A reader writes.... and the Dame agrees. Our Environmental Noise Team is first class.
Our lives are made intolerable by thoughtlessly noisy builders and all that can be done to limit and control them.
.....the Dame should know that the Environmental Noise Team have proposed bringing the Borough in line with the rest of London to stop builders making a racket after 6:00 pm rather than 6:30 in the evening. This is a splendid idea as I personally am put upon by 3 developments in my street (one of them for over 2 years) and we could certainly do with some peace and quiet in the evening as it is bad enough during the day.
The staff in Environmental are excellent on the whole but they cannot work miracles and this idea needs support to protect your voters from bloody builders who just do what they want.......
The staff in Environmental are excellent on the whole but they cannot work miracles and this idea needs support to protect your voters from bloody builders who just do what they want.......
One of those high value Council services that really makes a difference to our lives. Garden waste collection is another.
ReplyDeleteWell in the upcoming Budget they want to prune enforcement still further, and charge for garden waste. All this while Investec are pillaging and abusing our arts services for their own purposes. Totally disgraceful.
DeleteThat's quite shocking considering the fact that the Council already runs pretty minimal services in many cases.
DeleteCall the Noise Nuisance department outside office hours and the odds of anyone being able to turn up to deal with the nuisance is nil. They simply don't have the staff (i.e. funding). In the most serious cases you're likely to be advised to call the Police to deal with it as anti-social behaviour. This is nothing other than the Council passing the buck to another arguably under-funded public service, which most probably has more serious issues to deal with.
And the same sadly applies to many other enforcement departments. For example, we have a single dog warden for the whole borough. This compares unfavourably with the likes of Wandsworth, which funds a whole team of them. Is it any surprise that large parts of the borough are covered in dog sh*t as a result?
Charging for collecting garden waste has proved counter productive in other London boroughs. The Council would be well advised to think again unless they really like the idea of bags of grass cuttings and leaf litter dumped all over the place.
DeleteThis is the kind of service that council tax should fund and definitely NOT Opera Holland Park. And if there is a conflict and one has to be abandoned because of shortage of money - then it has to be the opera that gets the chop
ReplyDeleteTripe
Delete09:41: You clearly appear to have a very strange idea of the services a Council SHOULD provide and services that are mere frippery or luxury. This is one of those services the Council SHOULD supply. It is of direct consequence to the quality of life of residents. And lots of them. Opera Holland Park however is a frippery. If money is short, as we are so often told it is, the Opera should get the chop not this.
DeleteThe cost of moving from a £2 million house in K&C (the average house value of Hornet readers) is £300k for the Estate Agent and Stamp Duty. So guess what? We stay put and dig a basement or extend the back of the house. Often in a Conservation Area. The relentless rise in house prices means that K&C has become one huge building site. Its time to put a stop to the excess - for example multilevel basements and house extensions that make a mockery of Conservation Areas. But in the meantime all we have to stop life being absolutely unbearable is the Noise Control Department
ReplyDeleteThe average house value of Hornet readers is £2million? I think not.
DeleteAccording to the Land Registry the average value of a house in RBK&C is currently hovering around the £1.5 million mark and there is significant variation across the borough.Whilst many Hornet readers are most certainly "above average" it would be foolish to assume this also applies to their homes.
Exactly. The noise control (nuisance?) department is essential.
DeleteThe Environmental Team is well worth the taxpayers money, of course the idiots in Hornton Street will demolish it. They continue to slash by stealth good services and experienced officers under the guise of saving money in the tripe borough which was in no resident voted for and was in none of their mandates. What they are replacing them with is the non service and distracted officers from the other Boroughs and not one council member is standing by officers that stood by them.
ReplyDeleteThe environmental team has managed to quell the pollution both noise and dust from the build on Walmer Road and made sure the contractors did what they were supposed to do.
They will be needed more than ever when the 24 hour 20 year build starts in Earls Court, that will be round the clock lorries taking away waste and non stop building work that brings nothing to Earls Court....nothing because this council are incompetent.
Is this why Pooter behaved the way he did...he knew how useless they were.
