Political Evictions – OK so the last one was easy but what about this one?

Followers will know the position I took about evicting the family of small-scale rioter, Daniel Sartain-Clark. But that one was easy; he wasn’t found guilty of much.

But last week a gang of Latchmere residents was caught for fairly big time drug dealing. Against capital punishment as I am, my reflex action about drug dealing almost demands that the perpetrators are strung up. OK, that goes a bit far but what do you think about the Council’s threat to evict their families? (Though to be fair to the Council, it would be stretching definitions a bit far to call these political evictions).

Here are people actively destroying the lives of their neighbours, almost certainly with the knowledge of some members of their family, and the Council wants to evict them. What do you reckon? Evict immediately!

Well, I am not so sure. To start with, as luck would have it, living on the Kambala and Winstanley estates, some are freeholders, some leaseholders and some tenants and hence the power that the Council has to evict varies. Secondly young siblings and harrassed mothers are still innocent.

Let the judicial system take its course with the unpleasant dealers – on balance I still think that the Council should not evict the families any more than I think any criminal’s family deserves to be made homeless. Have I got this right?

What do you reckon to electing your local police chiefs?

For the first time ever, on November 15 the country, ex-London, will be electing 41 police commissioners. London will do its own thing on May 3 when in effect the Mayor is elected as the Police Commissioner. Labour candidates are being selected in the next couple of weeks and I heard one of them, ex-MP Jane Kennedy standing for Merseyside and Wirral, last week along with Peter Jones, a Tory candidate for East Sussex, and Brian Paddick the Lib/Dem candidate for London Mayor.

Deputy Chief Constable Beckley from Avon, chair of the Police History organisation (sic), stated that this was the biggest change in policing in this country since 1829 and the introduction of the Peelers! And there has been hardly any talk about it!

The debate posed the legitimacy of the ballot box against the politicising of policing. But a few sub-plots came out of it that I had not spotted. For example Kennedy argued that Cameron will not be able to draft in 12,000 PCs to London as he did after the riots, against the wishes of elected Commissioners. She led me to think that soon we will have post code policing just as we have post code health or education.

Beckley also pointed out that the operational independence of the Chief Constable is nowhere defined in the act and that under Boris we have managed to have 3 Chief Constables in as many years. What price operational independence? Whatever Johnson has done for London, he certainly has not brought stability to the Met!

Old political hands will, of course, have their own views about what the turn-out might be for the election on a damp, cold miserable November 15 in deepest Northumberland (How about 10%?), but it is certainly my view that elected commissioners should be totally integrated into the local political scene as in London. At least here we do know that Mayor Johnson is responsible for most things. Here in London accountability is sufficiently focussed that it is meaningful. In the shires I suspect that there will be a confusion of accountability with councils having most of the crime prevention responsiblilties and the Commissioner the traditional reactive policing responsibilities.

I have always thought that a single body would be more accountable than a selection of separate bodies and hence I think that London’s Mayor should have the focal responsibility for health, as well as policing. Whether that body should be a Mayor, or in my preference a Council with a Leader, is another matter.

Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere February Newsletter (# 34)

January highlights

1  The worst moment of the month was when Daniel was sentenced on 10^th January for his part in the riots. Don’t get me wrong. I have no sympathy for those who were involved in the riots, but I do believe that we need a sense of proportion and quite clearly what Judge Darling had to say implied very strongly that the relatively minor misdemeanours Daniel was involved in would not have led to a custodial sentence at any other time. But for more detail see the 11^th January entry below.

2.  The best moment of the month, however, was when the Council back-tracked on their decision to evict his totally innocent mother and sister – see 19^th January entry below.

3.  On 12^th January I was fascinated to hear Louise Casey, Head of the Government’s new Troubled Families Unit. Her Unit, a Tory Government initiative, is based on the old 80:20 rule, though in this case the figures are probably more like 99:1 rule, which says that you spend 80% of your effort on 20% of your caseload. This rule, if you haven’t heard about it, applies to all areas of work so a doctor, say, spends 80% of his time on 20% of his patients, a teacher spends 80% of her time on 20% of her pupils, etc. It is certainly true of me, with at least 90% of my constituents (more than 10,000 of you) taking absolutely no more than 10% of my efforts and the other 10% more than occupying 90% of my attention.

