will arise.

Note: Photos from Harrow Manorway this morning.

 

19 September (Part 2) - Oh no, not another one! ©

Landlords selling up appears to be coming a thing. The rented flat opposite me went on sale at Able Estates this morning.

Stand by for another HMO in Sidcup. “By order of a major housing association” again.

204 Ellenborough Road. Click image for Rightmove web page.

 

19 September (Part 1) - No CPZ extension

The writing was on the wall for the Abbey Wood CPZ proposals made last April when the decision on the proposals for the adjacent area made in late June referred to the April proposals being still undecided. See below.
And so it proved to be. The almost perfectly satisfactory CPZ (the link includes objections from the Belvedere ward Councillors) on the Bexley side of Abbey Wood station will stay exactly the same as it has always been with an 11 to 1 time restriction to deter commuter parking. In the words of Richard Diment, the Cabinet Member for Places, “The proposed changes for the CPZ [will] be abandoned.”

I can imagine that some residents will be unhappy that the weekend parking problem will remain and even I living beyond the CPZ boundary see long weekenders park outside my house from Friday to Sunday.

Residents of Abbey Road may be dissatisfied too as none of the houses there have dropped kerbs - because the steep North to South incline on an East to West Road prevents garden parking - and Bexley Council sells their road space to commuters for £15 a session.

But the majority view has prevailed.

How did such a silly proposal, including a Residents’ Permit price hike, which provoked two petitions come about? The answer is pretty obvious. They came from former Cabinet Member Craske who has probably never been North of Watling Street while I have credible reports that his replacement Richard Diment was seen patrolling the streets himself to better assess the issues and come to a sensible decision.

Extract from Councillor Diment’s decision.

 

18 September - The S word

I am not big on holidays. My parents only took me on three (Bude, Hastings and Dymchurch) and by the time I was 45 I had racked the number up to seven. Despite being more inclined to stay at home I have holidayed in Wales eight times in my life. The number will never reach nine.

For the same reason that I will not spend any money in Bexleyheath, I will not go there. The constant threat of being fined takes away any pleasure there might be. (†)

Just with Khan and ULEZ, Comrade Drakeford, a Welshman so idiotic that he banned children from buying toys from open supermarkets during the pandemic, is using false statistics to justify his blanket speed limit stupidity.

At the weekend I asked my son who has worked in the road and vehicle safety arena ever since his first job testing braking systems for Lucas, what was the biggest cause of road fatalities.

He instantly responded with the S word. Stupidity.

Having installed and operated the UK’s first NCAP test facility many years ago he is not unaware of the consequences of speed and no one is likely to deny that a 30 m.p.h. impact will be more devastating than one at 20 but there is, he said, a lot more to accident statistics and the consequent costs than speed.

He likened it to the case of a lady of his acquaintance - and mine - who suffered from bad blood circulation and was told by the doctors that if she did not immediately give up smoking she would lose her legs. They were not interested in the fact that her medical records showed that the circulation problems went back to childhood. According to their mantra, smoking was the cause. A more intelligent doctor eventually discovered that it wasn’t and 30 years later the lady still has four limbs one of which can hold a cigarette.

Blaming speed for road deaths is simply lazy science. If the object is to reduce road deaths then drop the 20 down to twelve, then five and eventually zero. Overall deaths would rise. Who would deliver the food, medication and organs for transplant?

The financial impact of speed limits versus the humanitarian considerations is a complex balancing issue. Within the past ten years the government has commissioned investigations into the effects of raising speed limits which have shown that there are benefits but the woke and the ill-informed are focused only on that one S word. They are like the lazy doctors who see smoking as the only cause of poor blood circulation.

Until someone is prepared to put their head above the parapet and come out with the whole truth we are, just as with Covid, no petrol cars after 2030, Net Zero and all the other fashionable causes, doomed to an ever more miserable existence at the hands of incompetent; no stupid, politicians.

Dare I say that in Bexley we appear to have an administration with more sense than most?

