Andrew Gilligan: Small Shops Under New Threat As Sainsbury’s Comes To Town

Greenwich town centre is to get a new Sainsbury’s supermarket, triggering a potential new threat to the town’s remaining independent shops.

The motorbike accessories store in the same Greenwich High Road block as the existing Co-op is closing down. On its windows are statutory notices announcing that Sainsbury’s is applying for an alcohol licence for the premises. The new store – about the same size as the Co-op by the looks of the site – will be the third new supermarket chain to open in recent years, after the M&S Simply Food at the Cutty Sark and the Tesco Metro on Trafalgar Road.

The post-Tesco fate of the other shops on Trafalgar Road – closure for some, reduced business for many – could be a worrying portent of the future. The new Sainsbury’s will be within a minute’s walk of Greenwich’s main cluster of independent food shops – the greengrocer, butcher, cheese shop, fishmonger and general grocery on Royal Hill.

True, these places have managed to cope with the Co-op, for years. But Sainsbury’s stock is likely be more directly competitive with them – more fresh food, more bourgeois comforts and more upmarket stuff than the Co-op – meaning that it’s a more serious threat.

And the competition between the two neighbouring supermarkets may also (temporarily) drive down prices on the basics and staples to an extent which damages Royal Hill. I found last year that the prices of the Royal Hill shops were suprisingly competitive with the Co-op (then Somerfield). If both of the retail behemoths are prepared to sell things at a loss as they battle it out, however, it seems unlikely that the smaller players will be able to compete on price. That could do them great damage.

At the same time, perhaps the most consuming retail issue in Greenwich – the fate of the market – is about to come to a head. Planning permission for Greenwich Hospital’s hateful scheme to knock down the market was refused exactly a year ago. But the Hospital’s appeal against the decision will be heard by a planning inspector at a public inquiry between September 7th and 17th.

Greenwich Hospital’s changes to the scheme – principally keeping, though reglazing, the roof – don’t seem to have convinced anyone. The existing shops will still be demolished and the number of stalls, and the food court, reduced. The site will be dominated by a 100-bedroom hotel.

On Sunday, as we covered on the site, there was a demo against the plans, with the three local councillors handing out leaflets claiming that even the revised proposals “will see the end of Greenwich Market as we know it.” This is true – because the cost of the redevelopment will almost certainly mean that the Hospital will have to raise the rents to a level beyond that which the existing independent traders can afford. Hays Galleria or Spitalfields, next stop!

The cynical view is that the tourists won’t be able to tell the difference. But of course they will – and we most certainly will. The market was so rammed this weekend that, to the rage of passing motorists, the demonstrators had to stand in the road. If it’s turned into a feeble appendage of a 100-room hotel, with added chain-stores, it won’t be anything like as much of a draw to the town.

As well as the local councillors, the influential Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment – the Government’s design standards watchdog- has attacked the revised scheme. In their response to the planning inspector, CABE said the new plans were still ‘alien.” They criticised the proposed layout of the market, the ‘dominating’ scale of the boutique hotel and the detailing of the glazed roof.

They branded as “awkward” the proposed new route from Greenwich Church Street into the market. And they said that the relationship between the roof and the proposed new buildings on either side was still not “fully resolved.”

I’ll be covering the saga of the market and the public inquiry in more detail within the next two weeks. But we should look at the onward march of the supermarkets – a Waitrose and a further Tesco are also rumoured – with just as much alarm.

Andrew Gilligan: Eight days to save the market

“You pig,” said the text message on my phone. “You are such a low life. You kill Dr Kelly again, you putzer.”

As you might guess from the somewhat obscure nature of the deadly insult (whatever is a “putzer?” Even the OED can’t tell me) it was another billet-doux from Greenwich’s Favourite Restaurateur, Frank Dowling, showing all the courtesy we have come to expect from his much-loved industrial catering empire.

Frank often reacts badly to criticism. Last year, after I pointed out that some of his most expensive outlets had failed their hygiene inspections, he rang me up to call me a “c***.” My report of this conversation is still the top item when anyone Googles you, Frank!

Let’s wait to see if anyone from Greenwich Hospital sends a rude text after this week’s column. I’ve been looking in detail at the changes submitted to the planning inspector as part of the Hospital’s appeal against the refusal of planning permission last year.

The Hospital – no doubt hoping to head off inconvenient calls for the whole application to be re-run – itself describes its changes as “minor alterations.” They are indeed relatively minor, and therefore change few of the objectionable features of the scheme which led to its unanimous rejection by councillors.

