Boris Watch

Not content with confessing to voting for Boris underage, calling me rude names, ringing up Boris/Ferrari LBC phone ins without declaring an interest, conducting unsolicited astroturfing for Oona King, threatening anyone who exposes her activities and then acting all innocent and hurt when the entire Internet called her out, Einy Shah has today apparently emerged as a Force in Boris’s 2012 election campaign.  In a tweet at around 3pm today that shows he’s probably not aware of Einy’s jealously-guarded privacy, one Nicolas Clark, like Boris (and Einy, if memory serves) an Islington local and the top chap in Conservative Future in London, rather blows the gaff:

Had a good meeting with Einy Shah to discuss Boris & CF Campaigns @backboris2012 from @LondonCF angle #backboris2012

Now, the official Twitter account @backboris2012 certainly had our suspicions from the start, but not perhaps quite as much as @backborisagain, who started almost immediately Boris’s campaign first got going in private at the beginning of August*.  The line in badly spelled baiting of London’s non-Tory politicians seems awfully familiar:

@GreenJennyJones the first thing i am going to do when re elected is to ensure that your groups budget is cut so u cant make any more vidoes

We’ll keep an eye on that, although surely even Einy wouldn’t stoop to actually impersonating her idol?:

@joederrett will you vote for me? I did keep you on the pay role for months after i deafted your mate Ken #backborisagain

So, why is Einy apparently involved in @backboris2012?  Well, Boris usually uses the GLA account @MayorOfLondon but as we’ve seen before usage of this publicly-funded account for openly political as opposed to office-related communication is going to be potentially embarrassing.  Therefore Boris will need a non-public-expense-employed resource to run his re-election Twitter account, and who better than the social media expert, trusted crony and now ex-Mayor’s Peer Outreach Team worker who is reported to hang around City Hall, according to informed sources, trying to get in the lift with Boris.  Spies at the House of Commons, meanwhile, report that she no longer appears to be on Jo Johnson’s staff there, either, lending weight to the Back to Boris theory.

One tiny thing bothers me – is she *really* working for Boris 2012, or make believing it?  Time will tell, but I suspect the story of Agent Einy, Labour’s greatest asset on the inside at City Hall, isn’t done yet.

* @backboris2012 was registered at this point

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The Councillor’s office. In the distance, cries of “get Coleman out” are heard.

Councillor

I’m sorry if they’re angry but the cuts have to be made.

Secretary

Yes, Councillor.

Councillor

It’s not as if I like it – but this is the age of austerity.

Secretary

Indeed.

Councillor

It’s going to hurt us all…

Pause

Secretary

Erm, Councillor – this isn’t about the expenses, is it?

Councillor

If I have to suffer we all have to suffer!

Secretary

*Sigh* Yes, Councillor.

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The Greens at the London Assembly (and, for that matter, Labour and the Lib Dems. Actually, everyone except the Tories and Schrodinger’s Nazi*) are kicking off about the bizarre TfL-led (but Boris/Moylan/Ranger driven) plan to remove traffic lights from London’s streets.  When this first came out I mapped a few of them before running out of time, and found some peaches such as the one by the back door of an RBKC school (Marlborough Primary School on Sloane Street, number 12/000200).  It’s in the Western Extension Zone, to boot.

View War On Pedestrians in a larger map

Anyway, the new hippy huggy Evening Standard is covering the story today.  What’s notable is that it puts the stress on some of the councils involved saying ‘bugger off Boris’, due, unsurprisingly, to Danny Alexander’s Gideon Osborne’s lunatic obsession with cuts.  In other words, Boris is going to have to come up with something he hates – a business case – after all, he’s pledged to work with the boroughs, not rip out their infrastructure in the teeth of their opposition.

* You’re not sure if he is or not until you open the box. No one wants to open the box.

Update: Tory Troll covers the story here

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Apparently from midnight here.  Quite why the UK’s state broadcaster can’t show pictures of London’s state bus paid for by the UK taxpayers’ money as soon as it has them escapes me, but I’m sure TfL’s press office will have embargoed it for a good reason.  I’m *sure*.

Talking of dim PR, this dropped out of TfL’s corporate website the other day:

Passengers are now enjoying the benefits of track and station upgrades with the introduction of the final four-carriage trains in London Overground’s fleet of electric trains.

