Bethnal Green and Bow Conservatives

The Conservative Group presented their alternative budget at a meeting of the Council on Wednesday 3^rd March.

Conservatives propose a 1% decrease in Council Tax, whilst providing better frontline services. 

Conservative Group Alternative Budget 

Labour have maxed-out the credit card and now face a £54m black hole in the finances, whilst the Conservatives would deliver more Police, more Homes and free school meals.

Conservatives will provide safer and cleaner streets, with 17 extra police officers (one per ward) and an additional 6 wardens dealing with litter, dangerous dogs and parks, and double the amount spent on repairing pot-holes in our roads.

Conservatives will cut Labours waste, by closing the loss making Eastend Life, cutting the advertising budget by half and shrinking the Council’s ‘Communications team’. In addition the amount spent on an army of over 80 consultancy firms will be reduced by £250,000.

The Conservatives will also make the boroughs councillors take a 10% pay cut and scrap some £152,000 of additional payments to Town Hall councillors, and an additional £250,000 spent on Executive assistants to Councillors.

To deal with the impending financial black hole the Conservatives would hand back the keys to Anchorage House, saving £8m per year and look to sell HR, Legal and Finance services to other boroughs and RSLs (of which there are 68 operating in the borough all with their own HR, Legal and Finance teams).

With Childhood Obesity being the 2nd highest in Tower Hamlets of anywhere in the UK, the Conservatives would from September 2010 give each and every child in the borough a free school meal, ensuring that all our children get at least one healthy meal a day.

With 23,000 people on the housing waiting list, the Conservatives will double the budget for offering cash incentives to those under occupying council homes, delivering an additional 170 bedrooms per year and will build an additional 200 more homes than the Labour budget, delivering an further 1,000 extra bedrooms.

The Labour government has cut the ESOL budget for Tower Hamlets College by £1.2m. The Conservatives will spend an additional £330,000 on delivering a further 368 ESOL class places for those that cannot speak English. Nothing entraps people in poverty more than not being able to speak English in our borough.

Whilst delivering all the above, the Conservatives will also be able to give something back to local residents by cutting the council tax by 1%.

Bethnal Green and Bow Conservatives are holding an open primary meeting to select a parliamentary candidate for the general election. Any resident of the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency who is an elector on the current electoral register may register (or apply) to attend and vote

The meeting will take place on: -

Sunday March 7^th

at

St. Hilda’s Community Centre

18 Club Row

London

E2 7EY

Commencing at 2:30pm

(Doors open at 2pm)

You may choose from the following candidates: -

Six Candidates are on the short list and they are:

Graeme Archer
Head of science research and technology for a worldwide company and lives on the Shoreditch Hackney border.

Kemal Butt
Is a Conservative councillor on Three Rivers Council.

Maria Ioannou
London born, Maria works in-house at an International Publishing Firm.

Zakir Khan
Head of Community Affairs for the Canary Wharf Group.

Claire Palmer
Barrister, living in Bow

Ali Stow
Works for the RAC and lives in London

The meeting will be chaired by Rob Hayward OBE (Conservative MP for Kingswood between 1983-92) and administered by Cllr Matt Davis (Chairman, London North East Conservative Area).

If you wish to attend you must pre-register by sending your name and address to the registration officer, either by

E-mail: bgbcandidate@googlemail.com

Or phone: 07842552526

Registration closes at 10:00am on Friday 5^th March.

All those who are confirmed as registered voters will receive a letter of admittance, which they should bring to the meeting along with an item of ID.

To take part and vote, you must be present at all presentations and remain for the final vote.

Local Party Chairman David Fell says:

“We have a strong and diverse field of candidates to put before the voters of Bethnal Green and Bow and look forward to selecting a candidate who will be ready and prepared to battle Labour and Respect in this constituency. We believe that it is time Bethnal Green and Bow is represented in Parliament by a member who will put local people first. In this year of local voters will be able to choose someone who will do exactly that”.

At the December Cabinet meeting council officers reported that this Labour run Tower Hamlets Council is in a serious financial position. A report showed that the Council is forecast for a massive £8 million overspend. This is equivalent to a 12% increase in Council Tax. Tower Hamlets Conservatives have regularly exposed Council waste, including the wasted money spent on Labour’s freesheet, East End Life; wasting taxpayers money on removing a highly rated Chief Executive who was quickly appointed as Chief Executive to another London Borough; and the £800,000 overspend in rent on the Council’s own offices in Mulberry Place.

While this Labour Council is busy spending taxpayers’ money, the Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson has frozen the GLA precept and your local Tower Hamlets Conservatives presented an alternative budget that would have cut Council Tax by 1% whilst providing extra Police Officers, CCTV and homes.

Tower Hamlets Council has been consulting on its “Core Strategy”. Documentation is on the council website here:
http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgsl/851-900/856_local_development_framewor/core_strategy.aspx

As you will see there are 17 different downloadable pdf documents, 2 downloadable representation forms and an innocent looking text link, “evidence base”, which leads to a further 129 pdf documents. The sheer volume of cross-referenced documentation renders it inaccessible to almost all residents.

There are fine phrases such as, “refocusing on our town centres”, and “a better place for living well”. Apparently, “Bow will be based around a rejuvenated market and a lively town centre”. That’s odd, because Labour have had years to do this, but instead have done everything within their powers to kill off Bow’s shopping centre, the Roman Road.

Tucked away on page 46 of the “Borough Portrait for the Town Centre Spatial Strategy” are these words: “Predicted development in Tower Hamlets over the next 15 years will see major redevelopment on a scale unparalleled in the rest of London. The number of households will increase from 78,530 to somewhere close to 110,000 households representing a 42% increase…”.

