30 November - The Borella Breakfast Box

While Bexley Council endeavours to save the pensioners who our two Labour MPs are prepared to see die from hypothermia, the local Labour Leader Stefano Borella who, judging from his remarks in Council is not in favour of attacking old people, is turning his attention to the other end of the age spectrum. Free breakfast for children.

Not something I look on as natural Bonkers’ news - it is national policy - and not one I would at first sight support on a universal basis but you may form a different opinion if you read Stefano’s new Press Release. (PDF)

There is another reason why Stefano’s Press Releases will always find a home here and that is because whatever our political differences he never allows them to come between us in other ways and I remain on his PR Mailing List. The Conservatives on the other hand!!

Never have I received a Tory Party Press Release for publication and if you are wondering where all these came from, every single one was forwarded to me by my Labour MP. You will note that there have been none since her sad departure in 2019. Bexley Tories are their own worst enemy. I am still blocked on X by their Leader. Total idiocy when it must be obvious by now where my political allegiances lie.

 

28 November - The battle of Crayford

I will forever find it mind boggling that any individual can vote in favour of vulnerable old people being condemned to misery in a cold house and, if the Labour Party’s Risk Assessment proves to be accurate, around 4,000 of them to die as a result. How does someone sleep soundly in a cosy bed at night after doing that? Has the newly elected MP for Crayford any conscience at all? Will he be made to pay the electoral price in five years time? One must hope so.

Fortunately Crayford is not totally without a humane political face; its ward Councillor, Melvin Seymour, has taken the lead in promoting Bexley Council’s response to Labour’s attack on pensioners. Warm spaces and the Bexley Box of Winter Warmers, food, blankets, clothes etc.

And before I am accused of sour grapes for my loss of £300; I am not going into details here, but I gave mine away.

You won’t find any Labour MP doing that.

 

26 November - A sign of national discontent?

Most people will have heard of the Get Starmer Out petition by now. 2,557,692 signatures when I last looked. I have a confession to make; I have been asked to sign dozens of petitions since creating BiB but have never ever done so. I am not keen on giving my email address away unnecessarily, but this one looked like being a good bit of fun which might embarrass the Prime Minister, though with him being more than a little robotic it is perhaps a vain hope.

On Saturday evening I manufactured a temporary email address and signed up. I was number 400 and something thousand.

It is interesting to note that almost as many people in Crayford would like to see the back of Starmer as in true blue Old Bexley and Sidcup.

I am at a total loss as to how anyone can think the new Government is doing anything other than making a total mess of everything.

 

24 November - From balls to Box and Cocks

@tony talks bollards
As expected the Vexatious Victor was quick to remind me of the Sidcup bollard. It was briefly covered here in 2021 and according to @tonyofsidcup’s latest message, Bexley Council had wasted £3,600, as of the beginning of this year, on keeping the Hadlow Road Ball in not very good order.

It even has its own X Account.

Every time I read of Hadlow Road I remember my school friend Mick Hadlow who had a fully operational Bren Gun in his bedroom. Whatever happened to that?

@tony, a former accountant, is perhaps more of a fan of Rachel Reeves than I am. He is more upset by her blatant plagiarism than the CV amendments.

Note: I fully expect to be told off by @tony for the rude puns in the headlines. He usually reacts!

Mad Miliband
You may have read within the past 48 hours that our electricity supply situation is on a knife edge so I was more than a little surprised to get this email from Octopus Energy yesterday afternoon.

Any electricity used above average consumption between 7 and 9 this morning will be free. Initially charged but then refunded. They have done it before and whilst there is no way of checking their arithmetic it has always looked about right to me.

My average use in the early morning is pretty much zero because the battery powers the house having been charged at cheap rate overnight.

Last night, because of today’s offer, I charged it only a little bit but right now I am making up for it.

On top of that the car is being charged (I will get about 70 free miles) and the immersion heater is on. I even used the air fryer and kettle for a few minutes.

I managed to get the load up to 17 kilowatts (without using this computer) for a while which if left like that would have cost £9·30 between 07:-00 and 09:00. I am not sure how this makes any sense but maybe Mad Miliband does.

According to Octopus my energy consumption puts me among the lowest 1% of consumers in this area. Despite running an EV! What are you doing with yours folks!?

Higher than usual because of the recent battery software problem.

It occurs to me that if anyone wishes to move over to Octopus and uses this link https://share.octopus.energy/ebon-eel-467 Octopus will give you a £50 credit and me the same which I can pass across to Dear Teresa for her Bexley Box scheme to help counteract the wicked actions of our two local MPs.
Nerds may wonder why my immersion heater is not taking the full three kilowatts, it is electronically regulated to a level which the battery can sustain even when the household load is high.

 

23 November - Hail the winner!

It is three weeks now since it was revealed here that @tonyofsidcup had won his Court battle with Bexley Council who said that they were not going to answer his questions any more because they were unreasonable and motivated by self-interest. Far from it, the Judge said he was acting in the public interest and his case was helped by the fact that some of his Freedom of Information requests are given publicity here.

Yesterday the News Shopper caught up with the story though unlike Bonkers they chose not to say who at Bexley Council signed off the unlawful decree. Was Kate Bonham wrongly advised by the Legal Team or a new recruit keen to impress the Council Leader? An influential insider says it is the former.

The NS article provoked a number of comments but the best one was from @tony himself.

If he ever gets to the bottom of the £40,000 catering contract I may get to know whether my Council informant had himself been misled by officials or not.

As for the £4,000 bollard; maybe I am forgetful, but I haven’t a clue.

You can be pretty sure that @tony will be telling us about it soon.

 

22 November - Liars, hypocrites and thieves

Bonkers doesn’t get everything right although I don’t think it is as bad as my former Councillor claimed it to be a few years ago. According to him it was one third wrong and one third conspiracy theory. But it was wrong last April, arguably a day late, when it said that Rachel Reeves, unlike the Conservative Chancellor at the time, did at least have some financial qualifications.

But I was wrong, she was a clerk in the complaints department of a building society. She had previously called for the resignation of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak for having cake with their office cup of tea.

 

21 November - Not such a bad day’s work

Three weeks ago I said there were some technical problems here which was something of an understatement. The home battery I installed last year stopped working, or to be a little more precise the inverter started doing silly things. That is serious because my peak hour electricity tariff is nearly five times as expensive as off-peak and the inverter system was acting dumb. It had worked perfectly for 18 months but one day it lost the ability to sense when it should charge the batteries and when it should discharge them to the house load and save taking power from an expensive grid.

Naturally the inverter supplier assumed it was my fault despite me having touched nothing. I made sure all the data lines were still intact and checked that all the firmware was up to date to no effect and the supplier said “I’m stumped”

By trial and error I found that the batteries would discharge into the house if I disconnected the AC supply to the inverter but of course in that state it could not charge from the grid or from the solar panels. To take advantage of cheap electricity I had to manually switch the power on at 00:30 and off again at 05:30. If the power connection was left on the batteries wouldn’t do their job and I would be saddled with expensive electricity all day long!

The problem is now fixed. An obscure software bug which affected only certain system configurations has been identified. For the first time in a month I will get a full night’s sleep. This is the future people! Your life controlled by software engineers encouraged by Ed The Loon Miliband.

Not properly thought through
The Bexley Box that is. As you will have gathered, I very much approved of the Council Leader’s plan to keep vulnerable old people warm this Winter. It is a good plan in its own right and if it embarrasses Labour politicians, so much the better.

I asked the Cabinet Member if there was anything residents could do to help and he gave me the banking details. I sent off a few bob but to my mind it is a partially lost opportunity.

The generic Reference of ֹ‘Bexley Box Project’ does not identify the sender, so don’t expect a thank you, but more importantly there is no facility for Gift Aid to bump up receipts by 20%.

The same is true of the Mayor’s Charity. I got very close to donating but no Gift Aid put a stop to that. Not being able to take every opportunity to rob this rotten Government does not go down well with me.

Tidying up
I asked Cabinet Member Richard Diment if I could remove the out of date notices which adorn local streets. He said “Please do” because they get up his nose too. Perhaps I will ask him to remove the ‘New Road Layout sign’ that I have been passing regularly since 2007.

Maybe if you have a faded tatty Council notice in your street you could do Richard a favour too?

Poor old Sadiq
I am informed that yesterday’s Euro Ncap news reached BBC i-Player but as I am not allowed to look I have no idea what is there. About six minutes into yesterday’s Evening News according to my transport correspondent but you will have to be quick. It expires this evening.

 

20 November - Khan’t do anything right

The Mayor is odd man out
As predicted, Euro Ncap has now gone public with more of its HGV safety scheme. Too complex to be summarised here except that Volvo has five stars and Iveco has only one. A Google search will reveal a lot more information.

This is a new safety standard which outclasses the one TfL recently announced and in partial operation now. Ncap’s is a more comprehensive standard which detects suicidal cyclists who creep up on the inside of lorries but it will take effect only when vehicles are replaced. That may sound like one up for TfL in the short term but it is all a bit meaningless when you add in that existing vehicles can be self-certified to be TfL compliant by the vehicle owner.

If only Sadiq had not been so arrogant as to think he could do more than the Europe-wide experts who have the co-operation of manufacturers which Sadiq has not.

More money down the drain for little or no advantage.

A good day for parking problems
I have given up on making reports on badly parked vehicles because Bexley Council generally ignores them and that was my excuse for today.

The drain clearing lorry had been misdirected to the wrong address and wasn’t there for long and as for the cars, to be honest I would much rather drivers kept the road clear than block it Kelly Wilkinson style.

However at one o’clock I went to take a look and found the Traffic Warden had beaten me to it. While passing the Mini its lights flashed and 30 seconds later its owner showed up. Thinking it might be an out-of-Londoner who didn’t know about the pavement parking rule I asked if she lived locally. “Can’t you tell from my accent?” came the reply followed by my “No” I couldn’t.

I beat a hasty retreat because things quickly got unnecessarily aggressive.

Three tickets.

I am glad I am not a Civil Enforcement Officer.

Another FOI
The petitioner from Poplar Mount has submitted a Freedom of Information request. Seven good questions including where is the evidence of accidents and who was consulted.

The latter particularly interests me. When Abbey Road was narrowed in 2009, Bexley eventually admitted that they had consulted in Elstree Gardens and some addresses even further away but not in Abbey Road and others affected.

Have they been more honest this time around?

 

19 November - Stuck Farmers

You can see where I have been this morning, sorry for the absolutely crap photos; I did not want to appear too conspicuous with the SLR and my six year old phone is not very responsive to the shutter button, or in fact anything else. I have just bought a new one but yet to bring it fully into use; and would it be wise to take an expensive phone into Khan’s London?

However that is my excuse for not being able to provide a photo of Kemi Badenoch. I took several but none hit the phone’s memory.

I arrived round about 10:45 and somehow got swept forward to within 100 feet of the stage. The speeches went on for almost an hour and a half, mainly ordinary working farmers but also including not only Kemi but a couple of her Shadow Cabinet, Ed Davey and Jeremy Clarkson.

Particularly notable was a Labour Baroness who spoke about Reeves’s budget being not only fundamentally unfair but also politically stupid. She related the number of rural MPs Labour needs to get into power and they will never get them again.

There was supposed to be a march down Whitehall to Parliament Square after the speeches but as it was already jam packed with men in Wellies that was not very practical and officially called off. I made my way in the other direction to Charing Cross Station.

The news since getting home is that there was some sort of march but I have yet to see the pictures.

With the almost constant rain and umbrellas being somewhat anti-social I was very grateful to the lady handing out free Support Farmers cap.

When I have dried it out I will post a photo of it here.

It seems to me that a determined and powerful farmers’ lobby represents the best way of bringing down this wicked lying Labour Government and getting rid of everyone local who supports their dishonesty and cruelty.

The Met police were there in large numbers but only to try to keep the road clear. They must have given up at some stage because buses stopped running.

