Review of the year: December 2008

December, appropriately, brought together many of the campaigns I've been working hard on throughout the year.

I submitted a detailed objection to the Council's Danebury Avenue redevelopment plans - and was delighted to be joined in opposing the grant of planning permission by, among others, The Putney Society's Buildings Panel, Wandsworth Cycling Campaign, Roehampton Business Forum and, possibly most consequentially English Heritage.

Thames Water look set for a major fine over their terrible pollution of the Wandle in 2007 - the issue was referred by Sutton Magistrates to Crown Court which has unlimited powers to penalise Thames Water. I write regularly about issues affecting the Wandle, which I grew up alongside, and you can find these posts here.

While all local attention has been on the Putney Place, Tileman House and Roehampton redevelopment planning applications, the Conservatives sneaked through approval for a 16-storey tower block in Buckhold Road - Cockpen House. While the north end of King George's Park is dominated by tower blocks along its eastern side (Neville Gill Close), the significance of this planning permission is that it opens a new side of the park to overbearing buildings. Unless you, the voters, stand up to the Tories over their planning policies, King George's will be the first local park to resemble New York's Central Park - hemmed in on all sides by massive buildings. We need to say no, now, before it's too late.

At the same time as Conservatives nationally were lecturing us all on the evils of tax-and-spend policies, Wandsworth decided it would be the perfect time to announce an inflation-busting 27% hike in parking charges, taking the price of a permit to almost twice the cost of one in next door Fulham.

And I exposed the Housing Benefit scandal locally that costs taxpayers even more. The Tories really aren't the champions of fiscal responsibility they pretend they are - even the Taxpayer's Alliance has said so on this issue.

Review of the year: November 2008

Putney Place was finally defeated; the Council bowing to the overwhelming public opposition and fantastic campaign I had the privilege of working alongside residents on. Unfortunately, just as one overdevelopment application is put to bed, the next springs up: Tileman House, further down Upper Richmond Road near the junction with Putney Hill.

I published the second edition of The Putney Pensioner reporting on just some of the help being made available to local senior citizens by the Labour Government to help meet fuel bills.

We exposed how the Conservatives' increasingly desperate plans for developing Danebury Avenue were based on a largely fatuous transport study.

And we unearthed secret Tory plans to turn Danebury Avenue into a traffic free-for-all by removing the road closure by Alton School; all, apparently, to make their crazy redevelopment plans more marketable. Later in November I held a ballot of local people to see what residents thought of the plans to remove the barrier; an overwhelming majority - over 70% - wanted it left alone.

Nationally, the most significant and far-reaching pre-budget report further widened the differences between Labour and the Conservatives; with the light-weight Conservative Treasury team still failing to grasp the fact that doing nothing turns economic difficulties into economic catastrophes, as their two recesssions proved.

Putney suffered a spate of costly and portentially dangerous power outages - I've just had a reply from the National Grid and this, apparently, is an EDF Energy problem - nothing to do with them, guv.

For those Putney people fed up with the Thames being polluted with sewage every time it rains heavily, plans were unveiled for a massive new super sewer - the Tideway Tunnel - which will run directly underneath the river from Hammersmith all the way to Beckton in the East End.

And finally I published a Q&A on Labour's bold plans for reforming GP services, including the controversial plans for polyclinics.

Review of the year: October 2008

The month started off with a meeting called by the Putney Society, which I addressed, with the developers of Putney Place. The meeting came as more tower block plans were announced for Clapham Junction, prompting the Battersea, Wandsworth and Putney Societies to all agree that the lack of coherent town centre planning by the Conservatives locally was a real threat to the character of our borough.

The fourth edition of The Putney Paper was published, leading on the clear blue water that emerged throughout the Autumn between the Conservatives and Labour on housing.

The global economic crisis began to dominate headlines opening up further clear choices between Labour action to help people keep their homes, jobs and livelihoods, and the do-nothing Tories who want to engineer a repeat of their two catastrophic recessions. Indeed, some Tory policies announced only a few weeks earlier, would have raised taxes.

Give a bad idea long enough and the extraordinary consequences of it become evident. So it is with the right-to-buy policy in Wandsworth, which the Tories pursued so zealously that they created a massive housing shortage and are now in the extraordinary position of renting back - at exorbitant cost to taxpayers - former council homes right across Putney, Roehampton and Southfields.

Maybe the amount they're pouring down the drain on renting back properties they once owned is the reason why the Conservatives can't even keep Highcliffe Drive clean?

