Dates for Diary

Oops, it's been a while since I last posted on here - I've been getting on with life outside politics, but there are a number of local events coming up worth supporting:

Saturday 5th February: Lewisham libraries 'read-ins' in protest at proposals to close 5 of the borough's libraries.
Crofton Park & Sydenham 11:30am - 1.00pm, Blackheath Village & Grove Park 2.00 - 3.00pm, New Cross 3pm onwards. Turn up, read and (quietly but clearly) make your voice heard.

[UPDATED 20.21: I forgot to mention the People's Convention against Cuts and austerity, 12th February, up at Euston Friends Meeting House - details over on Lewisham Right to Work blog.]

Thursday 17th February, 9am: Mayor & Cabinet and Tuesday 1st March, 10am Council Budget Setting Meeting
Due to the large number of people wishing to express their democratic right to protest at November's council meeting (or something like that), the Chief Exec (or Mayor, not sure who) has, on the advice of the police, decided to change the times of the two key budget meetings to 9am and 10am.

So 'Alarm Clock Lewisham', including many of the council workers whose jobs will be affected by the cuts will no longer be able to attend the meeting and will be relying on Lewisham's pensioners and anyone not working then, to make sure their concerns are heard.

19th February: Lewisham Carnival Against the Cuts
A day of events across the borough to oppose cuts to services. More details at Carnival Against Cuts.

22nd Feb Lewisham says no to cuts - Rally for an Alternative -For jobs, growth, justice.

Brendan Barber (TUC General Secretary) plus various local trade unions and anti-cuts activists
Time: 7pm-8.45pm (refreshments, stalls and entertainment from 6pm).
Venue: Goldsmiths College, New Cross go to Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre access via gate at end of Laurie Grove London SE14 6NH
Organised by Lewisham TUC with support of Goldsmiths' Student Union

26th March: March for the alternative: jobs - growth - justice'.
TUC national demo in central London. By the time this demo happens, most councils across the country will have already made sweeping cuts to local services. Better late than never I suppose, though.

To keep up to date on local anti-cuts campaigns, check out the Lewisham Anti-Cuts Alliance or Lewisham Right to Work blogs, and the LACA Twitter Feed.

Public Meetings Coming Up this Week

A few anti-cuts events coming up locally this week that I wanted to highlight:

Wed 24th Nov: Lewisham Right to Work Public meeting with PCS Gen Sec Mark Serwotka, 7pm, Lewisham Methodist Church, Albion Way. Details here.

Thurs 25th Nov: Goldsmiths University Rally Against the cuts with Tony Benn. 6.30pm, Great Hall, Goldsmiths College, Lewisham Way. Details here.

Mon 29th Nov: Lobby of Full Council to oppose cuts. 6.30pm. Details here.

I don't see eye to eye with everything some members of the Lewisham Anti-Cuts Alliance say (personally I don't support the idea of setting an illegal council budget in Lewisham), but it's a fairly broad church and I do share with them utter opposition and horror at what the impact of the ConDem government's cuts are going to have at both a local and national level, often on the most vulnerable in society.

Lewisham Anti-Cuts Alliance are on Twitter, if you would like to follow them, and they also have a blog, as do Lewisham Right to Work.

A few photos from the campaign

Well it's been a busy few weeks out campaigning for Ute in the by-election. I've been having a break from my 'break from politics' to help with the campaign. We've been getting a great response on the doorstep, and have spoken to loads of residents that have previously never been in when we've called.

Back in April/May, it was difficult to get people interested in the local elections, with all the focus on the leadership debates on TV etc. This time the emphasis is firmly on local issues, albeit with the impact of the government cuts to local government a top concern for many. And there is much more emphasis on the candidate than there was in May, where quite a few people seemed to be voting on party lines, rather than for individuals.

When the by-election was called, the national party asked us if we would like some 'big guns'. We looked a bit askance at first and thought it sounded very ungreen, but we've been delighted that Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP, deputy leader Cllr Adrian Ramsay and London Assembly member Jenny Jones have all come and supported our campaign, along with lots of members and supporters from both the local area and further afield.

Caroline Lucas (top and second picture) is pictured here with local Greens supporting the campaign to keep Crofton Park Library open. Jenny Jones AM (third picture), who leads on pedestrian issues for us on the London Assembly, came to take a look at the Lewisham Way crossing that the Mayor of London is inexplicably threatening to remove - passersby told us that they remembered signing the petition a few years back to get the crossing put in, and couldn't understand why TfL would want to ride roughshod over local opinion now. And Cllr Adrian Ramsay is pictured canvassing on Gillian Street.

It's been a while since I've spoken to anyone on the doorstep who wasn't aware of the by-election, and many residents are probably starting to get a bit cheesed off with the unusual level of attention they are getting from local political parties. Hopefully those who've lived in the area a while will know which parties they hear from regularly, and who are just showing a fleeting, by-election related interest in the ward.