So the aim of this Unit is to focus government’s attention (government in this context is meant to mean everything, such as schools, the NHS, the judicial system, the police, social services, probation services, etc.) on the very small number of troubled families – Casey estimates that 120,000 families in the UK are the source of an extremely high percentage of the criminal, educational, health, etc., costs and problems that we face. The argument being that if we put a lot of money into solving their problems then we can save £millions more in the long term on all those mainstream services.

Interesting, but frankly I am sceptical. It seems to me that until we address some pretty basic inequalities in the UK (caused by low pay, youth unemployment, unemployment, poor housing) then resolving the problems of today’s 120,000 families will only mean that they will be replaced by 120,000 others in a few years’ time.

Marco Polo House

4.  The Planning Applications Committee on 19^th January had two dramatic plans to consider. One was for the demolition of the post-modernist Marco Polo Building in Queenstown Road and its replacement with 15 and 13 storey blocks of 456 flats with associated bars, restaurants and shops. If it goes ahead, this will be one of the quickest re-developments we have seen. The Marco Polo building (pictured) is itself only 25 years old. The other was for a 5-10 storey building containing 116 residential units on the site opposite York Gardens Library and Halfords on the corner of Lombard Road. That one was refused but the Marco Polo replacement building accepted.

5.  The 25^th January, Finance & Corporate Services Committee had stacks of very important but rather technical, internal matters relating to the running of the Council, which would not I suspect be of much interest to the public at large. One very small matter, however, might be of interest to some Latchmere residents as it concerns the sale of the St. Christopher Clinic in Wheeler Court, Plough Road. The clinic has been relocated and it will be converted into flats.

6.  The 23rd January, Housing Committee decided to increase rents Council rents by an average £8.33p per week or 7%. They will continue to be the highest Council rents in the country.

My Programme for February

1.  The Council meets on 8^th February and the Clapham Junction Town Centre Partnership the day after.

2. The Labour Party is holding its “Ken Livingstone Manifesto” discussion on 11^th but as I am doing a surgery at Battersea Library that same morning I will miss most, if not all, of that.

3. The Wayford Residents Association meeting is on the 23rd.

4. The Planning Applications Committee is on the 19^th.

Eltringham School

5. For the more nostalgic amongst you I would draw your attention to two demolitions, yes DEMOLITIONS, taking place this month or about to take place. The most important to mention is that of Eltringham School in Eltringham Street, which for those who don’t know it is the Victorian School building on the left just as one drives onto the Wandsworth Bridge roundabout from York Road. One lady, who still lives in Eltringham Street, tells me that she went to school there (if you are reading this did you say in the 60’s?) and that her mother had lived in the same street for years before then.

St. Peter's Church Hall, Plough Road

And the second was featured in last week’s local Guardian and is the hall of the old St. Peter’s Church in Plough Road. The inside of the hall is rather splendid, if somewhat run-down, but the most notable element of it, at least as far as recent local history is concerned is the mural on the south side of the hall. The painting is very faded and it will hardly be a great loss to Battersea. But for some of it brings back memories of Rev Michael Wimhurst, who in the 70’s was a radical vicar at the church, which was burnt down at some point in the 80’s.

Royal Artillery Monument

Did you know?

Next time that you are in Albert Bridge Road, between Petworth Street and Albany Mansions, keep your eyes open for a blue plaque to Charles Sergeant Jagger, (no relation to Mick) who lived there in the 1930’s. It’s on about 60 Albert Bridge Road and very, very near to Jagger House on the nearby Ethelburga Estate.

Jagger born in 1885 near Rotherham, fought and was wounded three times in the 1914-18 War. For 10 years after the war he sculpted many of the First World War memorials that were constructed all over the country. His most famous memorial is the Royal Artillery Monument at Hyde Park Corner and, although it does not come out very well, that is a Howitzer on the monument.

Localism – the Big Lie – and Parliamentary Boundaries

I was having a week-end in the Peak District and stopped for the night at Leek. It is a small, attractive market town, but like many English market towns it seemed a bit dead in the evening. I got chatting to a guy in the pub, who turned out to be a guitarist and singer. I asked him about where he played and apart from the pubs he mentioned, in passing, the Town Hall, where he used to play. I asked him to show me the Town Hall and he pointed to a carpark on the other side of the road.