 

18 November (Part 2) - London diverges from the EU

Last Tuesday the TfL representative introduced the subject of the Direct Vision Standard to the Transport Committee, a scheme which I have been hearing about once in a while and in its various incarnations for the past ten years.

In 2013 London cyclist deaths hit five in only nine days; they had been no better the previous year, but ‘only nine days’ was headline material. Heavy Goods Vehicles were the culprits, usually a case of turning left as a cyclist undertook them. Mayor Johnson was spurred into action calling for a thorough investigation.

At the same time, he was criticised for suggesting that cyclists should exercise more care but he was right. Why do you think so few HGV drivers are prosecuted?

Although I have picked up a few interesting snippets of information about the work on saving cyclists from their own follies I assumed much of it was confidential and could not be featured here, but all that is changing and what follows may be found on the web.

The initial recommendations to Boris were not very different to what is coming in shortly but in 2014 they were expensive and maybe before their time. All we got was a new generation of lorries with much larger and lower windows and additional mirrors which assumed that drivers could be watching all nine of them at once.

Unsurprisingly this was not the answer to London’s problem, nor did it solve the same problem which was being seen across the European Union. In Brussels the wheels turn slowly but they can be thorough. Their project slowly moved towards Euro Ncap for HGVs including all the electronic gadgetry to be found in modern cars.

Someone who will remain nameless was a frequent visitor to all the European HGV manufacturers to advise on how they could build in the new technology to meet EU requirements. Some were able to make minor modifications to existing production but the majority preferred to wait for the introduction of their next model.

Meanwhile TfL ploughed a separate furrow with an incompatible system overlooking the fact that Daimler, Dennis, ERF, Ford, Iveco, MAN, Mercedes-Benz, Scania, Volvo and the rest of them are not specially interested in manufacturing to meet the whims of a tin-pot Mayor. The result was no vehicles met the TfL specification which at one time looked like starving London because of an absence of compliant trucks.

A few enterprising third party companies produced bolt on kits of parts to modify old but not too old lorries and some kits were better than others. Who was going to certify that the existing lorry fleets had been modified correctly? No one was available and hauliers stood to be fined £550 a day if they were to keep the supermarkets stocked. Some ingenuity was needed: enter haulier self-certification!

If you need to self-certify your vehicle star rating If you are applying for a single vehicle that we do not hold details for, and you know the vehicle has a star rating of zero, you can still apply for an HGV safety permit. This process is now available for vehicles rated one and two stars under the Progressive Safe System. To self-certify the vehicle as zero, one or two stars rated, you must upload a written statement as part of your application.

Meanwhile how are Euro Ncap getting along with their scheme and what is the difference? Well the main difference is that it will not be retrospective and thereby avoids the home made bodgery on which the London scheme depends.

The EU identified many reasons for cycling deaths and aims to counter all of them. TfL’s Direct Vision Standard only tackles two so it is entirely possible that London could attract the older modified and less safe vehicles while the new generation of Ncap safe lorries are deployed elsewhere in the country.

Euro Ncap has already teased their new standard to the pubic and my information is that the final all-singing all-dancing one designed to make Khan’s ideas look like “something from the the dark ages” will be launched in just a day or two’s time.

Will the Direct Vision Standard wither and die because manufacturers are not prepared to take it into account? And how much money will the Mayor have wasted by not waiting for the Euro standard?

 

18 November (Part 1) - Democracy? What democracy?

After a busy couple of weeks on meeting reports things will be quieter until the next one at the end of the month. So it’s back to less formal stuff today.

While walking along a road yesterday, not too far from home, a resident tidying her front garden asked me what I knew about the CPZ Consultation and why four months after it being sent to residents we have heard not a word. I was only able to tell her what was reported here a week ago. That Bexley Council is now calling it a Survey and the Cabinet Member is not expecting to see any recommendations until the end of the month.

The complication is said to be, If residents in a proposed Zone don’t want to see a CPZ and all the parking taxes associated with it but are sandwiched between Zones that are happy to pay, there is a displacement problem. I think that means everyone gets a Zone, like it or not. Hence the wordplay between Consultation and Survey.

The lady in the gardening gloves didn’t seem too sure whether she wanted a Zone or not. It will cost her money every time her daughter visits although I got the impression that she voted in favour. What particularly concerned her was that none of her neighbours knew about the (downgraded to Survey) Consultation and they denied ever being given the letter. Very possible, I was missed from a Consultation in 2009 that included areas much further from its subject than me.

When I said that I thought our three Councillors had taken it upon themselves to ignore the Survey, or maybe follow it, (I do not know its result) and push for a CPZ she was not very happy. Why should someone who lives in Welling tell her what she wants, and probably she has a point.

Personally I selfishly don’t much care either way because at a push I could get six cars on to my drive and I am only really interested in seeing the prohibition of end on parking which sometimes blocks my drive and occasionally the entire road. If that doesn’t happen you can be sure the scheme will get nothing but criticism from me along with the three Labour Councillors who have allegedly intervened.

Not in quite the same boat are the residents of Poplar Mount, (click map to see where it is,) many of whom don’t like the imposition of yellow lines at all. They allege that Bexley Council has responded to just one request to paint yellow lines in their roads and annoy everyone else. I really don’t understand Bexley Council; in my neck of the woods they ignored numerous requests to paint yellow lines around corners for years, totally uninterested in the provisions of the Highway Code.

The petitioner has related to me what I would describe as the usual Bexley Council trickery. Only advising a handful of residents out of 62 houses affected. A Freedom of Information request submitted in July disappeared without trace because someone lost it and someone called Lucy can be pretty rude to enquiring residents.

The yellow lines will take away seven parking spaces but it seems to me that Cabinet Member Richard Diment has already gone against residents’ wishes.

At present Poplar Mount people have 90 signatures on their petition while Bexley Council has only one resident on their side. A complaint is going into a number of people including the new Councillor.

Bexley Council’s track record on petitions is far from being impressive so good luck with that. I have told them that petitioning the MP is not a lot of good and the Cabinet Member might have been a better bet but the chances of Bexley Council doing something now that might please residents is pretty much zero. When did they last do that?

Dear Neighbours,

As you might be aware (or not as seems the case for many), the council has decided to paint double yellow lines around the corners of Poplar Mount/ Methuen Rd and at the end of Methuen Road. This will remove around 6/7 parking spaces from our streets. You can see green paint where the lines will begin and end.

I did discuss this with a few neighbours at the time of a letter received (mid-July) who informed me that they knew nothing about the proposal.

A number of us wrote to the council, all to reject proposals (as published in the link provided below). Despite all of the people rejecting the proposal the council is still going ahead. This is a quiet residential area, not a major route and will only naturally encourage greater speeds on these roads resulting in faster driving around the corner. Not only this but it will also take away parking spaces from our streets.

The Council states that this is to improve sightlines based on one complaint.

I believe that this will make our roads less safe and I say why are they trying to fix something that isn’t broken?

I sent a Freedom of Information Request on 22.07.2024 and will follow up with another to gather more evidence because they have only published 4 rejections missing another 2 including mine and there’s a clear lack of justification for the proposal.

You can find the details of the council proposal on this page; https://democracy.bexley.gov.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=3216

We are Plan 7.

In a democracy we should be able to have a say in the matter that affects so many, yet how can we object if we don’t know it’s being done? Informed consent should only apply.

With a view of all of the above, I am arranging a petition for those who do not want to have double yellow lines painted.

I will knock on doors to collect signatures on Tuesday 12.11.2024 from 7 pm.

If you won’t be home or I miss you and you would like to sign the petition please let me know and we can make arrangements that are better suited.
I very much look forward to hearing from you and hope that you will take the time to join me in getting the double yellow lines stopped by signing this petition.

Best wishes

Click image to see more.

 

17 November (Part 2) - Buses Bulgarians Burglars and Bexley Based Body Botherers

The Police’s transport team is supposed to report to Bexley Council’s Transport Committee but I think I am right in saying that I have never been at a meeting where they haven’t turned up without an excuse for not being ready for it. The 12th of November was no exception.

The Police Inspector on Zoom from Lewisham apologised for not being able to answer the speed enforcement question posed at the previous Transport meeting. “Do you have an answer” said the Chairman Smith. “I am afraid nothing really, we have been really busy lately catching criminals believe it or not and it is quite a lot of work to get someone convicted so I can’t tell you much on speeding, I do apologise. Are you concerned about specific locations ’cos we can send some officers down there with a speed gun?”

“We have caught a man who was sexually touching on buses, the 180, the 99 and 422. He lives in Bexley but he was doing the offences in Greenwich and Woolwich. We caught him because we saw similar descriptions coming in and when there are offences on a bus it is really really helpful that people tap on, children often don’t tap on but the tapping on is how we get to the right CCTV quickly. We looked at the CCTV and saw the same man on several occasions and we simply; we got on a bus stop where he got on a bus. He is going to Woolwich Crown Court on, I think, 14th December. So that was touching young girls on the bus.”

“Another small success was that we caught someone dipping into people’s handbags. There is an organised network of Bulgarians, some Romanians but mainly Bulgarians, across London and across Europe and they will stop someone withdrawing money, pretending they are on their phone. Women working in twos and threes often with scarves and draping clothing. They will follow that person and create a distraction and one will bump into you and take your money. We caught one recently and searched her home in Hertfordshire and found some really interesting intelligence, names and addresses and bank details.”

“Bexleyheath Broadway is a bit of a crime hotspot. It tends to be fights and a bit of robbery using e-bikes and e-scooters. Most victims are women and we are conducting decoy ops.”

“Thefts of motor vehicles, Mercedes are being targetted, it was Land Rovers for a while. Not exclusively but it is mainly Mercedes vans but generally Bexley is low for crime.”

The police failed to fulfill any of the commitments made at the previous meeting.

No statistics were forthcoming and the Inspector was clearly scratching around for transport related news so the Chairman came to her rescue by calling for questions.

Councillor Sally Hinkley said something tactful before moving to a question on Community Road Watch and in particular Abbey Road, Belvedere “where vehicles go along very very quickly and there are frequent accidents along there, quite nasty ones. Has it ceased there as a location for Community Road Watch, it is not on your list?” The excuse for the omission was the list is maintained by someone who has been very ill.

As I can see Abbey Road from where I am sitting right now and use it daily, may I say I have never seen anyone with a speed gun here and whilst most people drive safely, some go at outrageous speeds on the wrong side of pedestrian refuges if there is anyone in their way.

Presumably Councillor Hinkey had forgotten that she was sitting right opposite the Highways Manager who engineered in the dangers and despite his protestations to the contrary, ignored the recommendations of the Transport Research Laboratory. And guess who authored that report which I have here right now?

Councillor Smith asked for the restoration of fixed speed cameras on North Cray Road. There used to be cameras at both ends and in both directions but now there is only one. Preferably they should be average speed cameras, he said.

The Police Inspector said she “was not too clued up on the criteria but the object is not raising revenue but no collisions.” TfL “who do not want to spend any money” will be approached again.

Councillor June Slaughter said she was fed up with “cyclists with no lights who come out of nowhere” and do the police target them? “Not really but it is a good idea. We do sometimes apprehend them going through red lights. Are there specific locations?”

Councillor Diment said that “pedestrians dressed head to toe in black” are no better.

The police officer was released from the interrogation suite and sent on her way.

Note: While researching an on-line Thesaurus for a B word relating to the bus pervert I searched for an equivalent of Paedophile and found that the website really didn’t like that word. Tried another one. Same result. What a load of old nonsense. It probably generated an alert sent to some busybody outfit!

 

17 November (Part 1) - Back to TfL

A fair chunk of what Rachel Harkes from TfL had to say about buses has already been reported, the SL3 issue in particular, but her report was more wide ranging than that.