And new figures released by Wandsworth NHS showed that in addition to waiting times being cut nationally from 18 months under the Tories to 18 weeks with Labour, locally we're doing even better: over half of patients were seen within 8 weeks. Meanwhile, the local NHS improved its performance indicators too.

Review of the year: September 2008

At the beginning of September squatters evicted from a derelict block of flats in Lambeth found their way to empty MoD housing for servicemen in West Putney: William Gardens. The MoD thought they would save themselves a packet not providing basic security for the housing while it was awaiting refurbishment, but ended up shelling out thousands in legal costs to evict the squatters and then securing the site.

The Council eventually plucked up the courage to consult Roehampton on thoroughly dumb plans to ban right-turns off Roehampton Lane into Medfield Street, which would simply divert traffic up Roehampton High Street. These plans were brewed up by the Conservatives in early 2006, but by the time they got round to consulting on them even their own councillors were coming out against them. Strangely, the results of the consultation have yet to be announced - the Putney Society believes they represent an overwhelming NO to the Tory plans.

The leader of the Liberal Democrat party, who lives in Putney despite representing Sheffield, continued to prove what a man of the people he is after his failure to know what the basic state pension comes to, by slagging off local secondary schools and angsting about having to slum it Sainsbury's because he could no longer afford Ocado. Oh, the suffering.

I spent the start of September out and about on the Southfields Grid - the network of streets just to the south of Southfields tube - and took up a number of problems raised by residents of Hanford Close there. My petition is going to committee early in the new year and I'll keep residents informed.

And after the failure of the council to consult Roehampton adequately on the redevelopment plans, I published my own survey - which gained over 330 replies compared to the council's risible 65.

Opposition to the Putney Place towerblocks steadily grew throughout September: more on this in my review of October 2008.

Review of the year: August 2008

Ensuring our armed forces receive the respect they deserve is one of the reasons I'm standing for election, and in August I met with two local pensioners who had served our country during the Second World War and who sought my help to claim their Veterans Badges.

August marked the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the National Minimum Wage which the Conservatives told us would add millions to the unemployment lines but instead served to lift hundreds of thousands of our lowest paid workers out of poverty.

And despite some very poor weather during most of August, the Roehampton Festival, organised by local youth charity Regenerate was held on a pretty decent day.

Review of the year: July 2008

In July we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service. Locally we've seen Labour investment in very real terms: in the rebuilding of Queen Mary's Hospital and the commencement of work on Putney Hospital by Putney Common, as well as thousands more nurses, doctors, dentists and midwives. At the same time waiting lists have been slashed from 18 months under the Tories to just 18 weeks today; still too long but a vast improvement.

Several campaigns that came to dominate the Autumn were launched: the planning application for two monstrous towers at "Putney Place" opposite East Putney Station was submitted; and the Council held a so-called consultation that hardly anyone knew about and even fewer participated in on their plans to redevelop Danebury Avenue.

I met with the minister responsible for regulating dangerous dogs to talk about local problems that have plagued Putney; in particular the Dover House estate area and Roehampton. And I made sure residents of the Putney Vale estate right on the edge of the constituency had their say as they set up a new residents' association for their patch.

The first edition of the Putney Pensioner was published; we'll be significantly boosting its circulation in 2009 thanks, in part, to the large number of sign-ups we've had from the Autumn edition of the Putney Paper.

On national issues, I wrote about the importance of green taxes not being exploited as just another revenue raiser, and also about the need to ensure that staple foods be protected as high fuel costs forced up the amount the typical basket of goods cost.

Review of the year: June 2008

I had a great response to my campaign to expose the shocking state of Putney's roads which continued throughout June, as all of these examples posted on my news pages during the month show.

The Labour Government announced its intention to make public swimming pools free to use - initially for pensioners and young children but eventually for everyone; something I strongly support and which you'll never get from the Conservatives.

The Summer edition of The Putney Paper was published, leading on the high-rise threat to Putney which continues today. I set out my position on this problem in an editorial titled Putney is not Manhattan.

Fuel prices began a shocking Summer rise, due to the refusal of OPEC countries to increase production, fear over gas supplies from Russia and financial speculators driving up prices just to make a quick buck in one of the last acts of greed before they precipitated the global economic crisis.

Separate but related, Channel 4 News exposed the blindingly obvious. London Labour MPs have been at the forefront of lobbying to get more funding for the least affluent parts of the country - all of which happen to be in London.

