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Greenwich news and information

Council Responds to A2 Business Concerns

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Greenwich Council has reacted to concerns from businesses affected by the continued roadworks on the A2 in Blackheath which are due to carry on until the end of April.

They have written to the Royal Parks Agency to request extended opening hours for drivers through the Greenwich Park, as was suggested in the comments section on Andrew Gilligan’s article about the traffic chaos. Critics may wonder why such arrangements weren’t put in place before the works started.

The council is also encouraging businesses to apply for a temporary reduction in business rates and is reminding them that there are opportunities for free advertising in the council’s Greenwich Time publication.

Council leader Chris Roberts said: “The impact of the closure of the A2 has undoubtedly affected the local community. Business-owners have contacted us about their concerns and we are working closely with them to identify what we can do to reduce the effects of the road closure.”

Council Tax Frozen for 09/10

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Greenwich Council has announced a council tax freeze for 2009-2010, meaning a band D taxpayer will continue to pay £980.91 for local services this year.

Councillor Chris Roberts, Leader of Greenwich Council, said: “We are all looking to find ways through the current economic challenges, and I hope our commitment on freezing Council tax and other charges sends out a clear message that the Council is doing all it can to support residents.” 

Londoners on the whole seem to have done well this year with average council tax rises of only 1.2%, which compares well with the rest of the country. The average Band D charge in London this year is £1,307.55.

Andrew Gilligan: We Are Sailing

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Thames Clippers

IN THIS week’s absurd public transport meltdown, one of the very few links between Greenwich and the rest of the world which mostly kept going was also the least well-known, but arguably the best one, of all.

Even now, astonishingly few people seem to realise that there is a fast, regular and frequent riverbus service between two piers in Greenwich and central London – with rush-hour and evening service to Woolwich, too. It runs every 20 minutes for most of the day – see the timetable on the Thames Clippers website here – and on the fairly rare occasions when I don’t cycle into town, it’s my method of choice.

I several years ago largely gave up on mainstream public transport – a course of action I cannot recommend too highly. Buses and tube, in particular, are now exercises in low-level misery; until you stop using them, you just don’t realise quite how much they blight your life, how much time and mental energy they waste and how much money they screw out of you.

But there remain a few public transport options that are a genuine pleasure to use – and now, with the roads still a bit slippery for cycling and the Southeastern trains not back to a full service, is the time to discover one.

It’s time to liberate yourself from your cattle-truck carriages, your subterranean holes full of other people’s germs, your traffic jams and points failures; time to travel to work with the wind in your hair and the matchless spectacle of the world’s greatest city before your eyes.

As well as the views, you will find a seat, a good punctuality record and even a little counter selling tea and coffee.True, the single fare from Greenwich (£5) is about twice the train price – but if you buy a monthly season (£100) and work within walking distance of one of the central London piers (Tower, London Bridge, Blackfriars, Embankment or Waterloo) you will pay almost exactly the same.

The neglect of the river is one of London’s great transport scandals. We have spent the last twenty years – and will probably spend most of the next ten – tying ourselves in knots about Crossrail, with still a quite serious chance that it will not be built. But we already have a waterborne Crossrail, an almost unused six-lane highway through the middle of the city, which could be brought into the full embrace of the TfL system for a fraction of the cost.

Yet the existing service isn’t even integrated with the rest of the network – no Oyster pay-as-you-go (yet), no Travelcards (Travelcard holders do get a one-third discount).

Greenwich Pier

Greenwich council has recently started what it calls the “Clipper Campaign” calling for Oyster acceptance and a 10-minute peak-hour service. Very laudable aims, although I should point out that TfL had already promised to install Oyster readers for pay-as-you-go on the river service several months before the council started its campaign. Could Greenwich be trying to claim credit for achieving something that is going to happen anyway?

The council website says that “the Mayor of London has given no date for installing the Oystercard equipment on the boats.” That is perhaps a little misleading: I’m not sure what Boris himself has said, but his Transport Commissioner, Peter Hendy, told the last meeting of the TfL board that Oyster PAYG on the river was a “Mayoral priority” which “could be introduced by mid-2009.”

