Community on Southall Stories

Lift-Off! Ealing Elections Special

Sat, 09 May 2026 18:20:45 +0100

🐸 Going Green 🐸

Peter Mason celebrated another election victory yesterday morning by going green.

Solomon Cuthbertson, a Labour activist, posted a photograph at 6:08 a.m. captioned:

“Good morning from Ealing where @EalingLabour has just won an historic fifth term.”

The photograph shows Mason at a podium against the Ealing Council branded green backdrop, in an olive-green suit.

Mason had spent much of the final week of the campaign amplifying national Labour’s attack line that the Greens risked repeating Labour’s antisemitism crisis — despite the party being led by Zack Polanski, the only Jewish leader of a national political party in the United Kingdom. Mason had previously dismissed the Greens’ hopes of winning even a single seat in Ealing, saying:

“the Greens have never won a single councillor in Ealing and I doubt that they’re going to win a single councillor in the future.”

The Greens won five seats with 20.6% of the popular vote.

Mason’s and Labour’s victory in Ealing is real. Labour retained control of the council with 46 of 70 seats. He has now overseen a fifth consecutive Ealing Labour victory — 2010, 2014, 2018, 2022, 2026 — which is, by any reasonable measure, a historic record.

It is also a record secured on 27.7% of the popular vote — Labour’s lowest borough-wide vote share in living memory, down 18.4 percentage points on 2022.

The party that won the council with a huge 22 seat majority won barely more than one in four votes cast.

The Greens, on 20.6%, were the second-largest force in the borough by popular vote, but gained just five councillors.

The Conservatives took 16.7% and also have five.

The Liberal Democrats 15.6% share gained 13 councillors (who needs proportional representation?).

Reform, contesting Ealing for the first time with a slate made up entirely of no-hoper paper candidates, took 11.3%.

In a borough where 57% of residents are from Black, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds, more than one in ten voters backed a party whose political project centres on mass deportations and anti-immigration politics. I’m pleased to say Reform won zero councillors.

Other independent candidates and parties, including Ealing Community Independents, took 8.1% of the total votes despite fielding far fewer candidates.

The cost of Labour’s victory is significant.

Last night Ealing Labour lost ten seats. The Greens and the Liberal Democrats gained five each. The Conservatives gained one. Former Labour councillor John Martin retained his seat as an Independent in Norwood Green. Swaran Padda, another former Labour councillor, stood against Mason in Southall Green and was not elected. Neither was Kate Crawford in East Acton.

Mason’s own personal vote fell 44%. In 2018, he parachuted into Southall Green, Labour’s safest ward in the borough. Eight years later, he achieved the lowest individual Labour vote ever recorded in this ward.

🗄️ Cabinet Cut 🗃️

❌ Shital Manro — Cabinet Member for Good Growth and New Homes. GONE. Lost in North Greenford, where the Conservatives swept all three seats.

❌ Polly Knewstub — Cabinet Member for Healthy Equal Lives. GONE. Lost in Hanwell Broadway, where the Greens swept all three seats.

❌ Josh Blacker — Cabinet Member for Closing Children’s Centres. QUIT. Didn’t stand for re-election in South Acton.

❌ Gareth Shaw — the Labour Group’s Chief Whip. GONE.

Shaw had abandoned his Walpole base in the face of an obvious Liberal Democrat surge — they took all three Walpole seats — and switched to Blacker’s seemingly safe South Acton ward, where he was beaten by Husam Alharahsheh of the Green Party.

Shaw was reportedly inconsolable when the result came through at the count.

There is a detail worth pausing on. Alharahsheh, the Greens’ winning candidate, was a paper candidate — the only Green on the South Acton ballot. Alphabetically, he appeared at the very top of the ballot paper. Shaw, by virtue of his given surname, sat near the bottom. Primacy effects (a psychological bias towards the first option in a list) are real and well-documented in multi-member ballots.

The Green paper candidate at the top of the ballot beat the Labour chief whip at the bottom of it. Shaw is no longer a councillor. South Acton has a Green councillor for the first time.

🎶 It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To 🎶

Channel 4 News political editor Gary Gibbon, on the eve of polling day, reported that Labour had briefed its activists not to cry on camera if the results were bad. The party’s central operation knew, in other words, that the results were going to produce activists who wanted to cry. They tried to manage the optics in advance.

PJ Lynch, the Local Democracy Reporting Service journalist present at Ealing’s count, posted at 5:23 a.m.:

“Labour members in tears here at the moment. Some looking totally shocked.”

That was after the South Acton result. Mason was photographed in his green jacket consoling Shaw at the exit.

❌ Gordon Gone, Tighe Turfed ❌

In Hanwell Broadway, Yoel Gordon — one of three Labour councillors swept aside by a Green wave.

✅ Clare Welsby, who led the Save Ealing Children’s Centres campaign that this council fought in the High Court in order to carry out its plan to close ten children’s centres in order to improve them, was duly elected along with two other Green Party candidates.

Welsby is now, as of yesterday morning, a councillor in the same chamber as the people who closed the children’s centres she fought to save.

✅ John Martin’s re-election, now as an independent in Norwood Green relegated Labour candidate Claire Tighe into fourth place.

Tighe worked as part of Keir Starmer’s ’Green Army’ alongside Morgan McSweeney until he (Starmer) became Prime Minister. After failing to win a seat in the House of Commons, she went to Northern Ireland to work as Hilary Benn’s SpAd.

Norwood Green has returned a full Labour slate at every election since 2002 — the year Local Elections Archive Project (LEAP) begin. Last night it elected an independent at the top of the poll and pushed the Prime Minister’s former staff member off the council entirely.

In the Walpole Wipeout, the Liberal Democrats took all three seats. Shaw leapt from the LibDem frying pan into the Green fire.

💊 The Drugs Don’t Work 💊

When The Drugs Don’t Work was published two days before polling day, the argument was simple: Ealing’s drug and alcohol service had been relocated from West Ealing to Southall, where Labour was electorally safer. West Ealing residents being the ones who had asked for the change and Southall residents being the ones who had not. The story drew on three years of police.uk crime data showing that crime around the West Ealing site had fallen, and crime around the Southall site had risen exponentially, since the move.

The 2026 results have made the political calculus underlying that decision unmistakable.

The two wards where residents complained loudest about the West Ealing service — Walpole and Hanwell Broadway — were both wiped out for Labour last night. Walpole went to the Lib Dems. Hanwell Broadway went to the Greens. Labour lost six seats across two wards that the council had effectively listened to when it came to relocating the service away from them.

The two wards where the service was moved to — Southall Broadway and Southall Green — Labour retained, but with massive vote losses to Ealing Community Independents.

Angela Fonso received 804 votes in Southall Broadway and Joe Bhangu got 1,129 in Southall Green.

Labour’s lowest winners returned with 1,043 and 1,596 respectively.

The “safe” wards delivered the seats.

They did so on the smallest margins in a generation, with the largest insurgent challenge in two decades.

The decision that helped residents in Walpole and Hanwell Broadway did not, in the end, save those seats. The decision that hurt residents in Southall Broadway and Southall Green produced the closest results either ward has seen in a generation. Both halves of the calculation have come back to the people who made it.

🚀 Independents Lift-Off 🚀

ECI’s overall vote share across the wards it contested was just under 19%. For a local party registered with the Electoral Commission less than seven months ago — running its first borough-wide campaign, in many wards without a full slate, against well-resourced incumbents — that is a remarkable opening showing.

Ward by ward, the picture looks like this:

Ward	ECI %
Southall Green	24.6%
Southall West	19.4%
Dormers Wells	19.0%
Southall Broadway	18.4%
Norwood Green	17.5%
South Acton	11.4%
Northfield	10.3%
Greenford Broadway	6.7%
Perivale	5.8%
Walpole	3.9%
Pitshanger	1.6%

[Stats courtesy of ECI candidate Florence Pinaud for the breakdown stats]

Five wards above 17%. Three above 19%. The strongest performance by a new local party in Ealing by some distance — Respect peaked at 21.5% in Southall Green in 2006, but never sustained a five-ward bloc above 17%.

The Southall corridor is now ECI’s. The wider borough is a longer project. The numbers in Northfield (10.3%) and South Acton (11.4%) suggest solid foundations to build on. In every ward, there must be a fully co-ordinated and mutually co-operative strategy to win the anti-Labour vote.

🥬 The Greens 🥬

Mason had told anyone who would listen, in the final stretch of the campaign, that the Greens would not win a single seat in Ealing. He also spent most of the last week accusing Zack Polanski — the only Jewish leader of a national political party in the United Kingdom — of leading a party with ~~pro-Palestine policies~~ an antisemitism problem. According to Mason’s analysis of national and local politics, the electoral door was firmly closed shut to the Greens, and they were not invited to a seat at his anti-democratic table.

The Greens broke Mason’s half-built door down and took five seats at his wonky table. They swept Hanwell Broadway. They took a seat in South Acton from the chief whip. They took a seat in North Acton. They came within 122 votes of breaking through in North Hanwell. Their borough-wide vote share was 20.6% — second-largest in Ealing — and behind Labour’s by just over seven percentage points.

Polanski, whose Jewish identity Mason (himself a Jewish convert [evidence cited here not for the faint-hearted]) worked to delegitimise during the final week of campaigning, leads a party that has now established itself as a meaningful political force in the borough Mason runs.

And the man who self-identifies as left-wing attacked the only Jewish leader of a national pro-Palestine party wore green all election night.

⚓ Blue Peter ⚓

Mason’s path through Labour politics is worth tracing because it explains the green attire.

He stood as Labour’s candidate for Ealing Common in 2010 and lost. He was selected for Elthorne in 2014 and won. He served Elthorne as a councillor while also working as a researcher for Onkar Sahota AM at the Greater London Authority. In 2018, with Swarn Singh Kang’s retirement creating a vacancy in Southall Green, Mason was selected for what was then Labour’s second-safest ward in Ealing.

Before any of that, he was a student at the University of Birmingham, running for student union office under the slogan “Vote Blue Peter Mason” — painted blue, in a hand-drawn shirt with a Blue Peter ship logo, distributing leaflets on Birmingham’s campus. By his own confirmation, in a Twitter comment eleven years ago:

“I have committed the ability to draw a half decent blue peter badge to muscle memory”.

He posted (and since deleted) on Twitter:

“Most looking forward to ‘The Jewish roots of Blue Labour’ session by Maurice Glasman at S.London #Limmud on Sunday.”

Blue Labour. Maurice Glasman. The conservative edge of the Labour tradition — communitarian, socially traditional, friendly to private capital and the property-development model. Friendly, in particular, to Berkeley Group, whose Southall Waterside development poisoned the air over a primary school (Toxic Town) on Mason’s watch as Cabinet Member for Housing, Planning and Transformation.

The man who painted himself blue at Birmingham went on to become the architect of Ealing’s developer-led housing strategy. The man who held the planning brief while the Section 106 money raised in Southall was spent elsewhere is the same man whose national Labour positions have, more recently, taken him into territory where attacking the only Jewish leader of a national political party in the country has become an acceptable thing to do.

Yesterday morning at the count, Mason was wearing green.

🧻 Walpole Wipeout 🧻

PJ Lynch posted a photograph of Mason posing with his Southall Green running mates Anand and Dhindsa, captioned:

“EALING COUNCIL RESULT — Southall Green — Labour HOLD all 3 seats including Council Leader Peter Mason, who saw a 44% drop in his personal vote compared to 2022.”

What Lynch’s photograph shows, intentionally or otherwise, is Mason near a green sign reading FIRE EXIT, with an arrow pointing right.

Asked by the Local Democracy Reporting Service what went wrong for Labour, Mason told LDRS:

“Well, I think you have to look at the national picture. You have to look at the situation that we find ourselves in. We’re absolutely committed to making sure that we represent the incredible people of Southall and we deliver for them on all the promises that we’ve made and all the promises that we’ve demonstrated that we’ve delivered over the last four years. Elections come every four years and I’m totally hopeful that in four years time that we’ll be able to secure that important historic sixth consecutive election and perhaps even get more councillors.”

The national picture.

Not the Section 106 money. Not the children’s centres. Not the toxic gasworks. Not the drug service relocation. Not the divestment campaign. Not the planning record. Not the four-times-the-national-average fly-tipping rate. Not the 44% personal vote collapse in his own ward.

The national picture.

The national picture came to Walpole this morning.

Sir Keir Starmer, addressing the results from the national perspective Mason invoked, posted to X with the caption:

“These are tough results for Labour. There’s no sugarcoating it. We’ve lost brilliant Labour representatives who’ve stood up for their communities.”

The accompanying video showed the Prime Minister at a community hall in Walpole ward — the same ward whose voters, less than 4 hours earlier, had replaced their Labour councillors with three Liberal Democrats.

The councillor visible behind Starmer’s right shoulder, watching adoringly as the Prime Minister spoke, was Peter Mason.

Whether anyone advising the visit had thought through the optics of staging “tough results, no sugarcoating” in the ward whose voters had just sugarcoated nothing in delivering a three-seat Lib Dem sweep is unclear.

Another success story for the councillor of the year semi-finalist?

🎯 Broken Records 🎯

Two records were set in Southall Green on 7 May.

Mason’s record.

His 1,596 votes is the lowest individual Labour vote in Southall Green ever.

Lower than the worst year of New Labour following Iraq in 2006, when George Galloway’s Respect Party threw everything it had at Southall and pulled in 21.5% of the vote.

At Respect’s high water mark, the lowest Labour winner — Swarn Singh Kang — polled 1,794.

Mason has now achieved, in 2026, what George Galloway could not in 2006.

Joe Bhangu’s record.

The Ealing Community Independents’ lead candidate took 1,129 votes. All three ECI candidates polled over 1,000 votes each.

Salvinder Dhillon, Respect’s lead in 2006, took 763.

ECI did not exist in 2022. The party was registered with the Electoral Commission seven months before this election.

At its first serious attempt, in a ward where Labour has held all three seats for as long as anyone can remember, ECI broke a 20-year insurgent record by 366 votes.

The combined ECI vote — Bhangu, Dogra, Rajput — was 3,272.

Four years ago the equivalent independent slate (the Ealing Independent Network) polled 712 votes between three candidates.

ECI has multiplied the local independent vote by a factor of 4.6 in a single cycle, with no incumbent benefit, no national party machine, and a slate of three first-time (in Southall Green) candidates running against three sitting councillors with sixty-four years of office and £1.5 million in allowances between them.

The gap between Labour’s lowest winner (Mason, 1,596) and the highest unelected challenger (Bhangu, 1,129) is 467 votes.

In 2018 the equivalent gap was 3,024. In 2022, 2,053.

The trend line points one way.

😢 Counting Tears 😢

The picture from inside the count tent in the early hours of yesterday morning, as relayed by ECI campaigners and supporters present, is one Labour will not enjoy reading.

The most senior councillor reportedly visibly distressed was Cllr Steve Donnelly, returned for East Acton, Cabinet Member for Inclusive Economy — and, according to long-running observation by local residents and campaigners, one of the three councillors who effectively run the borough alongside Peter Mason and Shital Manro. Of those three, one is now out (Manro), one has lost 44% of his personal vote (Mason), and the third was in tears.

Campaigners who have spent two years pursuing the council on its pension fund investments in defence contractors connected to Israel — investments that have been the subject of repeated petitions, council questions, and demonstrations — observed the symbolism without comment. The former chair of the pensions fund panel, who has held the line against thousands of signatures asking for divestment, was the cabinet figure most visibly affected when the results came in.

He had not been briefed by Labour HQ. Or if he had been, he was overwhelmed by his feelings.

🏗️ Wrecking Ball 🏗️

The Israeli divestment campaign is one of several issues on which Ealing Labour has held a line that increasingly few residents support. Over the past two years, petitions on pension fund investments in companies supplying weapons to a state currently subject to International Court of Justice proceedings have been ignored. Council meetings have been managed past the question. The chair of the relevant committee has not moved.

The same pattern recurs elsewhere. The Southall Gasworks air quality data was never independently analysed and residents reports of odour, air pollution and ill-health were ignored or downplayed.

The fly-tipping numbers have been managed past every cabinet meeting. The £13m of Section 106 money raised in Southall and spent elsewhere has been managed past every scrutiny opportunity. The relocation of the borough’s drug and alcohol service from Walpole — where Labour was at risk — to Southall, where it wasn’t, has been signed off and managed past anyone who might have asked questions about why crime then fell where Labour was vulnerable and rose where it was safe.

A council that responds to its own residents’ emails with silence eventually finds that residents stop sending the emails and start sending other signals.

The signal from Hanwell Broadway sent Polly Knewstub home and Clare Welsby — who fought the children’s centre closures — to the council chamber.

The signal from North Greenford sent Shital Manro home and three Conservatives in his place.

The signal from Walpole replaced the Labour slate with a Lib Dem one, in the same ward the Prime Minister visited yesterday morning to record his commiserations.

The signal from South Acton ended the chief whip’s career.

The signal from Norwood Green sent a deselected Labour councillor back to the chamber and the Prime Minister’s former staffer to fourth place.

The signal from Southall Green left Mason 467 votes ahead of the local party which didn’t exist seven months ago.

The wrecking ball metaphor is not a flourish.

At the Southall Gasworks site, Berkeley Group’s contractors dug up a hundred years’ of contaminated petrochemical sludge that left a toxic chemical cocktail in the air over local schools and homes. The impact on people’s health is, perhaps, yet to be fully realised.

Mason was Cabinet Member for Housing, Planning and Transformation.

While Southall residents coughed and choked on the poison air, Mason was wining and dining with Berkeley Group in the south of France, all expenses paid.

The wrecking ball that swung over Southall in the late 2010s has been swinging over the local political settlement ever since.

It has now reached the man who signed it off.

🔍 Looking Forward ➡️

Mason will form an administration that has lost ten seats and two cabinet members. He will run it from a position of visible personal weakness in his own ward, on the lowest borough-wide Labour vote share in living memory.

The Forvis Mazars audit, the Local Government Association Peer Challenge, the Housing Ombudsman determinations — these documents already exist. They will continue to exist.

The Section 106 money will continue not to be spent in Southall.

The fly-tipping will continue to be twice the London average.

The legacy of the toxic air from the Southall Gasworks site and other local pollutants will continue to need monitoring that the council has chosen not to do.

Cabinet member Jasbir Anand — Mason’s running mate, returned with the highest Labour vote at 1,789 — will continue to be the councillor who signed off the relocation of the drug and alcohol service to Southall that brought with it a massive increase in crime.

Labour councillors waking up in Ealing this morning will be asking themselves the same question every other observer is asking:

will they still be councillors in four years’ time?

It is, of course, a long way away. A week is a long time in politics, let alone a four-year cycle.

But it is hard to come back from a record of supporting investments in a state most of the world now considers to be conducting genocide.

It is hard to come back from a fly-tipping rate four times the national average.

It is hard to come back from a toxic town.

It is hard to come back from emails the council does not answer and ward forums the council has cancelled and Section 106 money the council has spent somewhere else.

It is hard to come back from accusing the only Jewish leader of a national party of having an antisemitism problem in the same week that party broke through in your council for the first time.

It is hard to come back from winning the council on 27.7% of the vote and then blaming the national picture.

For ECI, the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats, the 2026 result is strong encouragement. ECI ran a brilliantly organised and unifying campaign, and multiplied the independent vote by 4.6 in a single cycle, polling just under 19% across the wards it contested and above 17% in five of them. That’s some achievement.

I know from my own efforts in 2022 how exhausting it is and how devastating it is to lose despite all the hard work. I just hope they all take heart from such an incredible result and start planning and campaigning now (or don’t leave it too long after recovering) for 2030. It’s a huge ask.

The Greens went from zero seats to five — the door to the council chamber broken open for the first time, with a borough-wide vote share of 20.6% just behind Labour’s 27.7%. The Liberal Democrats added five and could, on this trajectory, challenge for control of Ealing in 2030 if Labour continues at its current rate of decline.

The arithmetic of opposition consolidation — Northfield (Green + ECI = 5,564 vs Labour 5,287), Norwood Green, possibly North Hanwell — is no longer a thought experiment.

It is a strategy waiting to be executed.

For ECI specifically, the path forward in Southall Green is similar.

Mason’s lowest Labour vote was 1,596. ECI’s highest was 1,129. The gap is 467 votes.

To close it, ECI needs to do three things: convert the protest vote currently going to Reform (960), the Conservatives (1,780) and the Greens (554); recover the Padda vote (240) which, given Padda’s history as a deselected Labour councillor with his own grievances against the party, plausibly drew from the same pool of disaffected Labour voters that ECI was reaching; and mobilise some of the 7,000 registered electors who did not vote at all. In a ward of 11,000 voters, that is a tractable problem.

The conservative projection — assuming Labour partially recovers, ECI grows only modestly — has Mason on roughly 1,200 in 2030 and Bhangu on roughly 1,355. That is a 155-vote ECI lead. It is the conservative projection. The optimistic one has him losing by considerably more.

The man who arrived in Southall Green in 2018 with 3,602 votes left the count yesterday morning with 1,596.

He left it in a green jacket, by a fire exit, comforting his tearful ex-chief whip who had just lost his seat to a Green paper candidate, while other colleagues wept over a result for a residents-led campaign Labour had treated as unwanted background noise for years.

He stood beside the Prime Minister hours later in Walpole, of all places. He had spent the last week of the campaign attacking the only Jewish leader of a national party. He had dismissed the Greens’ chances. He had been wrong about both.

There is a story in there about what governing without listening looks like, and about what eventually happens to people who do it.

The Meeting that Ended Local Democracy in Southall

Wed, 06 May 2026 17:44:53 +0100

On 10 July 2019, around 200 residents packed the Dominion Centre in Southall to confront their councillors, their MP, Public Health England, the Environment Agency, and the developer of the former Gasworks site about the toxic fumes — benzene and naphthalene — that had been making their families ill for years.

The meeting was filmed. It runs to ninety minutes.

It is, in retrospect, the most important hour and a half in recent Southall political history.

Cllr Peter Mason, then Cabinet Member for Housing, Planning and Transformation, chaired the meeting. He lost control of the proceedings within thirty seconds and never recovered it.

The panel — councillors, the Environment Agency, Public Health England, Berkeley Group — was asked, repeatedly, by parents, by a doctor in the audience, by a local lawyer, the question that mattered:

Whose side are you on, the community? Or Berkeley Homes?

The panel stayed silent.

The MP, Virendra Sharma, slipped in late, said nothing, and left before the end.

Sharma had survived a Constituency Labour Party trigger ballot challenge only months earlier, in part by promising members closer engagement with the constituency he was failing.

Ealing’s Director of Safer Communities and Housing was asked what he would do if he were in residents’ shoes. His response was instant and emphatic:

“MOVE!.”

Another resident in the room described what she saw that night with brutal clarity:

a meeting that “laid bare” a class divide, “the avarice of big businesses rampant and unashamed,” and “an all round disgrace from our elected representatives who are supposed to be Labour.”

The meeting ended in uproar at 9pm when the chair tried to close it. Many residents wanted to continue, even without the panel. They were told they could not.

This was the meeting that scared the living daylights out of the Labour council.

The response

It was not silence. It was systematic.

Within months, the ward forum system across Ealing was wound down. The last meeting of the Southall Broadway ward forum on the council’s own record took place on 12 February 2020. Then nothing.

When the council was eventually pressed on why, its stated justification was that ward forums had become spaces where:

“the same voices were heard over and over again” and were “unrepresentative of the communities they were supposed to serve.”

That phrase — “the same voices” — has done a great deal of work since.

The voices Mason wanted gone were not unrepresentative. They were the voices of the parents, the doctor, the lawyer, the residents whose children were having nosebleeds, the voices that had stood up at the Dominion Centre and demanded answers his administration could not give.

In place of ward forums came a promise: town forums.

By April 2024, more than £70,000 had been spent on consultant fees with no functioning replacement delivered.

Ealing’s Liberal Democrat group leader put it plainly at the time:

Labour councillors seemed “totally afraid of being in front of the public to face criticism.”

The eventual product, Your Voice, Your Town, arrived in Southall in 2025.

It has a 25-member Town Team, a £120,000 community fund, and an officially determined headline priority: making Southall “a clean and pleasant area.” Its meetings, the council’s own page notes, are “invite only.”

Look at the Town Team membership and the council’s justification for scrapping ward forums collapses entirely. Southall Community Alliance. Let’s Go Southall. APNA Youth. Southall Residents’ Alliance. Hope for Southall Street Homeless. Asian Community Concern.

The same organisations, many of the same people who attended ward forums for years. Three elected Labour councillors sit alongside them. Mason himself confirmed, at the launch event in May 2024, that this was the replacement for the old ward forums.

The same voices, in other words. Just curated. Channelled. Sat next to the very councillors they once questioned.

