H&F Conservatives Say No To Advertising Standards Authority And Press Complaints Guidelines Leaving Residents To Ask Why?

Should H&F Council’s so called “newspaper” be covered by the same Press Complaints Commission guidelines that govern all other national and local newspapers in our country? Should all H&F Council’s advertising be covered by the rules set out by the Advertising Standards Authority? The answer is a definitive “No!” – or at least that was the answer given by the three Conservative members of H&F Council’s Standards Committee last night when considering a code of practice on Council publicity.

In fact, all three Conservatives councillors who sit on the committee argued that it was “party political” for me to even suggest that the Council’s "newspaper" should be subject to the Press Complaints Commission guidelines. They made a similar ill-tempered point when I suggested the Committee recommends that H&F Council’s advertising should be governed by the same rules of fairness and honesty that cover messages from McDonald's, Coca Cola, Pampers nappies or any other UK advertiser.

The Press Complaints Commission guidelines would require the taxpayer-funded Council "newspaper" to attain basic standards of professional journalism. These would also, for example, have provided those residents who wrote in to H&F News to complain about an item on the Goldhawk Road Industrial Estate Property Scheme a chance to have had at least one of their letters published instead of being refused by the Council’s Press Office. Thames Water would have been able to reply to the misleading nonsense H&F Council printed about an imaginary “giant crater” in Ravenscourt Park and Furnival Gardens and residents would have been more fully informed as a result.

The wording, voted through by a majority of independent and Opposition Standards Committee members, can hardly be seen as contentious. It reads “we consider that there is other guidance such as the Advertising Standards Authority and the Press Complaints Commission which might play a role in relation to Council Advertising and newspaper publications respectively”. I can’t understand why the three Conservatives voted against this. It makes me concerned about what they think it will stop their Council Administration from doing. It will be interesting to see if the Council's Conservative Cabinet overturns the Standards Committee's recommendations or not.

The Advertising Standards Authority rules and Press Complaints Commission guidelines are there to protect citizens. While some sufficiently wealthy and motivated people can always take legal action if they believe their Council is behaving outside the law, most people are not in the position to do that. So, the ASA and PCC will provide residents with an effective route to correcting anything they feel does not meet the most basic standards of honesty and fairness. I hope this approach is adopted by H&F Council. I will let you know what happens.

The Standards Committee meetings are open to the public and the press. The next meeting is scheduled to begin at 7.00pm on 1st April 2009.

H&F Council Makes Evening Standard's Front Page For Rubbish Pile Ups

Hammersmith and Fulham Council is on the front page of tonight's Evening Standard. The Standard has picked our borough out as one of those that have "already missed out on their weekly collection" and goes on to say that "rats will be desperately seeking food and shelter" and that "uncollected rubbish lying around on the streets will be extremely attractive to them".

The Standard makes a good point. To be fair though, it's worth noting that H&F isn't the only local authority in this position. But, it was the only London borough not to have put grit onto its streets when the snow fell because they failed to plan properly, cut essential resources and couldn't get their machinery to work. As a result, our Council are stuck in a game of catch-up, which is why they're yet to collect much of our waste and have managed to gain centre stage for bad practice in the process.

H&F Council told the Standard that they will now put on "extra shifts... so as much as possible of the waste and recycling is collected". However, they have posted a comment on their website that seems to contradict this telling residents "The new combined refuse and recycling collections that were scheduled to take place on Monday 2 and Tuesday 3 of February were suspended. This refuse and recycling will now be collected on Monday 9 and Tuesday 10 of February".

I hope they manage to get their act in order for the sake of all of us. Please email me here if you are experiencing any problems and I'll do all I can to help.

Service Cuts And Incompetence Leave Ice Traps Across Hammersmith & Fulham

Why are Hammersmith and Fulham's streets and pavements still covered in snow and ice while our neighbouring boroughs have managed to clear all their main roads and footpaths? Well, it turns out that H&F Council didn't start working on the problem until yesterday.