Answers last month to the Tory London Assembly member Gareth Bacon suggest that Greenwich’s “campaign” for the riverbus does not, so far, seem to have involved any contact with either the Mayor or TfL. As the local Tory leader, Councillor Spencer Drury, said: “I am curious what sort of campaign fails to contact the person or organisation which it is seeking to influence.”

It’s also worth pointing out the serious possibility that the Thames Clipper service will in fact contract, not increase, in the next few months. The extension from Greenwich to Woolwich is subsidised by TfL and the council, and was originally supposed to end this month, after the opening of the new DLR station. The subsidy has now been extended by another six months. It would be a shame if the next action of the leaders of the “Clipper Campaign” was to actually, well, clip the funding they give to the thing they’re trying to promote.

Still, let’s not bash the council spin-doctors too heavily this week. Their overall aim is good, and even once Oyster is available on the service, the real battle – for Underground-style fares and Underground-style frequencies – still needs to be waged.

In the meantime, take to the water. Even if it snows again, the Thames is most unlikely to freeze over.

Severe Weather in Greenwich

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The great thing about this snow is that it makes for some lovely pictures. The flip side of this though is that it affects people’s ability to get around safely, get to work or to the shops, or to access important services.

Greenwich Council has implemented its pre-organised “Snow Plans”, which means some council run services such as rubbish collection and general passenger services have been suspended. Meals on wheels deliveries will be made as normal.

Most schools are closed, and listen to local radio to find out if they will be open tomorrow. More heavy snow is predicted so the advice is not to travel unless you really have to. South Eastern has suspended services in and out of London.

Councillor Chris Roberts, Leader of Greenwich Council, said: “Greenwich Council is making every effort to keep vital services running and I am very pleased we are able to say we have got staff out and about to ensure the elderly and vulnerable are being looked after as normal. We urge people to stay indoors and keep listening to local news reports for the latest advice. We will be issuing updates as and when we have them”.

Andrew Gilligan: Taxing Times

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AM I SE10’s Max Mosley? Just to make clear, I do not live in a basement being whipped by whores – but I am surely the only person in the entire London Borough of Greenwich who actively seeks out our dear council’s ludicrous parody newspaper, Greenwich Time.

Most of us, of course, have as much choice about receiving this publication as we have about paying for it – it is thrust through our doors whether we want it or not, just as the money it costs is taken from us through the council tax. But my street isn’t assured of a reliable supply (it’s pretty rough down Hyde Vale, where even the milkmen fear to tread) – so most weeks, with a sick feeling of guilt, shame yet also secret, forbidden pleasure, I make the trip to West Greenwich library.

Furtively, hating myself, I enter the building, blow the dust off that week’s thick, virgin pile of Greenwich Times and – trying to ignore the staff’s incredulity and contempt at my actions – slip a copy, perhaps two, into a brown paper bag. I tell myself it doesn’t do any real harm – surely everyone involved must be over 18 – but that ignores the terrible price paid by all those vulnerable young trees, whose innocence has been quite literally pulped to print this ghastly perversion of natural, healthy journalism.

I get it to find out what the council wants us to believe it is doing – from which, through a simple formula (assuming exactly the opposite), you can usually work out what it is actually doing. It looks like a real newspaper. Quite intentionally, I’m sure, there’s no mention that it’s an official municipal propaganda sheet on the front cover. There are even bylines. Someone called “Peter Cordwell” seems to write most of the stories – surely this must be a pseudonym? Would anyone with any professional pride at all want to be associated with this stuff?

Because the front-page news story on the latest edition is just about the closest you can come to taxpayer-funded political propaganda without actually putting “Vote Labour” as the headline. “It’s not just freezing outside!” starts ‘Cordwell’ (who has a regrettable weakness for the exclamation mark – another sign that he cannot be a real person.) “Council leader Chris Roberts intends to bring the chill into the council chamber next month when he proposes to freeze the council tax.”

Goodness me – as recently as last October, Greenwich was one of 16 London councils which rejected a council-tax freeze proposed by the shadow chancellor, George Osborne. Could there possibly be an election coming up?

