Environment on Southall Stories

Feeling the Heat

Mon, 25 May 2026 15:34:05 +0100

Above: the council’s own climate risk map for Ealing. Reds and dark reds mark the highest-risk neighbourhoods. Source: Ealing CEES 2025 Progress Report, p.13.

On 11 July 2018, I recorded a video for the Clean Air for Southall and Hayes campaign’s petition to stop the toxic and odorous open-air remediation of Southall’s massive old Gasworks site by the mega rich developer Berkeley Group.

In the video, I described how I had to keep my windows closed all night and all morning in the middle of a sweltering three-month heatwave.

Why?

Because of the stink of petrol outside, a result of Berkeley’s “clean-up” operation.

With very little respite, we were enveloped in the sickly-sweet smell for most of that year’s three-month heatwave.

As a result, and as Berkeley refused to stop, the temperature inside my home — 26°C — was around 5°C higher than the temperature outside.

Almost eight years on, we are having a mini-heatwave in the last week of May, with temperatures topping 30°C for the next few days in London.

In 2018, the highest temperature in May was 28.5°C.

In June, it was 29°C. In July, 34°C. In August, 32°C.

The all-time UK record temperature in May, set in 1944, was 32.8°C.

“So what?” you might ask. “It’s nothing to worry about. Most people will be fine. It’s worse in the Global South, and people survive there with less to cope.”

It is true that most people will be fine.

But does that mean we should not worry about those who won’t?

Last year, there were more than 1,000 excess heat-related deaths in the UK.

Just last week, the Climate Change Committee warned that the majority of homes in the UK will overheat by 2050, water shortages will worsen, and the costs to public welfare could reach hundreds of billions of pounds a year.

What has all this got to do with Southall?

Quite a lot, actually.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that the impact of excess heat is worse in Southall.

But don’t worry! Ealing Council is here!

In April 2019, as the so-called “soil treatment hospital” at the Gasworks was officially decommissioned, Ealing Council declared a Climate Emergency.

And they’ve been “fighting” this climate emergency ever since.

Mostly, some might argue, by closing recycling centres, blocking roads with giant plant pots, and granting planning permission to transform the “Queen of the Suburbs” into a new Manhattan.

But the council has a strategy.

Ealing Council knew

On 11 January 2021, Ealing Council adopted its Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy.

The strategy committed in writing to climate justice, acknowledging in Section 6 that low-income households contribute least to emissions, are most negatively affected by climate impacts, and are least able to participate in decision-making.

Section 15 commits the council to use its planning powers — described as “one of the most influential tools available to the council to mitigate the effects of climate change” — to “maximise urban greening”, “protect and enhance our network of open spaces”, ensure new developments are “Air Quality Positive”, and “steer development to the areas with the lowest probability of risk from flooding.”

The targets are testable.

Tree canopy cover from 16.9% to 23% by 2030 (N1.1).
50,000 energy efficiency measures in private homes by 2025 (E1.4).
10,000m³ of additional surface water storage by 2025 (N3.4).
All major developments built to net zero (E2.2).

Ealing knew, in 2021, exactly which residents would bear the cost.

Veteran Southall Green councillor Jasbir Anand was appointed to lead the fight for residents.

Residents knew

Six weeks after the April 2019 declaration of a Climate Emergency, Ealing Transition Initiative submitted a detailed community response — pages of specifics, costed by category.

Among the asks:

retrofit of existing housing stock beginning with local authority homes;
shade trees in every street rather than ornamentals;
Passivhaus or equivalent standards for all building works and conversions; - and no further building on green spaces.

Seven years on, none of the four has been delivered in the borough’s most heat-vulnerable neighbourhoods.

Warren Farm Nature Reserve was saved but is scheduled to have building works right next door as new sports pitches and facilities are erected.
Passivhaus applies to new council-built housing only.
The trees that have been planted have mostly gone elsewhere — not in Southall.
And the retrofit numbers will be addressed below.

Only in Southall

Three years ago, I went through the council’s draft Air Quality Strategy line by line.

The strategy named Southall as an Air Quality Focus Area, identified BAME and low-income populations as disproportionately exposed, and committed to “fighting inequalities.”

But by then, the council had already:

approved continued open-air remediation of the contaminated Southall Gasworks site, including through the 2018 heatwave, when residents pleaded with leaders to halt work
failed to enforce the Construction Management Plan — and confirmed in an FOI response that it did not hold a complete copy of the original
refused to widen South Road bridge by the train station, the one mitigation promised when the Mayor overruled local planning objections
proposed destroying most of the rewilded Warren Farm Nature Reserve to build sports pitches the consulted public did not want.

Southall already has the lowest tree canopy cover in Ealing.

What I suggested in 2023

“If Ealing is serious about ‘fighting’ inequalities, action must be targeted to protect vulnerable people in Southall to reduce air pollution and its impact on the health of its large, mostly economically deprived and non-white population.”

“The Strategy and Plan must target children and older people, people with lung conditions, and pregnant women: outside schools and school run hours.”

[I wrote that in January 2023. As it happens, I was diagnosed with chronic lung disease the following year.]

“The Council must question if it is ethical to promote active travel in Southall when it knows that it is a high pollution area and that most of its population is particularly vulnerable to its adverse health impacts.”

I also proposed something specific:

“If the council’s air quality strategy is to have any real meaning and intent to address air pollution and multiple inequalities in the Southall Air Quality Focus Area and beyond, it must surely include a vast tree-planting project, and proper maintenance of our existing parks if no new ones can be created on non-contaminated land.”

The council adopted its draft strategy with some minor adjustments, and apparently ignored my submission.

The 10,000 trees planned in the new adaptation strategy are going to the new regional park, not into the priority neighbourhoods.

The council’s schools climate-change resource page, run by the School Travel Team, still does not mention heat adaptation, and still promotes active travel in a borough now confirmed as ninth worst in England for heat vulnerability.

Ninth worst in England

In July 2022, Friends of the Earth published an analysis of research led by Professor Sarah Lindley at the University of Manchester, ranking every English local authority by the number of neighbourhoods most socially vulnerable to extreme heat.

Ealing came ninth out of the whole of England.

Seventy-nine priority neighbourhoods for adaptation. Worse than Haringey, Brent, Lambeth, Hounslow, Wandsworth, and every other west London borough. Better than only Birmingham, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Nottingham, Southwark, Leicester, and Enfield.

The research, drawing on University of Bristol heat-exposure modelling and over forty social vulnerability indicators, identified where heat would land hardest, who lived there, and what they could afford to do about it.

Friends of the Earth then overlaid the rankings with Leeds University carbon-footprint data and found that priority neighbourhoods have lower than average carbon footprints. The communities most exposed to the climate impact are least responsible for the climate cause.

And one finding largely ignored at the time of publication:

People of colour are four times more likely than white people to live in a priority neighbourhood for adaptation.

The council had this analysis nearly four years ago.

As Professor Hannah Cloke, Regius Professor in Meteorology and Climate Science at the University of Reading, put it last week:

“The solutions exist. The challenge now is turning adaptation plans on paper into streets, homes, rivers and infrastructure that are ready for what’s coming.”

The plans on paper, in Ealing’s case, are five years old. The streets, homes and infrastructure have moved in the opposite direction.

The Leader’s own words

It wouldn’t be Southall Stories without a quote from our newly re-elected leader.

In June 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the man who would become Leader of Ealing Council the following year, Peter Mason, posted to his then-Twitter account:

“we’re basically operating a system that’s structurally racist. We can’t figuratively keep washing our hands of this, whilst telling BAME communities to do it literally. #BlackLivesMatter”

Three years later, at the unveiling of replacement memorial plaques for Blair Peach and Gurdip Singh Chaggar — both killed in racist attacks on the streets of Southall — Mason named structural racism as the cause of Southall’s gaps in life expectancy, earnings and housing.

He’s not wrong.

He’s also been Leader of the council during the period in which the Friends of the Earth analysis has sat on the public record. That analysis quantified one component of what the Leader publicly described.

People of colour, four times more likely to live in priority heat-adaptation neighbourhoods.

The council’s measured delivery against its 2021 climate justice commitments, in those neighbourhoods, is what the Leader’s stated diagnosis describes in practice.

Feet to the flames

In January 2022, the Ealing Race Equality Commission — set up by the council and chaired by Lord Simon Woolley — published its final report.

Mason had been in office as Leader for eight months.

Woolley’s framing was direct: previous reports across the country had ended up “gathering dust on shelves – and we do not want that to happen with this report.”

Priority 7 of the recommendations called for an independent body that would keep “feet to the flames” in order to “hold the next Ealing administration to account for progress”, with the Leader required to report on progress annually from 2023.

The council established the Citizens’ Tribunal in response.

Two years on, the Tribunal’s own evaluation report records that 58% of its members reported difficulties in obtaining the necessary data from the council. “This in turn diluted their ability to make informed recommendations.”

The council’s own accountability body has said, in writing, that the council will not give it the evidence it needs to hold the council accountable.

EREC’s housing recommendations — empowered tenant groups, a private-renters rights campaign, ward-level housing advice hubs — sit alongside one statistic from the same report.

Citing North West London Community Voices research, EREC recorded that BAME households in the borough are four times more likely to be overcrowded than the borough average. Private renters six times. Social renters eight times.

That is the demographic of the seventy-nine priority neighbourhoods, set out in the council’s own commissioned report, six months before Friends of the Earth published the heat-vulnerability rankings.

What the Council knew, and when

In January 2021, the council adopted its Climate and Ecological Emergency Strategy, committing in target E1.4 to 50,000 energy efficiency measures in private homes by 2025.

