Not the Labour Party Weasels again

To whom it may concern:

If you received through the letterbox this Lewisham Central Labour Party Newsletter (click picture to enlarge) be reassured, the Labour Party had no part in the Hither Green Cinema campaign and have not been authorized to tell people to write to them to support the campaign.

Funnily enough they are doing this to demonstrate that they’re fit for office.

If you want to help the campaign write to contact@hithergreenhall.org. You’ll be replied by me as secretary of the Hither Green Community Hall & Arts Society, you’ll receive no literature from any party, you won’t see or hear any party political references either in the email updates or literature or at campaign events and that mailing list will not be shared with anyone.

More pruning

Tomorrow Saturday 21st November there will be another round of pruning and clearing and planting at the Hither Green Station railway embankment along Springbank Road organised by Hither Green Community Association.
If you’re interested please email Joanna at info@ourhithergreen.com with your boot size, she must make sure that there are enough steel-capped boots for everyone.

Oysterlessness

Lewisham Station, c. 1900, passengers were already unable to use Oyster Cards!

If you want to get lost looking at old pictures of the area you can’t do much better than visit the wonderfully named IDEAL HOMES: SUBURBIA IN FOCUS.

Daily Mail jumps on my bandwagon

Only two days ofter my posting on rogue clamping in Lewisham and my call for the Council to do something about it the Daily Mail starts a campaign against Cowboy Clampers.

The article in the Mail gives some good legal background and call this activity a legalized mugging. According to the mail this is a completely unregulated activity and until legislation is introduced clampers are in their right to do whatever they want and suggest what new legislation should say.

I am not completely convinced that there isn’t anything that can already be done. Couldn’t this fall into street trading? It is indeed private land but open to public access.
One could say that trading has to do with the exchange of goods, I’d say that trading involves all economic activities, and clamping is definitely one.

The Council’s policy is to:

“oppose all street trading other than from areas approved by the Council where highway safety will not be impaired. For such sites a trader’s licence must be obtained from us”

So, if the legal definition of trading includes all economic activities then this could mean that Councils are already in the position to stop rogue clampers by denying licences for those sites not approved by the Council.

And if there were legal reasons why this would not work then all the legislation that’s needed is an extension of street trading to include clamping and a set of rules for the standards that need apply in order to obtain and retain a licence for this specific activity.

Loampit Vale #2

It’s tonight. Finally the Loampit Vale development goes to planning, and I spent the last couple of days reading from the mountain of documents that accompanies the application.
One document I can recommend is the design and access statement.
A massive tome of 277 pages giving a good overview of the project.
It’s very glossy and sexy, but planning should be about getting the best we can, and there still are issues.

I also spotted what looks like selective quoting there. At page 59 the document says:

We have met with CABE officers on two occasions and received a formal response following an internal Design Review Panel.
The outline proposals were considered at a panel meeting on 21 May 2008.
The panel stated that, “…whilst the quantum and size are large, this could be acceptable if carefully handled.”
However, they remained to be convinced of the departure from the Development Brief Masterplan.
They concluded that, “…we see its potential to create a vibrant public destination and a pleasant place to live.”

Now, if you go and look at the CABE’s website and their responses to the submitted disegn you’ll find that those sentences are longer and have a somehow different meaning when read in full (CABE review 1 and CABE review 2).

The concluding paragraph of the latest contains one the quote included in the design and access statement document, only that in full it reads:

To conclude, while we see the potential to create a vibrant public destination and a pleasant place to live, we do not think that the composition of the different typological elements and the quality of the courtyards in terms of sunlight are fully convincing.

As I wrote in my previous post on Loampit Vale, I submitted an objecion and would be pleased if it was upheld and the plan being thought through to make it really worth its while.