Considering that there have been predictions of bad weather since last Friday, it is unacceptable that there was no clearing on Sunday night when the first snow fall occurred. What's the reason for this? It's because our Council and its contractors couldn't get their gritting machines going. It was not until yesterday that the machines were fixed and set to work, but they then promptly conked out again at 7.00pm - begging the question why weren't the machines properly serviced earlier?

Beautiful as many of these scenes are, snow and ice are very dangerous when left on roads and pavements causing accident levels to rise significantly.

Heavy traffic seems to have dissipated some of the ice on the main roads. However, all the residential streets were still packed solid at midday today. And, all the borough's main footpaths were still untouched by any gritting as today's photos show.

Some civic-minded residents have taken it upon themselves to step in where H&F Council has failed. The lady in the above picture was doing her best to clear the pavements on Hammersmith Grove. She told me that she had been doing the same in Lyric Square and had been supplied with hot coffee by a local café grateful for her efforts.

Residents will recall that the street cleaning budget has been cut by £1million. This includes snow and ice removal and may prove to be a false saving if anyone injured on Hammersmith and Fulham's icy pavements decides to sue the Council for negligence.

I will report more as this story unfolds. Click on any of the pictures (taken between 11.25am and 1.10pm today) to enlarge.

Why Haven’t Hammersmith And Fulham’s Streets And Footpaths Been Gritted?

Late yesterday morning, one of my colleagues was driving back to Hammersmith from Uxbridge. He noticed that just as he crossed the borough boundary from Ealing into Hammersmith and Fulham the roads and pavements were packed with un-cleared snow and ice.

It seems that there were problems with H&F Conservatives’ newly privatised service. Firstly, as the Evening Standard points out “Hammersmith and Fulham Council only operates two gritting machines and no snow ploughs”. However, neither of these machines seemed to be working yesterday. This raises questions about whether the machines were fully functional or whether the deal H&F Conservatives struck has contractual limitations such as night time working only? I will find out and report back.

Garden Waste Service Cancelled. More Landfill, More Fly Tipping and More Uncollected Rubbish Is H&F Council’s Alternative - Fines On The Horizon

Hammersmith and Fulham’s Garden Waste Collection Service has been brought to an embarrassing end after H&F Conservatives announced it will amongst the latest round of cuts to services last Wednesday night.

The Garden Waste Collection Service became shambolic after H&F Conservatives won the 2006 local elections and introduced a new £6.25 charge for the scheme as part of their stealth tax initiative. Prior to that, charges for garden waste were included in the Council Tax payment and the scheme covered the whole borough.

By the end of that year H&F Council admitted that the scheme was embroiled in confusion when the refuse collectors proved incapable of recognising who had paid and who hadn’t - leaving garden waste bags scattered or uncollected across Hammersmith, Fulham and Shepherds Bush. Thousands of residents ceased to use the scheme. H&F Conservatives then put the prices up to £7.50 and complaints kept pouring in.

Then last year, the Conservatives said they would review the scheme but instead started to consult on a new £25 charge. The public outcry continued and in a surprise move, at last Wednesday night’s Council meeting, the Tories attached a last-minute amendment to another Council Motion which admitted they were going to give up trying to provide any sort of garden waste collection service.

Many residents are asking what are they now expected to do with their organic garden rubbish? The Council’s communal composting is also suspended meaning that the grass cuttings, branches and other material will now either be put out with other household waste and taken to landfill sites or go uncollected. Sources confirm that the borough’s Conservative Councillors are considering £100 fines for residents who put their garden waste into normal household rubbish. Many people will simply dump their garden rubbish onto the streets out of frustration or as an act of civil disobedience - making our streets even filthier.

Expect to read more about this as the Council encounters extra landfill taxes and falls even further behind on its recycling rates. Please email me here if you experience problems following this latest cut to the service and need my help.