And internationally, the consequences of Burma's dismal response to the Hurricane catastrophe started to be exposed, while in Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe lost an election and exacted a terrible price in order to cling to power.

Review of the year: May 2008

In May the word "pot" figured prominently in my news section: at the start of the month I called on the government to reclassify Cannabis to a more harmful drug, following a few years of downgrading.

Pot- as in pot-hole was also a common theme, as Conservative cuts of one third of the entire highways budget reduced many of Putney's roads to gritty dirt tracks. Our name and shame campaign bore results as some of the most neglected streets including Putney Heath and Rotherwood Road were belatedly attended to. But important local roads like Putney Bridge and Victoria Drive remain in a dreadful state even today.

Also in May friend and hard-working councillor John Farebrother became the first Labour Mayor for Wandsworth since 1978; I think the common consensus is that he has been a diligent and popular figurehead for our borough during 2008.

Every month I report on crime figures for all six council wards in Putney - and it's been a pleasure to do so because our local Safer Neighbourhood Police do an excellent job making our area one of the safest in London. In particular I have been able to present some remarkable figures for both Roehampton and Southfields where crime has been reduced by huge amounts.

One crime problem that wasn't prevented though was some appalling vandalism to Shalden House on the Alton estate and sadly the council failed to act to repair the damage until I stepped in and got it sorted.

Nationally I called for touger action on the Burmese military junta following their distinterested response to the devastating hurricane that hit the country just months after the brutal crackdown on democracy protestors in 2007. The media has lost interest in this issue - I have not.

Review of the year: April 2008

In April I gained some national publicity for telling the government they had got it wrong over the abolition of the 10p tax rate. As I've argued regularly, it's not making a mistake that proves anyone's undoing: it's the failure to accept that you've got it wrong and to then rectify the damage. That's why I was delighted when Labour pressure persuaded the government to think again and, while still abolishing the 10p rate (which lowered tax for millions), compensate the much smaller number who were made worse off by the change.

I was out and about in the constituency taking up local problems ranging from car crime in Coleman Court in Southfields and flooding on West Putney's Ashburton Estate, to trying to sort out Home Office bureuacracy for a local serviceman who just wanted to be able to join his brigade in Iraq but couldn't because of visa difficulties.

Nationally, returning to my passion for the environment I flagged up the damage the great rush to supposedly environmentally-friendly biofuels was actually doing to the planet. And while I opposed British athletes being made to boycott the Beijing Olympics over Chinese atrocities in Tibet, I did argue the case for action by our leaders.

And if you're after principle in your local MP, then don't read this.

Review of the year: March 2008

When patients wonder what one of Labour's so-called polyclinics will be like, many of the services provided will mirror those provided at the Tudor Lodge Clinic. Tudor Lodge in Victoria Drive on the edge of the Ackroydon estate servces a huge area in West Hill and has over 6,000 patients, which makes its satsifaction rating of 98% even more impressive. It was one of the first to pioneer convenient surgery hours for patients and it even attracted the attention of The Evening Standard back in March when I first wrote about it.

In March the Environment Agency also staged an exhibition in Putney's St Mary's Church highlighting the flood risk to our area - from not only the Thames, but also the Wandle and Beverley Brook. It was only a year and a half ago that homes in Putney and Southfields were flooded when heavy rains caused flash floods and the Wandle to burst its banks.

Throughout March my Don't K.O. our P.O campaign gained momentum, and at the end of the month I submitted over 700 petition cards plus my own submission against the closure plans.

March and April are traditionally the start of election campaigning - this year for the London Mayor and Assembly. In Putney this means that the Conservatives set foot on the local council estates for the first and usually only time in the year. If you're a foolish Tory Councillor, you then write about your supposedly horrifying experiences on your blog in a post tiled "Different Worlds". As soon as her bosses found out they pulled the post and then denied she'd ever written it, but we cached a copy and now, curiously, you have to be approved before you can read her blog - perhaps if they just made sure everyone knew the councillor only wrote fiction it wouldn't be such a problem for them?

The Conservatives also didn't seem to appreciate my coverage of the Police closure of Roehampton's Conservative Club after hard drugs were found being sold on the premises. Thanks to Tory mismanagement Roehampton lost another pub/club and the village has been saddled with a boarded-up eyesore for much of the past year.

This month's overdevelopment news also came from Roehampton where the Council tore up widely-consulted upon plans to redevelop Danebury Avenue and unveiled a new scheme for which it had no mandate. This one was to run and run.