It is of course also a matter of great concern that various massive developments are going up one next to the other and no overall study of the impact of these on traffic has been done.
The traffic through Lewisham Centre is traffic that generates elsewhere, Loampit Vale though narrow and congested is a major traffic artery, it hosts a public transport interchange and increased activity greatly impact on the flow of traffic. A study to determine what will happen once all these blocks go up would have been highly recommendable, the risk is that we create a spectacularly congested town centre when this could have been avoided with better planning.

There is no masterplan, in this document for the first time you find some pictures of how these giants would look like next to each other and personally I don’t like the result.
But that’s not a planning matter. Amenities’ space is a planning matter, quality of design is also a planning matter.
Tonight I’ll attend the meeting, let’s see what the committee members make of these concerns.

Waste

We’re 2 days away from next Council meeting and the Council’s website still hasn’t got the questions from the public and the members of last Council meeting held on 30th June. Here’s the link to the page where they should be, on 7th July I even wrote to the web communication team of the Council asking them to put them up and within a fraction of a second I had an automatic thank you reply, still no sign of them though.

In the meantime if you’re interested you can download a copy of the members’ questions from me, here, I post them here just to put them on the spot.

I had three questions, two on pools and I will write on them separately, one on waste. It may look like an unusual subject for a question at Council from me, the fact is that I was genuinely interested in how the Council deals with waste and also to know something about the recent Brown Bins initiative. Maybe my curiosity was solicited by the fact that quite a lot of those brown bins were assigned to people that have gardens and can therefore compost their own kitchen waste without the help of the Council.

Question

What is the cost of incineration of waste produced annually in Lewisham that could be potentially turned into compost instead?

Can you also provide me with a detailed breakdown of this cost to be able to understand how much each household of Lewisham as well as commercial activities contribute to this cost?

I would also like to have the data broken down between houses with use of a garden and those without. Can you also provide some data about the pilot brown bins initiative? I’m interested in its cost and the volume collected and how it has been disposed. I would also like to know how many households with brown bins have a garden.

Reply

Lewisham is in the process of undertaking a waste compositional analysis of its waste and from the reports that have been received to date approximately 35% of domestic refuse could potentially be composted at home. This includes kitchen waste and garden waste.

In terms of tonnage, Lewisham incinerated 76,093.37 tonnes of domestic waste in 2007/8. Based on the waste compositional analysis 35% or 26,633 tonnes of this could be home composted. Lewisham pays a set price per tonne (gate fee) to the SELCHP incinerator and the cost of the gate fee for 35% of waste was £1,211,268 for 2007/8.

Lewisham Council has to report on the costs of waste collection and waste disposal. The cost to the Council for waste collection per household is £51.31 and the costs for waste disposal are calculated per tonne at £47.01.

However, it must be noted that this is not the cost that householders pay through their Council Tax. The Council Tax only contributes a small percentage of waste costs, the rest of which comes from Central Government through the Revenue Support Grant. The data for this is not broken down for households with gardens and those without.

Businesses on the other hand do pay for their waste collection and disposal services and this amount depends on the amount of waste that they produce a week.

The trial garden waste service took place from July to October 2007 across approximately 5,000 properties. The areas that the trial took place in were chosen as they had a high proportion of properties with gardens.

The costs for running the garden waste pilot were approximately £180,000. The green waste that was collected from the properties on the green waste pilot was taken to Country Style Group via Veolia Environmental Services. This was then composted using a windrow composting system and the resulting compost used in agriculture and landscaping.

During the four months of the trial 219,960kg of garden waste was collected. A participation rate was also conducted towards the end of the trial, which showed that 51% of households took part in the scheme

What I find most of interest is that the incinerator charges a flat fee, no matter if it is a ton of dry wood or a ton of soggy rotten potato peels. Obviously a ton of dry wood will produce energy that the incinerator then sells on as electricity, the ton of soggy rotten potato peels will instead require additional energy into the system to be burnt.

