Forum Topic

Poor maintenance of roads in Acton

Has anyone noticed how the roads in Acton just get worse and worse? This was put to South Acton councillors John Gallagher, Yvonne Johnson and Mik Sabiers at the Ward Forum on 5 March. John Gallagher suggested that South Acton's roads had had more than their fair share of attention-well, he only had to step out of the Armenian Centre and look at the potholes on Mill Hill Rd or ride a bicycle along Bollo Bridge Road to see the reality. I believe only three South Acton roads have been resurfaced since 2010, let alone the pavements. Does anyone have precise information about this poor state of upkeep?

Julian Gallant ● 4572d17 Comments

Julian,I was there too and the councillors asserted that South Acton had done quite well on road resurfacing.  Whilst South Acton may have done better than the other Acton wards it has done really very badly with only three roads having been tackled in 3 years.  The list of Acton roads and footpaths resurfaced under Labour is here:Only £503K has been spent in Acton so far.  This is £2.8 million less than a fair share of the Conservative roads spend and £1.8 million less than a fair share of Labour’s reduced road spend.  The last chance for Acton to get some road spending before the local elections will be the cabinet meeting on 25th March at which the Labour cabinet will agree the list of roads to share the last tranche of £3.5 million they are planning to spend.  Just for Acton to get its fair share of Labour’s reduced road spending they will have to allocate £1.8 million to Acton.  Although it is much needed I fear Acton won’t get it.  Acton has done badly for roads under Labour as evidenced by this short list.

Phil Taylor ● 4572d

My oh my, what a happy coincidence. A Tory candidate moans about road resurfacing on the w3 forum and wonders if anyone has any data on road spending, and lo and behold, within 15  minutes a Tory councillor furnishes him with the (carefully selected) data. I wonder if there is a connection somewhere?

Robert John Anderson ● 4572d

Robert,Conservatives working together to highlight how badly the current Labour administration is treating Acton is no coincidence you are right.  What do you mean by carefully selected data?  The current administration has had three and a half rounds of road funding that have allocated £14 million so far.  Do you want the links to the cabinet papers so you can check for yourself?  Only £500K has gone to Acton and Acton is way underweight in road funding.  Roads like Spencer Road, York Road, Valetta Road, Lynton Road and Bollo Bridge Road look awful.  What little flexibility the Labour administration has had in capital spending has gone on an underused car park in Southall, doing up Ealing Town Hall and gold plating the streets around it and building shiny new council offices.  Our priority is to ensure that council tax is spent on people's doorsteps not on far away municipal baubles. 

Phil Taylor ● 4571d

My understanding is that any monies in the Road Maintenance Account have to be spent (or allocated to work) by 31 March ---- else they will be lost.They cannot be carried over - and will therefore be lost in this financial year.There is always a great rush by Councils to spend this money by 31 March and therefore it is not necessarily spent in the correct way.  Planning on how to spend this money needs to be taken seriously.

Dee Cook ● 4571d

Dee,That may have happened in the past, probably more in central government than local government and more on the revenue side than the capital side.  This process in LBE is quite orderly nowadays.  An allocation of funds is made well in advance and a paper comes to cabinet in February/March listing the roads to be surfaced in the next financial year. The problem recently has been that the Labour administration is spending £8 million less than the previous Conservative administration and for whatever reason that reduced spending is not coming to Acton.  There is a backlog of road investment because the 1994-2006 Labour administrations cut back on road spending quite recklessly.  They only spent £12 million in 12 years.  Indeed in 1999/2000 they spent absolutely nothing on road resurfacing.  In 2010-2014 Labour will allocate £17.5 million against the £25.5 million allocated by the Conservatives in 2006-2010 a cut of £8 million or 31%.

Phil Taylor ● 4571d

I witnessed some road 'maintenance'' last week in Twyford Avenue.  A contractor's truck stopped in the middle of the road ( holding up oncoming traffic) then a guy with a shovel jumped out took a shovel load of tar, threw it into a pot hole and banged the shovel on it twice.  He then scraped the shovel on the edge of the pavement, leaving lumps of black sticky tar all over the pavement.  Back into the van, then they stopped a few metres further on and repeated.  Presumably someone in the roads department can tick a box, confirming that the pot holes have been dealt with?

Vivienne Duggan ● 4571d

There is a difference between short term pot hole repair, and the resurfacing programme which is a strip and replace with a new surface rather than patch up. Both Julian and Phil know that the resurfacing priority is determined by an assessment of need process, and not allocated on a ward by ward basis.So to take the spend on an arbitrary period of time does not tell you anything about the fairness of the process. The priority list is produced by officers and so is reasonably independent of councillor lobbying.Finally, Julian seems to have missed off the councillors telling us that Mill Hill Road is to be resurfaced next year.

Pete Grist ● 4571d

What Phil won't mention is that the 2010 Conservative manifesto (p7, available on Phil's blog) pledged £15m on resurfacing roads. By his own admission, Labour has therefore spent more than the Conservatives would have, while dealing with unprecedented cuts from central government. (An aside - it's £18.5m we're spending, not £17.5m.)What Julian didn't mention from the ward forum meeting - perhaps he missed this bit - was that Mill Hill Road is going before cabinet later this month for resurfacing this year. Papers will be online a few days before the meeting on 25th March.As I'm a Labour candidate in South Acton this May, I will leave it up to residents to decide whether Julian and Phil are deliberately ignoring these facts to create a self-serving political narrative.

