Forest Gate North – Rachel Tripp's councillor blog

Rachel, Ellie and Seyi write…

In July, Forest Gate North Labour party held a meeting open to all local Labour party members, friends and supporters, to an event at Coffee7 called ‘Changing London’. Based on the book, and blog, put together by local residents David Robinson and Will Horowitz, this was a discussion event that enabled local people to share their thoughts and ideas about what we want from the next London Mayor.

As a result of those discussions, we have written the following letter, which we hope reflects the ideas people brought and shared, and gives a flavour of the kind of Mayor we want, and the kind of London we want to create.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CANDIDATES FOR LONDON MAYOR 2016

Dear Mayoral Candidates,

Our leaders regularly describe London as ‘the greatest city in the world’. But for many Londoners living in poverty and deprivation that claim can sound hollow. So in July 2015 Forest Gate North Ward Labour Party, inspired by the book/website Changing London: a rough guide for the next London mayor, hosted an open meeting for local residents to share their ideas on how the next Mayor could tackle growing inequality in London. Below, we outline our ideas in seven key areas.

While the Mayor of London’s formal powers may be limited, he/she has great influence and can play a key role to play in making London a better place to live for all of us. We ask the next Mayor to use both their powers and influence to champion a fairer, more equal, less divided, greener and safer city. We need a pro-active and collaborative Mayor who can develop a strategic cross-London vision, co-ordinating the work of all 32 boroughs and the City of London to promote economic and social development, address poverty, health inequality, and radically improve the environment and air quality.

We want the new Mayor to …
1  Gain greater control over revenues and raise more funding for London:
•    develop a plan for devolution of tax and revenue raising powers, and vigorously argue the case with central Government
•    set up an investment vehicle whereby Londoners can buy bonds to help finance infrastructure
2  Produce a housing strategy to alleviate rather than exacerbate the housing crisis:
•    work with local authorities to learn from and scale up schemes to increase the supply of genuinely affordable homes
•    commission a feasibility study into and argue for replacing council tax with a progressive property tax or land value tax to reduce housing market volatility, prevent property speculation driving up prices and make it too expensive for properties to stay vacant for long periods
•    oppose government changes that reduce the ability of councils and Housing Associations to provide social housing, eg the Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap
•    promote Community Land Trusts and housing co-operatives to provide affordable homes for local people especially in high value areas
•    crack down on manipulation of viability reports allowing developers to avoid including affordable homes in new developments
•    ban selling off plan directly to foreign buyers
•    strengthen and encourage the use of powers to take over empty properties
•    tackle exploitation in the private rental sector
•    lower VAT for housing renovation
3  Encourage good business practice:
•    purchase a share in the largest businesses in London giving him/her the right to speak at AGMs pushing the case for living wage, apprenticeships, curbs on high pay, fair and honest tax contributions etc
•    use procurement policies to encourage payment of the living wage
•    lobby central Government to allow the Mayor to set a London Living Wage
4  Make sure that Londoners have the right skills for employment, and reduce youth unemployment:
•    work with businesses and charities to set up apprenticeships and paid internships
•    set up a scheme similar to Labour’s ‘baby bonds’ so every young person has access to a pot of savings at 18 to be used e.g. for further education or training or set up a business
5  Improve the environment
•    develop strategies to support community solar energy schemes
•    phase out use of diesel fuel for transport in favour of electric buses
•    prioritise walking and cycling over other means of transport

6  Tackle crime, poverty and exploitation:
•    support the police in prosecuting white collar crime, which undermines responsible business practice, just as much as they do ‘poor’ crime
•    expand credit unions so people have an alternative to loan sharks
•    restore the homelessness safety net and improve support for non-priority older single homeless people
•    ban the use of Public Space Protection Orders which potentially criminalize (persistent) rough sleepers

7  Bring back healthy high streets:
•    Reform planning laws to enable councils to block gambling shops, chicken shops and pawnbrokers from taking over our high streets

Sincerely,

Forest Gate North Ward Labour Party, Councillors and residents
email: forestgatenorth@gmail.com
twitter: @forestgatenorth

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If reading this sounds like your kind of London too, please do consider getting involved in your local Labour party. We are always keen to welcome new members. You can join online here. We would love to have you.

Ellie writes...

A couple of years ago Eric Pickles patronisingly suggested 50 money saving tips to local authorities. This year alone Newham must find savings of £50 million. By 2019, these cuts will average £91 million a per year. To put this in perspective, in 2014/15 we spent £87.8m million on looking after vulnerable adults and £52 million on looking after vulnerable children and young people.