The most significant change is that the existing market roof will be kept, certainly an improvement on the Bluewater/ Stratford Bus Station combo we were promised before. However, the shops at the sides will still be demolished and a large new hotel, rising to four storeys, will still be built. The number of rooms in the hotel has been reduced fractionally (but is still “approximately 100”) and its roofscape profile has been slightly changed by removing louvres from part of the central block.

The overall effect of the changes is to reduce the built footprint of the hotel by just 2.6 per cent – from 5625 square metres to 5477 sq m. The overall built footprint of the scheme will fall by 4 per cent. This still represents a more than doubling of the footprint on the site, an increase in density which lay at the heart of the council’s reasons for rejecting the scheme.
As the council’s decision notice stated, the new build would have “an unbalanced and detrimental relationship with the established urban fabric of the area;” would be “visually obtrusive…to the detriment of the adjacent Grade II listed buildings;” would be “out of keeping with its historic surroundings;” would have “an adverse effect on the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage site in which it is located;” would cause “the overdevelopment of the site and…adversely affect the existing patterns of development;” would “lead to ‘town cramming’;” would “impact on the free flow of traffic;” and would “result in additional congestion and obstruction on the local highway to the detriment of pedestrian and highway safety.”

All these objections are related to the height and density of the hotel, which would poke visibly up above the existing buildings, and none has been significantly changed by the Hospital’s “minor alterations.”

The Hospital continues to make the ridiculous claim that its redevelopment will create only 18 extra person movements per hour, 16 of them by public transport, a proposition rejected by councillors. The proposed hotel alone will accommodate around 200 guests, with the vast majority (since they are carrying luggage) likely to arrive by car, taxi or coach. The hotel’s main entrance is in the middle of the one-way system and will almost certainly cause significant congestion.

Do not for one moment imagine that the retention of the roof should end objections to this scheme. The eviction of traders during the construction period (without enough space in the temporary market for many of them) will drive many out of business. The mix of shops and traders in any new market/ shopping centre is likely to change fundamentally, since higher rents will need to be charged to recoup the cost of the redevelopment. Whatever the Hospital says now, a redeveloped market has a Hays Galleria and Starbucks future.

The law says that the appeal ought to be decided on whether the council properly applied its planning policy, the Unitary Development Plan, and national planning policy guidance. It seems clear that it did. The council said the original market proposals contravened the UDP in ten places, and also breaches national planning policy guidance twice. The amended plans are still in breach of PPG and of at least nine policies of the UDP.

The public inquiry into the proposals will be held on 7 September. You have until 30 July to object to the Planning Inspectorate. The address is: Alan Ridley, Planning Inspectorate, Room 4/02, Temple Quay, Bristol, BS1 6PN.

Andrew Gilligan: Greenwich Market: Hospital may get rid of even more stalls

GREENWICH Hospital’s issuing the food stalls in the market with notice to quit has prompted an outcry. But it may be only the first part of the Hospital’s plan to undermine the market in order to clear the way for its redevelopment.

Traders believe that the Hospital’s new managing agents, Nelson Bakewell, are considering adopting a proposal with which they did considerable damage to another market they managed, Covent Garden. After the food stalls go, this website has been told, the Hospital is considering getting rid of all stalls which sell “manufactured” goods. In other words, only people who make their own wares will be allowed to remain. (The second-hand day won’t be affected.)

Between 20 and 40 permanent stalls – out of around 90 – would go, and a similar proportion of the casual traders. A committee may be drawn up to decide which traders are “creative” enough to remain and which need to be ejected.

You can see a sort of purist, idealist logic in this – making it a truly “craft” market. It’s true that there’s a certain amount of tourist-targeted tat in the place at the moment. But in the end it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the mix that is needed to make a market successful. It also risks quite a seriously large number of empty spaces if the hoped-for creative geniuses do not materialise.

The Hospital has dropped Urban Space, the manager which revived the market to its present pitch of success. Nelson Bakewell, the new agents, have decided, in the words of one source, that what they want from the market is greater “predictability” – of income and takings, which of course also equates to greater predictability of content. Hay’s Galleria, here we come!

“They say they can predict the shops, but not the stalls,” said one source. “They want to look at a spreadsheet and know what’s going to happen, but successful markets don’t work like that. You’ve got to be more flexible and more creative.”

