Weekly Update From Councillor Guy Lambert

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Puts on his protective gear and investigates environmental crime, aka flytipping

A packed house at the Pilot including Ruth Cadbury, Steve Curran, Kath Dunne, Sam Hearn (are we converting him?) and lots of local celebs to hear Will Norman, the Walking and Cycling Commissioner. A meeting report far better than I could manage is here https://hounslowcycling.org/will-norman-meeting-report/.

Fortunately this was held in the back room because my experience of the Pilot, being a touch Mutt and Jeff, is that I can never hear any conversations in the main pub area above the general sound of braying estate agents.

Friday was meeting free, other than I had arranged to give a lift to a local homeless person into Hounslow House, where we had arranged officers to be ready to help them out. Sadly. When it came to it, the homeless person involved did not wish to go with me, on the grounds that the council would not do anything helpful. It’s worth making clear that the council will always attempt to engage with anyone sleeping rough and will in almost every circumstance offer them emergency accommodation, either via their own services or via a charity partner, usually St Mungo’s. This homeless person has not asked for help from Hounslow and seems to be unwilling to do so, and has also refused help from outreach workers from St Mungo’s. If the homeless person can show they have local links, they will be offered some kind of long term accommodation and other support – and I don’t mean Bed and Breakfast, where Hounslow is proud of it’s record of using this unsatisfactory accommodation only very sparingly, and usually when there is an emergency. If you encounter someone sleeping rough, report it on Streetlink here or via their app. The homeless ‘horse’ will be taken to water and experience tells us they will eventually drink, but they often need persuading over a long period.

Saturday morning it’s the launch of Sadiq Khan’s mayoral campaign, so I hie to the Labour office on Chiswick High Road. Karen Buck MP – who is leading Sadiq’s campaign – gives a short speech to the assembled multitude (well, there were about 20 of us) as does Ruth Cadbury, then I head off to do a bit of door knocking near Sainsbury’s. I ask to be let in to a block of flats and somebody says over the intercom something unintelligible so I push the door to see if it opens. It does, so I knock on the door of the flat I just talked to. Young fellow comes to the door in pyjama bottoms only and asks me who let me in . I said I thought he did. He disagreed and told me never to darken his door again. When outside, a window opened, and he told me if he ever sees me again he’ll call the cops. This is my first experience of this in years of canvassing though I remember last mayoral campaign somebody telling me he wouldn’t vote for Sadiq as he is (in his opinion) a terrorist and a kiddy-fiddler. Takes all sorts. Anyway, I hope Mr Chiswick has recovered from the trauma of waking up to see my ugly mug. It was about noon but the youngsters of today…

Monday morning I wake at 6 and whip Pegasus from his sleep because he has to take me to the very lovely Kingsley Road in Hounslow, where we are doing a flytipping event. It is a busy and crowded street with shops and restaurants with flats above on one side, and terraced houses, many in multiple occupation, on the other. On Monday morning there are flytips everywhere, so our crew comprises council officers from the recycling team (one of them leading) supported by Hounslow Highways, Recycle360, Enforcement officers and ward councillors Pritam and Ajmer Grewal as well as yours truly. Clad in gloves, masks and in some cases Hi-vis, we dig into bags (I believe about 70 in all) looking for evidence of whodunnit.

Many bits of paper with names and addresses are bagged up and put in our ‘sin box’ and I was particularly pleased to find a torn fragment in one bag that we matched with another from another bag to make an address. I felt like George Smiley matching postcards. Meanwhile the enforcement guys were knocking on doors of the houses telling them to clean up their front ‘garden’ area or else, and Hounslow Highways were making sure all the businesses have a waste contract, as they must do by law. We left various piles with ‘Environmental Crime Under Investigation’ tape and fines will follow for those we have identified.

I noticed this van and tweeted that it was the Yorkshire branch of Recycle360 ee-cycle. I had an indignant question about why was Recycle360 working in Yorkshire. I suspect somebody in Hounslow has a very lovely R adorning their mirror, wall or whatever.

On Tuesday morning I had my regular catchup with the Chair and MD of Coalo, our housing maintenance subsidiary. All going well and they are commencing serious bids for work for other councils and external bodies.
Next is a meeting with our new director of Communications. He’s come from Hackney with a background as a journalist. I’m hoping he can help improve our communications to the public and also assist with our efforts to improve public engagement.

Then it’s a meeting about something that I’m quite excited about, our Environment Champions programme. I’m not going to say much about it because we are planning to launch in a few weeks, subject to various approvals, but a young graduate trainee has done a really impressive job of pulling this together, consulting with councils around London and the whole country and building something that I think will make a big difference to our Borough.

