Great headline in the Guardian today, 30/4/14! “Labour vows to rub out Gove era in education”.
That gave me an unexpectedly great start to the day and what is more the analysis is spot on, with David Blunkett accusing Gove of creating an unmanageable “Kafkaesque” education system. Tristram Hunt goes on to say that atomised schools (by which he means Free Schools, academies, maintained schools) leave a landscape of incoherence, confusion and lack of accountability. Good stuff.
Until, unfortunately, we get to the bit about Labour’s alternative; its recipe for success – independent directors appointed by local authorities on a fixed-term five-year contract from a short-list approved by the education department, by which is obviously meant the Whitehall Education Department and not the local authorities’.
So where is Labour’s case for coherence and clarity and most particularly transparent accountability when we consider local government – gone, caput, nowhere?
A few years ago, it was possible to think that the Labour Party had a coherent strategy towards local government, its powers and its democratic legitimacy. The move in London to make Metropolitan Police Divisions co-terminous with the London Boroughs and then to do likewise with the Health Authority areas opened the opportunity for locally elected councillors, and hence the local electorate, to have more of a say in running these very important civic services.
Combined with the extant structure of local government, it made it possible to think of a local accountable unit with sufficient power and influence to encourage democratic participation in civic governance. OH, how we need to re-vivify local democracy and here was the possibility to do just that.
Of course in this highly centralised state called the UK, there was still a long, long way to go. No true, accountable local authority could flourish without some kind of independence from, or at least accommodation with, the financial control of Whitehall. Unfortunately it always suits the party in power to maintain that control, regardless of the honeyed words about localism – always a tempting illusion under governments of any persuasion – at least until now.
But there were signs that local democracy might be gaining traction – until the take-over of policy-making by instant populists. Tony Blair introduced the Mayoral system and pin-up politics first to London, and then to the rest of the country; and at a lower level David Cameron introduced his elected Police Commissioners. By any stretch of the imagination these reforms added to the atomisation of local authority services, confusion and lack of accountability. They were stimulated by an immediate appeal to the electorate at the price of any coherent view about local as opposed to national democracy.
It will be argued that Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have made some sense out of London’s complex transport systems, but that was largely thanks to the coherent consolidation of power and responsibility across a massive urban area.
They will be better remembered for destroying any coherence, clarity or accountability across London’s planning system. Only this week London’s emerging skyline has been said by GLA planning Director, Colin Wilson, to be “very carefully planned. But we prefer to use a flexible framework” leaving us with what others have called an indiscriminate scattering of tall buildings across London.
The new skyline is far from universally popular, will undoubtedly change the look and feel of the city, will be irreversible, will make millions for some developers and will do almost nothing for London’s housing crisis, and it will be incoherent. As for whose responsibility it will have been – you’d need a degree in British local government practise to be able to answer that one.
The major problem is, of course, that people once trusted our local government service as dated but essentially competent and honest – indeed almost the envy of the western world – Westminster politicians now distrust it and abuse it. My suspicion is that Ed Milliband’s major task in domestic politics has to be to build a sensible local government structure into which directors of school standards and police Inspectors can be built. Such a structure would demand, and get, a genuine local political legitimacy. It would also encourage civically minded citizens to stand for local office.
Most important, it would increase election turn-out. The electorate are not stupid. They don’t vote much in local elections and why should they when local authorities are powerless and more and more an arm of national government. Let’s have a return to local government.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere April Newsletter (# 59)
March highlights
1. Of course it was not until March that the formal Council Tax decision was taken, that is agreed by full Council. But it was a formality and everyone knew what the result would be – a frozen Council Tax. That was pretty much what March was like – a slow wind down in the build up to the Council Election on May 22nd. Indeed the Council has what is known as a purdah when virtually no “political” business takes place until after the election – except of course the Planning Applications Committee, which like “Ole Man River just keeps rolling along”.
2. There wasn’t much on at the Planning Applications Committee either, except for 69-71 Falcon Road. This Halal restaurant is clearly very popular with its customers but is not as popular with its neighbours, who complain about the timing (and therefore noise) of its operations and its waste clearance record. Some of the neighbours are angry about the Committee giving the restaurant permission but the Council was in a bit of a jam. The application included improved waste procedures and a better smell extraction duct. The Committee could hardly refuse improved storage and effective extraction units when they were the main causes of previous complaints.
The Committee insisted, for what it was worth, and I know some neighbours do not think it worth much, that the restaurant will be closely watched by planning inspectors.
3. The other day, walking along Falcon Road, I looked,
truly looked rather than just glanced, at the entrance to the Falcon Road Estate. The one right down by the railway bridge, next to the bus stop and opposite the bus garage entrance. Here is a picture of it. I think it’s truly spectacular and a mark of what residents can do given the right kind of project. Have a really close look next time you pass by and feel inspired to do the same to your garden, or estate.
4. A number of constituents have asked me about the piece I wrote on the Bike docking stations and whether I could provide an update – well, I can. The Town Hall provides them to me, if I ask, on a monthly basis and I now have both January’s and February’s figures and can draw a few comparisons and conclusions. January is, of course, 6% longer than February and this year they were both about as wet and cold (or not so cold) as each other and so they are quite good comparators. Overall, the February usage of the bikes at 22,979 was 7% higher than January’s. The range of usage is quite large with over 1,000 usages at Falcon Road, Albert Bridge Road and Queen’s Circus and less than 100 usages in Stewart’s Road (Nine Elms) and Manfred Road, Putney. Although these figures appear quite high to me when you divide them by the numbers of days in the month, then one can wonder at the cost of this scheme.
So for example the usage at Manfred Road is just over 3 a day, which given the cost of the installation means it will be years before there is any real pay-back. We know that the docking installation costs were over £2 million. We also know that Barclay’s Bank has NOT sponsored the scheme to anywhere near the extent that Mayor Johnson (I’m not calling him B…s!) hoped. And we also know that TfL is being very secretive about the running costs. But the truth will out over time and although, I think the bikes are a great idea, I do suspect that TfL has gone over the top a bit on implementation.