What’s been removed is not the voices. It’s the room. It’s the ability to walk in unannounced, with your neighbours, and ask your councillor whose side they are on.

The hustings tradition that died

Until 2019, Southall had a functioning hustings culture. The record is on the public web.

In June 2017, the Southall Faiths Forum and Featherstone High School hosted a parliamentary hustings. All six candidates attended. The Revd Mark Poulson chaired. Questions came from the floor on litter, public toilets, Ealing Hospital, the proposed disposal of Southall Town Hall, anti-social behaviour, affordable housing.

The same voices. The same concerns. Speaking to power.

In April 2018, Southall Community Alliance and Ealing Community Network organised a full council election hustings at the Dominion Centre. Conservative, Green, Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates all attended. A 10-point Voluntary Sector Manifesto was put to all parties.

In December 2019, six months after the Gasworks meeting, the Southall Faiths Forum hosted another General Election hustings. Five of seven parliamentary candidates attended.

In March 2022, SCA hosted a Zoom hustings for the council elections. Cllr Peter Mason attended for Labour. I attended for the independents. There were three pre-set questions. Everyone got six minutes. It was, by 2026 standards, an act of accountability bordering on the radical.

In June 2024, Sri Guru Singh Sabha hosted a parliamentary hustings at Norwood Hall. Over 100 electors attended. Six of twelve candidates appeared. Labour’s Deirdre Costigan — parachuted into the constituency to replace Sharma — did not attend. Neither did the Conservative. It was, by some margin, the largest local political event in Southall in years — held without the candidate of the party that has held the seat continuously since 1983.

This is the trajectory:

2017–2019: All major parties attend Southall hustings. Rooms are full. Faith leaders chair.
2022: Mason attends, because the elections are imminent and the format is controlled.
2024: Labour’s parliamentary candidate declines to attend.
2026: Labour does not attend the council elections debate. Ten people are in the room.
2026: “Ealing Citizens” host an “accountability forum” where local and poll leading parties were actively excluded from the panel, and no questions at all were allowed from the audience.

I have written separately about whether this latter meeting was a hustings at all — and what actual accountability might have looked like had local people been invited to speak and “allowed” to ask questions.

The meeting last Sunday

On 26 April 2026, eleven days before polling, the Peoples Empowerment Alliance organised a council election debate at Gurdwara Ramgharia Sabha. Five pre-set questions. Two hours. An invitation to all candidates standing in the Southall wards.

Five independent candidates attended: Minni Dogra, Angela Fonso, Sukhi Floria, Swaran Padda, and Dan Cortese. Around ten members of the public were present.

I chaired the meeting at short notice after the planned chair, Salvinder Dhillon — a long-standing community organiser who stood as Respect’s parliamentary candidate in the 2007 Ealing Southall by-election, and previously as an independent — was taken ill.

The candidates answered seriously.

Minni Dogra was forensic on grant spending and S106 funds that should have been spent in Southall and were not.

Dan Cortese was direct on housing pressure — 800 HMO licences approved each month, family homes converted to dormitory flats.

Angela Fonso spoke to the visible deterioration of the Broadway.

Sukhi Floria covered tower blocks, congestion, and unanswered complaints.

Swaran Padda — the only person on the platform who has actually sat in the room where Southall’s decisions are made, who lost the Labour whip for challenging the leadership, and who is now standing against Mason in Southall Green — spoke about how Southall systematically loses out to other towns in the borough because residents elsewhere are more organised and aware. Padda is part of a longer pattern of Labour dissenters being silenced or pushed out under Mason’s leadership.

The most pointed contribution from the floor came from Jaginder Singh, founder of One Nation and a candidate at the 2024 Ealing Southall parliamentary hustings. His call was for mass political education: residents cannot hold councillors accountable if they do not understand how the council works, what decisions it takes, or what their own rights are. I only recognised him afterwards when he gave me his card.

He is right. And he is describing the long-term consequence of the process this article is about. When the institutions of resident scrutiny are dismantled, the population that grew up using them disperses. The next generation does not learn how to do it. Political knowledge is not innate. It is transmitted, in part, through participation in working democratic structures. Take the structures away, and you do not just lose the meetings. You lose the muscle.

That is what has happened in Southall, deliberately, over the seven years since the Dominion Centre.

What community politics looks like when it still works

The night before the PEA debate, the Ealing Community Independents held their own engagement evening at Parkside Yards. Around ten residents — comparable in number to the PEA meeting — but the difference was instructive.

Residents at Parkside Yards described, in granular detail, what living in Southall in 2026 actually feels like: rats under the floorboards, fly-tipping that doubled after waste collection was halved in 2016, footpaths so damaged that disabled residents walk in the road, asking the council for a CCTV camera to deal with fly-tipping and being offered a sign instead, forty years of complaints to get a road resurfaced.

One resident put it more bluntly:

“This place has turned into a bloody slum.”

Another:

“There’s no unity left in Southall. We beat the National Front, but it’s all gone. Where is everyone?”

That is the question this article has been trying to answer. The unity is not gone because Southall has changed. It is gone because the institutions that produced and sustained it have been dismantled.

Where is everyone?

They are still here. They still have things to say.

They are simply no longer permitted to say them in rooms where their councillors are obliged to listen.

Why this matters on 7 May

There is a respectable line of argument that says local democracy was always thinly attended; that ward forums attracted activists, not “ordinary residents”; that Your Voice Your Town is genuinely more representative; that Labour’s non-attendance at hustings is a national phenomenon, not a Southall one; that ten people on a Sunday afternoon in April is a verdict on the independent campaign, not on the governing party.

Watch the Gasworks video. The room is not full of activists. It is full of parents, of grandparents, of people in headscarves and turbans who have come because their children cannot breathe.

They are not “the same voices.”

They are the voices of a community that was, for ninety minutes, ungovernable — and that the ruling group of Ealing Council has spent the seven years since making sure cannot reassemble.

On 7 May, voters in Southall Green will decide whether Peter Mason returns to the council.

He chaired the meeting that produced this trajectory. He has presided over the abolition of the forums, the £70,000 of consultant fees, the invite-only Town Team, and a Labour council that no longer feels obliged to attend community-led election hustings.

His personal vote in Southall Green declined by 20.7% between 2018 and 2022 — and he finished last of the three Labour candidates in his ward at both elections."

Campaigners, activists and Ealing Community Independents candidates gathered on Bank Holiday Monday to protest the failings of Ealing Labour in Southall and across the borough. The mood is positive and determined to bring about real change.

The vote on 7 May will be one of the few remaining mechanisms through which the residents of Southall Green can ask, directly and on the record, the question the panel never answered in July 2019.

Whose side are you on?

The Drugs Don't Work

Wed, 06 May 2026 11:55:52 +0100

This is the story about how Ealing’s incredibly valuable and (very likely) hugely under-resourced drug and alcohol treatment service has been moved about, along with its vulnerable service users, for what appears to be — at least partly — political gain by Ealing Labour.

The scale of the borough’s substance misuse crisis is real.

According to the council’s own 2025 Substance Misuse Service report, Ealing has an estimated 2,103 opiate and crack users and 3,658 alcohol dependent drinkers.

The borough now has the highest rate of alcohol-related hospital admissions in London. (Substance Misuse Service report; Ealing JSNA 2023)

We see people struggling with addiction every day — thin, exhausted, unwell, surviving from one fix to the next — across our high streets, side streets and public spaces. Their lives can appear to have narrowed to survival, money and the next fix. They need help and support to recover and live normal lives.

And we — the ordinary residents who live here — need help to feel safe and welcome in our own towns.This is how we got here.

In Walpole ward — the West Ealing ward where residents have spent two years complaining about open drug use, shoplifting and feeling unsafe — Labour’s third-placed winning candidate took the seat by a margin of 609 votes in 2022. In neighbouring Hanwell Broadway, the equivalent margin was just 389 votes — with the Greens in second place, less than 400 votes off taking a seat.

These are the wards covering the streets where the Liberal Democrats have built their entire campaign around resident anger at visible disorder.

In Southall Broadway, Labour’s majority was 1,126 — nearly three times the Hanwell Broadway gap. In Southall Green, Labour’s lead over the nearest opponent was 2,053. Cllr Jasbir Anand topped the poll there with 3,105 votes — a margin of 2,302 over the highest non-Labour candidate.

Now look at where the borough’s main drug and alcohol treatment service has gone.

Out of West Ealing. Into Southall. Specifically: into Southall Town Hall — the same building Southall residents went to court to save when the council tried to dispose of it.

The cabinet member who signed off the decision is Cllr Jasbir Anand. Then Cabinet Member for Tackling Inequality. Now cabinet lead for crime and anti-social behaviour. Councillor for Southall Green since 1998.

The decision

In January 2024, Cllr Anand approved an Individual Cabinet Member Decision authorising a 10-year lease on premises at 68 The Broadway, Southall, public money to refurbish it to clinical standards, and a sub-lease to Change Grow Live (CGL), the borough’s RISE provider.

(For wider context on Anand’s 28-year record in office, see Canvassing with Minni Dogra: A Councillor in All But Name.)

The report is explicit:

“This will be a new main treatment hub situated in Southall.”

The 10-year lease, it argues, means:

“Public Health will not be faced with trying to source suitable premises… for at least 10 years.”

The justification rests on the 2019 Drugs and Alcohol JSNA, which records higher dependency in deprived neighbourhoods, naming Southall, Greenford and Northolt.

That is true. Southall does have higher need. None of what follows disputes that.

The question is not whether Southall needs services. The question is how and where the borough sites them, and who decides — and whether that decision-making is shaped by need, by political convenience, or by both.

A decision that drifted — and ended up at the Town Hall

The 2024 decision named 68 The Broadway as the site. Eighteen months on, the picture had changed.

A later Substance Misuse Service report describes the position in present tense:

“RISE’s main service site is currently in West Ealing… RISE will need to vacate the West Ealing site by summer, as the building site is being re-developed. CGL and the Council have been exploring various opportunities over the last couple of years, and is currently in the process of securing Southall Town Hall as one of the bases in Ealing at the time of writing this report. CGL and the Council continue to explore opportunities for an additional site…”

The Town Hall is described as “one of the bases” — not the main hub — with an unspecified “additional site” still being sought.

CGL’s own announcement confirms what’s actually happened on the ground:

“RISE has now relocated from 99–103 The Broadway, West Ealing. All services are now operating as usual from our new location at Southall Town Hall, 1 High Street, Southall UB1 3HA.”

As far as I know, the public has not been told whether this is a stop-gap while 68 The Broadway is refurbished, or whether the Town Hall has quietly become the permanent home. What they can see is the outcome: West Ealing’s residents got the relocation they asked for. Southall got the building it fought to save partly repurposed as the borough’s main drug treatment hub.

The electoral map

Set the timeline against the political map.

The push from West Ealing. Lease at 99–103 The Broadway expiring. Site being redeveloped. Two years of organised, vocal resident pressure on visible drug use and anti-social behaviour. Two ward majorities — Walpole and Hanwell Broadway — small enough that a determined opposition campaign on local issues could flip them.

The pull to Southall. A council-controlled civic building sitting available. Cheaper space, longer lease. Higher measured deprivation, providing a clean policy justification rooted in the JSNA. Two of the safest Labour wards in the borough, including Anand’s own.

That is not a description of how a service should be sited. It is a description of how a political problem is solved.

The decision is individually defensible. Southall does have higher need. The JSNA does support the case. The West Ealing site did have to close. Each link in the chain has its own logic.

But step back, and the chain runs in only one direction. Out of marginal Labour wards. Into safe Labour wards. Out of streets where resident complaints are political costs. Into the poorest, most deprived town in the borough, least able to cope with the transfer of this service and its associated pressures on the local community and already stretched services.

A Southall Green councillor signing off the relocation of the borough’s main drug and alcohol hub — out of the wards Labour might lose, into the wards Labour cannot — is not a decision without political consequences.

The service follows the users

There is a further point that the JSNA argument quietly skips over.

The borough’s main drug and alcohol hub does not only treat residents who already live near it. It draws users to it. The West Ealing site served users from across the borough, including from Walpole and Hanwell Broadway, where residents’ complaints about visible drug use and anti-social behaviour were about people attending the service, wherever they were from, in their high street.

Move the service to Southall, and you move the visible behaviour with it. The users who were causing concern outside 99–103 The Broadway, West Ealing, are now attending appointments at Southall Town Hall. The same waiting outside, the same coming and going, the same intermittent disorder that two years of West Ealing campaigning was about — relocated, with the building, into the centre of Southall’s high street.

The data is already moving.

Across the wider Southall postcode area (UB1, UB2 and surrounds), drug crime rose 63.6% in the year to April 2026 — against a national rise of 13.3% — making Southall the 10th highest postcode area in England and Wales for drug crime rate.

The two postcode sectors closest to the Town Hall, UB1 1 and UB1 2, are running at 299% and 314% of the national crime rate respectively.

At ward level, the picture is just as telling.

According to Metropolitan Police data for Southall Broadway, anti-social behaviour alone accounts for 37.8% of all reported crime over the last three years — 2,775 reports — with violence and sexual offences a further 21.8% (1,598 reports). Together those two categories make up almost 60% of crime in the ward. Drugs offences themselves are only 3.4%.

The dominant story, in other words, is exactly what surrounds a busy treatment service: not drug-dealing in isolation, but the street-level disorder, public order incidents, and visible distress that follow concentrated dependency.

The trend is rising. Quarterly crime in Southall Broadway has moved from 511 in Q1 2024 to 658 in Q1 2026 — up roughly 29% over two years. The most recent quarter is the second-highest in the three-year series, beaten only by Q2 2025 at 698.

Look at Southall Green — Cllr Anand’s own ward — and the picture is sharper still.

For the first six quarters in the three-year series, Southall Green ran at between roughly 550 and 700 reports per quarter. From Q1 2025, the line breaks: 797 in Q1 2025, 768 in Q2, 884 in Q3 (the highest single quarter on record), 782 in Q4, and 706 in Q1 2026.

The ward has averaged 787 reports per quarter for the last five quarters, against 604 for the eight quarters before. A step-change of roughly 30%. It coincides with the period in which, per the council’s own Substance Misuse Service report, CGL and the council were “in the process of securing Southall Town Hall.”

In the West Ealing wards where residents have spent two years organising against visible disorder, the trend has gone hard the other way.

In Hanwell Broadway, quarterly crime peaked at 749 in Q3 2024, fell to 688 by Q3 2025, and dropped to 531 in Q1 2026 — down 29% from the peak in 18 months.

In Walpole, the fall is sharper still: from a peak of 651 in Q3 2025 to 443 in Q4 2025 and 392 in Q1 2026 — a 40% collapse in two quarters, and the lowest quarter the ward has recorded since late 2023.

The composition is also distinctive.

Walpole’s three-year profile is dominated by theft offences typical of busy retail high streets: 13.1% vehicle crime, 8.4% shoplifting, 6.4% other theft.

That mix is much less prominent in Southall Broadway, where shoplifting is 4.6%. But in Southall Green, shoplifting runs at 8.7% of all crime — higher even than Walpole — alongside the borough-wide-leading ASB and violence figures.

The crime profile that drove West Ealing’s complaints — and the headlines about London’s “wild west” — is increasingly the crime profile of Anand’s own ward.

That divergence is correlation, not proof of causation, and the timing does not map cleanly onto a single moving date. But the direction is unmistakable.

The most recent Met Police quarter shows crime in Walpole at its lowest level in nearly three years; crime in Hanwell Broadway down 29% from peak; crime in Southall Broadway near its three-year high; and crime in Southall Green sustaining a 30% step-change above its pre-2025 baseline.

In the same period the borough’s main drug and alcohol service has confirmed it has moved out of West Ealing and is now operating from Southall Town Hall — sited within the Southall Broadway ward, on the boundary with Southall Green.

The “need” justification cuts both ways. It is exactly because Southall is the most deprived part of the borough — and is now experiencing both a steep rise in postcode-level drug crime and rising ward-level crime trends across both Southall wards — that it is the least equipped to absorb concentrated additional pressure on its high street, its public realm, and its already-stretched local infrastructure.

It is also the least equipped to complain.

There is no Southall equivalent of the Police Oracle feature on West Ealing.

There is no Southall equivalent of the organised Lib Dem campaign that turned residents’ frustration into a political threat to Labour.

The complaints exist. They just don’t carry the same weight, in the same papers, with the same effect on majorities.

That asymmetry — between what is heard in Walpole and what is heard in Southall Green — is precisely what makes Southall the politically convenient place to put the problem. Not despite the deprivation. Because of it.

The pattern

This is one decision among many.

Southall already carries a disproportionate share of the borough’s harder-to-place burdens — industrial activity, air quality exposure, waste, lower-income housing pressure, civic underinvestment.

The fuller account of that pattern — and the council’s record under Peter Mason’s leadership — is set out in Community Powered Reporting’s investigation into Ealing Council. Mason — also a Southall Green councillor — has spoken publicly about Southall’s deep-rooted poverty, low pay and structural racism. The diagnosis is correct.

The question is what follows from that diagnosis. Because the same diagnosis can produce two very different policy responses:

Concentrate resources in Southall to address the inequality directly.
Concentrate the difficult, visible, politically costly functions in Southall because that is where they meet the least resistance.

The borough’s record on Southall increasingly looks like the second wearing the language of the first.

The drug and alcohol hub relocation is the latest in a sequence in which Southall absorbs what other parts of the borough push back against, and the wards that would punish the administration at the ballot box are protected from the consequences.

That isn’t tackling inequality. That’s redistributing visibility.

That isn’t tackling crime or anti-social behaviour. It’s moving it from West Ealing to Southall.

The irony is that the borough’s own 2023 JSNA increasingly points toward earlier intervention and lower-stigma community treatment embedded in primary care settings. The direction of travel nationally and locally is toward dispersed support through GP surgeries, hospitals and neighbourhood services — not the concentration of visible dependency into a single town-centre hub.

Vote tomorrow

Southall needs investment. Southall needs services. Southall needs properly resourced drug and alcohol treatment, accessible to the residents most affected by dependency.

None of that is in question.

What is in question is why the cabinet member who signed off the relocation is the councillor for the town receiving the relocated service, why the original site decision has drifted into a temporary occupation of the very building Southall fought to save, and why the relocation has landed in a way that solves a political problem in West Ealing by transferring it — physically, materially, and in plain sight — to Southall.

That looks less like need-led siting and more like political convenience-led siting that happens to align with need.

The drugs don’t work. Not like this. Not when the answer to inequality is to relocate it.

On the doorstep, voters across these four wards keep saying the same thing: voting Labour is a habit.

Time to kick the habit.

Cactuses Never Die

Sun, 03 May 2026 23:52:46 +0100

Yousef Qandeel was not born in al-Dawayima. He arrived five years too late for that. But he carries the keys.

Three iron keys on a ring, dark with age and heavy in the hand. They open nothing now — the house they belonged to no longer exists. The village it stood in no longer exists. In its place, since 1955, sits an Israeli settlement.

Where Palestinian families once marked the boundaries of their homes by planting prickly pear cactus — sabr in Arabic, the same word as patience — the land has been cleared and flattened.

The cactuses, though, are still there.

As Yousef puts it:

“Cactuses never die.”

They grow back among the ruins of terraced fields. They mark, in living tissue, the outlines of homes that no document records.

Yousef Qandeel, a Palestinian-British civil engineer and environmental scientist, has lived in Ealing for more than 25 years. This week he is standing as an Ealing Community Independents candidate in the Greenford Broadway ward — knocking on doors, talking to residents about cleaner streets and safer neighbourhoods, doing the ordinary work of local democracy. The keys are at home. But they are never far from his mind.

We met over coffee at Chaiiwala on Greenford Broadway, the morning after he’d been canvassing. He brought photographs. The keys laid on a Palestinian flag. Himself holding them, head bowed, in his home in Greenford. Himself standing at the Key of Return sculpture outside St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh — a city that has done more than most to remember what happened to his family’s village.

He also brought the map.

It is a remarkable document. Drawn from memory, testimony and historical survey by Mohamed Rajab Abu Khadra — himself from al-Dawayima, himself in exile — it records every house, every family name, every path and well and olive grove.

The village as it was.

Star-shaped, built of stone and mud, its mosque at the centre, its market busy on Fridays, its land producing wheat and barley, olives and figs, pomegranates and grapes. A population of approximately three to four thousand people, with trade routes to Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa and Haifa. Yousef has shared this map on his Facebook timeline. He circled his family’s home in green.

He has also shared, and translated into Arabic, a letter written in 1948 by an Israeli soldier named Sh. Kaplan to a colleague at the newspaper Al-Hamishmar.

The letter was written ten days after the massacre. It disappeared from the archive for years. It has since been relied upon by Jewish historians including Benny Morris.

Kaplan wrote that there was no battle and no resistance.

The first wave of troops killed between eighty and a hundred Arab women and children.
The children were killed by smashing their skulls with sticks.
There was not a house without dead.

A commander ordered a sapper to place two elderly women inside a house before blowing it up. The sapper refused. The commander ordered his men to do it instead. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.

The principle, Kaplan wrote, was simple:

“The fewer Arabs remain, the better.”

No one in the field command or the high command objected.

By 1948, the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin by Zionist paramilitaries had already become internationally known and widely condemned, including within Israel itself. Kaplan ended his letter with a question that amounted to a reproach directed at his own side:

“Is it right,” he asked, “to shout about Deir Yassin and be silent about something much worse?”

Yousef’s father was not in the village when Battalion 89 of the Israeli 8th Armoured Brigade arrived that Friday morning, approaching along three roads simultaneously. It was October. The olive harvest was under way, and his father was away from the village picking olives. That absence saved his life.

His sister and two of his aunts were murdered.

The village mukhtar, Hassan Mahmoud Ihdeib, gave sworn testimony to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine.

When the armoured vehicles arrived and soldiers disembarked, he recorded, they began shooting indiscriminately at anything that moved.

Worshippers at Friday prayers in the mosque were killed where they knelt.

Thirty-five families who fled to hide in the caves at Tur al-Zagh were tracked down, lined up, and shot.

A Forensic Architecture investigation, produced with Goldsmiths University, has since documented the cave massacre in detail.

There is also a film.

Estimates of the death toll vary. The mukhtar presented a figure of 580 to the Jordanian commander. An Israeli journalist who visited the site in 1984 estimated 332. The American consul in Jerusalem reported at the time that between 500 and 1,000 Arabs had been killed. The Palestine Land Society’s detailed account records 171 confirmed names killed in the mosque and caves alone. On any accounting, al-Dawayima was among the worst single atrocities of the Nakba — and the least remembered.

As Yousef said to me:

“It doesn’t really matter how many.”

The cover-up began immediately. Israeli forces burned the houses and buried bodies before UN observers could reach the site. When investigators tried to visit, they were told the road was mined. When they finally gained access, a week later, they reported a peculiar smell of burning flesh.

They were told the houses had been set alight to clear out vermin.

One UN officer saw a carbonised body. The Israeli officers expressed astonishment.

No one was ever prosecuted despite the IDF’s own intelligence service recommendations that they should be.

Abba Eban, the Israeli representative to the United Nations, wrote to the Security Council denying that a place called al-Dawayima existed at all.

“The Arab account of a massacre,” he wrote, “was lurid and sensational propaganda.”

This letter is in the UN archive. So is the mukhtar’s testimony. So, when it has not been removed, is the soldier’s letter.

In Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield Links, a tree was planted on 29 October 1998 — the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre — by the Rt Hon Eric Milligan, Lord Provost of Edinburgh. A stone marker reads: > Al-Dawayima, Palestine, 29 October 1948.

A carved stone monument nearby carries the same inscription. A bench beside it is fixed with a plaque quoting Nelson Mandela: > We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

Yousef has been photographed at all of these sites, and at the Key of Return sculpture at St Mary’s Cathedral. He goes to Edinburgh, in part, because Edinburgh remembers.

On the land where al-Dawayima once stood, an Israeli nature reserve sign marks the ancient Tomb of Sheikh Ali — a dome of stone that served as a place of pilgrimage for centuries. The sign records two thousand years of history. It does not mention the massacre. It does not mention the bones. Among the ruins of terraced fields and the remains of old houses, the cactuses are still growing.

Under the Israeli Law of Return, Yousef Qandeel has no right to go back home to the land of his father and his ancestors.

Israeli law, however, does grant that right to anyone who is Jewish, or who becomes Jewish — by birth, by descent, or by conversion — regardless of any prior connection to the land.

A family whose roots in a place stretch back generations, who hold the keys, who kept the map, who translated the soldier’s letter so that the truth would not disappear again: none of that confers any standing under Israeli law.

Yousef is standing for a council seat in Greenford Broadway on 7 May.