Soggy rotten potato peels make wonderful compost at no cost but another interesting point that one evinces from this answer is that it’s so dirty cheap for Lewisham Council to incinerate that economic reasons will never be a push towards composting. With those figures I pay for collection and disposal of all my rubbish with less than 3 weeks of Council tax a year. A bargain.

The Brown Bin trial came at a cost of £108 per household per year and that’s only for the collection, the total for collection and disposal of the same stuff plus all the other non recyclable rubbish comes at £98.31.

What we don’t know from this answer is if the Council disposes of the compostable at any cost or if it even makes some money out of it but even if that would be the case I think that it would be a rather small sum given the extremely low grade nature of the traded.

Last year the Council paid £1,211,268 for the incineration of the potentially compostable material. I think that there are about 110,000 households in Lewisham, that makes it about £11 per houshold. That’s about two days of my Council tax. But as they say it’s not even paid by the Council tax, it’s mostly out of grants that the Council receives so they have even less of an economic reason to shift.

It may be that unless the incinerator starts charging according to combustibility there won’t be any significant shift towards mass composting and we’ll keep on burning soggy rotten potato peels at huge environmental cost for another while.

Price-fixing in Lewisham?

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has accused 112 construction companies of rigging bids for contracts.

It said the firms colluded among themselves while bidding for contracts, leading to customers, such as local authorities, having to pay too much.

The regulator added that in a few cases firms entered into agreements whereby the successful tenderer would pay a sum of money to those that lost out.

It said 40 firms had admitted price fixing, and 37 had asked for leniency.

The cartel practice involved the use of false invoices.

Construction giants Balfour Beatty and Carillion are among those the OFT accuses of taking part… (link)

Earlier I saw on telly a very well groomed man representing the industry, that with exceptional calm and self-confidence explained that the companies paid by us to build our hospitals and schools have not been involved with price-fixing practices to inflate prices but because they didn’t want those jobs and didn’t want to upset their prospective future clients by not bidding, so they were shooting high in the hope that they would not get the job but would still be considered in the future.

I admired the way he kept cool and insisted on that, he’s obviously been coached in keeping a line that beggars belief with a straight face. His coach must have been proud of him.

In spite of this particular kind of admiration that he inspired me, my mind did go to the traditional way that Japanese managers adopt in these cases to safe-guard their honour, self-disembowelment with a traditional sword.

After all, taking money away from hospital budgets means that somebody will not be able to be treated for their conditions and could sometimes even die.

It’s only a few days that here in SE London we’ve been consulted on how much of the local NHS should be dismantled with options of the like of the closure of the local A&E in Lewisham. They are seriously claiming that a borough with a quarter million people can do without an accident and emergency.

This proposal sounds all the more incredible since Lewisham Hospital just opened a very swanky new building, 7 storeys or wavy modern architecture, it came with a £60m price tag and it is such a generous space that one of the floors is completely empty.

Carrillion, the company that built it not just managed to get the usual 30 years contract for the maintenance of the building, but thanks to an innovative deal they also get to supply the Hospital for the next 30 years.

Carrillion is also one of the companies that admitted of price-fixing.

I think that it is reasonable to ask ourselves if the current financial deficit that could lead locally to the loss of critical services could have been generated by this and other recent contracts.

Of course another thing that we must ask ourselves is whether it was wise to spend such vast sum on a building when the Hospital is in such deficit that closure of A&E is one of the options.

I think that now our local politicians should make an effort to bring an investigation over the Hospital deal and see whether there were irregularities at bidding and if that would turn up to be the case, to try to recover money from the contractors so that part of the deficit could be covered and maybe some of our services be saved from closure.

Springtime in Mordor

The versatile interview

Last week, as I sat in front of the television to see me interviewed on BBC London News I didn’t know what to expect.
Not that I didn’t remember what I had said, only that I had said quite a lot of things, and as television times are notoriously short with all probability much of what was recorded would not have made it through the editing.