The aforesaid son has resumed his tour of European vehicle manufacturers this week pursuing his ideas for safer vehicles. Around twelve years ago he made suggestions which were rejected by the know-nothing politicians. They later realised they were wrong and some of those twelve year old recommendations are beginning to see the light of day.

Another tranche of improvements are due to be introduced next year but Khan has rejected them and is presumably too stupid to realise that manufacturers build for the European market and not for the UK, let alone London.

My son is making a very good income out of stupid politicians who are constantly on the wrong side of science. The big vehicle manufacturers do not hire people who talk out of their backsides. That is Khan’s specialty.

When the accident rate goes down in the years to come it will be the result of good engineering and not nincompoop politicians. Meanwhile we will all get poorer because a slower economy translates directly into less money in pockets and stupidity knows no bounds.

† For the record, in 60 years of driving I have never received any sort of motoring penalty.

 

17 September - Nothing to see here

As originally stated yesterday, I was given a list of senior officers who attended Bexley’s ULEZ Task Force and a brief extract read as follows…

The Taskforce was the Director of Finance funding the legal bid, the Senior Legal Officer, AKA the Monitoring Officer, together with Heads from Transport and Environment (to argue on pollution), under the overall authority of the Chief Exec. A strong line-up to develop the best case for the Leader.

I think we can agree that that is exactly what one would expect of a Council about to spend a large sum on a legal challenge which was arguably mandated by a Manifesto commitment. (“Campaign to stop Sadiq Khan’s plan to extend the ULEZ and road charging.”)

This was in stark contrast to an FOI response which said…

The Task and Finish group was an informal group. Formal meetings were not held but the group met informally twice though those dates are not recorded. The ULEZ Task and Finish Group was a newly formed Members only group ie there is no support from council officers. The group was composed of Cllr Smith, Brooks, Adams and Ogundayo.

The differences were a little worrying coming from a Council with a track record of secrecy and deception but unlike some issues that have surfaced in the past I could not see any reason for Bexley Council needing to cover anything up.

Over the years I have collected a handful or so of Councillors’ mobile phone numbers, it was time to give one or two of them a call. Was there a simple explanation?

The answer appears to be yes.

A clue may be found in the two extracts above. ‘Taskforce’ and ‘Task and Finish Group’.

The latter term is new to me but it seems to be a lesser form of Scrutiny Sub-Committee. It met twice intending to gather evidence of the impact of ULEZ on Bexley’s residents and businesses but the need for formal surveys disappeared. Bexley people were angry and vocal with their opinion on Khan’s intention to attack freedom of movement and damage the economy.

The Task and Finish Group fizzled out and died and there was no need for a formal report. Everyone knew what residents thought about the new car tax without being too formal about it.

Meanwhile the high powered ULEZ Taskforce took the big important decisions. Scrutiny Committees do not make decisions.

So someone, me included, forgot that important distinction, and in retrospect it was always likely to be all legal and above board.

Some BiB correspondents have discovered that both Bromley and Bexley stated that their legal bills until last March was £18,003, via FOI response and comment in Council respectively. This ‘coincidence’ is easily explained. It was one bill divided by five Councils.

Anything else before this one is wrapped up?

Yes unfortunately. London’s tyrant Mayor will be extracting his pound of flesh with a bill for costs and despite me owning an electric car I drove it for 25 extra miles yesterday to avoid a ULEZ charge on a friend’s car and it will be the same next Thursday.

Some journeys are simply not practical by pubic transport.

 

16 September - Cleaned up their act did I say? I wonder

This blog has been temporarily withdrawn, not because anything included in it is known to be wrong - the ULEZ FOI response and the information that came from another Council source do totally contradict each other - but I have set up an appointment with another Council source for Sunday which may provide an explanation.

I am not sure how such disparate reports can be pulled together but it is only fair that someone should be given the chance.

Unfortunately it is has to wait until tomorrow as today is the big eight oh birthday celebration which means a long journey and it is of course why a Saturday blog went on line on Friday evening.

Maybe it will be possible to present the withdrawn blog with an explanation of the discrepancies alongside, or maybe it is simpler than that.