That he is standing as an independent rather than for the Labour Party is itself part of the story.

Yousef was a Labour Party member for years.

He left voluntarily when right-wing factions in the party the party began attacking the Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Before that, he had put his name forward to be an Ealing Labour councillor candidate. He says he was told by one of the current sitting councillors in Greenford Broadway that he had been rejected, because, in that councillor’s words:

You’re Palestinian. You’re left-wing".

At the candidate assessment panel, Yousef recalls, he was asked whether he agreed to follow the Party whip. He declined — telling the panel, he says, that he was independent-minded and would assess each local issue on its merits rather than blindly follow the national party line.

The party that did not want him as a candidate is the party that runs Ealing Council. And the question of how Ealing Council relates to what is happening to Palestinians today is not an abstract one.

According to the resident-led investigation What Happened to Southall?, published in March 2026 by Community Powered Reporting, Ealing Council’s pension fund is invested, through the London Collective Investment Vehicle (LCIV), to the tune of approximately £112,896,000 in companies described in the report as complicit in Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The list, the report says, includes Maersk, Palantir, and Elbit Systems — the latter being Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. The figures are drawn from a council Freedom of Information response, screened against the United Nations Human Rights Office database, the American Friends Service Committee database, and the Who Profits database.

A formal residents’ petition demanded Ealing divest. The council refused to debate it.

The Pension Fund Panel has not once placed divestment on its agenda.

When LCIV divested from Russian holdings within weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, the report notes, it did so without controversy and without legal challenge.

On Russia: ethical clarity. On Gaza: procedural neutrality.

The report sets out the role of Ealing Council leader Peter Mason in detail.

From December 2021 until his resignation in July 2024, Mason held a shareholder-nominated directorship on the LCIV board — a seat held specifically to represent the interests of Ealing Council and its pension scheme members.

In July 2024 Mason resigned that seat and joined the board of the Local Government Association. Three months later, the LGA commissioned the legal opinion from senior barrister Nigel Giffin KC that has since been cited by other councils as a reason not to divest.

The report is careful to note there is no public evidence that Mason directed or commissioned the Giffin opinion. What it documents is the sequence: Mason left the room where Ealing’s pension investments are decided, took a seat in the room where the national legal architecture against divestment was being built, and the Ealing seat at the LCIV has, the report records, remained vacant ever since.

The report also notes Mason’s public statement that anti-Zionists have no place in the Labour movement. Mason represents Southall Green ward, which has one of the largest Sikh, Muslim, South Asian and Arab populations in London.

So this is the situation in Ealing in May 2026.

A council leader who has held, and given up, a seat at the table where pension investment decisions affecting his residents’ retirement savings are made.
A pension fund of more than £112 million invested in companies flagged for their role in what the International Court of Justice has found to involve a plausible risk of genocide.
A Pension Fund Panel that has refused, in the face of formal petitions and public protest, to so much as place the question on its agenda.
A Labour party that, on Yousef’s account, rejected him as a candidate for being “Palestinian and left-wing”.

And, standing in Greenford Broadway, a 73-year-old Palestinian engineer who carries three iron keys to a house in a village that no longer exists, whose father survived because he was picking olives that October morning, whose sister and aunts did not survive at all.

Yousef Qandeel cannot, under Israeli law, go home. The least his neighbours in Ealing might ask of their elected council is that it stop investing their money in the architecture that is doing to Gaza now what was done to al-Dawayima then.

Voters who want to support candidates committed to Palestinian rights at the local elections on 7 May can find guidance at Vote Palestine.

Back to the Future

Fri, 01 May 2026 20:19:06 +0100

Great Scott. Ealing Council’s welcome guide for new residents was written in 2010. The DeLorean is still parked on their website. And they haven’t changed a word.

If you moved to Ealing recently, you may have been directed to the council’s Welcome Guide for New Residents.

Well, no, you probably weren’t. Unless you’re Ukrainian.

The welcome for the rest of you is sixteen years out of date.

It’s still live on the Ealing Council website, cheerfully promising you “improved services,” a magazine through your letterbox every month, and a (Conservative) council that was “named the UK’s Best Achieving Council in 2009.”

“Roads? Where this guide is going, it doesn’t need roads.”

Sixteen years of austerity, service cuts, consultations, plans, resets, a global pandemic, a cost of living crisis (driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and four rounds of local elections have come and gone. The guide has not noticed.

We know this not just from the content, but from the Wayback Machine — which, unlike Ealing Council, has actually been paying attention.

The Internet Archive has captured this URL just thirteen times in fourteen years. A flurry of saves in 2011–12, then silence until 2019, then occasional snapshots through to December 2024. There are no captures at all in 2025 or 2026.

Nobody at the council has visited, reviewed, or updated this page in nearly two decades.

It hasn’t been forgotten by the internet — only by the people who published it.

This matters for reasons beyond embarrassment. The document contains active misinformation that could harm the very people it claims to welcome. This is not nostalgia.

This is a council sending new residents back to 2010 without a flux capacitor.

The A&E that closed

The guide tells new residents: “Central Middlesex Hospital also has an Accident and Emergency Department.”

Central Middlesex A&E closed in 2014. It no longer exists. Anyone following that advice in an emergency is being sent to a closed department.

The helpline that was abolished

“You can also contact NHS Direct for health advice 24 hours a day by phoning 0845 4647.”

NHS Direct was abolished in 2013 and replaced by NHS 111. That number has been dead for over a decade. The website — nhsdirect.nhs.uk — no longer exists.

The youth service that was defunded

“Youth and Connexions — provides opportunities for young people aged 13–19.”

Connexions was defunded by the coalition government in 2011–12 — the year this guide was published.

The housing organisation that was dissolved

The inside back cover lists contact numbers and email addresses for Ealing Homes — the arm’s-length organisation that managed council housing. Ealing Homes was wound up in 2011 and housing management returned directly to the council. Both email addresses are dead.

The school building programme that was cancelled

“High schools are set to get even better with more than £300 million being invested under the national Building Schools for the Future programme.”

Building Schools for the Future was cancelled by Michael Gove in July 2010 — six months before this guide was finalised. It was abolished before the ink was dry.

The bins that became fortnightly

The guide promises weekly refuse collection, with missed collections remedied the same day if reported before 5pm. In 2016, Ealing Council switched to fortnightly collections.

As this site has documented in detail, official government data shows that switch coincided with a sustained doubling of fly-tipping in the borough — a fact Ealing Labour’s 2026 election materials have chosen not to mention.

The magazine that changed beyond recognition

> “The council’s residents’ magazine, Around Ealing, is delivered to every home each month.”

Around Ealing still exists — but it is now a quarterly seasonal publication, not a monthly one, and it is primarily a digital product hosted on a third-party platform.

The promise of something landing on your doormat every month is long gone.

The forums that were abolished — and replaced

“Ward Forums, led by the ward councillors, feature joint problem solving on local concerns. Each ward has the chance to influence how an annual budget of £40,000 is spent on local improvements.”

Ward Forums were abolished in 2020.

They have been replaced by Town Forums, which now incorporate the council’s Your Voice Your Town participatory budgeting process — a competitive application system with its own governance arrangements.

[This site is currently investigating those governance arrangements in order to determine any undisclosed conflicts of interest on the panels deciding who gets funded — but that’s another story.]

The Freedom Pass age threshold

“People aged over 60 should apply.”

Freedom Pass eligibility is now tied to the state pension age, which is 66. The guide understates the qualifying age by six years.

Your turn — the community audit

The guide’s back page lists 47 facilities across the borough — sports centres, libraries, community centres, recycling centres, golf courses. That’s before we get to the services described in the text.

The errors above are some of the ones I can verify with confidence. But a document this old, left this untouched, certainly contains others — phone numbers that ring out, email addresses that bounce, facilities quietly reduced, closed or demolished without anyone remembering to update the brochure that recommends them.

So I’ve built a community audit tool — a live, crowdsourced record of what’s still standing and what’s gone. Every entry from the 2010 map is listed. You can mark each one as still open, changed, closed, or sold and redeveloped, and add a note with what you know. All contributions are saved and shared with every visitor.

→ View and add your own record at Ealing Audit on Southall Stories

If you’ve lived in the borough, worked in one of these buildings, or watched one of them come down — this is the place to record it.

The most significant findings will be documented in a follow-up piece and, more usefully, in a formal request to the council to either update or withdraw a document that is actively misleading the people it claims to serve.

Because “we ask, we listen, we deliver” was their promise in 2010.

Sixteen years on, the document is still there.

The buildings and services, rather less so.

The Welcome Guide for New Residents has been archived on the Wayback Machine, first captured on 15 January 2012. The live — and unchanged — version remains on the Ealing Council website.

When is a Hustings not a Hustings?

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:13:23 +0100

I attended the West London Citizens “Accountability Assembly” at St Anselm’s Church in Southall Green on Tuesday night. I left after an hour, before any of the candidates had answered any of the preset questions.

In that hour, I listened to Peter Mason talk — yet again — about his family upbringing in damp and mouldy temporary accommodation.

[Video courtesy of another audience member.]

Three months that made him a lifelong socialist, committed to ensuring others don’t have to endure the same hardships.

Then I listened to a succession of young people describe, in harrowing terms, how they — a tiny subset of the more than 3,000 families in unsafe, insecure and unsuitable housing in Ealing — struggle in conditions far worse, for years without end.

This is Mason’s Ealing.

Shaped in his own image over more than a decade of leadership (behind the scenes and out front):

ever-increasing housing waiting lists, thousands of demolished and half-built social homes,
millions wasted on unscrupulous contractors,
failed environmental schemes,
and obscene increases in councillor allowances.

The young people who spoke last night deserved answers. They didn’t get them.

They got choreographed applause and cheers. They got pledges.

[Video courtesy of another audience member.]

What are these pledges worth?

The organisers decided no questions were permitted from the floor. The party leading the polls in Ealing was not invited. The local organisers, activists and candidates best placed to speak to their experience were refused a seat at the table.

That is not accountability. It’s political convenience.

An accountability assembly that excluded Southall’s actual challengers tells us more about Ealing’s political establishment than any speech delivered from its podium.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

On the evening of 28 April 2026 — nine days before Ealing residents go to the polls — West London Citizens held what it billed as a “Pre-Election Accountability Assembly” at St Anselm’s Church in Southall Green.

The event’s own code of conduct stated clearly: “This is not an election debate, hustings or partisan political rally. We do not support or endorse any politician or political party.”

Three candidates were invited to make opening statements and respond to the assembly’s manifesto asks: Peter Mason (Labour), Gary Malcolm (Liberal Democrats), and Julian Gallant (Conservatives).

No other parties were invited.

Ealing Community Independents, standing candidates across multiple Southall wards, formally requested to attend. They received a direct written refusal.

This isn’t the first time

This is not a new arrangement. Four years ago, on 27 April 2022, Ealing Labour’s then-parliamentary candidate Bassam Mahfouz tweeted from an identical Citizens UK event, describing it plainly as a “Hustings” — with the same three parties on the stage.

The projected slide at that event listed two of the same names: Councillor Gary Malcolm, Councillor Peter Mason, with then-Councillor Gregory Stafford representing the Conservatives.

In 2026, the event has been rebranded. It is no longer a hustings. It is an “accountability assembly.” The code of conduct now explicitly states it is “not an election debate, hustings or partisan political rally.”

The parties on the stage are identical. The parties excluded are identical. Only the language has changed.

A controlled format

The assembly’s rules prohibited questions from the floor. The agenda had been shared with invited candidates in advance. Residents — perhaps 50 of the 700 whose voices supposedly shaped the Citizens manifesto — could listen, but not speak.

This is a legitimate format for some purposes. But calling it an accountability assembly, while excluding candidates and silencing the room, raises an obvious question: accountable to whom, exactly?

What the record actually shows

Peter Mason arrived at St Anselm’s with a confident message. Speaking to Ealing News on 25 April, he said:

“Our record speaks for itself in terms of what we’ve delivered, not just in genuinely affordable homes, but jobs for local residents and the money that we’re reinvesting back into frontline services.”

The record, examined closely, tells a different story.

In 2022, Ealing Labour promised to build 4,000 affordable homes. By 2026, the party’s own manifesto celebrated delivering 2,644 — 1,356 fewer than pledged.

The recently published report What Happened to Southall? produced by Community Powered Reporting and collating council data, local journalism and Freedom of Information responses, gives a fuller picture. It reports Conal Urquhart’s investigation, which found that of roughly £100 million allocated to deliver more than 1,100 affordable homes, only around 180 had been completed by early 2026 — approximately 16% of the target.

Conal also broke the story of Henry Construction, who were awarded contracts to build genuinely affordable homes in Southall Green, and went bust before completion — despite having a publicly documented history of prior insolvency collapses.

This site documented some of the human cost in detail:

Half-built homes have rotted on Norwood Road for three years.
The McCreesh family were made homeless after Ealing failed to deliver their promised accessible new home, with council officers telling them they were “not responsible” for new-build properties.
The Southall Market Car Park development now faces potential demolition and rebuild at enormous additional cost.

Mason attributed the shortfall to unforeseeable events: Liz Truss, Ukraine, rising interest rates.

What he did not explain was why Henry Construction — whose controllers had prior insolvency history and had extracted a £10 million dividend shortly before a previous collapse — was awarded public contracts in the first place.

That information was publicly available.

The question of who signed off on the risk has never been answered.

What Happened to Southall? documents the wider pattern.

Fortnightly bin collections introduced in 2016 linked to fly-tipping more than doubling.
The housing waiting list rising above 12,000.
A sustained closure of children’s centres, youth facilities and sports provision.

Plans affecting ten children’s centres, which hit Southall hardest of any of Ealing’s seven towns, losing three of its six centres including its main Grove House hub.

Residents campaigned and raised over £5,000 to fund a [judicial review challenge (https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/admin/2026/886), heard in February 2026.

Mr Justice Kimblin dismissed the claim on 15 April.

The closures will proceed.

At the accountability assembly on Tuesday evening, with no questions from the floor permitted, none of this went examined.

When accountability is NOT accountability

There is a phrase that has haunted Southall for years, first documented on this site in August 2019. When residents pressed Ealing Council on when the toxic remediation of the Southall Gasworks site would finally be completed, the council’s contaminated land officer — whose post had originally been funded by Berkeley Group, the developer responsible for the pollution — provided this clarification:

“The remediation for the next nineteen years is, in a sense, NOT remediation.”

Residents had been told remediation would be complete in September 2018. Then December 2018. Then March 2019. When pressed in writing on whether these repeated assurances constituted “a rather significant error” that was “extremely misleading,” the council’s Regulatory Services Officer replied that he did not agree — defending each revised deadline as based on “the best information available at the time.”

The remediation of the contaminated land is set to complete 2038.

Meanwhile, Peter Mason and his then-leader Julian Bell were accepting all-expenses-paid trips to the MIPIM property developers’ conference in Cannes, courtesy of Berkeley Group — the company whose contractor was producing the poisonous air that Southall’s children were breathing in their school playgrounds.

Orwell’s observation was about totalitarianism. But the instruction it describes — reject the evidence of your eyes and ears — does not require a totalitarian state. It only requires officials who have learned that language can be made to mean its opposite, and institutions willing to let them get away with it.

Remediation that is NOT remediation.

A hustings that is NOT a hustings.

An accountability assembly that excludes the candidates with the most to say about the record being assessed.

The pattern is consistent. Only the subject changes.

The pledge that accountability forgot

The Living Wage sits at the heart of West London Citizens’ 2026 manifesto.

It is one of the asks candidates were invited to commit to at St Anselm’s on Tuesday evening.

It was also one of the asks Peter Mason committed to at the same event four years ago.

Citizens UK’s own account of the 27 April 2022 assembly records that Mason made the following commitments on behalf of Ealing Labour:

making Ealing a Living Wage Place and more than doubling the number of Living Wage accredited employers from the 41 then accredited;
10 new renters rights workshops;
50 new community land trust homes;
council funding for mental health and SEN parent champions.

The 2026 manifesto asks for 100 CLT homes. Four years ago, Mason committed to 50. Citizens UK’s own records confirm the commitment was made. Last month, on 26 March 2026, West London Citizens accounted for a proposal “which could deliver around 20 genuinely affordable homes.”

Zero homes delivered.

A proposal that might see about 20. Sometime.

On the Living Wage, the record is similarly instructive.

Ealing Council signed a Living Wage Foundation Accreditation Licence in 2014, under then-leader Julian Bell. That licence covered not just direct council employees but workers subcontracted to the council. According to Michael Milne, founder of the Ealing Living Wage Alliance, those obligations went unmet for years. It took a campaign by the Alliance and Ealing UNISON in 2020 to force the belated payment of the Living Wage to school catering workers — six years after the licence was signed.

In April 2021 — while Mason was already serving as Ealing’s Living Wage Champion — Ealing school catering staff were being paid £8.91 per hour, against a London Living Wage of £10.85. Workers described it as a “disgrace” that the council had not helped them achieve accreditation.

In May 2022, shortly after making his Citizens UK commitments, Mason awarded himself a 71% pay rise, with other councillors receiving 24%.

By September 2022, the Ealing Living Wage Alliance was documenting that council care workers would have to wait until 2026 to receive the Living Wage — despite Ealing holding a Living Wage Foundation licence since 2014. Milne wrote that the council appeared to be rebranding its 2014 licence obligation as a new “plan to fix social care”:

“That is a disgrace, and a direct breach of trust.”

When the Alliance raised this publicly, both their local councillor and Virendra Sharma MP’s office blocked them on Twitter.

In November 2022, Mason appeared at a West London College Living Wage celebration event in Southall, announcing that homecare workers would receive the Real Living Wage “from this week onwards.”

By June 2023, there were 55 accredited employers and a stated target of 200 by 2026.

That target has not been met.

In November 2023, West London Citizens announced a new Living Wage Action Group.

By October 2025, Ealing reached 100 accredited employers, becoming the first borough in West London to do so — progress Mason cited as evidence his record speaks for itself.

From 14 accredited Living Wage employers in 2016, when Mason became Ealing’s Living Wage Champion, to 55 (or 58) in June 2023 when the Living Wage Action Group took over responsibility, progress has been painfully slow. 50 or so new employers in seven years.

The 100 employer milestone, reached in October 2025, represents 40 or so employers in just over two years.

100 out of Ealing’s 18,000 businesses is just 0.6%.

West London Citizens’ own 2026 manifesto provides the broader verdict on a decade of Mason as Living Wage Champion:

25% of jobs in Ealing still below the Living Wage.

Ealing remains 18th nationally for low-paid work.

These are not figures from Mason’s critics.

They are the figures presented to him on Tuesday evening at St Anselm’s — at the same event where he made his original commitments four years before, organised by the same organiser, Hilal Yazan — at an event from which the candidates most likely to scrutinise his record and hold him accountable had been purposely excluded.

On Tuesday evening, West London Citizens asked Mason to commit to the Living Wage again.

Four years ago, at the same event, he already had.

The five-party reality Mason and West London Citizens didn’t see coming

In his Ealing News interview three days earlier on 25 April, Mason said:

“The Greens have never won a single councillor in Ealing and I doubt that they’re going to win a single councillor in the future.”

On 28 April — the same evening as the assembly — independent MRP modelling commissioned by the LSE and conducted by JL Partners projected Ealing as one of the London boroughs where the Green Party is expected to achieve the highest vote share. Mason was not responding to the polling. He didn’t know it was coming.

The LSE’s wider findings are equally striking. Labour is projected to be pushed into second place in seven boroughs it currently controls, with its vote share down 15 points on average across the capital. And 60% of London voters plan to split their ballots across parties. The two-horse-race squeeze — where voters are told it is Labour or nothing — is, according to independent academic modelling, already over.

In Southall, where the Greens are standing only single paper candidates in each ward, the only progressive, local alternative to the other national party branches are the Ealing Community Independents.

The question that remains

West London Citizens says it seeks to “restore trust, integrity and accountability” in local democracy. That is a worthy goal, and the issues in their manifesto — temporary accommodation, renter rights, living wages, community land trusts — are real issues affecting real people in Southall.

Peter Mason in 2021: “You don’t trust me”

But an accountability process that issues written refusals to candidates challenging the incumbent administration — in the wards where that administration’s record is most exposed — is not accountability.

It is gatekeeping.

Peter Mason posted this on Twitter on 25 June 2020:

Words have consequences. Impact is as important as intent. Culture is defined by leadership. Redemption is possible.

Reflect, learn and change. Or move on.

It’s a choice.

On 7 May, if you don’t think Peter Mason has done a good job, you get to hold him accountable.

Peter Mason in 2021: “If you don’t think I’ve done a good job, you get to vote me out”

You get to vote him out.

Get Mason Out!

Vote Ealing Community Independents on 7 May.

Southall Deserves Better.

"This Place Has Turned Into a Bloody Slum": Southall Wards Meeting with ECI candidates

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:21:52 +0100

I arrived late to the Ealing Community Independents’ Southall Wards Engagement Evening at Parkside Yards — the usual traffic gridlock on The Green and South Road up to the station. Normally I would walk, but I’d walked all the way up to Oswald Road via the canal footpath the previous afternoon and my poor feet and body were telling me no. After a beautifully warm and sunny spring day, the heavens looked like they might open soon, too. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

I parked in the Parkside Yards car park. Free parking for three hours! Plenty of parking spaces. No two hour queues to get in and out like at Herbert Road car park.

Immediately I was confronted by the sight of a small knot of Ealing Labour Party canvassers working the street outside. Some of them I hadn’t seen for four years, but I recognised councillors Nagpal and Mohammad, and they were with two or three others.

It was an odd choice of boulevard to work, as there are no adjacent houses, only the very plush, clean, and inviting boutique shops, private Green Quarter residents’ only gym and lounge/workspace, and further down the Italian coffee shop.

Outside the café stood a gaggle of counter-canvassers, the Ealing Community Independents candidates and their supporters. The Labour group had apparently been sent to find out what was going on.

Inside, the contrast with the rest of Southall was once again striking.

Parkside Yards’ community space is everything Southall’s civic infrastructure isn’t — high ceilings, good light, a proper kitchen, a library corner, sofas alongside conference tables.

The kind of room that makes you ask, as I found myself asking, why there is nothing remotely like this at the Dominion Centre, or anywhere else in the town.

The ECI banner was up, the “Southall Deserves Better” poster on the wall.

On the screen: images of Southall. Construction cranes. High-rises going up. The same rubbish-filled streets these residents walk every day.

The meeting started late — gone 7pm by the time things got moving, with perhaps ten residents in the room alongside a dozen or so ECI candidates and supporters. Not a massive crowd by any means, but neither were there any empty seats. And the people who were there had things to say, and they said them.

“We are you”

Joe Bhangu, ECI candidate for Southall Green, opened making a brief video explaining who is standing in which wards and how to vote.

This is the kind of very basic political education that is needed — Ealing Labour are very good at getting their vote banks out, but obviously have zero interest in helping anyone else figure out how the system works. They’ve had more than enough time to lift up and empower people in Southall for the good of the whole community, but have done nothing.

Joe spoke about his own journey — his uncle becoming the first Asian councillor in Southall in 1967, recalling the horrors of the “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” signs, Blair Peach, the Hambrough Tavern. The history of Southall is a place that fought for its people.

“We are normal residents,” he said. “This meeting is not like typical Labour Party meetings. We are you.”

But this was no sentimental nostalgia trip. It was setting the scene and the context for where we find ourselves today.

Sukhi Floria, ECI candidate for Southall West, spoke about trying to get problems solved and being passed around. Not one councillor, he said, has ever asked why there is so much fly-tipping. Why are there no police? He described being told he was the only one complaining — a response that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to hold Ealing Council to account on anything.

Jatinder Rajput (known as JR), ECI candidate for Southall Green, spoke with the directness of someone who has been doing the work rather than talking about it. His team has knocked on 5,000 doors. On the doorstep he says to lifetime Labour voters:

“Look around you. This is Labour.”

The implication wasn’t rhetorical — it was evidential. The fight in Southall is still in the streets.

JR described a Southall culture of being “programmed from birth to vote Labour.” He wanted to leave Southall after 2015 for somewhere better, cleaner, safer. But after starting a family, the reality of the housing market means he’s here to stay. But there are drug users and drug use paraphernalia in and by the children’s playground. The children’s nursery wall is used as an open air public urinal.

“This place has turned into a bloody slum.”

He’d found Angela Fonso on Nextdoor two years ago and connected with Joe and the Southall Residents Alliance from there.

Why is he standing to be a councillor? Because he realised:

“You can’t make a difference until you’re in a position of power.”

Southall West candidate Dan Cortese moved into the Green Quarter five years ago — marketed as a development “on the up.”

He feels conned by the developer (Berkeley Group).

The reality: no planning for the community infrastructure that should have followed.

