31 January - Net stupid

It is the last day of the month when traditionally BiB does not publish anything significant as the life of the month-end blog is short. More important stuff must wait until the 1st even though I would prefer to reveal a few more worrying things right now.

This is much the same as last month when it was reported that Autumn 2024 was the gloomiest of the past 14 years by a considerable margin.

January, despite four or five sunny days, was overall almost the dimmest since 2011. 2013 and 2021 managed to be a bit worse. By contrast 2022, 2023 and 2024 were all between 30 and 35% brighter than 2025.

It perhaps explains why Octopus Energy sent out emergency requests to use less energy on four windless days in January +and offered monetary rewards to those who did. Ed Miliband’s crazy policies, cover a tenth of agricultural land with solar panels, plug the fracking wells with concrete, dynamite the old power stations, ignore the need for nuclear, are vying with Rachel from Complaints’ efforts to bring the country to a standstill.

I don’t use much electricity during the day so there is almost no scope to respond favourably to Octopus’s request to cut my consumption, but on the first occasion I made sure the oven and kettle didn’t go on. My reward was a penny.

On the second occasion I thought I would be clever and turn off the incoming mains and run wholly off the house battery. It should produce a bigger saving and it did. Tuppence. I didn’t bother to throw the changeover switch on the next two savings sessions. The microwave (alone) doesn’t like it and demands its clock is reset.

Obviously I am not in a position to make much of a cut but cumulatively Octopus customers saved almost half a megawatt hour of electricity and the country’s lights didn’t go out.

When will Milibrain’s luck run out? Do you know where your candles are?

 

30 January - Give them an inch

Mr. Mustard the esteemed parking justice campaigner from Barnet posted this picture on X a week ago.

Like me he thinks it is a pretty stupid way to park but knows it is not actually illegal. Parking 50 centimetres from a kerb is illegal but the rule is not sufficiently well defined. So much so that in lazy Bexley no attempt is made to enforce even the most blatant of offenders. (Tape measures are too complicated.)

In the week since Mr. M. posted his picture, the same has happened outside my house most days. Bexley Council has been pondering whether some yellow and white paint might fix the problem but all we get is apologies for the delay in coming to a decision. (That is not absolutely accurate, there has been no apology.)

The six photos below are in pairs. One and two taken yesterday show how the desperation for a parking space encourages one wheel against the kerb and the other three anywhere and who cares if the road is nearly blocked and the red car cannot easily get out of its drive?

Photos three and four are the same but taken today.

Photo five has been seen here before. Bexley Council refused to give the car a ticket because eight inches across the drive is not a lot. (But more if you include the wing mirror.)

What happens if the lesson of Photos 1 to 4 is combined with 5 and the front wheel does not block the dropped kerb by much but the rear wheel is angled a long way across? It would not be the first time my drive has been blocked and Bexley Council has refused to take action. It is a registered ‘No parking’ drive too.

Photo six from two days ago was reported by a neighbour. Once again six or eight inches across a dropped kerb. A different CEO issued a ticket.

Bexley Council should enforce the law equally and not allow CEOs to look the other way because the law has only been a little bit broken.

 

29 January - Carry On Lying

Zia Yusuf is the Chairman of Reform UK and claims to have discovered that Councils are corrupt. Just where did he get that idea from?

I wouldn’t say that Bexley is the most corrupt Council ever although I could point you to quite a lot of shocking example if you ask me nicely, but Bexley may perhaps be able to lay claim to being the most secretive.

A Council with a lot to hide is never going to be keen on answering questions.

Typical of their attitude was Brian Smith not answering my question about how much money we may be gifting The StoryTeller and dodging it by sending their PR puff piece with not a financial figure in sight.

Brian Smith is Head of Economic Development in Bexley and works for Mrs. Richardson who appears to be jumping ship before the StoryTeller blows.

Contrast his non-response with that from Southwark Council. Mr. Keith Kondakor asked a similar question to mine about their Really Local Group cinema.

They happily told him (PDF) that they paid £168k. to RLG to cover their design costs and £28k. for the council’s own legal fees. The Southwark cinema closed and Southwark Council had the good sense not to bale it out.

Mr. K. commented on the This London’s coverage of the story and has been in touch with me privately. He knows and I know that if Bexley Council is denying they have given huge sums to keep film running through the gate in Sidcup, then they are liars. Bexley Council is highly skilled at hiring people happy to lie to cover their tracks.

 

28 January - Mission Impossible

News of the disaster movie developing in Sidcup continues to trickle in, the burning question being to what extent Bexley residents are having to pay the price of continued admission and you can be absolutely sure that they are. Council lips may be sealed but the truth will eventually get out.

Lewisham Council let its cinema debts climb to £650,000 before pulling the plug and it remains to be seen how deep Bexley is prepared to dig in an attempt to save faces and hide their lack of business expertise.

Why am I so sure? Because my Freedom of Information question “Is Bexley Council party to any agreement to underwrite funds which may have been provided to The Really Local Group to ensure its presence in Sidcup and if so what are the limits of any such guarantee?” has been well and truly dodged.

In less than half the time allowed for FOIs the Head of Economic Development came back with…

The cinema has already become a much-loved feature of the town and has had a strong impact on the local economy creating new jobs, stimulating investment and a real sense of vibrancy. The building itself, with a new library and flats, has already won many awards including a prestigious RIBA Pineapple Award in recognition of its outstanding design and its success in bringing the community back to the High Street and the regional LABC (Local Authority Building Control) Building Excellence award for the ‘Best public or community building’. In the last week came further news that the site has been nominated for the 2025 Civic Trust Awards final and is one of 39 selected from over 300 applicants. This is amazing news and a fabulous endorsement by highly experienced and well respected, independent external assessors. The Council will now move quickly to appoint a new operator for the longer term and will update further as soon as possible. Meanwhile the library will continue to operate on its usual basis.

My response will be along the lines of “Are you going to answer the question or would you prefer me to go to the ICO straight away?” Does Mr. Smith really think his irrelevant clap-trap will help him hide the truth for ever? Never has a cinema name been more appropriate.

My half baked analysis of The StoryTeller’s profit or loss account, half baked because I kept the staff costs very low and ticket sales on the high side (†) and more importantly assumed they lived rent free, suggested that at best The StoryTeller might break even.

Companies House says the loss in Sidcup was £388,000 with both Ealing and Reading hitting the two million mark. Inside Croydon informs us that there is another new cinema in Sutton and their Council invested a million and the Government £1·42 million. The Really Local Group came up with only £100,000.

Just as in Sidcup the Sutton cinema remains open. Is Bexley going to take us into the world of make believe by claiming that it alone had the good sense to not put up the money or undertake guarantees for the StoryTeller? If it had I would have had an honest reply to my FOI instead of no answer at all. Taxpayers put at risk again.

A film enthusiast who has been questioning the British Film Institute about the funds allocated to the new local cinemas and commenting publicly on the issue estimates that Sidcup is losing up to £5,000 a week and the only source of the money that keeps the cinema doors open and its screens bright is residents’ deep pockets.

He must be right, mustn’t he?

† Average UK cinema attendance is typically 15 to 20% of capacity according to the Office of Independent Cinema and the Council of Europe. My 1,000 attendances a week estimate for Sidcup may be optimistic. London’s biggest independent cinema in Leicester Square achieves around 5,000 attendees a week according to today’s Daily Telegraph.

Inside Croydon
Greenwich Wire
This is London

 

27 January (Part 2) - “Government grants are designed to hand more money to Labour boroughs”

The Cabinet meeting held last week adopted the usual format and was commendably short although arguably the financial aspects were somewhat behind the times; it reported only on the situation last November.

Back then the overspend was forecast to be £4·134 million which was a £586,000 improvement on the month before. As always it was Children’s and Adults’ Services that ran away with most of the money but the other departments are all in trouble to some degree. Fortunately there has been a reduction in the number of people in emergency accommodation or the figures would have been worse. It looks likely that some borrowing will be needed by the end of the year.

Cabinet Member David Leaf in his shortest ever address said the £4 million overspend was just under 2% and better than many other Councils but he was clearly not being complacent about it.

Cabinet Member Chris Taylor (Adults’ Service) waffled at some length but I failed to find anything sufficiently notable to warrant comment here.

No Councillor wished to comment on or question the few figures that had been given.

Council Leader O’Neill said that unusually for the January meeting there is still “a budget gap for next year” and that is because the Government is late providing all the information although the overall draft settlement is now known but “we haven’t yet got clarity”.

The Interim Director of Finance and Corporate Services said she was not able to add much to what the Leader had said but nevertheless managed to speak for nine minutes. Bexley should be able to scrape under the Council Tax referendum level of 2·99% plus the 2% Social Care precept but new Government regulations mean that residents will no longer be given any information about the precept; it will all be bundled up as one single figure. The Council still has no information about its grant to offset the National Insurance increase.

All fees and charges will be increased by approximately 2% (although if one looks at the detail it is not difficult to find increases a long way into double figures) and the Council Tax reduction scheme will be changed again. The poorest people will be asked to pay 30% of the tax due instead of 25%. So that’s a 20% increase for them. Even Rachel Reeves would be hard pressed to hit them harder.

Increases to short term parking fees are variable but typically around 6% but a lot less for all day commuter parking such as that around Abbey Wood station where Council greed has already impacted anticipated demand. However the four hour rate gets a 33% bashing.