As stated on Thursday, I very much doubt that Councillor Smith is at fault but reconciling the FOI response with the list of Council Officers alleged to have been involved should be interesting - or something!

By the way, tomorrow is not my 80th birthday but it doesn’t fall on a weekend. I would not celebrate it but you know what families are!

 

15 September (Part 2) - Another three years hard labour

Bonkers is 14 years old today and I have occasionally wondered whether it should be continued or put out of its misery. The popularity of blogs in general has waned over the years and with most of the big time liars on Bexley Council, both elected and otherwise, having gone to do other things, the need for it has largely gone.

In fact if you look at politics more widely you might conclude that while Bexley Council has gone some way towards cleaning up its act, politics in general has got ever more incompetent and possibly corrupt. I am looking at you Mr. Sunak. “Britain-is-Bonkers”?

But the decision has been taken out of my hands because without my explicit agreement to a three year extension, the relevant fees were charged to my credit card this morning.

So Bexley will continue to have two occasional sources of local news which don’t entertain advertisements or request donations. Arthur Pewty being the other one.

Someone brought round a copy of Wednesday’s News Shopper this morning, Bromley edition. In a reference to the homeless camp in Abbey Wood they reported that they thought it was underneath the Harrow Manorway flyover; but not “definite”. That’s what comes from relying on Social Media for news and not having a local presence, not to mention being three months behind BiB.

Maybe three more years will serve some purpose.

 

15 September (Part 1) - Lying again?

On 10th September it was reported here that Bexley Council was denying that a ULEZ Task Group ever existed. So what is this then? An extract from my own recording of the Places meeting held on 21st March 2023.

Councillor Cameron Smith reports to the Places Scrutiny Committee on the work of his ULEZ Task Group

Councillor Cameron Smith referring to the “ongoing work” of his ULEZ Task Force and promising to survey businesses and report later the same week.

Despite this Bexley Council asserts that it has no record of the Task Force being set up, it has no idea what its report may have come up with and no Agendas or Minutes were ever produced.

We can only assume that Councillor Smith did absolutely nothing or Bexley Council is lying again. My money is on the latter.

 

13 September - The housing Merry-Go-Round

There are a whole load of things wrong with this country which our billionaire Prime Minister apparently fails to recognise but one of the worst and most longstanding is that young people and even middle-aged people are unable to buy their own home.

How many UK problems could have been fixed if the clown had not given away nearly two billion US dollars of our money to solve other countries’ climate change issues without seeking agreement from any of us, including MPs?

I have said this or something like it before. In 1961 I was earning £403 a year including London weighting and commuting daily from Hampshire.

By the beginning of 1963 after a change of job I was on £820 a year but two years later had saved enough cash to attach myself to the bottom end of the housing ladder with a two bedroom ground floor flat with its own garden.

I am not sure who put an end to that happy state of affairs but it was definitely a politician. Looking back over the past 60 years one can only conclude that every last one of them who rose above back-bencher has been either useless, incompetent, self serving or corrupt and probably several of those things.

Young family men such as Mr. Murky (see adjacent Tweet/X which is one of many similarly themed) are unable to fully provide for their partners and children and for some that will be soul-destroying.

Some in his situation seem to think that Mr. Starmer will be their salvation which 65 years of political awareness makes me think is Cloud Cuckoo Land but we already have incompetent Socialists ruling the country so it probably doesn’t matter much any more.

Mrs. Thatcher allowed Council house tenants to buy their homes at a huge discount and by and large they weren’t replaced. Those that remained Council owned were eventually taken over by Housing Associations who are themselves doing something of a Thatcher on them. Selling them off to the highest bidder. Below is yet another one.

Maybe I am too old and demented to see any merit in this. If Mr. Murky is good for a quarter of a million pounds maybe the likes of him can grab the bottom rung of the ladder but I fail to see how yet another Housing Association sell off helps anyone; except perhaps the buy to let landlords and the HMO profiteers.