Anyway, time for me to get back on the doorstep rather than sitting here in the warm . . .

Save our Libraries March

There was a good turnout for yesterday's libraries march, and despite the ominous weather forecasts, the rain held off too. I would estimate that there were about 200 people who marched from Crofton Park library to the town hall in Catford. There was a good range of people there - lots of families with children and older residents, as well as the usual activists.

Lewisham MPs Joan Ruddock and Heidi Alexander attempted to speak at the beginning of the demo, but their voices were pretty much drowned out by heckling, with people shouting 'Vote against the cuts'. A number of politicians there were looking rather uncomfortable - the local Lib Dem cllr, as his party is being blamed for cuts at a national level, and the Labour cllrs and MPs as they run Lewisham.

I want go into loads of detail as Transpontine has already beat me to it with a good write up and photos, but suffice to say the march was vocal, determined and presented a united front from the 5 libraries campaigns, who have now collected over 20,000 signatures for their petitions.

Free insulation or freeze on taxation?

I posted last week about our amendment to this year's Council Budget, which includes a proposal to roll out free insulation to homes across Lewisham. The Lib Dems have set up a Facebook group called 'Let's FREEZE Lewisham's Council Tax' so not to be outdone I've set one up called Lewisham needs a Green New Deal, not more cuts to public services! Even if we don't manage to get our proposals through the budget this year, I think the Facebook group has a longer shelf life than just this budget round and could be a useful group to discuss ways of greening up Lewisham's economy, while also creating jobs and reducing fuel poverty.

Anyway, please do join the group to show your support for our proposals. There is also an article and discussion about the proposals over on Brockley Central.

Green Budget: Free Insulation to 25,000 Lewisham homes

The Council's budget for the next municipal year is due to be decided at Full Council on 2nd March. As in the previous two years, the Green Group has put in a detailed budget amendment, with a combination of proposals to overturn what we feel are unacceptable cuts and also proposing a number of new measures, including the roll-out of a free insulation scheme to 25,000 homes in the borough.

The plan would pay for free loft, cavity wall or boiler insulation in 25,700 private homes across Lewisham. That means all private homes in Lewisham which need insulation - but which do not qualify for free help under schemes for the elderly and those on benefits - would get it free of charge. (Those living in social housing will be getting the insulation anyway as part of the decent homes work.) The scheme would run along similar lines to the highly-successful and popular scheme initiated by Green councillors in Kirklees, with an energy company, which must carry out 'green' work under the government's 'Carbon Emissions Reduction Target' rules, being sought as a partner, providing half the cash.

Once again, Ute has led for the group on putting forward our budget proposals and I expect will be posting something further on this in a few days. (It's Ute's birthday today, btw, so happy birthday Ute!). You can read the basic details of our budget amendment here and see the Full Council papers here. Among our other key proposals are:

• A new £1m 'revolving' fund which could be dipped into by householders wanting to fit renewable energy equipment in their homes. The no-interest loans would only have to be repaid when the home is sold on, and the money would return to the fund so others can access it.
• £1.5m to retrofit solid wall (mostly Victorian or pre-1930s) council homes as they become void. As tenants in the Brockley PFI area can testify, these properties often get less insulation than those in other properties because their solid walls make installing insulation more complicated. It's disruptive work, so it makes sense to start by carrying it out on properties that are empty, before they are re-let.
• £500,000 fund to allow the Mayor to use compulsory purchase orders to bring neglected properties back into use. This follows on from the findings of my committee in its Empty Properties review earlier in the year and is aimed at being a last resort, when all other enforcement measures have failed (I can think of a certain property on the corner of Loampit Hill/Tyrwhitt Road that immediately springs to mind here).
• Money to roll out the 'brown bins' garden waste collection trial to almost 20,000 homes. Our budget amendment the year before last resulted in the successful pilot. We are now saying lets start rolling the bins out permanently.
  

While the Greens have submitted a detailed budget amendment, the Lib Dems have again opted for the back of a fag packet option. They propose a zero rate increase in Council Tax by scrapping the Mayor's proposals to spend £2m on measures to tackle the recesssion. That's it, no attempt to overturn any cuts they might not like, no positive growth proposals to help us tackle the 'triple crunch' of climate change, peak oil and the credit-fuelled financial crisis. I am confident that our proposals will benefit residents more, both in the medium and long-term, both in terms of energy bill savings, new jobs and warmer homes than a one-off council tax freeze. No budget amendments from the Tories (again) or the Socialists.

Could your street be Lewisham's first eco street?

One of the Lewisham Green Group budget amendments that we got through earlier this year was money to run a street-by-street energy reduction scheme. The pilot programme has been announced this week and the Council is looking for a road in the borough to become Lewisham’s first ‘Eco Street’.