By July 2021 — six months later — the council’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Climate Action, Cllr Deirdre Costigan (since July 2024, the Labour MP for Ealing Southall), wrote to the then Secretary of State, Kwasi Kwarteng, telling him in writing that “the major levers to reduce costs and make retrofitting affordable for more households do not sit with local government”.

Without national VAT cuts, the costs of retrofitting would “fall beyond the means even of relatively financially comfortable households.”

In November 2021, the London Assembly published a written answer from the Mayor to a question from Onkar Sahota AM.

The question recorded that “Ealing has only enough funding to start work on 68 council homes out of the 5,000 that are ready for refurbishment.”

That is the council’s own social housing backlog, on the record. 68 out of 5,000, ten months into a strategy promising 50,000 private homes by 2025.

By August 2023, Cllr Peter Mason and Cllr Costigan jointly wrote to Grant Shapps, then Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. Their letter quantified the gap in writing:

“this is estimated to be in the order of £300M for Council-owned properties – and £5B for all domestic properties within the Borough. The gap between existing funding from central government and the task in hand is profound.”

Five billion pounds. The council’s own figure, signed by its Leader, for the cost of decarbonising the borough’s housing stock.

On 21 January 2026, the council’s own Around Ealing magazine confirmed the delivery numbers.

Since May 2022, 1,207 of its own homes have been upgraded.

A further 732 council homes are scheduled for retrofit by 2028 — part-funded by £6.5 million from the Government’s Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund, and £35.5 million from the council over three years.

£35.5 million from the council, against a £5 billion gap the Leader had quantified two and a half years earlier. 0.7% of what the council itself told the government was needed.

The arithmetic looks worse still when set against Southall’s housing tenure.

In October 2022, speaking at a Southall Community Alliance forum, Mason described his own ward with unusual candour.

“If you live in Southall,” he said, “your opportunity and your access to get onto the housing ladder is next to nothing. 80% of the homes in Southall Green are in the private rented sector. The challenges and the quality of accommodation available leads people having to live in terrible situations.”

The council’s current retrofit programme — its own social housing stock — touches at most 20% of homes in the Leader’s own description.

The other 80% depends on the £5 billion private-sector decarbonisation the Leader himself told government, ten months later, was not funded.

Cadent Gas, the regional gas network operator, published its own data in March 2023 confirming that 16% of households in Ealing Southall live in fuel poverty — higher than the average both nationally and in London.

The same housing stock now ranked ninth in England for summer heat vulnerability is also among London’s worst for winter cold. Cadent privately funded a £94,540 community grant to mitigate this.

The public retrofit programme that would have reached most of those households is the same one the Leader told government, in writing, was £5 billion short.

Where did all the trees go?

The council’s own 2023 progress report confirmed the “commitment to plant 50,000 trees by 2026.”

The council’s 2025 Progress Report records over 41,500 trees planted since 2022 — the majority within the West London Regional Park, connecting Pear Tree Park, Warren Farm, Churchfields Recreation Ground and Horsenden Hill. A further 10,000 are planned, the report says, “prioritising areas with the least greenery.”

The areas with the least greenery, on the council’s own iTree data, are in Southall.

The planting to date has mostly gone elsewhere.

The very last “Going forward” item in the Nature section of the 2025 report is more revealing:

“Undertake an updated canopy cover survey to guide our approach to enhancing wildlife and connecting people to nature.”

The council is commissioning a new canopy survey in 2026 — after most of the planting has been completed.

Berkeley Group’s “Poison Park” — the so-called “green” space grafted on to contaminated Gasworks land — will be counted towards Southall’s green infrastructure on paper.

The site’s contamination history is well documented.

In May 2019, The Observer reported that fifty Southall residents (including me) interviewed by Jo Griffin described “breathing difficulties, the onset and worsening of asthma, eye irritation, irregular heartbeats, migraines, skin rashes, chest infections, nausea, dizziness, memory problems, a sensation of ‘internal burning’ and other symptoms.”

The soil was found to contain “hydrocarbons including benzene, a known carcinogen, naphthalene, asbestos and cyanide.”

The same Observer article cites a toxicology report obtained via Freedom of Information request.

The note, from Berkeley’s own consultants Atkins, reads:

“there are no private gardens proposed cannot grow veg on the contaminated soil ever ! [sic]”

That is the developer’s own technical record, on the site of the council’s new “green infrastructure” for Southall.

A pattern of unmet targets

The 2021–22 Council Plan set three “transformational targets” against the climate priority:

shifting residents away from car use,
hitting a 60% recycling rate by 2022,
and improving the energy performance of “social housing stock, council buildings, and resident homes throughout the borough.”

As I documented in detail, the council’s 2016 switch to fortnightly collections — sold to residents on the promise of cost savings and higher recycling rates — produced an immediate 103% spike in fly-tipping, and recycling barely changed: from 45% in 2015 to 49% in 2024.

The car use target has not been measurably reported against in any way the average resident can see.

The 2025 Progress Report introduces a new “Better Living Framework” promising six outcomes, including “Comfortable spaces: more homes, workplaces, public- and private- spaces are thermally comfortable all year round.”

That is the heat-adaptation commitment, restated yet again.

It joins a series: the 2019 declaration, the 2021 strategy, the 2021–22 Council Plan, the 2023 Air Quality Strategy, the 2026 Adaptation and Resilience Strategy.

Each iteration commits to the same outcome in different language.

None of them has been delivered in the priority neighbourhoods such as Southall.

The Local Plan in Examination

Section 15 of the 2021 strategy described the Local Plan as “one of the most influential tools available to the council to mitigate the effects of climate change.”

On 10 December 2025, the draft Local Plan was tested at the statutory Examination in Public.

Ealing Friends of the Earth’s Nic Ferriday presented evidence to the inspectors arguing that the plan’s “overriding policy” was to build “tens of thousands of flats, mostly in huge tower blocks” with “no mention of the fact that building and running high tower blocks emits huge quantities of carbon. Terraces of around five storeys are, in contrast, much more energy efficient but can still provide a similar density of housing.”

Ferriday also noted that the council’s “change team” — the unit responsible for delivering climate action — did not attend the EiP climate session, despite climate action being listed as one of the council’s three core aims. The accountability mechanism the council set up to drive climate delivery did not turn up to the formal planning examination where its strategy was being tested.

The council’s response to public criticism cited “the largest deployment of solar power in west London, planted more than 40,000 trees, installed over 1,000 electric vehicle charging points” and the borough’s score in Climate Emergency UK’s 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecard.

The council mentioned one figure from the assessment: “90% in the planning and land use category.”

The remaining categories are publicly available on the same scorecard.

Ealing scored 53% on Buildings & Heating — no change since 2023.
54% on Transport — down one point since 2023.
62% on Collaboration & Engagement, 57% on Biodiversity, 51% on Governance & Finance.

The borough’s headline 65% total score places it joint tenth out of 186 single-tier councils.

But the gap between its 90% on what it has written and its 53% on housing decarbonisation — the category most relevant to the £5 billion retrofit gap — is the entire argument of this piece in two numbers.

Tenth in policy. Ninth in measured vulnerability.

The council is celebrating the assessment of what it has written, against the measurement of what its residents experience.

The 2026 strategy

The forthcoming Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategy, previewed by MyLondon, proposes:

Passivhaus standards for new council-built housing. The 2021 ETI submission asked for this seven years ago, for all building works and conversions.
A 575-hectare regional park with 10,000 more trees and a rewilding project including beavers — alongside the 41,500 already planted in the same regional park.
District heating powered by waste heat from data centres, which currently consume 25% of the borough’s energy supply. At least two more are planned for Southall.

The strategy will be put out to consultation. The council has said it wants input from “community leaders.”

Act For Ealing, launched in January 2021 by Ealing Transition Initiative and community partners as “an online hub and network through which existing and emerging community groups can come together,” is described in the council’s 2025 Progress Report as a network of “60 organisations” that the council “wants to build on its role as a convener” of.

Ealing Transition Initiative’s detailed 2019 community proposals remain unanswered.

The ward forums through which residents could directly question councillors on the record have been replaced by the council-convened Your Voice, Your Town programme.

What next?

A serious adaptation strategy for a borough ranked ninth in England would publish, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, what has actually been delivered against the 2021 commitments.

It would acknowledge openly that the most-exposed neighbourhoods are the same ones bearing the air pollution, the gas works contamination, the canopy deficit, overdevelopment and the demolition of half-built new council homes. It would commit replanting and retrofit funding to those neighbourhoods in proportion to risk.

It would give the Citizens’ Tribunal the data its own members say they cannot obtain.

It would answer the question I asked them three years ago:

Is it ethical to promote active travel in Southall when the council knows the population is particularly vulnerable to the adverse health impacts of the air it is being told to breathe more deeply?

It would ensure that the climate team responsible for delivering the strategy turned up to the statutory Examination in Public testing it.

And it would stop treating “consultation” as a stage in a process whose outcome is already decided.

The council declared a climate emergency in 2019, and had the Ealing Transition plan in response.

Ealing had its own strategy in 2021. By July 2021 it was privately telling government the strategy could not be funded. By November 2021 the GLA was publishing that it had funded 68 of 5,000 council homes ready for retrofit.

By January 2022 the Ealing Race Equality Commission was telling it to hold its own feet to the flames. Ealing missed its own 2022 recycling target. It received Friends of the Earth’s climate change analysis.

It received my submission on the Air Quality Strategy in January 2023. Cadent Gas published Southall’s 16% fuel-poverty figure in March 2023. By August 2023 the Leader was telling government the retrofit funding gap was £5 billion.

Peter Mason has repeatedly publicly named the system he operates as structurally racist.

The Climate Change Committee published its national warning this week.

