Boris Watch

I’ve been flicking through the increasingly infamous new Policy Exchange report - ‘Cities Unlimited’ - and, despite fairly extraordinary ambitions, much of it seems a little thin. The denunciations of the “beyond revival” northern cities have caused the bulk of the backlash, but with regards to London the authors fancy an urban expansion of at least a mile, and also urge councils to convert industrial land into residential land. They acknowledge that urbanisation would not be popular, but claim, somewhat speculatively, that the increased value of the land would be sufficient to allow for the abolition of council tax.

An element that I’ll focus on is social housing. The report makes the admission that “virtually no one in social housing moves for job related reasons“. To counter this problem, the authors “imagine that people from Blackpool will move to an expanding Bromley“. Yet, as the quoted CASE report demonstrates, a growing number of those claiming social housing are disabled or retired. Their incentive for upping sticks to an increasingly urbanised capital is not given.

David Cameron has hurried to tell us that the report is ‘insane‘, but what does Boris - or his Policy Director - think?

Tags:   housing · jobs · Policy Exchange10 Comments

Going back to the the Venezuela Oil Deal for a moment, you may (the three of you who are interested in the minutiae, at least) remember that the deal was capped at $32m a year, or a percentage of the bus diesel use, whichever was lower.  Since the cost of diesel has rather risen, it’s likely it would always have hit $32m, which in the various PR battles over the scheme was always translated as £16m.

However, in recent days the gloomy UK economic forecasts have lead to the pound sliding against the dollar, presumably because the market expects an interest rate cut.  This now means that, at the BBC’s quoted rate of $1.8769/£1 $32m is now…

£17 049 390

So, the vastly rich state oil company (which trades entirely in dollars) would have seen no effect from this, but Londoners would have had an extra million quid in the bank to spend on, say, cutting fares for people on income support or making Parliament Square more cycle friendly.

Instead, Boris is going to hand back an unspecified amount.  Since the deal was done in dollars, presumably he’ll hand it back in dollars.  I hope we don’t have to buy them at today’s rate - I think someone should ask him.

Tags: 1 Comment

The Tory Troll, fresh from his summer travels, quotes a source as saying that:

“The rumour that the MPA is to be relocated is still circulating. Although how they intend to find desk space for another 100 people in City Hall is beyond me - unless this means 100 redundancies of City hall based staff.”

This rumour follows Dave’s revelation that Laurence Gouldbourne, Head of Equalities and Diversity at the MPA, has been made redundant “effective immediately“, with a source saying that it “happened so quickly that no-one in the MPA seems to know any more detail than this - including his staff“.

Boris and the police services have had a fractious relationship. There have been contradictory statements regarding the prevalence of crime and warnings of police cuts, despite Johnson’s previous exhortations to the contrary. At the end of last month it was reported that the Mayor would slash the TfL and, significantly considering recent speculation, MPA budgets in order to pay for his anti-knife programmes.

Has he decided that centralisation will makes things much more simple for him?

Tags:   jobs · Johnson Administration · MPA · policeNo Comments.

Boris has called on businesses to make their toilets available to the public. The Community Toilet Scheme, which began in Richmond in 2005, demands that councils “support local pubs, cafes and shops with an annual sum in exchange for which they welcome visitors to use their toilets freely“.

The Mayor is to urge each borough council to accept the scheme.

Tags:   toilets4 Comments

A few days ago, Dave Hill spotted this in Mayor’s report to the Assembly for 10th September.

“Agreed the award of and entry into a contract with Egon Zehnder for search and selection services to assist with the recruitment of 2-3 senior appointments within the Mayor’s Office (agreeing an exemption to the Authority’s contracts code of practice for this purpose).”

“The maximum cost of this contract to the GLA is £125,000 and will be contained within budgets set aside for the Mayor’s Office.”

A statement has now been released:

“The GLA have employed an executive search firm to search for individuals to fill two to three senior positions. These essential roles will support the Mayor in delivering his vision for London and it is therefore crucial that highest quality of applicants are put forward for these positions. Executive search firms have the capacity, network of contacts in the specialist fields and the ability to approach a range of individuals about the roles in a confidential manner. It is expected that this process will enable the recruitment of exceptional individuals with track records of success in their fields of expertise. The cost quoted is the maximum payable, in practice, we expect the final costs to be less.”

Apparently Nick Boles authorised this on the 7th July - three days after Ray Lewis’s resignation. We can only conclude that City Hall had suddenly lost confidence in their ability to judge applicants.

Edited, for different thought

Tags:   earnings · jobsNo Comments.

Boris has decided to cut £10,000 from from the budget of the Soho Pride festival, and will instead use the money to fund scholastic education against homophobia. The decision, according to the organisers of the event, “could prove fatal and mean 2008 could be Soho Pride’s last year on the streets of London“.

HOMOVISION writes that the loss of the festival “would have a significant impact on the London gay community” and argues that the decision “shows a lack of understanding of the London gay community“, although Pink News links to a Stonewall report that shows how badly needed education measures are.

You can donate to the festival here.

Update: Simon also kindly points us to this video, in which the organiser of Soho Pride discusses the funding cut. In not returning calls and then cutting the funding just before the event, the Mayor (or his office) certainly acted shoddily.

If you attend and enjoy Soho Pride then we do encourage you to donate.

Tags:   festivals · funds10 Comments

Self and nipper, with new mobile camera, on the bus back last night:

Obviously a triumph. The only possible justification I could see for that particular Borisism is that it really doesn’t do a lot for the pleasantness of a bus journey when there are cans leaking stale beer on the bus floor. Evidently whatever measures have been brought in to deter such anti-social behaviour aren’t as yet entirely effective…

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A couple of Boris bits from the latest Eye. First, from Rotten Boroughs:

Boris & Ken

“The trouble we have — and it is one of the few things in politics which makes me almost wild with anger — is the sale of the playing fields, above all the sale of the playing fields in state schools,” wrote Boris Johnson in the Telegraph back in 2004. How times change.

Last month the new London mayor signed off on his first planning application to build housing on a state school playing field. Campaigners against the development, which is to fund the rebuilding of Holland Park Community School, had hoped Boris the Menace’s much vaunted opposition to flogging off the nation’s playing fields would stop the plan in its tracks, since he has the final say on such applications.

At £76m the new school building is set to be the most expensive in the UK. In order to offset the cost, Kensington and Chelsea council is to sell off a chunk of the school’s playing fields — enough for “72 units” of residential development with “associated parking spaces”.

The council is pushing ahead with its plans, despite recently being told by its own panel of architects that the school designs were “monolithic and relentless” and would date very quickly. It did, however, scrap the idea of making the housing affordable and available to teachers.

City Hall’s announcement of approval of the plan trumpeted that the development would result in “improved informal outdoor space and an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool”. In fact the new pool is planned to be exactly the same size as the school’s current pool, 25 metres. If Boris thinks that’s Olympic-size, hadn’t someone better check the plans for London 2012?

Then, on a later, rather more tongue-in-cheek page, they present:

That Boris Johnson/Sir Ian Blair Email In Full

Blimey! This Blair chap sounds a bit of a rum cove. I mean he thinks he’s frightfully clever just ’cos he went to Oxford, keeps making the most fearful gaffes yet still stays in his job, and to top it all he gives work to his old mates! Cripes! What a good egg! My kind of chap! Lay off him you stinkers! You hear me!

Signed
Bo-Jo
Mayor of London

I wonder if there’ll ever be an edition of Private Eye while Boris is Mayor that doesn’t mention him? I don’t think there has been yet. No wonder editor Ian Hislop was encouraging Have I Got News For You? viewers to vote for him (before retreating to the safety of his non-London home).

Tags:   housing · humour · levelling the playing fields · planning · Private Eye · satire1 Comment

It seems that Boris’s sense of humour has returned.

Rosie Boycott - who runs an organic farm in Somerset and “writes regularly about the importance of food in improving health” - has promised a “radical rethink” in order to challenge “aspects of our current food system which are damaging our environment through wasteful practices and producing poor quality food“.

Some of the ideas ‘bursting’ from her are a little odd:

“I want to advocate the use of allotments and growing our own food…We can lean on councils to release more land and kids on Asbos could be put to work on them.”

• To receive an ASBO is to receive a civil order, not to have the entirety of your rights yanked from beneath you.

• I’m not entirely sure where councils are going to find these mysterious expanses of wasteland. They find it difficult to hold on to playing fields as it is.

Still, she is “absolutely thrilled” so we shall wait until her plans come into fruitition (or are announced but, y’know, ‘fruitition’ interposed in a post vaguely concerned with growing food…yeah…I’ll get me cyanide).

Tags:   food · jobs1 Comment

I mentioned TfL’s plans (strongly supported by the London Cycling Campaign) for replacing Aldgate Gyratory with a conventional human-scale road layout.  Diamond Geezer has been there as part of his Olympic 2012 narrative, and has some pictures and an interesting article:

Deroundabouting is expected sometime next year. A new cut-through feeder road will be established, which will lead to the pedestrianisation of the whole of Braham Street, to be infilled with leafy public realm. To be honest it’s a wonder Boris hasn’t yet cancelled the Aldgate Masterplan, given the delays it’ll bring to his beloved traffic flow.

Very snarky.

However, I don’t think Boris can stop this one even if he wanted to, although it does include part of the second phase of the now-canned 100 Open Spaces programme - what will tell us more about his true colours are the other city gyratory systems, which like Aldgate are usually a nasty place for cyclists.  I quote from a prominent cyclist, Mr. A. Gilligan:

You’re funnelled into one of the horrible main road junctions that guard almost all approaches to the Square Mile. This one, at Bishopsgate, isn’t even the worst. The two TfL-controlled gyratory systems at the Tower and Aldgate are among the very nastiest-cycle experiences in London, forcing you to ride with fast-flowing traffic either side of you.

I wonder what he thinks of the scrapping of the Parliament Square scheme - let me guess, it’s Livingstone’s fault.

The Tower scheme was considered to have capacity constraints in 2006, so I doubt anything can be done there under Boris.  In fact, it’s worth keeping this list handy.  As for the others, is Boris willing to inconvenience car drivers to reduce the risk to cyclists from death and injury?  Another reason for conflict is found in the Masterplan:

However west of the junction, particularly, vibrancy decreases, due to a number of gaps where buildings have been demolished and the dominating effect of the gyratory traffic system.

…

In and around the gyratory system, the quality of the built environment is generally poor.

So keeping the traffic flowing on the 50s/60s traffic systems of the city is not only incompatible with cycling, it’s incompatible with the ideal of a thriving small retail sector, not to mention a beautiful city.  These things are a dead hand laid on the city fabric and for that matter we should remove them where possible, and if this inconveniences the precious motorist, that’s the way it is.

Tags: 2 Comments