So however much we ‘embrace video conferencing’ or ‘hot-desk’ our socks off, as Pickle’s helpfully suggests, we are unlikely to make the savings his Government has demanded. So we are going out to consultation to help us make much more difficult decisions about the services which matter.

Unfairly, but predictably, Newham is being hit hard by this Government’s cuts. Next year we will receive £284 less for every home in the borough, while wealthy Richmond residents only see a cut of £57 per home.

We have always been committed to fighting this government, to protecting the front line, and to finding imaginative and creative ways to make savings. Over the last five years we have already made £106 million in savings. In my cabinet role I am responsible for OneSource, which is our shared back office service. This is basically sharing things such as I.T., legal, property and H.R. services with Havering Council. Putting our political differences aside (Havering is a Tory borough) we have been able to set up a genuinely shared service which has saved Newham £5m in its first year. By 2018/2019 it is estimated it will achieve the cumulative savings of £41 million.

Despite this, and a number of other efficiency savings we still need to go further. So please get involved in helping us think about how we do that:

• If you haven’t already, please drop by a street stall – outside Maryland Station on the 24^th at 10am or on 3^rd October at Woodgrange Market at 2.30pm
• Pop into the library to pick up a questionnaire, or you can fill it out online here 
• Join us on the 30^th budget challenge community consultation meeting at the Gate Library at 6.30pm.

The results from this consultation will help the us take your views into account when we are setting the budget for next year.

Sadly, getting rid of the choccy bickies in meetings probably isn’t going to help tackle this problem, so please make sure your voice is heard.

If you have more detailed questions about this consultation, you can check out the Q&A doc here. 

Rachel writes…

There is a busy weekend of community activities coming up, so I thought I’d blog as a quick reminder for anyone who has missed the publicity.

The first is a Forest Gate event to celebrate 50 years of Newham.
Saturday 5 September 12 noon – 4.00pm Magpie Close, Forest Lane Park, Forest Gate, E7 9DF
A party in the park with a 60s theme, this promises plenty of fun with entertainment including:

• 1960’s music and dance classes, cake decorating, embroidery workshop with  the Sewing Bees group
• Come along dressed in your 1960’s clothes, with prizes for best fancy dress.
• Bring a packed lunch and your favourite teddy to join our teddy bears picnic.
• Have a go at skipping,  hula hooping and other traditional 1960’s games.
• Bring along a white t-shirt to transform at our tie dye stall.
• Horticulture workshops provided by the Forest Gate Community Gardening Group, including soil testing and food preserving.
• Enter the great Forest Gate cake off…… show us your baking skills.
• Donate a picture for our Forest Gate memories scrapbook.

You can download the flyer in PDF format here: 03735_CN_ForestGate_St_Party_A5_V2

The second is the much anticipated Forest Gate jumble trail, on Sunday the 6th, from 11am – 4pm.

All the details of the jumble trail are on the website here, or you can find them on twitter, or facebook to stay up to date.

I first heard about a jumble trail on twitter, and I confess I was slightly transfixed by the brilliance of the idea: a fabulous combination of community spirit, decluttering, secondhand shopping, and general fun. In essence it’s like a big jumble sale, but taking place in participants’ front gardens. Like an enormous carboot sale, full of your neighbours, with a side helping of home made cake. You can see where all the stalls are on the weblink above, and can follow the ‘trail’ by going to as many or as few roads as you want to.

This one has been organised by the amazing Elaine Odlin, and is now up to around 90 stalls. I will have a stall myself, and am very much looking forward to setting up, decking the front of the house with bunting, clearing out our house a bit, and enjoying the atmosphere.

So it’s all go in Forest Gate. A party on Saturday, and a Jumble Trail on Sunday. I hope to see you there!

Come and say hello to us this Saturday. Forest Gate North Labour Party are holding another street stall in Woodgrange Market (corner of Sebert Rd and Woodgrange Rd) from 11am to 1pm. Come and chat to us about anything from local issues to Newham Council’s budget cuts consultation, even the Labour leadership selection! We look forward to seeing you. 

Rachel writes…

I thought I’d do a super-quick post on an issue which I know frustrates many residents: traffic speed along Forest Lane.  Forest Lane is very narrow, and can feel very unsafe for pedestrians, cyclists and others, especially when enormous coaches are going past at high speeds.

We’ve had a few queries and complaints about speeding there: one resident who was so horrified by the speed of a coach she photographed it, another who is concerned about the location of the bus stop, and more who are worried about speeding vehicles as they carry on up Woodgrange Road and up Centre Road. I know myself that when I walk along there with my children on scooters, the traffic makes it feel very hostile, and I am sure I would use the park on Magpie Close more if the route there felt safer.