Councillor Leaf said that “about half the boroughs in London are to get a share of a £600 million pot” which has been part funded by abolition of “the Services Grant” which used to benefit Bexley but won’t any more. Instead the money will go to Greenwich, £3·8 million, Lewisham 5·3, Hackney 9·7 and Newham, £11 million and Bexley zilch. He said the convoluted calculations that result in those figures would only make sense to “an economist of the calibre of the current Chancellor of the Exchequer”. It is expressly “designed to hand more money over to Labour run Councils”. The only non-Labour borough to receive those funds was Independent Tower Hamlets. The new formulae are such that whichever grant is involved Bexley will always receive less money than it did before.

“The Highways funding currently being hyped up by the Government comes with significant strings”.

Cabinet Member Munur (Growth) said new job starts which had been a success story are in jeopardy because of the National Insurance increases and he is “already starting to see some companies pull back”.

The CCTV contract taken out in 2009 expires in March. Much of the equipment is “no longer fit for purpose and technology has moved on”. The replacement will be digital and include both static and mobile cameras. The new system will not require a control centre and will be less costly than before. No servers, no hard wired cameras, no dedicated monitors, better image quality and greater flexibility.

Cabinet Member Diment (Neighbourhoods) said that Bexley residents are being adversely affected “by the bizarre decisions of this government”. Despite that, bin collection rates are improved - better than 99·9% - and recycling is back over 50%. Roundabouts have been improved aesthetically with more to come.

Parking charges will be “increased by 2% rounded to the nearest 10 pence” and it is better to “increase them gradually rather than larger increases periodically”. The Mayor has been asked to raise parking and moving traffic offence fines above the current level. The request is for a staggering 23% increase.

I was disappointed to hear Councillor Diment repeat the dubious claim that Bexley’s garden waste service is one of the cheapest which even if it were true rather ignores the considerable number of boroughs which make no charge at all. It will be going up by another £10 in April which makes my investment in a shredder an even greater bargain.

30 roads are due for resurfacing at a cost of £3·5 million and there will be more new pedestrian crossings.

Cabinet Member Seymour said that the Governmentְ’s failure to exempt care workers from increased National Insurance contributions is causing several millions of pound’s worth of problems which is making negotiating new contracts very difficult. “This Labour Government is making the lives of those at the bottom of the pile as difficult as possible.”

Labour Leader Borella welcomed “the certainty that the Labour Government has provided” and accepted that there were “caveats” to the pothole funding. He regretted that no Conservative boroughs had benefited from the Recovery Grant.

Councillor Diment reiterated the statement made at the Transport Users’ meeting. “Despite what the Labour Press Release (PDF) says there is not materially more money available for potholes than there was last year.”

 

27 January (Part 1) - Looking for help

The drugs and stabbing reports being sent to me from Erith are worrying and I have no idea how to help the lady concerned. I had hoped that the short video shown last Thursday might attract the attention of her Labour Councillors but it didn’t, but all is not yet lost. A Conservative Councillor volunteered to see if officialdom already knows about the case.

Another email concerned possible planning breaches but my reply to an address including the name Bill bounced back. Not immediately as if the address doesn’t exist but after a few days with a keep on trying message. Full mail box? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

26 January - Speculation but could it be uncomfortably close to the truth?

It has been an interesting few weeks on Bonkers with some out of the ordinary subjects cropping up.

An emailed question said “What is happening at Sidcup Manor House?” to which the honest answer was “I don’t know” and to be absolutely honest I had forgotten all about it.

A search of Bonkers revealed ten blogs that mentioned the Manor House, the last in 2023 alluding to “recent developments”. I never did find out what they were. I knew that there were plans some years before to develop it into a hotel, I even took a look inside in 2017, but the hotel idea apparently came to nothing. Or have I missed something?

I read all ten Manor House blogs again and stumbled upon an interesting one. 11th April 2019 which revealed plans for the Sidcup Manor House and the old Blockbuster store just a couple of hundred yards apart from each other. Both, it recorded, were being masterminded by Deputy Director Jane Richardson. BiB archived the Blockbuster plans; something else I had forgotten about.

Maybe I was wrong yesterday to entirely rule out any connection between the usually super efficient Mrs. Richardson’s departure and the failure, for now at least, of one of her pet projects and I am still wondering how anyone thought it was ever going to be a viable proposition. My interest in cinema has led me to speculate on possible scenarios. There is a lot of guesswork here but…

The earliest Storyteller screenings start at around 11 a.m. and the latest around 8 p.m. so allowing for adverts that is at least twelve hours a day; plus at least another hour to prepare and clean up afterwards. An absolute minimum of 13 hours a day and probably more. Seven days a week makes it nearly 100 hours of operation.

For staff you are going to need someone to sell the tickets, someone to press all the right buttons behind the scenes and someone front of house to be on hand in case of emergencies. 300 hours of staff costs, and as you can see I am setting the numbers ridiculously low. At minimum wage that is going to be £4,000 a week with National Insurance on top. I doubt the projectionist will be on minimum wage, the national average is around £30,000 a year, so clearly we are looking at a wage bill in excess of £5,000 a week.

Ticket sales are something I can only guess at but if my Tuesday visit was typical, and with something between six and nine performances a day over three screens we are looking at 750 tickets a week. Let’s call it 1,000. Maybe Tuesdays are quieter than the weekends. At a maximum price of £10 a ticket that’s £10,000 a week. Some are a lot less than £10.

But hang on a minute; Rachel Thieves takes 20% of that and the standard take for the film distributors is 50%, some a bit more. So of £10,000, £2000 goes in VAT and £5,000 to the film distributor.

There is some guess work here but clearly something similar has been going on or the Really Local Group (Blockbuster) wouldn’t have gone the way of Blockbuster itself. God help them if a projector bulb blows!

Another thing that struck me and has for some time is the choice of films. Currently Conclave (Black Bear), Maria (StudioCanal), Nosferatu (Universal), Paddington in Peru (StudioCanal), Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Paramount), We Live in Time (StudioCanal), Wicked (Universal) and Wolfman (Universal).

Where are Mufasa The Lion King and Moana 2 which you can see everywhere else? Both Disneys and Disney is well known for taking a tough line with creditors.

It is unlikely that the other distributors are going out of their way to keep The Storyteller afloat which leaves only one obvious source of funds. Is Bexley Council the landlord? Is my 2+2 making 5?

If Bexley is or has been the source of money for The Storyteller we are not going to find out until the Summer when they must make their accounts available for inspection. If they are trying to keep the lid on things now you can be sure that almost no one knows about it. Guessing again, someone at Capita perhaps, someone at the cinema and no more than a couple in Bexley Council. Quite likely not even a Councillor. I have seen senior officers who know the truth sit next to a Cabinet Member and listen to him unknowingly spout a load of untruths while the Deputy Director sits there letting him dig himself in ever deeper. Dishonesty at Bexley Council has known no bounds; I had hoped it had gone away but maybe they have simply got a lot better at hiding it.

@tonyofsidcup discovered just how quickly they delete their emails. I must find time to make an FOI.

 

25 January (Part 2) - Seriously dodgy

Maybe I read too much into the message and was too easily seduced by the comment “the Highways Manager is seriously dodgy” but the damage to Albion Road’s new roundabout was not as serious as I had imagined. Certainly it fell far short of the spectacular cock-up at Ruxley corner. (Photo 1.) Neither is it on a par with Wickham Lane where the combination of poor design and an adverse camber saw the diversion of bus services.

Bexley seems to have a particular problem with roundabouts and from Trinity Place to Watling Street it has some of the silliest in the South East. My transport consultant son, just back from advising the European Union this week, told me long ago that there is a simple bit of software that designs roundabouts. Tell it how much space you have and it will do its best and issue a warning about which vehicles will run into difficulty.

Alternatively tell it which sort of vehicle will be using it and it will specify a suitable roundabout. Despite this Bexley Council gets it wrong pretty much every time.

Albion Road/Gravel Hill. Not the worst damage ever. You may judge its length by the kerb chip on the right of the second photo and left on the first.

 

25 January (Part 1) - Jane bows out

A couple of hours was wasted yesterday looking for background information on the Really Local Group that ran the Sidcup Storyteller now in liquidation but stlll keeping the doors open on the back of someone’s slush fund. Well someone must be paying the wages and the electricity bill. I didn’t learn anything of interest and moved on to trying to link senior Bexley management names to RLG’s downfall.

In doing so I stumbled across the name Jane Richardson and whilst it probably has nothing to do with keeping cinemas afloat I was more than a little surprised to see Bexley advertising for a new Deputy Director of Housing and Strategic Planning.

Jane Richardson has held that position for a month longer than BiB has been in existence and is paid more than £130,000 a year. I always thought she was a cut above the other senior officers on parade at Council meetings, certainly in the early years when she easily outclassed the pretty much universal incompetence on display. Unlike her colleagues who have all thankfully been shown the door, Jane always seemed to be on top of her brief.

Google found four job advert links purporting to show the details but only the fourth of them - BlueSteps - actually did so.

I have no idea if Mrs. Richardson has found herself a better job or decided to call it a day. 80 year old men do not guess younger women’s ages; last time I did so what I thought might be 48 turned out to be 61.

I hope she is leaving for all the right reasons and not because her Strategic Planning has run out of road.

 

24 January - Still sitting in the dark

So it happened, it has gone bust, but when I check the Storyteller website it says business as usual with all the latest films available to see.

How come?

The Woolwich Wire reports that Bexley Council is looking to find a new operator but Companies House says that The Really Local Group operated a dozen companies of which RLG (Blockbuster) was only one.

The common factor is a Mr. Preston Paul Benson who has operated quite a large number of companies over the past decade or so, some dissolved, some not but the still operating cinemas appear to have been reduced to just Sidcup, Reading and Ealing. Apparently operating independently of RLG and somehow being kept going with funds from; well that is the big question.