As far as Latchmere is concerned, I think it is fairly obvious with a total usage of 759 in February that the Grant Road triple station is far too large for the demand. The contentious station in Fawcett Close with 206 had a large 57% increase in usage over January figures; the equally contentious station in Usk Road had a 52% increase from 162 to 246. Will demand continue to rise or will familiarity breed contempt? Interestingly, with the exception of Falcon Road, the really large usages are very near to Battersea Park. Is this because people want to “give it a go” with a ride round the park or does it demonstrate a substantial commute to Chelsea?
5. From my canvassing for the Council Election, it is clear that the regeneration of the Winstanley and York Road estates is causing considerable concern, not to say distress. One lady, living on her own, told me that she had moved in when the flat was new, in 1956 I think she said. She hated the idea that her flat might be demolished. As far as she was concerned it was her home and she loves it; it was where she had brought up her family and lived with her husband. Now her husband is dead and the kids have fled the coop but this was and is her life and the Council wants to demolish it. It is pretty important that we, the Council, get this one right.
The general strategy has been agreed by the Council, and the Housing Department staff are now on the estates consulting about it. And it is quite right that they should be advising and consulting with residents about the Council’s intention to demolish some of the York Road Estate and replace it with new build. But what I would like to make clear is that NO final decision has been taken yet on any single issue, and indeed there are powerful arguments against some of the suggestions. So if residents want to fight and campaign against the Council’s plans, they should not give up but they should make their voices heard loud and clear.
It is strange that, given the general distrust of the word of anyone in “authority”, that when it comes to one relatively junior officer saying that the Council has a plan to demolish this block, that comment is taken as a definite fact. Let me repeat, it is a plan and plans change as circumstances change, as opposition or support strengthens and weakens and as opinion is clarified. Some or even most of the Council’s plan will happen but I could almost guarantee that it will not happen exactly as is planned. If you can get all your neighbours to oppose one element of the plan then you will probably win the argument. If you can’t get anywhere near 50% to agree with you, then you won’t win and you won’t deserve to win.
6. Last month I wrote about the worrying report from
London Sustainability Exchange (LSx) about air pollution in Battersea at levels 5 and 6 times higher than European Union targets. I said that the worst pollution of all is under the Falcon Road railway bridge. Well following publication of this report the Battersea Society organised a morning of action on the 28th March. Some of us were sent off to interview shop workers to see if they were concerned and others looked for lichens and other plant-life that flourished in clean and/or dirty air.
Others of us attached measuring devices to various road sings so that we can measure levels of air pollution more accurately. Here I am fixing one of LSx’s measuring devices to the bus-stop just by the railway bridge – Yes they do have permission to fix measuring devices to bus-stops. As I said in March, I will be using this research to press for early improvements to the environment under the Bridge!
My Programme for April
1. Of course there is, as ever, the Planning Applications Committee on the 14th. However, for me and my colleagues there will simply be more and more election campaigning. So give us a wave if you see us about – it’s just part of the process! Oh, and as you swear and curse at having your TV viewing disturbed and exclaim that we are all the same, oh and in it only for the money, just give a thought. Would you rather live in a country where the only way to change a government was by war or revolution.
Did you know about Christ Church, Battersea?
Last month I wrote of the modest, modern church in 
Christ Church Gardens. I also wrote that its very different Victorian predecessor, consecrated on 27 July 1849, was full of all the confidence I associate with Victorian times. I also said that there is a rather splendid photograph of it in a Wandsworth Town Hall Committee Room. Well, here it is!
Well, the church certainly is very different from its current namesake but the picture certainly isn’t as I then said from the 1930s. A quick glance demonstrates that it is earlier than that. Does anyone know, or can anyone work out just when this might have been taken and let me know. I have my own idea, which I will share with you next month. Oh, and can you suggest who the photographer might have been? I have an idea about that too!
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere January Newsletter (# 56)
December and 2013 highlights
1. There really wasn’t much to say about December except that I went to the Xmas socials/parties/fairs of the Falcon Road and Kambala residents, the Big Local organisation, Battersea Arts Centre and of constituents Vicky and Jacob – thanks to all. There was also nothing of any great interest at the December Planning Applications Committee, and so with nothing much to say about December I thought I’d pull out my highlights of 2013 as recorded in the newsletters. And here they are.
2. No. 1 for me has to be the trip that we three Latchmere councillors, Wendy Speck, Simon Hogg and myself, made to Palestine in February. This, of course, had nothing to do with Latchmere, Battersea or Wandsworth (!) but your three Labour councillors went on this fact-finding trip, purely for interest – and it was certainly packed with interest. Here is a picture of the three of us with a banner given to us by the Mayor of Hebron. (As I said then, before any cynics out there think otherwise, it was all paid for out of our own pockets and had nothing to do with the Cou
ncil!).
The trip did give me a chance to take my picture of the year, and here it is – a cactus caught by the flash-light in the Judean desert at sunset, high above Bethlehem – and my was it cold.
3. The most significant ward issues of the year were the Council’s decision to spend up to £100 million on the regeneration of Latchmere and Roehampton wards, of which our share could be about £60 million, the development of the Big Local project in the Winstanley Estate area and the Mosque planning application. The regeneration project is at the stage where major decisions are soon to be taken about the extent of demolition and new build and the Big Local is also at a crucial consultation 
stage. I think we will know much more about the regeneration programme later in January. For some of the problems as well as the potential in the regeneration project, see Tony Belton, ‘All Change North of the Junction’, Battersea Matters: Newsletter of the Battersea Society (Winter, 2013), pp. 4-5.
4. In May I was delighted to report that Wendy Speck, Simon Hogg and I were re-selected as Labour’s candidates for the Council elections this coming May 22nd. Two months later my friend and colleague, Will Martindale, was also selected as Labour’s Parliamentary candidate at the General Election in 2015. Here he is pictured after the selection.
5. I was very pleased to take 30 or so local kids to meet the Mayor and to learn something about the Council and its functions. Here they are with the Mayor, and their mentor Victoria Rodney of the Mercy Foundation, on the “marble staircase” in the Town Hall.
