Click here:

https://saferstreetstooting.crowdmap.com/main

And here is a link to Wandsworth Living Streets, who are campaigning for a 20mph speed limit:

http://wandsworthlivingstreets.org/20splentyforus/

Earlier this week the official e-petition to stop the government’s dangerous NHS reforms smashed through the 100,000 barrier, which means a special committee of MPs will now have to decide whether or not to allow a debate on calls for the government to withdraw the plans. As each day passes opposition from health professions and experts grows, and the government faces more and more difficult questions about the impact the reforms will have on our health service.

The committee that will make the decision to allow such a debate don’t meet until Tuesday – I want the petition to have over 200,000 signatories by then. I’ve signed it, if you haven’t already, please sign the petition now, or forward it on to your friends and family and ask them to sign it.

Bit by bit the pressure is building up – there’s still time to stop it.

Click here to sign:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22670

The Leader of Wandsworth Council this week announced, with much fanfare, the Open Council initiative, but nowhere in the 27 key indicators will you find Council Rents or Council Service charges. Nor will you find them in the longer list of 90 key indicators. I would suggest that there is a reason for this. Wandsworth has the highest council rents and service charges, not just in London, but in the country. Not number one for service and value, but number 169! So much for the openness and transparency trumpeted by our Dear Leader.

If we look at the detail of Council Rents, we see that the Council’s proposed average rent increase of £8.33 a week or £433 pounds a year, takes the average council rent to £121.70 or £6,270 a year. Quite a lot of money for anyone on a modest income. However, the government has set a limit rent of £113.26 a week, close to Wandsworth’s current average rent of £112.38 a week. What does this mean? It means that the government will not reimburse Wandsworth for housing benefit paid above one hundred and thirteen pounds twenty six a week. According to the Housing Department’s figures 73 per cent of the proposed rent increase will be paid back by Wandsworth in Housing Benefit, only 27 per cent will be retained to spend on our housing estates. So out of total rent increases of £7.4 million, Wandsworth will retain only £2 million. I would submit that this is a very inefficient way of raising money.

If any one of us were donating to a charity and we were told that 73p of every pound we donated was going to be spent in administration costs, I suspect that we would very soon cross that charity off our list. But that is exactly what the financial wizards of Wandsworth are asking us to do. The only people who actually pay the £433 rent increase are the hard working and aspiring families who are not in receipt of housing benefits. Precisely the people who have been squeezed hardest by the government’s austerity measures. People whose votes one would have thought the Tory Party aspired to. Indeed the only time I can recall this Tory council reducing rents was immediately before the 2010 election, and that didn’t do them any good because they lost four seats.

What is even more peculiar is that the Housing Revenue Account doesn’t even need the two million pounds that will be raised by this rent increase. It is in rude good health with ample reserves of one hundred and eighty five million pounds. These will be boosted by the new financial settlement with the government to well over a billion pounds by the end of the 30 year planning period. I really am at a loss to understand this policy. It seems to me that by pursuing these reckless rent increases, the Leader has shot himself in the foot.

We see the same thing when we look at some of the service charges. Charges for communal heating and hot water to some 4,000 of our tenants and leaseholders are to rise by an average of 20 per cent, reflecting the increase in energy prices last year. But this average disguises some individual increases of over 60 per cent, £5 a week or £250 a year. At the Housing OSC I proposed that increases over 30 per cent should be phased over two years to mitigate the impact on hard pressed tenants and leaseholders. There aren’t that many of them, and the council is unlikely to be out of pocket as the current fall in energy prices means that its costs are likely to be over recovered next year. But the hard faced Tories on the committee said No.

I would ask the Leader of the Council to look again at Wandsworth’s rent and service charge policies. It is currently proposing to impose rent increases which are not financially justified on those hard working council tenants who are most affected by the current squeeze on living standards. Why make their life even more difficult, just for the fun of it?

Just who were that group of hooded figures in orange jumpsuits walking down Northcote Road this lunchtime?

It was a protest to mark the 10th anniversary of Wandsworth resident Shaker Aamer imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay. He remains the last Londoner in Guantanamo, despite not being charged or tried for any crime. His wife and four children – one of whom he has never met – still live locally.

