I sat watching Barack Obama with the same sense of expectation, hope and trepidation as millions of people around the world whilst he fluffed his inauguration oath and delivered a speech that was powerful in its oratory but still short in delivering a roadmap to deliver the promised change.
However, this is not what moved me to comment on a subject that is way out of my remit in "Making Carshalton Central". Instead, it was the desperation of Denis McShane, the Labour MP who jumped on Obama fever to issue a press release to the Guardian explaining that Labour MPs were hard done by because Tories called a vote about the European response to the small matter of global economic meltdown.
Feeling pretty pleased with himself, he has obviously forgotten that: 1. MPs are elected to Parliament to debate, vote and legislate, not watch TV. 2. There might have been one, two or a thousand of other opportunities to watch one of the most significant inauguration ceremonies in the short history of the United States of America. 3. His 'John Lewis' list must extend to a video recorder.
Simple message to Dennis McShane MP: stop wondering why politicians are as popular as bankers (estate agents are starting to get the sympathy vote) and get a grip.
There are a few changes for this corner of Carshalton. Click on the links to see the details.
Firstly a crossing on Westmead Corner is welcome to allow children attending Camden Junior School and people going to the shops on the parade to cross a busy road safely.
Then the two speed humps either side of the railway bridge on Shorts Road are being changed to wider road tables , which are the brick topped speed humps. These are to create convenient crossing points for the school and the alleyway.
The final change, the remodelling of the junction of Alma Road with Shorts Road, has been changed as a result of residents' concerns. Some have lived on this corner for over thirty years, know the area intimately and have to live with the consequences of any change. Therefore, I am pleased that the change seems to have been received better than the first drawing. As ever, not everyone will get what they want but it is crucial that the Council listen and respond. The main concern was that larger vehicles already use the entrance to St Philomena's to help manoeuvre around the corner that is made tighter by school parking. If the shopping parade on Carshalton Road is redeveloped as planned, construction workers may be using this route to get to the site so it is important to get this right.
I'll be going back to those residents to make sure that the Council have got it right this time. In the meantime, you can see the responses to the Consultation by road, here.
STEPS Zone 17 covers the roads to the North East of our ward. You can see the proposals for Cambridge Road and Banstead Road here.
Cross hatched road markings will be painted in the middle of Cambridge Road. I am told that this helps with lane discipline by suggesting that cars should only enter the hatched area if safe to do so. This road is a bus route and has a lot of parked cars by the BP garage.
At the other end, the junction with Banstead Road has been a longstanding problem. STOP markings and a 30mph circle will be painted onto the road surface. In Banstead Road, clearer road signs, indicating the existence of this side turning will replace the signs that only show a bend in the road. In a second phase of work, yellow lines will be considered for this junction. It was proposed that speed bumps were installed in Banstead Road, either side of the junction with Cambridge Road but all three councillors have opposed this.
It's not often that you see Colston Avenue as clear as this these days. The photo on the right was taken on Saturday lunchtime and shows how different the road is when commuters are not filling the road. Usually cars have to crawl through the middle with drivers surging ahead to fill gaps when one appears. The pinch points become punch points, stretching a hundred yards rather than the short width of the chicane.
Whisper it quietly, but we might have got a resolution. As I reported back in December, the results from the Controlled Parking Zone came back and were quite clearly against but Colston Avenue has not been forgotten. Officers have worked on a plan to remove the vast majority of parking on the road, leaving just the pavement parking and a small number of bays on the road. This will free up the road space to help the flow of cars. The pinch points will remain to ensure that the increased flow does not translate to excessive speed. Consideration has been given to adding signs to prioritise one direction over the other. However, there is a danger that this gives drivers a false sense of security, making them over-confident and lunging for the opening ahead of oncoming vehicles. Traffic flow will be monitored before further consideration is given to this change.
There are two further projects that affect Colston Avenue. A scheme to make walking to school safer for pupils at Camden Junior School has already resulted in a "tactile paving" crossing near the West Street Junction and as part of a wider scheme with the catchy title of STEPS Zone 19, a zebra crossing has been approved to be built on Westmead Corner and Colston Avenue will have a 20mph speed limit.
Colston Avenue has always been something of a pet project of mine. The original traffic calming scheme was pushed through as a political decision by a previous councillor for the area and Leader of the Council against the advice of officers. I'm only too pleased to sign off on a scheme that should correct this long-standing and costly mistake. Residents have asked me to deal with this as a priority for some six years now and I am glad to be able to go back to them with an answer. Having said that, not everyone will get what they want. Some wanted parking permits, others wanted the pinch points removed entirely. At least we have got something that should help. Let's see how it goes and come back to it if there are any further issues.