Residents have until Wednesday 10th September to submit their street's entry, saying why they should be the lucky eco street. So roll up Ladywell residents, get speaking to your neighbours and submit an entry. Although the Council press release dumbs it down a bit with talk of an 'environmental makeover', what this programme should (at least as we proposed it) be primarily about is insulating all the participating properties in street (economies of scale bringing down the cost etc) and other measures to reduce both your carbon footprint and your fuel bills.

You can download the application form from here.

The only criteria is that nominated streets should have at least 100 households, preferably made up of more than one type of dwelling (ie, houses, conversion and purpose-built flats). [Personally I can't see any reason why 2 adjoining small streets couldn't submit a joint entry, but I'll check that].

Residents on the street will receive:
- A free energy assessment for each home
- A free pack of environmentally friendly ‘goodies’ for each household
- Financial support for measures to make their home more sustainable and to reduce energy bills
- Information and advice on how to reduce, reuse and recycle

Improvements for the street will include:
- Local clean-up events
- A ‘sustainable living’ event for the street
­- Development of a car club for the street
- Opportunities to support local wildlife and other biodiversity improvements

You may also be interested in taking a look at the Council's Greener Home Guide.

Real Nappies for London Update

The Real Nappies for London scheme (RNfL) which was officially launched in June is now getting off the ground in Lewisham. A part-time officer to promote and administer the Real Nappies scheme has been appointed and it should be launched locally soon. In the meantime, parents in the borough with children in cloth nappies can claim their £30 voucher. Details here (the site also has lots of useful information on real nappies, including nappy exchanges etc).

Lewisham joined the scheme as a result of a Green budget amendment. Previous posts on nappies here.

Green Waste Collection Pilot (brown bins)

As already mentioned by Robert and Andrew , a green waste collection service is currently being trialled in Lewisham. This was one of the Green Party budget amendments accepted by the Mayor earlier this year. The pilot will run for four months and will cover 5,000 households, who will be offered brown wheelie bins and information leaflets explaining what can go in them. There will also be a number of free compost bins available. The aim of the trial is a) to get residents composting what they can in their garden b) use the brown bins for garden waste they can't easily compost themselves (eg hedge clippings). If this proves to be an effective way to reduce the volume of waste in the black bins and increase the borough's recycling rate (yes, apparently it can count towards the recycling target), then funds permitting, the programme could be rolled out to more homes. At least one street in Ladywell ward, Marsala Road, is taking part in the pilot.

There are a number of issues with introducing a third bin that need to be considered, not least space in people's front gardens/on the pavement, as well as the extra lorries on the roads to collect the waste, but hopefully in the longer-term the black bins can be replaced with smaller bins, as is already happening in parts of the borough. We need to look at ways of dramatically increasing the borough's recycling rate as well as reducing the overall volume of waste produced, and introducing a green waste collection service is one way of doing this. Some residents have apparently complained that they don't like the colour of the new bins - guess you can't please everybody all of the time :)

This is not a plastic bag

Following hot on the heels of Anya Hindmarch's highly-sought after designer bag and the announcement that Modbury in Devon has just become the first plastic bag free town in Europe, Lewisham town centre management team are about to launch a range of cotton bags, with the double aim of both promoting local shops and reducing waste.

The idea started out as a Green budget proposal. When we first discussed the idea with town centre managers, they liked it so much that they decided to spend a small amount of leftover cash from last year's budget on it straightaway. The first batch have just arrived back from the manufacturers and will be hitting shops soon. I believe the first bags are earmarked for the bigger shopping centres in Lewisham (ie Lewisham, Catford, Brockley), but as our budget proposal also went through, more bags (this time in fairtrade (and I think organic) cotton, as stipulated in our budget agreement) have been ordered, which I believe are going to be aimed at smaller shopping centres (I'm hoping this will include Ladywell, but I have no say over this).

The town centre managers will be offering the bags to shopkeepers at just above cost-price , who can then sell the bags onto customers at £2 each. This means that the scheme should be self-financing (ie sustainable in more ways than one!), as well as making the shops a small profit, and any profit made by the town centre managers will be ploughed back into buying more cloth bags or on other improvements to shopping areas.

So buy them quickly before they are snapped up and put on E-bay for extortionate prices. Could soon be the must have accessory for all shoppers in Lewisham!

Budget Comment (Ute)

From Ute:

As I have taken the lead for the Greens on the Council on our budget proposals, Sue has offered me the opportunity to contribute a piece on local authority budgets in general and on the Council meeting on Thursday 1 March which agreed Lewisham’s 2007/08 budget.