Breaches of the Kensington Academy traffic plan meant that the children’s lessons at Thomas Jones School were constantly disrupted; breaches of the Wornington Green traffic management plan meant that residents were kept awake all night and were in serious danger of being run over. Ward councillors complained vigorously but were told there were no officers to carry out the enforcement. So Cllr Dent Coad organised a human chain at Wornington Green and Cllr Blakeman checked the registration numbers of all lorries thundering past the School for two hours in the rain. Thus the Council was shamed twice to do its job. But unless additional staff are recruited, life in the Borough is going to become a complete nightmare. Heaven knows what will happen to us in Earl’s Court when that development kicks off – or at Notting Hill.
DeleteThe tri-borough experiment is little more than the undemocratic process of cutting Council services by stealth and reducing standards of service to those of the lowest common denominator (i.e. H&F).
DeleteThe upside of the scheme was that someone expected a peerage out of it as a "good Tory implementing good Tory policies". The downside is that residents get shafted as essential services progressively go down the tubes.
It's no wonder Westminster are avoiding much of it like the plague.
The Tories in Hammersmith and Fulham are proceeding to turn much of their borough into a semi-permanent building site for predominantly ideological reasons (it's a good opportunity to get rid of all those poor people).
DeleteUnfortunately it appears that the Tories in K&C have decided to do the same. Their reasons may be different (although perhaps not) but the end result is the same - large swathes of the borough will become permanent building sites to the obvious detriment of all those who live there.
Of course some "residents" don't actually live there at all and their primary concern is the appreciation of their property assets. Perhaps those are the only "residents" the Council worries about?
Bless 'em, Labour have put a motion about this on to the Council agenda and the Conservatives are so embarrassed by it that they have issued the following statement: "The Council acknowledges that large scale developments unfortunately do cause noise nuisance and disruption; enforcement is an important tool in protecting local residents. An exercise is being undertaken to co-ordinate all enforcement; the first steps being to get Planning, Traffic and Environmental Health working together more closely. A new head of enforcement has been appointed for the planning department and two further planning enforcement officers (making a new total of 7) have been employed. We will keep the number of enforcement officers in other departments under review. The Council requests that the Cabinet Members will report all developments on co-ordinating enforcement to the Public Realm OSC."
ReplyDeleteWhy Public Realm? Surely this all belongs in the Scrutiny Committee overseeing the Council's core services and/or planning?
DeleteOooops, that Scrutiny Committee appears to be chaired by a Labour Councillor. The Council leadership can't be that transparent surely ... ?
Yes, they can.
DeleteCllr Blakeman was never going to rock the boat and use her position as Leader of the Labour Group and Chair of the Scrutiny Committee to hold the Ruling Party to any kind of account.
DeleteToo concerned with colluding with the likes of neo-cons Ahern and Coleridge and maintaining the feel of her expensive leather shoes on the nice plush Hornton St carpet.
Sooner E Dent Coad takes over and returns some dignity to RBKC Labour Party the better.
Councillor Blakeman doesn't currently chair any of the Council's scrutiny committees. The Public Realm scrutiny committee that will be overseeing this matter is chaired by Councillor Marie-Therese Rossi (Conservative) and vice-chaired by Councillor James Husband (Conservative). Only one Scrutiny Committee is currently chaired by a Labour Councillor: Cabinet and Corporate Services, which is chaired by Councillor Emma Dent Coad. That's arguably the scrutiny committee that should be keeping an eye on this, but the Council much prefers a Chihuahua to an Akita.
DeleteDidn't "collusion" with neo-con Tories get Labour £10 million to spend on massive improvements to Grenfell Tower and Lancaster West Estate in North Kensington? Far more money than has ever been spent on any other Council estate in the borough.
Delete£10 million is most certainly not far more money that has ever been spent on any other Council estate in the borough. Similar sums have been spent elsewhere. Look harder.
DeleteIt is clear to me that the Noise and Nuisance Team (to give them their correct title) do an excellent job. I have dealt personally with the manager on a number of occasions in the last few years. They have always provided an excellent service within the limits of the small number of staff that they have. The builders next door to me were as good as gold after I used the service and the local watering hole is managed properly as a result of responses to complaints from my wife and I. Do not cut this service as it is vital.
ReplyDelete