Local Gov Minister Comes To See H&F Conservatives' Council Service Cuts & Stealth Taxes For Himself

In the spring of 2006, the Rt Hon John Healey MP visited Hammersmith to see how the Labour Administration’s extra investment into policing had produced the biggest falls in crime in London.

That May, the Conservatives took control of H&F Council following the local elections. Then - having promised residents “zero tolerance” on crime during the campaign – the Conservatives promptly reversed their position, removed all police funding from the Hammersmith team and cut police numbers in neighbourhoods with the highest crime. Now our borough’s crime figures languish behind Lambeth, Waltham Forest and a host of other London boroughs with crime up significantly in some wards. That's one reason why H&F Labour pledge that, if we form the next Administration in 2010, we will increase police numbers and give the five wards with the highest crime 24/7 police Task Squads.

John Healey is now the Minister for Local Government. I took him around the borough to see the harm the reductions in services and new stealth taxes are causing local people. John saw the boarded up Castle Youth Club (see pic left). This had provided a wide range of facilities to local young people but the Conservatives closed it down and sold it off. It is now set to become luxury flats. He saw Hurlingham Park which is currently still fenced off and - where children once played - there are mechanical diggers preparing for an exclusive polo tournament after the Tories hired out the local green space to an event organiser. I told John how the Tories are using new stealth taxes to put cost up to local residents. There are 578 of these which include the new garden waste charge introduced after the elections and set to be hiked up to £25 this summer.

We also popped in on Michael Templar’s birthday party at Wentworth Court Sheltered Housing scheme. Michael is one of the tenants’ forum reps and around forty residents of pensionable age turned out to take part in the celebrations. John took time to chat with all of the elderly residents. Many took the opportunity to tell him of their fears over the Council’s plans to remove the vital sheltered housing wardens.

Oddly, H&F Council instructed a member of their press office to go to the birthday party and insisted that he was actually allowed into the room were the celebrations were happening. He sat there and studiously took notes of everything everyone said. When I asked him what he was doing there he said he was “only following orders”. I'm told that the orders came directly from the Tory Leader of the Council. I cannot ever recall anything like this happening before and conclude that this is another instance of H&F Council’s PRAVDA style approach to their press operation.

Slaughter Resigns From Government To Campaign Against Heathrow Plans

Andrew Slaughter MP, Labour's parliamentary spokesperson for the new Hammersmith constituency, today resigned from his Government position as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Lord Malloch-Brown over his opposition to the expansion of Heathrow Airport.

Earlier this month Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon announced that BAA would be permitted to build a third runway at Heathrow with work planned to begin in 2017. Andy Slaughter has been a prominent opponent of the new runway and felt he was unable to support the Government on the issue. Last November Mr. Slaughter led a deputation of Labour MPs to meet the Prime Minister and subsequently spoke in the Commons debate on Heathrow. Read more here:

Cameron Turns A Blind Eye As H&F Conservatives Add £547 To Meals On Wheels Bills – The Cruellest Stealth Tax Of All

Interviewed in this week’s Gazette, Dawn Stephenson, director of Age Concern Hammersmith and Fulham, tells how H&F Conservatives’ £547 hike in meals on wheels charges is likely to have devastating consequences. She told Rebecca Kent “You hear about elderly people who die in their homes, but no-one visits them for weeks. That daily contact is really, really critical and if the service is reduced or cut altogether that would be just tragic”.

This is the third year in a row that prices for meals on wheels have risen – bringing the total increases to 60 per cent during that period.

On 20th March 2007, I actually wrote to David Cameron MP, the Leader of the Conservative Party, to alert him to the controversy of our local Tory Administration targeting this vulnerable group of people. In my letter, I explained “As you know, meals-on-wheels are provided to some of the poorest elderly and disabled people in our community. Many people believe that it is wrong to ask these people to pay so much more to eat.” Cameron didn’t even bother to reply.