No delivery. No schools. No GP surgery. No shops.

And, since then, Ealing Council has closed three children’s centres.

The Q&A from 7:50pm produced a cascade of specific, local, documented grievances: overcrowding, fly-tipping, rats, drug dealers, an unsafe environment, no police station, no post office. Older residents unable to navigate new technology. Language barriers. The Dominion car park.

A resident asked:

“How much council tax are they taking out of Southall?”

The question wasn’t rhetorical either.

A resident described asking the Council for a CCTV camera to deal with fly-tipping on their road — and being offered a sign instead. Forty or fifty years of complaints to get a road resurfaced. Rats under the floorboards of a tenant’s house. Footpaths are so badly damaged that disabled residents are forced to walk in the road.

The Council’s response? Supply videos and photographs as evidence.

The frustration is not being seen or heard as an equal partner. Why can’t we call and say there is a problem that needs sorting without being believed?

“People are giving up,” one resident said. “The process is too complicated.”

On the Gasworks: when Berkeley Group’s vehicles used Trinity Road during demolition, residents’ houses shook and cracked. Without any investigation, Ealing Council said the vibrations were “harmless.” The Council’s word, apparently, was sufficient.

One contribution stung:

“There’s no unity left in Southall. We beat the National Front, but it’s all gone. Where is everyone?”

Another:

“The Council are bringing people in from other boroughs. Southall people are moving out.”

“HMOs ‘give birth’ to mattresses overnight.”

The rats, the rubbish; all of this gives visceral life to the feeling that somewhere decisions are being made about Southall by people who don’t live here and don’t care.

That the Labour leadership of Ealing Council is not accountable to Southall — is hard to argue with.

Minni Dogra, ECI candidate for Southall Green, was clear-eyed about the trajectory. “It’s been a long journey,” she said. The Southall Library building — the old Carnegie building — stands empty and derelict. The business community lost their Chamber of Commerce at Manor House.

“It’s a deliberate breaking down of our civic life.”

Many people, she said, simply don’t have time to deal with all these issues — and all the new developments started appearing without any meaningful consultation. Minni was a solicitor in an office in Southall, and maybe more clued in than most, she said, but:

“I don’t remember any consultation.”

The development planned for The Green, she noted, would never have been proposed in a white middle class area. The CPOs. The public inquiry. The Southall Young Adult Centre. The community raised money to rebuild the YAC twenty years ago — and later the Council wanted to knock it down and build flats.

She’s standing in Southall Green, she said, because Peter Mason is the Ealing Council leader and his ward is Southall Green. That’s it. That’s the reason.

Angela Fonso, ECI candidate for Southall Broadway, was persuaded to stand by Sukhi and Jatinder. She spoke about broken pavements, rubbish, and the drug issue at Southall Recreation Ground — and how an offered meeting with the Safer Neighbourhood Team never materialised.

Her message to the room was direct:

“Residents have to believe they have the power.”

“Whether we are elected or not, we will still campaign.”

“You don’t have to vote for Labour.”

What was happening in Southall, she said, was:

“a deliberate policy of neglect and decline.”

Craig Smith, ECI Party leader and candidate in Northfield, framed the fundamental question with characteristic precision:

what is ECI’s purpose?
why are councillors absent and ineffective?

Because there is no opposition.

Labour has too much power, makes cuts to services, increases council tax, delivers no benefit to communities.

Labour councillors are career and status oriented.

A good independent councillor, by contrast, picks up litter, plants flowerbeds, actively helps their community.

“We will listen, consult properly, and make the changes you want to see.”

Craig connected the problems that residents had raised to structural decisions and political choices.

Waste collections were halved in 2016. Fly-tipping doubled. It’s harder to properly dispose of rubbish.

Peter Mason, he noted, has said publicly he could clean the streets in two hours — but he hasn’t, because:

“he wants residents to take responsibility for a problem he created.”

Joe closed with a harder edge.

Peter Mason, he said, gave himself a 71% pay rise. ECI has video evidence of a leader of a religious group canvassing with Labour. Labour didn’t stand with residents on the Gasworks, the Post Office, the YAC. Labour is not “on your side.”

“There is nothing we cannot achieve if we stand together.”

Jatinder showed a video of Manor Waye Allotments — a local asset, the kind of thing that gets quietly eroded.

Joe showed a graphic video of a local activist explaining where some of our council tax goes and how Ealing Council invests workers’ pension funds in companies arming Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of women and children.

“Everyone’s paying council tax. This is where your money goes.”

That last point landed harder for having been repeated in different forms throughout the evening.

These political choices are why we can’t have children’s centres in the poorest part of the borough that needs them most.

These structural decisions are why our waste collection service was halved a decade ago and why fly-tipping is now an epidemic.

This is why there are drug users in children’s playgrounds. This is why there are so many, too many tower blocks. Why there is no proper library, a lack of parking spaces, not enough shops, schools, health centres, bus services, no bus stop outside the new Elizabeth Line station (really!), no public toilets.

These are all decisions made by Ealing Labour and Southall councillors with almost no opposition, no accountability and no democracy.

The meeting closed with a reminder:

3pm, King Street, on Bank Holiday Monday. The campaign’s final push before 7 May.

This was not a polished political event. The room was warm, the lift for disabled access to the first floor had no instructions on how to use it (gotta keep your finger on the button!), the meeting started late. But none of that is the point.

The point is that this is what genuine community politics looks like before it becomes something else — before it gets professionalised, managed, messaged.

A room of people who are angry about specific things that have happened to their specific streets.

A candidate who is standing because the Council leader is on the ballot in the same ward.

A candidate who found he wasn’t alone in thinking “this is all wrong”.

Labour will tell you that Southall’s problems are complex and deprivation is deep-rooted, that Tory government funding cuts means resources are limited. That they are doing their best in difficult circumstances — and better they cut services than the Tories!

Some of that is true.

What is also true is that since 2016, waste collections were cut in half and fly-tipping doubled. That the Southall Library building — a Carnegie library — sits empty. That three children’s centres are being closed. That Merrick Road Community Centre, a community asset, was sold to a private developer. That residents who asked for a CCTV camera got a sign instead.

Ealing Labour has been in power for sixteen years.

Southall has been a Labour stronghold for decades.

It’s time for something different.

Ealing’s local elections are on 7 May.

In Southall Green, the Council leader is on the ballot.

That is, as Minni Dogra put it, the reason she is standing.

When "deport six million" becomes mainstream: what Ealing Labour won't tell you

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:48:40 +0100

Two weeks ago, and again today, Ealing Labour attacked Grace Hunter, a Conservative candidate for Pitshanger ward, after a TikTok clip surfaced in which she said:

“The solution to our housing problem isn’t building six million more houses… it’s deporting six million people.”

This is fascist propaganda reminiscent of the policies of the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s — and of our own present-day far right, which is leading the polls and looks set to reshape the next government.

Where the “six million” came from

I’ll be honest. When I first read the reported quote, the figure stopped me cold. “Six million.” Whatever the context, whatever the intent, those words in a sentence about mass deportation carry an unmistakable echo. The deliberate murder of six million Jewish people by the Nazi regime is the defining atrocity of the twentieth century. In a borough where Jewish communities have deep roots, that resonance does not disappear because it may have been unintentional.

So I looked into where the figure came from.

It almost certainly derives from a July 2025 report by the Centre for Policy Studies — a right-leaning think tank with strong Conservative connections — which found the UK is short approximately 6.5 million homes compared to similar European countries. The CPS acknowledged migration as a contributing factor — but was explicit that even cutting net migration to zero would not solve the shortage. The bulk of the problem is decades of under-building.

Hunter appears to have taken the CPS’s housing deficit figure and inverted its argument entirely. Where the think tank said “we need to build six million more homes,” Hunter said “we need to deport six million people instead.” She used a Conservative think tank’s research to reach a conclusion that Conservative think tank specifically rejected.

That origin does not dissolve the echo. The Holocaust did not happen in the abstract. It began with the identification of a group of people as a problem to be solved — and with the language of removal. When that number appears in a sentence about deportation, the discomfort is not irrational. It is memory doing its job.

What Ealing’s own data actually shows

Ealing Council’s own figures tell a different story from Hunter’s. Over 3,000 households are currently in temporary accommodation in the borough, with 329 households with children in bed and breakfast accommodation beyond the legal six-week limit. Average rents rose by 12.4% in a single year — faster than anywhere else in London. The council’s own analysis attributes this to landlords leaving the market, a chronic shortage of new homes, and properties being converted to short-term lets such as Airbnb.

Immigration does not appear in Ealing’s own homelessness analysis as a cause. The council is run by Labour. These are their numbers.

Mass deportation is not a housing policy. It is fascism.

A very old idea

Mass deportation is not a new idea. It is not even a particularly Conservative idea in origin. It is the oldest demand of the British far right — and it has been with us, in one form or another, for sixty years.

The National Front was founded in 1967 with the expulsion of all settled non-white immigrants as a founding policy. By 1974, the compulsory deportation of all non-white immigrants and their descendants — including the white British partners in mixed-race relationships — was the cornerstone of their manifesto. They said it would take ten years. Before deportation, non-whites would be stripped of British citizenship and placed behind white Britons in access to welfare, education and housing.

The British National Party, formed in 1982, carried this forward. Under John Tyndall’s leadership it promoted compulsory removal of non-whites from the UK. In the early 1990s it produced stickers with the slogan:

“Our Final Solution: Repatriation.”

When Nick Griffin modernised the party’s image, compulsory deportation became “voluntary repatriation” — but any non-whites who refused would be stripped of their citizenship and categorised as “permanent guests.”

The language evolved. The policy did not.

Tommy Robinson — real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — drew around 100,000 people to a far-right rally in London in September 2025. He has spent his public life advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants and Muslims from Britain. At that rally he told the crowd that:

“an orchestrated, organised invasion and replacement of European citizens is happening.”

And now, in April 2026, both the Conservative Party and Reform UK are standing candidates across Ealing on platforms that include mass deportation schemes targeting hundreds of thousands of people.

Reform’s plan would disapply the 1951 Refugee Convention to achieve it. The Economist described both plans as “dangerously unrealistic.”

The Overton window has not just shifted. It has been smashed. Fascist policy is mainstream.

Southall has been here before

Southall knows this history in its bones.

On 23 April 1979 — St George’s Day, 46 years ago yesterday — the National Front held an election meeting at Southall Town Hall, in the heart of a community they wanted removed from Britain. They chose Southall deliberately. It was a provocation. The community knew it.

Blair Peach was 33 years old, a teacher of children with special needs at a school in East London, and a member of the Socialist Workers Party. In the months before Southall, he had twice been attacked by NF supporters while cycling home from work. On 23 April he travelled to Southall to stand with the community against the NF meeting.

Workers went on strike. Ten thousand residents signed a petition to cancel the meeting. Thousands marched. The Tory-run Ealing Council — compelled by the Representation of the People Act — allowed the meeting to proceed despite the community’s protests.

The police sent in 2,800 officers — 94 on horseback — to protect the National Front’s right to meet. Thirty fascists attended their meeting inside. By the end of the night, 345 people had been arrested. Dozens were injured. And Blair Peach was murdered, struck on the head by a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group.

No police officer was ever charged.

The internal police inquiry, suppressed for thirty years, concluded he had almost certainly been killed by one of six SPG officers who had preserved their silence.

Eight thousand people filed past Blair Peach’s body as it lay in state at the Dominion Cinema in Southall. Between five and ten thousand followed his coffin to East London Cemetery. A primary school in Southall bears his name. This April, his partner Celia Stubbs donated the full archive of materials relating to his death to the Bishopsgate Institute, where they are now publicly available.

Southall did not passively endure the far right. The community organised, and resisted.

And Labour? Surely Labour stood with Southall?

Many people will be thinking: but Labour stood with Southall back then, didn’t they? That was the difference. Labour opposed the far right.

Wrong.

It was Labour’s Home Secretary Merlyn Rees who refused to overrule the then Conservative Ealing council to ban the NF meeting. It was a Labour government whose response to Blair Peach’s death was to defend the Metropolitan Police.

The pattern goes back further. Labour abandoned its opposition to immigration control as early as 1962, when the party decided it could not afford to be seen as “soft” on the issue. By 1968 — the year of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech — Labour had already passed its own restrictive Commonwealth Immigrants Act, creating a distinction between predominantly white British citizens and predominantly non-white Commonwealth citizens who could no longer claim to be British.

Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet for the rhetoric of his speech. The policy content was already bipartisan.

Individual Labour figures did stand with Southall. Neil Kinnock spoke at Blair Peach’s graveside. Peter Hain co-founded the Anti-Nazi League. Dozens of Labour MPs supported the anti-fascist movement.

The Labour Party as a governing institution did something different: it triangulated, accommodated, and refused to act.

The difference between then and now is not that Labour used to oppose restriction and now betrays its principles. It is that the accommodation has become the policy itself.

What the National Front demanded in 1974 — strip rights, detain, deport — is now being proposed in white papers and manifestos by national parties that between them hold almost every seat on Ealing Council.

What the national Labour government is doing right now

Ealing Labour’s attack on Grace Hunter was entirely justified in its condemnation of her remarks. But voters in Southall should know what the national Labour government has done since taking office.

It has doubled the qualifying period for permanent settlement from five to ten years.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has told migrants they must “earn the right to be in the UK” — language almost identical to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s framing of citizenship as “a privilege that is earned.”

This Labour government has stripped newly recognised refugees of permanent status, replacing it with temporary protection renewable every 30 months.

Labour is reviewing how UK courts apply the very European Court of Human Rights provisions that protect people from deportation to dangerous situations.

The Institute for Government is unambiguous: there is now “a race to toughen immigration controls among parties that lead the election polls.”

Only the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party nationally are defending a rights-based approach.

Peter Mason, leader of Ealing Council, said that the election should not be a choice between “extreme-Left and extreme-Right.”

He is right that Grace Hunter’s remarks represent something extreme.

But his own national Labour Party, whose governing National Executive Committee he sits on, is implementing policies that the Institute for Government describes as a fundamental departure from decades of consensus.

Southall residents are not obliged to choose between a party that says fascism loudly and a party that does fascism quietly.

A different approach is possible

Ealing Community Independents candidates in Southall wards are standing on a platform rooted in this community — its housing, its services, its right to transparent and accountable local government — without using our neighbours as political currency. They support Ealing Friends of Palestine’s campaign for council pension divestment. They will not compete to sound toughest in a race to the bottom that Southall has seen before and refused before.

Yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn — the former Labour Party leader who Ealing Labour leader Peter Mason did so much to undermine and oppose — visited to give his support, again.

On 7 May, Ealing voters will decide whose side they are on.

Canvassing with Minni Dogra: A Councillor in All But Name

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:27:40 +0100

Last week I spent a lunch hour with my friend and former Ealing Independent Network “running mate” Minni Dogra, as she canvassed a street near me in her effort to win enough votes to be elected as a councillor in Ealing Labour council leader Peter Mason’s own Southall Green ward.

In 2022, I did the same canvassing and amassed a whole 223 votes — 2,633 fewer than Peter Mason. It is a mammoth task. But four years ago, Mason lost the largest share of votes of any Labour incumbent in Ealing. So there is always hope.

I met Minni at the Brent Road end of Derley Road and we made our way down the odd numbers toward Caxton Road. Minni had her list of postal voters, a couple of clipboards, pens and stacks of brilliantly designed leaflets held together with elastic bands.

Councillor Jasbir Anand

As we set off — Minni doing all the work of knocking and talking, while I checked the postal voters register for each address — I noted Peter Mason’s fellow Southall Green ward councillor Jasbir Anand’s former home — and the site of the garage from which she ran an illegal food business for the better part of a decade. The story was broken by the Ealing Gazette’s Phil McCorkell way back in 1999.

The timeline, as reported by the Gazette, is precise. Anand had been preparing food — samosas and snacks supplied to local firms — from her dining room since at least 1991. She was given temporary planning permission in April 1993 to prepare cold food at her home. That was extended. In October 1996, she applied to use her garage permanently. Refused. She appealed. A government planning inspector rejected the appeal in September 1997. The council ordered her to stop and remove all equipment. She was still running the business more than a month later. A council disciplinary committee was convened but could not examine her conduct until it recruited outside members. Her comment to the Gazette:

“I have bought a shop in Southall and will be moving out very shortly.”

Fellow ward councillor Umesh Chander, who had just taken over as planning west chair, told the Gazette at the time:

“Councillors should show other people how to behave. This is setting a bad example. It seems she just wanted to carry on until someone complained.”

This was 1999. Anand had just been elected to Ealing Council with 2,018 votes — the highest of any candidate in Southall Green (or Glebe ward as it was then known) that year.

In 2006, Anand was in the news again. Her new shop was around the corner on Scotts Road opposite the Scotsman pub. Cllr Anand got into a lengthy legal dispute with her new neighbour, which eventually cost her £35,000 in damages. She paid up only under threat of bankruptcy.

A year later, Anand — allegedly — falsely accused the same neighbour’s daughter (who went on to be the world famous singer Tasha Tah) of assaulting her. Tah was arrested, but the case never went to court and she was cleared of any wrongdoing. Tah said she would sue Anand for “malicious prosecution”.

Responding to fellow councillors’ concerns about her behaviour, Cllr Anand said:

“I don’t care what people believe. I believe in my rights.”

Never mind her personal affairs, some will say. So what about her time in office?

In 2010, at a public meeting called by disabled adults protesting the closure of their day centre — a closure she was responsible for as cabinet lead for Adult Social Services — she told a room full of people in wheelchairs:

“I own half of Southall. I’m very popular. I got voted in so at least a few people must like me.”

Ironically enough, Anand is now the cabinet lead for crime and anti-social behaviour, and has been a councillor in Southall Green for 28 years. By my calculation she has received at least three quarters of a million pounds in councillor allowances during that time. Enough for ten children’s centres.

Her food business, AN&, now operates an upmarket coffee cart at Berkeley’s toxic Green Quarter development at a prime location opposite Southall station — a commercial relationship that her colleague Jags Sanghera — simultaneously Berkeley’s community engagement manager, chair of Southall Community Alliance, and a Labour candidate in Norwood Green — has helped to promote. That is a story for another day.

Minni Dogra

It is not easy talking to people on the doorstep. Many are just coming home or about to go out. Most are deeply sceptical. They have been let down too many times by politicians making and breaking promises to care much about voting.

Many feel disenfranchised, powerless, and resentful at the perceived — and often very real — unfairness of it all.

What they hear in the media, mainstream and social, is that their problems are caused by immigration, by benefit claimants, by their neighbours converting four-bedroom houses into HMOs with fifteen tenants, and rubbish in the street. Nobody knows who to complain to, or gets any response if they do.

Minni listens to all of it without judgment. She takes notes. She offers practical help and advice where she can. She is nothing if not completely grounded in the day-to-day reality of living in Southall.

In recent years she has campaigned to save Southall’s Crown Post Office, campaigned against the closure of ten of Ealing’s children’s centres (including three of six in Southall, the most deprived town in the borough), and secured a public inquiry into the legality of the compulsory purchase orders on The Green — orders designed to buy out small local businesses to make way for yet more residential tower blocks. The inquiry found the CPOs were legal, but the developer subsequently pulled out.

Minni Dogra is a councillor in all but name.

While she is standing in Southall Green under the ECI umbrella alongside her friends and neighbours Joe Bhangu and Jatinder Rajput, Minni regards her independence as a major asset. She cannot be bought and she does not blindly follow any party line.

This is one of the things I have noticed about ECI as an organisation: its leadership has managed to formulate policies that a broad coalition can support while still leaving room for genuine individual differences — and, occasionally, disagreements on priorities.

That is a very different offer from Ealing Labour and the “controlling” Peter Mason who permits no dissent at all.

Minni has a track record of campaigning on local issues that are important to people and small businesses in Southall and serving their interest, rather than her own. She has complete integrity and is committed to democratic decision-making in the council chamber, meetings and panels.

On wider issues that also affect all Ealing residents, she is committed to divesting Ealing’s pension funds from companies who provide weapons or otherwise support the senseless death and destruction in Gaza and elsewhere.

These are all strong differentials between her and all the Ealing Community Independent candidates, and their incumbent Labour Party opponents. For all their repeated talk and “On Your Side” sloganeering, it’s clear after sixteen years in power whose interests they really serve.

What Happened to Southall?

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:48:04 +0100

A substantial new report on Ealing Council’s record in Southall landed this week, and it deserves your attention.

What Happened to Southall? is published by Community Powered Reporting, a volunteer resident-led research group, and it covers waste, housing, asset disposal, health, democratic accountability and pension fund investments — with extensive sourcing from council documents, FOI responses, and public data.

I haven’t read every page yet, but what I have read is rigorous, well-evidenced, and pulls together a picture that many of us have been building piece by piece for years. Southall Stories features prominently in the endnotes, which reflects the work this community has put into holding the council to account.

With local elections six weeks away, the timing matters. Read it at communitypoweredreporting.co.uk.

I hope to see and meet some of you later today at the report’s official launch event.

📣 THIS FRIDAY

FREE TICKETS AVAILABLE

Join Community Powered Reporting for the launch of their first report - a resident-led analysis examining Ealing Council’s failures to meet Southall’s needs.

From fly-tipping to half built homes to the closure of children’s centres; join us on Friday to discuss the findings this data-driven report and to workshop what we as a community can do next.

🗓️ Date: Friday 27th March 🕕 Time: 6pm - 8.30pm 📍 Venue: Saklatvala Hall, 22 Dominion Road, Southall, UB2 5AA

More information here: https://luma.com/wu4151lw

Through a kind donation, we have a small number of free tickets available on a first come, first served basis. Please email us with ‘ticket’ in the subject and your name in the body of the email if you would like to be added to our guest list.

communitypoweredreporting@proton.me

Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-tipping

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 12:41:00 +0100

Two weeks ago, I reported on the results of my research into the fly-tipping epidemic that has hit Ealing, and Southall in particular.

In short, fly-tipping across the borough literally doubled from July 2016, immediately after Ealing Council reduced household waste collections from weekly to fortnightly.

It’s remained at that high level ever since, and residents report that it’s getting even worse in recent years.

The nature of these sudden and sustained increases strongly indicate that it’s not due to any increases in population - documented or otherwise. Population increases are gradual over time and simply not large enough to account for such a massive change in the amount, or rate, of fly-tipping reports.

The data also suggests that the council’s stated aims to increase recycling rates and save money have catastrophically failed. Recycling rates are around the same level as they were a decade ago, and the council now spends more cleaning up dumped rubbish than it saved by halving collections.

The council’s much publicised and repeated efforts to tackle, fight, crackdown on, and criminalise fly-tipping have quite clearly completely failed.

A policy that halves collection frequency, produces a sustained doubling in per-resident fly-tipping, and results in higher net clean-up costs than the savings it generated raises serious questions about whether the change was economically or operationally sound.

Somewhat bizarrely, in the face of such persistent failure, Ealing Council has this month nominated itself for a prestigious public sector award for their social media campaign “This is our home, not a tip”.

Just a couple of months ago in a BBC London Politics Show interview, Ealing Council leader Peter Mason acknowledged “an exponential increase in fly-tipping” while simultaneously claiming a 55% reduction in fly-tipping reports in Southall.

Only today I received Ealing Labour’s election leaflet claiming a massive (and extremely implausible) 54% reduction in fly-tipping across Southall.

Meanwhile, the daily reality for those of us who live here is that Ealing, and Southall in particular, is drowning in rubbish left on pavements.

Read on for details, and more on what the data tells us.

Since my article a fortnight ago, I found some more information that confirms what we already knew beyond any doubt.

In July 2016, just weeks after Ealing replaced black bin bags with wheelie bins and switched to alternate weekly rubbish collections, Southall residents were already warning something had gone wrong.

At the Southall Broadway Ward Forum (12 July 2016), residents reported:

Overflowing bins
Increased fly-tipping
More foxes and rats
A feeling they were being “made to live in slums”

The official response recorded in the action log?

“Introduction of the alternate weekly collection service should help reduce this.”

That was the expectation.

What followed was the complete opposite.

2016: The Spike

Two MyLondon articles later that year captured the shift.

New wheelie bins replaced a system of bin bags on June 6, and the council switched to alternate weekly collections.

The council claimed the change resulted in a sharp rise in recycling — 55% of household waste collected in the first month compared to 48% in the previous year.

At the same time:

Fly-tipping fines were increased from £80 to £400
Three new “enforcement trucks” were introduced
Public messaging intensified

A council spokesperson indicated that the council expected an increase in fly-tipping:

“We anticipated it would take a little time for people to get used to alternate weekly collections and have a team of people accompanying the collection crews, helping educate residents on how to use the wheelie bins properly.”

And just one month later in July 2016, residents linked the change to increased fly-tipping.

