At the last Mayors Question Time (MQT) we almost had a riot on hand.

As the Mayor and black cabbies have fallen out of love, so the exchanges between the two parties get even more bitter over their livelihoods and how to respond to challenges like the Uber. But this does not justify insulting them as the Mayor clearing did at the last MQT, where he called them luddites. Quite honestly this is a posh boy’s way of calling someone a thicko and to all intents and purposed he had called class war against them.   

The very least he should do is apologise to the black cabbies at the next available public meeting, otherwise this is going to simmer throughout the reminder of his term as Mayor of London. 

The West End Extra highlights how the cabbies are taking to the road in this weeks front page. 

I recently criticised the Mayor of London Boris Johnson for his plan to introduce a 20p charge for public toilets in Trafalgar Square after it was revealed a factor in the decision was partly taken to increase takings at a café City Hall shares profits from.

The 20p charge is expected to raise around £100,000 a year to help fund the maintenance and repair costs of the toilets. The decision notice issued by the mayor states that the introduction of the 20p charge is likely to reduce the number of people using the toilets and suggests that the nearby café, which the GLA has a profit share arrangement with, may benefit from increased takings as people are more likely to try and use their toilets.

The requirement for customers at the café to make a purchase in order to use the toilets appears to be a abandonment of the principle behind the Mayor’s 2008 Community Toilet Scheme which called for London businesses to open up their toilets to the public to help ease the problems caused by the lack of public lavatories.

Whilst I don’t object to charging for public toilets if the money is used to keep them clean and safe, it’s a totally different matter if it’s being done partly to push people into spending more money at a City Hall run café.

Toilets should be a public convenience. This looks a lot like a money making scheme. It’s particularly hypocritical given that back in 2008 the Mayor called on businesses to open up their toilets to the public – this seems to be totally going against that message.

For many people, particularly the elderly and those with ill health, public toilets are a real necessity – we should be doing more to provide public toilets, not cynically trying to manoeuvre them into cafes where they’ll need to spend pounds if they want to spend a penny.

Mayor of London should come clean following reports from Property Week magazine that the he is planning to fix a target of 25% for affordable homes in the capital’s key Housing Zones and opportunity areas. If introduced, the target would effectively prevent local authorities from being able to negotiate the number of affordable homes on a development above the 25% threshold.

A 25% target would be far lower than the those currently demanded by many local authorities. The Mayor should adopt far more ambitious targets for affordable housing provision and to allow local councils a say in what the affordable target should be for major developments in their area.

For eight years Boris Johnson has failed to deliver the affordable homes we need, now he looks set to tie the hands of a future Mayor by setting a scandalously low target for affordable housing on major development sites. If true, not only would it stack the deck in developers’ favour, it would let them totally off the hook from their duty to provide the optimum number of affordable homes.

You don’t get the affordable housing which London needs by being soft on developers and tying the hands of local authorities – we need as many affordable homes as possible. The capital’s housing crisis is growing by the day and people are crying out for homes that they can actually afford to live in. Instead of dealing with this challenge, Boris Johnson seems to be the only person in London who thinks that it’s acceptable for three-quarters of new homes to be unaffordable.

After the PM came out this week with his concerns of the extent of money laundering in London, what do you think was the Mayor’s position when l asked him about the impact it was having on the housing market earlier in the year?

Yep you guessed right, complete denial about it. This when l quoted research undertaken by Transparency International, Corruption on Your Doorstep in a question to his office. The response l got said ” ….it did not produce any evidence to suggest the nature and scale of any such relationship”

Since then we have had the National Crime Agency suggest that foreign criminals push up London house prices. Mr Toon director of the agency’s economic crime command said  “I believe the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK.”

Do you think he’ll take it seriously now that the PM and National Crime Agency consider it a problem? Well l will have to ask and find out at the next Mayor’s Question Time. So much for even acknowledging it as a issue, in the first place.  

Philip Stephens makes completely the wrong comparison between Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn by suggesting they are two of a kind in his column in the FT last friday on the 24th of July. 

