Lambeth Liberal Democrats

2009 - A Labour year of misery and muddle

It's hard to imagine a year under Labour that could be much worse than 2008 but here in Lambeth they certainly tried their best. Here's our annual review of the local lowlights that we've all had to endure - while Labour told us how good it's all been, of course.

January 2009 - Faced with a huge housing budget deficit of some £13 million, Labour Lambeth politicians decided to make tenants pay through the nose to the tune of an extra £15 a week (a colossal 21 per cent rise) at a time when around the country a storm had broken out about Labour's savage 6 per cent average rent increases. Labour quickly trimmed the increase nationally back to 3 per cent while their Lambeth counterparts told tenants they were jolly lucky the increase was only 17 per cent. To cap it all they claimed that rents were far too low in Lambeth - so they whacked-up service charges by 5 per cent.

February 2009 - The Lib Dems uncovered more Labour housing misery when the number of families on the official council waiting list for homes soared to 17,000. Yet even this catalogue of catastrophes was trumped by the appalling record 1100 council homes left empty by Labour's heartless commissars. A wave of squatters moved in, including one whole block of flats in leafy Thornton ward (home to Labour's Cabinet Member for Housing). Labour probably spent more on expensive lawyers to get rid of them than if they'd let them efficiently to the borough's poor and needy in the first place.

Later, in a bumper month for gloom, we uncovered the curious case of the phantom libraries that Labour set up to hoodwink Government Inspectors that Lambeth was a seat of learning that out-stripped Oxford and Cambridge. Just as well, because had they visited Lambeth's real libraries they would have discovered they were more like the ruins of ancient Greece.

Even these paled into insignificance against Labour's ruinous onslaught on motorist's pockets. Having fought the 2006 election for a fairer parking system, Labour boosted its coffers in just one year by over £2 million in parking fines. And two parking scams - the notorious yellow box in Streatham Vale and the dodgy camera at Salter's Hill - hit the local and national headlines.

March 2009 - In the teeth of the recession Lambeth Lib Dems proposed a £91.69 Council Tax payback for hard-pressed residents already reeling under Labour's stealth taxes but they preferred to hang on to your cash having raised Council Tax by the highest percentage in London two years running.

A huge effort of officer time and your money went west trying to convince Government Inspectors that Lambeth was a model Council. Labour managed to hide the worst of the housing department financial scandals until after the Audit Commission Report was published. But their slip was already showing and the inspectors downgraded Lambeth from its previous position - although Town Hall spin-meisters trumpeted it as their best ever result while glossing over being a star short of the Labour's Leader promised target in 2006.

April 2009 - Lib Dems called for the Government to take-over Lambeth's crisis-riven Housing Department back in January but by April even Labour's MP for Vauxhall, Kate Hoey, had joined the clamorous call for outside intervention to rescue tenants from Labour's ALMO.

In an emergency Commons debate, and with another Labour MP, Streatham's Keith Hill, looking grim-faced beside her, she exposed Labour's lie that they had sorted out the housing finances only to have them nose-dive into the red within weeks. She lashed out instead at decades of Lambeth housing fraud, mismanagement and poor performance - which was spot-on but curiously at odds with the Labour Town Hall Leader's line that it was our fault.

Even this spectacular mea culpa in the Mother of Parliaments failed to move the iron resolve of Housing Minister Margaret Beckett into reducing the massive Lambeth Labour rent increase. The Minister dustily proclaimed that she was not in the business of helping out basket-case Councils to reduce their debts -otherwise they'd all want bail-outs.

May 2009 - Labour was forced to admit that a secret scoping report of its new housing ALMO by the Audit Commission in advance of any detailed scrutiny that might draw down the promised housing millions was so critical that it was promptly buried. Somehow, though, a copy was leaked to the Press who found that the auditors had slammed Lambeth Living's 'management' of housing in almost every respect. They also confirmed, what most tenants already knew, that services levels are far worse than when the Council operated them directly.

July 2009 - The Labour Government adds to Lambeth Labour's unease that in backing the unpopular ALMO they had backed a horse that stubbornly refuses to leave the starting blocks. Housing Minister John Healey announces the detail of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's bold new initiative to build more social housing - which is to take away the home improvement money promised to ALMO's.