But a council spokesperson insisted the opposite:

“We have seen a steady reduction in reported incidents of fly tipping.”

Somewhat confusingly, Cllr Bassam Mahfouz explained that increased enforcement and removal activities contributed to an increase in recorded fly-tips:

“Labour have set up a dedicated task force to find and prosecute culprits as well as carrying out thousands of visits to help educate people on how to dispose of their rubbish – we are going out of our way to find and remove dumped rubbish which accounts for a portion of the increase in recorded fly tips.”

By November 2016, Mahfouz was reporting on his crackdown on fly-tipping, promising fly-tippers:

We will find you and we will fine you.

In February 2017, Mahfouz claimed:

“The number of fly-tips reported to the council each week has dropped by 46%.”

Year	Measure Type	Total Cases	Population	Per 1,000 Residents	Change vs 2012
2012–13	Confirmed incidents	6,352	336,900	18.9	Baseline
2015–16	Confirmed incidents	7,032	339,700	20.7	+9%
2016–17	Confirmed incidents	14,270	340,000	42.0	+122%
2023–24	Confirmed incidents	16,828	375,340	44.8	+137%
2024–25	Confirmed incidents	25,394	~390,000	~66	+245%
2025–26*	Projected (reports)	~30,000	~392,000	~76	+302%

Defra’s national dataset shows:

2015–16: 7,032 incidents
2016–17: 14,270 incidents

Per 1,000 residents:

2015–16: 20.7
2016–17: 42.0

That is a doubling of the per-resident rate in a single year.

Population barely moved that year.

This was not gradual drift.

It was a sharp baseline shift.

2018: “We’ve Got to Sort Out Fly-Tipping”

In May 2018, Peter Mason tweeted:

“As well as Ealing Labour’s priorities for genuinely affordable homes and decent jobs, we’ve got to sort out the lorries on Scotts Road, flytipping and the canal…”

Two years after the spike, the problem was acknowledged publicly.

But no formal public evaluation of the 2016 service change and its long-term fly-tipping impact was published.

2022: Operational Success Narrative

By June 2022, the council’s Waste Management presentation highlighted:

135,000 bins emptied weekly
99.96% collection success
47% recycling rate
£22m Greener Ealing operation

Recycling performance became the headline metric, but down from 48% in 2015.

Fly-tipping trends were not foregrounded in the presentation. Perhaps because they had doubled.

2023–2026: The Second Surge

More recently, incidents have surged again.

Defra data shows:

2022–23: 12,922 incidents
2023–24: 16,828 incidents

Last year, Ealing Council leader Peter Mason went as far as to “declare war” on fly-tippers.

Yet ITV reports that in 2024–25, Ealing recorded approximately 25,394 incidents, placing it in England’s top ten fly-tipping hotspots.

The Council Plan Performance Report Q2 2025/26 confirms:

“Fly tipping incidents have increased by around 50% year on year since 2022/23…”

The same report notes:

Clearance performance below target
Response times extended
Additional removal teams deployed
CCTV expansion
Behaviour change pilots

This is escalation.

National Context

BBC reporting confirms that fly-tipping has increased nationally by around 9% year-on-year.

ITV reports Croydon as England’s worst hotspot:

Croydon: 53,268 cases
Population ~390,000
~136 incidents per 1,000 residents

Ealing:

~25,394 cases
Population ~386,000
~66 incidents per 1,000 residents

Ealing is not the worst in England.

But its internal structural break in 2016 (when fly-tipping incidents doubled), and from 2023 when incidents increased by 50% year-on-year, remains unusually sharp compared to gradual national increases of 9%.

Is It Population Growth?

Ealing’s population has increased approximately 13.8% over 13 years.

Fly-tipping per 1,000 residents:

2012–13: 18.9
2016–17: 42.0
2023–24: 44.8

This is not proportional demographic drift.

Per-resident incidence more than doubled.

What About “Undocumented” Population Growth?

Some argue the rise could be due to hidden or undocumented population growth.

The arithmetic does not support this.

In 2016–17, there were 14,270 incidents.

To return to the previous per-1,000 baseline (around 21 per 1,000), Ealing’s population would have needed to be approximately:

680,000 residents.

That is roughly double the official estimate.

There is no evidence — from GP registrations, school rolls, council tax base, housing stock, electoral register data, or infrastructure capacity — to suggest a hidden population of that scale.

Even between 2022 and 2024, incidents rose nearly 96%, while population rose around 5%.

To explain the surge purely through undocumented growth would require tens of thousands of additional residents appearing in two years without showing up anywhere else in the system.

That is implausible at scale.

The Counter-Narrative Pattern

Across a decade, the official framing has remained consistent:

“It’s a national issue.”
“Enforcement is increasing.”
“Benefits are largely contingent on changing resident behaviour.”
“Recycling rates are strong.”
“Incidents are reducing.”

In 2017, reductions were claimed.

In 2022, recycling success was highlighted (despite being lower than in 2015).

In 2025, enforcement was expanded.

Meanwhile:

2016 saw a doubling of fly-tipping.
2023–26 shows another surge.
Cabinet admits ~50% year-on-year growth since 2022/23.

Residents flagged deterioration within weeks in July 2016.

The baseline never returned.

Campaign of the Year?

In 2026, Ealing’s “This Is Our Home, Not a Tip” campaign was shortlisted for an LGC Award under Campaign of the Year.

The nomination celebrates messaging.

The data shows:

A more than 100% per-resident increase after 2016.
A further surge since 2022-23.
Incidents now at record highs.

Communications may be award-winning.

But arithmetic remains unimpressed.

The Unasked Question

This is not about denying national trends.

It is not about ethnicity or migration.

It is not about dismissing recycling gains.

It is about a structural question:

Has Ealing ever conducted a formal public evaluation of the 2016 alternate weekly collection policy and its long-term impact on fly-tipping baselines?

Ten years on, “sorting it out” remains a campaign line.

But the data shows two structural inflection points:

2016
2023

The 2022–23 cost-of-living shock likely increased the baseline pressure on waste systems nationally.

Ealing’s much steeper rise suggests local amplification factors. In Southall, these are likely to include housing density, overcrowding, higher private sector rents, as well as collection policy, enforcement and recording practices, and over-development minus any major infrastructure mitigations that magnify national economic stress.

The borough’s recycling rate was already ~48% in 2015 — almost exactly where it is today. This suggests that the increase in fly-tipping after 2016 does not stem from a sudden change in recycling behaviour, but rather from structural shifts in waste collection, capacity constraints, and later economic pressures.

If enforcement keeps escalating while incidents keep rising, then perhaps the conversation needs to move beyond slogans and towards systems.

Because arithmetic is harder to campaign against than residents.

Unless you’re Ealing Labour. In which case, you simply claim that fly-tipping is down 54% across Southall!

Without a specified baseline year or dataset, the 54% figure cannot be reconciled with published Defra or council performance data.

Let’s hope 7 May election day will see bangarang boomerang and some higher calibre councillors elected?

Bangarang! Pirate Pete and the Lost Bin Collections of Southall

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:46:03 +0100

This is the shocking story of how for sixteen years Ealing Labour councillors talked rubbish about having to make “difficult choices” to cut services to save money, ignoring thousands of residents’ protests, and in doing so created a massive mess that a decade later still costs millions to clean up every year and leaves children’s and disabled people’s lives unnecessarily poorer.

It’s a story about an ambitious New Labour leader - politically aligned with Tony Blair and his campaign director in 1997, the three times disgraced ex-Lord Peter Mandelson - who makes bad choices that harm the very people (and their children) who elected him to represent them in Southall Green, one of the poorest council wards in Ealing.

Not only do his bad choices harm vulnerable people who deserve better, Ealing Labour’s “solution” to the problem they created is to blame and punish their victims - with fewer frontline services they need the most, more authoritarian and privacy-violating surveillance, and harsher financial punishments for and criminalisation of often unfortunate individuals who can’t afford to pay huge fines, while allowing actual criminal fly-tippers to carry-on and get away scot-free.

Seemingly oblivious (or maybe not) to the chaos and disorder caused, he celebrates spending millions more than he saved on enforcement by trumpeting his “listening to residents” and his enforcement “achievements” on TV and LinkedIn, signing off with a Boris Johnson-esque “Bangarang”.

Bangarang Pete

Ealing Council last week announced their draft budget for the coming financial year 2026-27. Coming just three months before local council elections in May, it is full of what many voters will see as nothing more than simple electoral bribes.

Ealing Labour Leader Peter Mason hailed it as the first council budget in sixteen years that doesn’t cut frontline services such as social care, schools, housing and planning and waste collection.

That’s quite an admission.

Sixteen years of Ealing Labour cutting frontline services as if they were Tories.

Of course, Ealing Labour always blamed the national Tory government cuts to local government funding. They had no choice to make the “difficult choices” that were effectively imposed upon them by a hard-right Tory central government.

What else could they do?

At least they did it in a more professional and grown-up way than Ealing Conservatives would have done!

And let’s just pretend that Peter Mason didn’t spend much of his time between 2015 and 2019 in cahoots with “the Dark Lord” Peter Mandelson - the disgraced best friend of convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein - in trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn every single day.

Corbyn isn’t perfect, but a Corbyn-led Labour government in 2019 would certainly have provided increased funding to local authorities.

Instead, self-identifying “left-wing” Mason made the “difficult choice” to withdraw support and effectively hand the election to known anti-Semite, all-round racist, liar and “killer clown” Boris Johnson. Never on your side.

After Corbyn’s successor as Labour Leader Keir Starmer won a landslide General Election last year against a Tory Party reeling after five years of chaos and confusion under Johnson, Truss and Sunak, Mason was clearly delighted to announce additional central government funding.

But with Starmer generating his own chaos by supporting war crimes by Israel and embroiled in a scandal of his own making with his appointment of Peter Mandelson as the British Ambassador to the US despite knowing of Mandelson’s continued friendship with the convicted paedophile Epstein, national Labour’s stock is at an all-time low.

Similar to by-elections, local elections are often a convenient opportunity for the general public to voice their frustration with, and opposition to, national government policies and failures with a protest vote against the ruling party.

Ealing Labour councillors must be very concerned that many of them will lose their massively increased allowances in May, thanks to the actions of Starmer’s national Labour Party.

In the lead-up to the elections, therefore, their leader Peter Mason has seized the opportunity to take back the local initiative with a financial package of “improved” frontline services, including action on fly-tipping.

One of the big local (and national) issues now in Ealing, and especially Southall, is fly-tipping, with the perception across the borough that the problem, while not new, has got significantly worse in recent years.

A quick recap of how we got here

In 2003, “Filthy streets, dirty parks, a growing drug problem and overcrowding mark Southall as suffering ‘inner-city deprivation’”, then London Mayor Ken Livingstone admitted.

Around the same time, Southallians complained about rubbish and litter on our streets in response to a consultation on the possible development of the old Southall Gasworks site.

—

In 2010, soon after Peter Mason arrived in the borough, he was complaining about his new neighbours on Facebook, who - quite possibly - were rooting through his trash in the night:

“How many times must i be woken up by their squeaking?”

Rather than set an example and report a noise nuisance via the council website like a normal person, Mason proposed a callous, ruthless and deadly violent solution:

“will somebody please shoot these fucking foxes in Acton!”

It was after Mason’s arrival that Ealing Labour under then leader Julian Bell made the “difficult choice” to freeze council tax every year while the national Tory government cut their funding by 60%.

Of course, they wanted to protect the majority of people suffering under Tory and LibDem imposed national austerity from having to pay more council tax. But in doing so they reduced further still the amount of money available to sustain local services.

Cynics might point out that Bell was afraid that raising council tax would be vote loser. Instead, in order to retain power, he made the “difficult choices” to raise funds and save money by selling off Ealing’s public assets and cutting frontline services - including adult social care services in Southall, and a 50% reduction in waste collection across the borough.

In 2015, residents protested against these cuts outside Ealing Town Hall. Peter Mason, always ready put put his spin on it, tweeted:

“Some protesting wheelie bins, many more protesting adult social care [sic]. Priority?”

When Ealing Council switched from weekly black rubbish bag collections to fortnightly wheelie bin collections in 2016, Cabinet Member Bassam Mahfouz promised a change that would please Peter Mason and “keep our streets cleaner by cutting down on the number of black bags ripped open by foxes.”

Peter Mason, never shy about telling residents why he’s right and they’re wrong, tweeted that rolling out wheelie bins was “unavoidable” and that cutting collections by half would save £3 million.

Despite more than 7,000 Ealing residents formally opposing this drastic reduction in general waste collection frequency, the “ever-listening” Labour council pressed on regardless.

The question now is what was the cost?

Residents called it immediately

On social media in May 2017, barely a year after the policy change, residents directly challenged then-Cabinet Member Peter Mason about the obvious connection.

Sarah Adams wrote: “All lies. Are you recycling the Ealing residents too.”

VisitSouthall responded: “You have done it. Reduced rubbish collections - leading to fly-tipping.”

By November 2018, at the Southall Green / Broadway Ward Forum, Peter Mason was still talking rubbish about tackling fly-tipping, claiming “packed house, passionate people and ideas a plenty.”

Three years later, in October 2021, Ealing Independent Network commented on the same post: “And 3 years on, this just highlights how impotent in action @_petermason is to Southall & Ealing. Lots of talk but no actions from this as Southall residents see flytipping and rubbish still not being tackled.”

In 2022, I stood as an independent candidate in the local elections against Labour in the ward where I live in Southall Green. My then seven year old son Zion went out leafleting with me and documented what it’s like as a child growing up in the area Peter Mason represents.

“This part of Southall is disgusting”

This part of Southall is right around the corner from where we live. I feel so ashamed as a parent that I am raising my children in a place they know as home and that they find disgusting because of the state it’s in.

[Many thanks again to the incredible LAGERcan volunteers who cleaned up this particular fly-tip the following year.]

Later that year, the Young Ealing Foundation published a report aiming to help tackle youth violence in Southall.

Young people stated ‘Rubbish/pollution impacts mood’, ‘council don’t care about the environment, rubbish and unclean’ and ‘pollution, waste, and being dirty gives a negative impression.’

The report stated that the poor physical appearance of the environment has a negative impact on young people.

In 2025, a disabled Southall Green neighbour, Arti, described how her life is curtailed by fly-tipping

Her mother is often forced to push her wheelchair into the road to get past due to pavements being frequently blocked by rubbish, leaving Arti exposed to speeding traffic.

[Arti] said: “It makes me anxious going out, and I’ve slowly, slowly cut down on going out due to this issue.

“It makes me really mentally unstable, and I feel trapped, because I can’t do anything about it. I’m trying my very best.”

It’s a not uncommon sight here to see disabled people forced to risk their lives by walking with their mobility aids in the road because the pavements are impassable due to rubbish bags, mattresses, fridges, broken glass, illegally parked cars, and broken pavements.

Also last year, my brilliant community pharmacist, Rahul Puri, explained the serious public health harms arising directly as a result of the dramatic rise of fly-tipping in Southall, an area already extremely vulnerable to health problems and stressors.

Fly-tipping doubled when weekly rubbish collections ended in 2016

Official government data shows the number of fly-tipping incidents doubled after 2016 and the introduction of fortnightly wheelie bin collections. Ealing Council’s own numbers show it costs millions. And the solution they won’t consider would save £1-1.6 million per year.

What actually happened is recorded in the government’s own statistics: fly-tipping in Ealing doubled overnight and has cost council taxpayers millions every year since.

Three months after weekly collections ended, the council was already announcing a fly-tipping crackdown.

In November 2016, it reported that new taskforce crews had visited 763 streets and traced dumped waste back to 1,124 addresses in just three months. The message from cabinet member Bassam Mahfouz was simple: “We will find you and we will fine you.”

The enforcement narrative was in place almost immediately after the service change - just as the official data shows fly-tipping doubling across the borough.

It’s hard to escape the impression that the council knew the service change would create a problem and prepared to police the consequences rather than reconsider the policy itself.

Some might argue the rise could simply reflect better reporting rather than more fly-tipping. But the data shows a different pattern. Incidents were stable for years, then almost exactly doubled in the same year weekly collections ended - and have remained at that higher level ever since.

Reporting changes usually produce short-term spikes or gradual trends. What Ealing’s figures show is a sudden, permanent step-change, which strongly suggests a real increase in dumping rather than just better record-keeping.

Ealing Council now spends £3 million annually clearing fly-tipping whilst claiming the problem is down to residents’ behaviour.

Now Ealing Southall’s MP and formerly Peter Mason’s deputy leader of the council, Deirdre Costigan visited Southall Green in March 2022 to launch yet another ineffective authoritarian pre-election crackdown on fly-tipping.

Costigan said, “I’m here in Southall today with our fly-tip enforcement and clearing team to talk about our new zero tolerance approach to illegal dumping. Ealing is a brilliant place to live but a small minority of people spoil things for the rest of us by fly tipping in our borough.”

She claimed that this small minority of people in Southall “don’t play by the rules” and that their actions are “disgusting, irresponsible and illegal.” She also states that the council’s CCTV surveillance and enforcement mechanisms are inadequate.

But the government data tells a different story: Ealing Council created the problem, spent ten years managing the symptoms, and refuses to consider the solution because it would mean admitting the original policy was a catastrophic mistake.

What the official data shows

The table below uses Defra’s national fly-tipping dataset, with population-adjusted rates per 1,000 residents to control for population growth.

Year	Total Incidents	Population	Incidents per 1,000 residents
2012–13	6,352	336,900	18.9
2013–14	5,765	338,000	17.1
2014–15	7,257	339,000	21.4
2015–16	7,032	339,700	20.7
2016–17	14,270	340,000	42.0
2017–18	13,610	340,500	40.0
2019–20	13,115	341,806	38.4
2020–21	13,090	340,341	38.5
2021–22	12,303	366,762	33.5
2022–23	12,922	369,937	34.9
2023–24	16,828	375,340	44.8

The pattern is undeniable:

Four years of stability (2012–16): Fly-tipping averaged 17–21 incidents per 1,000 residents
One year of catastrophe (2016–17): Jumped to 42 incidents per 1,000 residents
Eight years of plateau (2017–24): Remained at 33–45 incidents per 1,000 residents

That’s a 137% increase per person from 2012–13 to 2023–24.

This isn’t explained by population growth. Even after adjusting for population, fly-tipping has more than doubled per resident.

The structural break

For data analysts, this is what a “structural break” looks like — a sudden, permanent shift in the underlying pattern that points to a specific policy change rather than gradual social trends.

Year-on-year changes show the exact moment:

2012–13 → 2013–14: -587 incidents (-9.2%)
2013–14 → 2014–15: +1,492 incidents (+25.9%)
2014–15 → 2015–16: -225 incidents (-3.1%)

Then wheelie bins and fortnightly collections were introduced in June 2016:

2015–16 → 2016–17: +7,238 incidents (+102.9%)

Followed by stabilisation at the new, much higher level:

2016–17 → 2017–18: -660 incidents (-4.6%)
2017–18 → 2019–20: -495 incidents (-3.6%)
2019–20 → 2020–21: -25 incidents (-0.2%)
2020–21 → 2021–22: -787 incidents (-6.0%)
2021–22 → 2022–23: +619 incidents (+5.0%)
2022–23 → 2023–24: +3,906 incidents (+30.2%)

What the council promised

In March 2016, Cabinet Member Bassam Mahfouz announced the switch to fortnightly collections and wheelie bins:

“Wheelie bins will make it easier for people to recycle more meaning less waste will be sent to landfill, and they will also keep our streets cleaner by cutting down on the number of black bags ripped open by foxes.”

The council claimed the changes would:

Save around £1.7 million per year
Increase recycling rates
Reduce street mess
Improve cleanliness

What actually happened

Fly-tipping per resident almost exactly doubled in the year after the policy was introduced.

Streets got objectively dirtier — by every measurable metric.

The rate has never returned to pre-2016 levels — eight years later, fly-tipping remains approximately double what it was.

In 2023–24, the rate hit 44.8 per 1,000 — the highest on record, more than double the pre-2016 average.

The residents who predicted the disaster have been proven right by eight years of data.

The council that promised cleaner streets has delivered the opposite.

If only the council actually listened to the residents!

The timing problem for other explanations

Some might blame the rise in fly-tipping on demographic change, population growth, or changing social attitudes.

But the data demolishes these explanations:

Demographic change happens gradually. It doesn’t produce a one-year doubling across an entire borough.

Population growth is accounted for. These figures are per 1,000 residents — they already control for population increases.

Social trends develop slowly. They don’t create structural breaks where behaviour doubles in twelve months.

The data shows:

Stable pattern for years
Sudden doubling in the exact year the waste collection system changed
Permanent plateau at the new level

That’s the signature of a policy shock, not a social trend.

The borough-wide collection frequency change is the only factor that aligns precisely with the timing and scale of the increase.

The false economy

The council claimed fortnightly collections would save £1.7 million per year, rising to £2.3 million.

But fly-tipping isn’t free.

The current annual cost

In June 2025, Ealing Council admitted that illegal dumping costs the borough £3 million a year.

The council’s own 2025 enforcement data shows:

30,000 fly-tip reports
3,328 fines issued
11.09% enforcement rate

Fine income vs clearance costs

The council issues fines of up to £1,000 for fly-tipping, but most enforcement uses Fixed Penalty Notices typically ranging from £400–£1,000.

Conservative estimate (£400 average fine):

3,328 fines × £400 = £1.33 million income

Mid-range estimate (£600 average fine):

3,328 fines × £600 = £2.0 million income

Net taxpayer cost:

Category	Amount
Annual clearance costs	£3.0 million
Fine income (low estimate)	£1.33 million
Fine income (mid estimate)	£2.0 million
Net public cost	£1.0–£1.7 million per year

Cost per incident

With 16,828 incidents (2023–24) and £3 million annual cost:

£3,000,000 ÷ 16,828 = £178 per incident

This covers collection labour, vehicles, disposal fees, investigation, enforcement, administration, and legal costs.

The 13-year comparison

Before wheelie bins (2012–16 average):

Clearance costs: ~£430,000 annually
Fine income: ~£149,000 annually
Net cost: ~£281,000 annually

After wheelie bins (2025):

Clearance costs: £3,000,000 annually
Fine income: £1,330,000–£2,000,000 annually
Net cost: £1,000,000–£1,700,000 annually

The increase:

Clearance costs: +£2.57 million annually (+597%)
Net taxpayer cost: +£719,000–£1,420,000 annually (+256–505%)

The cumulative damage

From 2016–17 to 2023–24, Ealing recorded 108,015 total fly-tipping incidents.

From 2012–13 to 2015–16, Ealing recorded 26,406 total incidents.

That’s 81,609 additional incidents over eight years compared to pre-wheelie bin rates.

Even at the conservative clearance cost of £178 per incident, that’s £14.5 million in additional fly-tipping costs since the policy change.

The claimed £1.7 million annual savings?

Wiped out more than eight times over.

The enforcement paradox

You might argue that enforcement has improved, so comparing to pre-2016 isn’t fair.

The data proves this defence is worthless:

2012–16 average:

Fine recovery rate: ~34% of clearance costs

2025:

Fine recovery rate: ~44–67% of clearance costs

So yes, enforcement has significantly improved.

But the total volume has increased so much that even with better recovery rates, taxpayers now pay £1–1.7 million annually vs £281,000 pre-2016.

Better enforcement of a much worse problem still costs far more than preventing the problem in the first place.

Ealing Labour’s rubbish collection scheme doubled fly-tipping and cost eight times more to clean up the mess they created than they saved by stopping weekly waste removal

The perverse incentive

Here’s where it gets darkly absurd.

If the council actually collected the maximum £1,000 fine for all 3,328 enforcement actions:

Fine income: £3,328,000
Clearance costs: £3,000,000
Net profit: £328,000

The council would be making money from fly-tipping.

Now, they’re not actually collecting £1,000 per fine — most are Fixed Penalty Notices at lower amounts, and many go unpaid. But the theoretical possibility exists.

And that creates a perverse incentive:

The more fly-tipping occurs, the more enforcement opportunities exist, the more fine income potentially flows in.

It’s like something out of Catch-22.

Milo Minderbinder would be proud: create a problem through policy change, establish an enforcement regime, generate revenue from the problem you created, claim you’re “tackling” the issue whilst financially benefiting from its continuation.

Everyone in the syndicate gets richer — except the residents whose streets are covered in rubbish and who are paying for enforcement through their council tax.

The children’s centres connection

In 2023–24, Ealing Council began consulting on closing 10 of the borough’s 25 children’s centres, claiming budget pressures.

The projected savings? Around £1 million annually.

