Via the excellent No Rock and Roll Fun and the NME I see that lots of our favourite pop stars (and others) have signed up to the Unite Against Fascism statement urging people to vote in the elections on 10 June.

There are serious concerns that the BNP might win a seat on the GLA through the top up system.  So if you have a vote on 10 June I'd urge you to use it.

I've been seeing the stuff that the Liberals have been putting out in the local council by-election that's happening on 10 June.  Lots of their attacks on Labour have focused on my area of responsibility in the council, so there goes any friendly feelings I might have had for them.  (I'm sure they'll be crying into their milk, whatever.)  Here's my answer to their critique:

The Environment in Lee Green

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When the Liberals talk about Labour's record on the environment in Lee Green and Lewisham you'd think that everything was terrible and there is nothing good.  You might not think that Lewisham is competing to win the title of best borough in ffice:smarttags" />Britain in Bloom this year, or that we won the London in Bloom competition last year.  Well, that's fine as political knockabout, but perhaps we can look beyond the negative campaigning and recognise the changes we have made and the challenges we face.

 

Local resident surveys tell us that local people recognise the improvements we've made to the recycling service, with satisfaction having gone up by 12% last year, second only to the increase in satisfaction with bin collections which went up by 16%.  We do have a long way to go on improving our recycling rates, but it is worth noting that last year we introduced a kerbside collection across the whole borough for the first time and the mini recycling centres on housing estates. The number of tonnes of material that were recycled doubled in the last year and we did reach our statutory target of recycling 10% of all domestic waste.  There is a long way to go; by the end of next year we need to be at 18% and we can't reach that without your involvement (whoever you decide to vote for).

 

This year we will add glass and cans to our "green box" scheme, make sure to watch out for the publicity.

 

ffice:word" />Another area that we are accused of not doing enough is around fly tipping.  In the last year the council picked up less fly tips than the year before.  Not because people who work for the council are lazy, but because there were fewer fly tips across the borough.  This wasn't chance either, we have been making sure that every business in the borough has an agreement with a proper waste company or with the council to get rid of their waste.  Last year we signed up over 300 businesses to Lewisham's trade waste agreement.  We also ran some small scale pilots, including one in Lee Green to try and find out who is fly tipping and to prosecute those who were doing it.  

 

You may be interested to know that last year the Council prosecuted over 100 people for 'enviro-crime' and fined over 440 people for things like fly-tipping, littering and not clearing up their dog mess.  We are in fact one of the leading local authorities in the country on prosecuting those that we can identify as taking part in these anti-social activities.

 

No one is saying there aren’t lots of things we could improve, and we will, but there are already lots of things that all of us can be proud of when we say we live in Lewisham.  The fact we won London in Bloom last year, and will be representing London in Britain in Bloom this year and some of the fantastic parks and opens spaces in the borough including the very well used Manor House Gardens.

 

I am proud of making Lewisham my home and really like living here, I hope you do to and that you’ll want to do what you can to improve the environment not just run it down.

Via Tom Watson.

I'm sure that all of us have either had this thought, or know people that should.

I spent some of this afternoon helping to make a presentation to the board of the London Recycling Fund, essentially asking them for cash to help us improve our recycling service.  We had 5 minutes to make the presentation and then 10 or so for questions.  Clearly there had been a lot of work by officers beforehand in preparing and submitting the bid, but I was quite shocked at how perfunctory the presentation and questions were given how much we are asking for.  In other areas of my life a bid of this size would certainly require at least two interviews of at least an hour in each case.

Nevertheless, I did feel that the questioning was probing and clearly they are having to cope with too many bids for the resources they have available, and a tailing off the resources over the next few years.  So it will be very interesting to find out whether we get some or all of the money we've asked for.