Will Hammersmith council publish the legal opinion it used to gag a local families group?

We reported recently that almost the last action of H&F News (aka The Greenhalgh Pravda) was to drop an advertisement from a group of parents thanking families who had chosen to use our local primary schools. You can read the pulled advertisement here. It's from Parents' Alliance for Community Schools (PACS), which is trying to raise the profile of the borough's excellent primary schools.

We now gather that, because the advertisement gently criticised free schools, the council’s lawyers apparently argued it should be pulled, even though H&F News had already approved the draft and prepared the artwork.

According to the Chronicle, the council was frightened of falling foul of new rules on local authority publicity. A spokeswoman said, "We were concerned we would have been backing an anti-political organisation… It was only before we were about to go to press that our legal department raised this potential issue, and we were unable to run."

Putting aside any questions we may have about what on earth “anti-political” means (did the spokeswoman perhaps mean “too political”?), we wonder what H&F’s legal department actually advised, given that neither of the two relevant government documents - the Code of Recommended Practice on Local Authority Publicity nor the related Explanatory Memorandum - says anything about council publications not being allowed to carry views which disagree with the council.

Indeed, the Explanatory Memorandum says, "A healthy free press is important in providing information to the public to hold their local authority to account" (para 7.2). While H&F News was hardly a free press, the idea of holding the local authority to account – which the advertisement did – clearly gets the government’s thumbs-up.

Perhaps PACS could make a Freedom of Information request (here's how), asking to see the verbatim opinion given by the legal department on which the decision not to publish was based.

Even though H&F has officially been named one of the worst councils at responding to freedom of information requests, this may just be worth a go.

Or perhaps they could make a complaint to the Local Goverrnment Ombudsman (here's how).

How Hammersmith Tories use debt as a smokescreen for ruthless cuts

At the council meeting on Tuesday, Tory councillors lamely blamed the council’s debt for their decision to slash early years services and youth support. One nameless councillor (oh, very well, it was Helen Binmore) even claimed that if interest rates went up, so would the council’s debt repayments.

Fortunately, Labour’s Rory Vaughan was on hand to explain that most of the council’s debt is on 20 to 30-year fixed rates, which provides solid protection from an interest rate rise.

If he hadn’t been shouted down, Rory would have gone into more detail about why the Tory claims about Hammersmith’s borrowing are economically illiterate, as we have already explained here.

The truth is that for the leading local Tories – if not all their more gullible members – debt is a smokescreen, a carefully constructed myth that they use to justify cutting an extra £1 on top of every £3 of local cuts demanded by the government.

If they stopped peddling the debt myth, they would be forced to have the courage to admit they are cutting because they believe ideologically in hacking the state down to (a very small) size.

Tory Councillor Harry Phibbs let the cat out the the bag when he tweeted recently that the cuts didn't go far enough.

Official: over 11,000 Hammersmith kids to lose early years support

Hammersmith Tory councillors confirmed their decision to cut £3.4m from Sure Start early years services at a council meeting yesterday evening. They ignored a petition from 2,000 residents and pleas from impassioned parents for an Andrew Lansley-style "pause for reflection".


Under close questioning from Labour opposition leader Steve Cowan, top council official Andrew Christie revealed that the much-reduced service would help only 2,000 of the 13,100 children it currently supports. That's a cut in numbers of 11,100 or nearly 85%!

Mr Cowan also asked Cllr Helen Binmore, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, who argued strongly for the cuts, to justify her claim that early years services would get "better". She couldn't.

"Won't resign": Helen Binmore



Labour Councillor PJ Murphy asked Cllr Binmore whether she would resign if services got worse and a centre closed. She said she didn't expect this to happen.

 

Sure Start centres give Hammersmith & Fulham children the chance to make friends and learn as they play. They help parents get professional advice on health and family matters, learn about training and jobs or just socialise with other people.

 
 For more than one in six local children and their families, the council has shut the door on these opportunities.

Andy Slaughter MP on Sure Start lobby, White City whitewash and Shirley Porter's ghost

• Lobby Against Closure of Sure Start Centres and Youth Clubs
• White City Whitewash
• Surely Not Shirley?
• Free Schools - At What Cost?
• Wormwood Scrubs Fun Day
• Round-up

Lobby Against Closure of Sure Start Centres and Youth Clubs
6pm Tonight, Monday 18 April, in front of Hammersmith Town Hall

On Monday night I will be joining local Labour councillors and groups from Hammersmith & Fulham Parents Unite and the Fulham Cross Youth Project in asking the council’s Cabinet not to make more cuts to services for children in the borough.