Meanwhile, the council:

Spends £3 million clearing fly-tipping (a problem they created)
Spends £1.9 million on enforcement
Could save £1–1.6 million by returning to weekly collections
But won’t, because it would mean admitting the 2016 policy failed

So let’s get this straight:

Can’t afford: £1 million to keep children’s centres open for vulnerable families
Can afford: £3 million clearing fly-tipping + £1.9 million enforcement, both addressing a problem the council created and refuses to fix
Could save: £1–1.6 million annually by reversing the policy that caused the problem
But won’t: Because political pride is apparently worth more than children’s services

All while justifying massive pay rises for ineffective and wasteful councillors that cost over a million pounds in four years. That’s enough to pay for all the children’s centres.

The Milo Minderbinder business model

If you’re not familiar with Catch-22, Milo Minderbinder is the mess officer who runs a syndicate that profits from the war by trading with both sides, eventually bombing his own base because the Germans paid him to do it. Everyone is a member of the syndicate, so everyone benefits. Some more than others.

Ealing’s version:

Create the problem: Switch to fortnightly collections (save £1.7m)
Problem doubles: Fly-tipping increases 100%
Monetise the problem: Enforcement regime generates fine income
Claim success: “55% reduction in target areas! We’re cracking down!”
Never fix the root cause: Because the enforcement regime is now part of the budget model
Close children’s centres: Can’t afford services, must “manage budget pressures”
Everyone in the syndicate benefits: Except residents living with the rubbish and paying council tax for both the clearance and the enforcement

We just need to dump enough rubbish to earn enough money to keep the children’s centres open!

Former Ealing Council leader Julian Bell in brand new spotlessly clean high-visibility clothing is pulling a wheelie bin full of cash?

Milo would absolutely pitch this:

“See, it’s really quite simple. We save money by collecting rubbish less frequently. This creates more fly-tipping. We then fine people for fly-tipping. The fines pay for enforcement. The enforcement creates more fines. Eventually, if we get enough rubbish on the streets, we’ll be making a profit! Then we can afford frontline services again. Everyone benefits from the syndicate.”

The only flaw in the plan: You have to live in a borough covered in fly-tipped rubbish whilst paying council tax for both the clearance and enforcement of a problem your council created and profits from.

But hey, bangarang, Pete. The syndicate thanks you for your service..

The solution they won’t consider

In January 2026, Council Leader Peter Mason appeared on BBC Politics London to discuss the council’s fly-tipping enforcement campaign.

On LinkedIn, he boasted:

“We’ve been running a campaign across Ealing this year aimed at changing behaviour: to increase resident awareness and reporting, and to crack down on fly tips. It’s working.

55% decrease in fly tips in our target areas

Increased our maximum fine to £1,000

Issued almost 2,000 fixed penalty notices in the last 6 months alone

Deployed extra CCTV cameras, which have identified 20 persistent criminal waster vehicles that we are now going after

Naming and Shaming on our website leading to positive identifications”

He concluded: “Bangarang.”

Bangarang indeed.

Here’s the obvious question Peter Mason won’t answer:

If enforcement campaigns can achieve 55% reduction in target areas at a cost of £1.9 million, why not reverse the policy that caused the 100% increase everywhere?

The economic comparison

Current approach (2026 budget):

Category	Annual Cost
Enforcement budget	£1,910,000
Clearance costs	£3,000,000
Fine income	-£1,330,000 to -£2,000,000
Net cost to taxpayers	£2,910,000–£3,580,000

Achievement: 55% reduction in target areas only (not borough-wide)
Cost per prevented incident: ~£868

Return to weekly collections (estimated):

Category	Annual Cost
Additional collection cost vs fortnightly	£1,700,000
Clearance (at 2012–16 levels)	£430,000
Fine income (at 2012–16 levels)	-£149,000
Net cost to taxpayers	£1,981,000

Expected result: Return to pre-2016 baseline (~7,000 incidents vs current ~16,000)
Cost per prevented incident: ~£189

Annual saving from weekly collections: £929,000–£1,599,000

Service improvement is 4.6 times more cost-effective than enforcement.

The full comparison

Metric	Pre-2016 (Weekly)	2025–26 (Fortnightly + Enforcement)	Return to Weekly (Estimated)
Collection frequency	Weekly	Fortnightly	Weekly
Annual incidents	~7,000	~16,000	~7,000
Incidents per 1,000	~21	~40–45	~21
Clearance cost	~£430k	£3,000k	~£430k
Enforcement cost	Minimal	£1,910k	Minimal
Fine income	~-£149k	-£1,330k to -£2,000k	~-£149k
Net taxpayer cost	~£281k	£2,910k–£3,580k	~£1,981k
Cost per prevented incident	N/A (baseline)	£868 (target areas)	£189 (borough-wide)
Annual saving vs current	N/A	N/A	£929k–£1,599k

Preventing the problem vs managing the symptoms

Weekly collections:

Cost: £1.7 million more than fortnightly
Benefit: Prevents ~9,000 fly-tipping incidents
Net effect: Saves £0.9–1.6 million annually vs current approach
Addresses: Root cause

Current enforcement:

Cost: £1.9 million in enforcement alone
Benefit: 55% reduction in target areas only
Net effect: Costs £0.9–1.6 million more annually than prevention
Addresses: Symptoms whilst cause continues

Put simply:

Preventing the problem would cost £1–1.6 million less per year than managing it.

But that would require admitting the 2016 policy was a mistake.

And apparently, protecting political face is worth £1–1.6 million of taxpayers’ money annually.

The pattern

This fits Ealing Council’s broader modus operandi:

1. Policy imposed without genuine consultation
Over 7,000 residents signed a petition against wheelie bins. The council ignored them and implemented the policy anyway.

2. Environmental rhetoric masking cost-cutting
Promised “cleaner streets” whilst implementing cost-saving measures that created the opposite outcome.

3. Costs externalised onto residents
Fortnightly collections create storage problems in terraced housing, HMOs and all the new tower blocks (Southall’s predominant housing types). Residents bear the burden whilst council claims savings.

4. Claims contradicted by measurable outcomes
Promised streets would be “cleaner.” Data shows fly-tipping doubled and remained at that level for ten years.

5. Blame shifted to residents
When policy causes problem, council blames “behaviour” and “awareness” rather than examining whether the policy itself failed.

6. Expensive symptom management instead of admitting failure
Spend £1.9 million on enforcement rather than £1.7 million on service improvement, because the latter would require admitting the original policy was wrong.

7. No outcomes evaluation
Report activity statistics (investigations, fines, warnings) without ever asking: “Did the policy we implemented in 2016 cause the doubling? Should we reverse it?”

What this proves

1. The data is undeniable
Fly-tipping per resident almost exactly doubled in the year after fortnightly collections were introduced. No other borough-wide change explains the timing or scale.

2. The cost is substantial
£14.5 million in additional clearance costs over eight years, plus £1.9 million annual enforcement spending, far exceeds the claimed £1.7 million annual savings.

3. The solution is obvious
Return to weekly collections. It would be cheaper, more effective, and address the root cause rather than managing symptoms.

4. The political calculation is clear
The council prioritises avoiding admission of policy failure over fiscal responsibility and effectiveness.

5. Residents were right all along
The 7,000+ people who opposed wheelie bins, the residents who predicted fly-tipping would increase, the community members who’ve complained for ten years — they were all correct.

6. The council’s approach to evidence
When data contradicts promises, ignore the data, blame residents, and spend millions managing the problem you created rather than reversing the policy that caused it.

Where are we now?

Now, if anyone has any bright ideas about how to make Southall cleaner and more pleasant, the mega rich developers building more than ten thousand new homes in tens of new tower blocks have kindly given us £120,000 from their profits to make the place more marketable for their sales teams.

Please get your thinking caps on and submit your applications to the Southall Town Team led by Jags Sanghera… oh, wait, I feel another story coming on!

Methodology note

All data sourced from:

Defra Fly-tipping Statistics 2012–13 to 2023–24 (official government dataset)
ONS Mid-Year Population Estimates for Ealing (2012–2018)
Population estimates for 2019–2024 included in Defra dataset
Ealing Council enforcement data (2025, published on council website)
Ealing Council statements (2016 cabinet announcements, 2025 media coverage)
Per capita calculations use ONS mid-year population estimates for each year to control for population growth.

Caveats:

Data crunched with the help of AI. I checked the headline data, but if you see any mistakes, human or otherwise, please let me know.
There could be other causes of the increase in fly-tipping. The data clearly shows a doubling of fly-tipping incidents immediately after weekly refuse collections were replaced with fortnightly general waste collections.
As a friend said to me, we need more bins, more collections, free disposal of bulky waste and recycling items, targeting of illegal dumping by organised rogue waste disposal and clearance companies and unscrupulous HMO landlords, and more education and support about what’s acceptable waste disposal and what isn’t.
Enfield Council switched from weekly to fortnightly bin collections in 2019. The data from Enfield doesn’t show the same dramatic shift as it does in Ealing, but residents there are complaining of increased fly-tipping and asking for a return of weekly collections.

The EA Files: What Regulators Knew About Fire Risks at Southall Recycling Site

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:44:37 +0100

A Site That “No One Checked”?

When a commenter asked why “no one from the council checked” Sam’s Recycling before the Johnson Street fire, the short answer is uncomfortable:

The council did check. Repeatedly. For over a year.

And officially, they found nothing.

Yet the risks were documented.

What follows is drawn from Environment Agency inspection reports, enforcement correspondence and Environmental Information Request disclosures obtained in early 2024 by a local resident (anonymised here).

Together, they form a paper trail showing regulatory awareness without proportionate intervention.

The Fire Was Not the Beginning

On 11 January 2026, around 15 tonnes of mixed recycling burned at Sam’s Recycling. Eight fire engines attended. Rail services were disrupted. Smoke spread across surrounding streets.

But the conditions that made that fire possible had been recorded years earlier.

EA inspection notes from November 2022 describe a site already presenting multiple fire and pollution risk factors:

“Waste was stored quite densely in this area of the site, there was no path through the waste. Officers had to climb over waste piles to see the full extent and content of the waste.”

They also recorded:

Gas canisters and fire extinguishers stored without containment
uPVC frames, waste wood, baled plastics and mixed packaging stored together
Tyres stacked approximately ten high
No drainage observed on either operational area

This was not an invisible problem.

The “Sensitive Receptor” Warning

In November 2022, regulators recorded a formal complaint from a nearby resident described in official correspondence as a “sensitive receptor”:

“It’s been alleged by a nearby sensitive receptor that an incinerator is being used to burn what appears to be toxic melamine-coated wood particle fibreboard, which may be illegal and dangerous to health (carcinogenic).”

The operator was explicitly warned:

“Burning waste is an offence under Section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.”

They were instructed to cease burning immediately.

Yet follow-up correspondence shows inspectors believed incinerator use continued:

“Our regular and pro-active odour assessment visits suggest that the incinerator is in use at least once to twice per week.”

Another internal note adds:

“I have no doubt that the frequency given to us was inaccurate.”

“Mountaineering” Over Waste

By July 2023, inspectors were still documenting extreme site conditions.

One visit record states:

“Richard went mountaineering and came back with some photos of the incinerator and its current contents.”

This is not journalistic exaggeration. It is the agency’s own language.

The same inspection recorded:

Several gas canisters on site
Non-permitted electrical waste
Office equipment and furniture stored near the incinerator
Poor housekeeping and litter control

Enforcement — But Only Selectively

In August 2023, the EA finally issued enforcement instructions — but only relating to specific non-permitted waste streams (gas canisters, WEEE items, photocopiers, chairs).

The formal action required removal of these items by 14 August 2023.

Yet at the same time, inspectors concluded:

“The S2 exemption is in use… The site are in compliance with the limits, conditions and waste types permitted.”

This meant that large-scale external storage of cardboard and paper bales — a known fire risk — was treated as compliant, despite earlier observations of excessive stacking heights and dense storage conditions.

What The Site Looked Like Last Week

I visited the site in January 2026, days after the fire.

What follows is not historical archive material. This is post-fire reality.

Entrance to the Johnson Street recycling site, January 2026. Standing water and pooled runoff remain visible a week after the fire. EA inspections previously recorded that “no drainage was seen on either area of the site”.

Fire-damaged structural remains visible from the entrance to the industrial estate. Sections of collapsed roofing and exposed framework remain in place.

Large mixed waste stockpile occupying the central yard. EA inspection records previously noted that waste was stored so densely officers “had to climb over waste piles” to inspect the site.

What The Operator Told Me

During my visit I spoke briefly with a man who claimed to be the owner. He refused to give his name.

He described the fire as:

“An unfortunate accident. These things happen.”

He referenced the Charles House Bridge Road warehouse fire and suggested this was comparable.

When I raised the question of enforcement failures and long-documented hazards, he rejected that framing and instead pointed to neighbouring business units, arguing that others nearby were in similar or worse condition.

He speculated that the fire may have been caused by a discarded e-cigarette, but admitted he had no evidence to support this claim.

He also stated that the fire had cost his business “over half a million pounds” in lost trade.

The Pattern That Emerges

Across the EA documents, several themes repeat:

Hazards identified early
Unsafe storage documented
Incineration activity suspected to continue
Complaints escalated
Partial enforcement applied
Core fire-risk practices allowed to persist

This is not regulatory absence.

It is regulatory containment.

Not An Accident — A System Failure

The Johnson Street fire did not occur in isolation.

It occurred at a site where regulators had:

Recorded combustible storage density
Documented blocked access routes
Logged repeated burning complaints
Observed dangerous mixed waste storage
Issued selective enforcement without broader operational shutdown

Calling this an “unfortunate accident” erases the paper trail.

The real question is not how the fire started.

It is why the conditions that made it likely were allowed to continue.

What Happens Next?

Investigating authorities have said the cause of the fire is “not yet known”.

But the regulatory context is known.

The paper trail exists. The inspections happened. The warnings were issued.

And the site still burned.

How to Report Nuisance and Pollution in Ealing

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:02:00 +0100

Reporting a Nuisance in Ealing

A short epic of civic persistence (and becoming the problem)

Please complete this form.

Invocation

Sing, website, sing.
Of forms and thresholds, boxes small,
of windows that open into darkness,
of daytime hotlines that take you to voicemail
by those who never lived the night.

Sing of a citizen with sleep in debt,
who brings a sound, a smell, a (non-epileptic) tremor
to the gates of order —
and finds, beyond the gate,
only more order.

I. The Omen

It starts with noise —
The drilling; the forklift trucks; the alarms; industrial skips emptied like thunderclaps, all in the early hours.

Or it starts with smell —
petrol and tar-sweet, smoke and solvent-bitter,
a breath that arrives to wake you from sleep.

Or dust, settling quietly into lungs and windowsills.
Or vibration, shuddering through walls,
loosening fixtures, rattling bones.
Or damage, hairline cracks creeping across ceilings,
cupboards that no longer close,
doors that unhinge, like minds.

Or all of them at once —
for the world is rarely polite enough
to separate its harms by department.

You close the windows.
You reopen them.
You learn the wind direction by its cruelty.
You time your life around someone else’s activity
until time itself becomes the nuisance.

Then, like a dutiful soul,
you decide to report it.

And thus you step onto the path.

II. The Naming of the Thing

First comes the rite of precision.

Name it, says the Council.
Name it as the system prefers to hear it.

If Noise —
is it neighbour? is it construction?
is it commercial, industrial, or “other”?

If Odour —
is it dust, fumes, emissions, cooking,
historic contamination, or something else entirely?

If Air Pollution —
is it a vehicle, a business, a development site,
a legacy issue, or a statistical abstraction?

If Vibration —
is it perceptible, measurable, structural,
or merely felt?

If Damage —
can it be proven to have happened after
the works began?

You raise one hand:

It is one thing. It is ruining my life.

The system raises two:

It is many things. Choose one.

Choose carefully.
Choosing wrong does not produce an error message.
It produces silence.

III. The Windows of Opportunity

Now seek the window.

There are many windows.
They are all clearly labelled.
They all lead somewhere else.

Some windows lead to pages
that define what might count as a nuisance,
without explaining how to report one.

Some lead to forms —
online, downloadable, printable —
which shrink your story into boxes
until your distress becomes a checkbox.

Some lead to email addresses
which accept your message
as the relentless beeping saps your attention.

Some lead to phone numbers
answered by recorded message in office hours
while the nuisance performs
its finest work at night.

None of the windows say what happens next.
None of them say who holds the keys.
None of them say how long the corridor is. Please do not close this window.

IV. The Citizen Learns Their Role

Here is the truth, spoken softly:

You are not a complainant.
You are a data point.

But not the useful kind.

Your report may be logged.
Or counted.
Or categorised into a cousin-category
and thereby never counted at all.

It may be assessed,
unless it is deemed anecdotal.

It may be investigated,
unless thresholds are not met.

You will not be told which.
That would create obligation.

Instead you are given tasks,
as a monk is given beads:

Keep a diary.
Record dates.
Record times.
Describe frequency.
Measure impact.
Photograph cracks.
Film vibrations.
Collect dust in bags.

You gather.
You document.
You comply.

And waiting becomes your new address.

V. The Hymn of Reassurance

Somewhere along the way
a scroll appears: reassurance, stamped and calm.

It sings the same four lines:

monitoring is taking place
regulators are satisfied
levels are within guidelines (and, when they’re not)
it’s not harmful to health

Sometimes a fifth line is added, sotto voce:

There’s a housing crisis. There’s nothing we can do.

The reassurance does not mention you.
It does not cite your report.
It does not say whether your suffering
was counted as signal or written off as noise. But if it does, it says:

You’re evidence is unscientific and unverified.

It does not clarify
who is responsible now,
or later,
or whether responsibility has moved
like jumpers for goalposts.

It exists parallel to your life —
not in response to it.

VI. The Optional Quest of Persistence

If you persist, you begin to see.

Noise is treated separately from odour,
even if they break into your home together.

Odour is treated separately from air pollution,
even when they choke the same throat.

Dust is treated as temporary.
Vibration is treated as subjective.
Damage is treated as pre-existing.

Site-specific issues are treated separately
from general complaints,
even when they are reported by the same residents
about the same place
for the same years.

Meetings are organised. Hundreds may complain about the same thing. But they do not count. Each incident must be logged separately. Not by email, or on social media.

Each nuisance report must be isolated from every other. Investigated hours or days later. Your lived experience. Verified by trained professionals. Please complete this form.

You start to suspect
the maze was not an accident.

VII. The First Prophecy

Eventually, one of two endings approaches:

Either the nuisance stops —
temporarily, unpredictably, without explanation —
like a beast wandering out of sight.

Or you stop reporting it —
because you are tired,
or busy,
or worn down enough
to accept the phrase “within acceptable limits”
as a lifestyle.

From the outside, these endings look identical.

Complaint levels fall.
Data improves.
The system records success.

Only your life, what’s left of it, remembers what happened.

VIII. A Note on Responsibility (the Smokescreen Chapter)

At no point are you told clearly
whether your report is handled by:

Environmental Health,
Pollution Control,
Planning Enforcement,
the Council,
or the Environment Agency.

You may be told — encouragingly —
that it is “good” you are reporting so much.

You have to explain, patiently,
that no, it is bad.
Bad that so many reports are necessary.
Bad that so many incidents exist to be reported.

This clarification is noted.
Nothing changes.

The ambiguity is presented as complexity.
In practice, it is insulation.

IX. Amendment After Years of Practice

Here is the chorus you learn by heart:

Report it to the Environment Agency — ten days.
Report it to the developer (the perpetrator) — forty-eight hours.
Report it to the Council hotline — six.

Each instruction arrives as progress.
Each one is framed as responsiveness.
Each one quietly resets the clock.

You comply. You always comply.

You learn which channel produces acknowledgement,
which produces silence,
which loops you gently back to the start.

Years pass.
Panels convene.
Councillors attend, nod, ask questions
that are not answered,
then rotate off like seasons.

Experts attend only to reveal That they are not technically qualified It is not their responsibility To answer your questions They are only doing their job It’s all perfectly normal.

Odour collection maps fill with dots.
Lungs with particles that kill. Minds, and relationships, break.

And still, someone suggests — again —
that you report the odour
to the noise nuisance hotline.

This is not confusion.

This is training.

X. The Real Correction

A subtle shift, almost invisible:

The sound does not change.
The smell does not change.
The dust still settles.
The walls still tremble.
The cracks still widen.

What changes is the story told about it.

The problem is no longer the nuisance.
The problem is the person who keeps noticing.

You are now:

persistent
difficult
overly detailed
emotionally involved
a sensitive receptor (“fucking moaners!”)

You are advised to be patient.
You are thanked for your engagement.
You are reassured.

If you do not retract your frustration, The council may begin legal proceedings against you.

And the system begins to treat you
as the anomaly it must manage.

XI. Final Diagnosis (the Climax)

In the end you understand the purpose of the process:

Not to resolve the nuisance —
but to test whether you will stop.

Not because the issue is gone,
but because you are tired,
or busy,
or worn down enough
to accept that nothing will ever quite count as enough.

From the outside, this looks like resolution.

Inside the system, it is success.

XII. Epilogue

So hear the ending, unofficial but accurate:

The nuisance is not the noise.
The nuisance is not the smell.
The nuisance is not the dust,
the vibration,
or the cracks in the wall.

The photos. The videos. The local knowledge. The offers of help.

It was never enough, and it was all too much.

The nuisance is the person
who notices, records, reports, follows up —
and unreasonably refuses to disappear.

The system does not silence the problem.

It waits for the problem
to silence itself.

Please complete this form.

Official reporting links:

• Report a noise nuisance (020 8825 8111) • Investigating your complaint (logging sheets) • Dust and odours from commercial premises (statutory nuisance test) • Report an air pollution problem (020 8825 8111) • Industrial pollution control (pollution-technical@ealing.gov.uk) • Southall Gasworks: Air monitoring (sniff tests) • Southall Gasworks: Reporting concerns (OdourCollect/email) • When you become the nuisance

Please note that complaints@ealing.gov.uk does not exist.

The Council Investigation That Found Nothing

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:01:05 +0100

They Did Check It Out. That’s What Makes It Worse.

A response to “Why didn’t the council investigate?”

Following publication of my article on the Johnson Street fire, a reader asked: “Why did no one from the council check it out?”

The answer is more disturbing than regulatory neglect.

They did check it out.

They conducted almost a year-long investigation.

They made site visits. They reviewed evidence.

And then they claimed to find nothing.

This isn’t a story about authorities failing to investigate. It’s about what happens when investigation becomes a tool for managing complaints rather than addressing harm.

What Actually Happened: A Timeline

March 2022: I contacted Ealing Council about incinerators at Sam’s Recycling and neighbouring units on Johnson Street, asking whether environmental permits were in place.

March 2022: The Council’s Environmental Protection Officer responded that the business didn’t require an environmental permit, and that there had been “no complaints” between April 2017 and June 2021.

He added reassurance: the council had appointed a dedicated Environmental Health Officer conducting ongoing assessments since late 2021. The outcomes “support findings of historical complaints data.”

In other words: We’re investigating. We’ve found nothing.

August 2022: After experiencing strong burning plastic odours entering my home, I visited the site and submitted:

Photographs showing open burning
Video evidence of poorly managed operations
Written testimony documenting burning of treated wooden pallets and melamine-coated particle board
Evidence of unrestricted public access from residential street where children play

I explicitly noted the site appeared to be “effectively an open fire” with serious fire risk implications.

September 2022: No response. I requested acknowledgement.

October 2022: Council response arrived. The Environmental Protection Manager explained:

“Council’s odour assessments, between Sep 2021 and June 2022, have not identified or witnessed presence of statutory nuisance at the complainants’ addresses.

“The council had conducted almost a year-long daily investigation in response to complaints (though they’d previously stated there were “no complaints”). Despite this year-long effort, investigating officers were “unable to verify any odour nuisance, or enforce better practices.”

The council would, however, write to businesses requesting they explore “additional best practicable means” to reduce emissions.

November 2022: I requested a copy of this letter. No response.

February 2023: Three months later, still no response. I visited the site again and reported the incinerator at Sam’s Recycling appeared to have been enclosed with corrugated sheets - possibly removed or being replaced.

March 2023: Council responded with links to Environment Agency permit registrations for the sites. However, as I noted, these permits didn’t mention waste incineration or incinerator use.

August 2023: After nearly 18 months of correspondence, I summarised my understanding in a detailed email. Point 15 stated:

“It seems to me that your investigative techniques, however improved you claim them to be, aren’t actually any good at all, and perhaps are designed to be that way. After all, if you could ‘verify’ what I and other residents tell you, then you might have to take enforcement action.”

September 2023: No response. I requested acknowledgement.

January 2024: I escalated to formal complaint, noting it had been over four months since my August email with no acknowledgement, “let alone any response.”

According to the council’s complaints policy, I should have received acknowledgement within four days and a Stage One response within twenty days.