I had four consecutive meetings at the Council offices yesterday about a variety of traffic schemes proposed for Carshalton. The results were positive.
Residential roads across the Borough are divided up into areas known as Strategic Traffic & Environmental Problem Studies or STEPS zones for short. STEPS zone 19 includes Salisbury, Blakehall and Carshalton Park Road and the roads around the perimeter of Carshalton Park. It reaches across to Manor Road in Wallington.
All residents received a letter from the Council asking if they considered their road to be a rat-run, whether it should be made into a 20mph zone and if any traffic calming should be considered. 20% of residents replied with a mixed bag of replies. In order to make sense of them, the area was broken down into four bite-size chunks.
Residents around Blakehall Road were split, with Carshalton Park Road identified as the biggest rat-run. However, neither the level of responses or the accident data merited the need for speed bumps etc. I did insist that attention was given to sightlines on the junctions. There are a lot of children that go up to Stanley Park Infants and Juniors along that route. The corner of Blakehall and Salisbury is dreadful with vans and cars blocking the view for turning traffic and the corners near Glebe Road are similar. There are several occasions when traffic is forced into the path of oncoming traffic. I know that parking is getting more difficult in that area having seen more cars in twenty years that I have lived here, but I would be supportive of yellow lines on the corners to ease this problem.
Residents around the Park did not generally see their road as a cut through and so it was easy to decide to leave well alone. The other two smaller areas are not in my ward and were less clear cut. Residents in Grosvenor Avenue and Grosvenor Road were keener on slowing the traffic that speeds up the straight road, though there have been no accidents along Grosvenor Avenue and only one on the kink in Grosvenor Road. Accidents have occured as one might expect, at the junction with Park Lane. The area in Wallington has not been resolved yet as the ward councillors are meeting with officers this week.
Update: View the results broken down by road here.
For sometime people have been bemoaning the fact that Sutton High Street struggles to compete with the size of Croydon and the more upmarket Kingston and Epsom for shopping. With little direction for so many years, major retailers saw little benefit in coming to Sutton.
Before Christmas, I thought that it was a sign of the times that a Pound shop could be undercut by a "99p" shop. The pictures opposite show the two stores proudly sitting as bookends at the top and bottom of the High Street respectively.
Now, however, a Pound shop in Poole has closed down due to the competition from a 99p store that recently opened opposite. There are plenty of vacant shops in Sutton. Anyone fancy opening a lucrative 98p store? I'll nip down to the bank and get a few bags of 2p pieces for change.
How many near-misses must there have been along the roads of London over the last month or two with the advent of these roadside billboards?
It screams out the bait as if Brian Blessed had been the copywriter but the product that it is marketing is hidden in the lurid colours and the sheer size of the provocative text of the question.
According to the Sunday Telegraph, they have been removed voluntarily by the firm behind the advertising campaign after the Advertising Standards Authority dithered following a string of complaints. I don't consider myself prudish but the posters that were on Beddington Lane and Carshalton Road were ugly and just daft, playing on a base schoolboy sense of titillation. As do most people, I get enough spam in my inbox about sex, viagra and plenty of other things, I really don't need it while I'm away from my emails for a while relaxing in the traffic on the red route. I could say that it gets up my nose, but since this product is a nasal spray that it is claimed cures impotency, I'll rely on a judgemental shake of the head.
Anyway, the people who I feel sorry for are those who live opposite the posters who must have to look out of their bedroom windows everyday before they go to bed and when they get up to have the same question being posed of them. I'm not sure if Brian Blessed has considered retraining as an Agony Aunt.
I looked at the money that my daughter received for a Christmas present and wondered how long it would be before my pay packet looked the same.
Gordon Brown's announcement that he is to create 100,000 new jobs looks suspiciously like another measure to be seen to be doing something rather than one that will have any meaningful or lasting effect.
2009 is going to be a tough year for the economy. Locally, we need to work closely with Sutton businesses and large employers to see what more we can do as an authority rather than just wringing our hands. Pushing through measures that help large national companies who provide many of the Council's services won't help local businesses. We need to ensure that we are fully aware of what local residents and local businesses want from us before acting. Giving them a greater voice to speak to councillors and question exisiting policies will be a good start.
We called in to debate at Full Council, the decision to increase spending on communications by another 50% hidden away in the small print of the new contract for Westminster Council to provide our service. Because this is now a shared service between two local authorities, normal rules for tendering do not apply.