The Council are proposing the closure of nine of the 15 Sure Start Centres, used by thousands of families with pre-school age children. While the grant from government is falling by 12.9%, the Sure Start budget is being cut locally by almost 50%. When some councils are protecting children’s services from cuts, ours is targeting them.

Similarly, with youth clubs, only three of the seven local clubs are still open, and - to prevent them being re-opened in the future - the Tories are now selling the sites. Many young people, parents and community groups will be there to lobby for a change of heart - please join us for the rally at 6pm or the Cabinet meeting at 7pm.

White City Whitewash

What is the future for White City? The way to find out last week was not reading about the Mayor of London’s ‘vision’ but attending the planning inquiry in the Town Hall.

Although the planning framework for the area won’t be agreed until next year, Westfield and Imperial College are putting in planning applications for 3,000 homes this autumn. These will include blocks of 20 and even 30 stories and will set a precedent for the rest of the site. Consequently, the developers are already saying at least 6,000 new flats can be justified east of Wood Lane, not the 4,500 in the plans.

The council wants over a thousand of the new homes to be council homes at low rents. No, this is not some dramatic u-turn by the most anti-affordable home council in the country. The condition is that they are all taken by residents of White City, Wood Lane and Batman Close Estates to the west of Wood Lane. Not one new affordable home must be built.

You don’t have to be Richard Rogers to work out that this leaves over a thousand empty flats in White City Estate – half the current neighbourhood. And yet the plan states ‘there are no plans for the White City housing estates’. What they mean is they won’t tell us.

It was clear as soon as the Opportunity Area was extended to include the estates that, just as in West Ken, the long-term plan is demolition and re-development to a much higher density with luxury rather than affordable homes.

At the same time Shepherds Bush Green and Town Centre were included in the development area, even though they are south of Westfield. So far here we have seen an attempt to get rid of Ginglik, the Village Hall put up for sale, plans to cut down mature trees and erect a cafe on the Green (now subject to a planning inquiry) and seven stories of flats crowding out the Market.

There is space for development in White City, in the interests of new and existing residents. This isn’t it.

Surely Not Shirley?
So far the council have sold off 64 of the most valuable council homes on the open market, leaving more local families to wait in inadequate of overcrowded accommodation. Now they are set to approve a more general sale of 300 properties of different sizes and values.

This is the comment of the council’s own lawyer on the plans: ‘sales...must be motivated purely by bona fide housing objectives. In particular, they must not be tainted by any considerations of potential electoral advantage (any member or officer pursuing, or wilfully blind to, such motives would act unlawfully and not be protected by any legal advice).’ What can he mean?

Free School - At What Cost?
Wormholt residents were both angry and bewildered when asked to view the revised plans for the ARK Free School last week. Lack of demand (there were only 25 applications for places at the school originally intended for 410 pupils) led the council to cut pupil numbers by half, and many local people thought this meant it would be a lot smaller. But it will still take up the same footprint, closing local roads, building on open space right up to the edge of homes and forcing local community groups out of their premises.

A bad neighbour but not very good for local children either. The small play area is right on the A40. Existing schools have been encouraged or forced to become two-form entry to be more economic, but this will be a very small school costing several million pounds to set up while Bentworth, Canberra and Wormholt Park are starved of funds.

Wormwood Scrubs Fun Day
Last weekend I visited the annual Fun Day at Wormwood Scrubs organised by Groundwork London. Over 400 local residents came along to enjoy the beautiful weather and the wide range of activities run by the Groundwork team. The children who attended were able to meet the animals at the mobile zoo, take a ride in a traditional horse drawn cart, or make their own puppets to take home with them. They also made a model of what the Scrubs would look like in the Twenty First Century.

Groundwork London has been working in West London since 2002, bringing local communities together and helping them engage with the natural spaces in the city. The charity was instrumental in having a Local Nature Reserve designated within Wormwood Scrubs Park.

Round-Up
As Parliament isn’t sitting until after Easter I have had time to:

• Meet leaders of the Syrian opposition to President Assad’s oppressive regime. On their behalf I wrote to William Hague to ask whether CS Gas used against protesters had come from Britain and why the Syrian Ambassador has not yet been censured
• Give evidence to several sessions of the examination in Public of the council’s Core Strategy, the 20-year plan for the borough
• Visit Newport to speak at the annual conference of personal injury lawyers and meet with mediation specialists Resolution to talk about the government’s plans for compulsory mediation

To contact Andy, please e-mail him at andy@andyslaughter.com or call his office on 020 7610 1950

FoI request to devious Hammersmith council would expose the truth about early years cuts

Users and friends of H&F Sure Start early years centres will be delivering a 2,000-strong petition on 18 April, asking the council not to rubber-stamp £3.4m worth of cuts to the "Sure Start" services that give children a better start in life. There will be a peaceful “buggy push” rally at 6.15pm outside Hammersmith Town Hall, King Street, London W6.