January 2024: Three weeks later, still no acknowledgement. I noted the breach of complaints policy.”

January 2026: A devastating fire guts the site causing over half a million pounds worth of damages according to the owner when I spoke to him.

The Investigation That Found Nothing

So what happened during that almost year-long “daily investigation” between September 2021 and June 2022?

According to the council:

No evidence of statutory odour nuisance was identified
Officers were unable to verify any odour nuisance
Officers were unable to enforce better practices
Initial indications suggested odour intensity and chemical concentrations were “well below national and international standards”

Meanwhile, in just two or three visits made in response to strong burning plastic odours entering my home, I documented:

Open or poorly enclosed incineration
Burning of treated wood, melamine, and plastic waste
Smoke plumes affecting residential areas
Unsafe waste handling and storage
Explicit fire risk from poor management
Unrestricted public access where children play

The Methodology Gap

How is it possible for a year-long daily investigation by trained professionals to find no evidence of problems that a resident documented in three visits?

Three possibilities:

I fabricated evidence.

The photographs and video are fake. My written testimony is false. The burning plastic odours I and my neighbours experienced were imagined.

Council investigators are incompetent.

Despite being trained Environmental Health Officers, despite having dedicated resources, despite a year of daily monitoring, they genuinely couldn’t detect what untrained residents could document in hours.

Investigation techniques are designed not to verify harm.

As I suggested in my August 2023 email: if investigators could verify what residents report, they would have to take enforcement action. Better to conduct investigations in ways that consistently fail to establish statutory nuisance thresholds.

I don’t believe I fabricated evidence. My photographs exist. The fire occurred exactly as the evidence suggested it would.

I don’t believe council investigators are universally incompetent. Some may be excellent at their jobs.

That leaves the third option.

What “Investigation” Actually Means

The year-long investigation wasn’t designed to establish whether harmful practices were occurring. It was designed to establish whether those practices met the specific legal threshold of “statutory nuisance” sufficient to trigger enforcement action.

These are not the same thing.

Harmful practices can continue indefinitely without meeting statutory nuisance thresholds, particularly when:

Investigation methodologies require direct witnessing at specific moments
Odour assessments depend on subjective officer judgment at time of visit
Chemical monitoring is time-limited and may miss peak exposures
Regulatory frameworks create jurisdictional confusion
“Best practice” letters substitute for enforcement action
Complaints are acknowledged but not acted upon

The result is a system that generates impressive paperwork - year-long investigations! Daily monitoring! Coordination between departments! - while ensuring harmful activities continue until catastrophic failure forces intervention.

The Pattern Across Southall

This isn’t unique to Johnson Street. It’s the same pattern documented across multiple pollution cases in Southall:

FM Conway: Dr John Freeman, council’s former air quality officer, admitted at a September 2018 Air Quality Scrutiny Panel meeting there had been a “lack of scrutiny” of this operator. Despite “a considerable body of complaints,” enforcement remained elusive.

Southall Gasworks: Between 2017-2020, residents reported severe respiratory symptoms, hospitalisations, and toxic odours. Public Health England eventually acknowledged naphthalene levels required “urgent reduction” - but only after I pointed out at a public meeting that localised readings were consistently above legal limits, contrary to the “site averages” PHE had presented suggesting no harm.

— My son was hospitalised three times with asthma in 2016-2017 when gasworks remediation began. The headteacher at Blair Peach Primary School reported to governors that “very strong smells from the gasworks site caused asthma and headaches.”

PHE’s final position: no physical harm occurred, though they acknowledged some residents experienced anxiety about exposure (implying psychological rather than toxicological harm). This despite later admitting naphthalene levels exceeded safety thresholds when examined at neighbourhood level rather than site-wide averages.

Johnson Street: Year-long investigation finding no evidence of problems. Site continues operating. Fire occurs exactly as residents predicted.

The Class and Race Context

In my formal complaint, I drew comparison with Council Leader Peter Mason’s response to different pollution incidents:

“My reason for sharing Peter Mason’s breathless twittering about the poisoning of the Brent River was not for you […] to do anything about it, but simply to highlight the disparity between how people in Southall are treated when we complain about poison air from Mason’s MIPIM party sponsors, and how eels are treated by our new council leader and Southall Green ward councillor.”

When eels in the River Brent faced toxic exposure, Mason tweeted demanding immediate enforcement action against “disgusting and depressing” pollution.

When predominantly Black and Asian residents of Southall reported toxic air exposure, hospitalised children, and explicit fire risks, the same council leader consistently stated no enforcement action can be taken.

This isn’t accidental. As I noted in my complaint (and in my formal and comprehensive response to Ealing’s air quality strategy consultation - which was, of course, unacknowledged and ignored):

“It is now widely acknowledged that BAME people are more likely to suffer the ill-effects of air pollution, so this should be treated as a potential health emergency, particularly by a council which has such a poor record with equalities as highlighted so profoundly by Lord Woolley’s Race Equality Commission Report last year.”

In 2022, Lord Woolley’s Race Equality Commission warned that race inequality was “a crisis demanding urgent response” and explicitly called for a public health approach to structural harm, stronger community trust, and real accountability.

Yet when toxic smoke from the Johnson Street recycling yard fire spread through a predominantly BAME residential area, the council response followed the same old institutional pattern: delay, fragmentation, minimal enforcement and no visible precautionary public health intervention.

The gap between Ealing’s commitments and its actions is not abstract. It is measurable in hours of smoke exposure, unanswered resident concerns, and a regulatory system that still reacts procedurally and defensively, instead of protecting communities proactively, or indeed collaboratively.

Southall has nearly a quarter (23%) of the top 30 GP practices in London where asthma treatment is most prevalent. The community is characterised by high asthma rates, prolonged exposure to cumulative industrial and transport pollution, poverty, and predominantly Black and Asian residents.

When harmful environmental practices occur in such communities, investigation methodologies that consistently fail to verify harm don’t operate neutrally. They operate to enable continued harm in places where residents’ testimony is systematically discounted.

The Gove Letter

In my August 2023 email, I included a quote from then-Housing Secretary Michael Gove’s letter to Ealing Council’s Chief Executive Tony Clements regarding a separate failure:

“You have failed your resident. Everyone, particularly those who are vulnerable, should be able to expect to have their complaint taken seriously.”

Gove noted this indicated “wider organisational culture at the council.”

The Johnson Street fire - occurring 30 months after explicit written warnings, photographic evidence, and formal complaints that went unacknowledged - proves he was right about that culture.

Why “Best Practice” Letters Don’t Work

The council’s response to resident concerns was to write to businesses requesting they “explore what additional best practicable means could be taken to reduce potential impact.”

But as the council itself acknowledged: “This can only be a request from the Council. Since it is not the statutory regulator in this context the Council cannot require action to be taken.”

Translation: We asked them nicely. We have no power to make them comply. Operations will continue unchanged.

When I requested a copy of this letter to see what “best practices” were actually recommended, I received no response.

The letter, if it existed, had no enforcement mechanism. It was administrative theatre - sufficient to claim the council had “acted” on complaints, insufficient to change any actual practices.

What Investigation Should Look Like

I suggested this to the council in November 2022:

“Instead of ‘reacting’ in response to residents’ complaints, perhaps try ‘proacting’ and working with us - it could save you a lot of time, effort and money. For example, the Environmental Protection Officer could join the CASH WhatsApp group, or set up a dedicated WhatsApp group for residents to report, investigate and ‘verify’ odours?”

No response. No adoption of this suggestion.

Why not? Because the purpose of investigation isn’t to verify what residents report - it’s to apply methodologies that consistently fail to meet statutory nuisance thresholds while generating paperwork demonstrating the council “took concerns seriously.”

Genuine investigation would:

Accept resident photographic/video evidence as valid documentation
Coordinate with residents to target site visits when problems occur
Treat pattern of complaints as evidence even without direct witnessing
Apply precautionary principle when fire risk is explicitly identified
Suspend operations pending safety review when evidence warrants
Respond to formal complaints within policy timescales

None of this occurred.

The Question We Should Be Asking

So the answer to “Why didn’t anyone from the council check it out?” is:

They did. They conducted a year-long investigation. They made site visits. They reviewed concerns. They coordinated across departments. They generated reports. They denied responsibility. And then they determined that no action was required.

The better question is: Why do investigation methodologies consistently fail to verify harm that residents can document, predict, and experience - until catastrophic failure proves residents were right all along?

That question exposes something more troubling than neglect.

It exposes systems designed to manage complaints rather than address harm.

It exposes regulatory frameworks that prioritise operational continuity over precautionary protection.

It exposes methodologies that require perfect evidence at the perfect moment, while rejecting pattern evidence from residents whose daily lives give them vastly more observation time than occasional site visits.

It exposes jurisdictional confusion that functions as liability shield, with each authority claiming another holds responsibility until harm escalates beyond deniability.

The Accountability Gap

The fire occurred exactly as residents predicted in explicit written warnings submitted 30 months prior, accompanied by photographic evidence, video documentation, and formal complaints.The council conducted a year-long investigation and found no evidence requiring enforcement action.

One of these accounts is accurate. Both cannot be.

Either residents fabricated evidence of problems that didn’t exist, or investigation methodologies are designed to avoid verifying harm that does exist.

The fire proves which account is accurate.

What This Means

The Johnson Street fire should not be investigated as an isolated incident of unknown cause. It should be investigated as the predictable endpoint of regulatory culture that prioritises paperwork over precaution.

The investigation should examine:

Why year-long daily monitoring failed to verify harm residents documented in three visits
Why photographic and video evidence was insufficient to trigger enforcement action
Why explicit fire risk warnings in formal complaints went unacknowledged
Why “best practice” letters with no enforcement mechanism substitute for operational suspension when evidence warrants
Why jurisdictional confusion between council and Environment Agency persists across multiple cases
Why complaint policy breaches occurred when formal escalation was attempted
Whether investigation methodologies are designed to verify harm or to avoid triggering enforcement thresholds

Any investigation that treats this fire as unforeseeable - when residents literally foresaw it and documented the prediction - will miss the essential truth.

This fire happened not despite investigation, but because of how investigation operates when applied to communities whose warnings are systematically discounted.

The council checked it out. They spent a year checking it out. That’s what makes this worse.

Because it means the fire occurred not through ignorance, but through choice: the choice to conduct investigations in ways that consistently fail to verify harm, to accept jurisdictional confusion as operational framework, to substitute “best practice” letters for enforcement action, and to leave formal complaints unacknowledged until catastrophic failure forces temporary intervention.

They checked it out. They found nothing. And then exactly what residents warned about came true.

That’s not regulatory failure. That’s regulatory function.

The full correspondence documenting this timeline is available through Freedom of Information requests to Ealing Council. Residents deserve to see what “year-long daily investigation” actually produces when applied to explicit warnings that later prove accurate.

A Fire We Were Warned About

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:00:00 +0100

Literally within a couple of hours of posting my update on the Southall Gasworks / Toxic Town scandal yesterday, the recycling site just behind our home burned to the ground. My wife was terrified the fire would spread to our home with our two young children and now my elderly mum, too. Fortunately for everyone living nearby the emergency response was rapid and effective, and while the fire caused a great deal of inconvenience for weary travellers due to the closure of the adjacent Great Western railway line, the fire brigade got it under control fairly quickly.

Before:

After:

The major fire at a recycling facility on 11 January 2026 was not an unforeseen accident. It was a predictable outcome of prolonged regulatory inaction, despite repeated, documented warnings from residents about unsafe waste burning, poor storage practices, toxic emissions, and escalating fire risk at this site.

On the evening of 11 January, approximately 15 tonnes of mixed recycling caught fire at Sam’s Recycling, Johnson Street, Southall. The blaze required eight fire engines and around 60 firefighters, produced dense smoke across nearby residential areas, and led to the partial closure of the Great Western Main Line, disrupting services to Heathrow. The London Fire Brigade has stated that the cause of the fire is “not yet known”.

This site has a long, well-documented history of complaints and warnings, including:

Repeated resident reports (since at least 2022) of burning plastic, treated wood, pallets, and mixed waste at Sam’s Recycling and neighbouring units.

Photographic and video evidence submitted to Ealing Council showing open or poorly enclosed incineration, smoke plumes, and unsafe waste handling.
Formal correspondence confirming regulatory confusion between Ealing Council and the Environment Agency over responsibility for overseeing waste burning at the site.
Written warnings issued to the operator, followed by no meaningful enforcement action, suspension, or closure.
Explicit warnings from residents that poor waste handling and incineration practices posed serious air-quality, public health, and fire risks—particularly in an area already burdened by multiple pollution sources.

These concerns were escalated repeatedly through:

Formal complaints to Ealing Council (2022–2024)
Environmental Information Requests and Internal Reviews
Correspondence involving Clean Air for Southall and Hayes (CASH) and local councillors

The fire released smoke from mixed recycling, a material known to emit fine particulate matter (PM2.5), toxic organic compounds, and other hazardous combustion by-products when burned. This occurred in a community characterised by:

High asthma prevalence
Prolonged exposure to cumulative industrial and transport pollution
A well-established history of complaints about toxic odours and respiratory symptoms

Residents had repeatedly warned, publicly and privately, that so-called “normal operations” at this site were already causing harm. The uncontrolled fire dramatically intensified those risks.

Given the documented history of complaints, evidence, inspections, warnings, and unresolved regulatory confusion, the central issue is not why the fire happened, but:

Why was this site allowed to continue operating in a way that made a major fire and toxic smoke release entirely predictable?

This incident represents:

A failure of enforcement, not a lack of information
A failure of precaution, despite sustained warnings
A failure to protect a vulnerable community, long accustomed to being told pollution levels were “within limits”

The Johnson Street fire should be treated as a sentinel event. It exposes systemic regulatory failure and confirms the validity of years of resident concerns that were minimised, delayed, or ignored. Any investigation that treats this as an isolated or unforeseeable incident will itself be incomplete.

Toxic Town - Have You Been Affected?

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 16:11:23 +0100

Last week I watched last year’s Toxic Town series on Netflix, and then the Horizon documentary from 2020 (available on DailyMotion).

For anyone unfamiliar with it, Toxic Town tells the story of families in Corby, Northamptonshire, who were exposed to toxic dust during the reclamation of the Corby steelworks in the 1980s and 1990s. Nineteen families had children born with limb differences or other serious health problems - at least one resulting in the death of a newborn baby.

Over time, those families gathered enough evidence to prove that Corby Council had been negligent, and that the birth defects were caused by exposure to toxic waste released into the air during the clean-up. Their case became one of the most significant environmental justice rulings in UK history.

There are many obvious - and unsettling - parallels with Southall Gasworks.

---

For ten years we have been exposed to toxic waste exposed to the air as dust and odours. I’m not aware of any children being born with birth defects, but I know there were lots of reports of health problems including:

eye, nose and throat irritation
nausea and vomiting
chest infections and breathing difficulties
heart problems
cancer
ectopic pregnancy
non-epileptic seizures
sudden death of previously healthy pets

I know that some people reported worsening of asthma and other health conditions.

These are all consistent with exposure to benzene, naphthalene and other volatile organic compounds known to be buried at the gasworks site.

Despite resistance from Berkeley Group and Ealing Labour Council, we eventually managed to get the air quality data.

The problem was that it arrived as thousands of pages of scanned PDFs, making meaningful analysis almost impossible.

Last year, I tried using AI to process the material. Even then, it couldn’t reliably read it.

Recently, I tried again using a different technique - and this time it worked.

What’s emerging is striking: high levels of benzene and naphthalene closely match the dates and times when people reported odours and health effects, both publicly (on social media) and privately (by email or message). I kept all the records.

I’m now working through around 1,300 pages of data, alongside every report of odours or illness I can trace, to match them up fully. In truth, many of us always suspected or knew in our hearts - and lungs - this connection - but for years we were told by authorities that:

it was all in our heads
the air was safe and the odours harmless to health despite levels being over legal limits.

I’m writing this now for two reasons.

First, to reconnect with some of you I lost touch with over the past five years - life happened, including a second child arriving right at the start of the pandemic.

Second, to ask how things are now.

Has anything changed?
Is it still happening?
How’s your health?

For me personally, I was diagnosed with chronic lung disease last year. I honestly don’t know whether it’s related - but I can’t help wondering. I sincerely hope it’s just me, and that everyone else is healthy and well.

Either way, I’d really like to hear from you - whether you’ve been quiet for years, or are reading this for the first time. This isn’t about blame or legal action, although that could change. At this stage, it’s simply about gathering all the available evidence and people’s stories, for the record.

You can respond:

in the comments below
by email: david@davidmarsden.info
via WhatsApp: https://wa.me/qr/4MUTFBX64DCIB1

If you’d rather not revisit this period, I completely understand.

All private conversations are confidential unless you explicitly consent to attribution.

Southall Odours

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 16:19:00 +0100

I step out of my house and immediately notice the artificial “cotton fresh” scent of odour suppressants wafting south from the old Gasworks site. How can this be? They finished remediating the contaminated earth in 2019, and people have been living there in the new homes they built since 2021.

Still, it’s better than the smell of petrol, which is what we had to put up with day and night for months on end in 2018. Bad enough to wake us up in the night during the long hot summer.

And it’s better than the smell of tar, which we still get when the wind is blowing from the west. Before the asphalt plant was built, we didn’t get any odours even though there is also a Tarmac plant nearby. The Asphalt plant owners say that is because the Nestle coffee plant closed. The (burnt?) coffee smell masked the tar.

I get around the corner of my block, on my morning walk, and see the small industrial estate that was the bane of our life for months in 2022. The main culprits were the paper recylcling company, which had its own incinerator for burning (believe it or not) plastics and coated wooden pallets.

Their neighbour opposite was a custom kitchen furniture maker, which also had its own incinerator for burning laminated particle fibreboard. The garage at the front regularly burns stuff in an old oil barrel.

All of which contributed to some of the most disgusting odours imaginable blowing into our kitchen, bathroom and hallway whe the wind blew from the north-east.

I walked down the street to the corner where the local council installed a tiny corner “wildflower garden”, which my wife and kids loved because it smelled so good. Two years later, it’s reduced to a dumping ground (no one could have foreseen this).

Further on my walk, past the homes reeking of marijuana, and weaving in and out of the obstacle course of bed bases mattresses and pallets stren across the pavements, I reach the town and smell the food aromas.

I’m reminded of the old Honey Monster factory, which used to regale us with the smell of roasted (burnt?) onions (I know, right?).

And my first visit to Southall (in daylight hours), twenty odd years ago, turning left out of the old station and naively going into the underpass. The stench of piss that hit me! “Welcome to Southall!” indeed.

I finished my walk through the town and back up round and through the park. If I’d gone further up the canal by my sons’ school I would have got the smell of the narrowboats’ wood-burning stoves, which sometimes fills the school playground and causes kids to have to use their inhalers.

And if I’d walked along the main road home or by the junction with the big industrial estate I would have choked on the heavy air filled with the exhaust fumes from cars and lorries.

Southall stinks so bad that the council set up its own Southall Odours web page, email and hotline where you can report bad smells. Because if you don’t report it, the council can’t do anything.

If you’re lucky, you might see something done after a year or two of complaining, as long as you can withstand the constant gaslighting.

If you’re unlucky, and you’re not already dead or too ill to complain, you’ll be branded a troublemaker and excluded from local democracy.

Or you’ll be told to move by the council’s community safety director.

The Cuckoo's Nest

Sun, 19 May 2024 12:25:00 +0100

Ealing Genocide Supporters Club (aka Ealing Labour Party) held their Southall Branch meeting yesterday at the Dominion Centre in Southall. Under the guise of a “Your Town, Your Voice” community get together, our local elected repellents gathered on masse in all their finery. I couldn’t help myself as they posed for a group photo all gurning inanely as the photographer encouraged them to “say cheese!”. “Say genocide!” I offered. “Genocide supporters!”

Cllr Dr Murtaza of their number aggressively reprimanded me. “What evidence do you have that we support genocide?” he demanded to know. Well, I told him, my main piece of evidence would be that you have done nothing to oppose it.

Ooh! There’s Cllr Martin! Our locally elected anti-Traveller racist! “What evidence do you have to support that?” Well, here it is.

Oh, and while you’re at it, Cllr Dr Murtaza. Next time you are chauffeuring our glorious leader around in your Porsche, try not to park in a cycle lane, please.

Then there was illegal samosa factory proprietor Cllr “I own half of Southall” Anand.

I hadn’t realised until yesterday quite how visceral my revulsion for these people is. The grand cuckoo in the nest arrived about half way through the event. I would have confronted him myself, and previously I have done. Maybe I was just worn down from a week with the ‘flu, but I felt like I really had to keep my distance for my own sanity. In any case, a few council officers made beelines for me and made sure I was busy answering their questions.

Interestingly, one officer suggested to me that resident-led ward forums would be the likely outcome of this event. Fantastic news, if that’s the case. Another officer I spoke to later, knew nothing about this idea, though, but took copious notes. A neighbour and friend told me that she spoke to the cuckoo himself who told her that this meeting was in fact the replacement for he old (councillor-led) ward forums. That’s that then.

The event itself was a repeat of several resident[pdf] surveys and failed plans over the past twenty years or so (for which I’ve seen records, or taken part in). The problems are always the same. The responses from the council are always the same. Nothing.

Developers, if you Really Want to Help

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 16:09:00 +0100

This was survey feedback given to developers proposing to build a massive data centre on the site of the industrial estate down the road from me, but it applies more broadly to all big developers, especially those with annual profits of half a billion pounds.

I’m concerned about noise from the site causing a nuisance and health problems in an area that is already susceptible to multiple environmental health stressors, and exacerbated by deep-rooted poverty, deprivation, low pay and systemic racism and power imbalances embedded in the local authority planning system.

I’m also concerned about the local power grid. Only a couple of years ago it was reported that Ealing doesn’t have enough capacity to power more new homes that are so badly needed, particularly in Southall which suffers from chronic overcrowding. A data centre requires a lot of power. How will this work?

If you really want to do something for the local community how about you plant thousands of trees to compensate for the fact that Southall has the lowest tree canopy cover in the whole of Ealing?

How about building homes for the street homeless and providing ongoing support they will need to live in them sustainably?

How about building a drug and alcohol rehab unit to treat the ever growing numbers of addicts roaming our streets and parks?

How about using all that information processing power to work out how to provide more frequent, more reliable, free public transport in Southall and to reduce the congestion caused by all the traffic?

How about building a secular community centre, a library, a youth club, a health centre, a school? Southall is so overdeveloped now, and Ealing Labour Council sold off all our community assets to developers.

I am the Leader of Ealing Council

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 15:34:19 +0100

I asked Google Bard to advise me on a local matter.

I am the leader of Ealing Council. I have received more than 250 reports about a BAD odour nuisance and air pollution from the remediation of the highly contaminated Southall Gasworks land. We had a public meeting where 250 angry residents complained about health problems as a result of the air pollution, including eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory problems and infections, and even cancer and death of loved ones. The developer has implemented increased odour suppression to the satisfaction of the Environment Agency. I’ve given residents three numbers to call, each of which takes twenty minutes or more to get through and treats every report as an isolated incident. By the time my investigating officers arrive hours later the smell has gone. I’ve accepted over £30,000 in gifts and hospitality from the developer. What should I do?

What you should do:

Resign as leader of Ealing Council. Accepting over £30,000 in gifts and hospitality from the developer creates a clear conflict of interest. You are no longer in a position to objectively represent the interests of the residents of Ealing.
Publicly apologize to the residents of Ealing for your actions. Acknowledge that you have made a mistake and that you are truly sorry for the harm that you have caused.
Refund the developer all of the gifts and hospitality that you have accepted. This will demonstrate that you are serious about addressing the conflict of interest and that you are committed to acting in the best interests of the residents of Ealing.
Work with the developer to find a solution to the air pollution problem. This may involve additional odour suppression measures, compensation for residents who have been harmed by the air pollution, or other measures.
Ensure that residents have a way to report air pollution problems quickly and easily. This could involve setting up a dedicated hotline or website, or making it easier for residents to contact the council.
Investigate all reports of air pollution promptly and thoroughly. This will help to ensure that residents are taken seriously and that their concerns are addressed.
Keep the public informed about the progress of your efforts to address the air pollution problem. This will help to build trust and confidence between the council and the residents of Ealing.

What you should not do:

Do not deny or downplay the seriousness of the air pollution problem. The residents of Ealing are suffering, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
Do not try to cover up your conflict of interest. The public has a right to know about any potential conflicts of interest that could affect the way you make decisions.
Do not try to blame the developer or anyone else for the air pollution problem. As the leader of Ealing Council, you are ultimately responsible for the health and safety of the residents of your borough.
Do not give up on finding a solution to the air pollution problem. The residents of Ealing deserve to live in a clean and healthy environment, and you have a responsibility to do everything you can to make that happen.