In the evening, it’s Chiswick Town Hall. Hounslow Highways are presenting to the Chiswick Area Forum and Steve Curran is presenting the council budget because Shantanu Rajawat – the lead member for Finance, who would normally do this -  is off in Antwerp, probably organising a jewel heist.
Hounslow Highways do a very good presentation and actually come in for some praise and thanks from the assembled Chiswick councillors. They do a very decent job on most things and my job is to try and extend that to everything: I believe we’re making progress, and relationships are good.
Steve presents the budget: it’s not his fault that the numbers are hard to understand, the way local government finance works is incredibly complicated. Anyway, nobody’s really interested in understanding, preferring a bit of political Knockabout. The Horror of Homefields (Cllr Gerald McGregor) comes out with his usual polemic. It feels like Frank Sinatra’s final farewell tour – all the old favourites trotted out for his adoring audience (himself) but even he seems to be losing enthusiasm these days. You can’t fault Ron Mushiso for enthusiasm, though it’s not always easy to decipher what he’s on about beyond ‘Labour Bad’. Genghis Todd is uncharacteristically quiet, not wheeling out his usual forensic questions  (“the third line of paragraph 6.27 on page 142 seems to conflict with what Councillor Dennison predicted would happen in the paper presented to Borough Council in August 2014 – can you explain?”). I suppose this is because he is in the chair.

Wednesday morning I’m in Green Dragon Lane looking at the trees. No, I’m not having a dreamy morning, but seeing what we can do to save some of the trees that have been identified to be cut down to make way for a footpath down the South side of the road. The answer seems to be that some of them cannot be saved but some others can be by modest adjustments to the footway width etc and yet more may be OK, subject to some investigation of how their root systems work underground. Each one that goes will be replaced by two new ones, but people are rightly unhappy about losing mature trees. I urge that the replacements should be more than mere saplings and this is agreed, though nobody pretends they will be the same as those going for a few years yet.

Then it’s Hounslow House and the Environment Director and I go on our walkabout, in this case heading up the Bath Road to Hounslow west. This road has had bad problems with fly tipping, litter etc and I think we are both pleasantly surprised that, whilst still far from perfect, it is noticeably cleaner than it was say a year ago. We do find one enormous flytip. This is rather neat as it has been arranged behind a low railing  and the majority is black bags all neatly sealed up with grey gorilla tape. Looks very industrial to us, and we set off the sleuths to try and identify the perpetrator.

In the afternoon a long meeting with the Chair and MD of Lampton 360 group. New brooms are sweeping nicely and there’s plenty to do in the four operating companies. This meeting is about long term strategy and also about short/mid term business plans for each of the businesses, in preparation for March cabinet. We have a lively discussion about each business and seem to find ourselves violently agreeing, plus it feels like we have a good partnership developing where we can have open discussions and a willingness to learn from each other.

I can’t get to the Ferry Quays AGM because I have to attend the Isleworth and Brentford Area Forum in the evening, at West Thames College. A big agenda featuring the budget (again, this time with Shantanu - back with his alleged (by me) bag of loot) and controversy in the shape of the cycle lane between Twickenham and Syon Park, via South Street in Isleworth.
Everybody professes to be in favour of cycle infrastructure in principle, but each time we try to introduce it, there is local opposition. For this scheme, the original consultation showed people mostly in favour but some concerns about South Street. So the traffic engineers improved the South Street design  but a much lower number of respondents then said they didn’t want the lane (or wanted the engineers to have another go). There comes a  time when these things have to move forward. We have 9000 people dying from pollution every year in London and carbon emissions from transport are far and away our major global heating contributor. I point out that child road deaths in The Netherlands have fallen from over 400 annually before they fell in love with bikes to 14, and that the point of cycle lanes like this is not really for sleek speed merchants like me and Steve Curran (laughter) but for kids going to school or people of all ages going to the shops etc. Anyway, the vote is 8-3 in favour, so the cycle lane will go ahead, subject to statutory consultation.
At the end, there are a couple or petitions, one about our leisure centres and asking for standards to be radically improved, and one about a skatepark in Brentford. I’d love to make this happen, but not sure where we could put it, nor where the money would come from. Anyway, I commit to work with the leisure team and with Brentford and Syon councillors to see if we can get something done. A man from Ealing Skate parks was there and he invited us to go and look at the two they have recently created. I’ll certainly do that, and some (at least) of my colleagues are keen too.
I noticed I was coughing well last evening and woke up in the night with a sore throat so I’m housebound today and will miss the Lampton360 board meeting and Planning this evening. Up and at ‘em in the morning, I hope.

 

 

Cllr Guy Lambert

February 7, 2020