This bank holiday weekend and half-term we are cooking in our homes.

More vulnerable people will die.

Across that period, in the same neighbourhoods named in every successive evidence base, the council has approved more density, less canopy, more contamination, less green space, and fewer of the social rent homes that house the residents who carry the risk.

Ealing did not stumble into ninth place in England. It knew. It was warned. It legislated. It built anyway.

If you can’t stand the heat, don’t declare a climate emergency.

And don’t live in Southall.

The Man in the Middle

Thu, 07 May 2026 10:29:47 +0100

Yes, yes, yes, he’s on the right in this picture!

On 6 November 2023, Berkeley Group’s Southall development — The Green Quarter, rising on the site of the former Southall gasworks — handed a £2,500 cheque to the Western Road Urban Garden Project.

The cheque was branded with Berkeley’s logo and The Green Quarter’s name.

It was presented in the garden and photographed for Berkeley’s website, where the story was published on 23 January 2024.

The image is striking for reasons that go well beyond a small community grant.

The person presenting the cheque on Berkeley’s behalf was Jags Sanghera, Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement.

The person present as chair of Southall Community Alliance — the umbrella organisation through which the grant was directed — was also Jags Sanghera.

A Career That Connects the Dots

To understand why this matters, it helps to trace Jags Sanghera’s career.

Between April and October 2015, he worked as Community Liaison Regeneration Officer at Southall Community Alliance itself — the charity he now chairs.

In November 2015, he moved to Berkeley Group as Community Liaison Officer, a post he has held continuously since (since promoted to Head of Business & Community Engagement at St George PLC, yet another Berkeley Group subsidiary).

Sanghera is also named as a Berkeley Foundation “Community Champion”, a role he took over in Southall from Rick Watler (Berkeley’s head of construction at the gasworks site, who was a local authority appointed governor at Blair Peach Primary School).

Berkeley’s own SouthAll Community News newsletter (Issue 1, Winter 2016) featured Sanghera in its Staff Spotlight, describing him as someone who had been “working with the Southall community for many years” and was helping to deliver Southall Waterside for “current and future generations.”

His role, as described on his LinkedIn profile, is “to facilitate, own and manage key stakeholder engagement” for Berkeley St Joseph — the Berkeley subsidiary responsible for the Southall gasworks site.

In other words: Jags Sanghera’s professional role, for over a decade, has been to manage Berkeley’s relationships with the Southall community. The organisation he previously worked for — and now chairs as a volunteer trustee — is one of the most prominent community bodies in that same space.

An example of Sanghera’s engagement with the community is from his 2023 “consultation” report.

In it, Sanghera asked local residents adjacent to the Gasworks site, many of whom have suffered years of bad smells, toxic air pollution, ill-health, damage to the structure of their homes and roads, loss of enjoyment of their gardens, and loss of light into their homes what they thought.

This is what Sanghera published about them:

“The response from residents to our engagement activity was generally ambivalent or positive. There was, however, a pocket of discontent towards the end of Beaconsfield Road, where residents took issue with a re-occuring smell, noise from the construction site and loss of views. There are still a substantial number of residents who do not really understand what is happening at The Green Quarter, despite their proximity to the site. However, many of these residents appear to take little interest in the community more generally.”

To anyone who knows anything about Southall and the impact of the Gasworks redevelopment on local residents, it’s an absolutely shocking and appalling thing to say. It shows a complete lack of empathy, and a total absence of any sense of regret, responsibility or accountability.

On 27 October 2022, the Charity Commission register records, Jagjit Singh Sanghera was appointed as a trustee of Southall Community Alliance (charity number 1104671). He is now its chair, as listed on the SCA’s own website.

The Cheque

Berkeley’s Community Chest programme distributes small grants to local community projects. A £2,500 award to a community garden is, in isolation, unremarkable. The grant was also reported by Ealing.News.

What is not standard is the arrangement visible in the photograph published on Berkeley’s own website.

The grant was presented by Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement.

It was received by the chair of Southall Community Alliance.

Both roles were held by the same person.

The cheque passed, in a literal sense, between two positions occupied by a single individual.

Neither Berkeley’s published account of the event nor SCA’s public-facing materials flag this overlap.

There is no declaration of interest on the public record in relation to Berkeley Group funding received by SCA.

The Charity Commission’s published guidance on conflicts of interest requires trustees to identify, declare, and manage situations where their personal or professional interests intersect with the charity’s.

Where a trustee is professionally employed by an organisation providing funding to their charity, that relationship requires active management — typically including the trustee stepping back from decisions about that funding. No such process is visible in the available public record.

The Political Dimension

Jags Sanghera has stood for election three times in Ealing.

In 2010, he stood as a Conservative Party candidate against Julian Bell — who would go on to lead Ealing Labour for more than a decade in power — in Greenford Broadway ward, receiving 1,478 votes.

By 2022, he had changed party: he stood for Labour in Ealing Common ward, coming close to winning a seat on a strong Labour night across the borough.

This year — on 7 May 2026 — he is standing again, as one of three Labour candidates in Norwood Green ward, as confirmed on his Ealing Labour candidate profile.

Sanghera’s selection as a candidate in Norwood Green — usually a safe Labour ward in the Southall constituency — comes after he facilitated Cllr Jasbir Anand’s catering business to take over the coffee cart opposite Southall station, ousting a small local business which had built up the customer base — more on that story post-election!

Jags Sanghera explains how Anand came to operate the coffee cart opposite Southall station, on Anand’s Instagram.

If elected, Jags Sanghera would become a councillor on Ealing Council — the same council that determines planning applications for Berkeley Group’s Southall developments, negotiates section 106 community benefit agreements with Berkeley, and makes decisions that directly affect the financial and operational interests of his employer.

That is a conflict of interest of a different order of magnitude to the community grant.

The Southall Town Team

Southall Community Alliance’s reach extends beyond grant-receiving.

SCA has a presence on the Southall Town Team, a council-facilitated body that brings together community stakeholders, local businesses, and the council to plan for Southall’s future.

The Town Team has a formal role in shaping how community benefit funds and developer contributions in the area are directed.

Through SCA’s participation in that body, Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement — in his separate capacity as SCA trustee chair — has a seat at a council-facilitated planning table.

Community stakeholders engaging with that body in good faith may not be aware of this overlap.

Greenwashing, corporate capture and conflict of interest

I am not alleging that the Western Road Urban Garden Project did anything improper in receiving a grant. The garden project serves a genuine community purpose, and the volunteers who tend it deserve support.

I am not alleging that Berkeley Group acted unlawfully. Corporate community grant programmes are entirely legal.

But these activities can also be used for purposes that ultimately extract resources and wealth from the communities they take over for the benefit of company shareholders.

The United Nations calls it “greenwashing”:

Greenwashing manifests itself in several ways – some more obvious than others. Tactics include:

Claiming to be on track to reduce a company’s polluting emissions to net zero when no credible plan is actually in place.
Being purposely vague or non-specific about a company’s operations or materials used.
Applying intentionally misleading labels such as “green” or “eco-friendly,” which do not have standard definitions and can be easily misinterpreted.
Implying that a minor improvement has a major impact or promoting a product that meets the minimum regulatory requirements as if it is significantly better than the standard.
Emphasizing a single environmental attribute while ignoring other impacts.
Claiming to avoid illegal or non-standard practices that are irrelevant to a product.
Communicating the sustainability attributes of a product in isolation of brand activities (and vice versa) – e.g. a garment made from recycled materials that is produced in a high-emitting factory that pollutes the air and nearby waterways.

Jags Sanghera’s marketing video for The Green Quarter as posted on Anand’s Instagram.

Readers can decide if any of that applies to the contaminated old gasworks site now rebranded as “The Green Quarter”.

I recommend that curious readers who like to verify things for themselves (and who doesn’t?), visit the Green Quarter. Free parking for three hours at Parkside Yards! Just be aware to follow all the rules, including:

“Unauthorised filming, photography, audio recording, or live streaming of any part of the site (including external façades, communal areas, residents, staff, or visitors) is not permitted under any circumstances”

The Center for Constitutional Rights calls it “corporate capture”:

“Corporate capture” is a phenomenon where private industry uses its political influence to take control of the decision-making apparatus of the state, such as regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures. When corporations draft legislation privately with lawmakers that they have significant influence over, this results in laws and policies that benefit corporations, while often harming the environment, low-income people, and communities of color.

Jags Sanghera, among his many other roles, also sits on the Ealing Safer Neighborhood Board (see also https://esnb.org.uk/).

The overlap between his roles — as a Berkeley employee managing Southall community engagement, as chair of a Southall community charity that receives Berkeley funding, and now as a Labour candidate for the council that regulates Berkeley’s planning interests — raises serious questions about conflicts of interest that do not appear to have been formally declared or managed.

Those questions are in the public interest, during an election in which he is a candidate.

There is also a structural question about the revolving door between community organisations and the developer whose long-term presence in Southall depends on maintaining community legitimacy.

Sanghera moved from SCA to Berkeley in late 2015. He returned to SCA as a trustee — and became its chair — in October 2022. Berkeley describes his work as facilitating and managing key stakeholder engagement. The community body through which he does part of that work is one he also leads in a voluntary capacity.

The Allotment Question

This article began, in a sense, with a YouTube comment.

ECI’s recent video report on Manor Way Allotments documented the neglect of a community site maintained largely by elderly volunteers — volunteers who, as a commenter on that video rightly noted, have given years of quiet, unpaid work to their community.

The video raised the question of why these volunteers had not received funding support, and noted that another project in Southall had.

The other project was the Western Road Urban Garden Project. The funding came via Berkeley’s Community Chest. The grant was presented by and received by Jags Sanghera.