The Hospital and Nelson Bakewell have also parted company with two key people running the market – Shaun Hose, a consultant engaged to draw up a “creative vision” for it after councillors rejected the redevelopment plan last year, and Patrycja Nowak, the market manager inherited from Urban Space. Both resigned over what other sources say was their concern about the direction in which the new management was taking the market.

“I simply do not believe they know what they are doing,” said one person closely involved with the market. “We have been waiting for months for them to tell us what their vision is for the stalls part of the market and we still don’t know. I think the problem is that they don’t know themselves.”

The Hospital not knowing what it is doing would be one possibility. But the other possibility is that they know exactly what they’re doing. I’ll cover the Hospital’s new, revised plans for the redevelopment – now being considered by the Planning Appeals Inspectorate – in more detail in next week’s column. But, just as in the plan that was rejected, it appears – and our sources confirm – the floorspace available for the market stalls and their associated storage will be less than it is now, even without the demands the proposed new hotel is likely to impose on that same, limited floorspace.

Less space implies, of course, fewer stalls. But if lots of the stalls have already been chucked off, they won’t be in a position to complain about the redevelopment. And the quieter the market becomes, the less justification there is for not redeveloping it.

The eviction of the food stalls is blamed by all our sources on Greenwich’s second least-favourite institution, after the Hospital, Frank Dowling’s Inc Group. Dowling – all our sources say – demanded that the food stalls be removed because they were damaging the trade of his pubs and restaurants.

I can quite understand the deadly peril for Frank’s third-rate catering empire of having to compete for business with outlets that might be quite good – though Frank, it should be said, last night denied to me that he’d made any such demand over the food stalls and “didn’t even know” they were going.

But whatever motivated it, the moves on the market appears to be part of a wider agenda. Just as I described in my previous column with the shops, Greenwich Hospital appears to be hollowing out the retail core of the town to reduce resistance to its still overbearing and inappropriate redevelopment plans. As I’ll explain next week, I have a feeling it’s not going to work.

PS – Sorry about the long gap since the last column. I’ve been on holiday – back regularly now!

Andrew Gilligan: Where have all the shops gone?

HAVE you noticed how many empty shops there are in Greenwich, all of a sudden? In the town centre (excluding Royal Hill) there are 19. The shop that was Warwick Leadlay, at the entrance passage from Nelson Road to the market, is the latest to fall vacant – for the second time in two years.

The only thing in the shop now is a notice in the window from its most recent tenant, Graham and Green, announcing that they have relocated to Notting Hill. That could stand as an epitaph for the folly of Greenwich Hospital’s retail strategy. They elbowed out a business, Warwick Leadlay, that had provided decades of stability on the retail scene, to bring in a trendy outlet that fled back to its comfort zone as soon as it realised that SE10 is not, thank God, Notting Hill.

Around the market, nearly half a dozen shops are vacant. Next to the Post Office, the big Bottoms Up site has been empty for months. The parade at the Greenwich end of South Street now has two vacant shops. The clothing shop in King William Walk has closed. Two of Frank Dowling’s pubs and bars, the old Cricketers (aka the Lani Tiki Lounge) and the Inc Bar above the market arch, are dry. The travel agency near the DLR station has flown away.

Some of it, no doubt, is because of the recession. Some of it is because of Greenwich Hospital’s wish to redevelop the central Market site. It is gradually moving traders out of the bits it wants to demolish, to boost its loathsome scheme to turn the Market into a hotel with a modern shopping precinct attached – unanimously rejected by the council last year, but the subject of an appeal and public inquiry this summer. More on this soon.

Some of it, though, may be because Greenwich shops depend on visitors, and it is simply not an attractive place to visit at the moment. This used to be somewhere that visitors (if not locals) came to shop. But as well as the shops, we have of course lost about three-quarters of our markets. I am increasingly struck by how hugely disappointing the town must now feel for those visitors who can remember it from a few years ago.

The dominant feature of central Greenwich has become a series of hoardings concealing, variously, a mutton-headed tarting-up (the foot tunnel), a national tragedy (the appallingly botched restoration of the Cutty Sark), a vaguely unneccesary “improvement” (the Sammy Ofer wing at the Maritime Museum), an endlessly-delayed project (the pier) or a supposed future university, currently and almost certainly now indefinitely an empty space (the old Village Market site.) And that’s before the Olympics get started…

As the new government starts to wield the axe, the assumption in many quarters seems to be that all public spending is good and that any cuts to it are bad. Much of the time this is, of course, true. But Greenwich increasingly strikes me as a textbook example of just how destructive public spending and official improvement-mania can be. We would have almost certainly have been happier, and our town would have been busier, if they had just forgotten about thir grand plans and left the pier, the foot tunnel, the Cutty Sark, the Maritime Museum, the park and the Village Market alone.