Mr. Preston resigned his directorship at RLG (Blockbuster) on 16th January and The Woolwich Wire provides a little more detail of the addresses still operating.

Operating a cinema at a time when most people are satisfied with the far from optimum quality that comes down a phone line cannot be easy and an audience of 13, as there was the only time I went there, must surely be a precarious operation. Charging only a fiver to get in even if a bog standard chocolate bar costs almost as much is not a way to get rich quick.

As I said that the time, the equipment in evidence was not exactly state of the art; to be snobby for a moment, I wouldn’t give their loudspeakers house room. The sort of thing you might see in a well equipped cinema costs around £5,000 per audio channel and Dolby Atmos supports 128 channels though most cinemas would max out around the 24 channel mark. It’s an expensive business.

A top rated laser projector starts at around £50,000. Even an upmarket domestic grade one can be £15,000. IMAX starts at around £300,000. I don’t think it is surprising that the Storyteller was not the best film experience and maybe Bexley Council baulked at the costs; always supposing that they had a say in what was being planned.

It is worrying that Lewisham Council is exposed to the losses in Catford and I sent Bexley an FOI as follows on 14th January to see if we in Bexley are too.

It has been reported that the Storyteller cinemas in Ealing, Peckham and Catford have financial difficulties and that Lewisham Council is owed money. These reports also refer “to a Bexley Council spokesperson confirming that it expects The Really Local Group [the Sidcup cinema owner] to be liquidated.”
Under FOI regulations please…
1) Confirm that the latter report is true.
The cinema owner is said to have opened its venues “backed” by government funds.
2) Is Bexley Council party to any agreement to underwrite funds which may have been provided to The Really Local Group to ensure its presence in Sidcup and if so what are the limits of any such guarantee?

Question 1 is redundant now but taxpayers really do deserve to be assured that they are not being asked to shore up a cinema because the alternative of seeing it close would be both sad and embarrassing. If the FOI produces a simple No we can probably breath a sigh of relief but if the answer is in any way evasive I will be pretty sure, after 15 years of Bexley watching, that here is something going on that they would rather you knew nothing about.

If that is the case in a couple of week’s time when the FOI is due to be answered It will be an uphill struggle to get anything out of them. All the staff involved will clam up; they always do because they have too often displayed a total lack of business acumen. Anyone remember the lack of an overage clause in the Tesco contract which led to Bexley Council having no interest in the profit made by Tesco when they reneged on the original contract? In all probability, millions were lost.

 

23 January (Part 2) - Intolerable abuse

As well as dealing with correspondence from the young man abducted to Africa without explanation a lady has been trying to tell me about the abuse she has been suffering. I say trying because there is a language problem and worse is that she has been unable to send documents in a readable format. Nearly 20 A4 documents have arrived as jpg files of as little as 34 kilobytes each. Needless to say I cannot read them and probably the lady concerned is frustrated by my inability to comment.

I have managed to decipher her Erith address and the address of the alleged abuser, Erith again, but I am not sure if it is the lady who is being abused or a child. The latter probably.

The words drugs and County Lines can be deciphered and knives and stabbings too.

It really needs to be handled by the Council or the Police but apparently it has been with zero effect. I can make out letter headings from both the Met Police and Bexley Council but there is no way I can see what is alleged to have gone on or what they may have done.

However the video below, an extract from a much longer one, indicates that there is or certainly has been a problem which needs to be sorted out.

The video shows behaviour which should not be tolerated whatever the circumstances. (You should probably keep the volume down.)

Who is going to help? Do the Councillors for Erith know about this case?

Note: The image top left has been processed to allow it to be seen on Bonkers and is larger than 34k but nothing can be done to improve legibility.

 

23 January (Part 1) - Indecisive Bexley

It could be argued that it is a motorist friendly policy but the uncertainty of leaving parking infringements to CEO discretion leaves drivers guessing and when dealing in matters of law that is rarely a good idea.

It was established last March that Bexley Council does not provide its Civil Enforcement Officers with tape measures so they are told to ignore even the most blatant of 50 centimetre sinners.

@tonyofsidcup established that Bexley doesn’t prosecute obstructions on private land one might assume because they always provoke an appeal and there is no money to be made from such cases.

The motorcycle rider is now a regular in his/her favoured parking spot.

Yesterday someone was technically in breach of the dropped kerb rules by putting his front wheel two inches across the flat part of the entrance to my drive and the body by another six inches. It was not causing a problem.

By chance I bumped into the friendly CEO while going off duty half a mile away and I showed her the photo. She said she would not issue a ticket because to do so “would be a bit mean” and I am not going to disagree; but there is no guidance given apart from don’t be too mean. Is that good enough? I have seen cars parked in the more traditional kerbside way with no more than six inches of overhang which have been given a ticket.

Is this something that should be left to individual discretion of CEOs and wouldn’t a tape measure be a good idea?

 

21 January (Part 2) - You couldn’t make it up

After a month of questioning Bonkers finds itself able to unleash another story critical of Bexley’s Social Workers, not that I would suggest that they are worse than any others.

The original story seemed so unlikely that I required a lot of reassurance and documentation that it was not being put out solely to discredit Bexley Council and since a legal challenge has recently fallen by the wayside one might argue that it is. However that does not make it fictitious.

I hope I am not too biased against Social Workers who do not generally get a good press following too many high profile cases - baby Peter etc. - but over my 81 years (why this sudden interest in my age?) I have encountered Social Workers at a personal level only twice. My son when very young had a slightly twisted foot which the doctor said would eventually right itself. It did, but meanwhile he would trip himself up and give himself a bruise or two. Despite the dodgy foot being on his medical records the Social Workers would have to come around for a house inspection.

I can understand why they may have done that once or twice but after a while it may have been more sensible to look up his record and ask the lad what he had done this time. Not a big deal but it did tend to confirm my view that a profession content to name itself after a Communist Newspaper and use the initials SS may not be made up of the brightest people.

When I was looking after a nonagenarian aunt the Social Workers were a total let down and her General Practitioner and MP had to intervene. In Bexley a Social Worker was happy to tell me that they would punish vulnerable people they deemed to be awkward.

Generally speaking the worst reports about Social Workers end with some nonsense about lessons being learned. I suppose they must do things other than ‘steal’ people’s children but we don’t often hear about it.

I don’t think I will ever forget reading Bexley’s memo which said in mid-December that they would investigate reports from school teachers “after the party season” which proved to be a death sentence but except that it didn’t result in a death the new report may be every bit as bad.

My scepticism that such a thing could happen has been tempered by seeing the legal correspondence in which Bexley Council is referenced. Its existence doesn’t prove the case absolutely but on the other hand the Council has not denied it.

The allegation that Bexley Council has faced is that an eleven year old African boy named Alfonzo - I thought it best to give him a fictitious name but the victim is insisting I use his real one - was put into Council care when his teachers made reports that things didn’t seem to be quite right at home. After being with one OK foster parent he was moved to another where he was unhappy. After only two weeks the foster parent indicated that she was going to throw him out from a Thamesmead address I know fairly well and which I have avoided for many years. Maybe irrational but I do not feel safe there.

The day after being given the warning which had confused Alfonzo he was detained after school by his teachers and released into the custody of three men in a black car. They took him to a hotel for the night and in the morning a convoy of three cars took him to an airport. One man accompanied Alfonzo on a flight to Sierra Leone which was his place of birth but where he knew no one.

Alfonzo’s more recent investigations have led him to believe that the three men were contracted by Bexley Council which may have been deceived into thinking they were delivering him into the hands of his father. Alfonzo has not been able to discover if there was a Court Order but assumes that if there was his UK parents did not contest it. In any case his father travelled overseas and Alfonzo was never sure where he was.

Alfonzo was not aware that his father might be in Sierra Leone and not surprised when he was not at the airport to receive him. Instead a complete stranger collected him from Freetown Airport. Bexley’s paid escort said he needed to do a bit of shopping but would be back. He then disappeared into the crowd and was never seen again. The stranger took Alfonzo across the border to Gambia and from there to Guinea where he was left to fend for himself in a half built house.

He now believes the stranger was most likely a family friend.

Alfonzo lived rough for about five years by which time he was old enough to do a runner and organise a passport which got him back to Bexley. The Council promptly put him back into care.

The story so far can be told because Bexley Council found a legal defence to the alleged neglect and that aspect of the case against them is ended but the legal documents do not deny what Alfonzo calls his kidnapping and delivery to a stranger. The subsequent trauma deserves compensation but it is difficult to prove and Alfonzo does not want to blight his life any more than Bexley Council already has.

What sort of Council delivers a young boy into the hands of a stranger in another land? Are the people who did this to Alfonzo and at much the same time to Rhys Lawrie now living off of a fat pension?

 

21 January (Part 1) - More than just a patch

The current interest in potholes sent me scurrying up Colonel New’s Road to see the pothole repair work scheduled for Monday to Thursday this week. A New Road resident had already expressed surprise that the repairs were far more extensive than pothole repairing alone suggested and he was happy about that.

I may be able to explain why the repairs go beyond a simple patching up job, assuming this year follows the pattern of 2024.

Twelve months ago the Highways Manager said he had belatedly received £275,000 from the Conservative Government to be spent on potholes before the end of March with a promise of the same next year, 2025.

He did not regard it as very sensible but repairing long sections of road was the only way of ensuring the money wasn’t lost. There was simply not enough time to plan the repair of umpteen individual potholes. Same again this year perhaps?

Nearly 30 buses an hour up and down what was once a quiet residential street have done a great job of cracking the surface.

Here are some photos taken this morning and some from the aforementioned resident yesterday. There were more men at work than the photos show. I try to exclude them after I inadvertently got a Crossrail worker sacked for not wearing a glove.