So while the Labour leadership contest has got dirty, let’s not do Mr Corbyn the disservice of suggesting that he is remotely like someone with whom he would have nothing in common politically.

You will find the above letter in the FT letters page today.

Londoners could be missing out on vast amounts of solar energy as a result of the city’s low uptake of residential solar panels.  The capital has just experienced record breaking temperatures with long hours of sunshine providing perfect conditions for solar energy production.

Despite a population of over 8.6m, it is estimated that the capital produces less energy from domestic solar panels than any other region of the UK. According to the latest Government figures London has only 46,284kW of domestic solar power generating capacity, the lowest of any region in the country. By comparison the South West has enough residential solar panels to provide almost 310,000kW in capacity.

A report from the London Assembly Environment Committee last year found that the Mayor was failing to hit key targets for his domestic energy efficiency programme, in part as a result of the slow uptake of solar panel technology.

Earlier this year a Government survey found that 81% of people supported solar energy, making it the most popular form of energy production in the UK.

There is vast untapped potential for solar power production in the capital. Whilst we bask in the summer sunshine, London could be producing significant amounts of environmentally friendly energy.

The Mayor’s dismal efforts to increase renewable energy use have failed to deliver the goods. Across the rest of the country the appetite for domestic solar power is rocketing yet in London uptake is severely lagging behind. When Wales, with a population of just 3m, produces three times more energy than London from domestic solar panels, there’s clearly a problem.

The Mayor needs to do more to promote the opportunities and benefits of domestic solar power in the capital. If London were to really embrace solar panel technology as other regions have, the potential is as bright as the sun.

–       Domestic (non-commercial) solar power generating capacity installed between 2010 and April 2015 by Region in kW:

• South West                          309,027
• South East                           263,944
• East of England                   235,626
• East Midlands                      206,081
• Yorkshire                             193,870
• North West                           178,573
• West Midlands                     158,888
• Scotland                               139,001
• Wales                                   123,643
• North East                            88,980
• London                                 46,284

Source: Ofgem, Feed-in Tariff Installation Report 31 March 2015

 –       The London Assembly Environment Committee’s 2014 report on the Mayor’s failure to hit carbon reduction targets is available here.

 –       The April 2015 DECC Public attitudes survey showing 81% support for solar energy is available here.

Almost 9,500 Londoners die prematurely each year as a result of air pollution in the capital new figures from Kings College London have shown. The research demonstrates how bad air quality in London has become, the Mayor needs to finally get serious about tackling air pollution.

The Mayor needs to take tangible steps to improve London’s air quality including allowing London boroughs to opt into the new ultra-low emissions zone which will charge the worst polluting cars for entering central London from 2020.

This research demonstrates that air pollution is one of the most serious public health emergencies facing London. Despite almost 9,500 Londoners dying every year, the Mayor has dithered and delayed when it comes to tackling our toxic air.

It’s time for the Mayor to get serious about air quality, that means expanding the proposed ultra-low emissions zone and allowing London boroughs to opt in should theywish. It should be an indisputable right of residents in Westminster to breathe clean air, not an optional extra as the Mayor is currently treating it.

The research by King’s College London is available here.

In the term so far we have had a number of motion on the postal service in London

The closure of Post Offices particularly the Crown ones

and the reduction & poor performance of the Postal Service across London in response to the part-privatization allowing TNT into delivery competition.

Since the botched part-privatization of Royal Mail by Vince Cable we now have the full privatization of the Royal Mail by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne – something even Margaret Thatcher would not have considered as she famously said, she ” wasn’t prepared to have the Queen’s Head privatized “

With the competition being withdrawn by Whistl, this final privatization will give over a public monopoly to becoming a private monopoly after almost 500 years of public service to us and see the asset-stripping its large land-holdings of Royal Mail in Greater London. 

The full privatization of the Royal Mail will mean;

the loss of a public voice in Postal Services like no consultation on PO closures and a commercially driven Royal Mail looking to down-grade Universal Service Obligation (USO) which will even affect Central London post codes!

All this when the Royal Mail last year made an operating profit of £600m and paid out ten’s of millions in dividends each year. 