 

12 September - Bexley’s finest engineering brains choose Lego bricks

If you build roads with wide sweeping ninety degree bends without a kerb to mark their edges, expect the occasional nasty accident caused by those who ought never to have been given a driving licence. Perhaps they weren’t.

There are very few solutions that Bexley Council could adopt but the obvious and most sensible would be to not promote staff beyond their level of competence; another might be to install more attractive traffic resistant bollards.

Probably the unsightly concrete Lego bricks favoured by Bexley Council will blight the Public Realm in what masquerades as the borough’s premier shopping destination for many years to come. The blocks outside Abbey Wood Station were placed there on 26th November 2019 and replaced even larger ones which protected the station during construction.

The best brains in Bexley have failed to come up with a better solution.

Bexleyheath Broadway. Protection for the Kings Arms.
Abbey Wood station, protected by unsightly blocks since 2019.

 

10 September - ULEZ charlatans and frauds?

A month ago Bexley Council refused to provide any information on what its Leader may have said about ULEZ to her colleagues in Bexley and in the other boroughs opposed to Labour’s unnecessary tax raid on the poor.

All that is known for sure about it is that by March of this year Bexley Council had spent £18,003 on legal fees opposing ULEZ but has been dreadfully coy on everything else other than hinting at a ULEZ Task Group.

Did it meet and when? Who chaired it, what was on the Agenda and recorded in the Minutes?

Nothing!

They had no discussions, no Terms of Reference, but spent your money anyway.

The Council’s FOI Disclosure Log confirms there were no ULEZ meetings and by implication all negotiations were by a nod and a wink by the wastrels who we allow to govern us.

 

9 September - Another wrong move

A couple of weeks ago a former Council house in Crayford was auctioned by a Housing Association which was perhaps in dire need of the money or maybe allowed the property to fall into such a state of disrepair that it was beyond economic salvation.

They are at it again; this time in Sidcup. Maybe Bexley Council which sold its housing stock to the Associations many years ago could buy these and start the circle again.

Image 1 - Rightmove website
Image 2 - Rightmove website
Image 3 - Rightmove website

 

8 September - Where Bexley leads, Birmingham follows

Birmingham City Council is on the brink of bankruptcy and has announced that it will have to cut services to statutory levels. This may not be an entirely bad thing if there is less money to be spent on things like woke street names, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and rarely used cycling routes.

They are not going to be spending money on the Commonwealth Games again or extending Clean Air Zones.

Get used to it Brummies, Here in Bexley the Council has not provided anything beyond the statutory services for ten years or more. All that is left in public hands is Hall Place, management of which was outsourced but found to cost more money than the in-house operation.

The few remaining leisure centres are privately run and little luxuries like splash parks, golf courses and cinemas are all provided or paid for by private enterprise.

Bexley’s equivalent of The Birmingham Festival was last held ten years ago and the borough is mercifully free of LTNs and cycle lanes.

It may be pretty much devoid of the nicer things in life and have almost the highest Council Tax in London but it is not yet bankrupt and looking at a 10% Council Tax rise like in Croydon.

 

6 September - The wheels are falling off all around us

The wheels seem to be coming off local government after 13 years of cuts in Government grants, Birmingham being the prime example right now. A lot of family silver has been sold off, parks in Bexley and car parks in Havering. It is bad enough for the local economy when Councils are forced to raise parking fees to unaffordable levels - up to £7·50 an hour in Abbey Wood. The result is 144 Amazon deliveries to this address so far in 2023 with very little money spent in the borough and nothing in Bexley car parks.

Councils sure know how to damage local businesses but some more than others. Havering across the river is selling off four town centre car parks. That should be good for local traders.

Local authority suppliers are feeling the pinch too. Capita is accused of selling software that isn’t theirs to sell and thanks in part to their inability to hold on to data securely their share price is down to just pennies.

From Belfast Telegraph. 13th August 2023.

Bexley is still outsourcing more services to Capita.

I am right now listening to the Conservative Opposition Leader in Birmingham on TalkRadio. He has uncomplimentary things to say about Capita who he claims overspent by five times on their IT system known as Oracle. That is the system which was a let down at oneSource nearly four years ago which Bexley fortunately wriggled away from. What sort of incompetents do not learn from their mistakes?