Nationally I met with the (then) Housing Minister to take my Number One campaign priority to the heart of Government.

Review of the year: February 2008

February was dominated by the announcement by the Post Office of its plans to close two local branches in Lower Richmond Road and Putney Bridge Road. I remain proud to have led two huge local campaigns by local residents telling the Post Office "Don't K.O. our P.O", even though we were all unsuccessful in saving the branches ultimately.

At the start of the year I met with South West Trains bosses to press them on the urgent need for an improved Putney Station, and better train services too. The plans subsequently announced go a long way to significantly improving Putney Station - station capacity will be increased, new ticket machines are already in place and passenger lifts will be installed.

The second issue of the Putney Paper featured these and other local transport stories, including my AirTrack campaign - a south of the river rail service connecting Heathrow with Waterloo and running through Putney and the plans to make Southfields tube one of the 2012 Olympic stations, which brings with it major service upgrades.

The theme that ran through the year was the Conservative council's utter lack of sense when it comes to planning decisions, and in February we saw just another of these planning debacles, when the Conservatives' refusal to insist on sufficient parking blighted the newest housing development in the area, Whitelands Park.

Review of the year: January 2008

When I reported on the battle local residents were having with developers to save the gothic lodges at the end of Putney Park Road, little did we know how big a threat the overdevelopment blight would have this year. The fight to save the Lodge was lost when the Conservative council failed to refuse the application for their demolition and the site will, in the next few months, see yet another distinctly average block of flats go up in its place.

In January Roehampton finally got its long-overdue new recreation centre, but only after years of battling to get the Council to honour a promise it made to revamp the outdated facilities there.
Another issue I flagged-up at the start of the year which has become topical at the end of it was the question of how much of our recycling ends up being dumped in landfill. Unlike most councils who are currently at least stockpiling recyclables until the market for them picks up again, Wandsworth isn't even pretending that our recycling ends up anywhere other than in landfill tips.

When energy prices sky-rocketed this Summer, much of the media latched onto an issue I've been campaigning on since I was selected as candidate. In January I wrote about the growing problem of fuel poverty as well as setting out the critical importance of a basket of energy sources to avoid the sort of power outages Putney began experiencing towards the end of the year.

The cost of food is also closely linked to the cost of fuel, though some retailers who were quick to raise prices on staples like bread have so far failed to reduce prices now the cost of food production has fallen.

January also saw the near-miss at Heathrow, when a plane experiencing difficulties narrowly missed homes around the airport. I believe the safety arguments are the strongest we have in fighting against Heathrow - but we need to be clear that if Heathrow is not to be given a third runway how we will meet our country's air traffic needs. I've set out my position: growth of London's other regional airports. The Conservatives oppose every single airport expansion plan, yet claim to agree that our air traffic capacity is at its maximum and that it needs to expand to keep London a competitive global capital.

Wandsworth's Housing Benefit scandal

This weekend's Sunday Times featured on its front page a story about next-door Conservative-run Kensington & Chelsea council putting a homeless family in a £2 million townhouse that costs taxpayers more than £91,000 a year in Housing Benefit payouts .

Look at the detail of the story, and you find Wandsworth comes fifth in the league table for such absurd, unnecessary and totally unjustified benefit payouts, with Housing Benefit of up to £4,193 a month being doled out locally.

Following the Government's recently announced changes to Jobseekers' Allowance, Housing Benefit remains the last unreformed benefit - and one that is being exploited by Wandsworth Conservatives to the detriment of taxpayers.

Housing Benefit is paid by central Government - the council isn't responsible for administering it or paying for it. But Wandsworth is the largest landlord - by far -in our borough with over 16,000 council homes. A large proportion of council tenants (but by no means all) are eligible for Housing Benefit, which can either cover 100% of the rent, or in most cases a proportion depending on what other income you have.

Local Conservatives have seen these housing benefit payments as a source of extra funding for them and so the have ramped up council rents to among the highest in London. In pushing up their rents, they are actually making more people eligible for Housing Benefit and so worsening welfare dependency and increasing the bill taxpayers have to pick up. That they are also squeezing those tenants not eligible for Housing Benefit but hardly wealthy is not an issue that bothers them either.

But it should bother you because, ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether it's central or local government that pays the Housing Benefit bill - it's still you and I as taxpayers that pay the bill. How likely do you believe it would be that Wandsworth's rents would start falling sharply if the council had to find the money to pay for Housing Benefit itself?