It got me to thinking about just why it is that, for two decades now, both Labour and Tory Governments have been talking up Localism and yet doing almost everything possible to destroy it. Both Governments have encouraged the growth of out-of-town shopping malls and giant hyper-markets and every time that Tesco announces 500 new jobs we all know that means the loss of many more corner shops and greengrocers. Both Governments have been equally keen on re-organising local government and every time they do, they destroy a little local pride.

On a few rare occasions local pride fights back - some will remember when Rutland fought successfully not to be abolished by Ted Heath’s Government. London, funnily enough for one of the most cosmoplitan of cities, is a particularly interesting example of local pride. Keep your eyes open next time you travel round. Just what has happened to Chelsea Town Hall? or Fulham Town Hall? or Bow Town Hall? or Peckham’s or Battersea’s?

The revision of parliamentary boundaries, due later this year, will provoke similar objections.

Council backs down from evicting rioter’s mother and sister

Today, 19 January, Wandsworth Council decided not to evict the mother and 8 year old sister of the rioter convicted last week (see my blog entry of 12 January). This marks a victory for sanity against the knee-jerk threats of eviction made by both David Cameron and the Council in August.

It is great news for the tenant and an enormous weight off her shoulders, following what Judge Darling had called the biggest tragedy of the many sentences he had imposed as a consequence of the riots. The Council was forced to recognise just how much the family was a pillar of the local community and to backdown from the gung-ho rhetoric used by the Tory party in last September’s Council Meeting.

From my point of view, opposing the evictions policy as self-defeating and deeply malicious, this family could not have been a better test case. As the judge said last week, the family are “Christian with both a capital and a small c” and an integral part of the community. There will be tougher cases coming forward, no doubt, where the convicted rioters will be more culpable than Daniel and the innocent other members of the family less vulnerable than a single mother and 8 year old. But that will not stop those other members of the family being as innocent as Maite.

I will try and defend them as much as I have done Maite.

PS This WBC decision followed an interview between tenant and local housing manager, where essentially the tenant was being interviewed for her general status as a tenant and very unsurprisingly the local housing manager could see nothing wrong with the tenant’s record as a tenant or any reason why the Council should evict her. The idea that the Council backdown was as a result of pressure from various outside fringe groups is simply farcical. Whether it was partly as a result of the pressure Labour councillors put on the Tories in Wandsworth, only senior officers and senior councillors can really say.

Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere January Newsletter (# 33)

Editorial

1. Frankly this one is dated but I am putting it on the blog for the record!
2. Just in case you wondered I have decided to skip the December Newsletter by the simple expedient of changing the naming convention. In the past I have called the Newsletter after the preceding month, but as from now I am naming it after the month at the beginning of which it appears. Hence this is the January and not the December Newsletter.
3. I have until now had a Did You Know? section at the end of the Newsletter. That obviously becomes more and more difficult over time and so I am going to make that section more general, including Comment as well as Did You Know?.

December highlights

1.  On 5^th December I attended a meeting at the Doddington & Rollo Association Hall, which had been called by “Wandsworth Against Cuts”. Speakers included Austin Mitchell and John McDonnell, both Labour MPs, and a tenant speaker from East London. The meeting was inspired by the Government cuts and their impact on local government services and by the Council’s response to the riots and specifically the threat to evict the families of rioters.
2. Perhaps 50 people turned up, which is not bad for a public meeting nowadays but these protesters are never going to achieve their objectives if they ignore the Labour Party, the most powerful anti-Tory vote in Wandsworth, and for that matter most of the country. So whilst I have a lot of time for left-winger, John McDonnell, I cannot say quite the same about Austin Mitchell, who is, for me as they say, “all mouth and no trousers”. And really what is the point of having that kind of meeting without one single Labour councillor being invited to speak – we are the only real opposition to the Tories and having a protest without us is pointless. (OK, this is a bit of a beef from me because I have done more to publicise the ludicrous policy of evicting innocent mothers and children than anyone else and they didn’t even bother to ask me to speak – but so be it).
3.  The Council Meeting on 7^th December was a curious affair. The Council is pursuing a programme of cuts, which meant a couple of million from education and £1 million from Social Services, but it was very difficult to work out what they meant as the Tories were indulging in salami slicing – a small slice off every item of the budget with a few backroom staff cut here and a few more cut there, enabling them to say that they were not cutting services. Services will, of course, be affected but perhaps not in very public ways – just delays in getting answers and slower telephone response rates – that sort of thing.
4. The Tories chose to have the set-piece debate on the economy and its impact on the Nine Elms area, which seemed an odd choice given that the owners of Battersea Power Station went bankrupt in the same week. The other big debate centred on the Council’s decision to abolish Wandsworth’s Parks Police. The proposal is that the Met Police will take over the role and save the Council money. No doubt the debate will be on U-Tube at some point though I can’t find it yet. However, if you haven’t yet seen a Council debate let me give you the link to the speech I made in September against the Council’s policy to evict the families of convicted rioters. The link is:-