Andrew Gilligan: Park Olympics: A Potential Nuclear Bomb for the Council

After giving the Olympics planning permission in March, Greenwich Council may dare to hope that the issue is over. I’m much less sure. It would, for instance, be wrong to see the recent council elections, at which Labour was re-elected, as providing any endorsement for the council’s policy. All the opposition parties supported the Olympics, too.

More importantly, and more dangerously for the council, the way Greenwich made its decision appears to be in direct breach of two key principles of planning law and the Local Government Code of Conduct, and of broader legal principles governing the way in which public bodies must make decisions.

Under these rules, local authorities and their members have a duty to approach planning applications with an open mind and without prejudgment. They are under an absolute legal requirement to invite objections, consider them properly and go through a full consultation process. They are supposed to judge each application on its merits, carefully examining the details presented to them for compliance with their planning policies.

And there were many details. Locog’s application amounted to thousands of pages – setting out all the things the council was supposed to think about before it gave the go-ahead. We can, however, definitively prove that the entire process was a charade. Long before any actual application was presented, the council stated publicly that its mind was made up. Before even a single objector was heard, the council said, in effect, that they would all be ignored. Before even a single page of evidence was produced, the council made clear that the application would be passed.

The key piece of evidence is Greenwich Time, the council’s propaganda newspaper, performing a useful service for perhaps the first time in its sorry life.

On 9 September 2008, more than a year before the planning application was even submitted, a Greenwich Time headline about the proposal piped: “Course the Royal Park will be fine!” and described the park’s hosting of the events not as an if, but as a when (“The o2, Greenwich Park, Woolwich Barracks – three world-class venues that will put Greenwich firmly on the world stage when they host up to a third of the events at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”)

On 30 September 2008, Greenwich Time trumpeted: “A first look at the new [Olympic] cross-country [course] map – and it looks just great!”

On 6 October 2008, Greenwich Time described the park’s use for the Olympics as a “field of dreams” and stated: “The Olympic and Paralympic Games are coming to London – and Greenwich – in 2012… at the 02, Greenwich Park and Woolwich Barracks… Let the excitement sink in.” It described the use of the park as a “’natural’ for the Games” which would offer an “unparalleled opportunity” for the area. This is the council’s official voice speaking, don’t forget. Does it sound a bit like prejudgment to you?

On 8 December 2009, just after the planning application went in, Greenwich Time announced: Greenwich will host a number of Paralympic sports in 2012… The Paralympic equestrian events will be held at Greenwich Park.” The same words were used in an official council press release, four days before.

And on the morning of the planning meeting itself, 23 March 2010, Greenwich Time plopped onto my mat complete with a big map showing the Park as an Olympic venue and a double-page spread on how “a temporary arena will be built within the Park to host the equestrian events.” Actually, boys, at that stage it was still theoretically an “if” – because you hadn’t made your decision, remember?

In an age when even the most trivial decision has to be consulted on, at the risk otherwise of being struck down by the courts, Greenwich Council has left a huge flank open here. Of course, many such decisions are fixed well in advance. Consultations and suchlike procedures are usually shams. But great care is normally taken to pretend, to go through the motions of open-mindedness. I can’t remember any case in the past where a public authority has so blatantly announced the outcome at the beginning of the decision-making process.

This indisputable evidence that the council acted with predetermination and a closed mind seems to me to offer significant scope for legal or other challenge.

Andrew Gilligan: The Election Verdict and the Council Leader’s Bottom

CHRIS Roberts, newly re-elected leader of Greenwich council, reacted to his victory at last week’s polls with characteristic grace. “Chicken run, my arse, that’s my comment for greenwich.co.uk!” he shouted, according to site contributor Darryl Chamberlain. (Mr Roberts, as we revealed here last year, performed a moonlight flit from his previous ward, Peninsula, to safer territory in Glyndon.)

We need not dwell on Mr Roberts’ arse in this space – we already see more than enough of his fine, manly jaw in the pages of Greenwich Time – but close analysis of the results shows some interesting patterns.