Westminster are acknowledged as the best at what they do. We know that it is vital for any Council to inform residents and to hear back from them. However, this does not mean that contracts can be given out, unchecked by politicians. This was due to be agreed by a mechanism called a Delegated Decision Notice (DDN) which is usually reserved for smaller decisions that have to be made in a hurry. THe DDN is circulated to councillors and if no-one calls it in, an officer can give the go-ahead.
£600,000 per year is not an amount that we believe should be just waved through. Cllr Brett Young, the lead councillor for communication showed disdain and irritation for having to come before the Council to explain what he has been doing over the last year, explaining that he was puzzled why we would possibly want to discuss this.
Parents who are going to be affected by the restrictions on school transport for SEN children had left by this point, so they did not see how eager the lead councillor was to crow about where this extra money was going. He is also the lead councillor for Children, Young People and Learning Services who pushed through the cuts for children with learning difficulties earlier in the evening.
It never ceases to amaze me how this administration is visibly running out of steam. Once the public gallery empties, they resort to cheap points scoring without addressing the specific points that are up for discussion. I can handle a bit of political argy-bargy but find it extraordinary that they appear hurt and personally wounded when their policies are criticised, but think nothing of finding novel ways of blaming Maggie Thatcher, Boris Johnson for their woes and wondering why the opposition are not implementing any of their own policies, forgetting that we are not in power. Oh well, politically it suits me if they carry on in this vacuous way. As a resident who gets the bill once a year, I'm not so chuffed.
Update: Background music removed from video by popular request.
As I catch up with some posting after the festivities, I've completed the first video reporting back from the last full Council meeting of the year. Cllr Tim Crowley proposed a motion that would make the formal changes necessary to allow business owners the right to ask questions at full council meetings and attend Local Committee meetings as special advisers. These are available to residents but not to people who may have a business in the area, maybe employ Sutton residents, certainly pay business rates, but don't necessarily live in the borough themselves. I had thought we had learned our lesson about taxation without representation some years ago when all of that tea went to waste.
The Lib Dems did not seem to understand the premise of the motion, instead taking it as a lead to have a debate about every aspect of business and the economy except the one matter that we raised. This was until close to the end of an interminable 56 minute session when the Lead Councillor for Resources accused us of being bureaucratic for wanting to amend the Constitution.
It was only last summer that the same councillor attempted to ride roughshod over the Council rules when defending his colleague over the Garden Waste fiasco. Now only six months later, he failed to understand that it was the Council's Constitution that was denying business owners a voice and that there was a convoluted process in place to avoid any individuals doing what they liked without any checks or balances. He also expressed concern that councillors should consider the risks and impact of any policies that they might introduce. Since he is the lead councillor responsible for the increases in Council Tax for the last three years, I can understand why he might be blissfully unaware of the need for such consideration, but I would have hoped that there would be one member of the majority party that might pull him back from the brink after a year where the Council has impacted quite spectacularly on residents.
The Council meeting overall was quite extraordinary. It was apparent to those in attendance that the administration has run out of steam. They opposed for opposition's sake. The fact that it is the Conservatives in Opposition seemed to pass them by; they still blamed Boris, Thatcher and David Cameron for things that weren't even up for discussion.
The end result of this motion was a watered-down amendment. We agreed with this because we genuinely wanted something to be done. I'm not convinced that we will see anything before the election as it was written off through the explanation that they needed to speak to businesses first. I've ranted on more than most about communication, but this is a consultation to tread water if ever I've seen one. There is no need to speak to anyone else. If businesses aren't interested in asking questions, they don't need to. They can just carry on as they are.
However, as it stands, if they do, they need to petition the Economic Development Taskforce to ask the Community Leadership Advisory Group (CLAG)to consider the matter and commission a report from the legal department which can then be considered by CLAG, recommended to the Executive and then ratified at a full Council meeting where constitutional changes tend to get pushed through once a year. The shortest time period this could happen is within the next three months. As someone who was self-employed for sixteen years, three months for a decision is no decision at all.
Plenty of stories that I haven't got around to posting due to my last few days of work at Westminster, last minute Christmas shopping, tidying up before and during the family arriving and the inevitable bout of man-flu which will go down in dispatches as something akin to SARS whereas in reality it was tamed by overdosing on Lemsip.
I'll catch up in between the festivities, but in the meantime, have a fantastic Christmas
Councillors on Development Control Committee rejected the application to redevelop the site on the corner of Ruskin Road and Park Lane. Reasons cited were overdevelopment, impact on the highway and substandard amenity. More when I get it.
Tragic news comes to me of a fatal stabbing behind the Charles Cryer Theatre in Carshalton High Street. A car has also crashed near the Grange by Beddington Park. Police are investigating whether there was any link.