A commenter challenged this comparison as unfair: if one project applied and another did not, that is simply a different outcome based on different actions. It is a fair point, as far as it goes.

But the structural question is different.

The allotment volunteers at Manor Way are not the subject of this article, and nor are they responsible for any of the arrangements described above.

The question this article asks is whether those arrangements — the multiple roles, the undeclared overlap, the revolving door — represent the kind of transparent, accountable community governance that Southall deserves.

And whether the voters of Norwood Green are entitled to know about them before they cast their votes today.

Computer Says No

Thu, 07 May 2026 07:12:57 +0100

Update, 10 August 2026: Ealing Council’s press office contacted me today to ask for a minor amendment to this article. Their email arrived without difficulty.

The April email from the Head of Environmental Health confirmed the council was working to ensure my emails were “not unnecessarily blocked.”

Presumably, the blocking was, at some prior point, considered necessary.

How many times have you asked yourself — or heard others ask the same question?

Why does the council never reply to my emails?!

When residents raised concerns about toxic odours from the Southall Gasworks site, they were told to keep reporting. Every call, every email, every logged complaint was encouraged.

“It’s good you’re making so many complaints,” they were told at a meeting with Peter Mason in March 2019.

Volume of reporting, the implication was, would produce results.

It didn’t.

And now, after eighteen months of correspondence with Ealing Council about environmental enforcement failures in Southall, I understand why.

There isn’t one filter between a complaint and accountability in Ealing. There are at least three. And the council has, at various points, been aware of all of them.

Filter one: the complaint that never arrives

The Head of Environmental Health & Trading Standards wrote to me in April to confirm that some of my emails had been blocked before they were received. She had followed up with the Head of ICT, she explained, and been advised that emails:

“have indeed been blocked due to factors such as email length, content, or the size of the chain.”

This is the first filter.

Note the word content.

Not size. Not formatting. Content.

Who decides which content triggers a block? On what basis?

The council’s response offered no answer — but the question matters, because detailed, evidenced correspondence is precisely the kind most likely to require action, and precisely the kind most likely to be silently discarded before it enters the system.

No notification to the sender. No record on the council’s side.

No complaint, no failure to respond.

No problem. No action required.

What makes this harder to dismiss as a technical glitch is that the evidence was already in the council’s own file when my Stage 1 complaint was closed. The response itself quoted a Pollution Control email from June 2025 stating:

“Our IT systems must have blocked it due to links included within the email.”

The council knew. It closed the complaint anyway.

The Stage 2 response, from Assistant Director Joe Blanchard, upheld Stage 1 in full. Instances of filtering were described as “extremely rare.”

No governance review. No apology. No procedural changes.

That response closed the council’s internal process.

My complaint is now with the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (Case 26000430), submitted on 21 April 2026.

Filter two: the complaint that isn’t counted

Of the complaints that do arrive, many are never counted.

The reporting system itself is documented to exhaust complainants into silence: fragmented across multiple hotlines, dependent on telephone menus, requiring each incident to be logged in isolation.

Odour complaints about the Gasworks site had to be reported separately to Ealing Council, the Environment Agency, and Berkeley Group’s own PR company. Each body counted only its own tally. None shared a running total.

The official figure given by council leader Julian Bell at the July 2020 public meeting was 250 complaints over three years — 79 in 2017, 51 in 2018, 82 in 2019, and 38 in the first part of 2020. Those 250 were the ones that got through and were logged.

But at the March 2019 meeting with Peter Mason — the same meeting at which residents were told their volume of reporting was welcome — one resident alone had already called the Environment Agency over a hundred times. The official response to that volume of contact was that Berkeley Group was “going above and beyond what is expected.”

Residents at last month’s ECI meeting in Southall described being told they were “the only one complaining” — a response familiar to anyone who has tried to hold this council to account on anything.

Low complaint counts, in this system, are never evidence of low harm. They are evidence of effective filtration.

Filter three: the complaint that isn’t verified

Of the complaints that arrive and are counted, the council’s own investigation records show a striking pattern: investigating officers verify almost nothing.

As I documented following the January 2026 Johnson Street fire, Ealing Council conducted a year-long daily investigation of the Sam’s Recycling site on Johnson Street.

Its conclusion: no evidence of statutory nuisance. No enforcement action warranted.

In three visits made in response to strong burning plastic odours entering my home, I had documented open incineration, burning of treated wood and plastic waste, smoke affecting residential areas, and explicit fire risk.

The site burned down thirty months after my formal written warnings, causing over half a million pounds of damage.

The Ombudsman submission sets out the problem precisely: the council relied on monitoring methods unsuited to detecting intermittent emissions, did not properly consider information already held by the Environment Agency, and carried out no internal review after the fire of its monitoring approach, its complaint handling, or its escalation processes.

The verification methodology requires officers to witness a statutory nuisance threshold at the precise moment of a visit. Residents’ photographic evidence, video documentation, and patterns of complaint do not meet this threshold.

The result is that investigation techniques function as designed — not to verify harm, but to avoid the enforcement obligation that verified harm would create.

This is the same pattern documented across Southall’s pollution cases.

At the Gasworks site between 2017 and 2020, residents reported respiratory symptoms, hospitalisations, and toxic odours. Public Health England’s assessments relied on site-wide averages that masked localised readings consistently above legal limits.

Residents were encouraged to keep reporting.

The data was there. The verification never came.

The system in full

Set out together, the three filters describe something more troubling than administrative failure.

Complaints are encouraged — volume is welcomed, residents are told it is “good” to keep reporting, Berkeley is praised for going “above and beyond” — because volume without verification is harmless to the institutions being complained about.

The IT system silently discards the most detailed correspondence.

The fragmented reporting architecture ensures counts remain low.

The verification methodology ensures that what is counted rarely produces enforcement.

At each stage, the absence of a finding becomes evidence that there is nothing to find.

The 250 complaints Ealing Council recorded from the Gasworks site were the ones that passed through all three filters.

The questions the council has not been asked — and has not asked itself — are how many were blocked before arrival, how many arrived but were never properly counted, and of the 250 that were counted, how many were ever verified by an investigating officer visiting the site while the problem was actually occurring?

The Ombudsman is now being asked to determine whether a complaints system with documented filters at every stage — one that then uses the absence of complaints as justification for inaction — constitutes maladministration.

The desired outcomes I have set out include an independent review of the council’s monitoring methodology, its correspondence handling, and its coordination with the Environment Agency.

Whether the Ombudsman agrees those are reasonable expectations will be a test of whether the system has a fourth filter — or whether there is, finally, somewhere the complaint actually lands.

This Is Our Home. It's a Tip.

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:13:27 +0100

Update, 1 May 2026: A reader has correctly pointed out that the Defra 2024-25 fly-tipping statistics cover April 2024 to March 2025 — and therefore predate Ealing Council’s “This Is Our Home, Not a Tip” campaign and Peter Mason’s claimed 55% reduction in fly-tipping across Southall, both of which relate to 2025-26. The Defra figures establish the pre-campaign baseline, not the campaign’s results.

However, the contradiction at the heart of this piece does not depend on Defra data. Ealing Council’s own Q2 2025/26 Performance Report — covering the campaign period itself — states explicitly that fly-tipping “has increased by around 50% year on year since 2022/23.” That is the council’s own in-year monitoring, for the same period Mason is claiming a 55% reduction in Southall.

The council’s data and the council leader’s election claim cannot both be true.

The correction strengthens rather than weakens that conclusion.

A postscript to On the Bins Again, Boomerang! and Bangarang!

Ealing Council was shortlisted for an LGC award for their fly-tipping awareness campaign. It was called “This Is Our Home, Not a Tip.”

Defra figures published today show fly-tipping in Ealing rose by 50.9% in 2024-25 to 25,394 incidents — the highest ever recorded in the borough, sixth worst in London, and seventh out of 294 local authorities in England. At 65.8 incidents per 1,000 residents, Ealing is now worse per head than Brent was at any point before its own enforcement crackdown began.

Neighbouring Brent, running an aggressive enforcement campaign for several years and having switched to twin-stream recycling collections in October 2023, is down to 16,338 incidents — 46.3 per 1,000. Harrow, which never switched to fortnightly collections, recorded 13,925 — 51.4 per 1,000.

The enforcement comparison is particularly telling. In 2024-25, Ealing issued 1,993 fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping and saw incidents rise 51%. Brent issued 916 and saw incidents fall 40%. More fines, worse outcome. The difference is not enforcement intensity. It is the structural problem that enforcement cannot fix.

The council’s explanation? Higher figures partly reflect improved reporting by residents. The same explanation Newham offered in 2016 when their new digital reporting system inflated their counts. The difference is that Brent’s improved reporting produced a 40% fall in the same year.

Gareth Lloyd Jones, Managing Director at HIPPO Waste, told Ealing.News that Ealing’s ranking is “despite only capturing publicly reported incidents,” pointing to “a broader underlying problem.” He’s right. It has been documented in some detail: reduced waste collection capacity since 2016, a cost of living crisis reducing residents’ ability to pay for disposal, rising private sector rents driving population churn and overcrowding, and a borough where housing density and overcrowding mean the fortnightly system was never designed for the communities it serves. The council’s awareness campaign has 8 million social media impressions. Fly-tipping has 25,394 incidents.

There is one further question the 2024-25 figures raise. In a BBC London Politics Show interview earlier this year, Council Leader Peter Mason claimed a 55% reduction in fly-tipping in Southall. Ealing Labour’s election leaflet repeated the claim as a 54% reduction. No baseline year or dataset was specified for either figure, and as the Boomerang article noted, neither can be reconciled with published Defra or council performance data.