http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/info/10058/decision_making/1232/council_meetings_online_council_21_september_2011/4

1. The Planning Applications Committee on 15^th December was a very low key affair. But on 19^th December I attended a small exhibition at the Council about the Council’s plans for the future of Eltringham School. It was a “Drop-in” style of consultation and it was a bit difficult to assess the number of locals who attended or their general reaction to the plans, which are for a residential development. As a member of the Committee I will have to give my view on this in the next couple of months. Do let me know if you have any views on the matter.
2. Did you see the Evening Standard, 14^th December? On page 6 there was an article headed “Google puts Battersea on the map after six years of dodgy directions”, which majored on my part in getting Google to move the name “Clapham” from its position on Google maps above the Battersea Arts Centre (the old Battersea Town Hall) to its rightful place over Clapham High Street.
3. For the details of the story see this website www.lovebattersea.org.uk. But let me correct the details. As the site says I am a joint-Chair of the organisation trying to get Battersea named “properly”, but the rather jokey quotes attributed to me by the ES actually belong to my good friend Philip Beddows, a maverick rather amusing ex-Tory councillor. Oh, and as for the organisation: it’s called SW11tch – play on SW11 and switch the name from Clapham to Battersea – get it!
4. Philip’s grander fantasy is to get the station renamed Battersea Junction but somehow I think that is a trifle ambitious!

My Programme for January

1. I have a meeting of the Finance & Corporate Resources Committee, the Council’s premier policy committee, on 25^th January.
2. The Battersea Park School Finance & Personnel Committees on 23rd.
3. The Court Case against a Wandsworth tenant’s son continues to sentencing!
4. The Planning Applications Committee on the 19^th.

Did you know?

That my fellow councillor, Simon Hogg, has been encouraging me to write a blog. So I have taken him at his word and started one. I am not really sure that it is my style. I write long pieces, which are not the blog style. But my latest entry is about the appalling story from one Tory councillor and his views about Council tenants. Here is the link – let me know what you think!          http://tonybelton.wordpress.com/

Yours sincerely

Tony Belton, Latchmere Labour Councillor

Left & right hand at odds in Government policy

At least in principle, one of Cameron’s best decisions is to continue with and develop Labour’s Troubled Families initiatives. Today, I heard Louise Casey, the Head of the Troubled Families Team in CLG, describing her work on the Family Intervention projects (FIPs) and very impressive she was too.

120,000 troubled families cost public services the best part of £9billion per year or about £75,000 per family per year. These particular families impose a work burden on the NHS, the criminal justice system, housing and education services and so on. Some families are said to be “clients” of more than 20 public agencies.

The cycle of deprivation, illiteracy, truancy, criminality and a range of other issues can easily be imagined. Casey, and Cameron, wants to break into this cycle of despair and make life better for these 120,000 families and their neighbours in particular and the rest of us in general.

How strange then that the very same Government is currently consulting on making it easier, and almost mandatory, for Councils to evict the families of the convicted. So one arm of Government is working hard to support troubled families, whilst another arm wishes to impose severe homelessness and stress on many of the same families.

I am not saying that all troubled families are in trouble with the law or that all in trouble with the law are troubled families but only a fool would not accept the likelihood of a very considerable overlap. I plead with the Government (and Wandsworth Council) to drop this punitive and self-defeating policy of evicting the innocent families of rioters – and other criminals.

Is it Clapham or Battersea?

A jokey addendum to the court case featured in my last blog is that the Crown described Curry’s as being in Clapham’s high street. Judge Darling, obviously a south Londoner, questionned this and the two of them did an elaborate dance of misunderstandings. Whilst the judge retired to consider his verdict I pointed out to the Crown prosecutor that Clapham High Road was the best part of a mile away and that Curry’s was actually in Battersea’s main, if not High, street.

