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News and Comment July 2024

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10 July - Another day, another Council cock-up

Monday’s Places Scrutiny meeting webcast was unavailable yesterday, the webpage said ‘Archiving’ for most of the day and now that it is available the recording begins part way through Agenda Item 6 without the usual Indexing of individual comments. That makes two of the last three meetings that would be reported here which have been messed up.
Places Scrutiny
Agenda Item 6 was Bexley’s partnership with the company that runs the Leisure Centres. Post Covid footfall is rising “and we are on the cusp of not needing to subsidise them”.

GP referrals are bringing 70+ obese and other health compromised patients a month to exercise schemes with free or heavily discounted memberships and a total of around 1,300 people are signed up.

The next item was employment levels in Bexley.

I was less than impressed by the opening statement. It didn’t look right to me, so out came the calculator.
Employment stats
Of Bexley’s 155,100 working age residents 135,500 are working. That’s 86% not 81%. Well done Bexley or maybe 135,500 is a typo. 125,500 would be 81%. These figures were debated but nobody remarked on the oddity.

The seven figure sums being invested in delivering new jobs was subject to some criticism, a target of 500 with a one year drop out rate of 60%.

Homes in Multiple Occupation was next on the Agenda.

Councillor Sally Hinkley (Labour, Belvedere) said the arrangements for permitting HMOs and granting licences “was quite dodgy” and standards, such as over-crowding, could be below what was expected. Councillor Cheryl Bacon (Conservative, Sidcup) took a broadly similar view.

It was accepted that there was an anomaly within the law.

HMO licence fees in Bexley are significantly lower than in neighbouring boroughs and planning applications have doubled in three years.

Councillor Rags Sandhu (Conservative, Bexleyheath) asked which London councils were excessively using Bexley’s hotels for temporary accommodation, but no official statistics are available.

Some HMOs have been closed following police investigations and Council noise complaints.

Councillor Chris Ball (Labour, Erith) referred to a number of HMO hotspots and his ward has 58 with eleven in just one road alone. Council officer comment was that the problems are compounded by “good landlords getting out of the market”.

The meeting concluded with recycling. Identifying different types of plastic and whether they can be recycled confuses most people and it would seem that Councillors are similarly afflicted. The Council website has advice that may be useful.

 

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