The council is shamefully claiming that the cuts will mean “Families get a Surer Start” (see their press release here). This is sheer nonsense: even after a brief consultation launched in response to parents' protests, we estimate that the council is still slashing 19 out of every 20 pounds it previously gave to most Sure Start centres.

Before the consultation, the council said it would reduce funding for nine of the 15 existing centres to £19,000. We understand most centres were getting £400,000 to £500,000 a year each so the new funding is less than one-twentieth of what they used to get.  £19,000 is barely enough to keep the buildings open – certainly not enough to provide any worthwhile help for families.

Following the consultation, Cllr Helen Binmore had the gall to say, “After listening to parents, we are altering our proposals to provide more funding than originally planned for the Cathnor Park, Wendell Park, New Kings and Shepherd’s Bush Families Project centres.” It turns out this actually means a total increase for these four centres of only £44,000, so on average they and the other five will still be getting less than one-twentieth of what we believe was their previous funding.

The cheeky council press release also trumpets that the remaining six centres will each have their funding increased. Yet it carefully doesn’t say by how much, probably because the truth is that the council will require these centres to do hugely more than now for only a tiny bit of extra funding.

Are we being unfair? Put in a Freedom of Information request!
See here for how. The request should ask the council to itemise centre by centre: 

(a) What budget each centre had in 2010/11 and what budget it will have in 2011/12; and 

(b) What services each centre offered families in in 2010/11 and what services it will offer in 2011/12. 

It should be stated that this information is being sought for each centre individually, ie for each of Bayonne Nursery, Bishop's Park, Broadway, Cathnor Park, Flora Gardens, Fulham Central, Fulham South, Masbro, Melcombe, New Kings, Normand Croft, Old Oak, Randolph Beresford, Shepherds Bush Families Project and Wendell Park. See here for details of the centres.

The honest scale of the reduction of support to local children and families will then become clear.

But why does any of this matter? We hand you over to Steve Cowan, leader of the Labour opposition on the council (see here for more from Steve):

"Well, if you care about living in a country where children grow up to have good jobs and are able to win wealth for the UK in an increasingly competitive world; where they are less likely to get involved in crime or anti-social behaviour and instead live healthy, productive lives, then early intervention through Sure Start matters.... The latest empirical evidence shows that early, pre-school, years intervention gives our children the best possible start in life. Even Republicans supported the introduction of the similar Head Start programme in the United States and almost every developed nation has a variation of Sure Start."

Hammersmith & Fulham Tories' links with Young Britons' "madrasah"

An unsettling organisation called the Young Britons' Foundation (YBF), in which Hammersmith & Fulham Conservatives play a starring role, has been expertly probed by local blogger Guy Debord's Cat. Long-standing HFConwatch readers may remember we first aired our concerns about YBF in March 2010, noting that its leader, former H&F councillor Donal Blaney, had called the NHS Britain's "biggest waste of money", claimed global warming was a "scam" and suggested that water-boarding prisoners could be justified.

According to its own website, YBF "identifies, trains, mentors and places philosophically sound [sic] activists in politics, academia and the media". After giving them "policy and skills training at our workshops", YBF "places" [sic] these people in "full-time jobs and work experience in the City, the professions, business, the media, academia and politics".

Right-wing commentators have approvingly called the organisation a Tory “madrasah”, a term mostly used (or abused) to describe schools for radical, ideological fundamentalists. In the same way, perhaps, that the Militant tendency was a left-wing madrasah in the 1980s, until the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock dealt with them.

YBF's links with the H&F Tories run deep. 

Cllr Greg Smith, H&F's cabinet member for residents services, is YBF's director of campaigns. He co-founded YBF in 2003 with Donal Blaney, an H&F councillor for Eel Brook Common from 1998-2002. He also ran Greg Hands's campaign to become MP for Fulham in 2005 and then set up Hands's office.

Cllr Mark Loveday, H&F's Chief Whip and cabinet member for strategy, is on YBF's advisory board.

Greg Hands MP sits on YBF's parliamentary council. Hands was Donal Blaney's fellow councillor in Eel Brook Common. In 2007/08, he claimed £7,500 in parliamentary expenses for "consultancy" payments to Greg Smith.

Guy Debord's Cat notes the similarities with the troublesome, now defunct Federation of Conservative Students (FCS), and another blogger wonders to what extent "1980s FCS-types" have been "mentoring" the YBS. Cllr Harry Phibbs, H&F's cabinet member for community engagement, is well-known for his starring role in the FCS, until the organisation was denounced by that notorious left-winger Norman Tebbit.

