Hounslow Council’s Heathrow community consultation

This morning Hounslow Council’s launched its community consultation to Make Some Noise Over Heathrow. It will see a questionnaire sent to every one of the borough’s 100,000 households, inviting residents to have their say. It is the biggest consultation ever carried out in the borough.

 Difference between Hounslow approach and Richmond and Hillingdon

Richmond and Hillingdon Councils have both committed to a 2-question referendum on which voters can voice their support for expanding Heathrow airport and seeing an increase in flight numbers. The result will be politically and legally binding on both authorities.

The Hounslow questionnaire also contains the two questions that are being asked by Richmond and Hillingdon to ensure that residents across West London are being asked to voice their thoughts on the same issues.

A community engagement exercise was thought to be a more flexible approach and has allowed Hounslow Council to create a questionnaire with a total of 11 questions. This provides an opportunity for a more in-depth engagement with community opinion and allows the Council to ask questions on the importance of Heathrow to the local economy, seek views on transport improvements and address noise and air quality issues as well the issue of night flights.

 The community engagement exercise will run over a four-week period. This will enable the Council to campaign for a longer period of time, which will hopefully result in a higher response rate thereby increasing the validity of the overall results.

 By covering a wide-range of issues relating to Heathrow, Hounslow Council also hopes to galvanise public support for its position on noise, air quality and night flights.

 Community events in libraries and high streets

 In order to support the Heathrow consultation exercise, a series of roadshows will visit each of the borough’s eleven libraries between 15 April and 16 May, providing an opportunity for residents to get additional copies of the questionnaire and ask any questions around the issue of further expansion at the airport.  The main purpose is to increase participation in the consultation.

Staff will be on hand to proactively ask residents if they have received the consultation document through the door, if they have completed the questionnaire online, or if they would like more hard copies of the document for themselves, family or friends, in order to increase participation.

This exercise by Hounslow will be quantitavely and qualitavely very different from the Richmond & Hillingdon referendum and will usefully produce information about the how local residents feel the trade-off between job and quality of life issues over Heathrow should be managed rather then a yes or no approach. I look forward to seeing Hounslow submitting their data to the Davies Commission.

Lynton Crosby creates headlines with his views

The Evening Standard reported on Friday that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson will today be taking Lynton Crosby on his Gulf State trade mission. Incredibly he’s the political strategist employed by the Tories (both Johnson & Cameron) known for his “f….ing Muslim” views on election campaigns. These views were exposed by the Mail on Sunday in its 17th of November 2012 edition, as shown above.

You would think given his ‘f….ing Muslim’ views he would know that the Gulf states are all Muslim kingdoms! Given these comments, he should at least acknowledge them and apologise for them before he sets foot on the plane on Sunday to the Gulf states. As l am not sure how Gulf States will respond to someone who holds these views particularly on their soil.

The Mayor with his political strategist Lynton Crosby

Twin Towers on Chelsea Barracks lying empty still!

Last year, the Mayor responded to an interesting question about the number of potential homes in London with planning permission but which are currently in ”stalled” developments.  The figure was quite startling – 170,000 stalled developments!  This number, if built, would help alleviate the chronic shortage of homes in the capital, helping to accommodate homeless families; families needing to move into larger properties and the plethora of Londoners waiting to take their first step into owner occupation.

Yet while the national focus is on how to incentivise developers to get on and build, we should not underestimate the part which Land Valuation Tax (LVT) could play in stopping developers sitting on land banks.  The Economist made point of this in its editorial on the 9th March where it said:

“………………. It would be much better to tax the land value: that would make hoarding expensive and force owners to sell to someone who can use the site. Once in use, the site value and the tax would rise—creating a virtuous circle, as the revenues pay for better infrastructure, making land more valuable.”

The New Statesman also articulated the problem in a recent article about “Why all progressives should support land value tax”.  It said:

“Landowners, including homeowners, are freeloaders on a gigantic scale. The total value of the housing stock in the UK was £1.3trn in 1990. With only inflation it would now be worth £2trn, but instead its current value is over £4trn. This £2trn increase above inflation has come through a rise in the value of land itself, not through new buildings; comparatively few houses have been built in the last two decades. Landowners have gained £100bn yearly on average from a rise in land values. As Churchill might have said, never in the field of human endeavour has so great a reward been given for so little effort.”……………

A case in point is Chelsea Barracks (a potential £3 billion proposal) in the City of Westminster, on the border of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. This major site in Central London has now been lying empty for probably the best part of a decade, if not more, with no sign of movement.  The original proposal included about 50% affordable housing (before the intervention of Prince Charles).   The local council attempted to find out what the owners were doing with the site and wanted to help move it on recently when it warned the owners “start building or sell-up” , but without much success.   Stories like this probably account for a number of stalled sites across Greater London.  And soon, we are to get another barracks on the market, Hyde Park in Knightsbridge.  Will this also lie empty for years before it gets developed? LVT is a measure which could catalyse developers into utilising land which the capital desperately needs to house its growing population.

Aid isn’t always what its cut out to be!

