Changes to local stations:

Baker Street (Metropolitan) will only be open for 60 hours and 30 minutes a week (as opposed to 94 hours a week) 36% reduction

St John’s Wood will only be open for 67 hours and 15 minutes (as opposed to 97 hours and 30 minutes) 31% reduction

Warwick Avenue will only be open for 19 hours (as opposed to 90 hours) 79% reduction

Westbourne Park will only be open for 16 hours (as opposed to 69 hours and 30 minutes) 77% reduction

The changes come despite mayor Boris Johnson’s election promise to "defend local ticket offices" and "stop the planned ticket office closures". In his 2008 election manifesto, the mayor said he would ensure "there is always a manned ticket office at every station".

Across London opening hours are being cut by 30 per cent – or 5,290 hours a week.

Local Labour Assembly member Murad Qureshi said:

 "The mayor was elected on a clear promise to keep ticket offices open yet here he is cutting far more than anything that was planned before. Passengers will feel less safe and more vulnerable in the daytime and late at night as a direct consequence of the mayor’s broken promises."

Transport for All, a charity who campaign on behalf of disabled passengers, have warned that the changes will make stations even less accessible.

Transport trade unions say the cuts will turn stations into a "criminal’s paradise", making them more dangerous and leaving passengers – especially female passengers – more vulnerable to crime and anti-social behaviour. The TSSA union recently pointed to an assault which allegedly took place on an unmanned station.

TfL announced last March that 450 ticket office jobs would be cut as a result of the proposed changes. Negotiations over the job losses are on-going and one of the unions involved has accused the mayor of "jumping the gun" by pressing ahead with the ticket office cuts while the dispute is unresolved.

Ends

Notes

Murad Qureshi is a London wide Labour Assembly member and a former Councillor in the City of Westminster.

Further information about Boris Johnson’s cuts to ticket office opening hours is available here: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/projectsandschemes/16277.aspx

Boris Johnson’s manifesto promises on ticket office closures can be found on page two here

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2009/04/27/Transportmanifesto.pdf

For further information please contact Alison Marcroft on 0207 983 4363

One has to  respond to the British prime minister David Cameron’s assertion yesterday that multiculturalism was a failed policy.

He appeared to be echoing similar remarks made by German chancellor Angela Merkel last October in which she said Germany’s attempts to form a multicultural society have utterly failed. Cameron’s speech at the Munich Security Conference on the Feb 5 focused on the challenges posed to the UK by ‘home-grown’, British Islamic extremism and radicalisation. 

Yet while Merkel was at pains to underline that “Islam is part of Germany”, the British leader did not offer any such qualification in his comments. Nor did we  hear a similar condemnation of right-wing extremism from the PM. All this while many thousands of Londoners celebrated with the Chinese community the beginning of their new year in Central London. We did not hear him talking about this aspect of multiculturalism, its cultural and linguistic form but just its recent religious manifestation, largely in response to world affairs. In his attempt to curry favour with Merkel, he clearly picked on the Muslim communities of the UK.

It is also apparent the divisions within the Conservative Party about Islam and multiculturalism. On January 20, the party’s Muslim co-chairman Baroness Warsi expressed her views that it had become socially acceptable to be prejudiced against Muslims. Her fellow cabinet member, the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, is meanwhile on record as saying: “Islamism [is] a totalitarian ideology [which turns to] hellish violence and oppression'”. So clearly in the cabinet, Gove has won the debate and got the ear of the PM and not Warsi.

Cameron’s speech in Germany also coincided with a demonstration in Luton in the UK by the newly-emergent far-right street protest group the English Defence League. The final insult is that the EDL supporters were quoting him as justification for their march.

Yes, if maps attached to one of the city’s newest docking stations are anything to go by.

Bemused two-wheelers are up in arms after discovering that the latest bike bay to be built in Fitzrovia wrongly informs people that Soho is to the north and Fitzroy Square is to the west.  

A docking station in Warren Street is labelled Euston, and the maps – which are produced by TfL’s “wayfinding” organisation Legible London – appear to direct bike-users the wrong way down one-way streets. 

Linus Rees, a cyclist and chair of the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Association, has catalogued a series of Boris bike “blunders” on the website of local paper Fitzrovia News. 

He said: “As anyone should know, Fitzrovia is the area bounded by Gower Street to the east and Great Portland Street to the west, and Euston Road to the north and Oxford Street to the south. 

“But it seems the folks at Transport for London and Legible London can’t find their way around as well as they should.”

Last year Labour London Assembly member and north Westminster resident Murad Qureshi criticised TfL for marking non-existent docking stations on its maps.

He said: “I have been particularly concerned about the delay in the roll-out of the final docking stations in the central zone, particularly in Westminster and Camden. 

“Getting the directions wrong in the map in Fitzrovia is perturbing and suggests the whole vision of the bike hire scheme isn’t quite going in the right direction either.”

Because one-way streets are not marked on Legible London’s maps, bike-users unfamiliar with London’s roads could unwittingly break the rules by taking what they believe to be the best route, said Mr Rees.

He added: “Westminster City Council fine people for going the wrong way down one-way streets, but they are directed that way by these maps.”

He has uploaded photographs of a bike restocking trailer parking on a pavement and another of a docking station labelled as being in Bloomsbury when it is actually in Fitzrovia.

Yesterday (Thursday) a TfL spokeswoman said signs would be corrected.

View full article here

All 20 wards in the City of Westminster are each currently covered by a safer neighbourhood team (SNT) made up of a minimum of one sergeant, two police constables and three police community support officers. But reports from boroughs across London suggest that the make up of the teams could be changed.

Labour Assembly member Murad Qureshi said:

"Safer neighbourhood teams work well and are highly valued in the City of Westminster. But despite Boris Johnson’s promise to support them we’re getting mixed messages about their future. The Mayor must come clean and be honest with Londoners about the reality of his cuts and whether our team is safe."

In Merton it was reported last week that, "The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, and Kit Malthouse, London�s Deputy Mayor in charge of policing, are demanding borough police forces scrap the existing "one-two-three" structure where each SNT has one sergeant, two constables and three community support officers."

And on BBC London last night, it was reported that in the City of Westminster the police are proposing to merge 14 electoral wards in the north of the borough, each currently covered by six officers, into five bigger districts. "These proposals would result in a 50 per cent reduction in the number of sergeants, leaving those remaining responsible for policing a wider area", according to the BBC.

Acting Met commissioner Tim Godwin told the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) last week that the number of neighbourhood policing sergeants will be halved from 630 to 330 by the end of 2013.

Boris Johnson said in 2008, "I fully support the Safer Neighbourhood Team model, and I am committed to ensuring that there at least 6 officers in every ward." 

The MPA is currently reviewing safer neighbourhood teams and is due to report later this month.

Ends

Murad Qureshi is a London wide Assembly member and a former councillor in the City of Westminster.

For further information please contact Alison Marcroft on 020 7983 4363

Will it be Boris’s legacy to London or a fanciful dream without a hope in hell of taking off?  It was while he was a candidate for the Mayoral elections in 2008 that Johnson first stumbled across the idea of an airport in the Thames Estuary after reading a newspaper article.