I am going to standardise on pothole without a space and damn the American spell checker. There were 80 occurrences of pothole on Bonkers and 35 potholes. The latter are all gone now. The word that is, not the suspension wrecking cycling hazard in a road near you.

 

20 January (Part 3) - pothole or Pothole and how can we fill them?

I hate having to imply that people I know quite well are not telling the truth and so the last few days contrasting what the MP for Bexleyheath has been telling us about pothole money against what Bexley Council has been saying about it have been less than comfortable.

Basically Labour has been saying that Bexley has been given £900,000 to fix potholes while their Highways Manager has said he has heard nothing from Government, doesn’t expect to until next month and can only hope it is as much as the Conservatives provided. I have him saying it on tape so he must have had his reasons.

Who is right? I do not know. All I can say is that the Highways Manager is not averse to telling massive whoppers when it suits him and the Leader of the Local Labour Group has never been caught out fibbing in the 15 years I have been watching him.

He has issued a Press Release (PDF) and until it is proved otherwise I am going to assume that at best there has been a misunderstanding and at its worst the Highways Manager’s information is out of date.

What I really want to know is whether the correct term is pothole or my preference of pothole which my spell checker rejects.

 

20 January (Part 2) - From three screens to three emails

Story Teller
I don’t think it is on their website yet but The Greenwich Wire has picked up on the Sidcup cinema story. To their subscribers they reported “On Monday, I asked Bexley Council and Really Local Group what on earth was going on. Bexley didn’t respond and has stayed schtum throughout. RLG, however, has now appointed a PR company to deal with queries. We were promised statements on Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday. And then nothing at all on Friday.”

Bonkers has been given some, let’s just say comments, about the situation and promised more if I provide an email address and included a code word to indicate I’d be happy to receive them but the word was not easy to work into a blog so it didn’t get done. I don’t often have an excuse to refer to Roman ships powered by oars - or kitchens for that matter.

I submitted an FOI on the subject a week ago to see if Bexley Council has been silly or not.

He’s back!
Complaining about Councils is mainly an old man’s game and I sometimes think about my regular contributors who are no longer with us. I can reel off nine names without really thinking about it, there may be more.

One who I knew wasn’t dead but not been heard of in ages crawled out from under his hideaway at the weekend. Do you remember Olly Cromwell whose investigations frightened Bexley Councillors even to the point of beating him up? They did it both within the Civic Offices and as he exited a hospital at a time when they had a great number of secrets that required a very heavy lid on top. Nobbling the police, lying in court, signing false statements; they would stop at nothing.

Well the man is back with a political blog and I wish Harlow Council the best of luck. They may very well need it once John gets up to speed.

Difficult emails
There have been several recently. Bonkers is not really the right place for reporting domestic abuse or planning irregularities but I will look into them as far as I am able. Assuming, that is, the senders respond to further probing.

I referred to another strange message a few weeks ago about which I have with some difficulty uncovered a few facts. It doesn’t go as far as I had hoped but it is pretty shocking stuff, albeit from long ago. I am hopeful that the established facts can go on line tomorrow.

 

20 January (Part 1) - Loadsa money being spent but not much in Bexley

The Network Rail representative at the Transport Users’ Sub-Committee was William Knighton who looks after railway infrastructure over much of Southern England including of course all of South London.

He is currently busy planning the spending of £1·35 billion in South East London and Kent over the next five years and reaching the end of the £90 million Lewisham improvements and £400 million at Victoria.

Hungerford Bridge into Charing Cross which dates from 1864 has just started a £210 million refurbishment which should not affect train services too much, followed by £70 million on replacing the points leading to the Charing Cross platforms which probably will.

The Slade Green Depot is getting a makeover including new train maintenance equipment.

Possibly not such good news is that the Blackheath tunnel is going to be closed again. After replacing 10,000 bricks last year further work has to be done to stop water ingress and from 18th May 2025 to 29th July there will be no trains on the North Kent line taking the Lewisham route. Presumably two fewer trains an hour from Abbey Wood. The dates may change slightly but, barring the unforeseen, no more closures are anticipated.

More bad news is that Erith will not become an accessible station until the 2030s at best. The Access for All programme which saw Bexley station upgraded last year operates on a five year cycle and the bid for funds in the 2024-2029 period was rejected by the Department for Transport. Network Rail will try to strengthen the case for Erith but there can be no guarantees of success in 2029-2034. Assuming that this Government continues its support.

Hither Green will get a full upgrade but Belvedere will have to be satisfied with extra bike racks.

 

19 January - Miscellaneous Transport issues

The following is a few oddments of possibly useful information gleaned from last week’s Transport meeting. The Network Rail report may come tomorrow.

The criticism of TfL and consistently poorly performing bus routes has already been reported. Someone suggested bypassing TfL and approaching the bus providers directly but you can be pretty sure that some form of red tape would inhibit that. TfL has blamed the Thames Road road works for its poor performance, “even on routes that go nowhere near it” according to Councillor Richard Diment. “Baffling.” He added that three routes are being taken over by Go Ahead this weekend 269, 99 and another unstated. (It’s the 401)

Councillor John Davey went back to “sorting out the SL3 stops in Bexleyheath” which may be a reference to Lion Road again. He has said before that he thinks that stop is redundant. Also the “statistics fiddling” resulting from running the SL3 short of its destination. He then moved to the Hail and Ride section in his ward where “the named stops bear no relation to the actual stops”. He blamed narrow roads to which one might ask “and who is responsible for that?”.

The Chairman revealed that the TfL rep from the last meeting had contacted him directly about stopping the SL3 in Bexley “and TfL said No”. He is “not dropping it but will await the official response from the petition”.

The first words on roads were that the government has still not confirmed the size of the grant for next year. £100,000 of it will go on the street lighting electricity bill.

Councillor Sally Hinkley said the Agenda referred to five more pedestrian crossing sites. “Where are they?”. “Not off hand” the most senior roads man replied, however he did go into some detail with the Yarnton Road flooding problem. Southmere Lake, Peabody, Thames Water and one way valves were all implicated.

Sally then referred to Page 42 of the Agenda which is helpfully blank (†) but it is something about an ongoing investigation into collisions in Erith Road, Barnehurst Road and Woolwich Road. The roundabout at the northern end of Nuxley Road was featured more than any other site. Accidents apparently caused by cutting straight across the painted roundabout and a few “tail end shunts”. Sally said the police were pushing for a proper Nuxley Road roundabout raised above the road but the Highways Manager doubted it would allow a bus to turn into Nuxley Road and we have seen quite enough impassable roundabouts in Bexley already. (Ruxley, Wickham Lane, Albion Road.)

Councillor June Slaughter referring to another non-existent page asked if contractors who made a mess of our roads could be fined but she was told the procedures allowed only for £200 so it wasn’t worth the effort. If they are chased through the Courts the award goes to the Treasury not Bexley, so it is all a waste of time. The same goes for fly tipping fines.

Councillor Diment, referring to Government grants, said we should be wary of Government announcements of new grants which are in fact the same as last year but with a different name. It is not new money. “None of the money announced by this Government is actually available yet.” Neither have they announced the conditions attached to the grants.

The discussion on CPZs already mentioned here revealed once again that the Highways Manager now regards the Consultation as an informal survey. There will be some devious reason for that, probably to do with not having to publish every objection. Indeed there was fairly direct reference to exactly that. On a more positive note there were references to marked bays and signs which are in my opinion essential in ‘my’ CPZ.

Councillor Diment said he will be reaching his decision as quickly as circumstances allow while Councillor Davey put in a plea for the explanation to residents to be in plain English, otherwise “I will get hundreds of emails”.

Replacing the EV Chargers abandoned by BP Pulse will, once approval is obtained, be pursued through another company.

The big potholes on the Penhill roundabout may be fixed at the end of this month but no one was very sure.

† This was not the only reference to a page that I do not have and one must wonder if the Councillors’ Agenda is different from the publicly accessible one.

 

18 January (Part 2) - Where has the money come from?

For some reason I found this X post by our Labour MP more than a little annoying. To be fair I find pretty much everything done by Labour MPs intensely annoying as they work to undermine our country, cover up a myriad of mistakes and crimes and put foreign interests above our own.

As I said to Councillor Smith before he started his meeting, how do these people live with themselves and do they really believe what they spout?

I suspect that most people have similar thoughts but where are these 10% of pensioners who polls tell us still think Labour is doing a good job? Never where I hang out.

YouTube is awash with people from comedians to barristers putting out videos deriding Starmer in particular and Labour in general. I have never seen the like of it before.

X is much the same but that may be a biased sample because for several months past I have muted anyone who can only debate with the C word. Almost by definition I have removed 100% left wingers.

Where can the right of centre go? Nowhere really.

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch seems to get worse by the day and even if her performance improves her party is full of liberal bedwetters.

I had doubts about Reform UK from the moment Richard Tice wanted me to be forced into taking the Covid jab which probably killed a close friend and his mate Nigel is regarded with deep and increasing suspicion. I can’t see myself voting Reform UK again especially if it continues to field small time crooks as candidates.

But why did this picture annoy me so much? All the motley crew was doing is bragging about £900,000 being spent on Bexley’s potholes. Where did they get that number from?

Last Wednesday, a few minutes before Highways Manager Andrew Bashford announced that it was International pothole Day and said there was talk of Government grants for potholes being cut by 25% to combat some ruthless boroughs which have been spending the money on other things, the Chairman asked him how much money will be available for road maintenance next year.

Mr. Bashford replied that “the funding for next year, both revenue and capital side, has still not been fully confirmed. It may be signed off in February”. It may be spent on potholes and it may not; street lighting may soak up more than last year. “The figures are all over the place.”