She was still crippled to some extent by the cyber attack on TfL and the consequent data shortages and “temporary suspension of some of our processes”. The Zoom audio is of very poor quality but I heard Rachel say that some sort of card concession application remains on hold and refunds on pay-as-you-go contact tickets are unavailable. Staff log-ins are difficult if not impossible and “lots of retail systems have to be restored and not accessible yet”. Bus performance data is not available but applications for the 60 plus and 18 plus passes have just come back on line.

General news items included toilet provision at tube stations and the fact that eventually no one should be more than 20 minutes from a TfL toilet and lorry safety.

That subject has been alluded to here before because TfL has long been looking for their own unique way of reducing HGV accidents. The statement last Tuesday was…

“Improving lorry safety; we’re releasing information on what we have called the Direct Vision Standard and it’s a standard for HGVs that come into London and drive across London and it basically measures how much HGV drivers can see through their cab window and it sets minimum standards to promote safe driving in the capital and we are making that a safety requirement. The Direct Vision Standard for HGV providers will make sure that lorries meet those standards in the future and hopefully that will reduce any road risk to cycling and walking.”

The family transport expert has been campaigning on this issue for ten years or more and I understand that come next Wednesday the fruits of his endeavours will become public knowledge when the new Euro Ncap standards for HGVs are announced. I am expecting the TfL proposals to be totally outclassed.

Moving on to green energy, TfL wants to install “solar farms at tube stations and move towards 100% renewable electricity across all our operations by 2030”.

The meeting then moved on to the SL3 and how many extra stops can be introduced before all pretence that it is an Express route disappear.

After that there was a brief discussion on the difficulties of keeping buses well maintained and the problems of retaining qualified technicians for ever more complex vehicles and how bus journey times are being adversely affected by road works and diversions.

Councillor June Slaughter asked why driver shortages had been mentioned in the meeting Agenda “when salaries seem to be quite reasonable” but the TfL lady said that was not her report and she could only think it was an historic problem because she was not aware of shortages now.

Councillor Diment wanted to see more electric buses because Bexley had not seen any since the 132 and B13 two years ago.

Councillor Smith said that we were still waiting for the result of the Blackwall Tunnel consultation and in particular the tolling. He was told that the result should be out within the next month. He went on to complain about the performance of the two an hour service along North Cray Road. “It has no other public transport and it is very poorly served. it becomes totally reliant on private vehicles.”

Cameron also asked about the fatal bus crash in Watling Street but at that very moment the TfL lady’s PC crashed and she was unable to look up the present state of the investigation.

And there necessarily endeth TfL's quarterly report to Bexley Council. It had just about come to an end anyway. The proposal to consult on an Express bus route from Abbey Wood Station to Woolwich via Thamesmead was not discussed.

 

16 November (Part 2) - Back on track

And so we come to the beginning of the Transport Users’ Sub-Committee meeting after previously digressing into roads and buses.

I arrived very early but the Chairman Cameron Smith, Richard Diment and Sally Hinkley were already there and as usual greeted me like a long lost friend; even my own Councillor the always generous and kind Sally Hinkley after I have made it pretty clear that I cannot get my head around what it takes to work for an MP who is content to see your Granny die of hypothermia.

Cameron invited me to sit at the main table - which I did not - and speak if I was inclined to do so - which I briefly did.

After Councillors Slaughter and Davey showed up the meeting began right on time with a presentation by George Patterson from Southeastern. He had a set of slides which were unfortunately not available to the Committee and I had not gone equipped to photograph the screen.

George said that in mid-December trains would recommence looping through Sidcup and back to the Woolwich line with some tweaks to train times “so check before you travel” and an overall increase in capacity.

A good number of SE stations are to be deep cleaned and all but one of Bexley’s stations are included in the programme. George quickly ran through the list and if I heard the muffled Zoom call correctly Erith was not on it. Sidcup would have extra work done including repainting and “everything that is broken will be fixed”.

Leaf fall has been later this year but the North Kent and Bexleyheath lines continue to perform better than the industry average especially in respect of cancellations (2·6%) where Southeastern is almost the best in the country.

Class 376 trains will be refreshed starting next Spring. Dark blue livery and by Summer, LED lighting, new floors and seats.

The last batch of almost new class 377s are coming through and “we will be getting rid of the 30 year old Networkers”. Around 30 of them. The replacement programme will continue “until the end of the decade”.

A new Communications system will be introduced next week which should improve customer communications to keep them informed of imminent events like bad weather and emergency timetable alterations

Councillor John Davey asked what sort of things caused cancellations locally. Just over half of cancellations are related to infrastructure, Networkers break down occasionally and are expensive to run. Crew availability has not been much of an issue since Covid.

Councillor Cameron Smith expressed his gratitude for the reintroduction of the “off-peak rounders but are you going to be looking at expanding into off-peak services too”. (Maybe there was a slip of the tongue with two off-peaks but that is what has been recorded.)

Fortunately the Southeastern response indicated that it is peak hour rounders that are returning in December but “I am making the case for the return of off-peak services as well”. George said - in response to a question from Councillor June Slaughter - that the new train times are already on the National Rail Enquiry website and having tinkered with it I can confirm that there will be peak hour trains from Sidcup to Abbey Wood. Quicker than an SL3 through Bexleyheath!)

Southeastern’s Government subsidy is still quite high but much of it is the result of being the only Train Operator to run High Speed Services (HS1) and “it has very very high track access charges. We are trying to renegotiate that”.

Councillor Richard Diment referred back to a previous meeting where assurances were given about the opening hours of ticket offices and provided examples of when and where the service appeared to be lacking. This is probably due to staffing numbers being dropped to one person who might occasionally need a lunch break etc. Mr. Patterson took the examples away to check that that answer is valid.

Councillor Diment repeated his little nag about Thameslink stopping at every station in Kent and six stations in Greenwich but misses both Erith and Belvedere. This, as we have heard before, is due to timing conflicts in the London Bridge area but Mr. Patterson said he would discuss the issue with GTR, the train operator, but they may have further issues north of Blackfriars.

He also said that Southeastern had doubled the frequency of trains at Erith and Belvedere to pre-Covid levels and some passengers complain about trains that stop too often. (Bring back the Cannon Street, London Bridge, Woolwich Arsenal and Abbey Wood flyer that used to get me home in 22 minutes!)

And with that the railways section of the meeting reached the end of the line.

 

16 November (Part 1) - Danson Park. Never again

One day a week is devoted to walking so that I get away from this keyboard occasionally. I join up with a gang of old men and we usually catch a bus somewhere and then walk until we just happen to stumble across a Weatherspoons for a £1·99 pint. (Until it goes up courtesy of Rachel Reeves National Insurance hike.)

We are running out of new walking routes and this week we were reduced to getting a 301 to Bexleyheath and walking to and around Danson Park. Unfortunately everyone but me can’t go long without dropping into a coffee shop. Until I fell into this new habit I am pretty sure I had never been inside a Pret or a Costa or any other rip off joint of this nature and not had the pleasure of paying around three quid for lukewarm coffee.

And that was how I came to visit the Danson Park caff for the first time ever.

In these joints I usually look around to see if they have any gluten free cake because I always like to support outfits that look after coeliacs. Only the café in Charlton House Park ever has and not as expensive as the cafe in the Natural Museum a few weeks ago. All cakes £5·75 each. I didn’t even buy a coffee there in protest.

The notable thing about the Danson House café was that none of the cakes were priced and neither was there a price list for tea or coffee or anything else and customers are expected to buy blind. I handed over four pounds and got a couple of coins back. I didn’t actually count it but it was almost certainly 25 pence.

We won’t be going there again.

One of our number had had enough walking after circumnavigating the lake once and my bus App said a B14 was due in just a couple of minutes so I used a route and type of bus I had never used before. A small tin box with a single door at the front.

As it approached my chosen stop I moved forward and stood near the door while taking care to “hold on to the handrail while the bus is moving”. The family vehicle safety expert keeps me well informed about the number of people killed and injured each week by London buses.

When the bus stopped its door swung open, hit me hard on the forehead and ran over my left foot and trapped it such that I couldn’t get it away. The driver had to open it again and slightly open his cab to make sure I was OK. I can still slightly feel the brusing on my foot a few days later.

The family bus expert says I really should report it to TfL as they are very interested in the cause of their not very good accident statistics.

The B14 might be a cheap and cheerful bus but it is a step up from the Dartford to Gravesend Fastrack bus. Now that really was a tin rattle box and I read somewhere that they were withdrawn from service a couple of weeks ago. Those buses took off with the doors still open which I am pretty sure is not possible on a TfL bus. It was such an uncomfortable journey that the gang spent £6 each on a train back to Dartford to make sure our remaining teeth were not rattled out.

I had not been to Gravesend for several years. On a dark and grey day it looked the most run down, closed down almost deserted hell hole you might see south of Rotherham.

The old Fort was interesting though.

 

15 November (Part 2) - The SL3 to Bexley Village - or not

As the petition to have the Superloop bus stop at Bexley Village’s War Memorial on the Western periphery of the Village has become a talking point on X, BiB’s report on last Tuesday’s Transport Sub-Committee meeting will take another non-chronological step by reporting now what was said there on that subject.

It will be another verbatim report because I do not wish to influence the issue one way or another; well not by much! I have already said that I personally don’t really see the point of an extra stop as Bexley Village already has many bus services and the railway line to all the places served by the SL3 although it must be accepted that the 229 to Abbey Wood station takes a slow and circuitous route.

But who in Bexley Village would want to take the Elizabeth line into central London when there is a direct Southeastern service on their doorstep? But as someone who can be sitting on a Liz line train within ten minutes of shutting my front door it is not really any of my business.

The TfL speaker at the Transport Committee meeting was Rachel Harkes and with excuses for a horribly muffled sounding audio recording of a less than perfect Zoom call this is what she said about the SL3.

The SL3 discussion actually started with Councillor John Davey saying he believed the SL3 went through Bexley Village on its journey towards Bromley South but uses the A2 from Blackfen in the other direction. [In practice with no stops between Bexleyheath Library and Sidcup station it goes wherever there is least traffic and I have seen a Thamesmead bound bus at the War Memorial more than once. I use that stop myself occasionally.]

He then asked for an additional stop to be made at the Northern end of Brampton Road where it joins Long Lane. The cynics will point out that this is close to where Councillor Davey lives but his justification was that “a lot of buses intersect at that point”. [One of which already goes on the SL3 route direct to Abbey Wood station (301) with only four additional little used stops and another (B11) takes the same route to Bexleyheath station as the SL3.]

He thought that Bexleyheath’s three stops were unnecessary. The Station, Lion Road and the Library. Cut out the “pointless” Lion Road was his suggestion which I found to be rather annoying as I used it twice in each direction only yesterday. You only very occasionally see people using the Lion Road stops he claimed whereas I can tell you that in what must be my well over 50 SL3 journeys since February 2024 it has never yet bypassed Lion Road.

He said the Library stop was a “nightmare” because the same stop is used by both North and South bound buses. Ignoring the fact that the arrangement is entirely due Bexley’s idiotic road systems he wanted that stop moved too. To Albion or Townley Road presumably making the SL3 even more of a bloody nuisance for shoppers wanting to get home to Thamesmead etc. i.e. me yesterday who missed a 301 at the Clock Tower by ten seconds and checking the bus App had to run to just get an SL3 at the Library. There is no way I would have made Townley Road in time.

That, he said, were his thoughts on the subject “after using the SL3 a few times”.

Rachel Harkes said “in terms of the request for a stop at Bexley Village, just to update you, obviously it did come up at the last [Transport] meeting and so Michelle [?] and one of our principal transport planners met with some Bexley officers following the meeting and we looked again at the options whether or not we could have a stop in Bexley Village and one of the things we wanted to do was to be able to provide some data back to yourselves looking at the number of trips being made on the SL3, where those trips could be served by other routes and sort of estimate the number of passengers per day that are [inaudible] at the moment per stop.”