In the council elections, across the borough as a whole, the Labour vote share was 46 per cent. This delivered them nearly 80 per cent of the seats – ah, the joys of first-past-the-post!

The Labour vote rose by 4.7 per cent in the borough as a whole, though some wards in the east of the borough showed rises of up to 12.6 per cent. Such a rise is not that surprising given that 2006, the last time the council was fought, was a shockingly bad year for Labour in London.

Fascinatingly, however, all three wards covered by greenwich.co.uk – Greenwich West, Peninsula and Blackheath Westcombe – saw falls in the Labour vote.

Not huge falls, for sure – Labour dropped by 5.6 per cent in Peninsula, 2.6 per cent in Blackheath Westcombe, only 0.2 per cent in Greenwich West – but still very much against the trend. It does seem as if the residents of SE10 and SE3 are growing gradually more sceptical of the council’s general wonderfulness. Perhaps Mr Roberts was right to be cross with this website after all!

There does also seem to be a bit of an anti-Olympic vote. As well as the three wards around Greenwich Park, the two Woolwich wards, Common and Riverside, both very solidly Labour, also saw a drop in the Labour vote, against the trend. Woolwich Common is, of course, the place where the Olympic shooting events will be held. (The new Royal Arsenal development, with its influx of middle-class residents, will have been another factor in the Labour drop in Woolwich Riverside.)

The only other ward in the borough where the Labour vote fell a bit was Glyndon. There are no Olympics there, no bolshy websites. But Glyndon was the ward where Chris Roberts was standing.

Greenwich will be even more of a Labour fiefdom for the next few years, even though the majority of voters did not vote Labour. But relief may soon be at hand. One of the “political reform” proposals being batted around in the Lib-Con coalition talks this week was changing local council elections to a form of proportional representation. That feels like the kind of thing the Tories could give the Lib Dems to make up for opposing PR for Westminster.

Maybe, just maybe, the next few years will be the swansong of the Greenwich one-party state. Remember that, councillors, won’t you, in the hugely unlikely event that you’re tempted to behave arrogantly?

Labour vote share – 2010 council elections by ward

	%	Change on 2006
Abbey Wood	52.2	+12.3
Blackheath Westcombe	34.1	-2.6
Charlton	51	+5.7
Coldharbour	33.6	+6.2
Eltham N	34.9	+10.6
Eltham S	27.4	+7.9
Eltham W	51.1	+1.2
Glyndon	58.5	-0.9
Greenwich West	40.5	-0.2
Kidbrooke	46.1	+6.5
Middle Park	39.7	+1.6
Peninsula	40.1	-5.6
Plumstead	55.1	+5.1
Shooters Hill	47.8	+5.4
Thamesmead Moorings	59.7	+12.6
Woolwich Common	61.5	-0.4
Woolwich Riverside	56.5	-6.5
Total	46	+4.7

Seats: Labour 40, Conservative 11

Andrew Gilligan: How To Make The Most Of Your Vote

This column – unlike, say, Greenwich Time – does not do party political propaganda. Since living in Greenwich, I’ve voted for all four parties contesting our three local council wards. I’m not going to tell you how to vote,  and I doubt you’d take any notice if I did. What I can do, however, is give you the information to decide how you can best use your votes to produce the effect you want.

If you are broadly satisfied with the council, the choice in any of our local wards is easy – give all three of your votes to Labour. If you are dissatisfied, and want change, you’ll have noticed that all the other parties have, at various points, been sending round leaflets claiming that they are the only ones which can beat Labour, that it is a “two-horse race” and that voting for anyone else is a “wasted vote.”

In a sense, each of them is right – depending on where they say it. In each of the three wards, a different opposition party has the best chance of defeating Labour. First, you need to know which ward you live in.

Greenwich West is anything west of the park and Naval College. This includes the town centre, West Greenwich, and the bits of SE8 that are in Greenwich borough, such as Millennium Quay. All three of this ward’s councillors are currently Labour.

Greenwich West is a contest between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with the Conservatives some way in third.

Peninsula includes East Greenwich (between the railway line and the river) and GMV. The boundary starts at the Trafalgar Tavern, goes down Park Row, turns along Park Vista (including the houses on both sides), and then follows the railway line. All three of this ward’s councillors are currently Labour – though, in a sign of potential vulnerability, one of the sitting Labour councillors, council leader Chris Roberts, has done a “chicken run” to a a safer ward.