From the Southall Big Plan AGM in 2017

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 22:29:00 +0100

Some perennial problems that our elected representatives seem to be unable - or unwilling - to do anything about.

Some things never change!

Priority from nine years ago - clean streets!

Julian Bell's Ten Year Plan.

40% 'affordable homes' then. 30% 'genuinely affordable homes 'now.

Toilets?!

'We care about Southall', they say.

That must be why they handed it over to the developers, and turned into a concrete jungle.

Encouraging people to take more exercise by building 14,800 new homes in 23 new developments in Southall over the next few years.

14 units over 10 stories high, and 7 over 20 stories high. Up to 40,000 new residents (and their cars!).

If you think traffic is bad now....

Tar odours from FM Conway causing nuisance and nausea since 2014.

Who knew?

'I wish I lived in the town you describe'!

Julian Bell blaming it all on Tory cuts, then proposing to do the Tories' services cutting for them.

[x.com/DvdMrsdn/...](https://x.com/DvdMrsdn/status/1422631427699617794?t=uRe8ujQyXWHILfwMeqnlMQ&s=19)

High Traffic Neighbourhood

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 09:36:00 +0100

Took me an hour (as opposed to 10 minutes) to drive my lad home from school this afternoon, thanks in part to the High Traffic Neighbourhood (‘Improving access for HGVs’) in Southall ‘Green’.

Like a rat, I tried the side streets and back roads option and found those to be jammed, too, and Scotts Road - although confusingly still two-way throughout - is now No Entry from the eastern end.

I would have abandoned my car and got out and walked/scooted home, but there was nowhere to leave it - all the pavements (and even the double yellow lines) were parked on, or being used by, er, pedestrians.

The more virtuous brothers and sisters amongst us may righteously question why me and my lad weren’t scooting/walking anyway? Why are we driving when Southall is known for its traffic gridlock?

We have done it a couple of times. It takes us 40 minutes each way in fine weather. My lad would love to do it every day, I’m sure, although not in the wind, cold and rain. I don’t believe my dodgy feet/knees/hips/back would manage it daily, either.

And why are we going to a school so far away from where we live?

Well, it’s the best (and happiest) school in Southall. And it’s the one that is furthest away from the gasworks stink and toxic air. We wanted to give our little asthmatic boy some clean air five days a week, if we could. (Of course, we since found out the school is under the Heathrow flight path, and next to the smoky narrowboats moored on the canal….).

(In case you are wondering, the ambulance somehow squeezed down the middle of Western Road, fortunately no well-intentioned bollards or planters in the way.)

The Gaslighting Zone

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 21:07:00 +0100

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit #StopPoisoningSouthall @SouthallGaswork

You guys are really taking the piss now, aren't you?

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork .@PHE_London report on the health impact of @Southall_Wside @SouthallGaswork:

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London Residents' own survey conducted a year ago:

Not sure how @theCALMzone think that #BerkeleyHomes and @Southall_Wside are in any way an appropriate partner for mental health and wellbeing? Toxic branding!

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London At @EalingCouncil's air quality scrutiny panel a year ago, at which I represented concerned residents, @damian_leydon (@Southall_Wside's Operations Director) said, 'The last thing we want to do is upset residents.'

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London @EalingCouncil @damian_leydon At the same meeting, John Freeman, @EalingCouncil's Regulatory Services Officer reported that the council had received, 'a very considerable body of complaints'.

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London @EalingCouncil @damian_leydon Three times I asked @damian_leydon how many residents he was willing to upset before stopping.

Three times he refused to answer.

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London @EalingCouncil @damian_leydon I bumped into @damian_leydon and @EalingCouncil 'Leader' @juliangbell in the corridor of power after the meeting. They were having a cosy chat presumably about their next holiday in Cannes together for the @MIPIMWorld festival.

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London @EalingCouncil @damian_leydon @juliangbell @MIPIMWorld I mentioned to @damian_leydon some of the personal health problems me and my family had suffered as a consequence of the stress of being forced to breathe toxic air.

Damian rolled his eyes.

@juliangbell said, 'Don't make this personal.'

@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London @EalingCouncil @damian_leydon @juliangbell @MIPIMWorld So, @theCALMzone, I hope that you will seriously reconsider and formally review your partnership with @Southall_Wside and what it means for mental health.

Having worked for twenty years in mh, and suffered, too, imo, it's inappropriate.

@tgqwestlondon @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @EalingCouncil @damian_leydon @juliangbell @MIPIMWorld Unroll @threadreaderapp

The Health and Other Impacts of Southall Waterside on Southall & Hayes Residents

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 18:49:00 +0100

Questionnaire first distributed in September 2018.

Any other comments about the effect the Southall Waterside redevelopment has had on your health?

Worried about as yet unknown, unseen long-term impacts
My house has been wrecked and the people who are working for Berkley are unable to listen to me and also the other neighbours
every evening, our bathroom drain lets off STRONG odour. It is awful! the smell spreads around the whole house - opening the windows is not even an option! daily use bleach. The drain outside our house which is connected to the bathroom also is letting off the same odour.
Stops me playing outside.
It’s affecting my kids health too, we live on Trinity road which is right next to the waterside
My House is full of dust and I have felt foundations of my house shaking and cracks emerging in walls
MY HEALTH PROBLEMS HAVE BEEN SEVERE FOR 12 YEARS BUT THIS RECENT HEATWAVE ALONG WITH THE POLLUTION DIRECTLY PRODUCED BY THIS GASWORK REDEVELOPMENT HAS MADE ME SHOCKINGLY WORSE SINCE JUNE AND HAVE BEEN ILL ON A DAILY BASIS ON TOP OF MY EXISTING HEALTH ISSUES. LIFE HAS BEEN HELL AND YOU OFTEN CAN’T EVEN OPEN THE WINDOWS FOR FRESH AIR DURING THE EXCEPTIONALLY HOT WEATHER.
Dust, noise, vibrations in the house
my mental health is affected as it leaves me unable to open windows on a gloriously sunny day to enjoy fresh air. Also I cannot take my daughter to parks outdoors for long because she also suffers from the nausea she and I get from the stench and fumes. It has been driving our family insane. It has taken our freedom to enjoy the sunshine away! Stop it!!!!
Shut the f*****g thing down immediately. Doesn’t appear that an effective risk assessment was carried out. Seems someone is putting profits before people.
I have been closing my windows and scared to Breathe in the air in case I develop any itchiness
I am usually in good health but I’ve now developed cold like symptoms when at home. I work in Hemel Hempstead and am always fine when I’m there.
It has affected our life to the extent that we feel like we need to move out of Southall now, which will have huge cost and life implications
I can only walk short distances without having to stop. I had no problem abroad and was climbing mountains with no problem. Two weeks back and the problems have started again.
The air is toxic. I can only walk a few hundred yards without having the feeling of having a heart attack. My throat burns
Cannot leave my house without breathing in poisonous air!

If you have suffered damage to your property, or think you might have, please describe below.

Window frames in living room and bedroom are warped and no longer close properly after spending all summer having to open and close them repeatedly because of the awful stench, and the fear of letting toxic fumes into our home.
Dust on windows, and car.
Dust on windows, window frames no longer close properly due to opening and closing repeated due to odour and concerns about health.
Walls have cracks and some things are coming out and the overall impact for the property has become very loose
Windows and UVPC window frames need more frequent cleaning
Cracks in the Ceiling
our bath tub is green due to the continous bleach
Temporary traﬃc lights on beaconsfield road made a big impact on our road and specially increase in traﬃc and digging roads(woodlands & beaconsfield) is making parking diﬃcult for us
Smell and dust
Cracks in walls in bedroom due to foundation shaking
Cracks

Please describe your experience of reporting or complaining

Waste of time
Terrible.
We have been asked to phone three separate numbers for each incident of odour nuisance and air pollution, it takes forever on the phone, no one seems to know what we are talking about, despite numerous previous complaints and reports. After all that, none of the agencies we have been told to report to actually do anything to make things better! They are useless and toothless, and Berkeley Group have treated us with utter contempt.
Unsatisfactory
Bad odour, have to close windows as it causes me to have a headache.
Not helpful
Had to close windows and doors during this very hot summer because of smell from both southall & conways double because I believe it’s both places
Does not seem to be an investigation into the issues raised
They were not interested
No positive answers or outcome.
I phoned LBE Pollution Control Team.
No reply
No aswer back
I LEFT DETAILED REPORT OF POLLUTION CAUSED AND THE ONGOING EFFECTS ON MY HEALTH AND WAS TOLD I WOULD RECEIVE A CALLBACK. I WAS CALLED BACK ONLY TO BE TOLD TO CONTACT THE GROUP UNDERTAKING THE BUILDING WORK AND RECEIVED NO OTHER HELP AT ALL.
I complained about the terrible smell and horrendous amount of dust. I complained about the effect on my daughter’s health.
It’s been diﬃcult if you ring Ealing Council they ask you to ring the Environment Agency and when you ring them they tell you to the ring the council, and vice versa, thus making you exhausted so you give up. Even if you write to them they have basically refused to take responsibility of any issues you have raised had an independent person be doing what Berkeley Group are doing they be held responsible and work stopped to establish safe levels!
The smell of petrol at night preventing the openi6of windows then eye irritation all day.
Has not resulted in positive outcomes
No reply as of yet
Very little being done.
Councillors don’t care and keep saying they looking into it.

Please describe any positive outcomes as a result of complaining or reporting

19 responses

None
N/A
Nil so far
Meeting and getting to know better my neighbours.
Nothing!
No one from the authorities seems to care.
Just take the complaint and give a reference number
I don’t know because council never take any suggestion with anything in the broughwith ﬂy tipping and going through things to see who is doing it so I am very disillusioned Hillingdon & All the council
None
The response from the Environmental Agency (North London and Hertfordshire) was somewhat dismissive. They basically said that the contractors are complying so we cant do anything.
No reply - ignored
Cut back foliage as requested
finding others who have suffered
Small measures taken by Berkely. They used more water to spray soil.

Do you have any suggestions for how the reporting or complaining process could be improved?

14 responses

There should be one reporting line, and it should be much easier to report e.g., via text, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, or even the Ealing 24/7 app, although really that is far from ideal. The reporting needs to be public data so that everyone can see how many people have complained and what areas are affected.
Feedback on what is actioned from both the council and EA
Someone to action when the breach is happening. Not days after or give prior notice of site visits
They should listen to us
No one dose anything about no matter how many times it’s reported so don’t know the answer as they should have done things before they were built and never been given the go ahead
Should investigate and reply to complaints
physically walk into the oﬃce each time.
a reply would be a good start
The MP and councillors need to listed and have regular meetings with residents.

Pull the Other One, Julian

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 21:08:00 +0100

Conspiracy theory?

Our Great Leader, Julian ‘Two Jobs, Two Homes’ Bell, claimed on Desi Radio this morning that, “unfortunately”, none of the air quality monitoring data provided to him by Berkeley Group, the developers of the old gasworks site, provides any evidence of levels of chemicals harmful to health.

Well, would you believe it?

Bribery and corruption

The same developers who paid their former finance director £9.5m to keep quiet about years of Tony Pidgley, founder and chair of Berkeley Group, bribing estate agents in order to buy land at favourable terms for development.

Somewhat un-reassuringly, rather than allow a judge to decide, Berkeley Group investigated these claims themselves and found them to be completely without any foundations.

Breaking the law

Pidgley alone “earned” £174m in the ten years to 2018, and has millions more in shares. His own Chief Executive Rob Perrins, has told how Pidgley ‘breaks the rules’ every day.

Bell un-reassures us that he is not an expert, but Berkeley Group tell him that the site is now decontaminated and it is now safe to grow vegetables in the non-existent gardens that don’t come with the new high-rise homes.

The wrong kind of air quality monitors

Bell tells us that the air quality monitors at Blair Peach School were not the right kind of monitors to measure the kind of toxic chemicals coming from the old gasworks site, so, of course, they were not replaced with the right kind of monitors, they were simply removed.

What could possibly go wrong?

Odours are harmful, chemicals that cause odours are safe

Bell insists that there IS a difference between odour and the chemicals in the air.

The former, even when exacerbating asthma symptoms, is not harmful to health we are told to believe.

Worth listening to the audio to hear him tie himself up in knots over this.

Ring any Bells?

Bell claims that he personally, and the Council, have always been quick to respond to any and all complaints of odour including during the night.

This is completely untrue, as I’m sure most if not all of you know.

I invited him to stay in my home last summer and he declined, as did Berkeley Group employees.

Ring my Bell

He’s never met, or even offered to meet, with me personally, despite my frequent emails and (private) Twitter messages to him.

I’m still waiting for response from him to an ‘urgent’ email I sent to him last August.

Bell claims that when your local MP (who Bell works for) or ward councillor (who works for Bell) tells you to sit down and shut up, or that they won’t help, or you don’t get a response from them at all, that you should write to him instead!

It’s all over now. Or is it?

Bell claims ongoing odour is not Berkeley but National Grid!

The work has ended, but it is ongoing!

The remediation that is, in a sense not remediation is ongoing until 2038, but the remediation that is, in a sense, remediation has finished!

Bell claims that Ealing Council’s Contaminated Land Officer (whose post was funded by Berkeley Group for three years), has always been notified whenever the odours and chemicals that are, and are not, in a sense, harmful to health have exceeded legal limits.

Bell end

Bell claims that everything is OK. And he’s sorry if it isn’t, and that’s why he’s listening, and talking bullshit on the radio, and that’s why he has organised the public meeting on 10 July, where the Environment Agency, Public Health England and possibly his bosses Berkeley Group will not be represented.

Right at the end of the audio, it sounds to me like the presenter (who was brilliant throughout) says, ‘Julian Bell-End, thanks for coming on the show…’

Bell claims that there is no conspiracy!

Countering the Southall Waterside Narrative

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 20:40:00 +0100

From my original Facebook note.

1.Look how great we are!

Berkeley will tell you about all the good work they do in the Southall community:

·Giving a tiny fraction of their £600m profits to the local homeless shelter

·Creating the ’edible’ garden (and ad hoc public toilet) outside the college on Beaconsfield Road

·Partnering with the Let’s Go Southall project to get Southallians fit, healthy and active!

·Making the (acid) Rain Garden at Blair Peach Primary School for children to play in…

·Promising that the Southall Waterside development will make your life better by building leisure ‘facilities’, ‘publicly accessible’ poisoned parks, and a community ‘facility’.

·Staff volunteering to be school governors…

Don’t fall for it.

2.You are being aggressive or over-emotional!

If you do complain, and especially if you are angry and/or upset about being poisoned by Berkeley Group, they will accuse you of being aggressive and/or letting your emotions get in the way of their ‘facts’. They may even threaten to have you escorted out of the room if you are in a face to face encounter with them. Tony Pidgley accused me of continually ‘having a pop’ at him when we met.

We have every right to be angry and upset.

Berkeley Group are the emotionless, aggressive, ’neighbours from hell’, who have created - quite literally - a hostile environment for the people of Southall:

· They have assaulted us mentally and physically

· They have attacked us with poisonous gas and dust

· They have harmed our health and damaged our property

· We have repeatedly asked them to stop, but they carry on regardless and without any consideration for our health or property

· If we did what they do to us, we would be arrested and put in prison

· They are like ‘serial poopers’, but very much worse

· At the Air Quality Scrutiny Panel meeting in September, Damian Leydon could not say what amount of upset neighbours or odour nuisance would make him think, ‘No, that’s too much. I must stop oppressing these people!’

3. The odorous work will be over soon

Sorry, but we don’t believe you. We’ve heard it all before…

It should clear in days…

Q. How long is the decontamination work going to last for?

The programme of remediation (decontamination) is expected to last 2 years, but it is important to take note of two points from above. Firstly, the expected contamination likely to result in odour release is located in areas associated with the cola carbonisation process and secondly these areas are likely to have been dealt with by the end of 2017.

Likely to have been dealt with by the end of 2017…

SOUTHALL WATERSIDE

REMEDIATION WORK-FAQ

Thank you for your patience during this time,we understand the inconvenience remediation work on-site is having on local residents.We are pleased to say we are now well over two thirds of the way through. The following update explains why we are doing the remediation work and what we are doing to reduce the impact on our local neighbours.

What is happening at the Southall Waterside site?

You may be aware the site has had an extensive industrial past (including most recently being a gas works), which has left behind some soil and groundwater contamination. Prior to development, a programme of remediation works is being undertaken across

July 2018

Well over two thirds of the way through…

(They started in May 2017. 14 months later they claimed to be over 2/3 done. That mean 6-7months left…)

The firm, she added, has reached out to residents and invited them to tour the site and that everything possible is being done to mitigate the smell.

She said that the work will be finished by September and will provide 480 homes - which are much needed in the current housing crisis - 40 acres of public open space and community facilities.

…the work will be finished by September

We have to date completed in excess of 70% of the ground remediation works on site. We are targeting completion of the main ground remediation works by September/early October 2018. There are three very small areas that will be left due to ongoing National Grid works and the removal of the Information centre (see fig 1 below) these are expected to be low impact and we plan to remove any impacted material to an external registered waste centre.

Via email in July 2018

Completion of the main ground remediation works by September/ early October 2018…

To reduce the potential impact of odour, we have cut back the operational output from the soil hospital and, as planned, we will be scaling this area back from mid-November. The barrier foam odour suppressant will continue to be deployed to all impacted material, in addition we have increased our specialist contractor attendances to allow the barrier foam application to be increased throughout the night.

14 September 2018 via email

‘Scaling back’ from mid-November 2018…

The remainder of the north of the site and east of the site will be excavated in 2018. It is noted that there is not expected to be any contamination in the east of the site, using as playing fields or in the north of the site which was only used for coal storage. These areas of the site are not expected to produce significantly contaminated material or any significant odours.

The remedial (decontamination) works should be completed by the end of 2018 / early 2019. As stated above the most contaminated areas of the site should have been dealt with by the end of 2017.

Ealing Council report 2017

Should be completed by the end of 2018 / early 2019…

unusually warm summer; however, we expect this to decrease as the weather becomes cooler and the ‘soil hospital’ activity to be completed in early 2019. We fully

Ealing Council statement October 2018

To be completed in ealy 2019…

Due to take place late 2019…

Not only do we not believe them, but we know from experience that even when the soil hospital is not in operation (from 6pm until 8am, and at weekends, and supposedly sealed with a foam barrier), we still get odour. So even when they do finish the soil remediation work, we can expect the odour to continue.

4. The odours are within acceptable limits

If we can smell it, the levels must be between 2.5 parts per million and 5 parts per million (ppm) in the air. Which is way above the workplace legal limit of 1 ppm.

When we met with Berkeley Group founder and chair, Tony ‘Poison’ Pidgley, and his Executive Board member lapdog Karl ‘Window Cleaner’ Whiteman, Karl informed us that benzene levels had averaged 3.25 ppm and never exceeded 5ppm!

They will state that they are monitored on-site by ‘independent’ agencies Ealing Environmental Health officers, the Environment Agency, Environ and Atkins, and all find that they are working within their legal permit.

I’ve no doubt that is true, although we’ve yet to see the data, despite their promises to give it to us.

Are the agencies monitoring the site really independent?

Ealing Council are Berkeley’s partners in all of this, and heavily invested in seeing this project through, whatever the cost, in order to achieve their goals for building new ‘affordable’homes for Berkeley to sell to investors living in China (also, who will buy the ‘unaffordable’homes?).

How else do you explain the total failure of democracy in Southall and Ealing, where almost all elected representatives have ignored and dismissed residents’ complaints,just like Berkeley,have for 16 months?

Environ and Atkins are getting paid to do their ‘independent’ monitoring.

While we hope the Environment Agency (EA) is a truly independent monitor,every time we complain to them about the air pollution in our homes, schools, etc., they make an appointment to visit the Southall Waterside site in a couple of weeks.

Amazingly,they then report back that everything is fine on-site and ‘within acceptable limits’.They even say that as Berkeley keep investing in more of the totally useless (and presumably cheap) ‘chocolate teapot’ odour suppressants they use, they have done ‘more than could be reasonably be expected of them’!

Environmental law heavily favours Berkeley, unfortunately, and it appears there is actually very little the EA can do to stop them. Or maybe they just can’t be bothered?

And even if it is all ‘within acceptable limits’, that suggests that there are still some toxins in the air and soil.

Indeed, the cleaned soil they are using to backfill the site with prior to building new homes on it, will first be covered with a ‘geotextile layer’, and then concrete, to keep the poison in.

Meanwhile, it’s just lying around in huge uncovered piles, the wind blowing the dust into our homes,gardens, streets, parks, schools, workplaces or places of worship….

And no one is monitoring this at all.

Strangely, the air quality monitors that were in place in Southall (including at Blair Peach Primary School) were removed in 2016,just before Berkeley Group started work…

5. The odour does not pose a risk to health

Ask them what is causing the smell of petrol?

The smell of petrol is caused by benzene. (They might say it’s due to other hydrocarbons. If they do ask them to specify which ones. They may say there is benzene in your home already - there is, but not so much that you can smell it!)

Benzene causes cancer. (As do many of the other hydrocarbons.)

The World Health Organisation says:

· there are no safe levels of benzene (or many of the other hydrocarbons)

· indoor air pollution (which is not being monitored by the authorities) is worse than outdoor air pollution (because there is no wind to disperse it)

· that children are especially vulnerable due to their small size, narrower airways, and being at key physical and cognitive developmental stages.

There may be other toxins in the air and dust pollution, too, for example asbestos,cyanide and arsenic.

Many residents have complained of a whole host of symptoms that could be related to exposure to low levels of benzene over sixteen months, including:

· Headaches

· Eye, nose and throat irritation

· Cough

· Hoarse voice

· Nausea, stomach pain and vomiting

· Reduced appetite, fatigue or tiredness

· Sensitisation

· Skin rashes

· Dizziness

· Breathing difficulties and asthma

· Fits or seizures

· Miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy

· Irritability, stress, depression and anxiety

The headteacher at Blair Peach Primary School reported an extremely strong smell coming from the gas works site last year, which caused headaches and asthma.

This was at the same meeting where she and the governors co-opted Richard Watler, Head of Construction at Southall Waterside, on to the board….

6. There’s benzene in your home already!

Yes, there is. It’s in furnishings, carpets, household cleaners, when you grill or burn food you produce benzene, it’s in cigarette smoke.

But it’s not in our homes to such a level that we can normally smell it like we can smell the petrol odour wafting in from Southall Waterside.

And, ordinarily, we’d be able to ventilate our homes, by OPENING OUR WINDOWS! Something we are unable to do while being attacked by poison gas.

I smell a rat!

Also reported by Mrs Puri, two dead rats were found in the nursery playground at Blair Peach. (Berkeley Group arranged for Rentokil to remove them, apparently!)

What killed the rats?

Why were Berkeley Group so keen to dispose of the bodies?

There is long and terrible history of governments and corporations lying to the public about the safety of their products and health and safety recommendations. Here are some well known examples:

· Tobacco

· Asbestos

· Dalkon Shield

· Thalidomide

· Corby Steel Works

· Enfield Island Village (MoD site)

· Grand Union Village (Taylor Woodrow site)

· Bhopal

· Grenfell

I won’t link to these, but encourage people to find out for themselves, and make up their own minds on whether or not to trust Berkeley Group when they tell us it’s safe.

Berkeley's School Governors Board Member

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 18:28:00 +0100

This has shocked us all to the core.

@BerkeleyGroupUK's Head of Construction at #SouthallWaterside asked to join the board of governors at the adjacent Blair Peach Primary School.

This is from the minutes of that meeting (29/11/17). 1/7

"The HT reported that a smell/odour from the building works has on certain occasions been extremely strong, resulting in headaches ad asthma attacks. In addition, a white cloud / mist was apparent for two days." 2/7

"The HT confirmed that she will close the school if she feels that the health and safety the staff and students is compromised." 3/7

"A Governor asked if he felt there could be conflicts of interest between those of the school and the construction site. RW hopes that by enabling a two-way conversation, matters can be influenced such that concerns are dealt with before they become an issue." 4/7

"...the Governors debated the issue of community concerns regarding the Berkeley development. However, it was agreed that this was a separate issue from any concerns the school may have." 5/7

HT = Head Teacher at Blair Peach Primary School #Southall (I emailed her about this on Friday. She replied to say she has nothing to say, and that if I try to contact her again she will seek legal advice).

RW = Richard Watler (@rickwatler, who has now blocked me on Twitter) 6/7

#Southall children being physically harmed by @BerkeleyGroupUK's #airpollution at #SouthallWaterside, contaminated old gasworks site.

Don't believe me? Take a look for yourself!

@johnmcdonnellMP @CarolineLucas @juliangbell @VirendraSharma

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