There are a few possible solutions here: we may be able to improve things a bit as part of the Crossrail redevelopment. There is some money available here for improving the space (known in official-ese as the ‘public realm’) outside the station. So if improving access from Forest Lane is your priority, please do take part in the consultation when it opens and let us know. We will publicise the consultation when it starts, of course. Another is the opportunity afforded by Quietway, where Seyi has been discussing with officers how some works to create a quieter and safer route for cyclists can also contribute to calming the traffic. There is talk about rerouting coaches entirely, as I tweeted relatively recently, but that isn’t confirmed yet. Another resident had been tweeting National Express to ask about the routes they use, and their permission, which was a conversation I became part of, and was given an email address to discuss the issue further.

Today, whilst working through my to do list, I wrote a quick email to National Express, letting them know residents’ concerns, and hoping there was something we could do together. I am delighted to say that I received a reply incredibly quickly (I am simultaneously pleased and embarrassed by people who respond to emails so fast, I have to admit). The email said,

‘Thank you for bringing the issue of coaches on Forest Lane to our attention. Whilst technically coaches on non-local services can indeed use roads that are not specifically barred to them, National Express, as a responsible operator, do not wish to see our coaches operating along wholly unsuitable roads. We would include Forest Lane in this unsuitable category and we do not wish to see our coaches operating along this road, except perhaps in the most wholly exceptional circumstances, such as being directed by a police officer etc due to a road closure along the normal route.’

He added later on, ‘Whilst a bus route, Forest Lane is clearly configured for local traffic only and its use by our coaches does nothing either for our community relations or our customer experience. All those speed bumps are hardly conducive to a good journey.’

He finished by saying, ‘We will re-issue a reminder to all drivers on our network who use routes through Stratford of the routes that they should be taking and will advise them they are not to use Forest Lane under normal circumstances.’

There are several interesting things about this – not including how fast some people respond to their emails. The first is that I have a bit of a theory at the moment about writing polite complaining emails. So I specifically decided not to get hot under the collar but instead to write something very measured to National Express saying that residents were concerned, as was I, and I was keen to know how we could improve things. Possibly my friend at National Express is always on top of his inbox, but equally, it’s possible that striking a friendly tone helped things along. Another point to make is that when thinking about this, I kept coming back to this issue, and getting embroiled in pondering how I would find out about who has permission to use what road, and who would know this, and how I could check it, and what I could then do. I then decided that whatever the answer to these questions was, I would just try getting in touch with National Express first, and see if I could just ask them to use another route, and what they might say.

The last thing, of course, is that I would be hopelessly naive if I thought this was the answer forever. Terravision coaches also drive along Forest Lane (so I will also contact them and test my ‘polite email enquiry’ theory a bit further…!), also a reminder to drivers isn’t necessarily immediately effective.

So if you are a local resident, if you see National Express coaches using Forest Lane, can you let me know? I can pass it on to them, and hopefully we can keep giving feedback, and improving things along there bit by bit.

 Seyi writes….

Rachel writes…

The Corporation of London is currently consulting about the ‘management issues’ around the whole of Epping Forest, and is looking for input from people who use and love it. Although not part of Newham itself, Wanstead Flats, the southernmost part of Epping Forest, borders part of Forest Gate North ward, and is a very important and special place to many people in Forest Gate. People run there, play football, pick litter, watch fireworks, make snowmen, walk their dogs, teach their children to cycle…

In fact, a joint meeting with people from the Corporation of London was one of the first things Ellie, Seyi and I arranged after we were elected last year. (Publishing a report from that meeting is number 1,001 on the list of things I’d like to find time to blog about… apologies…) At that meeting we raised with members of staff from the Corporation issues that residents had raised with us including litter, bins, signage, and much more.

One of the main points that we took away was that the Corporation was planning a consultation to set a new 10 year strategy for 2017 – 2027 on how to manage all of Epping Forest, and that this would be a good chance to feed into decisions about these sorts of issues. And now here it is!

The consultation is online here:
Corporation of London – Epping Forest Consultation

I do not want to be misleading, and make out that this is simple or quick to do. This is a huge consultation, covering a wide range of topics. And it comes with all the usual caveats that dog consultation processes, about openness and transparency, about accessibility, about what questions are being asked and what decisions have been made beforehand. But I would urge anyone who uses Wanstead Flats to contribute to this. Wanstead Flats is very different from other bits of Epping Forest but is also apparently one of the most-visited parts, and it is so important that the Corporation hear from people who use and love – yes and people who are frustrated by! – the Flats.