 

5 September (Part 2) - Park wherever you like - almost

One of my neighbours made an amazing discovery overnight and is calling it a traffic cone. Maybe he should patent the idea and sell it to Bexley Council who might then save taxpayers’ money by avoiding partially abortive road painting operations. As you can see in Photo 1, it successfully displaced the Moronic driver (MR06 NEK) from his favourite blind corner but who nevertheless could not resist his trademark park 30 centimetres from the kerb trick (Photo 2) in order to maximise difficulties for residents opposite trying to exit their drives.

These once quiet residential roads were not built with all day commuter parking in mind and one day Bexley Council might wake up to that fact and install some single yellows with a time restriction. Maybe in less than the 37 years it has taken to get the corners up to Highway Code standards.

The white Hyundai i10 driver (Photo 3, GD15 KCX) is a different sort of idiot. Who in their right mind would straddle a broken yellow line when the legally required end marker is in place?

One well deserved PCN was issued.

Nose to kerb parking continues to create a problem (Photo 4) but Bexley Council says that marked bays would be unenforceable. No one there is bright enough to see that they might encourage more considerate behaviour.

All photos taken today.

While walking with a Carrill Way resident in Lesnes Abbey Park yesterday we bumped into the local enforcement officer taking a short cut to New Road. We had been talking about the new yellow lines which he had somehow not noticed. (To be fair his front door does not look in the right direction.)

He asked the CEO lady about builders working on his own house parking across his own drive at his invitation. As I had already told him there is no problem with that and it was confirmed, however she kindly went further than that and showed me how her electronic gadget brought up a list of protected driveways. My own house is the only one in the whole of Coptefield Drive that has a registered dropped kerb where any vehicle can be ticketed and none registered at all in Carrill Way.

Please don’t tell Moronic and his ilk that they can block any drive unprotected by the new double yellows and Bexley Council will be entirely happy with the situation.

(And our useless Police will wrongly tell you it is a Council matter as they did me three months ago.)

 

5 September (Part 1) - Not sitting on their arses. © Gillian Keegan

The Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete business which has occupied the thoughts of a few BiB readers did not just come to light only last week. In July 2023 Labour Councillor Esther Amaning (Belvedere) asked the Cabinet Member for Education about it but was much too far down the questions queue to get an answer straight away.

But eventually she did as follows…

There is still nothing on the Council’s or Cleeve Park School’s website about it presumably because affected parents have been kept informed more directly and everything is under control.

The official Council statement came only on X (formerly Twitter). “The London Borough of Bexley currently has one Academy School - Cleeve Park School, Sidcup, where reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete has been discovered in a small part of the school following a DfE survey. The Council will continue to liaise with both the school and the DfE on the arrangements to monitor and manage this issue. The school has put in agreed measures to shut off the affected area, which will enable the school to remain open.”

You can be pretty sure that infinitely more Cleeve Park pupils will injure themselves by tripping in the playground than by decaying concrete.

News Shopper report.

 

4 September - Phase I completed

The double yellow lines in Carrill Way and Abbotswood Close got done by 1 p.m. today but unfortunately the offending motorists didn’t.

Unusually there were only two cars parked on the Carrill Way corners today and one in Abbotswood the driver of which was located and moved. A lot better than last Saturday when an enormous untaxed lorry blocked Carrill Way completely for a couple of hours. How did I miss that?

The moronic driver with the personalised number plate (MR06 NEK) was there as always by 7 a.m. this morning but closer to the kerb than usual. Obviously someone who does not read street notices.

If Bexley Council had any sense they would have allowed the contractor to cone off the corners but he said they were no longer allowed to do that.

A couple of the residents in Carrill Way were betting that Moronic will be back again tomorrow squeezing into the gap between the unfinished lines. They said the number plate did not quite read MORONIC but it was a good effort for a cretin.

Abbottswood Close.

Carrill Way.