The Taxpayers' Alliance said this in respect of the Kensington case: "The Council must work harder to find affordable accommodation and to more to stop greedy landlords from exploiting taxpayers' generosity." In Wandsworth's case, not only is the council doing everything it can to reduce affordable accommodation but it is also the greedy landlord.

The Tory planning muddle

This week, the leader of Wandsworth Council chose the distinctly unfestive message of planning as his last contribution to the SW15 website.

In a post he should have titled "The Nightmare Before Christmas" he welcomed the lack of planning restrictions that enabled him and his colleagues - on a whipped vote in full council - to push through the massive skyscrapers proposed for the Ram Brewery in central Wandsworth. He went on to write:

"In a recession this pragmatic approach is even more critical. We support the Mayor's move away from rigid housing targets."

Anyone with half an ounce of foresight might have thought that in a global economic downturn, with the potential for thousands of homes being repossessed in the coming year we need to boost the amount of affordable housing for rent in Putney. The Conservatives clearly lack even that half ounce. Let's be clear: the Conservative opposition to affordable housing has nothing to do with pragmatism or making sure our patch weathers the recession: it's opposition to the sort of people they believe live in affordable housing.

And that narrow-minded, short-termism is damaging the quality of life of local people: both those who might hope to be housed in the affordable homes Cllr Lister has negotiated away, or the rest of us who will soon live in an area dominated by tower blocks and skyscrapers.

This is Conservatism at its worst. It starts with failure to plan properly. This manifests itself in the approval of massively inappropriate overdevelopment which the Putney Society, Wandsworth Society and Battersea Society have all spoken out against. It develops into the abandonment of the council's social responsibility to house those not able to get or remain on the housing ladder. And it ends with a borough transformed beyond repair but local Conservatives smug in the knowledge that some of their pet projects have been paid for by the developers as the price for getting their overdevelopment applications approved.

This is not local leadership. It's the abbrogation of leadership. It's up to you decide whether you are content to allow your current representatives to wreck Wandsworth or, instead, elect me as MP to ensure far stronger, clear leadership.

Chuggers Law?

A few days ago, the Labour Government announced it was looking at introducing a licensing system for public charitable collections - the so called Chuggers (Charity Muggers) who accost us when we're out shopping, trying to get us to sign up to a standing order for their cause.

This is something I have called for myself, and from the correspondence I receive through my Save Putney High Street campaign, something that animates a lot of you.

The aim is for a new licensing scheme for public charitable collections that will ensure responsible fundraising and deter bogus collections and prevent any nuisance to the public. I look forward to this review being completed so that we can better control what is at best a public nuisance and at worst can approach harrassment.

The planning threats just keep on coming

The Wandsworth Borough News is reporting on a reception held by the council last night to unveil yet more overdevelopment they're championing - almost all in the Putney constituency.

The schemes unveiled included:

• The next phase of the Riverside Quarter development between Wandsworth Park and the River Wandle
• South Thames College on Putney Hill
• Hardwick's Quarter, which is presumably their fancy name for the Cockpen House development
• Southside shopping centre
• The nearly finished Parkside tower block beside King George's Park, which they are misleadingly calling affordable housing

The thing I find most disturbing is the relish with which the Conservatives keep rolling out these plans (just before Christmas, when they think we'll have our minds on other things, note) as if the views of local residents are irrelevent, the character of our area immaterial and the strain these developments will place on local infrastructure inconsequential.

Bizarrely, at the very reception the Conservatives were announcing their plans alongside their developer chums, they also announced a redesign of the Wandsworth one-way system to show off the "elegant Georgian terraces, churches and pubs that characterise the area": as if all this new development won't more than offset any small improvements to traffic flow a redesign may provide.

It's bad enough that they keep giving the green light to all this overdevelopment - but now they're actually wining and dining the developers in lavish receptions funded by local taxpayers: and putting out press releases to make sure we all know it.

Parking permits up 27%

The day after Tory Leader David Cameron lectured us about the evils of tax increases, Wandsworth Conservatives unveil a 27% increase in the cost of residents parking permits.

The price of a permit will now be £95 - a cost that has increased 44% since the council elections two years ago.

Curiously, the Conservatives mentioned nothing about their plans to hike up the cost of parking permits in their election manifesto for those elections - just as they forgot to tell us about their plans to close Wandsworth Museum or West Hill Library.

This is the reality of Wandsworth: Council Tax may be low but only because the Tories claw back the money through stealth taxes like this.