If you want to respond you will need to register on the site. You can then log in and begin. Each section has introductory and explanatory text, then questions to answer, and a free text box at the bottom for any other ideas or comments. You do not have to answer every part of the document! The Corporation have assured us that they welcome comments from people who only want to comment on part of the document.

In the interests of making things more accessible (and in response to a plea from twitter!) I have summarised some of the areas below that relate to areas or topics that residents of Forest Gate may be interested in. I hope this is helpful.

Section 1 1.6.A ‘Keeping cycling on track’ may be of interest to cyclists. It examines the importance of cycling, but also some of the ways that unrestricted cycling can damage the landscape, wildlife, and cause a hazard to other people. Should there be more cycling? A speed limit? No cycling at night? This is the section to air those views.

Section 4 1.6.D is called ‘Keeping football alive and kicking’. If you are one of the residents who has contacted us about litter left by footballers then you may want to comment here. It points out that pitch hire is currently subsidised by the Corporation, and suggests some different ideas for improvements, including a changed (we presume increased) pricing structure, working to increase participation, and a facility for online booking.

Section 1.3, ‘A safe place for visitors’ looks at safety in Epping Forest. Should the Corporation do more work with the police to ensure that they know they can take action regarding behaviour on Wanstead flats? Or do anything else? Here is your section to comment.

Section 1.11, ‘An exciting natural playground’ looks at play and play areas in Epping Forest.

Sections 4.3 and 4.4 look at litter and fly tipping, and these are sadly the two issues that people contact us most often about. There is loads of really interesting information about the volumes of litter that the Corporation is dealing with, and some of the ways that they try to improve the appearance. If you think there should be more bins, or more signage, then this is your section to say so.

Please do go online, have your say, and make sure that the views of people from Newham are included in this piece of work.

Ellie, Seyi and I will respond to the consultation. Probably in the form of responding on the topics I have highlighted above. If there are specific things you want us to include then please let us know. But please respond as individuals as well: the more people who comment, the more weight our combined views will carry.

Seyi writes… 

Some how at the Forest Gate Festival I was “heavily persuaded” by member into joining Newham Cyclists’s on their next bike ride around the Borough. Monday 3rd August came by too quickly and before I knew it I was on a very pretty bike (Thank you Cornelia and Thom Forzagaribal) cycling down the proposed Quietway 6 route from Coffee7 FG with the Newham Cyclists Squad! o_0. We stopped at theOlympic Park and while enjoying a much needed drink I attended their meeting. During the meeting we discussed the challenges with the proposed Quietway route and I took away plenty of useful suggestions which I’ll pass on to Newham London officers. It was really helpful for me to see the route from a cyclists perspective- literally! Thank you SO much Newham Cyclists for looking after me, I expected to come with at least one bruise from falling off my bike in panic but instead I woke up with stiff legs 😉 ‪#‎Squad‬!

Newham Cyclists are part of the London Cycling Campaign group who are leading on a really important End Lorry Danger Campaign You can find out more about them and or joining the group here: http://newhamcyclists.org.uk/

Seyi writes…

19,000 letters were distributed at the end of July advising residents and business owners of the Stadium Event Parking Control Pilot. This will affect the 4 Residents Parking Zones within 30 minutes’ walk of the Olympic Stadium so this will mainly affect Forest Gate North ward residents living in Maryland.

Please see a copy of the letter below:

Olympic Stadium Residential Parking Zone (RPZ) Changes:
Following on from the London 2012 Olympic Games Newham Council has invested in the Stadium as a venue that will provide a legacy to the borough by hosting a variety of events including football, concerts, baseball and community events. This autumn the Rugby World Cup matches will take place in the stadium during September and October, and from the summer of 2016 the Stadium will become the host venue for West Ham United FC.
Newham Council aims to ensure that residents and business owners have priority for parking on event and match days. With this in mind the London Borough of Newham (LBN) will be introducing additional parking as part of an 18 month experiment basis within your RPZ to ensure that on Event Days parking is controlled. The times of operation on all Event Days will be extended from the existing RPZ hours to 8am – 9pm. This will come into effect on the first Event Day, which will be the 23rd September 2015.
This experiment will require the replacement of signs within your RPZ area during July and August 2015. The new signs at the entrance of the RPZ will state the times of operation for the zone and the next event day, while signs within the zone will state the bay type controls and times of operation for the zone. These changes will not affect the current times of operation of your RPZ apart from on event days.

The experiment will be reviewed in six months time, during which time if you want to comment on the changes or have any queries about Event Day parking please contact Diane Bourne, Senior Engineer at either the above address, by emailing eventdayparking@newham.gov.uk or by phoning 02033731344.