When we prepared our budget proposals, we decided to focus on two areas from our election manifesto – waste/recycling and support for local shops. In addition we included a proposal to continue an access to schooling programme for refugee and asylum seeker children and one to provide seed funding for renewable energy in schools which was required in order to generate considerable external funding for this scheme. Details of these are included in Sue’s previous posting.

We also looked at the budget which had been proposed by the Mayor. For any local authority there are many conflicting priorities and sometimes tough decisions have to be made as to how to allocate the money that is available. In a number of cases the Council is at the mercy of central government as funding streams and strategic priorities are decided in Westminster; this applies, for example, to adult education and adult social care. Lewisham Council has earmarked £1.3M in the 2007/08 budget to cover a funding shortfall for adult education from the Learning & Skills Council.

By far the greatest individual budget pressures exist in adult social care due to increasing demand and less funding being channelled through the NHS without an equivalent increase in social care funding for local authorities which have to pick up the pieces. In Lewisham this has led to a projected overspend of £7.2M in 2007/08 which has to be contained within the overall budget. The original proposal by the Mayor would have meant that part of this would be made available from reserves with the expectation that following statutory consultation £1.612M would be returned in savings. This would effectively have pre-empted the outcome of the consultation.

We thought that this didn’t make sense at all and proposed to fully commit these £1.612M from reserves as a one-off measure to buy time and allow for a meaningful co-operation with service users on how to shape services in the future. Clearly it is unsustainable to continue funding such shortfalls from reserves in the future, however laudable the cause. However, it is important at this stage to remove pressures of immediate savings to enable all parties involved to work in a more collaborative way which should hopefully lead to better solutions for service users.

Shortly after our budget proposal was published the Mayor announced that he was going to do just that.

In addition we included a reversal of savings for respite care and of equalising service offers in our budget proposal, which brought the total of our proposed reversal of adult social care savings to almost £1.8M – or 25% of the total budget pressure in the Mayor’s proposal.

In total our budget proposal came to just under £2.1M and we made sure it was balanced – we did not want to just come up with a wish list but identified funding for all our expenditure items. We also ensured that our proposals were technically feasible and legally sound. The Mayor eventually incorporated all our expenditure items in the budget proposal that was submitted to Council and we decided to support the budget on that basis.

As I said at the Council meeting on Thursday, I am proud of what we achieved with our budget proposals. We were the only party in the Council to even address the adult social care budget pressure and to come up with a feasible proposal that then got majority support. Whilst this will not solve all the problems of this borough, it is a starting point – it will make Lewisham greener and socially more responsible and provide support to local businesses. Opposition councillors have two options: they can simply complain that the world is bad, or they can make constructive proposals and take decisions on an issue-by-issue basis when they can make a real difference. We have chosen to do the latter.

Ute

Cllr Ute Michel

Lewisham Council's Budget - all Green amendments accepted

Ute or I will post more comment on last night's council budget meeting soon, but for now, in brief, all our budget proposals were accepted by the Mayor. These included a number of proposals to deliver additional investment in environmental initiatives and practical measures to promote local shops and businesses while reversing £1.6m of proposed cuts in frontline services for Adult Social Care.
"Lewisham's Green Party councillors last night persuaded the Mayor to make radical changes to his budget.

This means extra eco-friendly measures such as school solar panels will become reality, along with ideas to support locally-owned shops.

It also means shelving the mayor's plans to break up a groundbreaking scheme that helps traumatised refugee children to integrate into our schools. The Mayor promised to listen to what the Children and Young People committee recommends.

But the Greens would not have supported the budget if the Mayor had not agreed to make important changes to his plans for services for some of Lewisham's most vulnerable adult residents.

Green Party finance spokesperson Cllr Ute Michel said:

"Last week we said the Mayor should think again about removing adult social care services from many current users. Just hours later he agreed to do just that. Without his promise to consult with an open mind, the Greens could never have voted for this budget.

"Before that change of heart, the review would have been massively biased in favour of cuts, because the council would have had to find £1.8m of savings. Last night that pressure was lifted and now service users have a far better chance of being listened to."

Green group leader Cllr Darren Johnson added:

"We will now fight for the consultation to be not about penny-pinching but about empowering vulnerable residents to lead full lives in our community just like everybody else."

Green Party proposals accepted by the Mayor:

For the environment

* A pilot green waste wheelie bin collection for 5,000 households
* £10,000 ringfenced to promote recycling, energy conservation and other sustainability schemes
* £60,000 to install solar panels and energy efficiency measures in five schools within the Energy Action Zones
* Vouchers for hundreds of families to purchase 'real' nappies to cut down on the huge waste caused by disposables

For local businesses:

* A cheaper recycling service
* Exploring the potential of a high-tech local shoppers' loyalty card
* Thousands of locally-branded cotton shopping bags to be sold by local traders, cutting down on plastic and expressing shoppers' community pride"