Louise Alexander

Councillor for Weavers Ward.

Thursday, 22 March 2007

Circus on the circus

Friends of Arnold Circus put together such good events, that I wouldn't want you to miss out if you're local.

This Saturday 24th March gives you the opportunity to try out circus skills.  While on Sunday 1st April there will be trapezing, unicycling, hoola-hooping, puppets, drumming, clowns, a brass band and other performances from 2pm with a cabaret performance between 7pm and 8pm. All free on the bandstand of Arnold Circus on the Boundary Estate

Posted by: louisealexander in: General

Wednesday, 21 February 2007

Bethnal Green Road - love it or hate it?

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Does the clutter and grime on the Bethnal Green Road assault your senses or do you love the bustle, small shops and market bargains?  There was a recent consultation on this subject which ended 25th March.  Here are some of my observations.

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Posted by: louisealexander in: General

Wednesday, 10 January 2007

Conserving the Boundary Estate

defaultVery productive and constructive meeting about the Boundary Estate with the conservation team.   We managed to raise all the issues which have been bugging me and local residents for years: 

- The fabric of the buildings is deteriorating

- Heavy goods vehicles cut through the estate, some working on the East London Line

- TfL protect the width of the streets for buses

- The No.78 continues to use Arnold Circus as a turning circle and leaving engines running early in the morning

- Joy riders career through the estate

- Maintenance of courtyards is poor

- Lack of enforcement of parking controls in the courtyards

- Being on the boundary of Hackney means poor development control, rival parking restrictions and poor maintenance of the road/pavement on Boundary Street

- Saturation of Redchurch Street area with bars leading to pedestrians and traffic cutting through the estate late at night

- Plethora of estate agents boards and satellite dishes eating into the fabric of the building

- Poor quality of workmanship of the major works undertaken by the Council to the blocks

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The Boundary Estate was the first social housing in the UK, but the combination of cut-through traffic and development on all sides means that the calm estate feels "under siege".  However, a number of suggestions were made by the conservation team: 

- Apply for a grant  from the Heritage Lottery Fund

- Lobbying TfL about lorries, road width and the no.78 bus

- Investigating a Home Zone, with 20mph zones

- Changing parking restrictions to be similar to those in Hackney

- Sending out tidy-up notices to owners who are letting their property deteriorate

- Additional conservation area for Redchurch Street

If you have additional points that you'd like to add into the Conservation document on the Boundary Estate, you can find the documents and ask for response forms using this link.  The consultation is open until January 18th and the proposals from it will go to Cabinet in March.                                                    

Posted by: louisealexander in: General

Thursday, 04 January 2007

Are Conservation areas protected?

I only found out about the consultation meeting on the conservation area of Brick Lane when, snuggled up in a sofa in the Hookah Lounge nearing the end of my third holiday book, I picked up an email from a local resident and thought that I could manage to stroll down Brick Lane and onto the Brady Centre in the 15 minutes til the meeting started.

Residents would have been even more pleased to see their local Spitalfields and Banglatown Councillors, given the level of complaints about about enforcement of planning conditions, retrospective planning permission, illegal developments against which no enforcement has been taken, noise nuisances not being acted on by Environmental Health Officers, saturation of the area by bars, clubs and restaurants and other erosions of the conservation nature of Spitalfields. However, though conservation areas were mentioned in the last Cabinet report, which can be found on item 8.3 of the main document, I for one did not realise the consultation was this imminent.

The Boundary Estate, Bethnal Green Gardens and Globe Road will be consulted on next Tuesday 9th January and other conservation events in the coming 2 weeks can be found here. This is not a conclusive list - Jesus Green is among the conservation areas which will be consulted on in 2008.

Posted by: louisealexander in: General

Wednesday, 13 December 2006

Questioning the Cabinet

The ideas and policies behind the reports that are decided on by Cabinet are initially developed at the Leadership Advisory Board.  These meetings are not open to the public or other councillors, and the only way the Lib Dem Opposition in the last administration found out what went on was by putting in a Freedom of Information request for the minutes.

However, as Opposition Councillors, we have an opportunity to pose questions on Cabinet reports once they are drafted via the Overview and Scrutiny Committee.  You can find attached questions that were posed last week on some of the decisions made by Cabinet and the written replies that were submitted by the Leading Council officers.    (pre-decision_questions_051206-oscfinal.doc)  All of the questions came from me, though they were admittedly worked on both by Scrutiny officers and the Overview and Scrutiny Committee itself.  In brief:

- Will the new recycling contract continue to employ local people?

- Can the provisions for Sheltered Housing be rolled out to Elderly Persons Dwellings?