The proposed 42% increase in “homes”, which is in addition to the thousands of flats recently built, will wreck Tower Hamlets. Quality of life for existing residents will suffer greatly. Despite the grand claims, something’s got to give, so there won’t be much green space left. The infrastructure will be unable to cope. Having so many people crammed into high density flats will lead to social breakdown.

Many of the new flats have tiny rooms and some of the private flats have rooms smaller than would be permissible for social housing.  They will become the slums of the future.

The council says it is keen on getting input and the 143 page Statement of Participation contains a list of Specific Consultees who have already had that opportunity. It contains 23 pages of vested interests (29 on each page). These include architects, property developers and construction companies.

Only a small percentage of the new flats going up are social housing. Most are private flats sold for profit. Marc Francis, the one-time Lead Member for Housing and Development (now just Development), is not listening to his constituents. Instead he is fronting a private construction goldrush.

Conservative party policy is to scrap Labour’s top down spatial strategies which impose these impossible targets, and instead let local people and local boroughs decide how much development they want.

This time it’s about a Labour activist filling in postal vote forms.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23740214-details/Labour+activist+tells+party%27s+new+star%3A+I+%27helped%27+voters+fill+in+postal+ballots/article.do

You would be unlikely to find the content of these articles in East End Life!

The first, in April, was Tesco Towers and referred to the duplicate planning application nodded through for the Safeway Site.

The second, Chips with Everything was about how a fast-food takeaway was allowed to be within 400 metres of four schools, against the council’s own Healthy Eating Policy.

In June Private Eye examined Councillors pay in an article headed Salim Chance.

July brought some inside information on Martin Smith’s “resignation” - Those Phobias in full.

Tower Shamlets, the most recent article, highlights the fate of some big sums of public money.

We thought that this information should be made available to all Tower Hamlets residents. Private Eye have kindly given us written permission to reproduce them here.

The Andrew Gilligan wrote a very interesting article about the threat to democracy posed by Council Freesheets last week. It’s on the London Evening Standard website here.

Just before you reach St Anne’s Church at Limehouse there is a statue of a man who is inextricably linked to our Borough. A man who shaped the world we live in today. But for some time now you would have had a job finding the statue. It is covered in ugly old wooden sheets. It stands there like an upright corpse, our history shrouded and dead. To compound his redundancy he stands outside another discarded piece of east end history. This man was Clement Attlee. Post War Prime Minister and MP for Limehouse. And the Library is Limehouse Library, a place of self improvement and learning for generations of Tower Hamlets residents.

We live in a Borough full of history. Great lives have passed in our locality and great events have taken place. They are reflected in the many buildings that mark our heritage and define the environment we live in today. It is a heritage that we can be proud of and the buildings that reflect this glory should be a matter of pride. But how does Tower Hamlets Council care for the architecture that illustrates our Borough story? They are allowing our past to rot before our very eyes, mocking our forbears. Ironically much of our heritage is connected to the Labour Party but Labour in Tower Hamlets does not care for history, theirs or any others. To understand this you only have to look at the baleful example of Bancroft Local History Library which Labour threatened to close and Conservatives helped the campaign to save.

The list of buildings in their charge, which they are allowing to fall to ruins includes Bethnal Green Library, Limehouse Town Hall and Poplar Baths. Even if you accept that preserving history is an expensive privilege then what of the impact on our visual environment? The places we have to live. What of the waste of great community buildings? The waste of money itself on new buildings whilst old ones stand ready for use, for life, as they once had. As Tower Hamlets Labour Council continues to squander taxpayers’ money on new vanity projects they ignore what stands all around them. This failure to protect and utilise our architectural heritage is a testament to Labour’s misspent years in power. It marks their profligacy and, what is much worse, that they have no soul, no love for what makes our area what it is and makes us what we are. They recently put up signs welcoming people to the Borough. On the signs they mark out some of the iconic buildings that identify where we live, the Tower of London, Canary Wharf and Christ Church Spitalfields. All these buildings have one thing in common. They are not the responsibility of the Council. Thank goodness! You will not see their buildings highlighted. They are a shame on this Borough and they are an indictment of a heartless and stupid Labour Council.

http://www.poplarbaths.org.uk

Boris has expanded his street tree programme to take in another 40 ‘tree free’ locations. Londoners will be able to request a tree where they live through a new website.

During his election, Boris promised to fund 10,000 street trees in areas where they will most help to improve people’s quality of life. The first 1500 street trees are already being planted in 20 priority locations and he has now expanded the programme to cover 40 areas across 32 London boroughs.

Locally Stepney, Shoreditch, Bow Common and Bromley –by-Bow have been designated as priority areas

If you live or work in one of these priority areas, then visit http://www.london.gov.uk/streettrees/ to request a tree.

East London Advertiser has run articles two weeks running about a clash between Tower Hamlets Chief Executive, Martin Smith, and the council’s political leader Lutfur Rahman (Labour). It appears Martin Smith is being forced out of office at great public expense. It is on the Advertisers front page on both 11th and 18th June 2009 issues

The Advertiser also has article headed “Labour HQ seizes local party’s crisis-hit selection process” - see the online version of The East London Advertiser here. The Advertiser says Tower Hamlets Labour Party was placed under “special measures” three years ago. Because the problems have yet to be resolved Labour HQ will not allow the local party to select council candidates at the next election. The article makes for a very enlightening read, whatever your political colour.

You would be unlikely to read about any of the above in East End Life! If you really want to know what’s going on in Tower Hamlets get the Advertiser.