Oh dear, Jeremy. You seem to make the error of mistaking comments on a thread for ‘obsession’. Perhaps you ought to pay more attention to what goes on.Mason and his cohort are very economical with the truth across the board. There are several legal challenges ongoing with Ealing Council because of the way it operates, the most high profile being the conversion of the Town Hall into a boutique hotel, with the loss of the publicly owned Victoria Hall. The council has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds pushing this scheme and is now the respondent in the legal case, even though the actual respondent should be the Charity Commission. Oh, and that money being spent is money diverted from budgets that could be spent on core services, not fancy boutique hotels.If the hotel doesn’t get built the developers, Mastcraft, pocket a £350,000 indemnity payout from the council. A deal struck before the planning committee met to decide on the application. And that’s more money from the public purse down the drain.Concessionary fares are funded from council tax. It’s there on the breakdown every year. It has to be a set amount because fine revenue is too precarious to rely on. What Ealing was very keen on was using its transport surplus to build cycling infrastructure, at great expense and often poorly designed. Even the cyclists say so.You don’t seem very questioning of decisions made by those in power or what the consequences of those decisions are. With the lack of local media scrutiny many decisions are not known about until they come into force. Planning is a prime example of that, with secret, unminuted meetings between council officers and developers despite that being against the rules.If you are naive enough to think that council’s operate in an ‘open, honest and transparent’ manner then perhaps you should be renting out the vast space in your head to some of the 12,000 people on the council housing list in Ealing.
Simon Hayes ● 1417d