- Will there be Green or concrete open spaces in the Whitechapel, Aldgate & Bromley-by-Bow Masterplans?

- How will the Council keep the new Vehicle Removal contractor accountable?  

- Will the Idea Stores overspend be monitored by Cabinet?

- What is the cost/benefit of the Council's petitioning on the Crossrail Bill?

If we are not satisfied with the answers given, we can call the reports in for Scrutiny, but the Lib Dems have no plans to do so this month.

Tuesday, 12 December 2006

Policing the markets

defaultThis is the team who viewed the Sunday market at Brick Lane / Bethnal Green Road yesterday:  Sue is the police control on markets in the borough.  Next to her is the new Borough Commander Jerry Savill, squeezed in is Dee Doocey (Lib Dem Greater London Assembly Representative who is on the Metropolitan Police Authority), me and Paul Kinzett who is in charge of the Safer Neighbourhood Teams in the west of Tower Hamlets.  News must have gotten out that several high profile police officers were approaching because when we arrived at the hot-spot, there was nothing to be seen, other than a few traders with goods on the pavement just across the border into Hackney - no illegal goods, DVDs or cigarettes in sight.

However, the police and Dee spoke to local residents and were shown where stolen goods including bikes often are and where anti-social behaviour which can accompany the markets takes place.  I explained how until we got the market inspectors and the police working in tandem several years ago, the residents concerned were passed from the police to market inspectors to Street Services. 

Tribute has to go to the Head of Markets David Saunders who was lobbied by me and Neighbourhood Manager Carol Yarde shortly after arriving in post 3 years ago.  We brought together the departments concerned and found out that market inspectors backed up by police were effective in deterring the criminal element of the market, but that this needed to be kept up on a regular basis - one or two blitzes had no long term effect. 

Hence the meeting with the new Borough Commander to try and persuade him that allocations of police to the markets on Sundays were a Good Thing in order to promote a safer environment for those visiting the markets and residents alike.  Fingers crossed that it works...

Dee Doocey is leading a Greater London Assembly scrutiny review of markets and plans to interview some of our market inspectors as part of that.  Anyone with any comments on markets in London is welcome to feed their comments in through me and I will pass them on.

Sunday, 10 December 2006

Any future in short life housing? Yes, if parties work together.

There isn't so much direct influence that one can exert on policy as a councillor of an opposition political party.  One of the mechanisms that we can use is 'call-in' - when the Cabinet makes a decision we don't like, we can 'call it in' - that is, criticise it and propose an alternative course of action.  If the Overview and Scrutiny Committee agree our recommendations, then they will take our solution back to Cabinet who can then amend or alter their previous decision, if they are so minded. It does mean that you are very much responding to Cabinet's agenda, but sometimes it's a useful way of altering a hasty decision or poorly written report in a positive direction.

Last month the Cabinet considered "the Future of Short Life Housing", a report which looked at the various options for selling off the houses owned by the council but being run by Short Life housing cooperatives, usually managed by the people who live there.  I'm particularly sympathetic to Short Life Housing, as I used to live in some very low priced substandard accommodation in Deptford, paying £20 p.w. while I worked my way through uni was very appreciated. I was the Treasurer, but made a rather unpopular decision of paying housing benefit directly to the Coop and moved out soon after.

Anyway, it looked as though the folk in Phoenix and TUSH (that's Tower Hamlets Users of Short Life Housing to you!) might be evicted or just given a one-off offer into some possibly poor accommodation in order to achieve this.  This was particularly unfair as TUSH had been working on proposals with the Council and the Greater London Assembly for an Eco Build sustainable solution.  I was perturbed that the decisions to sell off (albeit to an RSL) would by-pass them altogether.

So I drew up a call-in which criticised the report and  proposed an alternative course of action, with a deal of input from TUSH members Felix Dawe and Chris Cook (Final_draft_of_call_in_of_the_Future_of_Short_Life_Housing.doc).  Respect added their input and the Conservatives approved it too.  It took a little more work to arrive at an alternative course of action which we all agreed on which wasn't so watered down that it was meaningless.  But we all agreed that any proposal needed to be worked on in conjunction with residents, and that the properties should not be sold on commercially and stay as social housing and that the Community Land Partnership model of funding should be examined as an alternative option.  

The surprise was this Tuesday at Overview and Scrutiny when the Committee agreed with us.  Firstly Chris Cook led a deputation by residents and explained the Community Land Partnership.  There followed a cross-party presentation, started by Respect Cllr Rania Khan whose ward was particularly effected, continued by me and with Cllr Tim Archer of the Conservatives helping me to field the Committee's questions.  The Chair Cllr Uz-zaman added some thoughts of his own and referred it to Cabinet where he presented it successfully the following night.