Peninsula is probably a contest between Labour and the Greens, though the challenger here is less clear than in the other two wards.

Everything south of the railway line, east of the park and west of the A102 (M) is in Blackheath Westcombe. This includes nearly all of Maze Hill, the Blackheath Standard area, Westcombe Park, and the bits of Blackheath Village that fall in Greenwich borough. One of this ward’s councillors is Labour and the other two are Conservatives.

Blackheath Westcombe is a contest between Labour and the Conservatives, with the Lib Dems a long way in third.

The ward map is here and you can check any specific address here.

The judgments I’ve made are based on the results at the 2006 council elections (and on no other elections – the Mayoral vote is not really comparable.) There are three councillors in each ward, so you have three votes. Last time, Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives each stood three candidates in each ward. The Greens only stood one candidate in each ward.

The percentage shares of the vote for each party in 2006 were as follows:

	Labour	Lib Dem	Conservative	Green
Greenwich West	40.7%	31.9%	19.6%	7.9%
Peninsula	45.7%	21.7%	21.3%	10.9%
Blackheath Westcombe	36.7%	17%	39.1%	7.2%

Because the Greens only stood one candidate in each ward in 2006 (they are standing three in each ward this year), they limited their capacity to get votes and these figures probably understate their level of support. Many Green supporters would probably have cast more than one of their votes for the party had they been able to. There are also substantial differences between candidates of the same party – in Peninsula, Mary Mills got 250 more votes than her two Labour colleagues.

So I have also worked out each party’s share based on average votes per candidate. They were as follows:

	Labour	Lib Dem	Conservative	Green
Greenwich West	34.9%	27.3%	17.6%	20.2%
Peninsula	37.6%	17.9%	17.4%	27%
Blackheath Westcombe	32.1%	14.9%	34.2%	18.9%

One last thing – you can, of course, register a qualified endorsement of/ protest against the council by splitting your votes, giving some of them to Labour and some to the opposition.

Happy voting!

Andrew Gilligan: Local News – The “Greenwich Time” Way

THE DAY that Greenwich Council’s propaganda newspaper, Greenwich Time, announced the BRILLIANT news that this is to become a royal borough, it seemed only right to put a picture of the monarch on the front page.

No, silly, not that absurd interloper, the Queen. She was rightly relegated to page 3. Page 1 was reserved for the traditional anvil-jawed photo of our very own age-old symbol of pomp and majesty, council leader Chris Roberts. “Residents, businesses and the millions of visitors to Greenwich will share in our delight at this wonderful news,” said King Chris (note the use of the royal we.) That issue was billed as a “souvenir edition.” But for Mr Roberts, every edition of Greenwich Time is a souvenir!

Inspired by a discussion this week on greenwich.co.uk, I went through some recent back numbers of South London’s very own Court Circular, to see just how many times Mr Roberts and his Labour chums have been puffing themselves at our expense. And the results from the international jury are now in.

Total number of mentions of Labour politicians: 98.
Total number of mentions of non-Labour politicians: 0.
Total number of pictures of Labour politicians: 29.
Total number of pictures of non-Labour politicians: 0.

Mr Roberts, by the way, features on the front page in 8 out of the 12 issues I examined, often with a picture. And when, by some terrible oversight, he is left out of the front-page story, he nearly always gets a column and picture inside (“I was surprised to be told today that I will receive an award as the Greenest Leader in South London…”)

Other very special Greenwich Time stars include Greenwich West’s own Maureen O’Mara – who must, on this tally, be a bit worried about holding her seat – and John Fahy, never pictured without a shovel in his hand. And we mustn’t forget Nick Raynsford MP. He might be hard to find on the streets of Greenwich, but he makes up for it in Greenwich Time. Lib Dems? Tories? Greens? You what?

There isn’t space here for a full list of all the Pravda-esque inanities of “the newspaper campaigning for a greater Greenwich,” but the one that made me laugh the loudest was the fearless scrutiny by one Nick Day of the council’s response to this winter’s snow.

“The extended spell of severe weather must have been testing the council’s resources to breaking point,” wrote Mr Day. “I’ve been frankly amazed at the impressive response…I’ve often been quick to hold the council to account, so I must be equally quick to praise the grit (sorry!) and determination that officers and workers have been applying to their immense task.”

You certainly should be sorry, Nick. Actually, I seem to remember that there was relatively little snow in south-east London by comparison with the rest of the country, and what there was was not cleared conspicuously effectively in Greenwich.