“We have been able to dig that up but unfortunately the data wasn’t available until the middle of last month October just because of everything that has been happening, the cyber incident at TfL. So that did [inaudible] at the moment after our meeting with the Bexley Officers and it still would be our recommendation not to put an additional stop at Bexley Village, not at this point in time. It is still a relatively new service; it is still bedding in in terms of number of passengers, there are other links and routes available to do the journey, you know, that the SL3 would do but that information is obviously [inaudible] at the moment and I can provide a little bit more information in due course.

Cameron Smith: “If I could just jump in there, we have been doing a campaign locally, a petition to bring the SL3 to Bexley Village. Our officers will pass on the data to me regarding Transport for London. What I think has happened is that the number of people who would like access to the express service in Bexley Village has been wildly underestimated. I will put my hands up for being a bit, when this was first asked of me by a resident a number of months ago, sceptical to it but I have been really quite amazed by the number of people who have come forward and asked us and that is why we started the petition and what we have got is Thomas Turrell our Assembly Member submitted it at City Hall last week.”

“Because of the timeline we have submitted to by the plans [rustling paper noises obliterated some of that], that is about 1,500 signatures but actually it has grown now to about 1,940 signatures in the Village and I can share that information with you because I think it would be quite interesting for you to have a look at along with the plans [?] because I do think that; I can totally see in what you’ve provided that you know there is kind of a weighing up of the balance, will it delay more people than it would benefit etcetera but I think you have got the estimates wrong in terms of the demand in Bexley Village. It is really quite high, it is really quite surprising. We have been knocking on a couple of streets over the weekend and the number of people who mentioned the campaign and signed the petition, I mean it is, there is barely anyone in Bexley Village who hasn’t signed it but I will share that with you afterwards. I know that Transport for London will respond to Thomas Turrell but the number is higher and I think it might be interesting to be aware of.”

“And the other thing I would say is, I know it is in the response talking about the delay, the delay is very minor especially seeing it is already running in one direction past the Village and I do know that Penhill Road just how heavily congested that can be and while the Village can be, when you actually turn at the War Memorial you don’t contribute to that congestion nor do you you get stuck in it because it is on the other side of the Village at the mini-roundabout where the High Street and Bourne Road meet that is the real problem area. So I think it needs a bit more work on this but we have some information we can provide you basically to help with the case and I am happy to share that afterwards.”

John Davey requested that Rachel Harkes took a look at “the stops in Bexleyheath which to my mind don’t look sensible. Is that a possibility?”

Rachel: “I can certainly take that back for our planners again and get them to do a review again and it might be helpful to look at the data that we have provided back as well as that obviously gives you a better idea of the demand for the Village stop and passengers as we go along because obviously Bexley Villagers are rushing out to the stops we are changing and that might be helpful to have backdated as well but I will take that back to our planners as well.”

Councillor Davey with his only “occasional” use of the service, may be unaware that the Lion Road stop is right outside a pub called The Wrong ’Un which is probably a pretty fair description of his opinion of the worth of that Bexleyheath stop.

Councillor Smith is far too young to know that the congestion in Penhill Road was deliberately created by Bexley Council’s decision {they admitted in writing to me that that was their intention] to halve the width of its exit on to the Blackfen roundabout. Traffic ran freely until Bexley Council’s usual road design idiocy ran riot again.

And why am I slightly amused by the fact that in the 15 years of Bonkers, Bexley Council has always been reluctant to act on petitions to them but expects everyone to jump to attention when they start their own?

 

15 November (Part 1) - Bexley’s Box Bankers

The Council has let me know the banking arrangements it has put in place for those who might want to rebel in a practical and entirely legal way against the Labour Government’s decision to deprive elderly people of their Fuel Allowance this Winter - and if 4.000 die, who cares?

They are extraordinarily callous people and every one of their MPs (bar one) and supporters should be regarded with deep suspicion. A lady acquaintance said to me, the Chancellor must be one ugly bitch. I think she was referring to her inner soul and if I am correct she must surely be right on the money.

If you can spare a few bob to keep a vulnerable old person a bit warmer and relieve the load on hard pressed hospitals you might wish to do something practical about it.

London Borough of Bexley No1 Account
AC No 21101167
Sort Code 51-70-14
Ref : Bexley Boxes Project

If your bank is anything like mine that account is listed under Utilities so you don’t have to type the numbers in and risk getting them wrong. If you dislike Starmer as much as I do, just send something. (Probably I have now committed a criminal offence and can expect a visit from the Thought Police. What sort of country do we now live in?)

Bexley has a new webpage for its Bexley Box.

 

14 November (Part 2) - Kier SStarmer grants Baroness her wish

For several years our Council Tax has been increased by 2·99% annually. Below is an extract from this year’s bill…
The Conservative Government set the 2·99% cap for the year 2019/2020 after setting it at 1·99% two years earlier at the same time introducing a 2% levy to pay for Adults’ Social Care.

Bexley Council struggled to manage with the 3% cap and the Leader campaigned behind the scenes for it to be lifted.

Question from November 2023.

For some inexplicable reason Councillor Cameron Smith thought that the cap should be lifted too and you didn’t have to be Mystic Meg to forecast that a Labour Government would do his bidding. I forecast it twice. Not particularly clever, 60 years of Government watching has proved that is what Governments do, especially Labour ones.

Yesterday the SStarmer regime which promised not to raise taxes on the working man, said it was going to set the cap at 5% for 2025/2026. Three times the current rate of inflation and nearly twice what it was last year..

Nothing was said about the 2% Adult’s Social Care imposition so it looks as though the 20% of voters who were seduced by Labour’s false promises are responsible for stuffing us all. And how high will LowIQ Khan set his precept next year?

 

14 November (Part 1) - Bexley Boxes

Two days ago I asked Bexley Council if there was any way that individuals could help with their Bexley Box scheme but they said unfortunately not.

Yesterday evening I received an email from a Cabinet Member which said they had changed their mind and it was likely that a Donate button or similar would be added to their webpage. It’s not there yet but I will be keeping my eye on it.

Looks like I will have to be putting my money where my mouth is.

P.S. Another message, this time from a member of staff, said personal care items, toiletries, non-perishable food etc. could be dropped off between 10am and 2:30pm at Civic Offices Reception.

 

13 November (Part 2) - Transport Committee discussion on roads

The silver car left before I needed to set off for the Transport Committee meeting last night and to be fair I could have got through the available gap without too much difficulty, it was cars emerging from behind the flats opposite which could not get out without using the footpath.

The Committee meeting consisted of four parts, five if Introductions are reported separately, they being Rail, TfL, Transport Police and Roads.

Roads is the only item which produced any information that arguably is best not left waiting so Roads is going first. It is basically the Highways Manager saying his piece and Councillors asking questions.

There was nothing new to report on cycling issues but there were developments on electric vehicle charge points. Ecotricity (?, the acoustics are very poor and the Agenda doesn’t say) who had planned to install 100 charging points in Bexley has somehow produced 102 but no one is complaining.

Another provider may provide another tranche by using a £450,000 grant made under the On-Street Residential Chargepoint Scheme. Around 80 possibly higher powered units could come from that but everything is delayed.

The original chargepoints, twelve sites in Nuxley Road, near Belvedere Station, St. John’s Road, Sidcup and elsewhere have all gone because BP decided without warning to pull the plug and just go! Fortunately they were persuaded to leave the underlying electrics so replacement is not too difficult and being pursued.

The previous Government twice in 2024 provided £275,000 to fix potholes which allowed 200 to be repaired along with 19 much larger ‘road patching’ operations. They fixed another 100 or so clusters of potholes while the annual total of pothole repairs is nearer 1,500 fixed.

A metre square hole can cost between £300 and £500 to repair.

Nothing has been heard about further Government funding for next year “We are in limbo.”

Councillor John Davey (Conservative, West Heath) said he had seen utility companies fill holes with concrete and they seemed to last longer than the usual asphalt fix and wondered about the economics of adopting that technique. The Highways Manager said he disapproved of the practice, concrete top surfaces introduce anti-skid issues. He went on to say that too many of Bexley’s old roads were never very well constructed and are prone to sagging and cracking.

Chairman Cameron Smith asked if the worst part of North Cray Road is in line for resurfacing? He had seen people swerving to avoid the worst sections. He was told that officially they don’t individually meet the emergency repair criteria but there are so many of them that they will be given attention. Ruxley roundabout “is quite dangerous” and may have to be repaired over five nights.

Cameron also asked for an update on the CPZ consultations in the Abbey Wood area. He was told there were no plans to re-visit the existing CPZs but around Abbey Road, South of the railway line, the top end of New Road, Woolwich Road and around Belvedere and Slade Green Stations were all being looked at.

“A consultation, more of a survey”, had been undertaken among residents “to get a feel from the locals”. There would be problems if some areas were for the CPZ but the one in the middle was not and the discussion now includes ward Councillors. The Belvedere ward Councillors, including the newly elected one, are pushing for the Abbey Wood CPZ. Residents have made their position clear.

It is possible that there will be more Consultations before a decision is made.

In December a bid will go into TfL for more Zebra Crossing funding.

Councillor Sally Hinkley (Labour, Belvedere) said that the view from the top of a bus (a tenuous transport link there!) showed that “Riverside Gardens has been going on for ever” but was pleased to hear the refurbishment night be completed by next Spring.

 

13 November (Part 1) - Just a quick one - or two

Just a little one before the first of yesterday’s Transport Sub-Committee meeting reports which should make an appearance later today.

Litter Bins
Cabinet Member Richard Diment has several times mentioned the hundreds of new litter bins that have appeared across the borough this year although I can only find two brief references to them on these pages.

One is hereand here is the other.

My Sidcup correspondent newly released from his vexatious tag noticed that he had three new bins within an almost literal stone’s throw from his smashed front window,

He asked what the criteria were for their location.

The answer was that weren’t any.

“The Council did not produce any analysis to determine where the bins should be positioned.”

Randomly sprinkled?

Bexley Boxes
If our ‘wicked’ (© Councillor Peter Craske) Labour Government did what they should have done with the Winter Fuel Allowance and means tested it I doubt whether I would have got very much or anything at all. I revealed here that the Net Zero subsidies introduced by the Labour Government in 2009 are so stupid that by carefully juggling solar panels, home batteries and cheap rate tariffs I am paid about £2,000 a year for using electricity. Miliband Madness.

It makes me feel rather uncomfortable to know that I am paid by people who may be freezing to death so I asked Bexley Council if there was any way an individual resident could get involved in their Bexley Box scheme. The answer was a very polite “No not really” and I would guess that the European Union’s ridiculous GDPR would get in the way.

So I am left feeling just a little guilty.

 

12 November - Difficult Choices and the ‘wicked’ response

Following the Leader’s report the Council usually nods through their approval of the reports from the various Committees and when they do it is a non-event not worth reporting here. Last week however things were slightly different. The Adult Social Care and Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee chaired by Councillor Janice Ward-Wilson was pulled out for further comment. Can it be coincidence that it allowed them to loudly blow their trumpets and make Labour reach deep into their Bexley Box of excuses?

Unusually this report is verbatim so that you can judge if those excuses were lame or not. Spoiler alert: They were very lame. That may be because Bexley’s Labour Leader is not an enthusiast for killing old people or it may be because there is no valid excuse.

Cabinet Member Melvyn Seymour (Crayford) said the stand out subject was the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Allowance. “It should not be under played that a large number of our elderly residents are going to be at severe risk of protracted and ongoing illness because of these cuts. The Party opposite makes great play about respiratory conditions because of ULEZ; well many of our elderly people do suffer from respiratory problems unconnected with ULEZ and it is hardly going to be helpful for them to return to cold houses as they can’t put their heating on. I think Members around this Chamber should know in the discussions I have regularly with my Director that our hospitals are mainly, now almost exclusively in OPEL 4 which is the highest level before we go to a very serious level of alert.” [Operational Pressures Escalation Level.]