Anyway, back to Greenwich Time: “Chris told GT: ‘For the past ten years Greenwich has established a record which is all but unparalleled across London for rigorous and efficient management of its budgets. While continuing to levy what is almost the lowest cumulative Council Tax increase in London, we have seen Greenwich go from having the second-highest Council Tax in London to being 22nd of 32 boroughs.'”

Both these latter claims are in fact misleading, since they relate to council tax in the current financial year, 2008/9 – not next year, when the freeze Greenwich Time trumpets comes into effect. We don’t actually know how Greenwich will compare to other London councils next year yet, because not all have yet announced their 2009/10 council tax levels. It seems likely that many other boroughs will also freeze, or even reduce, their council tax, which might make Greenwich one of the more expensive authorities again.

And as for that “all but unparalleled” efficiency, the truth – which Greenwich Time somehow forgets to mention – is that our current council tax is in fact the fourth highest in inner London, the class of councils in which we are included, and almost precisely the average for London as a whole.

It’s true that the level of any authority’s council tax depends on factors other than its own efficiency – such as Government grants. But since the level of the council tax is the ground on which Greenwich Time has chosen to blow its PR bugles, a more accurate claim would therefore be that the council tax shows our efficiency is, at best, average.

No doubt the purpose of all this, and all the other Greenwich Time bullshit, is to persuade us to love the council, and to re-elect the wise and beneficient leader who features so constantly in its pages. But I feel increasingly sure that it is having precisely the opposite effect.

I never used to have all that many quarrels with the people who run Greenwich. I’ve even voted for some of them. It isn’t one of the more outrageously useless authorities – it was quite good over Greenwich Market, for instance.

But I, and other people I know, feel insulted by the sheer stupidity and relentlessness of Greenwich Time – now published, incredibly, every single week. We feel angry at the simply improper way that our money is being used to promote politically-motivated distortions. And with non-council related feature material alongside all the Town Hall happy-news, I feel concerned that the clear intention is to undermine independent local newspapers which can paint the full picture.

They no longer have a state-controlled press in East Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic. But below the radar, and in keeping with our new status as a country where freedom is being nibbled away, we are getting one in Britain.

Council Wins Funding For Tunnel Refurbishment

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Greenwich Foot Tunnel

EXCLUSIVE
Greenwich Council has won funding from central Government to refurbish the Greenwich and Woolwich foot tunnels. £11.5 million has been awarded as part of the Government’s Community Infrastructure Fund which will allow for substantial improvements to both of the tunnels, which are used by 1.5 million people a year.

The century-old tunnels will benefit from

  • New lifts
  • Refurbished stairways & head houses
  • New CCTV and communications system, including help buttons
  • New lighting
  • New drainage
  • Structural repairs
  • Leak sealing
  • New signing
  • Historical information murals

Works are expected to be completed by March 2011.

2012: Council Should Remember Who They Represent

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HERE’S an interesting news story you might have missed. According to papers just released under the Freedom of Information Act, Greenwich Council has been misleading us all about the cost of its officials’ recent ten-day jaunt, sorry vital fact-finding mission, to the Beijing Olympics.

They claimed to have spent £14,000; in fact, we now learn, they spent more than £25,000. Business-class flights all round, naturally. Newham, the borough where the vast majority of the London Games will actually be held, sent a third fewer people and spent only £9,000, by the way.

As the “consultation” on the deeply risky proposal to hold 2012’s equestrian events in Greenwich Park gets started, it’s tempting to see the council’s extravagance as all too symptomatic of the way it’s got the importance of the Olympics totally out of proportion.

No-one at the Town Hall has yet been able to explain how a fortnight of showjumping, behind security fences which no local will cross, can benefit the borough in any way. But that hasn’t stopped Chris Roberts, the council leader, claiming it as an historic breakthrough for SE10 on a par with the arrival of the Docklands Light Railway.

It’s tempting to see the council’s dishonesty about its China jolly in the same light as its bland assurances that the impact of the Games on the park will be “minimal.” How can they say that when, by their own admission, they have conducted no impact studies; when, in other words, they don’t know?