Some stories have been so good that Greenwich Time did them twice – like the one on falling bus crime and burglary figures, front-paged on both the 5th and 19th January (“Making you much SAFER”) and based on a possibly dodgy comparison. The shortage of space created by the repetition of such stories was no doubt why other news – like the excoriation of Greenwich’s social services as “shocking,” “arrogant” and “very poor” by a High Court judge – never made it into Greenwich Time.

My tally of councillor and MP mentions, by the way, covers less than three months’ worth of Greenwich Time, between 5 Jan and 23 March. Some vestigial respect for democratic decencies (or more likely the fear of court action for breaking electoral law) has kept the politicians out of the paper over the last month.

But, even during the election campaign, Greenwich Time has found a sneaky way to push the Labour message. The front page of the April 13 edition (“Spring in our step… Local businesses crack on despite the credit crunch”) told everyone that the “green shoots” of recovery were back: “Confidence [in Greenwich businesses] is growing by the day… There is a realisation that they have survived the abyss… Some businesses have sadly disappeared, but far fewer than may have been feared,” wrote the chair of the local chamber of commerce.

In the 1950s, as part of some dastardly imperial plot against the French, civil servants of the Colonial Office successfully persuaded the people of the Pacific island of Tanna to worship Prince Philip as a god. Portraits of the deity still hang in many a grass hut. Mr Roberts is clearly trying the same trick with what he believes to be the simple, credulous people of Greenwich. In me and others, the sheer clumsiness of the operation has had the opposite effect – making me automatically mistrust everything the council does, even if it is worthwhile.

The Tories are promising, if elected to the council, to close down Greenwich Time, which sounds like a good idea. This ridiculous apology for a newspaper has become the prime symbol of a council that treats its citizens like idiots.

Blackwall Tunnel to be closed even more, foot tunnels closed from this week for months

As a revelation, I know the following will rank alongside the religion of the Pope and the sanitary habits of bears in woods. But Greenwich Council has not been straight with us.

They promised to give three months’ notice of the dates when the foot tunnels would be closed. In fact, they gave eleven days. The closure – between 9pm and 6am weekdays in Greenwich, and between 6.30am and 8pm weekdays in Woolwich – was announced on April 8. It took effect this Monday, April 19.

I particularly enjoyed the council’s claim that “alternative crossing arrangements have been made to reduce the impact of these closures.” No new crossing arrangements have been made. The only alternatives are those which already existed – the erratic Woolwich ferry, and the Thames Clipper riverbus between Masthouse Terrace and Greenwich piers.

The last departure on the latter is at 11.18pm northbound, and 12.37 southbound. There is also the DLR, but that shuts before 1am too, and does not carry cyclists, a big component of the tunnel’s users. There will be no way at all of crossing the river at Greenwich for more than five hours.

And I mean no way. To add to the pain, this week it emerged that “Transport for Livingstone” is further extending its highly controversial closures of the Blackwall Tunnel. The tunnel is already closed to southbound traffic between 9pm and 5am, five nights a week, and between 1am and 8am on Sundays. Now, it will be closed the entire rest of the weekends, too. The exact number of weekends is still to be announced. Who knows, maybe it’ll be all of them!

The closures will run continuously from 9pm on Friday to 5am on Monday, meaning that this vitally important tunnel will spend more hours in the week closed than it spends open. The next step, no doubt, will be the arrival of men in white boiler-suits and gas-masks to seal Greenwich off with giant plastic sheeting, like in the film Outbreak.

The Blackwall closures will last until 2012 and the foot tunnel a fair while, too. Last year one faithful Labour blogger, with a reliable record of being wrong about most things, bought the council’s spin that the foot tunnel closures would be “short.” The shutdowns will, in fact, last for at least eleven months – even longer than I predicted. And it was only sustained pressure from Greenwich Cyclists and others, including this column, that persuaded the council to keep the Greenwich tunnel open at all during the day. Woolwich users, lacking the same voice, have been stuffed.

Despite the damage limitation exercise we managed to do, the whole foot tunnel project still makes me very angry. It symbolises, on a local scale, our rulers’ addiction to spending money we do not have on things that we do not need.

For the £11.5 million the project is costing us, we get not just months of disruption, but a finished facility in some ways significantly worse than before. The claimed objectives of the refurb include “improved safety” and a “more welcoming environment.” The council’s own study showed that the main deterrent to use of the tunnels was that people felt unsafe using them, especially at night. But this project will see the lifts permanently de-staffed and all human presence removed.

