Peckham Rye Labour

Taken from the Rotten Boroughs section of the most recent edition of Private Eye.

If you’re looking for a policy which sums up the way Southwark Council has been run since 2002, you could hardly do better than the Lib Dem/Tory policy towards the meals on wheels service. This is a service which delivers meals to vulnerable and elderly people in their homes. In 2008 they decided to increase the cost of a single meal from the council’s meals on wheels service from £2.20 to £3.20. For people already struggling to make ends meet this was a really significant increase. For some it stretched their finances to breaking point. Shocking stuff for anyone who still thought that Liberal Democrats were supposed to be a nice bunch of well-meaning, community minded activists. By anyone’s standard this was mean-hearted stuff, particularly given that the measure was projected to raise just £150,000. A significant amount of money, but not a king’s ransom in terms of local authority spending when we’re talking about an important and popular service. Surely, the savings could have been ...

One of the reasons Southwark’s Lib Dems and Tories are failing to improve services in our borough is because they seem to have fostered a town hall culture which refuses to acknowledge poor performance. Both politicians and senior managers often appear incapable of admitting that some services are in urgent need of improvement. When an independent inspectorate recently published a report on council services, Southwark’s reaction said more about them than they might have wished. The Oneplace report on Southwark was not exactly complementary. It ranked the council as the third worst in London and stated: “. . . performance in adult social care and housing is not strong. The Council did not meet its decent homes target and has not identified all the resources to allow it to do so over the next two years. It is behind the pace on modernising its adult social care services to give people more choice over the services they receive.” This is pretty damning stuff, but, in fairness, Southwark ...

Last night I went along to a council Overview and Scrutiny meeting to see the Lib Dem Executive Member for Resources, Cllr Tim McNally, being quizzed about council finances. One of the issues that was discussed was the payment of bonuses to approximately 40 of the most senior staff at Southwark. As Cllr McNally explained, there are two ways to pay people, either by a fixed salary or you can incentivise pay and make it performance related. Fair enough you might think. However it seems that the Lib Dems and Tories running Southwark have devised a third way to pay staff - paying a 10% or even 15% bonus to the highest paid staff that bares no resemblance to council performance given that, just a few weeks ago, Southwark was officially rated the worst council in inner London! We are in difficult economic times and you and I are counting our pennies. In the coming weeks it's increasingly likely that a whole host of council schemes will be cut as the capital programme spending is review...

As I've mentioned in a previous post , last Wednesday's Nunhead and Peckham Rye Community Council passed a motion regarding the former public toilets on Peckham Rye Common. The motion set up a group, lead by local Labour Councillor Gordon Nardell, which will make suggestions to Southwark Council on alternative uses which might be made of this building. Those present at the meeting rightly felt that local people should come up with some alternative proposals to the current plan: Southwark Council seems hell bent on renting the building out as a shop, despite the fact that it's on common land. In case you're not sure which building I'm writing about, it's located near East Dulwich Road here . At the meeting I asked Councillor Nardell if I might become a member of this sub-group. He agreed, and I think membership is open to anyone who is interested in joining. The group will be coming together in the near future to hold the first meeting. Personally, I'm ...

Gavin and I spent today delivering our local newsletters. The lead story is on housing and sets out Labour's action plan to tackle the terrible state of social housing following seven and a half years of neglect by the Lib Dems and Tories running Southwark Council. The council’s failure to improve social housing was singled out by the Audit Commission this week. Southwark is one of only two councils in London to receive a ‘red flag’ for its housing services, which means that housing problems are “not being tackled adequately” Yet the response from the Lib Dem Council Leader Nick Stanton was out of touch with reality - he has failed to acknowledge that the council has been reprimanded by the Audit Commission in any of his statements to the local press. We've picked up lots casework from Peckham Rye residents living in social housing in recent months but one sticks in mind as particularly upsetting. A few weeks ago I met a young man who had been housed by Southwark because he...