Read more here:

http://simonhoggblogs.com/2012/02/11/guantanamo-comes-to-clapham-junction-shaker-aamers-10-years-without-charge-or-trial/

Read more here:

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/local/wandsworthnews/9522871.Tory_councillor_stands_down/

We recognise and respect the desire of local parents for more school places. Local people want more local secondary school places but the most practical way of providing such places is through expansion and increased resources at established local, successful, schools like Chestnut Grove and Graveney. Both schools lost out when the Building Schools for the Future funds were cut by the current government, calling a halt to expansion plans.

We do not want local parents left in the lurch by promises of a school that doesn’t happen. The Michaela Community School (MCS) proposal to occupy the Trident Business Centre site has not been planned or thought through. Even if it could meet its September 2012 deadline – at present the owners of the site have not  been given a realistic offer of purchase, nor has planning permission been applied for – it will offer places across a 10 mile area, selected by lottery. So local children in Tooting will have little chance of getting a place.

Even free schools have to be in the right place with the right facilities. If a free school is set up anywhere then we have a duty to make sure it has the highest possible standards and resources. The Trident Business Centre is a poor site for a school. Converting the site would be costly, would jeopardise hundreds of local jobs – over 400 – and would cause great disruption to commerce, traffic and local people in the area round Bickersteth Road.

Read more here:

http://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/news/9494835.Tooting__free__school_yet_to_secure_premises/

http://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/news/9525463.Labour_councillors_revolt_against__free__school_plan/

Trident Centre: 'preferred' free school site

Saturday 21 January 2012

Katharine Birbalsingh, the teacher described as a Tory darling for her attacks on state education standards, is at the centre of a dispute over her plans to open a free secondary school with a “private ethos” in an area of south London desperately in need of primary schools.

Birbalsingh has been accused of wasting taxpayers’ money by parents and teachers in Tooting, Wandsworth, the proposed site of the Michaela community school, where Mandarin and Latin will be on the curriculum.

The new secondary school will take money away from the local authority if it attracts pupils from schools under the latter’s control. And critics say because the department for education has earmarked half of the £1.2bn it has allocated to school building on free schools, it does not have enough money to tackle the national crisis in primary schools.

Read the full story here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/21/katharine-birbalsingh-free-schools-project

Wandsworth Council decided not to evict the mother and 8 year old sister of the rioter convicted last week (see my blog entry of 12 January). This marks a victory for sanity against the knee-jerk threats of eviction made by both David Cameron and the Council in August.

It is great news for the tenant and an enormous weight off her shoulders, following what Judge Darling had called the biggest tragedy of the many sentences he had imposed as a consequence of the riots. The Council was forced to recognise just how much the family was a pillar of the local community and to backdown from the gung-ho rhetoric used by the Tory party in last September’s Council Meeting.

From my point of view, opposing the evictions policy as self-defeating and deeply malicious, this family could not have been a better test case. As the judge said last week, the family are “Christian with both a capital and a small c” and an integral part of the community. There will be tougher cases coming forward, no doubt, where the convicted rioters will be more culpable than Daniel and the innocent other members of the family less vulnerable than a single mother and 8 year old. But that will not stop those other members of the family being as innocent as Maite.

I will try and defend them as much as I have done Maite.

PS This WBC decision followed an interview between tenant and local housing manager, where essentially the tenant was being interviewed for her general status as a tenant and very unsurprisingly the local housing manager could see nothing wrong with the tenant’s record as a tenant or any reason why the Council should evict her. The idea that the Council backdown was as a result of pressure from various outside fringe groups is simply farcical. Whether it was partly as a result of the pressure Labour councillors put on the Tories in Wandsworth, only senior officers and senior councillors can really say.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2089057/So-strong-action-Council-abandons-attempt-evict-family-involved-summer-riots.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Tony Belton on evictions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQukL9XxxYk&context=C3522e34ADOEgsToPDskJMaifsA6ERZIj5WDSrJrUd

Cllr. Leonie Cooper on evictions:

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/01/20/how-a-local-council-went-after-the-family-of-a-convicted-rioter/