Southall’s official population is around 80,000 — almost certainly an undercount given the scale of undocumented migration into a borough with a 21.5% annual population churn and severe private sector overcrowding. Even on the official figure, if Southall genuinely accounts for roughly a fifth of Ealing’s population, and fly-tipping across the whole borough is up 51% to 25,394 incidents, then a 54% reduction in Southall implies the rest of Ealing has seen something close to a tripling of incidents to compensate. That would represent a catastrophic failure of borough-wide policy that Labour has conspicuously not mentioned. The more likely explanation is that the figure is based on a different metric, a selected time window, or simply cannot be verified — which is why no source was provided.

Ealing Council’s own Q2 2025/26 performance report states explicitly that fly-tipping “has increased by around 50% year on year since 2022/23.” The council’s own data and the council leader’s election claim cannot both be true.

Three articles. Months of Defra data. Five boroughs. One unasked question.

Has the 2016 alternate weekly collection policy been evaluated as a material cause of the sustained and now accelerating rise in fly-tipping?

Still no answer, a week before local elections.

Fly-tipping incident data: Defra Fly-Tipping Statistics for England, 2024-25. Per-capita figures calculated using ONS mid-year population estimates as published in the Defra dataset.

On the Bins Again

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:02:41 +0100

This is a follow-up to Bangarang! Pirate Pete and the Lost Bin Collections of Southall and Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-Tipping, which documented how fly-tipping in Ealing doubled the year weekly black bag collections were scrapped in 2016 — and remained at that high level ever since.

After those two articles, a commenter on a separate Facebook post promoting the launch of the “What Happened to Southall?” report questioned the focus on bin collections, among other things.

MW Gurney made several points worth taking seriously: that fly-tipping has risen nationally, that other factors like bulky waste charges and enforcement levels matter, that Ealing’s recycling rates compare well with London, and — most directly — that if collection frequency were the main driver, “every borough on fortnightly collections would look the same.”

Now, to be fair, right at the bottom of my first “Bangarang” article, I did say:

“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.”

In my follow-up “Boomerang” story, I explicitly stated some of the other factors involved:

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

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.

None of this suggests that collection frequency is the only factor. But it is one of two variables that changed suddenly — and the one that aligns most closely with the timing of the spike in 2016.

What Happened to Brent?

The best way to test whether fortnightly collections cause fly-tipping spikes is to find boroughs that made the same switch — and look at what happened.

We do not have to look far.

Brent switched to alternate weekly general waste collections around 2013-14.

The decision followed an August 2010 Executive report promising “long term efficiency savings in excess of £1 million each year” and a step change in recycling rates towards 60%. The report also introduced a “no side waste” policy: only waste that fits inside the bin will be collected.

Residents predicted exactly what would happen.

Brent’s Own Overview and Scrutiny Committee called in the decision, citing concerns including the “implications of fortnightly refuse collections on housing estates and properties in multiple occupation.”

The call-in papers from November 2010 make grim reading in retrospect.

By November 2012 — before the full fortnightly switch was even complete — a Wembley Matters report on a council scrutiny committee revealed that Brent’s own officers explicitly linked the rise in fly-tipping to the new collection system, which had “led to residents dumping excess/uncollected waste on footpaths and near litter bins in some areas.”

The campaigners who predicted it, the report noted, had been right.

Then the full fortnightly switch landed.

In 2014-15, fly-tipping in Brent surged by 84% in a single year — the largest year-on-year increase of any local authority in England.

A Freedom of Information request by the Press Association confirmed the figures; a December 2015 industry report recorded them independently. The Kilburn Times reported that Brent Council spent £531,178 clearing illegally dumped waste that year, recouping just £11,670 in fines.

What Happened to Hounslow?

Hounslow announced its switch to fortnightly wheelie bin collections in September 2015, implementing it from April 2016 — just weeks before Ealing made the same change in June 2016.

Residents in Chiswick and Brentford immediately petitioned against it, warning that terraced streets with “tiny front gardens” were “totally unsuitable to house a wheelie bin of any type.”

The council pressed on regardless, promising cleaner streets, higher recycling rates, and cost savings of £1.3 million per year. Sounds familiar?

Within weeks of the July 2016 launch, residents were sending angry emails to the council. MyLondon reported residents’ complaints of dirty and littered streets:

“We have new bins but no idea when they will be emptied,” wrote one Feltham resident.

A fellow resident did the arithmetic:

“They have given us 6 wheelie bins for 22 properties containing 46 residents. That is one third of a bin per property for two weeks, one sixth of a bin per week.”

Streets in the TW3 postcode were described as “dirty” with “recycling boxes bursting at the seams.” The council’s response — “wash and squash plastics and cans as much as possible” — was not equal to the scale of the problem it had created.

A resident petition to restore weekly collections warned explicitly that “councils who move to fortnightly collections see overflowing bins, more litter and more fly-tipping.”

The Hounslow data tells the rest of the story.

What Happened to Harrow?

Gurney argued that if collection frequency were the driver, every fortnightly borough would show the same pattern.

The Defra fly-tipping dataset shows they do — at the moment of their respective policy changes.

Year	Ealing	Brent	Hounslow	Harrow
2012–13	6,352	6,911	13,934	6,228
2013–14	5,765	7,001	15,864	8,429
2014–15	7,257	12,912 (+84%)	16,282	7,072
2015–16	7,032	13,198	19,809	8,462
2016–17	14,270 (+103%)	17,340	22,973 (+16%)	6,835 (-19%)
2017–18	13,610	18,609	17,063	9,626
2018–19	12,547	23,965	21,897	13,658
2019–20	13,115	34,197	22,480	11,151
2022–23	12,922	34,830	26,135	9,222
2023–24	16,828	27,023	27,241	12,609

Source: Defra Fly-Tipping Statistics for England, 2012-13 to 2023-24.

Brent switched first. Brent spiked first (+84%, 2014-15). Ealing switched in 2016. Ealing spiked in 2016-17 (+103%).

Hounslow switched in April 2016 and its figures climb steadily from that point. Harrow, which did not switch to fortnightly general waste collections, shows no equivalent spike. In 2016-17 — the year Ealing’s fly-tipping doubled — Harrow’s figures actually fell by 19%.

Brent and Ealing both recorded sharp increases at the moment each borough changes its collection system.

Hounslow, starting from a baseline level equal to Brent and Ealing after they switched, shows a smaller immediate increase.

Three boroughs switched; three boroughs saw an immediate increase. The one that did not switch did not.

Gurney said:

“if it were the main driver, every borough on fortnightly collections would look the same.”

Up to a point, they do.

The pattern is not that every borough looks identical. The pattern is that every borough breaks at the point the system changes.

That said, the longer-term picture is messier, and worth being honest about.

When Brent, Ealing, Harrow and Hounslow (plus Newham) are indexed against the national trend, Ealing actually turns out to be the clearest case — precisely because it is the simplest.

Ealing had no new reporting technology introduced in 2016, no major change in street cleansing methodology, but it did later introduce a new fly-tipping “task force” enforcement drive to tackle the 216% increase. That, and repeated “crackdowns” every four years just before local elections, probably helped maintain the flat doubled rate we see until 2023.

Ealing’s 2016-17 spike is a clean structural break from a stable baseline, diverging sharply from both the national trend and from Harrow, which tracks the national trend throughout.

Brent and Hounslow both show sustained divergence from the national trend, but with more noise — later enforcement campaigns, a twin-stream recycling change in Brent’s case, and Covid-era disruption all complicate the picture.

Ealing is not the weakest case. It is the clearest one.

The Structural Reasons

Why does this happen? The answer lies not in residents’ values but council attitudes, assumptions and arithmetic.

Brent Council’s own 2005 waste strategy — produced by consultants SLR/LUC — warned that fortnightly collections “may not be feasible in many areas.”

They noted that alternate weekly collections work “in high performing areas” and where “diversion of up to 50% of the waste stream to recycling and composting means that residual waste bins are rarely full on collection day.”

That describes a leafy suburb with modest household sizes and gardens. It does not describe Brent, Hounslow or Southall.

Brent’s 2019 Inclusive Growth Strategy documented what those boroughs actually look like:

Brent has the highest population density in outer London at 78.8 persons per hectare, against an outer London mean of 43.3.
Overcrowding in the private rented sector more than doubled between 2001 and 2011, from 8,134 to 16,642 overcrowded households.
Almost half the population live in flats.
Brent has the highest number of housing benefit claimants in all outer London boroughs.

The Hounslow resident who calculated one sixth of a bin per person per week was not describing cultural differences, an absence of “British values” or documenting a need for individual behaviour change. He was describing the physics of the material structural problem with everyday reality for ordinary people.

One fortnightly wheelie bin cannot physically contain two weeks of waste from twenty-two properties sharing a building.

The most striking confirmation of the link comes from Brent itself — not from critics, but from its own officers.

In July 2014, as fly-tipping in the borough was surging towards its 84% annual spike, Brent Cabinet received a report recommending an increase in dry recycling collection frequency to weekly. Among the listed benefits of doing so:

“more frequent waste collections are also likely to reduce the amount of waste that is fly-tipped in Brent.”

That is a council officer, writing in the year of the borough’s worst-ever fly-tipping surge, officially recording the causal link between collection frequency and fly-tipping.

Ealing’s Cabinet, two years later, made the opposite decision with no equivalent analysis on record.

On Recycling

Recycling was the stated justification. It did not materialise.

Gurney is right that Ealing’s recycling rate is among the highest in London — second in 2023-24 at 48.7%.

But London as a whole languishes near the bottom of English regions at 33%, and being near the top of a poor-performing region is not the same as meeting the targets used to justify the switch.