There was also another successful cross-party call-in at the same time, which concerned the creation of an centre for Old People with dementia. This is proposed at Shipton House in the Nags Head Estate at Weavers Ward.  It seems to me a sensible solution putting it right next door to an elderly person's facility, but it means evicting some more Short Life Housing residents who live there at the moment.

Phoenix housing has already moved out of some properties on the Nags Head Estate to vacate for residents from Clays Lane who are being moved to make way for the Olympics.  Phoenix had enough vacancies to rehouse their people internally from this, but now they are being asked to  vacate Shipton House and they do not have the rooms for those residents.  I am annoyed that although I asked for a one-off offer of alternative accommodation to be included in the call-in, this was not added, nor was it brought up at Overview and Scrutiny and Cllr Jones wouldn't let me raise the matter at Cabinet.  Not that it would necessarily have made much difference, I have been in email contact with Housing Director who is unwilling to change the Council's position.  Under the Council's constitution, I am not supposed to publicly criticise Council officers, so let me reserve the criticism for the Lead Councillor for Housing who is responsible for setting direction - Rupert Bawden - for not caring about evicting people who are at the butt end of his Cabinet's policies. 

Saturday, 09 December 2006

Progress

Work has started on the crossing at Bethnal Green Road/Brick Lane which we've been campaigning about.  I can see it out the window of the internet cafe from where I'm writing this.  What's missing from this picture is the traffic island and traffic lights which were bizarrely place in the middle of the road - look at the patch in the road to see where it was.  default

However, still no written response from the Council - they promise a written response to every petition 28 days after submission and that was 13th September.  So I don't know exactly when the public consultation that has been promised in the Richmix will take place...

More later as & when... 

Posted by: louisealexander in: Ward-related

Friday, 01 December 2006

Fraud

On Tuesday I went to a Councillors training session on the Tower Hamlets Anti-Corruption and Fraud Strategy.  Not quite as interesting as it sounds, it was led by the Internal Audit Team. 

An interesting statistic: 5% of people are dishonest, 5% of people are honest and 90% of people are opportunists!  Worrying, if applied to Councillors, in spite of the Code of Conduct which we sign.  But if the 'opportunists' are people who break the rules if given a chance, including the speed limit, it could be possible.  So the Internal Audit Team are responsible for creating systems that don't provide opportunities for Fraud, Corruption or Collusion (the latter being where there is no direct benefit received). 

More Respect Councillors turned up than all the other parties put together - notable absence of Tories (but I believe they all have high-powered jobs, too, so maybe that is their excuse).  We were particularly interested in the monitoring procedures for voluntary sector organisations, but information about that was hard to come by, as the officers were mostly talking about the procedures for the Council itself.

Given that there are a lot of rumours flying around about different sorts of corruption/collusion locally, I asked whether unsubstantiated information would be welcomed, as it might match up with things that the Team already know and help build a better picture.  We were referred in the first instance to the Monitoring Officer, Head of Legal, Isabella Freeman, but there was a reluctant admission that we could contact the internal audit team.

So I have submitted another question to Full Council along the lines of the ones that my colleague John Griffiths used to ask periodically, asking what the total cost of the Fraud investigation into organisations that the Council was funding.  Prior to the local elections, the cost to the Council had reached just over half a million pounds.  Though there was a trial over the election period which found former councillor Kumar Murshid not guilty to a much reduced charge which only concerned £4,500, I was under the impression that the investigation into Millennium Advanced Technology Training is still on-going.   We shall see...

Tuesday, 28 November 2006

Barred

Today I was supposed to go to a meeting of the Bethnal Green Area Residents Panel (BGARP).  I knew there were issues about people having to send notification that they were going to attend, so I did that in good time.  I was sent an agenda, minutes & a map.  Today I was sent an email saying that I could not attend.

Being me, I was tempted to turn up anyway.  I hate being excluded from stuff and I really understand it when others feel the same way, too.  Residents wanted Councillors present, so why wouldn't the officials let us turn up?  It all made sense when I was told that other Councillors had submitted formal enquiries about this and were told that the panel should be asked first.  I realised it might cause even more trouble if I went and other Councillors from other parties had been told not to.

It smells as though there is an attempt to stop a Respect takeover of the Area Residents Panels - I've not been to one for quite a while, but I do know that Carol Swords is chairing the BGARP.  Now, don't get me wrong, if Respect bring in new energy into running the estates and manage to get things done, then I'm all for that.  As long as it's done in a manner that doesn't exclude people on a different political wavelength or those who are not political at all.

So I went to the AGM of Oxford House instead and heard about their good works.