We have also have institutional investors rather ” friends in the City ” buying up shares in Royal Mail since Osborne announcement. 

Ironically this including the Norges Bank – state bank of Norway and its sovereign wealth fund of Norway investing in Royal Mail when the UK government is selling it off. 

We also have up to 10,000 people employed by the Royal Mail in London and this privatization doesn’t bode well for employment standards in the Postal industry particularly after what we saw with TNT/Whistl offered their workers when entering the delivery market. The stories of mail dumping by employees of Whistl on zero hour minimum wage contracts illustrates well the connection between quality of service and terms and condition of employment.

We also have the asset stripping of the remaining major sites in London like Nine Elms and Paddington. After the undersale of Rathbone Place and the fasico of Mount Pleasant this is very real. With Rathbone Place we had Portland Estates buying it for £120m only to have recently valued at £500m. With Mount Pleasant we only have 12 per cent affordable housing after Mayoral intervention over the heads of the local councils. 

These land asset should be used to deliver housing across all tenures in the capital and not have venture capital stripping such assets. 

So this motion calls on the Mayor, to defend London’s postal service and ensure the Royal Mail land assets are used to deliver housing in London across all tenure by arguing for the government to retain its 15 per cent stake in Royal Mail and committing to protecting the USO. All this by strengthen the position of Royal Mail in the Postal Services Act. 

Now we have had the report from Airport Commission recommending expansion of Heathrow Airport, it strikes me we have to wonder if it is really better for passengers not withstanding the obvious adverse impact on the quality of life for Londoners particularly near to the airport and in West London. 

The report has not only disregarded the possibility of a network of competing airports throughout London and the rest of the UK, its recommendation would effectively recreate a monopoly at Heathrow that will suck in long haul connections from the regions of the UK and drive up prices for passengers. 

Regular air travellers in London will be accustom to using a variety of airports in London & the South East including City, Luton, Gatwick, Stansted, determining by price and easy of getting to the airport where to take their journey from home or the office. Yet we will be forced to take all our long haul air journeys via Heathrow with this recommendation from Howard Davies with very clear implications to consumer welfare. We have this already with flights to the US where clearly Heathrow has a stranglehold and pound for pound these trips are a lot more expensive than similar length trips to Asian destinations to emerging economies where at least we have many more options.

We can see some of the benefits of competition between the different London airports with low-cost long haul a real option from Gatwick on the transatlantic flights offered by Norwegian Airways using new Dreamliner aircraft going to New York for as little as £179 while consistently achieving load factors in excess of 90 per cent In October, Norwegian, will introduce a daily connection from Gatwick to  New York (JFK). Will this progress if Heathrow is given a monopoly on long haul flights by Howard Davies?  I think not. 

The irony is that the Competition Commission ( now the Competition & Market Authority ) in 2011 broke up the monopoly that BAA had over airports in London and South-East when it owed all three major ones – Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted – where for years it had underdeveloped the two smaller airports. Now it appears Heathrow Holdings PLC have got their way completely with continued expansion of Heathrow without any responsibilities for the other two, after having to sell off the others. More so as it looks like becoming a private monopoly of long haul flights if Howard Davies recommendations are accepted by the government. 

The matter needs referring back to Competition & Market Authority, for the sake of the consumer and travelling public if nothing else.  

Anyone who has watched the recent Paddington Bear movie, particularly those who live or work locally to the area where the film is set, probably noticed that the shots of Paddington station appeared to look remarkably like Marylebone station.  Indeed, it was the frontage of Marylebone station with the name Paddington slapped on to it!! After all should Paddington Bear return to the station where he arrived for the first time in London, he would be very confused. 

Why was this done? I suspect it’s because the front of Paddington station looks so lousy that the film makers used the more attractive frontage of the station from Marylebone and simply changing its name.

I trust Network Rail has taken note of this, as it doesn’t reflect well on how it manages Paddington station.  Now that the film has made the station a global landmark to which many tourists will visit, we don’t want them to be disappointed.  It’s time the front of Paddington station was given a revamp by Network Rail, in keeping with how it looks in the movie.

I’ll be writing to Network Rail to make the point.