“The fact that people are going there now in larger numbers you can argue is demographic change, a lot of it is different conditions still relating to Covid, I know some people find that difficult to believe but is certainly true. Although Covid is in the rear mirror it still certainly casts its shadow over people with mental health and various health issues. Not helped by the fact that NHS doctors were on strike for a long time and thousands of procedures, elective procedures, were put on hold. That has hardly helped the situation. It might be unpalatable but it is a fact.

This puts an enormous pressure on our discharge facility which is working really well at the moment, and our re-enablement and I pay great credit to the team for the work that they are doing.

It is quite simple, this withdrawal of Winter Fuel Allowance is going to make people fearful; it is going to cause us enormous problems in how we plan for our Winter resilience but even more importantly, although we will continue to provide our statutory duty the bottom line is that the most vulnerable people in our society, those that are housebound and do not qualify for the Credit, are going to be sicker for longer and I find that personally an appalling indictment on the state of our politics.”

Councillor Craske wanted to say that there had been three developments since the Scrutiny meeting was held.

The first was that “although we were told by the Members opposite before the election that our energy bills would be cut by £600 in fact the Regulator has announced that bills will go up by an average £150”.

“Secondly we have launched the Bexley Box to step in and help those hit hardest by the cruel and wicked Labour cut to the Winter Fuel Allowance and I hope all Members will be supporting this Box and putting things in and helping delivering them and supporting those most in need particularly those responsible for the cut.”

“Thirdly we have announced we will be providing help through the Household Support Fund and again to help those hit hardest by this cut. It is estimated in research published a while ago, that 4,000 elderly people could die as a result of the removal of Winter Fuel Allowance. Now that is not my words, it is the Labour Party’s research before the election. They said that if the Winter Fuel Allowance is cut they expected some 4,000 people to die and they have now implemented the policy that they were against before the election and now they are in favour of it. And those that made that decision, the wealthy Cabinet Ministers won’t have to worry about reductions into the Fuel Allowance because if they need a big warm coat or a big jumper they can just phone up Lord Ali and he will donate thousands of them. Maybe he can donate some to the Bexley Box.”

“Earlier when given the opportunity to explain why they had gone back on that pledge to reduce bills by £600 and take the Winter Fuel Allowance away from 34,000 residents the Labour Group had nothing to say, They couldn’t say anything. Don’t they support this decision by their own Government? Let them stand up now and tell us why they support taking the Winter Fuel Allowance away after telling us they were going to give us £600. Let’s hear from them. I know many Bexley residents will welcome our initiatives through the Household Support Fund and the new Bexley Box to minimise or help reduce the impact of these wicked Winter Fuel Allowance cruel cuts from the Labour Party.”

Councillor Stefano Borella (Labour Leader, Slade Green and Northend) responded by saying “in politics, difficult decisions have to be taken. I can look at many decisions which you have taken in this Council that I think are detrimental to people in this borough over many many years but you took them for whatever reason to balance the books or Make Bexley Better. That is what we always hear from the Party opposite. Our Government had to come in and deal with an appalling situation. There is no point in saying it is all fantastic, we’ve been left some golden legacy by the Party opposite. That is absolute rubbish to hear. I heard what people say about Growth Rates in different countries but Italy is doing better than this country than when you were last in power so I think we should not need to listen to the nonsense that I hear opposite and I heard about Covid.”

“Now I remember Covid. Do you remember Michelle Mone? £37 billion that she got from the Government for that disgraceful contract. Do you remember the parties in Downing Street? Do you remember the previous Government sending people home to care homes in the middle of Covid? I am not going to take any lectures from the Party opposite about how we treat old people because I think we have been treating old people disgracefully for far too long and OK, you can have a go at us for the Winter Fuel Allowance, fine, it’s a fair cop. Would I have wanted my Government to do it? Of course not but my Government has to make difficult decisions and it has decided to do this. So it’s a tough decision. Now I don’t mind criticism from other parties but I won’t take the faux outrage from the Party opposite at all.”

“In 1997 when this policy was brought in, brought in by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair the Party opposite voted against it in the House of Commons. Their Party wanted it means tested when they came in, they had to make difficult decisions. In 2011 they cut [reduced] the Winter Fuel Allowance. They forget that. From £400 to £300 to £150. They forget that. They forget all the cuts they did years ago and then in 2017 Theresa May said she did not know how many pensioners would lose their Winter Fuel Allowance if she won the election. The Conservatives said they would means test the Winter Fuel Allowance worth up to £300 for all pensioners if they were elected on the 8th of June [2017]. That was your Party seven years ago. I stood as a candidate in that election and at the time we did oppose it but you altered it but here you are attacking the Labour Party for the very policy that I know that Members opposite… [sic]

“We talked about the Council Tax Reduction Scheme which is a means tested benefit and here you are attacking us for this. Now I hear what the Council said about The Bexley Box; why was that not done in years gone by because pensioners were suffering in years [gone] by but now you are doing it because you want to make political points in this Chamber and you want to embarrass us?”

“I think the way we have treated old people has been disgraceful for many years and I won’t listen to criticism from the Party opposite about this and certainly not when you wanted to introduce it and you guys all campaigned on it. You wanted this, so I am sorry Madam Mayor, I won’t listen to that criticism and in Covid we are going to have to get that money back from those people who took that and we can talk about, you know, coats and everything else but I remember all the disgraceful things that went on under the last Government particularly under Boris Johnson who yesterday miraculously got off Channel 4 because he was trying to promote his book, that is all he wants to do. Promote his book. Nothing in the national interest. So I am sorry Madam Mayor, I may have spent 25 minutes wasting Councillor Craske’s time but I would not have wasted that time if I had seen sight of that alteration before, we wouldn’t be here now, but all I will say is I am taking no lectures from the Party opposite. Just remember that lady there [pointing to a picture of Theresa May], you campaigned for that and you wanted it.”

Councillor Kurtis Christoforides (Conservative, St. Mary’s & St. James) “thought it was interesting that he should wave a picture of a former Prime Minister and say that she campaigned to means test the Winter Fuel Allowance and maybe put that in a Manifesto or document so the public could take a view and vote accordingly and I wonder where the removal of the Winter Fuel Allowance was in the Labour Party Manifesto before the General Election because as a keen student of politics I did read through it and didn’t see it anywhere. Possibly my eyes are failing me. And one other point, the cost of heating a home was very different all those years ago.”

“The new Government said they would be a Government of service and said explicitly that they were drawing a line and doing things differently but here they are taking back-handers and saying one thing and doing another.”

If Kurtis had had more time to think he may have reminded everyone that the difficult choice was between cutting WFA and paying off the Labour Government’s Union paymasters and that Italy has adopted right wing policies. More importantly that the Conservatives may have talked of means testing or even reducing WFA in 2017 but they never actually did it. Pensioners may have suffered in years gone by but fuel costs were only a quarter of what they are now and they still received their WFA. To vote for its withdrawal after promising not to and saying nothing about it in the Manifesto and deliberately risk the lives of 4,000 pensioners you have to be, to quote Councillor Craske, truly wicked and only caring Labour can be that wicked. How can anyone continue to vote for these ghouls? Their difficult choice must never be forgotten,

Councillor Janice Ward-Wilson (Conservative, Crook Log) said the Scrutiny Committee wanted to be sure that all Members of the Council were aware of the impact on Bexley’s elderly residents of Labour’s withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment. “Without warning in the Manifesto they removed the payment from thousands of Bexley pensioners with immediate effect in the quarter that the energy price cap was raised by 10%. Yes, review the payments but don’t remove it from people on low income, it is too narrow, without warning and without an Impact Assessment. People need time to adjust to the change, it is uncaring and so disappointing. Services, charities, families, friends and neighbours also need time to organise themselves to increase support for the most vulnerable this Winter. Support that is stretched as services and charities prepare to pay increased National Insurance contributions.”

“Let no one forget that age is no respecter of persons. If we are healthy and financially sufficient with good friends and family around us all is well and Bexley’s good neighbours will look out for those who are elderly. However if we don’t have those benefits then to enjoy a warm home is our haven.”

“For residents with age reduced ability to regulate bodily temperature Winter cold can be life threatening. Pensioners are being told by the new Labour Government that the Triple Lock will remain and they will be 4·1% better off. This is disingenuous, it is not new and it is not introduced to offset removing the payment. The Conservatives Government had already committed to the 4·1% Triple Lock rise and the Triple Lock Plus which meant that the State Pension would always be below the Tax Threshold avoiding the so called Fiscal Drag. We must not overlook that the 4·1% will not be the same for everyone. Those on the lower basic State Pension will receieve less than those on the new State Pension which will not come until next April when it is getting warmer.”

“In the energy related Cost of Living Crisis [the Conservatives] also provided Cost of Living Top Ups which won’t be available this year. Upsetting for those pensioners already struggling to see the new Government’s high percentage pay awards going to sectors already earning above the average salary. To have this small payment removed just as Winter approaches appears callous. No doubt there will be some who say this is a non-issue now. Move on, it’s done it’s dusted and nothing will change it but I don’t agree because once the Winter sets in it certainly won’t be a historic event. It will be very real to those who can’t afford to heat their homes or won’t heat their homes due to concerns about affordability. The withdrawal of this payment evidentially will adversely impact a lot of our residents and the responsibility of this newly imposed hardship lies firmly with this new Labour Government and with all those who voted in favour of the change.”

“Even though the time to act is short Madam Mayor this Council will do what it can an where we can including the aforementioned Bexley Box, supporting Pension Credit applications, signposting of warm spaces including our libraries and ensuring that information is provided in the Bexley Magazine on what help is available.”

“I commend the leadership and compassion of the Leader of the Council regarding these measures demonstrating a core value of Conservatism that those who have worked hard in their lives should have dignity and security in retirement. Finally I am pleased that this was discussed at the Adults Scrutiny meeting: I know without doubt that all Members across this Chamber value all our residents including our elderly so it is time now top make that show and stand up against this ill-thought through heartless measure. I recommend that all Members here tonight accept this report and in so doing show support for our most vulnerable pensioners. Thank you Madam Mayor.”

The report was accepted.

Note: Unusually, the Councillors are quoted here in full unlike the usual arrangement when the comments are selective and sometimes abbreviated. This is a very important and divisive issue and those residents interested in local politics should know who is in favour of supporting the elderly and who might be less so.

For the record and to counter Government propaganda on the level of pensions, I, with a full set of pension contributions get rather less than Government’s stated highest rate of State Pension (£221 a week) but better than the lowest Basic Pension figure I have seen quoted and I have no idea why.

The Conservative Government gave me a Winter Fuel Allowance and a Cost of Living payment last year and Labour is giving me nothing. Overall it is a 5% reduction on last year’s pension payments so their talk of being pensioners being better off with the 4·1% increase next year is the sort of BS one can expect from Labour. And that 4·1% is to cover inflation not Rachel Reeves’ highway robbery.

Fortunately I was in a position to pay into an employers’ pension fund so I am not in a particularly difficult situation, but spare a thought for those who will freeze this Winter thanks to Wicked Labour.

 

11 November - The Leaderְ’s Report

The Leader began her report by welcoming Councillor Jeremy Fosten and she had something to say about his Thameslink to Belvedere campaign. At present Thameslink trains do not stop in Erith or Belvedere allegedly to enable it to make its allocated slot between the North Kent Junction and London Bridge.

In 2020 the train company said that they had other priorities and now they are saying “it is not feasible”. Strictly speaking it is not a case of me joining Jeremy’s campaign but rather the reverse. He should “make it clear to his residents that it is the Conservatives already fighting for them. It is a shame that your colleagues didn’t tell you that” so that your claim was not in the leaflets. (See last page.)

“Now that you know the facts I am sure you will be putting that straight for people.”