We are told it’s quite commendable that the UK government is maintaining its aid commitment of 0.7 per cent of gross national income (GNI)  in these auster times amongst all the developed countries in the world but the reality is aid has always been part of foreign policy tools of a country as the letter from Lord Malloch-Brown in FT dated the 3rd of April, reveals so starkly. Here he clearly states the pay-off of British aid in terms of diplomatic influence. So lets not get too starry eyed about it as some do about achieving the 0.7 per cent target.

The reality anyway though is the $50 billion annual of official assistance globally is dwarfed by flows of remittances or money transfers sent by migrants around the world to their various ancestral homes, by almost tenfold. The latest conservative estimates put it at some $ 400 billion by the  World Bank in 2012 . A flow that is given very little attention in developed world particularly amongst think tanks and NGOs.

Interestingly the global financial crisis of 2008/09 has not sent migrant workers streaming back home, despite worsening employment prsopect and anti-immigration rhetoric in some destination countries. Such international migration has enormous implications for growth and welfare in both origin and destination countries. An important benefit to developing countries is the receipt of remittances or transfers from income earned by overseas emigrants. Ask any Finance Minister in the developing world and he will tell this loud and clearly.

So thanks to Lord Mark Malloch-Brown for giving us a reality check about what aid is really about and lets put more of a focus on making better use of these huge remittance flows into the developing world in the first place.

Please find the letter published in the FT on its letter page for the 8th of April 2012

Having spent the Easter break reading the long awaited Aviation Policy Framework (APF), my initial thoughts are that it is not as encouraging as one would have hoped for in environmental terms given the initial draft consulted upon last year. 

I should have suspected the worst as it was released just before the Easter break by the Department of Transport (DoT) released late one friday afternoon. Ideal time for it not to draw too much attention. During the consultation the right questions were being asked and thus the London Assembly Health & Environment Committee responded on environmental concerns like noise and air pollution and some governance issues on behalf of Londoners.

In term of noise, the decision to retain the 57Leq contour is frustrating as is the assertion that compensation should be paid only for a 3dB increase in noise when the comparable level for road schemes is 1dB.

In regard to air quality, the document contributes nothing concrete to helping solve the problem and is extremely disappointing in this area. The Government appear to be passing the buck to Davies who has pledged to assess all proposals for new capacity in terms of their air quality impact. 

All this confirms to me that the APF has given the Davies Commission a free rein over environmental issues, illustrating well how ministerial changes do matter. When both Justine Greening MP  & Theresa Villiers MP were at DoT covering aviation at least both were asking the right questions and we saw that clearly within the consultation document. After this episode I’ve come to the view now that environmental concerns and responsibilities in the transport arena should be taken out of the DoT and put into one of the environmental ministries asap. Otherwise the issues won’t get the attention merited of them by Londoners.

Last night l was shocking informed of the above facebook page that had been put up clearly by Bengali Islamists against alleged atheists in London. Nastik is the Bengali for atheist. Whatever you may think of the politics of Bangladesh at the moment particularly with the war crime trials, nobody should be making threats to other individuals with whom you may disagree with on such matters particularly when British residents in the UK are involved.

jahadist with this list will think it is their Jihadi duty to annihilate those listed as atheist.  Those who have put the page up have thus  endangered the individual above lives. And while the page has now been put down, do not think the danger is over as events over in Dhaka have yet to come to their end game. Thats why l have approached the Met to offer these individuals and their families protection.

LAS control centre in Waterloo

With all the sweeping charges in the NHS in London now upon us, spare a thought for the London Ambulance Service (LAS) which after the Met deals with the most emergency 999 calls in London if not the country with over a 1.5 million annually.

The LAS has an annual budget £283 million employing about 5,000 people. As a result of the Nicholson challenge it needs to make a saving of 53 million pounds over five years. That is a 19 per cent reduction by 2015/16 compared to 2011/12 with as a result plans now to cut 890 jobs over five years including 560 frontline jobs. This at a time when it dealt with 1.6 million calls in 2011 with calls rising annually by 3 per cent annually and urgent calls rising fastest at 14 per cent in 2012.

Furthermore we have a situation where potentially  London could lose up to 8 A&E departments out of 31 across Greater London. In this scenario people are expecting the LAS to pick up the slack, but with even fewer trained staff to do this they simply don’t have the capacity to do it and its only going to get worse. Compounding this situation is our growing and ageing population will undoubtedly put increasing pressure on A&E waiting times, as London’s population races from 8.17m now to 9m by 2020.

If we lose A&E departments we need more ambulances, not fewer. As ambulances are often the first point of contact for emergency patients, A&E department closures will impact on the LAS workload, with fewer A&E departments clearing meaning longer journey times to reach hospital and thus increases to both blue light journeys and non emergency trips. And fewer paramedics mean longer response times for an ambulance to reach the emergency. Not surprisingly in January 2013 the Care Quality Commission reported that the LAS has dangerously low levels of staff and sometimes ill-equipped vehicles.

No-one is appears to be looking at the combined impact of A&E closures and simultaneous ambulance cuts. Over the winter period already the LAS was given an extra £6m to help category A responses to reach 79% within 8 minutes in January when the target is 75 per cent. So London’s emergency patients are being squeezed in a pincer movement of healthcare cuts and lives could be put at risk. The warming signs already there for all to note, so lets not forget the LAS when saving London’s emergency services.

 A fulerl version of this blog has been printed in this week Forum column in the West End Extra