For £11.5 million, we could afford to double-staff both tunnels, with a lift operator or security guard at each end, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the next 23 years. That might be worth spending money on. It would even create a few jobs, as well as improved “safety and welcoming.”

Instead, at Greenwich, our money is paying for “feature lighting” to “allow colour and animation to be subtly manipulated to create different moods at different times of the day.” This will provide “the infrastructure for contemporary art installations so that the tunnels can contribute to cultural life in the locality.” Walking through the tunnel will become “an event in itself.” Let’s hope the event’s not a mugging, eh?

Greenwich Council, Britney and £1750 an hour: nice work if you can get it

DURING THE election period, the usual weekly picture of Chris Roberts, Greenwich Council’s wise and beneficient leader, has temporarily disappeared from Greenwich Time. But at least he has something else to keep him happy.

Today, I can reveal that Mr Roberts has become possibly the highest-paid council leader in Britain, collecting the attractive sum of £1,750 an hour from the public purse for his services.

Mr Roberts is an executive member of London Councils, the umbrella body for the 32 London boroughs. He doesn’t like London Councils much – he’s pulling Greenwich out of it to save a few quid in affiliation fees. But he is happy to take the £10,499 a year paid to executive members for turning up to its meetings – except, alas, that he doesn’t turn up much of the time.

In the four years since the last elections, Mr Roberts has attended only 18 out of 32 meetings. In the most recent financial year, he has attended three out of five, making a total payment for each meeting he’s been to of £3,500. The meetings last about two hours, so the hourly rate is something equivalent to a City lawyer’s.

Nor is Mr Roberts the only person at the council to enjoy unusual rewards for his services. Tucked away on the council website, I found a fascinating report about council officers’ use during 2009 of the authority’s sponsored hospitality suite at the O2. Greenwich taxpayers pay £100,000 a year for this private box, with its ringside seat at many of the arena’s top events.

“Officers,” says the report, “host the suite for most events to ensure that all guests understand how the suite operates… officers have been recruited from across the council to form a pool of volunteer hosts.”

According to the report, the shows seen for free by Greenwich Council officers in their private hospitality suite included Metallica, Simply Red, Lionel Ritchie, AC/DC, Russell Brand, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Beyonce, Britney Spears, Kings of Leon, Boyzone, Madonna, James Taylor, and Pearl Jam.

They particularly liked Britney – council officers went to see her ten times. Beyonce, another favourite, scored four and Kings of Leon three. There were also numerous performances of Walking with Dinosaurs and Ben Hur Live.

Tickets for these events, if the taxpayer was not providing, would cost up to £110 each. “Feedback from guests continues to be overwhelmingly positive,” the report adds. You don’t say!

In theory, the money for the officers is recouped by selling tickets to Greenwich Card holders – but the report shows that for the latest quarter given, June-September 2009, there’s a substantial shortfall.

I mention all this because in the upcoming election, the case against Greenwich Council is simple. It’s that they are obsessed with flashy irrelevancies at the expense of anything important.

The borough’s schools have long been second-rate. Only this week, the council’s social services department took an absolute hammering from a High Court judge. Lord Justice Wall, the new head of the Family Division, described Greenwich social workers as “shocking,” “arrogant” and “very poor.”

But instead of tackling these problems, or anything else that really matters, the council is transfixed by a series of sideshows: the Olympics, Royal Borough status, and endless attempts to fuss and meddle with things, such as the foot tunnels, that are pretty much all right as they are.

The Olympic horseriding will not educate a single child, fund a single social worker or create a single permanent job. It will almost certainly cost jobs, crippling the area’s tourist economy for a whole summer, and damaging the park for much longer, if not permanently.

I have genuinely tried to understand what the councillors see in these things, what they imagine is in it for Greenwich. With some reluctance, I’ve been forced to conclude that it’s the junkets. The Royal Borough thing has already been “celebrated” with a slap-up banquet in the Painted Hall. The Olympics have generated lovely air-miles in trips to Beijing. Endless quantities of private luncheons, celebrity hob-nobbing and reserved grandstand seats await the lucky champions of Royal Olympic Greenwich.

When you see the extraordinary way in which the councillors, and some of their staff, treat themselves, it’s not so hard to understand why the dull slog of sorting out the schools seems a bit boring by comparison.

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