Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Questions on cycling, cock-ups and crime

Tonight was the last full Council meeting of 2005 – and for once it was mainly useful (well even Millwall win occasionally). Given this, I’ll do separate posts about the more interesting parts of the meeting – firstly on question time.

Council question time is the most heavily choreographed part of the full Council meeting. There are seven questions for oral answer at every meeting – three Labour, three Tory and one Lib Dem – with two supplementaries allowed to each question. The Party Groups pick the seven questions, which consequently generally have a common pattern – Labour tend to ask about schools, the environment and regeneration ; the Tories major on the potential tram, other anti-Ken questions, and central Ealing issues ; whilst the Lib Dems concentrate mostly on parochial issues for the Southfield and Ealing Common wards that they represent (although I have to confess that I’ve done my fair share of parochial East Acton questions).

I had a question down to Cabinet Member Ray Wall : “Could the Cabinet Member for Transport and Planning Policy report on the recognition and awards given to the cycling promotion and development work of the Borough?”. I asked this question in order to raise awareness of the very impressive record of achievement by the Borough’s cycling team, and Ray outlined some of the praise and awards that they have won including :

- One of the 2004 London Cycling Awards (the ‘cycling oscars’) for the campaign to 'market cycling' in a multi-pronged approach to encourage cycling that includes free cycle training, installing bike parking in streets, and schools, providing cycle lockers on estates, and 'bike buddy' schemes to help commuters on their journeys. This has also been strongly praised by ‘Marketing Cycling’.

- Being rated by The London Magazine as the top London borough for the provision of cycle paths. In a poll of environmental performance, the magazine rated Ealing top for cycle paths and 7th out of 33 overall.

As a supplementary question, I asked about the potential impact of cycling of the proposed tram, and specifically how the Council was trying to ensure that TfL acted on the tram issues raised by the local branch of the London Cycling Campaign. Ray replied that “the tram scheme requires a comprehensive traffic management design for the whole corridor, and is an opportunity to take cyclists’ needs into account in an integrated way … I know that the TfL design team is working to identify the intended route for cyclists all along the corridor, and will be bringing proposals to the Ealing branch of the LCC in the new year.” This is welcome, but it’ll be important to make sure that TfL keep to their commitments – trams and cyclists can co-exist, but this does require good quality sensitive design by the transport planners.

This consensus on bikes was broken by a bizarre attack on cycling in a second supplementary question from an opposition Councillor. He claimed (to general incredulity – such ‘what have you been smoking?’) that promoting cycling means encouraging pavement cycling. To their credit even most Tories laughed at this nonsense, and Ray pointed out that he couldn’t really be expected to answer an incomprehensible question.

Another later question was inevitable – Tory Licensing specialist John Popham asked about the failure of the Council’s public halls to properly apply for licenses under the new legislation. This news had come out at the weekend, leading to endless obvious jokes about organising p*** ups in breweries. In their responses, both Laurence Evans (as Chair of Regulatory Committee) and John Delaney (as Cabinet Member) were admirably honest. John described it as an “indefensible cock-up … for which the people responsible should be held accountable”, whilst Laurence announced that he had made a formal complaint to the Chief Executive (Darra Singh) demanding an investigation into what happened and why. Still, it’s a classic ‘you couldn’t make it up’ moment.

Other questions mostly covered the usual suspects – schools results, car parking and the potential tram. However, there was uniquely one question each from the Tories and Lib Dems on the usually sedate subject of Gunnersbury Park (next to Ealing Common ward). The (unspoken) reason for this interest was obvious – Ealing Common is currently the only ward in the Borough with split representation (two Tories and one Lib Dem) and is already lining up as a battle royal of the leaflets between the two Parties, in the run up to next May’s local elections. We’ll now be on ‘Ealing Common watch’ at every question time.

The Council meeting had started with a very impressive presentation and question and answer session with Commander Colette Paul – the new(ish) Police Commander for the Borough. Colette talked about some the recent achievements locally – such as a drop of 14% in vehicle crime and of 7% in ‘theft and snatch’ offences. LB Ealing is now in the top five Boroughs in London for issuing ASBOs, and also has 55 ‘Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs) – a scheme that can be used to try to produce better behaviour without going to the lengths of a full ASBO. However, she was honest enough to recognise that some challenges remain – burglary is up over the last year, as is street crime. The recorded rise in street crime is no surprise here in East Acton, where there have been some noticeable problems recently that the local police safer neighbourhood team have been addressing.

Colette also said that the police were not seeing any impact from the new licensing system. I took this a cue to ask her a question about the police role in licensing - and in particular the concern of many of us that their central licensing team and their neighbourhood team colleagues don’t seem to always work together. The Borough police have regularly withdrawn objections to even long pub hours extensions, even where residents are reporting concerns from local police about anti-social behaviour. She said that she would look at the issues I raised, and accepted the importance of the police working in partnership and as a team. I’m writing to her to take her up on this offer.

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