The Leader said she was “furiously going through the Labour budget announcements to understand the impact of those announcements”.

“Employer’s National Insurance will affect the Council and its contractors and the care companies we use but we need to live within our means.”

“One of the first acts of the new Government was to withdraw the Winter Fuel Allowance and Age UK issued a statement to say the payment is vital in keeping old people [sic] and allowing them to afford their energy bills in the Winter. They said old people should not have to choose between heating and eating. Unite the Union, not supporters of the Conservative Party, have launched a Judicial Review.”

“Obviously our concern is the impact of this cruel decision on Bexley residents and to have pulled the rug at the last minute is cruel. Most of the 34,000 affected are mobile so we are working to find warm spaces which we have done before but there are more spaces out there and we are identifying them so people can go where they choose and then we need to advertise it. The next edition of the Bexley Magazine will offer tips on how to keep warm.”

“We think about 2,000 of the 34,000 residents are housebound and we care about them. We will deliver them a box full of goodies to help them keep warm. We will call them Bexley Boxes. (†). We are thinking what will be in them and some local companies have already got their cheque books out. It will be hard - GDPR etc. - but it will be worth it.”

“Let’s get out and do it.”

Councillor Stefano Borella said he backed the additional SuperLoop stop at the War Memorial in Bexley but had the bus stuck to its original route it could have served Blackfen. Referring to the Belvedere by-election he said it was the first Labour ward by-election in 24 years and they took control of the Council soon afterwards. He was hoping that history would repeat itself so that “the housing ethos” could be changed.

After defending the Labour budget - “tough decisions have to be made” - Stefano was critical of Bexley Council for not consulting widely on the proposal to change the Council Tax Reduction Scheme. “The Consultation was appalling.” Every Council Taxpayer should have been informed because every one of them might one day need the Reduction Scheme. “Why did we not at least consult with the people in receipt of it?”

Train enthusiast Stefano asked if the 125th anniversary of Slade Green station would be celebrated next year. To most people’s surprise the Leader knew that anniversary was approaching.

The Leader referred back to Stefano’s comment on the budget’s tough decisions. “No one will forget that pensioners were penalised to feed the Unions.”

Cabinet Member Leaf responded to the criticism of the Council Tax Reduction Scheme consultation. It closed last week with 74 responses including one from the Labour Group. There are nine options available and no decision has yet been made. GDPR, a hang over from the European Union, prevented wider circulation.

After referring to his recent “landslide” Councillor Fosten looked forward to constructive cross party cooperation. In Belvedere, residents had been crowd funding for CCTV but been rebuffed so Jeremy welcomed the Council’s renewed interest in the subject. (ANPR cameras installed in Wallhouse Road in July.)

There is no CCTV in Belvedere aimed at preventing street crime.

On the subject of the DLR to Belvedere he said that Bexley Council had failed to attend stakeholder meetings “time and again” and now they are too late to contribute and “it may kill the project as a whole”.

The Leader responded that 862 residents voted Labour but 1,375 voted for other candidates. “Not a landslide.”

“CCTV is only in town centres but technology has moved on” since it was installed.

She claimed to have been personally involved in the DLR stakeholders’ meetings.

† If you search the web for Bexley Box you will find it is an American term to describe similar emergency boxes which may be picked up from police stations etc. in Carolina. Contrary to my expectations it has nothing to do with the town of Bexley in Ohio but is named after a murdered child named Bexley.

 

10 November (Part 2) - The Conservative view on ULEZ 15 months after its imposition

The Mayor said there were only a few minutes left in which to debate the original ULEZ Motion and Councillor Kurtis Christoforides was first to catch the Mayor’s eye. He said he “was disappointed by the tone of those opposite because they were the least constructive that I have ever heard them be. It feels like a real shame.”

“I want to speak on its impact on working people. What exactly is a working person, the finest minds in the Labour Party having been straining every sinew to solve this knotty conundrum? The Prime Minster’s definition is that working people know who they are which is not very specific. It is very difficult to build good policy on that foundation so it is no wonder that Labour ignores the impact of ULEZ on working people because they don’t even know what or who they are.”

“Another possibility is that the term was a deliberately ambiguous pre-election ploy. I hope very much that Bexley residents with Labour representatives pay very close attention to whether they are working hard for them because with all this confusion about what counts as work who knows what the Party opposite spends their time doing.”

“There is a point to all this theorising and this is it.”

“Wealthy people who don’t need to work don’t drive 20 year old diesels; they have the latest Tesla. No, it is the people mentioned by my ward colleague [Cameron Smith] that are affected. The same people mostly affected by the loss of the Winter Fuel Allowance and the increase in employer National Insurance contribution and the tax on family farms. Did pensioners not work? Do small business owners not work? Do farmers not work? In my ward they do.”

“Those opposite will say they have raised the minimum wage but the problem with that is if you don’t have a job the maximum wage is zero and the policies that they are advocating, they are supporting, they are introducing, are taxes on jobs. Things like ULEZ and NI going up means job opportunities go down especially for young people and the lower paid.”

“What makes this distasteful is that the Party opposite has claimed to be the great puritan defenders of working people, the guardians of the have not, the hammer of the evil Tories who would balance the books on the backs of the poorest and they have done exactly that. This is not Socialism and what happens if you remove Socialism from the Labour Party? Just the Champagne and Lord Ali’s clothes.”

Time being the enemy again, Members had voted earlier for an extension of only 20 minutes, the Mayor asked Cabinet Member Diment to sum up.

He congratulated Councillor Smith for bringing the Motion forward and Councillor Fosten for his Maiden Speech “but he only knew where more money could be spent and none where it could be saved”.

“ULEZ remains deeply unpopular in Bexley. 15 months on from the extension the Labour Mayor and TfL continue to struggle to demonstrate tangible benefits while the costs to residents who can ill afford it are clear, We have no Underground, we have no Overground, no DLR, no Thameslink. We need dramatic improvements.”

Councillor Fosten’s campaign for Thameslink to stop at Erith and Belvedere requires the train companies talking together to avoid the conflict at North Kent junction. “It is not that simple. Major rescheduling is required.”

He welcomed the Bexley Village Councillors’ campaign for the Superloop bus to stop at the Bexley War Memorial instead of running non-stop from Bexleyheath to Sidcup bypassing two stations along its route.

“We have had promise after promise from TfL that there would be more electric buses but there have been none in the past two years.”

The Mayor argues that the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels must both be tolled but the M6 and the M6 Toll roads coexist. “The toll is simply another way of extracting money.”

Unlike the Mayor in his ULEZ-free Manifesto Bexley Council was elected on a Manifesto to pursue the legal route against ULEZ.

The revised Conservative ULEZ Motion was approved.

 

10 November (Part 1) - Labour’s case for ULEZ

The problem with not being in the Council Chamber when a party comes up with an Amendment to a Motion is that you don’t get to see what it is and Councillor Borella began by agreeing with me that the Council’s Motions procedures do not work properly.

He noted that a year after the introduction of ULEZ "the world hasn’t ended and the Mayor has a mandate to do this policy". He said that some of its local supporters were “cranks”.

“People will adapt and change and that is what Bexley residents have done. Air pollution has a negative impact on the health of London and it is a silent killer and residents have to deal with it every day. I am happy that I am on the side of the Mayor. I have not owned a car for 16 years and managed perfectly alright.”

“Today I have used the SL3 bus and the Elizabeth line introduced by a Labour Government and Mayor. We should be proud of those transport improvements and we will be fighting for the DLR to come to Belvedere. The electric buses referred to by Cameron Smith, the 132, were introduced by a Labour Mayor and the previous Mayor did not do anything about that.”

[Google says the first fully electric buses were introduced to London in August 2013.]

The party opposite spent £147,000 on fighting the Mayor in Court which led to a legal overspend which was “appalling”.

“The Blade Runners have committed criminal acts on infrastructure including Council infrastructure and Members opposite did nothing to condemn that action.” [The Conservatives mumbled their dissent.]

“Maybe you have forgotten but it was Mayor Johnson’s proposal to charge at Blackwall. Our Amendment is a sensible Amendment which reflects what ULEZ is about, It is about air quality and we will not be voting for this politically motivated stuff. This borough fails people who walk and cycle.”

The Amendment was seconded by Councillor Jeremy Fosten (Labour, Belvedere) and any friends and family who may have been watching his debut from home will have been disappointed. Bexley’s webcams have been broken for several years and no longer reliably focus on the Councillor speaking. True to form they focused on Sally Hinkley, Nicola Taylor and Baljeet Gill and missed Jeremy by several feet.

Councillor Fosten began by apologetically referring back to the petition he organised in 2019 when Bexley Council decided that an ugly fence should enclose Shoulder of Mutton Green “but this Motion and Amendment is more important than that. It is important that residents know where the Council stands, however residents already know where the Council stands, We spent £150,000 on a Judicial Review that failed. ULEZ is the only policy that has been plastered on Tory leaflets for the past year. It is well documented how Bexley Council and the Conservative Party stands.”

“This Motion is a waste of time because there are many other issues we could be talking about tonight including some the Council might be able to fix. Arson and vehicle thefts are increasing in Belvedere because the Council is too cheap to install CCTV. Fly tipping is rife yet the obsession is with reporting it and not tackling the problem.”

“Despite how necessary CPZs might be [in Belvedere] you cannot come here consulting on the necessity to charge residents £130 a year and then peddle conspiracies about further charges to road users. Where is your Motion on that? You come here to pass a cheap political whim instead of getting on with the job of helping residents. The Council would do well to step outside of its glass house.”

“Air quality is worse than you think it is. I am an asthmatic and before I went to university I used to use my inhaler only once or twice a Winter but now I have to use it often and my doctor has had to increase the dosage.” {The Conservatives did not fail to see a possible flaw in this argument.]

“I would prefer the Motion was a little less combative. Instead of trashing the whole scheme let’s work together and support who ULEZ genuinely affects but Conservatives shout from the sidelines about how much they dislike the Mayor, the goal being to remain in power in 2026 but here they are being the loudest in the room and the furthest away from supporting residents.”

Councillor Anna Day (Labour, Slade Green) said ULEZ has been “a success and on this side we are looking for a cleaner greener fairer future. Air pollution leads to premature death”.

Because of time pressures caused by the Adjournment the Mayor allowed only one Conservative speaker. Councillor Cameron Smith said he would not accept the Amendment. He agreed with Councillor Fosten that “residents know where Bexley Council stands but the question is where do you?”

Inevitably the Amendment was formally rejected.

Note: The foregoing monologues lasted about 13 minutes and the extensive quotations reported here are much abbreviated. As written they do not always seem logical to me. For this reason readers may judge for themselves by listening to the original audio.

 

9 November (Part 2) - Safety Valve blows

If you follow @tonyofsidcup on X you may know that expert on Questions that he is, he produced a spreadsheet containing every Question from a Councillor over the past two years.  (Click to put it in your Download folder.)

@tony has today posted an extract which illustrates Councillor Asunramu’s (Deputy Labour Leader, Thamesmead East) interest in the Safety Valve.

I am still none the wiser. Until yesterday the term Safety Valve had appeared only once on Bonkers. It wasn’t explained then either but may be found on one of Bexley’s many often short-term websites.

 

9 November (Part 1) - ULEZ again

Next on Wednesday’s Agenda was the long delayed (May 2022) ULEZ Motion from Councillor Cameron Smith. It came from the era when Sadiq Khan was yet to impose his new tax on movement and the proposed Court challenge by Bexley Council and its allies had not yet been made.

Councillor Smith said he considered ditching the Motion entirely but instead produced a new one which the Mayor accepted.
Stefano Borella (Labour Leader) asked for ten minutes to consider his response to the amended Motion. He had asked the day before the meeting if he could see the amendment and been refused which he said made a mockery of the processes. If he had seen it he would have checked his response to the original Motion which could now be ruled Out of Order. “If we had been given sight of the alteration we would not now have to waste ten minutes.”