…

Kulveer Ranger, the Mayor’s transport adviser, said: ‘This is yet another example of the Mayor’s successful delivery of crucial investment in the transport infrastructure in this city*

Only it’s nothing of the sort, is it, Kulveer?  In fact, a moment’s research discovers that the original 152 car Class 378 order of 31st August 2006 included options up to 216 cars.  36 of the extras were then ordered on the 4th July 2007, 24 of which were to extend the initial three car trains to four cars in, er, 2010 (the final cars form 7 more four car units, ordered in April 2008).  It’s these that Kulveer Ranger is pretending to the world that Boris had anything to do with, rather than being contracted for delivery well before Boris even stood as a candidate.

It’s this kind of thing that causes one to lose faith in Kulveer Ranger as anything other than a twit in a fancy waistcoat.  But that’s just me being a mean old leftie, isn’t it?

Actually, has Boris *ever* ordered a rail vehicle?  Four trams in Croydon, I think, and even those are borrowed from Edinburgh.

* Actually, perhaps someone ought to have proof-read it:

Six trains per hour all day Camden Road to Willesden Junction with four trains per Richmond to Clapham Junction and two trains per hour Willesden Junction to Clapham Junction

Um, four trains per hour Richmond to Stratford, I think.  Richmond to Clapham Junction’s pretty well served already. Buck up, chaps.

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Careless tweets cost a rude post about Boris’s increasingly anachronistic-in-an-age-of-austerity pet bus project. Ross Lydall, the Standard’s much better replacement for Andrew Gilligoon, is on his way to Ballymena for the launch of, no doubt, a mock up of the New Bus For London and some PR.

That this is an expensive distraction from the real transport issues facing London (keeping up service levels, fighting George Osborne for a decent settlement, completing Crossrail without going over budget, raising the Underground from the PPP morass without affecting safety or performance) is of course obvious now, but at least the cost seems to have settled. Tomorrow’s Finance Committee meeting papers are out, and the Project Monitoring/Project Approvals doc [PDF] shows no more approval being granted than the £11.4m already known about for the first five.  Series production, and with it a solution to the problems of paying for the second man and persuading the bus industry to pay for Boris’s vanity, is thus some way off.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Boris is likely to have a bus workers’ strike on his hands.  Unite are protesting at City Hall today.

The Unite union has said the coalition government’s spending review next month will also affect wages.

It is currently balloting members at a number of London bus firms for action over pay and conditions.

Only a real cynic would link the appearance of an angry union with the disappearance of Boris* and all the capital’s journalists on a jolly to Ballymena, if you can call ultra-dry Protestant Ulster ‘jolly’.

Possibly the first canary in the coal mine about spending cuts is this line from the September PMPA foreword, which is a new development:

From 14 July 2010 until the revised Business Plan is agreed, Interim Expenditure Controls have been introduced that have resulted in a temporary reduction of the threshold for approvals at the Project Review Group from £5m to £1m. Projects between these figures will be reviewed at PRG but will not be subject to the CGAP.

What revised Business Plan?  I thought it had just been revised?  If they’re clamping down as far as the trivial level (against a multi-billion budget) of £1m then one feels the next few months could be unpleasant, and the expensive vanity bus even more of a standout waste of money. Time to search out what happened in mid-July.

* Embarrassing Update: Boris of course hasn’t disappeared, he’s at Mayor’s Question Time today. Really odd to send the journos to Ulster then?

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As it’s revealed today that our profligate Mayor paid three guides £240 to escort a solitary cycling commuter from Brixton to The Mall and shelled out for three guides and a TfL Traffic Controller to deal with the hordes four cycling commuters at Clapham Common during last week’s London Underground strike, it’s time to look at the numbers for the cycle hire division of the Mayor’s “Cycling Revolution“.

Thanks to the determination of blogger North Of The Thames, it’s now possible to read the TfL Cycle Hire Scheme Business Case Submission [PDF] (albeit partially redacted) and decide for yourself whether the Mayor has provided us with value for money. As North Of The Thames comments:

The business case, released through a Freedom of Information request from this blog, confirms that as originally conceived the scheme has a positive benefit/cost ratio but as costs have spiralled it now represents a poor use of public money. As the point the budget changed the decision to push ahead should have been re-evaluated and the scheme cancelled. Questions remain as to the process that was followed for the budget extension and as to whether the Mayor’s office in particular knew that the scheme was a poor investment but chose to continue anyway.