So why is Daniel Francis saying that Bexley has been given £900,000 by his Government especially when one of the people in his gang was sitting opposite Andrew Bashford when he said he knew nothing about it?

I get the impression that Labour is under instructions from on high to put out propaganda, true or otherwise, and MPs’ integrity counts for nothing. Same ol’ Labour - or Conservatives.

 

18 January (Part 1) - No Platformed

The Transport Sub-Committee is the only one I know of that formally invites guests. One might say that train drivers, bus drivers and cyclists are represented but not the far more common type of driver despised by officialdom everywhere. It also listens to the views of children but not the old buffers unless you count Councillor June Slaughter and me. Chairman Cameron Smith always makes it clear that I can comment if I wish although I try not to. If only there were more Councillors like Cameron. At this point I should probably mention that I bumped into Cabinet Member Cafer Munur before joining Cameron and Co. and he was as friendly as anyone might wish - except perhaps his boss.

It has already been mentioned that TfL and the Police in particular do not take the Transport meeting very seriously and this week the absentee level reached 100%. Not a single one of the guests bothered to show up. Not even George although to be fair he had an extremely good excuse. Something to do with a successful coupling I think.

Southeastern however did not let George’s absence derail the meeting and fielded a pretty good Rail Replacement Service in the shape of Damien Testa. In contrast to the TfL representative who may have been a sleeper on a bus which had run out of puff short of its destination, Damien was broadcasting from a railway carriage. It may be a small point but it indicates some enthusiasm for his job. It may of course also indicate that he is a dab hand at computer graphics but it looked authentic enough to me.

If you enlarge the accompanying photograph you will see that his name and position is up in lights on the train information board. It has been suggested to me that Southeastern is all talk and no action but the same source has also suggested that the Metro lines should be taken over by TfL which might produce the interesting side-effect of putting Bexley’s Transport Committee into terminal decline with no one showing up at all.

As an aside I use Southeastern to London Bridge with much the same regularity as the Overground from Liverpool Street to Chingford and I know which offers the better service. (Admit it. If I called it the Weaver Line you wouldn’t know what I was talking about would you? £6 million unnecessarily spent by the bogey man Mayor.)

And now the chore of listening to my muffled audio recording. Why are the acoustics in Room G08 so poor?

Mr. Testa said that the Government (the DfT) is prioritising improvements to performance and reducing subsidies and taking Train Operating Companies back into public ownership. This year Southeastern will be joined by South Western, C2C and Greater Anglia.

Southeastern has been getting busier although not yet to pre-Covid levels. It saw 431,000 journeys on 5th December and got close to that on several days since. Growth is more marked on long distance trains than in Metroland which is probably down to the Elizabeth line effect. By the end of March it is likely that 138 million journeys will have been made over the twelve months.

On punctuality Southeastern is at 85% on time within three minutes. The aim is to get to 90% quite soon. Cancellations are only 2·3% which puts Southeastern in 9th place on the TOC league table and above them are companies which only run a handful of specialist services per day so the score is really better than it looks. Metroland is actually better for cancellations than the Southeastern network average.

As announced earlier in the week and here last November the Class 376 trains are to be refreshed with better lighting and USB sockets starting from next Summer and the 707s will be retrofitted with accessible toilets. The first of thirteen 377 units arrived last November with the rest coming over the coming months. These are almost new trains with air conditioning but it is not very new news and forecast by Murky Depths almost a year ago.

On a technical note all the stations are being surveyed electronically so that precise information on platform heights, curvature etc. will be available as design data for new train manufacturers. A contract has been placed for new ticket vending machines providing the full range of tickets.

ANPR is going into car parks at 37 stations including Bexley, Sidcup and Crayford. Possibly operational by Spring and after listening to what its customers were saying, will be capable of taking cash. Bexley and Bromley Councils please note.

A charitable community fund with a budget of £125,000 in 2024/25 has been set up with funds increasing threefold next year. It will be supporting around a dozen projects this year and next including the Samaritans (understandable) and musical activities (less so). The bids from charities etc. totalled more than £3 million so most will have been disappointed.

I should have remembered that 2025 marks the 200th anniversary of railways in Britain and a number of commemorative events are planned. https://railway200.co.uk. From memory of the slide - so check before you go - there will be an event at Charing Cross Station on 25th February to which the Fat Controller has been invited.

Councillor John Davey said that “the new trains are great” but they don’t go any faster and almost said what’s the point. Mr. Testa held out no hope beyond long drawn out journeys becoming a more comfortable experience. (Do I have to say again that 35 years ago my journey home from work on slam door 40 year old stock took 23 minutes and now it would be 32 minutes and fewer trains during peak hours? How did they do it?)

Councillor Richard Diment said it was all very well quoting punctuality statistics but the average masks some extreme delays, commonly 20 minutes late into London on the Sidcup line according to both his experience and his residents. “Good off peak performance hides real problems in the peak period. What is being done to tackle the extreme outliers?” (One Bexley Councillor has been keeping a diary from which he can gauge the extent of the problem.)

Extreme weather and trespassers got the blame. Newer trains may help. Councillor Diment added that “Bexley residents make more use of National Rail to get to work than any other London borough so it is really important”. Mr. Testa signalled his intention to look into it.

Mr. Testa rounded off his presentation with a few interesting points.

There are at least four trains an hour across all Metroland routes. Annual season ticket sales which used to be the big earner have fallen off a cliff as travel moves off-peak. 28 day tickets - use them when you like - have taken over from monthlies. (It was implied this is main line services only.) At Abbey Wood four out of five passengers entering the station head for the Elizabeth line and at Woolwich - looking at the two stations as a whole - two out of five opt for the Lizzie.

There were no promises of timetable changes other than a reference to the recently restored but limited loop line services but Southeastern is trying to get someone at TfL to talk to them about “more integrated and seamless services”. It was at this point that Councillor Diment made his plea for for the SL3 to serve Bexley station. The answer was a forlorn “Well we can ask” following which the Committee reiterated its own opinion of TfL.

As Mr. Testa coasted towards the buffers, his Network Rail colleague grabbed the Dead Man’s Handle and took control. More to follow.

With apologies for the lame railway puns.

Railway statistics. When I was a commuter into Waterloo in the days of steam there was a signal box just a few yards beyond the end of the terminus platform long since obliterated by the tracks installed for Eurostar. Trains would belt up from Hampshire in 39 minutes and be held at that signal box for several minutes until a platform could be found. The trains were timed in by the signaller and given five minutes grace. Given the wait for a platform a train could easily be ten minutes late but still be marked on time. I remain a sceptic. Last time I looked that steam hauled journey of 39 minutes - some were 43 - now takes a minimum of 54 minutes. They call it progress.

 

17 January - It’s all about the money

Rather late in the day @tonyofsidcup has found his photo of the motorbike which Bexley Council refused to prosecute despite it being an obvious hazard to anyone coming around the corner with their head in a phone or with a white stick. (The lighter coloured paving is clearly part of the highway despite it being private land.)

My guess is that CEO’s in Bexley are not allowed to exercise discretion as permitted by established case law but are under instructions not to touch vehicles parked on private ground with the proverbial barge pole.

You can be pretty sure that every PCN would be challenged on those grounds and would end up costing the Council money in Adjudicator fees.

There is no compulsion on a Council to pursue parking offences; Bexley told me that they do not pursue the 50 centimetre rule because it causes too many arguments and it seems more than likely that they do the same with private land issues. I suspect that Deputy Director Kim Durrani is being economical with the truth when he says he is concerned about imposing unnecessary financial burdens on riders and drivers for trivial reasons. Surely everyone will see that for the BS it is. Since when has any Council been concerned about imposing financial burdens?

I don’t know why he can’t come out with the likely truth; that there is no money in issuing PCNs on private land which are almost 100% certain to be challenged, but the truth as I rediscovered in the case of his fellow Director Kevin Taylor is not something that comes easily to senior managers in Bexley. BiB has become a 15 year catalogue of such dishonesty.

In an attempt to get nearer to the truth I have suggested to @tony that he submits an FOI asking how many PCNs have been issued for private land parking in 2024 and how many were challenged.

Not issuing such tickets is not in my view a completely unreasonable policy but a policy of rarely if ever telling the whole truth is.

 

16 January - No trains today, not many buses either!

A Councillor at last night’s Transport meeting congratulated me on my summary of the usual turn of events. Police, utterly useless, TfL as reliable as an SL3 bus and Southeastern and Network Rail put them to shame every single time.

Yesterday neither the Police nor TfL bothered to put in an appearance although even without them the meeting managed to continue for more than two hours. Every time I thought I could safely pack away my notebook, Councillors Davey and Hinkley would pop up with another question.

For time reasons this report is from scribbled notes and analysis of the audio recording will have to wait for another day.

The Chairman was clearly displeased with the Police and wondered how they might take their responsibilities to Bexley Council more seriously and put in an appearance once in a while. I would suggest that the Councillor who I overheard whispering unkind words about a resident into the ear of a colleague stands up and says it loudly for the benefit of my recorder; then we could guarantee four or five rozzers at the door within minutes.

No one was very happy with the TfL representative going AWOL again which allowed a few choice comments which I will carefully fail to attribute. “When they say things have improved they can never provide any evidence.” “They always blame road works for habitual late running.” “The B14 has been consistently poor for a very long time.” “I am baffled by their excuses” and finally, straight out of the Sadiq Khan excuse book, “It is always someone else’s fault.”

John Davey was puzzled by the Hail & Ride Service which operates between Knee Hill and King Harold’s Way approximately. The road is mainly too narrow for a bus to stop. I agree it is a bit silly. I followed a 301 to the meeting and it stopped three times between West Heath Road and St. Andrew’s Church which might be 300 yards apart.