6. A sad feature of the year – for me at any rate was the Government’s decision to take Battersea Park School out of the Borough’s control and make it a Harris Academy. As a consequence of this decision I resigned as Vice-Chair of the Governors after more than a dozen years. Rather more important the Head, Gale Keller, also decided to resign as of 31st December.
7. On a very practical level, with considerable support from many of you, I have fought off an idea from Network Rail to close the Grant Road exit from CJ at an earlier time of night; I have got the bus-stop replaced opposite the end of Culvert Road; addressed the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Eid Celebration in York Gardens Library; dealt with pr
obably a couple of hundred cases to do with housing, planning, transport and jobs. I also attended probably about 40 Council and Committee meetings and another 20/30 resident meetings. Wendy Speck and Simon Hogg are equally active in different and complementary ways. Wendy is the Chair of Chesterton Governors and does a tremendous amount in and about the school as well as being a very conscientious councillor. Simon is a policy man and very active in the Committees as well as being very involved in the Winstanley Estate regeneration.
8. And of course my review of 2013 would not be complete without a brief mention of the dreaded streptococcal G poisoning; what a pain, literally, but it is at last showing mild signs of recovery!
9. Finally my Did You Know sections last year were about the Katherine Low Settlement, the Latchmere Estate, Maureen Larkin, Senia Dedic, Darius Knight, Elizabeth Braund, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Tavern, London’s major transport problem 100 years ago – horse manure; Caius House, Caroline Ganley and John Archer.
My Programme for January
1. On the 9th January I had the Borough Residents Forum, which is actually a bit of a misnomer as by residents is meant Council tenants and leaseholders, and in the week beginning 13th January I have the Passenger Transport Liaison Committee, a Winstanley Estate Steering Group and the Met Police’s Special Neighbourhood Team.
2. The Planning Applications Committee this month is on the 20th and that is followed by the Strategic Planning and Transport and Housing Committees on the 22nd and 23rd.
3. There is also an important Big Local consultation meeting on the 25th at the Wilditch Centre.
Did you know the connection between Maysoule Road and the Victoria Embankment Gardens?
You may remember that in my December Newsletter I had a picture of 
Hyacinth Stone of Buxton House at the John Archer plaque unveiling and that I promised that I would tell her about the connection between Buxton House, Maysoule Road, and Victoria Embankment Gardens. Well here it is.
Not long ago I was early for a meeting in Westminster and so I went for a short walk in Victoria Embankment Gardens. When there I had a look at a monument I had seen before but never particularly noted. Here it is with its inscription. Imagine my surprise to discover that it was a monument to one of the early campaigners against the slavery and below is the inscription.
And of course all the blocks in Maysoule Road are named after many of the men responsible for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, as it was then. Buxton House is almost certainly named after T Fowell Buxton, who took over the leadership of the anti-slavery cause in the House of Commons in 1825 after Wilberforce retired. Wilberforce, who of course has another Council block on York Road named after him, had succeeded in getting the slave trade abolished in 1807.
But that was the trade in slaves from Africa to the New World. The abolition of slavery in the 
British Empire had to wait until 1834 and was achieved under Buxton’s leadership. Charles Buxton was his Liberal (i.e. radical, as there was no Labour Party then) MP son, who had the monument built.
The monument is in easy view for any passenger on the 87 bus into Westminster, on the right immediately after Lambeth Bridge. And you will note the names include Clarkson, after whom another block in Maysoule Road is named.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere November Newsletter (# 54)
October highlights
1. First of all a big thank you to all those who sent me good wishes for a speedy recovery from streptococcal G poisoning. I am making reasonable but not exactly speedy progress as some of you will have seen as I struggle around, but now on one and not two crutches!
2. Second an even bigger thank you to all those who responded about the possible closure of the CJ Grant Road exits at an earlier time than currently. I got 40 responses between when I put the message out at about 11.30 am and 5 pm on Day 1. I immediately sent those responses off to the Town Hall and then onto the railway companies. I have heard nothing since – hopefully we have nipped that one in the bud.
3. The Battersea Park School (BPS) saga rolls on. You may remember that I suggested that the Government was intending to make the school into an Academy sponsored by Harris (the carpet people). Well this month the Governors were invited on a trip to see two Harris academies in Merton. I am afraid that I thought that I could hardly manage to stumble around a couple of schools in one day and so I did not go. But nothing definite has happened since then and indeed the Government has sent a relatively “soft letter” about the school’s reactions to the original Ofsted Report – perhaps the rather good GCSE results announced in August have resulted in a couple of second thoughts.
I would still bet on the Government pressing on with their dogmatic policy of moving BPS out of local democratic control and making it a sponsored academy. But given the pressures on the Government and the very public failures of their policies in a couple of recently well-publicised cases, there is just a little chance that they might back down.
4. The 8th October Planning Applications Committees had a number of interesting applications, most particularly for the Prince’s Head and the one-time Chopper or @Battersea pubs/clubs. Both of these pubs have been the centre of considerable local concern over the years but now it seems as though both are going to be re-developed. There have been a number of applications, which have reached an advanced stage of consideration on both sites but finally applications came to Committee and were approved.
The Prince’s Head application was for 19 flats (16 two-bed and 3 three-bed), of which 5 would be of a shared ownership type, and therefore classified as “affordable”. These would be built above commercial lettings on the ground floor. Given the nature of the Falcon Road shopping frontage I am not absolutely certain that the shopping units will work – for a start most of the shops in Falcon Road are on the opposite side of the road. But I guess it rather depends upon the nature of the shopping. If it is one of those Tesco/Sainsbury locals then I am sure that it will be a success – but we will have to see. I know that for some of the residents almost anything would be a plus when compared with the Prince’s Head at its worst!
The Chopper application was similar but slightly larger with 29 flats being built above commercial properties, including a new pub. 6 of these flats would be of a shared ownership style tenure. Hopefully the pub will replace the rather belligerent character of the old pub with a pleasant recreational but modernised pub. Both applications were accepted.