Conversations with residents of both roads revealed a marked difference of opinion. In Abbotswood Close the complaint was that the yellow lines took away too much parking space which a resident wanted to use and did not seem to appreciate that Highway Code guidance is that lines should always extend ten metres around corners, not some arbitrary amount. Another additionally wanted a CPZ and residents’ permits because £150 a year is a small price to pay for not having to shuffle two cars on a private drive.

In Carrill Way there is a wish for single yellow lines to stop all day road blocking and for the parking bays to be marked to discourage end on parking. This would be my preferred solution too and it is pleasing to note that Bexley Council’s refusal to see sense is not just a personal bee in a bonnet.

 

3 September - The lack of concrete facts

There have been three enquiring messages to BiB about Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete which is a bit odd because I had never considered myself a structural engineer. Maybe if I was I would have thought long and hard about buildings made of Aero Bars.

But trying not to be facetious I suppose parents are more than a little worried for their children’s safety.

A quick search of various news sites suggests that only one school in Bexley is built from RAAC, and fortunately not all of it. That school is Cleeve Park in Sidcup. It is an Academy and therefore somewhat arm’s length from Bexley Council but one would have thought that either or both could have put up a notice on their websites to keep parents in the picture; but there is nothing.

With only public buildings affected so far one must hope that The Woolwich Building Society were above such false economies or Bexley Council Taxpayers will be landed with a big bill.

 

2 September - Net stupid

Having solar panels fitted in January 2011, an electric car for the past five years and home storage batteries since last November you are entitled to conclude that I am an eco-zealot, but you would be wrong. I wouldn’t go as far as saying I couldn’t care less about green politics but some of it is I believe to be utterly stupid. I went down the ‘green’ route to save money and in that regard the solar panels have been a spectacular success.

The subsidy paid to me by people who can very often ill afford it is a little over £2,000 a year even if I use all the electricity myself, and usually I do. (The subsidy is inflation linked until 2036 but less generous for new installations.)

The electric car came about because my son who is a consultant to the industry, told me that hybrids were a big waste of money, at the time anyway, but electrics were fun to drive. He was right and I wouldn’t want to go back. Thanks to doing no more than 6,000 miles a year and a bit of sunshine it doesn’t really have any fuel costs, maybe a tenner a year; but is it cheap to run? I’m afraid not. Despite having a full licence for more than 60 years, always keeping the thing in a locked garage and never ever having to make an insurance claim, this year’s insurance quotes ranged from £880 (LV) to £2,157, Aviva.

Servicing and MOT works out at around £200 a year so that’s getting on for 20 pence a mile. More than twice the rate for my old Kia Picanto. So maybe the electric won’t last for ever after all.

The home batteries were supposed to save money too with a possible break even point of four to five years but I learned the hard way that cheap Chinese inverters are a pain in the proverbial and if you expect support from the importer, forget it. The comms on mine never worked at all so most nights I would be out in the garage fiddling with buttons adjusting for the next day’s weather forecast and likely electrical load.

A Dutch unit was far better, worked pretty much straight away but twice the price. It will never earn its money back but at least the frustration has gone away.

With the sunshine levels declining I gave it a short off-peak booster charge a couple of weeks ago and not for the first time it worked perfectly, but last night no such luck.

I awoke to find it had charged as instructed but had not switched back to discharging to the house load. I looked for an on-line solution which led to me charging the batteries to 100% on peak rate electricity. More than five quid’s worth, but no good.

After farting around all day I found something deep inside the menu structure which had set the inverter to not having a grid meter - all by itself. Without metering the grid the inverter does not see a house load so doesn’ְt see the need to discharge. Flicked it back over and all was well.

Our idiotic government thinks that every one of us is a techno-nerd willing to monitor various apps all day and capable of sorting out such problems without calling in the expensive ‘experts’.

The aforesaid son who among other things checks out the software that runs self-driving cars says he really cannot be bothered. He’d rather spend his time earning his fees than spend it trying to knock a few quid off his fuel bills.

I suspect he has a good point.

 

1 September - Two down, one to go

Cut, burned, intact. Harrow Manor Way 31st August 2023.