Councillor Davey was still going on about rationalising the SL3 stops in Bexleyheath and was critical of services in both directions both stopping at the same Library stop causing confusion to anyone who cannot read. He didn’t specifically mention getting rid of the Lion Road stop again but I took the opportunity to remind him that it is by far the best way of getting from his ward to the nearest Wetherspoons and the Salvation Army Church.

John also complained that the only reason that TfL can claim that the SL3 runs on time is that buses are turned around short of their destinations. As an addict of one of the phone Bus Apps I can confirm that you can watch an SL3 heading your way and it suddenly disappears to be replaced by another in 25 minutes time.

Clutching at straws the Chairman had earlier asked the Southeastern rail man if he could lean on TfL to get the SL3 to stop near their Bexley station but the reply was along the lines that they take no more notice of us than they do of you.

It was both John and Sally Hinkley who raised the issue of CPZs and in particular when are residents going to be told anything. The report to the Cabinet Member which was said to be due last November, then this week is now a vague “some time in the coming weeks”. It was nothing more than a guess but the Highways Manager thought yellow lines etc. might go in during the Summer but there is an awful lot of red tape to be attended to first. There was no news on whether we will get a useless two hour middle of the day restriction or something that might actually deter commuters like 8 till 4.

I had someone actually park on my drive last week. I had wondered why tyre tracks kept appearing on the lawn.

The long rumoured Yarnton Way pedestrian crossing will probably never happen. Thames Water is unlikely to be able to stop water seeping into the site from Southmere Lake. I’m not surprised, I used to watch the water level go up and down in the holes Network Rail dug for Crossrail.

There is some sort of accident analysis going on at various sites. One was the the roundabout outside the old Belvedere Police Station. I also heard it said that North Cray Road is scheduled to begin resurfacing at the end of March, 24th from memory.

I think that is about it for now, the Railway stuff will be a little bit more formal and if the audio recording reveals anything missed here I will tack it on to the end of the the train report.

 

15 January - Normal business may resume soon

Transport
Council meetings resume tonight which should allow for fewer gaps in these pages as BiB will be able to report on Policing, Railways, Roads and TfL from the Transport Users’ Sub-Committee. If it follows the usual pattern and Agenda an ill-prepared police officer will apologise for not having had enough time to fulfill earlier promises and leave us not much wiser than before.

Then the man from Southeastern will rattle through a series of slides like the train enthusiast he obviously is and with any luck we will have a list of achievements during the past quarter and some announcements of what we are going to see quite soon. George Paterson is always the star of the show.

With TfL it is 50:50 on whether they will put in an appearance and if they do whether the year old cyber-attack is still depriving them of vital statistics. No doubt we will hear how Sadiq Khan’s Off-peak Friday Fare stunt was a failure and how imposing tolls on Blackwall Tunnel is really really popular and will not invoke the law of unintended consequences.

Then we will get the update from Bexley on how many unwanted EV chargers have been dumped into inconvenient places and where to see the biggest and best potholes. I will ask the Cabinet Member if he still expects to get the CPZ recommendations before the end of November. Sorry, some time this week.

Email
Someone asked if he could email me which led me to a BiB Menu error. Because the Mayor of London kept spamming me with unwanted propaganda I experimented by changing BiB’s email address and taking if off the site. It didn’t work. SadIQ carried on spamming on the new address - a determined sod! So I restored the email page. Unfortunately I forgot to put it back on the Contact Menu so no one could find it. Should be OK now.

@tony
Has not given up on pursuing his argument that Bexley Council should ticket vehicles parked on private land but I feel their compromise is about right. Generally they don’t issue PCNs but might at the discretion of the CEO. In @tony’s case there is no photograph of the alleged obstruction so leaving private land parking to the discretion of the CEO who decided to ignore it is not easily challenged.

From the look of the site (see photo) I would guess he may have been unduly generous but I am not going to argue with him as I wasn’t there.

@tony’s latest letter from Bexley Council does however include a couple of interesting paragraphs.

These were not consecutive paragraphs.

In the first paragraph the Deputy Director of Neighbourhoods admits that PCNs should not be issued for trivial matters which may well be of use to anyone asked to pay £65 for a wheel partially on the boundary line of a Yellow Money Box junction. However he does admit that parking on private land is not always a penalty free activity.

@tony should never have assumed that a Deputy Director will ever concede that his CEO might have made a mistake, After all, his colleague Kevin Taylor would not concede that his employee Kelly Wilkinson had broken the law by blocking the highway even when the photographic evidence and three witnesses said she had.

With such brazen effrontery being in every Bexley Deputy Director’s armoury what hope is there of beating one who has a reasonable defence?

 

12 January - The End

Councillor Craske’s pet project, the Sidcup Cinema on the site of the old Blockbuster video rental store, is said to be in financial trouble and has already closed its Catford screens.

Bexley Council has confirmed that the cinema company is likely to be liquidated.

I only went there once and wasn’t especially impressed, but that’s just me as a very occasional cinema projectionist sixty years ago who is critical of modern presentations; not the technology, but the lack of pride in doing the job.

Councillor Craske was Cabinet Member for Leisure when the cinema plan was first projected. Press Release. (PDF)

News from London Centric.

 

11 January - From wokery to wankery

Do you know who Thomas Turrell is? Probably not, but you should. He followed James “Your Blog is Well Out Of Order” Cleverly and Bridge Blocker Bacon (See image republished on 5th January) as our GLA representative. (Bexley and Bromley.)

Cleverly is best forgotten but Gareth Bacon did a sometimes brilliant job of holding Sadiq Khan to account. More than that really, he several times exposed Khan as the incompetent lying city wrecker that he is.

I don’t know a great deal about Thomas Turrell but he is fairly active on X and probably deserves more than his 1,885 followers. Earlier this week he caught my eye with a comment about the GLA’s Environment Committee excluding Bromley Council from a discussion on the health of London’s rivers many of which flow through Bexley on their way to the Thames.

Through @tonyofsidcup who can never leave any stone unturned I have learned what was behind Thomas’s comment.

Invitations to attend the Committee are the prerogative of the Chair and Thomas suggested having someone from Bromley there as a guest. He not unreasonably thought that river management would benefit from an Outer London input and Bromley is well placed to balance budget and river health. With several small rivers passing through the borough it has acquired considerable expertise in that area.

The Chairman of the Environment Committee, Green Party GLA Member Zack Polanski pictured above, rejected Thomas’s suggestion, not because he considered the Bromley representative not to have the requisite knowledge but because he was the wrong sex.

“We are looking to get a balanced panel especially in terms of Gender. Lewisham has a female Councillor who is willing to be on the panel” and went on to emphasise that Bromley’s man would result in a gender imbalance on his panel.

Stuff the expertise, having a woman on the panel is the best way to preserve river health!

The current crop of Labour politicians is widely considered to be absolutely nuts but the Greens have always been like it.

Polanski is Deputy Leader of the Greens nationally and was arrested in 2019 while protesting on behalf of Extinction Rebellion. He said at the time “I’d absolutely be willing to go through it again repeatedly.”

 

10 January - Where are we now?

It’s another quiet time for Bexley Council news as the poor dears are still on their Christmas break but there is a meeting next week which I aim to attend.

While occasionally pondering whether it is worth continuing with Bonkers I am encouraged somewhat by there being four occasions recently when BiB has published things before any other local news outlet. There was @tony’s Court victory in the vexatious FOI business, Councillor Smith’s belated - not his fault - Motion on ULEZ, the mysterious business of Methuen Road which acquired double yellow lines against the wishes of the residents - while similar and busier roads don’t have them - and finally the imminent refurbishment of train carriages announced here almost two months before anywhere else. In the case of Methuen Road, the press even stole my photographs of the protest, not that I care but maybe Bonkers has its occasional uses after all.

This is perhaps the time to answer a few questions directed at me in recent weeks. An easy one; “how old are you?” Answer, old enough to have survived a V1 flying bomb at the beginning of 1944.

Did I pay the £4,800 demanded under threat of Court action by the Reform UK candidate for ruining her election chances? I had said that voters who wanted to know more about her should search Bexley Council’s website to get an idea of what her former Councillor colleagues thought of her. Maybe I should have been less obtuse and say what she had done.

Instead I sent six pages of polite eff-off to her solicitor. It was six pages of stuff which no one would want to be aired in Court and referred to a two hour audio recording which has never gone public in any way. It is of her former business partners discussing in some detail her modus operandi. Almost six months later all is quiet.

What is happening to the CPZ Consultation the result of which was promised in an email dated 21st October to be available during November? Did I report that? Possibly not but there was a similar reference here on 13th November when it was said that recommendations would be available before the end of November. The very latest information is that it may be available next week.

My guess is that the Lesnes Abbey area voted in favour of a CPZ and Belvedere and West Heath did not and if the Council honours those wishes areas further away from Abbey Wood station will likely suffer from bad parking even more than they do now. An interesting dilemma for the Cabinet Member.

And finally, “what happened to the Social Worker scandal alluded to last week?” Ah that. It looks to be absolutely horrendous behaviour by Bexley Social Services. The young man who says he was abandoned in a foreign country aged only eleven and with no one to care for him sent me 23 emails and a few legal documents none of which told the complete story and I spent a lot of time trying to assemble it into a cohesive whole.

It was a complicated story and I asked for approval to publish and a check for accuracy. There has been no reply and whilst the legal documents indicate that something awful may have happened it is equally possible that ‘recollections may vary’. For the time being at least Bexley Council Social Services are off the hook.