I thought three other applications were particularly interesting. One was for 157 flats and houses to be built round the old Elliott School site just off Putney Hill. I mention it because I know lots of kids from Battersea went to Elliott. I couldn’t help noticing the outraged protests of Putney residents. The sale of the land and the use for private residential housing was to pay for the Council’s costs in building the new Ark Academy to replace Elliott. The point was that these were luxury housing built to low densities and costing, well we will have to wait and see, but my guess is north of £2 million – and the locals were protesting!
Another application for a 7 storey building, providing 12 flats, on a miniscule site opposite the Battersea Dogs’ Home provided an interesting contrast. Seven storeys squeezed in on the space of a tennis court as opposed to spacious large properties, two contrasting sites, one in Battersea and the other In Putney – I hardly need to say more!
But I was surprised that the one application that was refused was for a large (13 storey) commercial and residential development on the Upper Richmond Road near to East Putney station. Surprised because the Council has appeared to allow applications of almost any scale in “town centre” sites but on this occasion the recommendation was for refusal and refuse it we did. Was it because it was in the Council Leader’s own ward and his own constituents were protesting?
5. On Thursday, 17th October, I managed to drag myself around the Caius House (Caius is a latinised word for keys and is actually pronounced KEYS) development just behind Badric Cour![647293_f644bcdc[1]](https://tonybelton.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/647293_f644bcdc1.jpg)
t. Caius House will mean nothing to many of you because the “old” Caius House youth club was demolished in about 2008. (See below for the history of Caius) The new youth club, and the residential properties above, which are paying for the development, are due to be handed over in spring, 2014. I and several other councillors went round the site and although it is difficult to tell from this photograph it is obvious that we are soon going to have a splendid new club right next to York Gardens, the Kambala and the Winstanley. We were told that it will be the largest youth club in the UK. Let’s hope that it is also the best. The top picture is of the new sports hall at the club and the bottom one is of the old building demolished in 2007/8.
6. The 16th October Council meeting did consider the cuts that the Council is going to make in the housing department (and others). Currently the Housing Department is taking the brunt of the cuts, but we will see many more. It is a little difficult to describe all the arguments for those of you who wonder what Council meetings are like look at this link http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/info/200318/decision_making/1606/council_meetings_online_16_october_2013/4. showing a U-Tube stream of the housing cuts debate. If you don’t want to watch it all – which I could well understand then Cllr Hogg’s speech is 12 minutes into the stream and mine is at 21.20 minutes!
7. On Sunday, 27th October, I attended the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Eid Celebration in York Gardens Library, where I was asked to give a speech on peace!. I am hardly an expert but I did to an audience of about 50 Battersea residents. The Ahmadiyya mosque in Putney is the first in London and was built in 1913 and their Merton mosque is the largest in western Europe. Some of the local organisers live on the Winstanley estate.
8. Finally a grudging congratulations to Jane Ellison, our MP, who has just been made Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Public Health). Despite our pretended enmity across the party divide, Jane and I get on quite well and if this appointment is recognition for her work opposing female genital mutilation then it is well deserved even if I hope she loses the job at the next General Election!
My Programme for November
1. Once the clocks go back we are in to the busiest time for councillors, especially in the winter before the next Council Elections – Yes, they are next May and so the rounds of canvassing and leafleting will be starting up soon. I do hope you accept me knocking on your door with patience and humour!
2. On 7th November I have as ever the Planning Applications Committee. On the 19th I have the Strategic Planning and Transport Committee, followed on the 21st by the Housing Committee.
3. The Borough Residents’ Forum, a committee of Council tenants and leaseholders, meets on 13th and I am the Labour Party’s representative on that.
4. The 15th November marks the 120th anniversary of the opening of what was Battersea Town Hall, now Battersea Arts Centre (BAC). BAC is laying on some kind of an event, which I will be attending. I look forward to seeing what exactly they are going to do – fireworks? A theatrical review? An exhibition? I will report back!
5. For my pains I am also the Treasurer of an organisation called SERA, which is a “green lobby” group with the Labour Party. SERA has its annual general meeting in Manchester on 23rd November and so on that Saturday I will be in Manchester.
Do you know anything about Caius House? I guess not.
Caius House is a charity and youth club which has been serving the community of Batt![collegehistory-loganprint_0[1]](https://tonybelton.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/collegehistory-loganprint_01.jpg)
ersea for over a century.
Gonville and Caius (see picture and pronounced Keys) College, Cambridge, is a 14th century foundation created by Edmund Gonville, a Norfolk cleric, and refounded two centuries later by John Caius, a successful and very wealthy student from the college. In 1887 some undergraduates and fellows from the College rented a house in what was then the very poor London industrial suburb of Battersea. They started a College “settlement” where former undergraduates from the College lived and ran a range of clubs for local residents. Shortly afterwards they started a boys club (and later a girls club) and found that it attracted members from the poorest and least educated young people in the area.
By 2008 the Caius House youth club building (located on Holman Road) had served the local the young people of Battersea well for about a century but was badly in need of renovation; however the layout was thought to be totally unsuitable for a modern youth club. The Trustees decided to sell the plot of land to a developer who would build residential accommodation with space for a modern youth club on the first two floors. After consultation with youth members, the community and the Council, the derelict old building was demolished and the process of re-building a modern state of the art youth club began.
The #Wheatsheaf, Tooting Bec
I cannot reply in 140 characters for Twitter lobbyists but here is the longer version that I sent to email lobbyists campaigning to save the #Wheatsheaf this afternoon.
“Can I make a friendly comment? When sending lobbying letters it is usually better to change the opening sentence from the standard one. Councillors tend not to rate lobbying letters, which have simply been copied, anywhere near as highly as ones that are individually crafted! Plus one of your stereo-typed letters contains a typo, repeated ad nauseam. You were surely contacting me and not “contracting” me – implies that you hadn’t even read the lobbying letter that you are expecting councillors to read – not convincing.