Apart from the escalating costs and poor value for money, a major failing which has caused chaos of gargantuan proportions for unfortunate commuters resulted from the following decision:

Demand estimation does not account for the after-rail market (see appendix B for details); this segment has been excluded from the analysis as the scheme is unable to cater for the very high demand from this market.

Appendix B:

The after rail market refers specifically to non-London residents who use mainline trains to commute to London. It is not proposed that this scheme supports this market at present, to do so would require 50,000 bicycles. This market is excluded from all analysis and the scheme will be structured to allow management of this demand as far as is practicable.

The highest authorisation level for this project was the Transport for London Board, the Chair of which is none other than Boris Johnson. Knowing full well that the scheme would not be able to cope with the after-rail market it was decided to press ahead anyway.

[Read more →]

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As Boris seeks, at least in PR terms, to fight London’s corner against Phil ‘Petrolhead’ Hammond’s cuts (Christian Wolmar reports PH’s latest outrage as being under the impression that cyclists don’t pay road tax, another data point on our ‘the Coalition actually believes the tabloids’ horrorgraph) it’s nice to see wasting money replacing buses pointlessly is going ahead.  Further to our recent update, the 12 is confirmed as converting to 41 double deckers, yer basic diesels, no hybrids, on 5/11/2011 (which is about three months after the previous contract ends, suggesting that debendifications are still delaying contract start dates).

Hang on, that’s only a couple of months or so before the Boris imposed 1/1/2012 deadline which handily gets TfL out of having to provide hybrids.  There are still five more routes to announce, leading to the long-awaited pile up of debendifications right at the far end of 2011 that we’ve been anticipating for a while.  Here’s the latest chart:

Done

Route    Tender    5    5+    Old PVR    New PVR    Revised End Date    PVR increase ratio
507    1-Jun-2002    1-Jun-2007    1-Jun-2009    9    15    25-Jul-2009  1.67
521    1-Jun-2002    1-Jun-2007    1-Jun-2009    19    32    29-Aug-2009   1.68
38    20-Jul-2002    20-Jul-2007    20-Jul-2009    47    72    16-Nov-2009  1.53

Awarded

149    18-Oct-2003    18-Oct-2008    18-Oct-2010    27    35    23-Oct-2010  1.30
18    23-Aug-2003    23-Aug-2008    23-Aug-2010    32    48    13-Nov-2010  1.50
25    26-Jun-2004    26-Jun-2009    26-Jun-2011    44    59   25-Jun-2011   1.34
12    31-Jul-2004    31-Jul-2009    31-Jul-2011    31    41  5-Nov-2011  1.32

Subject to contract (dates and PVR provisional)

73    1-May-2004    1-May-2009    1-May-2011    43    66    1-May-2011
207    9-Apr-2005    9-Apr-2010    9-Apr-2012    26    40    31-Dec-2011
29    14-Jan-2006    14-Jan-2011    14-Jan-2013    29    44    31-Dec-2011
436    9-Feb-2008    9-Feb-2013    9-Feb-2015    26    40    31-Dec-2011
453    16-Feb-2008    16-Feb-2013    16-Feb-2015    23    35    31-Dec-2011

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Those “teething troubles” with the cycle hire billing aren’t getting any better.

London Assembly Member Murad Qureshi has experienced the arbitrary nature of the charges applied to his credit card by the cycle hire scheme billing and this afternoon we read that another user of the cycle hire scheme has had £900 debited from their bank account:

It was not until the billing date, last week that I discovered that £900 had been debited from my current account. No, that’s not a typo, I don’t mean £90, NINE HUNDRED POUNDS.

On the first of the month when all my direct debits are due. It’s now 8 days later, the money is not back in my account. I spoke to them this morning and they assured me again (the same thing they said last week) that it would be in my account in 3-5 banking days and that they would send me an email confirming this (they said that last week too). So far no email even though on the phone the supervisor said “I am sending it now”.

Luckily, so far my bank has been pretty good though I am miles overdrawn.

I’m hoping that I will actually get the money back next week and then I will be sending them quite a large bill for my returned direct debit fees, other bank fees and my phone bill for the hours I have spent on the phone to them and my bank trying to sort this out.