 

8 January - The pavement parking lottery

@tonyofsidcup argued with Bexley Council that they should enforce parking restrictions on private land if it is to all intents and purposes part of the public highway. The law is on @tony’s side; Councils can issue a PCN to motorbikes leaning against shop windows if they choose to. Bexley does not and you may consider that to be the easy way to avoid conflict and keep most people happy: except of course partially sighted persons who might come a nasty cropper.

@tony doesn’t do things by halves, he asked every London Council what they do about obstructions of the highway where it is technically private land.

Bexley’s stance proved to be fairly typical and followed by Barnet, Camden, Croydon, Enfield, Hammersmith, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Merton, Newham, Sutton, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth and Westminster.

The ignoramuses at Brent, Haringey and Tower Hamlets all say the law forbids it.

At the other extreme Southwark quoted the precedent in law which @tony discovered and applies it as required while Hillingdon excelled by attaching a copy of @tony’s law. Top marks to both.

Barking and Richmond generally do not enforce on private land but accepts that there can be exceptions while Ealing, Greenwich, Hackney, Harrow and Havering are also well aware of the provisions of the law and take advantage of it if the private land looks like it is part of the highway.

Bromley, Hounslow and Kingston were not very sure; probably not bright enough to read the question properly.

Kensington & Chelsea point blank refused to answer the question arguing it is publicly available information.

All these different interpretations of the law make off road parking a bit of a lottery. Best not to do it.

 

6 January - Where the bins are

“and the new litter bins which have been placed apparently randomly around the borough.” (Yesterday’s blog.)

Not quite random according to @tonyofsidcup who has sent me an address list for the new bins. (Excel Spreadsheet. Check your Downloads folder.)

Presumably they are the consequence of Labour’s Motion on litter just over a year ago.

The Council’ְs criteria were…

• Public transport nodes (e.g. bus stops and railway stations)
• Neighbourhood shops
• Outside schools
• In Council car parks
• Near park entrances
• Outside entertainment venues (e.g. cinemas and theatres)

Seems fair enough to me but why @tony had to make two FOI requests to get the information remains a mystery. Why did he want to know anyway? Because his location suggestion (Knoll Road) was rejected.

Note: Reports of new bins not on the list have been received.

 

5 January - It’s not all bad

I have no idea what the Conservative politicians do in the North of the borough, not even up the hill from me where there are a few in office (West Heath ward) but in Sidcup and Bexley they maintain quite a high profile. I am inclined to think the relatively youthful energy of Cameron, Kurtis and Louie has something to do with it.

Only a couple of months ago they were banging on about slowing the SL3 Express bus by diverting it into Bexley Village as a permanent measure instead of just occasionally when traffic congestion elsewhere makes it a sensible option. Running non-stop from Bexleyheath to Sidcup allows five different routes that I have noted and stopping in Bexley Village would put paid to that flexibility.

With the Labour Government presenting them with an open goal Bexley Conservatives have issued another Newsletter which may be seen here.

They are boasting about the big reduction in missed bins since Councillor Diment relieved Councillor Craske of his responsibilities and the new litter bins which have been placed apparently randomly around the borough.

The Tories have learned that campaigning for Bexley to remain a quiet backwater as they did a dozen and more years ago was financial madness for which Council Taxpayers are literally paying the price. Bexley is the highest taxing Conservative borough in London

Back then it was all about cancelling the Thames bridge (against the wishes of residents expressed in the TfL Consultation) and doing nothing to encourage Crossrail into the borough. Who can forget the front cover of the Bexley Magazine featuring Leader O’Neill selfishly campaigning to keep traffic away from her Brampton ward? The Liz line may not have reached Abbey Wood had it not been for the pressure put on a Labour Government by a Labour MP.

Having realised that campaigning against transport links is not a sensible policy the Conservatives are now trying to make up for lost time by campaigning for a DLR extension to Abbey Wood and maybe even Belvedere and a Liz line extension to Ebbsfleet. In the medium term that is a lost cause but they were successful with their campaign for the SL3 to run on from Bexleyheath to Thamesmead. Which idiot thought a simple duplication of the 269 was good enough? Oh, that was the be(k)nighted Khan wasn’t it.

ULEZ (which is mentioned in the Newsletter) was not favoured in Bexley because it achieves nothing other than more taxation and it may be the case that Bexley is the most driver friendly borough in London. A low bar undoubtedly but despite its inability to design roundabouts properly (Wickham Lane, Ruxley and Albion Road all rebuilt to solve self-inflicted problems) and pedestrian crossings in silly places (Gravel Hill in particular) and its vindictive delight in using over-sized yellow boxes for no reason other than to raise revenue, it does compare well with much of London.

There are no enforced bus lanes and except where Khan is in charge, no 20 m.p.h. limits on main roads. Not too many speed cameras either. The Conservatives’ efforts to keep Labour out of Bexley should be applauded. Can we have a Newsletter for Belvedere please?

 

4 January - The Depraved and the Disappeared

In 2014 and 2015 the number of reports of Bexley Council taking children from their parents in what appeared to be dubious circumstances was reaching epidemic proportions. I surmised that ‘kidnapping’ was a reaction to Bexley Council’s failure to save Rhys Lawrie but the common factor of Social Workers allegedly lying to Family Courts was impossible to ignore. I thought it might be a good idea to bring the parents together so that they could compare notes and maybe work collectively against Bexley Council.

I can tell you from personal experience, hand on heart, that in the community of people who have had experience of social workers - myself included - it is a frighteningly common experience to find social workers lying outright without shame. And on two separate occasions I have been surprised to see that judges turn a blind eye if they are presented with such evidence! I’m sure they scratch each other’s backs.

The meeting plan fell apart to some extent because several parents had fled from Bexley Council’s clutches and were now living too far away to come to Thamesmead and the meeting was not reported here because with the necessary suppression of names and case details it would not have made much of a story.

Ten years later I can only remember that one parent was a lovely lady who kept a spotless home which I visited several times who had been briefly partnered by a man who lived on a gipsy camp in Sidcup and he had abused her terribly. Her son was taken from her and Bexley Council’s justification for the kidnap was in part that his mother was too good to be true and her house cleanliness was a sign of obsessive behaviour. Another parent was a local political party activist who had stood to be a Councillor. His name appears more than once on the election leaflets page.

A Bexley Councillor attended the meeting, about which I recall almost nothing. All I had done was bring everyone together.

Similar complaints of child abduction continue to come in occasionally and there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it. A Court is usually involved and Bexley Council is absolutely shameless and not a little vindictive so it is doubtful that publicity can ever improve matters. The latest such report is a little different; it is more reminiscent of something that came my way in 2013.

A correspondent wrote about his experience in a Sidcup Care Home the important bit of which is reproduced below…

The next few years are a bit of a muddle, I just remember we always seemed to be moving around and there were lots of uncles involved. We used to have to sit with mum and recite the address of where we were living in case we got lost. I remember Redhill, Kingston, Richmond, Leatherhead, Surbiton; we never seemed to be anywhere long. The upshot of it is that Shaz and I ended up in a foster home and then Hoblands, a children’s home in Sidcup.
The man who ran the home lived there with his family, his little boy (who we weren’t allowed to talk to) had a huge shiny blue pedal car that was kept in the area below the main staircase. It wasn’t in a cupboard or anything, just sitting there being all shiny and new and pedally. I SO wanted to have a go. I was only four or five I guess.
At night Shaz and I were split up and I hated it because that was when one of the staff used to go round deciding which boy he was going to have that night. We used to hear him walking up the corridor and pretend to be asleep hoping he was going to go straight past us to another room or better still, just go back downstairs on his own. His name was Stan, we used to call him Stan the Man. I was reading the BBC news website about 15 years ago and saw that Stan the Man had been arrested for child sexual abuse going back years so that turned out OK for him didn’t it? Hopefully he had his bollocks ripped off when he was inside.
Mum eventually came to get us and we got out of Hoblands and went to live in Orchard Villas in Foots Cray, Kent.

Google revealed in 2021 that Stan the Man (Stanley Sinkins) was jailed for 12 months in 1995 for his activities “in Kent”. That information seems to have disappeared from Google and The National Archives sealed the Court papers for 50 years. Rechecking today found that the page that confirmed it has gone too. Who might have arranged all that? Surely Bexley Council’s influence does not extend that far.

Upon release Sinkins moved to Cornwall where residents living in the same road as him (along with a number of his pervert friends according to those residents) asked the police for protection for their children but It was refused on the grounds that they must “uphold the rights’ of paedophiles who had served their time.

The Cornish residents were right to be worried about Sinkins, in 2001 he was jailed for ten years for more sex offences including “buggering a seven year old boy”. The vicar at Sinkin’s church is reported to have said “there had been cases where such allegations had been fabricated or guilty pleas had been entered under duress, and he would be contacting a Liverpool group concerned about false accusations made against carers”. A second conviction and a vicar sought to find excuses! Sinkins was 65 years old when he was jailed for the second time.

And now there is similar allegation from a young man. Detained by teachers at the end of the school day and frog marched to a black car and flown to be abandoned overseas. “Kidnapped” by Bexley Council is his description.

Now an adult and doing reasonably well for himself he wants to tell his story. Today’s news (Pakistani rape gangs) demonstrates that no perversion is beyond belief and I await with some trepidation of what more might be revealed to me.

There is a 14 minute video about how Bexley Council Social Services ‘kidnaps’ children linked from a blog posted on New Year's Eve 2015. Ironically this case did have its roots in false allegations made by children. Well worth a listen. The Social Worker is alleged to have justified the kidnap because “she hates Christian parents”.