You can read a little more at the Sutton Guardian website, though the story will undoubtedly develop over time.
I'll tell you what I told them: it is always shocking to hear of crimes like this, but it is especially disturbing when it happens in your local area.
My thoughts are with the family and friends of the victim, and I wish the police speedy success in their investigation."
Since Sterling isn't valuable enough to warrant 2-ply paper anymore, a man in Suffolk paid his parking ticket in the form of a cheque written on toilet paper rather than the soft, strong and very, very long US currency in the picture. He claimed that he used stationery that reflected his feelings towards the system that he was unfortunately forced to support through his taxes.
He was issued with a summons and had to spend the day in court as a punishment because it would have cost an additional £15 for the bank to process the payment.
Radio 5 reported an older story with some parallells where a man was sent a photo of his illegally parked car with a penalty notice. The man sent a photo of a signed cheque in payment. The Police sent him a photo of some handcuffs.
The last week has seen a lack of a basic knowledge of your basic range of superheroes when talking about Gordon Brown.
First, in a slip of the tongue, he returned to his movie roots of Flash Gordon when he stated that he had saved the world at last week's PMQs. This week, Harriet Harman stated that she would prefer Superman than the Joker to be Prime Minister. I could go into a thesis of a socially awkward Clark Kent, or a brooding reclusive Bruce Wayne but my favourite comparison was nothing to do with American comicbooks.
Michael Gove made a speech in the House last week where he said:
"The Prime Minister may believe, in his more modest moments, that he is Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the truth is that he is closer to a political Max Mosley: he thinks he is king of the world and he has clearly got money to burn, but all people remember is that he got a terrific spanking in German."
I promised to publish the results of the recent consultation about the options for controlled parking in the roads around Carshalton railway station.
Most residents came out against the two proposals of residents' permits or one-hour restricted parking. However, the roads immediately adjacent to the station came out in favour and so we need to work with officers to see if anything can be done to help residents there.
Colston Avenue came out with a split vote. I suspect much of the desire for change comes from the badly designed parking regime there which I am pleased is to be changed anyway. Yellow lines will stop cars from parking on the road, whilst pavement parking will remain. This will keep some parking whilst allowing traffic to flow along Colston Avenue. It will be kept under review to determine whether priority arrows need to be added or other modifications are required.
I have uploaded the spreadsheet of the road by road results which you can see here.
The campus at Cedar Close, Carshalton is to be rebuilt, updating the accommodation there for the residents who have severe learning disabilities.
Cedar Road is off Salisbury Road - almost directly opposite my house - and the site backs onto the Carshalton War Memorial Hospital land. The plan is to build new one bedroom flats with communal areas on the north end of the hospital land before clearing the existing Cedar Close land. I assume that with the hospital site due to be sold off, this will make an attractive parcel of land for developers when the lagging economy is well and truly fiscally stimulated. Neighbours in Salisbury Road have kept a close eye on the site for many years, expecting something to happen. As someone who will be directly affected, I will not be afforded any extra influence as a councillor, so I will be appealing to my ward councillor Eric Howell to ensure that whatever is built on the vacant site, it respects the character of the area and does not add to pressure on the infrastructure of the village. Cedar Close is designated as a low density site on development plans and sits adjacent a Conservation Area.
On a separate note, the families of some of the eleven residents that live in Cedar Close have concerns about the future care of their sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. At present, many of the residents share accommodation. Healthcare workers are assessing each individual to tailor the future development. However, many families are concerned that if the building is restricted to one-bedroom flats, the residents will lose the companionship of their fellow residents who have become firm friends. I cannot pretend to be an expert in this field but I will continue to speak to the families and the Council's commissioning team to ensure that the best and most appropriate facilities are available.
Dominic Grieve, Shadow Home Secretary discusses Damian Green's arrest and the search of his offices. He states that the Conservative MPs will be doing nothing to disrupt the Queen's Speech tomorrow. I suspect he won't need to. Rumour is that the red carpet is already being prepared to roll out in front of Black Rod rather than the more traditional slamming of the door in his face. The Speaker has got some explaining to do in his statement tomorrow.
I sat watching Barack Obama with the same sense of expectation, hope and trepidation as millions of people around the world whilst he fluffed his inauguration oath and delivered a speech that was powerful in its oratory but still short in delivering a roadmap to deliver the promised change.
Councillors on Development Control Committee rejected the application to redevelop the site on the corner of Ruskin Road and Park Lane. Reasons cited were overdevelopment, impact on the highway and substandard amenity. More when I get it.