But enough of the pompous lessons in lobbying and down to the meat. If you have read the Council paper 13-733 (and for those who are really keen then see link http://ww3.wandsworth.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s29843/13-733%20THE%20WHEATSHEAF.pdf ), you will see several interesting features. I will particularly pick on two:-
1. There is considerable emphasis on Government policies designed to get the local economy moving and that includes allowing permitted development rights in all kinds of locations (NB I am not agreeing with this so don’t argue please but like it or like it not it is the Government’s position). As it happens both parties in the Council are almost equally opposed to these policies, especially as regards permitted development. The Tory Council is no more keen than the Labour Opposition to have planning controls taken away from us. We have to deal with the consequences of un-neighbourly development far too often to be as cavalier as Government Ministers! BUT to help Tory councillors to stand against their own Government it would be very helpful if one or two of you could come up with a contradictory Government policy, apart from “localism”, which seeks to protect the fabric of the existing townscape – short of listing.
2. Paragraph 31 is the key. Members are “asked whether or not they wish to pursue making any Article 4” etc. That is very unusual. Officers usually come to a conclusion and make a definite recommendation to do or not do something. This means they do not really know and/or they have not yet been given political direction by the Tory majority. (the only equivalents that I can think of are when the Council is operating in a semi-judicial way such as licencing committee and occasionally planning applications, when they legally cannot predict what the members may decide.) That could mean that there is still everything to play for on this matter, which means to say that you have to get at more Tory councillors than just those on the Committee and to whom you have sent this email to. For starters you need to email the Leader rgovindia@, the relevant Cabinet member rking@, and the ward members for Nightingale and Bedford, namely adunn@,ajacob@, ihart@, smcdermott@, and swilkie@wandsworth.gov.uk.
I didn’t notice any comments re the Trafalgar Arms? Not worth making a point?
I will do my best, as I am sure my colleague Peter Carpenter will do, to protect the pub, partly because we both would like to extend the precedent to other places such as the Falcon at Clapham Junction, the Spread Eagle in Wandsworth High Street, etc. Oh, and I know it’s a pain but members really are a little frit of a massed public gallery quietly making their point – a simple placard saying Save the Wheatsheaf will do. Heckling does NOT go down well with members.”
Grangemouth – The Deal
Most news media billed this as a “good day” for Scotland with many commentators criticising Unite and by implication the trade union movement. There is little doubt that Unite’s tactics were flawed and they had not thought of how to re-act to Ineos’s counter-attack or the strength of the employer’s position. Rather reminiscent of the NUM in the 1980’s!
But surely we are blinded by the immediacy of the good news. I suggest that the more significant feature of the deal, in the long-term, was the total and effortless victory of international capitalism over the interests of the workforce. Ineos threatened to transfer production, at the stroke of a pen, to the cheapest source of supply, interestingly the USA because of the cost of energy and nothing to do with wage costs.
Add to that the “unaccountable” nature of management decisions made by multi-national billionaires and surely we are faced with a sea change in the centuries old battle between capital and labour. This plays out on an international stage but also at a very local level as we can see from this week’s other headline claiming that Council Compulsory Competitive Tendering (#CCT) is forcing many big out-sourcing suppliers to pay below the legal National Minimum Wage.
The implication is surely that labour is now fatally weak and international capitalism so powerful that the divide between the world’s mega-rich and the rest of us is bound to grow. Faced with this prospect the majority of us – the People – will either resort to national and international legislative control of the market or to violence.
Am I being too alarmist? Commentary from Greece or Spain suggests perhaps not. Politicians have to re-act.
The Housing Crisis – Is a massive building programme sufficient to resolve the housing crisis?
It is a common-place that a massive building programme is the way, even the only way, to resolve the housing crisis facing the young, those on low and middle incomes and the homeless. Well if my Borough of Wandsworth is any indication the answer is definitely NO.
In Nine Elms, less than a mile from Westminster a development of 20,000+ flats, home to maybe 60,000 people, has begun and will be largely completed in ten years time. But no one imagines that this development will have any affect whatsoever on the housing crisis in London. It is not a problem we have with the construction industry, nor with the planning system. The problem is distribution!
Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station, with first sales going to rich Malaysians but also rich Europeans (including Brits) may not be absolutely typical but what if the higher earners continue to trade up and use their market power to invest in the housing market and use rental income as an alternative to final salary pensions? What if they act as the mortgage lenders for their children – the so-called Bank of Mum and Dad? What if the massive growth of the buy-to-rent mortgage industry is clear evidence of a long-term trend to yet more exploitive rents.
The Tory mantra about the market clearly just doesn’t work – at least not in the UK in housing. We have to take back control of the market; as a society we have to resolve the issue of distribution. The Tories recognise this to an extent and are trying to tackle the issue in the socially rented sector with the mean-spirited Bedroom Tax, but it only tackles a small sector of the market and it only tackles an easy defenceless target – the poor, social tenants. Meanwhile the social sector gets smaller and smaller and the better off collar more and more of the market.
There are three interesting and dramatic examples of this process apparent in my analysis of how “right-to-buy” has operated in Tory Wandsworth. Firstly let’s look at the overall impact. Of the 18,000 Wandsworth Council properties sold nearly 6,000, 1 in 3, are now privately rented. (see my blog of December, 2012) Some of these rental properties are part of quite large portfolios. Several millionaires have been created. Their millions have, of course, been created out of the increased rents imposed on private tenants, rents ironically frequently paid by the state in the form of housing benefits. Many examples exist in Battersea’s Doddington estate, where Council flats being let at £200 per week to families classified by the Council as being “in need”, sit side by side with others being rented out at over £500 per week using landlord practises not far short of what fifty years ago would have been known as Rachmanism (Google Peter Rachman for a brief history).
Another completely different example is where small council blocks have been bought up by developers and redeveloped as very expensive town houses. One example is in Sisters’ Avenue (see March, 2013, Blog), where six modest post-war family flats were sold to sitting tenants in the 1980s at an average price of £17,500. In the late 1990s and early 2000s they were sold on to a developer at about £300,000 each. Now the six replacement town houses are being bought at £1.95 million a time. The end result has no doubt been a major improvement in the quality and scale of the housing stock and certainly the relative enrichment of six working class Battersea families but also a complete loss of affordable housing. The effect, unintentional of course, has been of some lucky people pulling up the ladder behind themselves.