Sir Simon Milton

We are very sad to hear of the death yesterday of Sir Simon Milton, deputy mayor of London, chair of the Local Government Association and former leader of Westminster Council. He was only 49.

We did not agree with Sir Simon's politics but we respected his love for local government and his dedication to improving it. We admired his brains, ability and gutsiness and enjoyed his eminently reasonable manner and dry, occasionally frisky sense of humour. At times, he seemed to be the only capable person in Boris’s administration.

We will miss him. Our thoughts go out to his partner Robert.

Andy Slaughter MP's latest punchy news and views

• Fulham Cross Youth Project to Close
• Furnish
• Uncertain Future for Riverside
• NHS
• Libya
• 'Pravda' Ends As It Began - With a Big Lie

Fulham Cross Youth Project to Close
Fulham Cross Youth Project (FCXP) in Lillee Road closes this Friday, the fourth youth club the council is shutting, leaving only three in the borough. I found out about the latest closure a few weeks ago when two of the young people who both use and help at the Project, Louis Scott and Lewis Williams, came to my surgery with a petition signed by hundreds of local people that said:

‘FXYP is a local youth club that caters for many young people between the ages of 11 and 19, 25 if you have a disability. The club has a basketball and football court, a communal area with entertainment facilities, which has a kitchen situated inside. There is also computer room and an art room which is used for homework club – our youth project is truly a home away from home for many of us.'

It is a great building, with dedicated staff – who will lose their jobs – and above all many ambitious, mature young people who rely on the project to give them opportunities they don’t get from home or school. This is the sort of venture the Council should be starting up not closing down.

In the run up to the Election last year, partly because their parliamentary candidate was a youth worker, the Tories denied they had plans to any more close youth clubs after the bad publicity they got closing Townmead two years ago. Since then White City and Avonmore have closed and now Fulham Cross. The cuts were sneaked out last August as a personal decision of the Council Leader, not even going to Committee. They will have cut over £1 million from youth services by the time Fulham Cross closes, but the real objective is to empty the buildings for private sale. Townmead was marketed for £4 million, Avonmore and Fulham Cross will be up for sale if the council’s Cabinet authorises this on 18 April – at the same meeting the nine Sure Start centres are being closed. By disposing of land and buildings as well as cutting funding the Tories hope to ensure that, if and when we regain control of the council in 2014, it will be impossible to build essential services up again.

Nationally, the government’s cuts programme affects women, children and the poorest families disproportionately, but H&F have taken a particular aim at children’s services: school budgets and building programmes, Sure Start, after-school centres, playgrounds and now youth clubs have seen cuts of up to 50%, way beyond the 27% over three years local government has to find.

Furnish
This week I visited Furnish, a local business that is providing offenders with productive work. Run by Shepherds Bush Housing Association, Furnish collects donated furniture and sells it at bargain rates to people moving into new homes who can’t afford to buy at full price. The offenders working there are part of the Probation Service’s Social Enterprise Programme, part-funded by the EU. In the past year Furnish collected 170 tonnes of furniture, made 1,537 collections of donated furniture and delivered to over 800 homes. This helps reduce the amount of furniture lost to landfill.

SBHA is the third biggest social landlord in Hammersmith and, unlike H&F Council and Notting Hill Housing Trust, still sees its role as helping people on low incomes find decent affordable homes locally. They were too charitable to mention the problems Furnish is facing have been caused by the Council increasing the rent on its warehouses in Scrubs Lane by £77,000 this year, or the loss of work placements from the Job Centre when the Coalition government cancelled Labour’s highly successful Future Jobs Fund – both of which threaten its viability.

A separate link up between SBHA and Latchmere Open Prison allows offenders near release to get work experience renovating flats before new tenants move in. Two of the ex-offenders I met were offered permanent jobs and are now training others to follow them.

Uncertain Future for Riverside

It is a sign of the times that the Bush Theatre (11% cut), the Lyric (5%) and the Bhavan Centre (18%) probably breathed sighs of relief when Arts Council England announced its grants this week.

No comfort for Riverside Studios however that has lost all its ACE funding. Riverside is one of the great artistic venues in a Borough that has many, from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts to the BBC, as well as those mentioned above. We must ensure its survival on its current site, especially given the Council and St George property developers would like to get hold of the site for more tower block developments around Hammersmith Bridge.

NHS
I’ve been responding to the hundreds of email and letters I’ve received about the Tories’ plans to privatise and carve up the NHS, and it was one of the topics raised when I did the politics hour on LBC this week, for the first time in some months.