Ealing’s recycling rate in 2015, before the switch, was 45%. Ten years later it is 49%.

Brent promised 60% recycling in 2010. Fourteen years later it is at 33%.

The recycling argument was built on a false comparison from the start.

Brent’s 2010 waste strategy cited a table of the top 20 recycling performers in England to justify fortnightly residual collections.

Every authority in that table used fortnightly collections.

But those authorities were Staffordshire Moorlands, Cotswold, East Lindsey, South Hams, South Shropshire: rural and semi-rural districts with low population density, large gardens, and modest household sizes.

The same strategy document recorded that Brent had 2.62 persons per household — the third highest in England and Wales — and the highest overcrowding rate of any outer London borough.

The evidence that fortnightly collections work for Cotswold was never evidence that they would work for Brent, or Ealing, or Southall.

What Happened to Newham?

The most telling comparison is not between boroughs that switched but between one that switched and one that switched back.

Newham is, by every measure Gurney would use to explain fly-tipping, a more challenging borough than Ealing.

A 2022 presentation by Newham’s Director of Public Realm described:

a population of 355,000 with a 21.5% annual churn rate,
almost 50% of residents in private rented accommodation,
the second most diverse borough in the UK,
and a deprivation ranking of 12th out of 317 local authorities.

Newham’s fly-tipping data requires a brief note before drawing comparisons.

The borough had a chronic, pre-existing crisis — identified by the Guardian in 2014 as the worst local authority in England per head.

A sharp spike in fly-tipping through 2013-15 coincided with the launch of a new digital in-cab reporting system in January 2014, which Newham itself acknowledged meant “reporting, and collecting of tips has increased dramatically.”

Defra’s own notes on the dataset record Newham’s explanation that “the ease of recording, combined with multiple street cleansing rounds carried out daily, seven days a week, results in a high level of fly tips recorded.”

The incidents are real — but the pre-2014 figures undercount them, making the spike look larger than the underlying change in behaviour warrants.

From 2015-16 onwards, Newham’s figures are meaningful: a gradual decline through to 2019-20, a Covid-era spike in 2020-22, and then a significant drop in 2022-23.

That drop followed a policy change. In February 2024, Newham’s Cabinet Member for Environment announced:

“We have recently launched weekly recycling collections, in place of the previous fortnightly collections, and this makes it much easier for residents to keep on top of their domestic rubbish.”

That is not an enforcement or a behavioural change intervention. It is a system or structural intervention to address material everyday reality.

The result: a 32% reduction in fly-tipping — the second largest drop in London — against a rising national trend.

A Labour cabinet member, in a borough more deprived and more densely populated than Ealing, explicitly said that weekly collections make it easier for residents to manage their waste.

And the data confirmed it.

What Enforcement Can and Cannot Do

Gurney’s strongest point is that enforcement matters. He is right. The evidence from Newham, Brent and Ealing all confirm it — targeted enforcement in specific hotspots can achieve significant localised reductions.

But enforcement and structural prevention are categorically different interventions with different cost profiles.

Brent’s experience demonstrates this most clearly.

After a decade of escalating enforcement — wanted posters, CCTV, naming and shaming, fines of up to £1,000 — Brent’s Don’t Mess With Brent campaign achieved a genuine and impressive reduction from its 35,000 peak.

Kilburn Times reported that by 2024-25, incidents had fallen by 53% year-on-year, with a 500% surge in fixed penalty notices placing Brent third in England for fines issued.

In October 2023 Brent also switched to twin-stream recycling collections, separating paper and card from other dry recyclables — a further service change that may have contributed to the reduction.

Several things changed simultaneously, and the improvement is real.

But even so, provisional figures for 2024-25 suggest around 16,338 incidents — still more than double Brent’s pre-fortnightly baseline of approximately 6,900 in 2012-13.

Enforcement reduces the peak. It does not restore the baseline.

After a decade, millions spent on enforcement, a 500% increase in fixed penalty notices, and a recycling service change, Brent has got back to roughly where Ealing was in 2024 — and neither has returned to baseline.

Newham achieved a 32% reduction by changing policy. These are not equivalent strategies.

The Unasked Question

None of this proves that collection frequency is the only factor.

Of course it is not.

Deprivation, housing density, overcrowding, enforcement capacity, bulky waste charging, the cost of living — all of these matter. My original “Bangarang” and “Boomerang” articles said so from the start.

The question that Ealing Council has never asked — and that ten years of crackdowns, campaigns and council award nominations have been designed to avoid asking — is a simple one:

Has the 2016 alternate weekly collection policy been evaluated as a material cause of the sustained doubling in fly-tipping?

The data from Brent, Harrow, Hounslow and Newham provides the answer Ealing is not looking for.

Three boroughs made the same switch from weekly to fortnightly collections.
All three show divergence from the national trend from the moment of the switch.
The one that did not switch tracked the national trend throughout.
The one that switched back saw a 32% reduction.

The pattern is not ambiguous. It is a boomerang — you throw the policy out, and the costs come back.

As Brent’s own consultants warned in 2005: fortnightly collections “may not be feasible in many areas.”

Southall is one of those areas.

The last ten years have not disproved that warning — they have confirmed it.

*All fly-tipping incident data sourced from Defra’s Fly-Tipping Statistics for England, 2012-13 to 2023-24. Data for this analysis drawn from the complete London borough dataset.

Provisional 2024-25 Brent figures from Kilburn Times / North London News reporting, pending official Defra publication.

A note on cross-borough comparisons: recording methodology varies significantly between boroughs and changes over time. Newham is a particular case — its figures from 2013-14 onwards reflect a proactive daily digital reporting system that produces higher counts than paper-based systems used previously and by other boroughs.

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.

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.

COPD

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 22:44:00 +0100

Last week I received confirmation of a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) based on results of spirometry tests back in August (it took that long for my GP surgery to get the results from the test centre, and only after my own intervention after their repeated failures).

My GP helpfully seemed very keen to blame my twenty-odd year history of smoking.

I first smoked at about age 20. My parents were smokers (wasn’t everyone back then?). I was never a heavy smoker. The most I ever smoked was ten a day. It’s also true I smoked a number of other substances that didn’t come with filters. And then there was some vaping. I suspect that might have been the worst of the lot, but who knows? I haven’t smoked for ten years.

In my childhood, I remember several episodes of severe shortness of breath, e.g., when running around the sports field at primary school I collapsed gasping for breath, and unable to continue. I was never diagnosed with asthma. I was told to get up and stop being so weak.

As I got older, whenever the football season started, I could never get through a full game. I put it down to lack of fitness and stamina at the time, but whatever it was, the symptom was breathlessness. I was told to get fit and sent off on cross-country runs.

I had regular episodes of shortness of breath throughout young adulthood that were not triggered by exercise (I’d more or less given up by then, helped by a dodgy ankle). I thought it might be hayfever or a dust allergy.

Fourteen years ago, I needed a thoracotomy on my right lung after a chest infection went wrong. I developed pleurisy, a collapsed lung and an empyema. In the post-op, my surgeon said my lung was “as good as new”.

In the years before covid, I had frequent chest infections requiring antibiotics and time off work to recover. Then and now, I wonder if that was triggered by the Southall Gasworks remediation and air pollution?

I now see that studies show that exposure to volatile organic compounds (including benzene, naphthalene and toluene) is related to COPD.

The good news is that I had no symptoms of COPD, so it’s been diagnosed at an early stage. I’ve started with my new inhaler, and my wife reports that I’ve stopped snoring.

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.

Risks to Health from Remediating Southall Gasworks

Mon, 01 May 2023 12:00:38 +0100

AI is more ethical than Ealing Labour Party. No money was exchanged.

What are the risks to health from remediating Southall Gasworks on site in the open air? The land is highly contaminated with benzene, naphthalene and a while host of other VOCs, PAHs, heavy metals, “blue billy” and asbestos, and surrounded by residential streets. The local community is mostly of south Asian and African heritage, and it is known that people with this heritage can be genetically vulnerable to naphthalene poisoning. What response from the developer and regulatory authorities should there be if levels of benzene and naphthalene are consistently above the legal safety guidelines and local residents complain of eye, nose and throat irritation, new or worsening of respiratory conditions and infections, or other health problems as a result of odour and air pollution?

The health risks from remediating Southall Gasworks on site in the open air are significant. The site is highly contaminated with a variety of hazardous chemicals, including benzene, naphthalene, VOCs, PAHs, heavy metals, “blue billy” and asbestos. These chemicals can cause a variety of health problems, including cancer, respiratory problems, neurological problems, and birth defects. The local community is mostly of south Asian and African heritage, and it is known that people with this heritage can be genetically vulnerable to naphthalene poisoning. This means that they are more likely to experience health problems from exposure to naphthalene.

If levels of benzene and naphthalene are consistently above the legal safety guidelines, and local residents complain of eye, nose and throat irritation, new or worsening of respiratory conditions and infections, or other health problems as a result of odour and air pollution, the developer and regulatory authorities should take immediate action to protect the health of the community. This may include:

Stopping the remediation work until the levels of contamination can be brought down to safe levels.
Providing air filters and other protective equipment to residents who live near the site.
Evacuation of residents who are most at risk.
Conducting a health study of the community to assess the impact of the contamination.

The developer and regulatory authorities have a responsibility to protect the health of the community. If they fail to take action, they could be held liable for any health problems that result from the contamination.