The Mayor was sympathetic to the request but procedures demanded that the revised Amendment was first moved and seconded. Cameron began by saying “residents are still being impacted every day by ULEZ. We owe it to them to talk about it here.”

Councillor Smith went on to tell how an elderly resident had very recently told him about five ULEZ fines received following hospital visits which he had expected to be covered by the hospital visit reimbursement scheme. He was unable without help to get on to the TfL website to appeal.

“Since ULEZ was imposed we have seen Sadiq Khan doubling down on his war on the motorist. There is to be more road user charging including on Blackwall Tunnel.”

“Every single day 48,500 drivers are charged [under ULEZ] 6,000 of whom don’t pay and fined. So every single day the Mayor rakes in £1·6 million taken out of people’s pockets. With little notice in the aftermath of the pandemic during an energy crisis and when people were feeling the inflationary squeeze the Mayor decided he should make it harder for people. In the first six months of ULEZ £107 million was taken from them in charges and another £32 million in fines. The vast majority of households in Bexley have a car but the Mayor claims that only rich folk drive yet TfL’s own research says that even among people on as little as £10,000 a year the majority in Outer London have a car. ULEZ was not in the Mayor’s manifesto.”

At a time when pollution was falling steadily “it was a choice to push the poorer motorists off the road. How long before he tightens ULEZ to bring more people within its reach? Despite the Mayor’s claim to be going green only 48 buses in Bexley are electric”

Councillor Rags Sandhu seconded the Motion and related once again the sorry tale of a plumber based in Kent but only three miles from the Council Chamber who could no longer service his customers in Bexley, Bromley and Greenwich.

He had bought a replacement van on finance five years ago but later discovered it was not ULEZ compliant. The finance early repayment penalty prevented him from buying another.

A specialist cleaning company had a much modified Transit van and had to spend a total of £26,000 on financing and modifying a replacement.

A number of businesses in the Welling Town Business Association have decided to give up when their leases come up for renewal because of the reduction in clientele coming into Outer London and the principal reason is ULEZ. Also their suppliers have increased delivery charges due to ULEZ.

“Independent businesses are being hugely impacted.” Councillor Sandhu had asked City Hall how many commercial vehicles from Bexley had been charged or fined etc. but the Mayor’s office refused to make the number public. However he was able to discover that Bexley residents had paid £2 million in fines.

This was the point at which an adjournment was agreed. The Mayor said ten minutes should be enough but definitely no more than 15. However the Labour Group took just short of 25 minutes to commit their thoughts to paper. It seems like a good time to pause this report too

 

8 November - Question Time

With Councillor Asunramu’s record on Questions it was no surprise to see her first out of the blocks on Wednesday. Four of the 32 questions were hers.

“Can Cabinet Member Caroline Newton give an update on The Safety Valve Programme” [whatever that might be]. Since Councillor Newton can not usually be bothered to answer email, don’t get your hopes up for a good explanation.

“The Safety Valve Programme continues to deliver interventions in line with the conditions set out in the DFU Agreement and remains committed to improving the outcomes for Children and Young People while also reducing the High Needs Deficit. The latest Safety Valve report was submitted to the DFE on August 28th and is made public through [the] Schools Forum where there is regular discussion. The final report of the year is due in to the DFE by 27th November.”

So we were none the wiser but it is something to do with Special Needs Education.

Councillor Asunramu (Labour, Thamesmead East) responded with the expected political comment. “We are unable to meet the budget” and it is all your Government’s fault because “they didn’t properly fund the budget”.

Councillor Newton said the demand for EHCPs keeps on increasing at the rate of about 11% a year both locally and nationally and “there will be an overspend this year” and later referred to the local MPs claiming to be passionate about SEND in a way that turns out to be “political posturing”.

Councillor Anna Day (Labour, Slade Green & North End) asked Cabinet Member Leaf what Bexley is doing about “income maximisation for residents”.

It would not be Councillor David Leaf if the reply was not “I have a very long list”.

Among them was ‘Advice and Signposting’, funding the Citizens Advice Bureau etc. ‘Communications’ through the Bexley Magazine and elsewhere. ‘Jobs and Employment’ which “supports hundreds of residents. The Household Support Fund provides cash payments and vouchers for things like furniture, rent, heating bills and help for Food Banks.”

Councillor Day said that only last week she and Daniel Francis MP found two families who could be helped during a two hour joint surgery. One with Disability Benefit and one through Pension Credit. “Could the Council be more pro-active?”

Councillor Leaf said they were working hard not only with Food Banks but also the provision of “Warm Spaces particularly after the Labour Government decided to hit pensioners hard by withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment”. He reminded everyone that very recently Labour was campaigning locally about a £600 discount on their fuel bills and now “everyone is going to be hit hard by the Socialist budget announced last week”.

Councillor Philip Read (Conservative, West Heath) took up that theme asking what could be done about countering “Labour’s terminological inexactitudes regarding taxation” used during the election campaign?

The always well equipped Cabinet Member produced the Office of Budget Responsibility’s report and quoted the bit about how “real household disposable income will fall under this budget” and growth forecasts have been revised downwards and inflation upwards, “a direct consequence of the budget”.

“Businesses and public services in Bexley will feel the burden of higher taxes. We as a local authority will face considerable additional costs. There is no National Insurance relief for Councils, GP surgeries or local care providers. It is a terrible budget for residents and is supported by Members opposite. They are the Pensioner Freezers, the Business Bashers, the Job Destroyers, the Tax Grabbers and the ULEZ Lovers.”

Councillor Peter Craske (Conservative, Blackfen & Lamorbey) made what was probably his first active appearance in Council since 2022. “What is the Cabinet Member for Adults’ Services going to do to combat the Labour Government’s cruel withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Allowance?”

Cabinet Member Seymour said that just under 39,000 Bexley residents had been eligible for WFA and only about 4,000 now. “Some people don’t need it but many will suffer severe hardship and make their health conditions very much worse.” He had spoken to residents who “for the first time in their lives had voted Labour but before the ink was dry on their decision Labour was falling over themselves to sign cheques for billions of pounds to Unions but no money could be found for the Winter Fuel Allowance. Absolutely disgraceful.”

The Council has been working with Age UK and the Leader will make an announcement in her report about what is being done.

Labour Leader Stefano Borella complained that Councillor Craske had “ad libbed” the word Cruel into his [written] question. The Mayor said that all Members should stick to the script.

Councillor Craske produced a local Labour public statement from 17th April 2022 which pledged that 27,800 Bexley residents would see their energy bills cut by £600 under a Labour Government. “Should Labour apologise for their cruel cuts?” The rather longer answer from the Cabinet Member could be summarised as “Yes”.

Councillor Nicola Taylor (Labour, Erith) knows all Labour’s favourite lines by heart and started with “After 14 years of Tory misery causing high energy bills from the lack of action by your Government and the consequent freezing homes why is the Cabinet Member only now setting up Warm Spaces and for political purchase [advantage?] rather than the benefit of residents?”

The Cabinet Member reminded the Councillor that it was a Conservative Government that paid people’s wages during the pandemic and paid half their fuel payments and despite that the new Government inherited the fastest growing economy in the G7.

Councillor Cameron Smith (Conservative, St. Mary’s & St. James) asked the Cabinet Member for an update on efforts to improve recycling rates.

Cabinet Member Diment accepted that the pandemic had taken its toll on performance as did the industrial action encouraged by the Labour Group Members but recycling was now officially at 44% and in April/May and June of this year it hit 51·3%. The best since pre-pandemic days. Bin collections are now officially at 99·88% successful and have just tipped over 99·9%. No more missed bins!

Country Style has invested £465,000 in new street cleaning machines.

Councillor Day said that “missed bins are still an issue and when will Bexley be at No. 1 for recycling again?” Bexley is improving faster than other boroughs so it should be back at No. 1 “in the very near future”.

At this point Question Time ran out of time.

 

7 November - My first hybrid Full Council meeting

I decided to attend last night’s Full Council meeting in person after speaking to the Mayor six weeks ago; I think I may have promised her that I would do so. Jeremy Fosten’s arrival as my new ward Councillor was a further incentive and in recent days the Question from Mr. Shvorob to which the answer should have been interesting.

But it wasn’t very.

If you listen to the audio clip you will realise that the Leader made no attempt to explain why Bromley and Greenwich fare better and when Dimitri asked her to provide a more complete answer the Mayor subsequently ruled that his interjection was his Supplementary Question which quite clearly it was not. It seemed to be an uncharacteristically mean spirited intervention but it became clear later that the Mayor was trying to save time whenever possible on what was predicted to be an over-long meeting.

Nevertheless it could be interpreted as another example of Bexley Council provoking follow up questions by not answering properly at the first opportunity; something Dimitri has publicly complained about before.

Teresa O’Neill dodging the question.

Dimitri had a second question lined up which was about fly tipping in the Market Parade area of Sidcup High Street. Unfortunately Cabinet Member Richard Diment did not have the requested statistics but offered some others of interest. In the High Street as a whole, twelve fixed penalty notices for minor fly tipping offences have been issued in the past twelve months and in the same period 231 penalties for littering. Mr. Shvorob was allowed to ask a Supplementary Question this time.

“Would the chances of solving the problems be higher if Sidcup ward Councillors actually lived in Sidcup and encountered the problems for themselves?” (Only one Sidcup Councillor lives there.)

Councillor Diment refused to answer the question. “Not appropriate.”

After Councillors asked questions - about which more later - Motions was next on the Agenda and provided a perfect example of the procedures being imperfect, Councillor Cameron Smith produced one on ULEZ which had been sitting in the Motions queue for 18 months.

He had considered withdrawing it but instead chose to highlight the innumerable problems that Sadiq Khan has imposed on local residents. Having produced a new rabbit from his hat the Labour Group rightly complained that they had not seen it before and needed time to formulate an amendment and the Mayor agreed. She authorised an adjournment.

Motions can be boring at the best of times and I wasn’t going to sit around for half an hour doing nothing. I packed the recorder and camera away and headed for the door but not before I was intercepted by most of the ‘friendly’ Councillors who had not bothered to acknowledge my email following the extortion of money with menaces. I am inclined to have words with them about that rather that let it fester.

Thanks to evening parking becoming ever more difficult necessitating a ten minute walk to the car and the temporary traffic lights in Long Lane it was best part of half an hour before I got home and tuned into the webcast on my phone. Then I cast it to the TV screen and watched the entire performance in relative comfort. The Adjournment actually lasted 25 minutes.

For the record I thought my new Councillor did pretty well despite the Council Leader’s attempt to put him in his place.

Note: This report dodges around the Agenda in a non-chronological way. This is mainly for reasons of time. Councillors’ questions come next.

 

6 November (Part 2) - Just an amateur

There will be a full Council meeting in Bexley tonight, the first for very nearly four months. Full Council means Public Questions and Mr. Shvorob does not disappoint. Only two Public Question today, both from him. Outnumbered of course by Questions from Councillors.

Over the past two years the champion inquisitors have been…

 

Zainab Asunramu - Labour - 23
Stefano Borella - Labour - 21
Anna Day - Labour - 20
Daniel Francis - Labour - 19
Esther Amaning - Labour -19
Janice Ward-Wilson - Conservative - 14
Dimitri Shvorob - 12
Chris Ball - Labour - 12
Wendy Perfect - Labour - 11

A long way to go before DS is up there with the top Labour Councillors.

 

6 November (Part 1) - It seems I am getting forgetful too

I am told that I omitted something important from yesterday’s legal update and readers are right; did I pay the £4,800 and did I remove old blogs and in particular those that referred to the 2024 General Election?

No to both questions but I did soon after the election introduce an Index to the coverage and while reviewing things removed the four letter adjective a Councillor friend (one of the three) had offered as a description of his former colleague. Four letters - not those four letters! - which very accurately described several incidents from the past.