Whatever the rationale, the benefits for the original purchaser, the enormous political gain for the Tory Party, there can be little doubt that “right-to-buy” has been disastrous for the future of affordable housing in Wandsworth and by extension much of London.
To counter this situation the London Labour Housing Group (LLHG) has produced a powerful and useful manifesto for the London Borough Elections of 2014 but it admits that as long as the Government and the London Mayor are under Tory control there are limits to what can be done. Typical of the dilemma facing Labour is the comment of Councillor Peter John, Leader of London Borough of Southwark at a recent Battersea Labour Party meeting, where he asked, “Just what are the prospects for social housing in Southwark, when the new council housing we are building now is subject to government subsidised right-to-buy schemes”?
The LLHG understands the problem but it is beyond its competence or political power to challenge the real issue, which in my view is the way that much of politics in general and property taxation in particular is so warped in favour of higher income groups. There is clear evidence of the former in George Osborne’s introduction of the “Help to Buy” incentive aimed at encouraging house price rises but doing very little for housing construction – a plan many economists clearly believe to be about creating a feelgood factor and not a sustainable housing boom. As to the latter the inequity of property taxation in the UK hardly needs mention – in Wandsworth for example the Council Tax on the many expensive £1 million+ properties in the Borough is currently £1,357 per year, exactly double that on the average property (serious comparisons difficult as no revaluations since 1991 – another example of the moneyed classes, scaring Governments off re-distributive taxation).
Unfortunately, the only policy remedies that I see are to take control of the market, to close the market in social housing and to control the private rented sector. But the politics of controlling the market (subsidising large scale construction for the social sector), abolishing “right-to-buy” and controlling rents is beyond the Labour Party as at present and, to be fair, beyond political reality unless the political mood can be changed in the same radical way that the Tories managed in the 1980s.
Social Media, Blogs and political parties
Ever since the 2008 Obama campaign it’s been a sine qua non of English speaking politicians that parties and individuals must have excellent social media skills. Go canvassing, run a street stall, kiss a baby but make sure you get the story on Twitter and the picture on Facebook. I hear plenty of rationalisations for this behaviour with my favourite being that it scares the Tories witless – we seem to have a low opinion of our opponents’ nerve and intelligence and a high opinion of just how newsworthy our stories are.
Which is not to say that I don’t think that social media has its role, but just as Facebook seems to have peaked already and lost some of its appeal, I suspect that Tweeting is going to calm down – after all admirer of Danny Blanchflower, the footballer as well as the economist, as I am I get fed up with his thoughts on sport, the weather and everything else tweeted 10 and 20 times a day.
Tweets seem to me to be superb campaigning and rallying cries designed for elections, announcements and dramatic events – not for everyday stuff like haircuts or canvassing. 99.9% of the tweets I have ever been responsible for announce that I have published another blog entry and that seems to me to be an ideal use.
But the Blog is, I think, of a different order. I am told, repeatedly that my blogs are too long, that people just won’t read them, that they are sometimes boring, but that isn’t the point. They are the modern version of the old essay, as written by essayists. Mine are for my benefit not primarily the readers. If you, dear reader, find one or two of them interesting then that’s great but primarily they provide a vehicle for my thoughts.
But whilst writing this, it occured to me that for a party politician this opens up a hatful of opportunities, and for parties a complex new problem.
For a century democratic politics has struggled with the problem of communicating with the electorate. This struggle has largely been “avoided” by the use of party labels. It has been impossible to speak to all the electorate, so we use short-hand. I am Labour, therefore, nice and caring. You are a Tory and, therefore, nasty but better at making decisions.
It is this facet that has led me to justify the party whip and party discipline. Indeed the most frequent use of the argument is in justifying party politics in local democracy. In local elections it is surprising to the professional politicians just how many voters think that there should not be any party politics at all.
And then along comes the blog. No longer is it possible for the party to control what the candidate says to the electorate; or really the whip to control the elected politiican and enforce the party line; or the Electoral Commissioner to monitor expenditure on elections.
Now I can publish my own maybe maverick views and get a level of support for them based purely and simply on my own persuasiveness and the extent of my readership; but so can all my councillor colleagues. What kind of challenge does this pose for party politics. That is, of course, difficult to say right now, but it is almost certainly going to be very profound.
In the States it appears as though the major parties virtually cease to exist for the four years between the national conventions with social media used by the leading candidates to grab funding and then encourage volunteer canvassers. The Tea Party appeared for a time to be the only active force between elections: a strange parallel with UKIP perhaps. Given the still falling membership of British political parties are we going to go the same way?
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere March Newsletter (# 47)
February highlights
1. On Friday 1st February I flew from Luton to Tel Aviv with a group of 30 people
organised by Labour Friends of Palestine (LFP). We were on a fact-finding tour. LFP is organised by ex-Battersea MP, Martin Linton, and this trip had a very Battersea feel about it with other trippers being my colleagues Councillors Wendy Speck and Simon Hogg. (Here we are with a banner given to us by the Mayor of Hebron.) This was no ordinary trip however but a pretty tough, hard-working one. (Oh and before any cynics say otherwise, it was all paid for by us!)
We met the Palestinian Foreign Secretary and his number two, the Governor of Hebron Province and the Mayor of Hebron City. We met Meir Margalit, a Jewish, left-wing Jerusalem city councillor with the difficult portfolio of looking after Palestinian affairs in East Jerusalem. We had a discussion with the British Consul in Jerusalem and were given a talk by a senior UN representative with responsibility for Palestine. We had discussions with the relatives, mainly mothers of course, of Palestinian prisoners, mainly young men of course, in Israeli prisons.