August 2009 - While everyone was in holiday mode and thinking of various leisure pursuits, Lambeth Labour was busy announcing that two swimming pools in Streatham and Clapham were to close. Not content with this, the same report to Cabinet contained the news that various Library buildings had only a short life left - no wonder Labour was so keen to promote phantom libraries to the Government inspectors. On Labour's hit list was the Durning in Kennington, Streatham's Tate, while the Listed Carnegie in Herne Hill was touted as being ideal for conversion to luxury flats.

Meanwhile, Labour-run Lambeth was declared London's Towaway Capital - beating even Westminster and Transport for London, which manages all the red routes. If you were one of the 7,238 motorists who had your car dragged away to a pound in darkest Lewisham, no doubt you were delighted that Labour-run Lambeth could at last come top in something.

The spoilsports in the burgeoning spin department, though, made much more of the fact that Lambeth's ticket numbers had actually fallen due to the borough's fairer parking regime. What they did not tell you was that almost every other London borough issued fewer tickets - but we discovered that in Lambeth the income from those tickets actually rose.

September 2009 - Lambeth hits the headlines again when a BBC TV investigation discovers that out of 112 high-rise council housing blocks only two had mandatory fire-risk assessments. These had been required three years earlier - and those two had only had them because there had been fires already. Even the few Lambeth homes being hurriedly upgraded had not had fire-risk assessments and those election-fuelled upgrades might easily have made the blocks less safe.

Such a potentially murderous muddle must have been highly embarrassing for Lambeth's Labour Leader who is, bizarrely, the capital's housing supremo too, but that was as nothing compared with the discomfort of the tenants that Labour had fleeced all year with sky-high charges when they discovered that they might be living in a towering inferno of Labour neglect.

Nothing really matches that story for importance but Labour Lambeth still managed to nearly top the polls across the capital for having the least satisfied customers over its crumbling sport and leisure facilities. And residents of Brixton Hill ward cocked at snook at their ward councillor and Council Leader when they rejected an extension of Labour's creeping controlled parking zones once they realised how much it would cost them.

In a particularly bad month for Labour, the Evening Standard ran an expose' on how Lambeth had sold off a desirable Streatham empty property at auction for a paltry £128,000 that went on the market six months later for £215,000.

Requiring only basic improvement, the flat was snapped up by a delighted consortium specialising in 'bargain' empty council properties. Not much comfort though for the cheated council taxpayers or those 17,000 hapless souls on the housing waiting list.

October 2009 - Labour launches a panic sale of council properties to stem the flow of the red stuff running all over its housing accounts. Bizarrely they decide to sell off masses of smaller family properties requiring little work to put right so they can keep a few really large houses requiring the sort of investment they clearly have not got.

Labour also wields the axe on its Lambeth (Barely) Living ALMO closing housing offices after it pledged at the election to open more. Even Labour's Leader in Lambeth, who usually blames everyone under the sun but him and his hopeless chums, was forced to admit " Housing management has not been good enough in Lambeth for two decades." And that from someone who's made it a whole lot worse.

November 2009 - The month was dominated by the sound of pigeons coming home to roost. Labour has poured huge resources into a so-called regeneration department on the back of claims that it will transform Lambeth's Town Centres - and for precious little result so far.

Much was made of new state-of-the-art leisure centres being ready in time for Lambeth to share the spoils of the London Olympics. So it was a bit unfortunate that the aged and creaking Streatham Swimming Pool finally closed (as predicted last July) - and probably for good. Labour said that's all right, people can go to Brixton - but that too was closing over Christmas and New Year for essential work and the last one remaining (Clapham Pool) is set to close not long after.

The future of Ice Skating in Streatham was also looking a bit thin when neither Tesco nor the Council would commit to a previous policy of continuous ice skating provision while a hoped-for and long-drawn-out new leisure centre was built and the two parties went into a secret huddle and refused to speak to anyone.

Liberal Democrat councillors placed a motion before Council that Lambeth should use its compulsory purchase powers to acquire the Tesco-owned land if a satisfactory deal is not be agreed. Rather tellingly, Labour voted this down.

December 2009 - The Liberal Democrats notch-up over 3000 signatures calling on Labour-run Lambeth Council to honour the commitment to keep continuity of skating in any agreement with Tesco for a new Leisure Centre.

Meanwhile news just escapes over Christmas that Streatham library is now suffering from major subsidence and part of the building has had to be closed pending a full structural survey.

Happy New Year?