When the Judge returned the prosecutor jumped up, apologised for his lack of knowledge of the geography of south London and asked for the record to be put straight. Judge Darling told him that was exactly what he had been trying to tell him but that his ignorance would be forgiven. In future I will have all those guilty of this heinous sin up in front of Judge Darling!

Justice for a rioter and his family?

I went to the Crown Court on 10 January to hear Daniel’s sentence – you will remember I was interested in his case following his involvement in the riots on August 8th in Clapham Junction. The headline is that he received 11 months, which Judge Darling said would mean that he would serve half that time in custody and the other half “free” on licence. The Judge also said that the 83 days he had been on conditional bail would be counted against the sentence leaving, according to my calculation, Daniel serving about a further 87 days in custody.

Judge Darling said in sentencing that this was the “most tragic” case he had come across in the whole riot aftermath. He accepted Daniel’s story about how he happened to be in Clapham Junction and that he arrived on the scene after Curry’s had been broken into. He acknowledged that Daniel was of good character (that is had no previous of any kind) indeed the Judge went on to say that Daniel was an exceptional young man with some level of educational achievement. Daniel was a Christian with both a capital and a lower case c, he said, working for the good of the community – the Judge said “an aid worker”, a helper, a doer with many good character references.

But in the aftermath of the riots despite all mitigation and against the PSR (Pre-Sentence Reports done by the Probation Service)recommendation, he, the Judge, had to take into account society’s concerns and fears about the events of August and that he had no choice but to impose some level of custodial sentence. (I should add that the Judge retired for 46 minutes to consider the sentence – he clearly did not do it lightly)

I have two comments: first that Wandsworth Council shows zero respect for the “family” if it pursues, as it intends to do, its policy of eviction with all the consequences that this will bring to bear on the mother and sister. I know the mother quite well and it is clear, and totally unsurprising, that she is under some considerable stress.

Secondly, that the establishment has got itself into a bit of a mess about sentencing in this situation. Whilst Daniel aged 18, with no previous record at all, got 11 months, a man aged 30, sentenced at the same time as Daniel with 11 previous convictions for 22 offences having served two separate terms of 6 and 7 years, got a custodial sentence of 20 months! I cannot believe that this variation of sentence 11:20 for these two men would have been the same in normal circumstances. The establishment has in my view put its fears before the cause of justice

Jobless Too Busy Shopping To Look For Work, Says Tory.

Yes, that was the headline over a story in the Evening Standard on 16 November 2011. What followed was a poisonous diatribe from Balham Councillor Paul Ellis. Look it up, if you can, on the ES website; I must admit I have not found the link!

But the article was so irresponsible that I intend to make the following speech at the 7 December Council Meeting.

“Marie Antoinette was tasteless enough to advise that French peasants should eat cake if they could not find enough bread. Jeremy Clarkson was vulgar enough to suggest that strikers should be taken out and shot in front of their families, but at least Antoinette was not the Minister for Wheat production and Clarkson not the Minister in charge of Industrial Relations.

Councillor Ellis was vulgar enough and tasteless enough to make the outrageous assertion that the Jobless in a Battersea estate were too busy shopping to look for work – and he is Chairman of the Housing Committee and responsible for tenant relationships. Louis XVI may have had some marital reasons for not chopping off Antoinette’s head and Cameron does not have any official role in terms of Clarkson’s employment at the BBC, but Wandsworth’s Leader does have the power and certainly has the grounds for guillotining his Chair of Housing.

Put to one side the comparison of an estate, which one I wonder, with the Oxford Street sales; forget the absurd generalisation about people in their 20s, 30s and 40s (his phrase – not mine), who after all have a 40% chance of being leaseholders rather than tenants and are probably employed rather than not – after all nowhere has unemployment rates higher than 50%; putting all that to one side he completely ignores the fact that this Council’s policies are to some extent based on the fact that some of our estates contain some of the most multi-deprived people in the UK.

Now I don’t want to make the same kind of ludicrous assertions about the residents of Balham, those whom Ellis represents, as he does about some unnamed estate but the grotesque assumption that in some ways more will be spent on Christmas on our estates than in the comfortable streets of Balham beggars belief. There is a class war starting in Wandsworth and it is the Tory party that is firing the first shots.