- We visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah, a Bedouin encampment
in the Judean desert, a Jewish settlement and several Palestinian villages surrounded by Jewish settlements – and all in four days! Oh and we also managed to fit in one or two of the major tourist sites such as the Church of the Sepulcre, the Wailing Wall and the Dome on the Mount (Christian, Jewish and Moslem sites) in Jerusalem, as well as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the tomb of Abraham and his family in Hebron. The picture is of a sunset scene in the Judean desert.
It was a busy trip, which of course I could write about for pages and pages but I will try and make just a few brief observations. First, and whilst I hadn’t expected Palestine to be at all hot in February I was not prepared for it being even colder than London was last month. Jerusalem is 3,800 feet or 1,000 metres up in the Judean Mountains and with clear nights the temperature really plummeted.
Secondly whatever the politics I was struck by the overwhelming physical
ugliness of man’s inhumanity to man – the thirty foot high, 700 mile long wall that the Israeli Government is building round and in Palestine is as ugly as the picture suggests. Anyone who saw the Berlin Wall or the wall in West Belfast will know exactly what I mean.
But there are also a lot of half-demolished homes, where the Israeli authorities have decided to move Palestinians out, or half complete homes where the Palestinians in return have half built homes without planning permission (I longed for Britain’s planning systems). There are brand-new sparkling highways for Israelis built alongside litter-strewn, wreck-spattered, pot-holed roads for Palestinians (puts our pot holes into context!). Not even South Africa under Apartheid had segregated roads, did they?
On another note the religious sites, the churches, mosques and synagogues
don’t really work for me partly because as they are shared between faiths they had neither the over-the-top garishness of say the Greek Orthodox Church nor the puritanical simplicity of a British church. But I also did not warm to kissing the very spot where Jesus was born – partly because the person, who decided where that spot should be lived 300 years after Christ and couldn’t have possibly known. And the old Xmas carol “Oh, little town of Bethlehem” will never feel quite the same now that I have seen the traffic, the mess and the commercialisation of religious tourism in modern Bethlehem. Though occasionally, as here, it has its amusing sides. But the real point of the trip was to look at Palestinian/Israeli relationships and what lies in the future for them.
The first thing to say is that life for the under-dog is always going to be rough and at the moment the Palestinians are the under-dogs all right. One doesn’t have to be anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian to see that being bossed around by gun-toting 20 year old Israeli soldiers can be a demeaning experience for a middle aged Palestinian and an absolutely infuriating one for a 20 year old, unemployed, one. But more importantly experience on the ground tends to suggest that the much talked about two state solution just does not look a credible possibility. Palestine is just too small, and too broken up by ever-expanding Jewish settlements to be viable.
It may be pie-in-the-sky but a united non-sectarian, democratic state seems to me to the only possible future for the two peoples. But that can only happen if one, two or three other things take place. They are that the USA decides it can no longer afford, or no longer wants, to fund the Israeli state; that the rich Arab states decide between them that they are going to fund Palestine as generously as the USA does Israel; or finally that the people of the area get fed up with beating themselves up just as pretty much the whole of western Europe decided in the years after 1945 that two millennia of war was just about enough. Funnily enough, I think it may happen sooner than you think!
2. The day after we got back, 6th February, was the Council Meeting. One thing that certainly could be said for our trip was that it put the normal Labour:Tory badinage into context! There really was not a big debate but there was some discussion about paying all Council staff at least the London Living Wage of £8.55 per hour. Despite paying our top officers over £100,000 apparently we cannot afford to pay a minimum of £8.55!
3. The Planning Applications Committee on 11th February had few interesting applications but there were five for Boris bike docking stations. I have mentioned before that £2 million is being spent on this scheme in the Borough. None of these were in Latchmere, because none of those designed for Latchmere have been objected to, but I have a feeling people are not going to be pleased when they see the number of such docking stations planned. I also have my own suspicion that the scheme will not be quite so successful here as in the City and the West End, not least because out here it starts getting hilly and Latchmere Road Hill is pretty steep however young and fit you are.
4. The Strategic Planning and Transportation Committee had a paper about lobbying for a Heathrow/Clapham Junction link, which will be of interest to many in the ward. But perhaps more will be interested that the Council is looking into making parking enforcement the same on Council estates as it is everywhere else. You may know that car clamping, which the Council used to do on estate roads is no longer legal so the Council had to do something. It also obviously wants to save money by having the same traffic warden system everywhere in the Borough. I am not sure exactly how it is going to work but clearly the intention is to have one system that applies on both estate roads and public roads – and about time to, some would say.
5. On the 26th we had the Housing Committee and I really am struggling to think of anything interesting to say about that – so I won’t report anything.
6. On the 19th Jane Ellison organised a meeting at Providence House to discuss the plans for the extension of the Falcon Road Mosque. Representatives of the mosque presented their plans and Jane had asked me, as a member of the Planning Applications Committee, to outline the planning position and just some of the planning issues.
There were about 50 people present and local concerns were expressed. The major concern was clearly parking though there was mention of the proposed change in the building line and of the installation of a dome. At one point, the meeting threatened to get a little lively but I have to admit Jane handled it very well – ‘tis pity she is the wrong party!
7. I have an apology to make to everyone. On 8th February I had 10 solar panels fitted on my roof and became a member of the “oh so green brigade”. It is obviously the reason that we haven’t seen the sun since.
My Programme for March
1. There is a Council meeting on Wednesday, 6th March (OK, I know that’s passed but that will have to wait until next month!), with Planning Applications on the 12th.
2. The Falcon Road Estates Resident Association is on the 7th but there is also a Big Local meeting at Providence House on the same day. I will go to the Big Local meeting.
3. The Big Local is having a couple of consultation meetings. One is at the Sports Centre in Hope Street and will be an opportunity for locals to give their views on what the area needs. The second, much larger event will be a fun day for all on Saturday 16th. In the morning this will be centred on the Chapel in Pennethorne Square and in the afternoon it will be centred on York Gardens and the Library and will include football coaching, bouncy castles, face painting, etc. You name it and it will be there.
Do you know?