Josh Blacker ● 4571d

Vivienne,I too have seen this behaviour and raised it with the officers who in turn raised it with the supplier.  The poor work you have witnessed is thankfully only a temporary measure and they will go back and do a proper patch.  I will pass this on to the roads guys, again!

Phil Taylor ● 4571d

Josh,Great to meet you last week.  If we are going to examine manifestos from 2010 perhaps you will make yours available?  In 2010 we were all very anxious about where local government funding would fall so the £15 million was as much as we thought we could offer at the time.  Since then Labour has found the cash for an empty car in Southall (£2.5 million) and three new council offices, a refurbishment of Ealing Town Hall and very expensive York stone paving around the Town Hall and Perceval House, about £12.5 million in all.  So apparently there was more scope for capital spending and our preference would have been for the roads outside people's houses to be resurfaced rather than spend the money on distant municipal baubles.  You are wrong on the numbers.  Labour will allocate £17.5 million in its time in office.  Very happy to go through the numbers in the cabinet reports with you.  The figure Bassam Mahfouz quoted was a strange one.  It included £6.5 million allocated by us for 2010/2011 and the next two financial years.  I have had this confirmed by officers - very happy to forward the e-mails.  Your assertion that the process is as it should be, an objective one driven by a survey and officer advice, is undermined by your own statement that Mill Hill will appear on the list.  The list has not been published yet and it certainly hasn't been shared with me as opposition spokesman on transport.  I can show you letters from Labour Northolt councillors that claim that they influenced this process.  The South Acton councillors said as much at their ward forum.  Very happy to hear that Mill Hill Road will be on the list when it is published next week.  It sure needs it as do many other Acton roads.

Phil Taylor ● 4571d

Well, this is great! Mill Hill Road will be resurfaced, pending approval in Council. I'm very glad I raised the subject of roads and pavements at the Ward Forum, and here. The figures are out in the open, where they should be. I am a prospective Conservative candidate but I've also been living in Acton since 1998, love the area and feel strongly about its upkeep and outlook. Next on we are going to talk about the green spaces.

Julian Gallant ● 4571d

well i am  sorry  if  they  think south  acton roads  are good the labour  guys  WONT be getting  my  vote  hope  john  reading  this filthy roads badly  maintained  and  acton  gardens  with  very  big  machines  breaking  the  pavements  also  acton  town is  terrible  the  pavements  all  the  way  down  to  bollo bridge  road

John Kennedy ● 4570d

John, you are right to complain! Road and pavement improvement is going to be a priority for a Conservative Council in Ealing. We won't make excuses.

Julian Gallant ● 4570d

Let's remove politics from this please. East Acton roads are in an appalling state too, particularly Valetta and Davis Roads. Is this because these roads border the neighbouring borough and so are left to dereliction? Requests to the council for full resurfacing (not quilt-work repairs, taking minutes of careless time) are not met with firm replies and courses of action.

Paul Cronshaw ● 4569d

Too many of our roads are in a poor state.  The photo above is Valetta Road in East Acton, the ward where I am standing on 22nd.  The chart above shows the Borough's own road spending this century on the Borough's own roads.  For 12 years from 1994 to 2006, Labour neglected our roads terribly.  In 12 years they spent £12 million.  This is ridiculous for a borough of our size.  It got so bad that in 1999/2000 our borough spent nothing on its roads.  When the Tories came into power in 2006 we realised that we had a huge problem.  We immediately put £500K into the roads in the current year and then put in £25 million.  When it came into power Labour thought that it could again skimp on roads but it didn't quite go back to its bad old ways.  They thought that they could get away with spending £15.5 million over four years (a 40% drop) but after a constant campaign from the Tories they recently found an extra £2 million to put in.  Interestingly for all  of Julian Bell's talk of  "unprecedented cuts" this extra cash came from an underspend on revenue spending.  So the final figure is £17.5 million, a drop of just under a third (31%).  RT @itvlondon:What did your council spend on repairing #potholes last year? Ealing came top with a bill of almost £1m http://t.co/dCqIiALa2O— Julian Bell (@juliangbell) March 31, 2014Rather stupidly Labour leader Bell has been bragging recently that our borough has London's largest spending on pot holes.  This is merely an admission that we have underinvested in our roads.  This is why the Tories will prioritise road (and pavement) spending.  It makes it safer for pedestrians.  It makes life easier for cyclists.  It hugely improves the environment that people live in - the same people who are paying the council tax.  Our philosophy is that your money should be spent on your doorstep and not on new car parks and doing up the Town Hall.  There is less money to go around so it should not be spent on distant municipal projects.

Phil Taylor ● 4512d

My goodness, Phil, you are dredging these threads up.Is it worth it?

Sara Nathan ● 4512d

Sara,Who knows?  I like a bit of debate so keen to put our stuff out there.  Looking forward to next Wednesday.  Thanks for organising.

Phil Taylor ● 4512d