Here are some additional information about the health risks of the chemicals found at Southall Gasworks:

Benzene: Benzene is a colorless, flammable liquid that is used in a variety of products, including gasoline, paints, and solvents. It is a known carcinogen, and it can also cause leukemia, anemia, and other health problems.
Naphthalene: Naphthalene is a white, crystalline solid that is used in mothballs and other products. It is also a known carcinogen, and it can cause respiratory problems, skin irritation, and other health problems.
VOCs: Volatile organic compounds are a group of chemicals that can easily evaporate into the air. They can come from a variety of sources, including gasoline, paints, and solvents. VOCs can cause a variety of health problems, including respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, and cancer.
PAHs: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are a group of chemicals that are formed when organic matter is burned. They are found in a variety of sources, including gasoline, coal, and tobacco smoke. PAHs can cause cancer, respiratory problems, and other health problems.
Heavy metals: Heavy metals are a group of metals that are toxic to humans and other animals. They can come from a variety of sources, including mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Heavy metals can cause a variety of health problems, including cancer, neurological problems, and birth defects.
“Blue billy”: Blue billy is a type of asbestos that is found in coal tar. Asbestos is a known carcinogen, and it can cause a variety of health problems, including lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis.

It is important to note that the health risks of exposure to these chemicals vary depending on the level of exposure, the length of exposure, and the individual’s health. If you are concerned about your health after being exposed to these chemicals, you should see a doctor.

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.

Response to Ealing's Air Quality Strategy and Action Plan

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 20:32:00 +0100

Ealing Council’s draft Air Quality Strategy is a 64 page document together with a 40 page Action Plan, and the consultation period runs until 30 January 2023. It’s taken me the best part of six weeks, all my spare time over Christmas and New Year, to get through it all, make notes and cross-reference to try to make sense of it all and offer some feedback.

Really, there must be a much longer consultation period if Ealing Council is genuinely interested in residents’ views.

The following is a summary of what the key points of interest are for me, and in particular in relation to Southall, where I live and work. My additional suggestions are in bold, and my comments and questions in italics.

Warning

This is a LONG post. I’ve tried to break it into sections to make it easier to read.

Disclaimer

I don’t claim to be an expert, other than through experience. I am just an ordinary resident living in the midst of four major industrial and construction site polluters for several years. I have campaigned alongside my family, neighbours and friends for clean air after my then nearly four year old said he wanted fresh air not stinky air. He’d been hospitalised three times when he was two and diagnosed with asthma. We soon discovered people who had lost loved ones, had heart attacks, ectopic pregnancies, cancer, all attributed to the foul petrochemical stink.

I welcome any corrections.

My Summary

If Ealing is serious about “fighting” inequalities, action must be targeted to protect vulnerable people in Southall to reduce air pollution and its impact on the health of its large, mostly economically deprived and non-white population.

The Strategy and Plan must target children and older people, people with lung conditions, and pregnant women: outside schools and school run hours. The Council must question if it is ethical to promote active travel in Southall when it knows that it is a high pollution area and that most of its population is particularly vulnerable to its adverse health impacts.

The draft strategy and action plan don’t do this at all.

Clean Air for Ealing!

To begin, I think it’s fantastic that Ealing Council has stated its vision for clean air for all Ealing residents, in alignment with that of local residents’ campaign group Clean Air for Southall and Hayes (CASH).

CASH has been asking for clean air for residents in Southall and Hayes since 2018.

Summary of the Strategy and Action Plan

Ealing’s draft air quality strategy’s five stated priorities are to:

Reduce road traffic emissions

Improve indoor air quality and reduce emissions from wood-burning

Reduce emissions from construction of new developments

Invest in green infrastructure

Raise awareness of air quality

It would be useful to see the strategy and action plan follow the same structure with clear definitions of terms, and specific and detailed aims and objectives for each priority, along with baseline air pollution levels and equalities data for each in order to monitor and measure impact.

Somewhat confusingly, the action plan groups its actions into six categories:

Emissions from Developments and Buildings

Public health and awareness raising

Delivery servicing and freight

Borough fleet actions

Localised solutions

Cleaner transport

This maybe because they are copied and pasted from the previous 2017-22 action plan.

It would be better for understanding, monitoring and evaluation to have consistency and coherence between the two documents, updating the action plan where necessary to reflect this.

Also somewhat confusingly, Ealing’s draft air quality strategy has nine stated goals, starting with the obvious. I’ll say more on these later:

Improve air quality

Tackling the climate crisis

Fighting inequality

Protect biodiversity

Protect health and wellbeing

Raise public awareness

Promote sustainable infrastructure

Support the transition to clean energy

Creating good jobs

Inequalities

There’s a lot of talk in Ealing’s air quality strategy about being inclusive and “fighting” (“reducing” would be better?) inequalities, and recognising that not everyone will be able to reduce their own air pollution “footprint” (“exhaust trail” might be more apt?). I’m not convinced that the strategy actually does this consistently, if at all. More on this later.

Public Health Policy

The strategy sets out how it fits into national, regional and local policy frameworks.

When I first read the strategy, I felt it fell very much within an environmental policy framework (which in Ealing seems to come under the Cabinet portfolio for Climate Action), with its focus on reducing air pollution, and as we’ll see later, promoting active travel.

In contrast, the draft action plan is explicitly a legally required document that falls directly within a public health policy framework (Ealing’s Healthy Lives cabinet portfolio).

*There’s obviously a good deal of crossover between the two, and other policy frameworks and cabinet portfolios, too, not least of which is housing policy (or Good Growth), and social policy (Tackling Inequalities).

It would be useful to see this joint responsibility formally recognised in both the strategy and the action plan, too. This work is important, and there needs to be joint working and accountability.

The strategy goes on to make the case for why air pollution is bad and needs to be reduced. The headline figure that around 150 people die every year in Ealing due to long-term exposure to toxic air is not insignificant.

Ealing’s Health Profile from 2019 puts that figure in some context:

Air Pollution in Ealing

Pollution Sources

The strategy states that the two worst air pollutants in Ealing are nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). Short and long-term and/or frequent exposure to high levels of both can cause irritation to eyes, nose, and throat, and cause or worsen heart and lung disease in children and adults, and reduce life expectancy.

Those most vulnerable to the adverse health effects of toxic air are children, older people, people with pre-existing lung disease (e.g., asthma), and pregnant women.

It would be sensible and ethical for the strategy and action plan to focus on reducing air pollution in and outside schools, sheltered housing, residential and nursing homes, and in and around identified local air pollution “hotspots”, especially where these are located in areas of known multiple inequalities (e.g., Southall).

I don’t believe the strategy or the action plan really does this at all.

The strategy explains in further detail what the main sources of NO2, PM10 and PM2.5 are in the borough.

Again there is what appears to me, to be some inconsistency about sources and their health effects within the same document. For example, on page 19 there is a graphic showing that wood burning is a source of particulate matter (PM2.5 - 20%, data from 2019).

On page 11, another graphic suggest that wood burning is a source of nitrogen dioxide (but not particulater matter):

In the graphics from the 2017-22 action plan, wood burning doesn’t get a look-in at all, data from 2013.

It would be useful for the strategy to have clarity and consistency on air pollution sources.

The good news is that road traffic emissions, the council’s key action area for 2022-30, reduced significantly in Ealing between 2013 and 2019.

It would be useful if the strategy could make clear and explain how the reduction in road traffic emissions between 2013-19 happened.

Air Quality Monitoring

The strategy notes the air quality targets set by European Union, United Kingdom and World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline limits.

It’s worth noting here (and in the strategy), that, as things stand, the background levels of PM2.5 in London (i.e., particulate matter that comes into the borough from outside Ealing and even from abroad) is around double the WHO’s target.

The draft strategy document continues by identifying the areas in Ealing worst affected by air pollution from nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. There are eight Air Quality Focus Areas, including one in Southall covering South Road (remember the name), The Green, King Street and Western Road.

Ealing has 67 air quality monitors across the borough, all recording levels of nitrogen dioxide, but only four measure particulate matter (PM10 only).

It seems remiss not to have more PM10 monitors, or to have any PM2.5 monitors (although there are three NO2, PM10 and PM2.5 monitors around the Southall Gasworks site, rather erroneously remarketed as The Green Quarter.

Ealing publishes annual air quality status reports.

Ealing also has an interactive map showing all its NO2 diffusion tube monitoring sites where you can see graphical annual data summary charts. Unfortunately, none seem to have been updated since 2021.

It would be useful to have more monitors for particulate matter, especially PM2.5, across the borough, and in Southall, and for published data from all air pollution monitors to be kept accessible and up-to-date.

Priorities for Action

Back to the strategy’s priorities for action, and my comments and questions, and suggestions.

Reduce road traffic emissions.

The biggest reduction in road traffic emissions came during 2020 covid lockdowns, and while it’s not practical, feasible or desirable to replicate that going forward, it might be worth promoting the idea that employers should encourage and support an increase to the 36% of Ealing’s working age population already mainly working from home whenever possible, as opposed to the current political groupthink that everyone must return to the office in order to be productive.

Improve indoor air quality and reduce emissions from wood-burning.

There are two wood-burning incinerators close to my home, which frequently create disgusting burning plastic odours forcing us to stay indoors and close all our windows. Not very good for healthy lives or improving indoor air quality, and the Council’s response to mine and my neighbours’ complaints has been infuriatingly slow and unhelpful. It doesn’t give me much confidence that the council really believes all these fine words about reducing air pollution and improving health outcomes when it comes to enforcement action.

Reduce emissions from construction of new developments.

Wouldn’t this be fantastic?! Again, the Council’s response to the Southall Gasworks poisoning has been shameful, and bears no resemblance to its 2017-22 Air Quality Action Plan pledges to reduce emissions and enforce construction management plans. How can we have any confidence that the council will put residents’ needs for clean air first, and above developers’ desires to enrich themselves and their shareholders by cutting corners by compromising the health and quality of life of the most vulnerable population in the borough already faced with multiple inequalities?