Maureen Larkin? I can’t remember when I first met Maureen but it was at an 
election, when I was standing for the Labour Party. I guess it might have been 1982. I called on some chap and got talking to him and it turned out that he had lived in the same house since the fifties and as I expressed surprise he told me about Maureen who was a far more senior citizen. So I called on Maureen and she told me she was born in her house in 1932 and as you see she is still there in the same house 81 years later. Can anyone beat that? Let me know if you can.
Many of you will know Maureen, who is still today very active as the Membership Secretary and Events Organiser of the Battersea Society. She has in her time been the Secretary or organiser of the Triangle (Poyntz Road, Shellwood and Knowsley Roads) Neighbourhood Watch and the Residents Association. She organises the Triangle Annual street party (she says she doesn’t organise it nowadays but I bet she has her say), which by the way I can say from experience is by far the best in the Borough.
In 2010 Maureen was presented with a Civic Award by Wandsworth Council in recognition of her services to the community. I remember it as a splendid occasion where she was accompanied by her daughter, Terry Barber. When I went round and took the photograph we chatted about Battersea when each little terraced house like hers had a family living upstairs and another downstairs and when the shared loo was a brick out-house in the yard, when the bath was a tub under the sink and Battersea, then the major industrial centre in west London, was filthy with coal soot and industrial grime.
Maureen clearly loves her community but she is not such an old sentimentalist to believe that everything was so good in the good old days, indeed she very much looks forward to tomorrow’s event to be organised and insisted that I had the Triangle party date firmly in my diary.
The Wandsworth Story behind Right to Buy
Wandsworth Tories introduced an aggressive Right-to-buy (RTB) policy a year before Mrs Thatcher came to power and made it a national Tory plank. It was, of course, a barn stormer and won many votes for the Tory party – and lost many more for a Labour Party perplexed about exactly how to tackle a policy, which was so perfectly attuned to an 80s Loadsamoney philosophy and such an anathema to any collectivist dream.
Lost in the political firestorm were some quiet voices on the Labour side, me included, who said as loudly as we could that outright opposition to the RTB policy was pointless but that reasoned criticism was valid and should have been pursued relentlessly. I recall two particular threads to our criticism. One was that receipts from sales should be used to replace housing stock.
Now in the current crisis about the lack of affordable housing everyone, even the Cameron Government, is talking, however disingenuously, about council house sales being accompanied by a policy of like for like replacement. The fact that the Blair/Brown Governments did no more to replace like for like than the Major/Cameron Governments does not make it any easier!
But the second criticism we had was that RTB would in the end result in the loss of affordable housing and would not be a long-term gain to the goal of creating a “property owning democracy”. Perhaps it is a little difficult to recall just how much Mrs Thatcher made of the creation of a share-owning, property-owning democracy but it was a central plank of the Tory philosophy of the 1980s. Now, however, with the first analyses of the 2011 Census figures we discover that for the first time since the war the proportion of the population living in private sector rented accommodation is on the rise and the number of owner occupiers is actually declining. Just what has happened to the property owning democracy?
Well using Wandsworth as an example reveals some interesting trends. Since 1978, the Council has sold 16,000 leasehold properties out of a stock of approximately 40,000 (there have also been thousands of freehold sales, including sales of whole estates). Having done some research on these 16,000 it appears that 5,650, or 35%, are now in the hands of private landlords, who have developed private sector rented empires on many Wandsworth estates.
The Council admits that one landlord owns 93 leases, from where he runs a private rented empire, whose asset value, very conservatively estimated, is worth more than £10 million. These 93 flats are let out almost exclusively to students of Roehampton University.
Moreover the Council admits to the fact that a further 17 landlords own more than 10 properties and another 83 own more than 5. But having done my own research on the figures and talking to the Council about their methodology, I am fairly confident that they have under-estimated the situation. The Council’s own figures are done on a simple spreadsheet exercise against a file of leaseholder names. They have not been asked to look more closely at the data and they have not done so – but I have.
It is clear that there are networks of ownership between members of the same family and apparently independent companies, often sharing the same addresses. Hence there are several small rental empires on, for example, Battersea’s famous Doddington Estate. In these properties, the Council makes an estimate for housing benefit calculations of rents are about 250% higher than the Council equivalent for the neighbouring properties. So for example, a two-bed Council owned flat is let at £123 per week and the privately owned neighbouring flat has a base of £320 per week for benefit calculation – the actual rent might be much higher.
As of early December, 2012, 31 of these properties were leased back by the Council for housing homeless families, all of whom were in receipt of Housing Benefit or Local Housing Allowance. No doubt some of these families will be hit by the so-called Benefits Reform that some Tory councillors defend on the rather ironic grounds that it will force private landlords to lower their rents. What a trick! Essentially guilty of creating a rental market with highly inflated rents they now accuse those very same landlords, they created, of exploiting the benefits system.
What I find extraordinary about this situation is that the Council officers, and the Tories, find none of this surprising. As one officer said to me, “If you return the properties into the market place then you will see the market acting as it always does with tendencies towards monopolies and exploitation”. He was accepting the reality of the situation. The Tory response is, of course, to defend the market despite, or because of, its faults, and actively to work to destroy the collectivist response to a major human need, which was the original purpose of council housing.
They have the temerity to criticise council housing and many of the subsidies that they claim it was based on and yet do not bat an eyelid at those very same once public resources being used for personal profit and gain.
This is perhaps not surprising amongst Tory councillors, who in Wandsworth are distinguished by the rise of its very own rentier class. It is not necessarily easy to interpret from the members’ register of interests but it looks possible that up to 10 Tory councillors, 20% of the whole, rent out properties for an income. But what I do find fascinating is that some Labour members seem to accept the market-place’s role, the place of market rents as a standard and the inevitable supremacy of market forces. Curious, when council housing has for a hundred years been a collectivist and, despite the occasional disaster, a highly successful response to the major problem of housing the totality and not just the affluent in our population. Doubly curious given that the two oldest council estates in the country, the Totterdown estate, and the direct works built Latchmere estates, are both Wandsworth estates!
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 