Inflation busting parking permit hikes are just one example; council tenants pay among the highest rents in London; pensioners needing home helps pay among the highest charges in London; charges for collecting bulky rubbish are among the highest in London; the amounts raised through library fines among the highest in London (and slammed by the Taxpayers' Alliance, no less); leisure centre charges among the highest in London; even the cost of dying - burial charges - are among the highest in London.

The irony of this 27% parking permit hike is that at the last council elections Labour in Wandsworth under my leadership pledged to make parking permits for the first car in every household free - which we'd have paid for by increasing the costs for second and subsequent parking permits in multi-car households. Of course, the Conservatives won those elections - so they'll say you get what you voted for.

It goes to show the real difference your vote makes locally.

Tories push another Putney tower

Last week councillors met to decide the Ram Brewery planning application in central Wandsworth.
Alongside the main application (which to recap is for twin towers of 32 and 42 storeys among other buildings on the brewery and adjoining sites) was an additional application to redevelop a site opposite King George's Park known as Cockpen House.

This plan (which unlike the brewery itself is in Putney constituency) would have built a 16-storey building above the park.

The real significance here is that, at present, there are high buildings - the three Arndale estate blocks in Neville Gill Close plus the new "Parkside" block - along just one side of King George's Park. This application would have opened up a new "front" for developers along another side, enclosing the park beneath these blocks as well as adding 200 new flats - 300-odd residents - plus all the associated traffic piled into Wandsworth's already gridlocked road network.

Most attention on this massive application, understandably, has focussed on the landmark skyscrapers on the Brewery itself, leaving the Cockpen House application almost unremarked on. And just look what the Council tries to do when no one is waging a campaign against over-development: the Tories recommend approving their tower blocks.



Labour councillors have "called in" all four planning applications to be debated by all sixty councillors at the full council meeting tonight which, given the importance of this application is only right. But there are 51 Conservatives and just 9 Labour councillors in Wandsworth, so don't expect much to change after tonight's important council meeting - except that if it doesn't, they'll have established a precedent that could make tower block-style overdevelopment elsewhere in Putney that much easier.

My response to the Danebury planning application

The closing date for comments on the council's planning application for Danebury Avenue has just passed and I submitted a detailed objection on five grounds: design, transport and access, housing and community facilities.

You can read my response here.

There is a wide array of opposition to this application:

• Myself, Putney Labour Party and the Labour Opposition on Wandsworth Council
• The Putney Society's Buildings and Conservation Group
• The Wandsworth Cycling Campaign
• English Heritage - in so far as they do not feel it is able to be determined as yet
• And most importantly of all the overwhelming majority of local residents as shown by the response to my detailed survey this Autumn

Like the Emperor's new clothes, the Council lacks even a figleaf to justify proceeding with this planning application and I very much hope that the planning applications department and the planning committee - which has a quasi judicial duty to act free of political interference from the Conservative administration - will determine this application on planning terms.

If they do so this application will be refused.

Wentworth Court arson attack

Twelve flats in Wentworth Court on Garratt Lane, part of the Arndale estate in Wandsworth town, were badly damaged by fire in the early hours of Saturday.

Fortunately, no one was killed in the attack, which fire investigators have now said was deliberate.

Anyone with information should call Wandsworth CID in confidence on 020 8247 8734.

I will be writing to the Council Housing Department for information about the state of the twelve flats that have been affected and to make sure that there was no structural damage done to the block - one of the largest in the constituency - by the fire.

Wentworth Court is the nearer half of the long, lower-rise yellow and grey blocks in the picture above.

Thames Water face unlimited fine over Wandle pollution

Thames Water's pollution of the Wandle last Autumn has been referred up to Croydon Crown Court after local magistrates in Sutton decided that the incident deserved a more severe punishment than the maximum £20,000 fine they were able to impose.

Two tonnes of dead fish had to be extracted from the Wandle following the spillage of 1,600 litres of hydrochloric acid (bleach) into the river last year. Fortunately, no lasting damage was done to the river and after remedial works and extra investment the Wandle is again thriving.

The company now faces an unlimited fine; which is right except even though the people who ultimately pay for this criminal negligence are you and me. Thames Water behaved appallingly over this incident - not only by letting the acid escape in the first place but then trying to cover up their error by tightening security and putting up new signage before the Environment Agency had arrived to find out exactly what happened. And yes, they have spent over £500,000 rectifying the damage but that doesn't erase the original error.