But look, let’s do what they ask for a minute. Let’s set aside our cynicism, our negativity, our moaning. Let’s admit that the Olympic equestrianism will bring us a superb spectacle. Or, rather, already is bringing us a superb spectacle. Not the showjumping – that can be rather boring – but the magnificent sight of various highly-paid PRs and officials desperately twisting in the wind as they face local residents’ questions.

You know, complicated stuff like: how can you claim the park’s flower garden will not be damaged if you’re going to run the Olympic cross-country course right through it? Or: where are you going to put the stables, the warm-up tracks, the staff accommodation, and the other 300-odd buildings they needed at this year’s Olympic cross-country event? Or: what about those 350-year-old sweet chestnuts in the park, planted by Charles II and among London’s oldest living things? Are they going to be among the trees that you will have to “prune?”

Such questions, or similar ones, came up last week at the annual meeting of the amenity group, the Greenwich Society, where officials from London 2012 were grilled for the first time by a local audience. Answers, however, were few, and colleagues of mine who were there say that it cannot have been pleasant for the officials concerned.

One interesting note about the local amenity societies is how unwilling they initially were to get involved in the growing local opposition to the Olympic use of Greenwich. Take, for instance, another organisation, the Friends of Greenwich Park. You’d think a body with that name would be single-mindedly against anything which threatens the place they were set up to befriend.

Not quite: the Friends’ committee had to be forced into opposing the Games by a special meeting of its ordinary membership, and even now it appears reluctant to follow through. Its chairman has pronounced herself somewhat reassured by the latest bromides from the Council and LOCOG. In this, she must be nearly alone in Greenwich. I’ve talked to a lot of people in the area about the Greenwich Park Olympics, and I’ve never met one, outside the ranks of officialdom and committeedom, who is actually enthusiastic about this aspect of the Games.

The fact is that councillors and committee members of amenity societies often have more in common with each other than with the citizens they’re supposed to represent. But they are supposed to represent us; and with a threat of this magnitude hanging over our precious park, it’s never been a better time for us all to insist that they remember that.

Council Approves O2 Expansion

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O2 Arena from the Greenwich Wheel

The O2 Arena on Greenwich Peninsular looks set to be expanded after outline planning permission was approved by Greenwich Council. The owners, AEG, has been granted permission for another 19,000 sq m of leisure or sports space, and 5,000 sq m for food and drink outlets. The expansion, which would grow the development by 39%, could see the addition of a new theatre, comedy club or some other large visitor attraction.

Greenwich Council Unaffected By Icelandic Bank Collapse

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The turmoil affecting the financial markets has had a devastating effect on Iceland. The collapse of its leading banks has left many UK councils, charities and organisations exposed as they had taken advantage of good savings rates and deposited their money abroad.

The good news for Greenwich residents is that the council has issued a statement saying that Greenwich Council had no savings in Icelandic bank, Landsbanki.

Other councils were not so lucky, with reports suggesting that over 100 authorities had Icelandic accounts, with some even using them to deposit money earmarked for employee salaries.

Stockwell Street Development Approved

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It appears that permission has finally been granted for a redevelopment of the site at 4-19 Stockwell Street. Currently the space is occupied by John Humphries House, and car parking space which is used as Greenwich Village Market at the weekends. Planning application 07/0897/F is still listed as “Decision Pending” on the Greenwich Council Planning website, but “Hi, Standard” has a report from someone who was at the council meeting where it was unanimously voted in favour of, and in the application’s supporting documents there is a letter filed last week which says permission has been granted.

The market on that space has been going for nearly twenty years and has a quirky charm which I think will have many supporters who will mourn its passing, but it is a weekend market, and for the rest of the week it’s just a car park used by businesses renting offices in the really, very dated John Humphries House.

The approved plans include a four storey block with 129 residential units, offices, retail spaces and an arcade area which will still provide for some market stalls. I believe the sensitivity of the area – with it being part of the UNESCO World Heritage site – and the proximity to the railway line, have been the cause of the delays over the years but with permission now seemingly given, what do you think about the decision?