It would seem that the “glitches” are a long way from being solved. £900 may be less than chickenfeed to the Mayor, but not to most Londoners.

UPDATE: Assembly Member Val Shawcross (and Chair of the Assembly Transport Committee) has just tweeted the following:

Cycle hire call centre deny all knowledge of my year’s fee payment despite me having paid over the phone and been sent a key. Chaotic.

FURTHER UPDATE: From the blog of Tom Edwards, BBC London’s Transport Correspondent, an email from a user who attempted to use the cycle hire scheme yesterday and experienced contrary advice from the  “helpline” when they finally managed to get through, rude staff who were openly laughing at customers unable to dock their hire bikes and left them standing around at docking stations for hours on end, despite Boris Johnson’s claim that, during the Tube strike, he had:

…asked TfL to pull out all the stops

As this unfortunate bike-hirer describes it:

What was simply a lack of foresight and proper planning became a customer service disaster.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The BBC have reported on the story.

FURTHER UPDATE: The Evening Standard’s Ross Lydall tweeted yesterday:

Feckin marvellous. A £450 “adjustment” has popped up on my #Borisbike #Serco account. Where’s #Kulveer when u need him?

TfL last week, commenting on the £900 taken from a user’s account:

“We have been assured by Serco that these members have now had, or are about to have, their money paid back into their bank accounts, and that they have all been offered compensation for the inconvenience they have experienced.

“Serco have put in place measures to make sure this issue with their billing system doesn’t happen again.”

Quite astonishing.

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This morning’s London Assembly Plenary was cut short after barely half an hour when the Tory Assembly Members walked out en masse, rendering the meeting inquorate.

What did they find so objectionable? They wished to prevent the Assembly from debating the proposed closure of London Undergound ticket offices and so orchestrated a mass flounce, meaning this issue of great importance to Londoners (and every subsequent issue in the agenda) could be conveniently ignored.

Caroline Pidgeon, Leader of the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Group issued the following statement:

It is shameful that the London Assembly has today been prevented from debating key issues including the threat to people living in homes owned by the Crown Estates and the planned reduction in opening hours at tube ticket offices.  These are bread and butter issue for Londoners and the London Assembly is here to make sure London’s voice is heard.

This disgraceful behaviour by Conservative London Assembly Members is an insult to the democratic process.

Shameful, indeed, not to mention undemocratic and demonstrating complete disregard for London and Londoners.

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Last year the Mayor added a new, exciting “festival” to his calendar of events for London – The Story Of London. You can read about this lacklustre affair here, here, here and here.

This year, the festival has been moved from June to October. Like fellow blogger IanVisits, I’d been somewhat concerned that no information about the festival had appeared on the Mayor’s website, less than a month before the event. After Ian’s email enquiry to City Hall last Friday, a map and searchable listing of events miraculously appeared on the same day.

Last year’s event was, apparently, such a runaway success that the number of events has been reduced from 500-odd to, er, 100-odd.

How about the distribution of the events? Ian has produced a much more user-friendly map than the official events map; it’s immediately apparent that our Mayor For Outer London has, yet again, neglected the far north-west, west and south-west of his realm, despite claims that:

The festival will take place across all of London’s 33 boroughs

Indeed, Ian has produced a very useful spreadsheet which lists events by postcode – see at a glance which boroughs have drawn the short straw.

The observations I made last year about the “festival” mainly comprising events which would have been happening anyway is echoed this year by Ian:

Hmm, unless my eyes deceive me, there is a lot less happening this year than last year. Also, no themed weekends – which is actually a good thing – but it does make the event appear a bit more disjointed than before.

My main gripe with the Story of London is that there is actually very little that is genuinely unique to the event. Yes, many of the events are themed around London topics, but most of the venues would have been doing something similar anyway, so what is being laid on that wouldn’t have happened without the Mayor’s Office prodding and poking people?

The Mayoral Decision [PDF] approving the expenditure for The Story Of London claims:

Story of London will act as an extra “reason to travel” for visitors to London both from the UK and abroad.

Really? Come to London to see some stuff that was already happening and is spread out over ten days – at three weeks’ notice? It’s not on during the school holidays, either.

Talking of holidays, what’s happened to USA Day? It’s apparently next month [PDF] but no sign of it on the GLA events calendar.

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