I write regularly about issues affecting the Wandle: you can read my news stories about the river at www.stuartking.net/blog/wandle.htm

Roehampton redevelopment; English Heritage weigh in

English Heritage are one of the bodies always consulted on major planning applications because of their potential impact on existing buildings, the overall setting of a community and the architectural opportunities a demolition provides.

They have today sent in a response to the Council advising them that there is insufficient information in their planning application to enable the plans for the redevelopment of Danebury Avenue to be determined one way or the other.

English Heritage go on to say that the Council has so far failed to justify its demolition plans, stating:

"There is a statutory obligation for local planning authorities to pay special attention to preserving the character of a conservation area but there is no consideration [in the planning application] of the implications of the loss of the buildings identified for demolition for the Alton Conservativon Area.

"In addition, no information has been provided as to the impact of the proposed development on either the Alton or Roehampton Village Conservation Areas. In our view the information provided in support of the application is insufficient to provide a full understanding of the proposal without which we do not consider the application can be determined."

They go on to recommend that "without this information our view is that this application should not be determined at this point."

This is another warning to the Conservatives to stop railroading their unpopular, unsupported, and damaging plans for Roehampton through. There is no need for the haste with which they're lurching on with this application - it is undemocratic and the economy makes their ideas less viable by the day.

I agree with English Heritage that the Council should not determine this application; and as the people approving as well as submitting this plan it is entirely within their power to pause for thought, consider the views of local people, think about the damage they're trying to inflict on Roehampton and - at long last - do the right thing.

You can read the English Heritage submission here.

More right to buy - are you kidding?!

Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith has done a lot since he lost the leadership of his party a few years ago. He has carved out a very clear interest in, and concern for, inequality and has set up a think-tank called the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) that focuses on it.

I respect Mr Duncan Smith's commitment to the issues he is now working on, but unfortunately, I believe too often he tries to make problems fit his right-wing outlook instead of challenging whether his beliefs would actually make a difference to the problem.

As an example of this, yesterday the CSJ published a report arguing that the key to lifting council tenants out of poverty is a greater incentive to buy their home. This is exactly the same idea that the Conservatives implemented nearly 30 years ago when they came up with their Right to Buy council homes plan.

The intervening years have shown that while Right to Buy was a popular policy and for some provided a means of upward mobility, it has caused many more problems than it has solved.

Today's CSJ report claims that right-to-buy stops estates becoming ghettos. In fact, right to buy has actually made estates ghettos. That's because so many of those who bought then moved out and let out their homes on mainly short-term lets. The result was that the community collapsed: new tenants move in and out every six months to a year or so; those who occupy the properties care far less about the environment they live in because they'll only be here for a few months, and those who haven't bought their homes find it far harder to get an appropriate property because the council housing stock has been decimated.

And what also makes estates ghettos is the lack of pride landlords take in maintaining their properties. Both Wandsworth Council and many buy-to-let homeowners are failing in that responsibility resulting in shabby estates and run-down homes.

So what Iain Duncan Smith has done is recycle a totemic 30 year-old policy and ignore the subsequent three decades of practical experience of it not working as the Tories originally hoped. Instead he should, surely, have challenged his belief in that policy and at least acknowledged that it has had drawbacks as well as successes?

At the root of the Tory approach to housing is a completely misguided belief that it is housing tenure that makes a difference to one's life chances. By repeatedly insisting that home owners are somehow more worthy, virtuous and successful than tenants, they have only stigmatised one perfectly valid, very large group of people. They do precisely the same thing in respect of marriage when they preach that anyone unmarried is unworthy to raise children.

The issue is not whether someone owns or rents their home - in fact it is utterly irrelevant - it is whether they have a decent job, got a good education, were raised in a supportive, structured family and have decent, loyal friends. For Conservatives, that just doesn't compute: they have a single idea: ever more home ownership and if it doesn't work, it's simply because it hasn't been implemented radically enough. Well, nowhere has right to buy been pursued as radically - and rabidly - as Wandsworth and the housing problem here is worse than in any neighbouring borough.

Unless the Conservatives learn from the mistakes they have made in Wandsworth, they will be doomed to repeat them. The problem with today's Tory report is that they have things backwards and have failed to learn a thing.

Putney's part in Labour's history

Anyone who takes an interest in Putney's history may be aware that Labour's greatest-ever Prime Minister, Clement Attlee was born and grew up in Portinscale Road.

But our borough was also home for one of Labour's less well-known party leaders - someone who would have been our first ever Prime Minister had he not been defeated by just five votes for the party leadership by Ramsay MacDonald.