Note: To be fair to the Cornish vicar, my journalist daughter told me that one of her investigations led her to youngsters who the police had persuaded to tell false stories because they would help to ensure a conviction and be due significant monetary compensation.

 

3 January (Part 2) - Six months and nothing!

It is only the second working day of the New Year but the Liz line commuters are at it again. I didn’t look outside until 09:40 and assumed someone was dropping something off to a neighbour but after 20 minutes I sent a photo to Bexley Council who turned up not many minutes later. (Photo 2)

M4 MSU was entirely blocking the driveway to six of my neighbours’ parking spaces and every part of the vehicle was in front of their dropped kerb.

Unusually I was not blocked in myself and was able to let a returning neighbour park on my drive (Photo 3) so that he didn’t get a ticket too.

It is almost exactly six months since Bexley Council consulted locally on a Controlled Parking Zone and I am pretty sure that residents voted heavily in favour. However the Council has done nothing obvious apart from insisting that it was not a Consultation but only an informal survey. An informal survey plastered with the word Consultation and sent out by Royal Mail.

At the November Transport Sub-Committee meeting the Cabinet Member said he had asked for all the information to be with him by the end of that month. In an email dated 21st October I was told that residents would get an update on the situation in November. Needless to say, none of us have. Meanwhile there is inconvenience to residents almost daily.

 

3 January (Part 1) - Pedestrian progress

Three on the trot may risk turning BiB into the @tonyofsidcup show but there is nothing more from him on the horizon. (†) Today he is back on his pedestrian crossing hobbyhorse. The road judged by Bexley Council to be most in need of a pedestrian crossing was Yarnton Way in Thamesmead but the Highways Manager provided a not unreasonable explanation of it being overlooked in favour of sites further to the South.

The Hurst Road crossing is up and running and Bexley Council is now consulting on one for Slade Green. @tony has never been there but it hasn’t stopped him from asking Vinney Rey to send him the plans. (See below.)

Vinney kindly sent a PDF and the following comment…

The scheme proposes to introduce a zebra crossing sited at Slade Green Road close to the junction with Chrome Road. The crossing would help school children of St Paul’s Primary and Haberdashers Slade Green Primary, as well as other pedestrians, cross Slade Green Road safely. The scheme involves:

• The introduction of a new zebra crossing on the existing raised table at the location.
• High friction surfacing to be laid on each approach to the crossing.
• Tactile paving surfacing for the benefit of visually impaired pedestrians.
• The introduction of no stopping (zig-zag) road markings associated with a zebra crossing arrangement.
• Adjustments to the existing ‘School Keep Clear’ markings and waiting restrictions at the location to suit the new road layout.

@tony is arguing that the crossing is not ideally placed. Too far from the bus stop. At the risk of rousing @tony’s ire I will turn his illegal parking story on its head. (He criticised Bexley Council for not looking at a problem.)

Vinney will have been to Slade Green Road and @tony admits to not being familiar with it.

More usefully, @tony’s questioning has uncovered two children who were recently injured at the forgotten Yarnton Way site.

† Whoops! Another arrived while finishing off the foregoing.

I found myself being intrigued by the fact that the Slade Green Road plans were produced by a company called Watermans. The same company that produced the water quality report which backed Bexley Council’s decision to close the Belvedere Splash Park. It was widely discredited at the time and the suggestion was that the final version was not impartial because it was modified by Bexley Council to suit their agenda. The original did not include the word Cryptosporidium. The Council’s was littered with it every few paragraphs.

Have we really got no one left in Bexley Council capable of knocking up a little engineering diagram?

 

2 January - The Commies are optimistic for the longer term

When the end of year blog linked to my list of wrong-headed, stupid or malicious decisions of the worst Government of my lifetime I half expected some kick back from demented Socialists and it only took an hour for the first of them to arrive.

@tonyofsidcup said I was “too harsh on Labour”. How could a list of actions collected only from Main Stream Newspaper headlines be too harsh? They were facts presented in abbreviated form; maybe in an unsympathetic manner but facts neverthless. Nothing came from X gossip or anything of that kind. Everything has been in the Telegraph, Times Guardian or Mail.

I told @tony that a defence of Starmer and Co might be interesting. Were former Bexley Councillors Daniel Francis and Oppong-Asare right to risk condemning old people to death? Would a man brought up in a Communist State be able to provide a rational explanation?

I am going to reproduce his reply in full, maybe with a few footnotes.

Oh, what is this doom-and-gloom talk, Mr K? Let the man pronounced by Bexley Labour to “be perceived as against us” lift your spirits and appreciation of our new government.
One thing to cheer is being retired when a recession is about to hit. As much as Daniel Francis MP, for example, may “sell” Labour’s first budget, this is a budget that raises taxes and reduces spending, and the economic impact of this combination is quite clear: some of the retail workers Daniel is taking selfies with will soon be out of a job.
Welcome to Labour’s Austerity, the payback for Tory sins! As a contractor, with private-school bills to boot, I look to 2025 with unease. Do I wish Tories stayed in power? Absolutely not! Memories of Tory incompetence and corruption are just too fresh, and evidence of the country’s decline under Tory governments - after a good run under Blair and Brown - is impossible to ignore, with A&E horror stories off Twitter only the latest.
How many people would like to swap Starmer for the hapless Rishi - never mind his peculiar replacement – and go back to the time when every week brought a new government scandal? Not me.
Thankfully, the question is theoretical: Starmer has enough time to ride out the economic cycle and come to the next General Election in a good shape. Back in the 1990s, Belarusian then-fresh-faced President Lukashenka famously reassured voters about his economic-reform plans by saying “You will live poorly, but not for long”. At the time, this was taken as a promise of a miserable and short life – delivered 100% - but with Starmer and Labour, I insist on the positive interpretation.

It is a relief to see that @tony makes no attempt to undermine my doom list. The Conservatives nationally were absolutely hopeless. Definitely incompetent and probably corrupt. You never read a good word about Rishi Sunak here and for the first time in my life I did not vote Conservative six months ago. However unlike @tony; if there was a choice of only Rishi or Two Tier I would vote for the one who did not grow up a Trotskyite who hates the UK.

Obviously I would prefer a wider choice but even if there is a better one within Conservative ranks the party is finished unless it can expel all its wets. And it won’t.

@tony’s “good run under Blair and Brown” ended in a financial crash and a note which said “There is no money”.

Starmer will never recover from his present position, nor should he. He is unpopular now and that will continue. Have you seen the tax rises planned for April? In approximate terms Vehicle Excise Duty is due to near double and in some cases go from nothing to almost £200 a year.

With the history of five Labour Prime Ministers and even more Labour Governments behind me I can confidently forecast that Labour will fail spectacularly and sanity will return to Bexleyheath and Crayford. No one likes a Granny killer. Not even @tony.

 

1 January - Absent for ten years but still lurking

I might have guessed that @tonyofsidcup would feature in the first post of the year just as he did last year but I was unprepared for seeing him resurrecting the name Greg Tippett.

That name appeared on Bonkers 27 times between May 2011 (unlicensed CCTV cars) and July 2015 (Bailiff malpractice) and none of them complimentary (illegally setting the police on a resident). I thought he had disappeared along with the senior management team that wrecked Bexley Council’s reputation all those years ago. But no!

@tony twice reported a motorcycle leaning against a shop front on Market Parade, Sidcup last October and was ignored by Bexley Council. Not a wise move when @tony is involved. The inaction provoked yet another Freedom of Information request.

A response came from Mr. Tippett who maintained that Market Parade is not part of the Public Highway which he backed up by saying the demarcation line was clearly indicated by differing footpath surfaces. (See Photo). He went on to acknowledge (†) that PCNs can be issued to vehicles on private land but considered this particular motorcycle was not a danger to the public despite it being an obvious trip hazard and did not obstruct any access to premises which if such criteria were essential for a successful prosecution would invalidate many if not most parking offences.

Without a photograph the CEO’s judgment is difficult to contest.

@tony argument is that unlike Mr. Tippett he had seen the site and passage was obstructed. To back his case he submitted the legal judgment made against a Mr. Robert White who leaned his motorcycle against a wall in Brewer Street, Westminster. He thought he was safe parking beyond the demarcation line (pavement lights) between public and private property.

Whilst the Judge accepted that the bike was parked on private land, he said that various precedents had defined a highway as…

“a route which all persons rich or poor can use to pass and repass along as often and whenever they wish without let or hindrance and without charge. Brewer Street is a busy thoroughfare in the heart of the West End and it seems to me obvious that generally speaking it is a highway within this definition.
The point is whether the highway extends right up to adjoining buildings and I am assisted by the views in a number of similar cases which I regard as highly persuasive and take the view that the extent of the highway is indeed indicated by its natural boundary, namely the building line.
I share the broad view that where there are no physical barriers and the public has been apparently free to walk over the whole width of the street for many years, such evidence suggests it is part of the highway. I too find that it is.”

Mr. White lost his case against the penalty issued by Westminster Council. How will Mr. Tippett respond to yet another complaint? @tony will no doubt let us know. So far he is asking only for an apology for Bexley Council’s alleged ignorance of established case law; but are they?

If Bexley Council adopted Westminster’s policy in Abbey Wood I can think of several traders who would be very upset about it. If Mr. Tippett has any sense he should perhaps more clearly acknowledge that @tony has the law on his side but Bexley Council as a matter of policy has decided not to pursue parking offences on private property except in exceptional cases.

Maybe he should also modify the blanket ‘ban’ on reporting private property parking displayed on his website. It is not “unable”, it is a conscious decision just like their decision not to enforce the 50 centimetres from the kerb rule.

Note: This blog was extensively edited on 4th January because the original analysis of the Council’s response missed the vital item marked with a † above.