But that was clear from start. In fact when the BBC journalist Matthew Cooke called me asking me to interview me about Forest Hill Pools I didn’t agree to that, but as we chatted about the recent events surrounding swimming pools in Lewisham and I told him that Forest Hill Pools was only one of two “shells” of Victorian Pools in Lewisham, both opened to the public within the same two weeks in 1885, both in an awful state of disrepair, an idea for an interview with a different slant came up.

So we recorded this interview in the alleyway between Ladywell Road and Lewisham High Street, me pointing at back of the derelict Victorian Ladywell Pools. There I spoke for a few minutes touching on various issues around swimming pools and historic pools.

Here’s in brief what I said:

swimming in historic pools is a unique experience for some non negligible quasi-holistic reason (link) ;

Lewisham Council is responsible for the disrepair of Forest Hill Pools, by displaying surprise at discovering that a 123 years old pool that they neglected to maintain has some problems that could cost a packet they only look silly and hypocritical;

on the other hand maintenance of historic buildings should not be met by sports and leisure budgets and unfortunately funding to maintain historic buildings is hard to come by and there is no legal responsibility to maintain historic buildings in good shape;

we may be living an epidemic of demolitions of historic buildings because the mantra in local government is that any building that is over 30 years old is only good for the scrap-heap;

this leads to the loss of some really fantastic buildings like the former Hither Green Hospital , a local architectural gem demolished a few years ago to make space for a housing development (this is the part that made it into the news);

we do need new pools and we need more budget for this and to use it to maximum effect, unfortunately as the population grows the new facilities only shrink when compared with the old ones, old Forest Hill Pools and its forecast replacement being a perfect example of this trend;

enough swimming pools to satisfy population needs are important because they are not just an asset for competitive sport, they offer an opportunity to keep fit to anyone and they are just about the best way and sometimes the only possible way to exercise for many people suffering from a series of very common conditions like asthma, arthritis, obesity…;

an investment in swimming pools would reflect positively on the budget for the NHS and to fail to see this shows extreme short-sightedness.

With all this to say I didn’t want to be boxed into something that I am not, I was also aware that many people in Forest Hill just want the old pool to be taken out of its misery. If the Council can’t keep it in good order than maybe it’s better to knock it down and build a modern one. I find it impossible to disagree with that.

In a different situation I probably would have stood for old Forest Hill Pools, in fact if the Friends of Forest Hill Pools would not have fought along many years to keep the old one up, today there wouldn’t be a pool to speak of there. The pools were first saved from closure some 12 years ago, and in case somebody forgot only three years ago the Mayor approved a consultant’s report advising him to keep only 4 pools in the Borough, and Forest Hill was not one of them.

The fact that the pools will now be replaced is an achievement of those efforts, sad to see that something that is a bit smaller is what’s on offer but at least there’s something on offer.

Going back to the interview. I think that the peculiar characteristic of it was that unlike my past media passages this time I wasn’t campaigning for anything specific, I didn’t have to push one message through, so I was particularly relaxed, I had a quite clear idea of what I wanted to say but not a prepared speech, just an ad lib improvisation on someting I’ve come to know quite well.

I was really more interested in giving the image of the two Victorian pools and their parallel lives and dismissals, I find that quite poetic, unfortunately news editors are more interested in a quick point. Never mind, I was aware that my poetic image probably would not have made it entirely so a few quick points to choose from were provided, one made it into the news and I’m quite happy with it.

In the news today (alert)

A quick note to those that have subscribed to this blog and anybody stumbling upon it by chance during the next 3 hours.

Today Friday 29th February at 6:30 pm on BBC1 (television) during BBC London News there will be an item on the closure of Forest Hill Pools.

On Monday I was interviewed about it by Matthew Cooke of BBC London and hopefully some parts of that interview will be broadcast this afternoon. The Mayor of Lewisham Sir Steve Bullock was also interviewed on Tuesday at Forest Hill.

See you after the news.