But that was year one. In this year's 2009/10 budget our Conservatives have added another £182 to meals on wheels to bills bringing the total hikes to £547 since 2007. It therefore seems that, at the very least, Mr. Cameron has been content to look the other way while this attack on Hammersmith and Fulham’s elderly, sick and disabled residents is allowed to continue.

There are three aspects to the Tories’ cuts to the meals on wheels service:

1. The new and highly dubious practice of telephoning elderly residents up and interviewing them to see if they still qualify for the service. Readers will recall the anxiety of one family when the Council cancelled the service for a 79 year old lady who suffers from dementia following such an interview, as reported here.
2. Hiking prices up in the hope that this tax will encourage the numbers of users to drop off and stop using the service.
3. Force people to switch to microwave food deliveries instead.

Back in 2007, I asked a senior finance official what rationale lay behind this new approach. She said that “the Administration wants to make more money from this service”. The Council has a £185m budget and this cut will save £100k. I wrote to H&F Conservatives and suggested that I’d be happy to advise them where else they could make this saving instead. They wrote back to say they were “happy with the increases”.

H&F Council’s Tory Administration spends millions of pounds on propaganda and other wasteful follies. I think most reasonable people will think that it would be better to cut back the press operation, or shut down H&F Council’s PRAVDA styled spin-sheet instead of hiking up these charges.

If you or anyone you know is affected by this cut, please email me here and I will do all I can to help.

Local Labour Round-up

Camden’s Cllr. Theo Blackwell has had the excellent idea of setting up a local Labour blog round-up. Different people, active in their communities, will take turns to summarise some of the issues going on with other councils and so give readers an opportunity to see what’s happening elsewhere. It's my turn this month.

This all coincides with Ken Livingstone’s launch of Progressive London. That initiative has attracted a breadth of political support and Progressive London will be holding it’s first Conference this Saturday.

I think it's right that we should start with Theo as this was all his idea. Here he demonstrates that those residents who believed they were all alone, in their frustrating dealings with their local council, are not - as Camden offers these unusual benchmarks. And, it seems that H&F Council isn't the only one handing out handing out inflation busting amounts of tax payers' cash to political cronies. Camden has been similarly generous too.

Islington Councillors Catherine West and Richard Watts are proposing to introduce free school meals for all children under the age of 11. A welcome bonus in these tough economic times. They plan to do it by raising the extra funds by cutting waste - such as spending on glossy PR. This is something H&F’s residents may want to ponder when viewing their Council's PRAVDA styled propaganda sheet.

Putney’s Stuart King suggests that Wandsworth Tories’ 27 per cent increase for parking permit charges is indicative of the stealth tax approach any future government led by David Cameron would take.

Over in Hackney, Cllr. Luke Akehurst tells how his borough has managed to invest in new front line services and deliver real terms reductions in Council Tax without the fantastic cuts in essential services or the 578 stealth taxes introduced into our borough by H&F Conservatives.

John Gray raises concerns about Boris' probity saying that he ceases to be funny when - putting aside the rights or wrongs of Damien Green’s arrest - he seems to have used information gleaned because of his Mayoral position to tip off his Tory colleagues of an impending police investigation.

And finally, Cllr. Kerron Cross gives an insight, that all involved in politics will recognize, when he takes an amusing slant on his recent invite to spend Valentine’s Day showing his "love for the good people of Poplar" by campaigning for Jim Fitzpatrick MP - the first rate Member of Parliament for Poplar and Canning Town.

If you're active in your community and have a local story from anywhere around the country that fits this brief then please email us by clicking here.

Hope

As the Chicago Tribune reports: "On the day before the Inauguration, President Obama observed the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, by participating in a day of service during which he painted a wall at a temporary shelter in Washington D.C. for the homeless and runaway youth".

Here are some pictures which capture just a few of the moments leading up to this historic Presidency: