Street cleaning - the facts!
It has taken not less than 37 written questions presented at the special council meeting by Conservatives councillors - on top of oral questions made on the night from opposition members - to Cllr Mahfouz, to have an idea of how he is really performing as Cabinet member for Transport and EnvironmentIn last week Gazette he proudly claimed that he had “achieved the highest ever rate of recycling and street cleaning”. Although recycling figures are now around the 44% rates perhaps he should have given credit to the efforts of residents rather than on himself, considering that hardly any new recycling initiative has come forward from this current administration. However the street cleaning figures do present a sorry state of affair and the reality is indeed different from the picture he describes – as we didn’t know ourselves by looking at the sorry state of our streets and road.Asked how many streets were graded A, B, C by the street monitoring team in the month of April and how did this compared with April 2011, the answer was as follows:Grade A: 2,960 (2012) - 12,750 (2011)Grade B: 790 “ - 444 “Grade C: 681 “ - 313 “Grade D 7 “ - 0 “It doesn’t take someone with a Maths degree to work out that from April 2011 to April 2012 only around a third of streets have been assessed compared to the same period in the previous year. It is also telling that Grade D (which is the worst grade possible) has also made a comeback in 2012. However, these figures clearly demonstrate that that our streets are getting dirtier by the year and that Cllr Mahfouz is being quite economic with the truth. Other questions put to him reveal that fly tips are up as well: from 277 in April 2011 to 344 in April 2012. Perhaps this is as direct result of cutting the envirocrime officers from 23 in April 2010 down to 13 posts in April 2012, as well as cuts in the street monitoring team: from 7 to 5 during the same period.Considering that one of the key priorities of this administration is “Making Ealing cleaner” and the fact that both last year and this year, and they are proposing to do the same for next year, they have budgeted to underspend £9M per year, are cuts to the above services justifiable or justified?To prioritise something means to put more resources into it, not cutting it!In the wave of the recent recycling and refuse contract fiasco and considering the above, it is time for Cllr Mahfouz and his administration to stop treating us like children by telling us what they think we may want to hear rather than how things really are. They need to come clean and be transparent if they want to regain some sort of credibility from their residents.
Rosa Popham ● 5094d8 Comments