Three months ago Clegg was boasting that the reforms were his idea, and Lansley and Cameron were refusing to listen to reason from doctors, patients or experts like the King’s Fund. Readers of this newsletter will know the fears I have heard expressed from local GPs, primary care, Imperial and the Mental Health Trust. A ‘pause’ in legislation is no good – presumably they intend to wait until the fuss dies down and then press on. What the NHS needs is stability both in its budget (the growth Cameron promised not the 8% cuts we are facing locally) and organisation.

Libya 

I spoke about the humanitarian crisis in Libya in a Commons debate on Tuesday. Since then further civilian and rebel deaths at Coalition hands have emphasised the delicate balance between protection of human rights and aggression. We do still have a role in stopping the attacks on cities like Misrata but Coalition intervention is getting closer and closer to arming the rebels and forcing regime change, which is not what the UN or the Commons voted for.

My attempt to praise William Hague failed when he denied press reports I put to him that the EU was about to recognise a Palestinian state. But the pressure from non-aligned countries is growing and it is only a matter of time before a majority of the UN lose patience with the stalemate and the expansion of Israeli settlements into Palestinian territory, now restricted to little more than 10% of historic Palestine.

'Pravda' Ends As It Began - With a Big Lie
Deceit and hypocrisy have been the journalistic watchwords of H&FNews since it began sliding through our letterboxes five years ago. In that time millions in taxpayers’ money has been spent on a vanity publishing exercise that has ranged from political bias to nauseating self-promotion of Stephen Greenhalgh and his chums.

In announcing its demise the headline claimed ‘all the costs were met by income from advertising revenue’. They were not. Only the printing and distribution costs were covered by advertising, some of which was by the council itself, some pinched from the Chronicle in an attempt to close that independent source down. The staffing, accommodation and overhead costs were all paid for by the Council, that is you and me.

And they will be still – H&F are going to pay the Chronicle to carry their propaganda, no doubt hoping to influence that paper to go easy on them too. I hope it doesn’t. This is contrary to the new Publicity Code introduced by their own Government. All opponents of state propaganda should complain to the Secretary of State, Eric Pickles.

Meanwhile the Leader of the Council lamented ‘it was never able to hold us to account’. Ignore the staggering hypocrisy of the statement, H&FNews did a lot more than censor any criticism and headline every word of self-praise of Britain’s most controversial council. It tried and probably succeeded in winning elections for the Tories. Not Hammersmith's parliamentary seat, although by banning all mention of my name for five years, they had a go. But the remorseless one-sided presentation of everything the Council, the Government, EU, Thames Water or the NHS did depending on who was running it may have helped them pick up Council seats.

And yet I shall almost miss it – where else could you find headlines like this week’s 'Children’s centre numbers rise following consultation', describing a decision to close 9 of the 15 Sure Start centres opened by Labour and reduce the budgets of the remaining 6 yet further?

Andy

To contact Andy, e-mail him at andy@andyslaughter.com or call his office on 020 7610 1950

RIP H&F News, twisting the truth to the end - all eyes now on the Chronicle

So, the last ever copy of H&F News has popped through our doors. As prettily presented piece of propaganda as ever we saw.

Local MP Andy Slaughter reminds us of the fibs it told right up to the last, of which perhaps the richest was “Children’s centre numbers rise following consultation”, when nine centres have lost virtually all their funding and the budgets of the remaining six have been cut.

We also enjoyed that old hypocrite, council leader Stephen Greenhalgh weeping crocodile tears that the paper “was never able to hold us to account”. It never tried. One of its dying actions was to refuse an advertisement from a group of parents thanking families who have chosen to use our local primary schools. See the whole extraordinary story here.

The Chronicle will now be the main source of local news. We hope it won’t be swayed into giving the council an easy ride by the money it is now getting to carry council announcements. And we hope the announcements themselves won’t prove to be further, thinly disguised political propaganda. Plenty of people, including a few of m’learned friends, will be keeping a watchful eye out.

Peaceful protest works - just look at the Save EMA campaign

James Mills, a leading light of the Hammersmith Labour Party, points out in the Guardian that while smash-em-up anarchists get lots of attention, the media ignore more successful peaceful protests, such as the Save EMA campaign, which has just forced the government to keep providing support next year to the quarter of a million teenagers who currently get the education maintenance allowance (EMA).

The campaign, which James runs, has also persuaded Boris Johnson to call on the government to review its decision to scrap the EMA.

This is good news for youing people in Hammersmith & Fulham and across London, and a useful reminder that legitimate and peaceful direct action still gets results. You can read James's piece here.