 

5 November - It seems I am Billy No-mates

It was mentioned here a few days ago that when the unmentionable Reform UK candidate demanded £4,800 compensation and the removal of what little General Election coverage there was from Bonkers there was quite a lot of dithering on my part on how to respond. Over the years quite a lot of Bexley Councillors have given me insights into the candidate’s modus-operandii and as I formulated my response I wondered about using some of that information. It seemed appropriate to let them know the direction in which my mind was drifting.

When Ms. F. last got litigious one of my Labour Councillors asked for a copy of all the legal documents that led to her downfall and the other offered a great deal of support in other ways. Neither responded to my email although their Leader Stefano Borella did when he heard about recent developments thus confirming his reputation as Mr. Nice Guy.

Rather more Conservatives had rallied round when I was accused of harassing the aforesaid and charged by Kent police. More than one was secretly telephoning support right up to the day before my Court appearance and their numbers remain on my phone contacts list to this day.

One described the litigious lady in graphic terms and has continued to do so in recent months. So I wrote to all the probable supporters to let them know that I might in anonymously vague terms refer to their support when responding to the solicitor who was demanding the £4,800.

When one considers that I only mentioned the candidate’s chequered past in Bexley because I was asked to do so by local Conservatives it didn’t seem to be much to ask. In the event I did not say anything about history except to suggest a search of Bexley Council’s website might be productive.

Not a single Conservative Councillor replied to my email (caveat below).

Not the Councillor who sent me a load of emails and was in contact by phone too when I was charged with harassment. Not the Councillor who was phoning me monthly to discuss local issues. Not the Councillor who called on me at home seeking advice and assistance. Not the Councillor who had emailed in a different context to the effect that he was always ready to help and certainly not the small number who pretend to be friends when I go to Council meetings.

Were they under instructions not to reply? It has happened before.

This poses something of a dilemma. Will I be impartial when reporting on their activities in future? Will I find some subtle way of naming them?

Ahh, the caveat…

Three Conservative Councillors contacted me in secret by alternative means. One supportive, one very helpful with a few choice words that he might use if in my position, and another who undertook to check over my draft response before it was sent.

It is more than three months since the response was posted; six pages of letter and two more of appendices. I didn’t include, but referred to, my two hour audio recording of the interview I did with a couple of knowledgeable property businessmen. No one has ever heard it apart from myself and I doubt publicity would be welcome in certain quarters.

Since then there has been total silence. My dossier of inside information may have proved to be too much of an obstacle. I might have relished making it all available but i seems it isn’t going to happen

Note: For the record I was charged, unusually perhaps, by the police but the CPS dropped the harassment charges when they read what I had said fewer than 24 hours before I was due in Court.

 

3 November - Vexatious or not? We have the definitive answer

The argument has been going on for a couple of years now and I haven’t always been 100% supportive of @tonyofsidcup who asks Bexley Council an awful lot of questions; sometimes in person but more often via Freedom of Information Requests. Quite how many it is hard to say but in the region of 100 over a couple of years.

Supportive or not I have been pleased to report the answers and his even more frequent non-answers because without people like @tony how would anyone know what our Council gets up to?

On reflection I was probably being a bit too critical with the X Direct Message seen here and originally sent to a Councillor friend six months ago but it illustrates how my support for his questions was occasionally strained. There were a lot of them and sometimes I felt @tony was flogging a dead horse and should learn when to give up. One thing I have learned over the years is that Bexley Council revels in intransigence and it will absolutely never admit to being in the wrong.

My loyalties were similarly divided when the Council Leader delivered her rant against @tony exactly a year ago. From past experiences I know that Bexley Council encourages follow up questions because they do not completely or honestly answer the first one. It is frustrating for the questioner and expensive for the taxpayer and I have never been sure if the reluctance to give a straight answer is one of political direction or management incompetence.

In the following audio clip the Leader illustrates perfectly her lack of understanding of how badly the Council answers difficult questions if it answers them at all.

Everything is marked by the stench of arrogance and infallibility.

Teresa O’Neill speaks: This is a long clip. At the very least listen from 3:15.

I am not going to repeat previous reports on the saga - those interested can look through the Index - except to say that new broom Kate Bonham, presumably anxious to make a good impression with the Leader, decreed @tony to be vexatious on 1st December 2023. See below.

She had been in post for just two months on a salary of £113,749 plus an allowance of £5,415.

Kate was backed by the Information Commissioner who was less than impressed with FOI responses being reproduced on BiB. Let the public know about Bexley Council? That will never do!

So undeterred, @tony went to law. On 24th October the Court gave its verdict.

Is Bexley Council every bit as bad as we imagined and has it broken the law yet again? And what will our Teresa think of her Kate if it has?

To be fair I have been of the opinion that Kate Bonham has in some ways been a breath of fresh air and I will offer the guessed excuse that she was badly advised by the legal team which in the past has been extraordinarily incompetent. Losing in Bexley Magistrate’s Court and getting its Team Leader reported to the CPS.

Management in Bexley has always been poor and I’d guess some parts of it still are.

Kate Bonham, Deputy Director, Finance & Corporate Services, 1st December 2023.

@tony was given a clear run in Court because Bexley Council, arrogant as ever, didn’t bother to show up.

According to the Court Judgment @tony made a bit of a thing about him providing a public service through this blog. He may be right but it would have been nice if he had told me first. However @tony’s real opposition came from the Information Commissioner who provided a 262 page evidence bundle.

@tony told the Court that with no real journalists operating in the area it was up to amateurs like him to dig up the facts. The ICO contended that some of his questions were “manifestly unreasonable” and the remainder were “vexatious”. There was a single exception but @tony was not really interested in that one so I won’t complicate matters by detailing it here.

The Court said that the difference between manifestly unreasonable and vexatious was “vanishingly small”.

The ICO/Bexley case that @tony’s questions were “self-serving” was thrown out despite Bexley Council saying they were because it had seen no evidence that @tony made the information available elsewhere. (Maybe if Bexley didn’t block Bonkers on their web servers they might be better informed.)

The Court said that none of the FOIs appeared to be “burdensome” and the number was large mainly because @tony chose to break them down into small bites rather than submit a massive one as a regular journalist might do.

The one question which Bexley Council deemed too expensive to answer (£630 in connection with ULEZ) was deemed to be an exaggeration. The Court estimated that reviewing 526 short emails would average just a handful of seconds each against the Council’s contention it would be at least three minutes.

You can see which way the Court was going can’t you?

I have had a copy of the Court Judgment for a few days and spoken about it to a couple of Councillors. Feedback from within the Ivory Tower is that there is a good number of red faces and not a little annoyance. I hope it is with the Legal Team who may have shown the level of competence to be expected of lawyers who have failed to make their way outside a public service sinecure.

The question now is; will Teresa O’Neill apologise to @tony for the broadcast attempted humiliation delivered a year ago?

Note: As this report has been published later than I would have liked, another blog has already published a summary. It is not correct in every detail and @tony submitted corrections.
The alternating use of @tony’s pseudonym (X handle) on Bonkers and his real name is at the direction of the man himself. I am sure you must know who ‘both’ are by now and there is no point in going against his wishes.

 

2 November (Part 2) - Everything comes to he who waits

It possibly helps to be very close to the Planning Committee Chairman’s wife but Bexley’s favoured developer has been getting his way with things for far longer than that. So maybe it is no more than a very bad look.

Quite often applications have initially met with refusal but all have been successful later.

The last time that Mr. Singh and his site at 238 Woolwich Road were featured on these pages was just over five months ago. 238 Woolwich Road is where Mr. Singh built his notorious concrete bunker which strayed just a little into Lesnes Abbey Woods and succeeded in driving his neighbour out because they could stand the eyesore no more. Singh was their only possible buyer.

Despite the initial knuckle rapping by Bexley Council, permission for the bunker to stay came a couple of years later.

An application to rebuild the associated house (238) was made in 2023 and a variation submitted in May 2024. (24/01647/FUL.)

A two storey extension for which permission has been granted with a conditions. The building has to look satisfactory and in keeping with the existing building. Big deal! I had assumed that that would be a given.

This report is a little late, permission was granted in July.

 

2 November (Part 1) - Still aboard the gravy train

Every couple of months I meet what is left of the original BiB crew. One deaf, one nearly blind, (the other half of the group dead) and me as Uber driver. Last Tuesday one of the questions was “whatever happened to Will Tuckley, is he still at Tower Hamlets?” To which I could only add “no” and little else.

If you have been here for ever you may remember that Will Tuckley was the Chief Executive imported to Bexley from Croydon after the later jailed (suspended sentence) Bexley Council Leader fell for a sob story from Tuckley’s predecessor. He claimed that he had to retire on health grounds. Serious heart problems, so off he went with a reputed £300,000 Golden Goodbye and a £50,000 annual pension which you are still paying. A couple of months later he popped up in a senior position at Hammersmith & Fulham Council.

Tuckley came attached to a story that while in Croydon he ran over and killed a man in a Council car park notorious for being frequented by people high on drugs and it was all hushed up and not reported. It transpired that Tuckley was great mates with the borough Police Commander who managed to follow him to Bexley.

While in Bexley Will Tuckley became notorious for all sorts of things one of which saw Greenwich Police investigate him for Misconduct in a Public Office. They had so much evidence that they had no alternative but to send a file to the CPS.

While he was being considered for prosecution Will was recruited by the Government appointed Commissioner to run Tower Hamlets Council which was in big trouble. The aforesaid Borough Commander and his Deputy went there too.

Former Police Inspector Mick Barnbrook wrote to the Commissioner to ask if he knew that Will Tuckley might soon be in jail but he was dismissed as a lying racist. Tuckley was appointed while the CPS carelessly lost the Police file.

All was quiet for a couple of years until Will Tuckley was caught up in a Tower Hamlets scandal and reported in the Sunday Times. A property developer bribed the usual Tower Hamlets suspects with £2 million and the allegation was that the Chief Executive failed to notice and only tipped off the police when the news was about to break.

Despite that, Tuckley limped on in Tower Hamlets until March 2023 when £217,844 fell into his hands. The Council’s 2022/23 accounts show total payments at very nearly half a million.

Then what?

Enquiries reveal he has landed a plum job in Slough. A near bankrupt (billion plus pounds of debt and deficit) Council that could afford to pay Tuckley £1,100 a day.

BBC report.

One Council, two Chief Executives on the make. How do they get away with it?

 

1 November - Incompetence rules the roost in Bexley

As you will likely know, this blog began in 2009 because I discovered that Bexley Council was blatantly lying to hide the effects of management incompetence. I naively thought it must be a ‘one off’ but Council lies kept Bonkers in regular employment until 2016 at least when some tailing off was detected.

Way back in 2010 lying proved to be not the least of the problems and Bonkers borrowed the slogan Dishonest, Vindictive, Criminal from the pages of The News Shopper because it was a succinct summary of the attitudes displayed by Councillors and Management alike.

But that seemed to fade away too leaving only the persistent theme of management failure. Bexley has seen managers who led the borough to Inadequate OFSTED results, managers who failed to prevent a child death, another who, contrary to advice, made a staffing cut which led directly to the death of an old lady in their care. A legal team that lied to the extent that the police took a keen interest in their activities and a legal team who more than once took residents to Court and lost. The word used by the judge to describe their activities was “unconscionable”.

More recently new management conducted a staff survey which revealed the poorest of management styles within Bexley Council including bullying and remoteness. And how could anyone forget Kevin Taylor’s lame attempt to justify the blocking of a road by one of his staff members?

Even more recently we have seen @tonyofsidcup branded vexatious for a series of Freedom of Information requests the legality of which seemed to be more than a little dubious.

@tony is not a man to take things lying down and made a legal challenge. Over coming days the details will appear here but meanwhile it is fair to say that Bexley Council has been routed and humiliated and the principal reason is management incompetence. Heads should roll but of course they won’t.