John R. Clynes led Labour in the breakthrough 1922 general election when Labour supplanted the Liberals as the official opposition to the (Conservative) Government, almost tripling the number of Labour MPs elected.

He served in David Lloyd-George's National Government during the First World War as the Orwellian-titled (but vitally important) role of Minister of Food Control.

Despite Labour's general election success, Clynes was challenged by Ramsay MacDonald, and defeated by just a handful of votes. MacDonald went on to head Labour's first ever government while Clynes became Leader of the House of Commons until the minority administration was defeated in 1924.

Along with other Labour greats Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury, he opposed MacDonald's austerity measures during the General Strike and refused to follow the Prime Minister into a National Government in the 1930s, which led to a Labour election disaster, during which Clynes lost his Manchester seat. But he regained it in 1935 and served a further decade in Parliament until his retirement.

A resident of Putney during his time in London as an MP, Clynes has a pleasant little council estate, John Clynes Court, named after him in Woodborough Road, West Putney.

Business vs Justine Greening

In a recent report Putney's MP - a member of the do-nothing Tory Treasury team - wrote:

"Like many businesses, I have some grave concerns about [the pre-Budget report's] effectiveness."

I find that a really odd comment, especially from someone who is supposed to have some interaction with business in her Treasury role. To recap, this is what those who actually speak for British businesses have said about Labour's Pre-Budget Report:

"This Pre-Budget Report, except in one important aspect, recognises the need to address the challenges posed by globalisation. The new emphasis on training, skills, planning, transport and intellectual property are all welcome and could make a real difference to the UK's future competitiveness if delivered fully, quickly and intelligently."

Richard Lambert, Director-General, the Confederation of British Industry

?This Pre-Budget Report is a sign of the importance of small businesses to the UK economy. The Government?s Small Business Finance Scheme, which closely resembles the Small Business Survival Fund the FSB has been calling for, will provide a vital cash boost to businesses struggling with rising costs and a lack of credit.

?Many of these measures, such as giving businesses longer time to pay bills and offsetting losses, will give small businesses a welcome breather from the taxman and allow them to concentrate on sustaining their business, supporting their staff and growing the economy in the long term.?

John Walker, National Policy Chairman, the Federation of Small Businesses

"The scale of the fiscal stimulus is what the IoD has called for"

Miles Templeman, Director General of the Institute of Directors

Those are the comments of the three main trade associations for British trade and industry - including small business. They don't offer unqualified support for the PBR - I wouldn't expect them to - but any objective reader will be unable to square them with Miss Greening's "talk down the UK" approach to politics.

No wonder the public has such legitimate concern about the Conservatives not being competent to run our economy when we hear these simply untrue summaries of what business thinks from the area's Tory MP.

Putney deserves better representatives than this.

Vote for King George's Park

The Mayor for London is running a competition for awarding grants of up to £400,000 to improve parks throughout the capital.

King George's Park, where I won my first football medal when I was a pupil at Allfarthing School, is one of the parks in the running. As the blurb on the competition website says:

"King George's Park is a long, thin open space, but most of its facilities are at the northern end. A grant would support work with the local community to develop a masterplan for the park, a new playground at southern end, improved wildlife habitat by the river Wandle, a riverside footpath; a new community café and an all-weather games pitch."

Anyone can vote for King George's Park - it's really straightforward.

Incidentally the photo shown here is of my 6-aside football team (I'm the the one on the bottom right if it isn't obvious! My team mates are [clockwise] Ansell, Zubair, Richard, Richard & Matthew).

A proportionate response

We still don't know everything we need to about the Police investigation into Conservative MP Damian Green, who was arrested last week. I'm not in the business of commenting when I don't know the full facts, though the police behaviour at this stage seems a little heavy handed.

What I do want to comment on are the quite disgraceful outbursts that have appeared from both some MPs and in the letters pages of our newspapers and even on the putneysw15 website, equating the Police conduct with "the Stasi", or "Nazi Germany" or "the KGB".

These comments, aside from being absurd the moment you give them a moment's thought, also diminish the horrifying experience of those who actually lived through that sort of tyranny.

There is no comparison between Police pursuing a complaint of possible criminal activity against an MP - who, let's remember, is not above the law - and the brutality, torture, murder and reign of terror those organisations imposed upon their countries.

We are getting to the stage in this country where people appear to believe that making the most ridiculous, inappropriate and shocking observations are the only way to grab the public's attention. Whether or not that's true, it doesn't make their comments any more accurate, honourable or respectable.