Invest in green infrastructure.

Southall has the least tree canopy cover in Ealing, yet is subjected to massive overdevelopment. This almost entirely terraced town is being transformed into a new Manhattan.

The one concession negotiated hard by our elected representatives, and granted by the London Mayor for overruling local democracy to allow the Gasworks development, was to widen the South Road bridge by the train station to ease the often gridlocked road. Now, the Council Leader has undemocratically pressed the ‘reset’ button. Having sat on the Mayor’s money and done nothing for so long it’s no longer nearly enough to do the necessary work. We are promised £9.5m worth of cycle lanes, a tiny new ‘pocket park’ outside Lidl on the High Street, and a couple of mini-‘orchards’ planted in existing parks, instead. And we have the ‘Poison Park’ to look forward to, the ‘green space’ crafted by Berkeley Group from the contaminated old Gasworks land.

If the council’s air quality strategy is to have any real meaning and intent to address air pollution and multiple inequalities in the Southall Air Quality Focus Area and beyond, it must surely include a vast tree-planting project, and proper maintenance of our existing parks if no new ones can be created on non-contaminated land.

Instead, the council Leader has undemocratically proposed a ‘compromise’ to destroy most of the already rewilded Warren Farm Nature Reserve in Southall in order to build new sports pitches that the vast majority of local people he consulted don’t want. I don’t understand how the Leader’s desires complement the Council’s stated strategies to reduce air pollution, tackle the climate emergency they declared, and to protect and promote biodiversity and our ecosystem.

Raise awareness of air quality.

The council also wants to (and must) lead by example.

If the council really wants to lead by example on reducing air pollution, then the council Leader cannot accept or request car rides to or from meetings in Southall, councillors cannot park in cycle lanes in Southall, nor fly to the property developer festival in the south of France. They must engage with Southall residents suffering the worst of the air pollution from multiple sources, and stop denying or minimising the existence and extent of the problems, and proactively and collaboratively work to reduce or stop such pollution episodes continuing.

Otherwise, the council’s strategy isn’t worth the virtual paper it’s printed on, and is just more hot air.

What we have in the draft plan, however, is largely a copy-and-paste of the previous 2017-2022 plan, which was, at worst, a demonstrable failure of ambition, leadership and political will, and, at best, a simple failure of the council to do what it said it would do.

Strategy Goals

Improve air quality. Protect the health and wellbeing of Ealing residents from the harmful effects of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM) air pollution.

The strategy MUST have the inclusive goal of protecting residents from the harmful effects of ALL air pollutants (not just nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter)..

Tackling the climate crisis…. by aiming for the highest environmental standards.

The “highest environmental standards” must be clearly stated and defined.

Fighting inequality…. to ensure that no-one is left behind… [and] residents feel safe.

The strategy must ensure that inequalities are reduced, that ALL residents are included in this process, and that their concerns for the safety of their air are taken seriously and acted upon. Promoting the uptake of expensive electric vehicles and discounting parking spaces for them is discriminating against economically deprived mostly non-white people who suffer most from air pollution.

Protect biodiversity. Ensuring our parks, open spaces and nature are protected and enhanced.

This is particularly relevant right now, as the Council Leader pushes on with his undemocratic desire to destroy much of the already rewilded Warren Farm Nature Reserve in Southall, and killing off a quarter of London’s endangered skylarks, in order to build new sports pitches and/or a football stadium.

Protect health and wellbeing. Protecting and enhancing the physical and mental health of all.

Except in Southall? Public Health England’s four risk assessment reports into the Southall Gasworks poisoning clearly stated that “Odours can cause nuisance amongst the population possibly leading to stress and anxiety. Some people may experience symptoms such as nausea, headaches or dizziness.”

Raise public awareness. Promoting awareness of the causes and impacts of air quality issues, as well as the available local solutions…. encouraging community activism….

Except in Southall? At every opportunity, Ealing Council has sought to erase, deny or minimise the causes and impacts of air quality issues related to Southall Gasworks, refused to enforce any local solutions, and actively discouraged and attempted to prevent community activists’ voices from being heard.

Promote sustainable infrastructure. Ensure local transport and development planning supports investment in sustainable infrastructure, that limits impact on air quality, enabling a shift to low-emission transport and energy options.

Except in Southall? The Council recently decided NOT to widen the South Road bridge in Southall. Widening the bridge, as promised, would ease congestion, and improve air quality, public transport and active travel options. The bridge widening was the one concession granted to the Southall community when the London Mayor overruled local democracy to give the go ahead to development of the highly contaminated Southall Gasworks site.

Support the transition to clean energy. Supporting the uptake of low-emission energy technologies and improvements in efficiencies, and reducing reliance on the consumption of fossil and solid fuels.

Like in Chile? Simply promoting and encouraging more (low emission) cars isn’t going to reduce congestion, emissions from brake and tyre wear, or help to reduce our “reliance on the consumption of fossil fuels”. Ealing reportedly doesn’t have enough power on the electricity grid for new homes until 2030.

Creating good jobs. We want to… deliver an ambitious programme of building more genuinely affordable homes.

Ealing is building fewer genuinely affordable homes than ever, and making the housing crisis in Ealing worse by demolishing more social rent homes than it is building.

Spotlight on Southall

These are all my comments, so I’m not putting it all in italics.

My suggestions and questions for the strategy are still in bold.

Southall cannot be used as a good example of how Ealing Council takes air pollution seriously.

Inequalities

Southall has a BAME population of more than 90%.

Southall Broadway/West and Southall Green are the two council wards that border the old Gasworks site, and which are downwind from the FM Conway asphalt and Tarmac plants, and the two wood-burning incinerators, depending on wind direction. They are connected by the Gasworks site and by the Air Quality Focus Area from South Road to The Green, King Street and Western Road.

Southall is already a high pollution area (and an Air Quality Focus Area as a result), but has several additive sources of unmitigated, uncontrolled air pollution.

Economically poorer, BAME people, children, older people and pregnant women are the most vulnerable to the health impacts of toxic air pollution. Certainly not a fairer start for Southall’s children.

We know from bitter experience over the last six years in Southall that the council has failed in its duty to protect some of its most vulnerable residents from harm.

Raising Awareness

To add insult to injury, the council failed to raise public awareness of the risks and the air quality monitoring data in an open and transparent manner before work on the site began, and while the work was in progress. It was only thanks to local residents and CASH campaigners that a Public Meeting was held in 2019, and it was only then that Public Health England (PHE) acknowledged that some people with African and South Asian heritage are genetically vulnerable to naphthalene poisoning. PHE stated that “levels of naphthalene [at the Gasworks site] must be urgently reduced”. Residents were never informed if, when or how levels of naphthalene were urgently reduced.

It’s noteworthy that the Council claims it asked PHE to get involved only “following concerns raised by local residents” and not because the Council itself carried out an Equalities Impact Assessment prior to works starting in 2016, knowing that the Southall population was significantly more vulnerable to air pollution due to high pre-existing levels and multiple inequalities.

Similarly, the council says it responded to residents’ concerns by installing “independent” air quality monitors on site in 2021, but this is five years after the work started, and two years after the main source of air pollution and odour complaints (the so-called soil “hospital”) was decommissioned. The monitors now installed record near-real time data for “urban background” emissions of odourless particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide.

The odours and air pollution that residents are concerned about originate from polyaromatic hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds (i.e., the hundred years’ of toxic waste from town gas, coal tar and petrochemical work sites). We are told that there are diffusion tubes monitoring these emissions, but there is a total lack of openness and transparency as to their locations and the data they have recorded. The council has refused to answer the most basic questions (e.g., what chemical or chemicals causes the odour of petrol? What level of this chemical or chemicals in the air is detectable by the human nose?) So much for raising public awareness!

Public Health

We are also told that the emissions from the site are not harmful to health (this despite hundreds of residents reporting that they have suffered ill-health as a result), so it is surprising that the council then spent £200,000 (albeit paid for by Berkeley Group) on these monitors. Is the air pollution from Southall Gasworks harmful to health, or not? The money would have been better spent on statutory nuisance enforcement. Why did Berkeley Group agree to pay for these monitors?

Moreover, the council must have known in 2016 that the economically poorer, mostly BAME population of Southall carried a higher burden of risk to the potential ill-effects of a hundred years’ of highly contaminated toxic waste being dug up and “cleaned” in the open air in the middle of a densely populated residential area. Why wasn’t truly independent (i.e., not paid for by the perpetrators Berkeley) air quality monitoring put in place before work started (to record a baseline), and open and transparent near-real time data published so that residents could see for themselves the reality of what they were forced to breathe night and day for the best part of two and a half years?

Enforcement

Why didn’t the council force Berkeley Group to stop work and make the site safe in the three month heatwave of 2018 when residents pleaded with the council leader, local councillors and Member of Parliament to do so?

The council failed to act on enforcing the construction management plan (CMP) at Southall Gasworks. Indeed half of the plan was missing from the planning portal and the council admitted that it didn’t have a full copy of the original CMP.

How on earth was the council planning to enforce a CMP it wasn’t in possession of? This was a gross dereliction of duty to care for the health and wellbeing of (by its own definition) the most vulnerable residents in the borough.

The Council was committed to full enclosure of waste sites in its 2017-22 Air Quality Action Plan. Why wasn’t the one hundred years of petrochemical waste “soil cleaning hospital” enclosed?

National Grid have enclosed their enclosed their soil remediation work specifically to avoid causing odour nuisance to the local community (and thanks no doubt to campaigning by local residents and activists at Clean Air for Southall and Hayes).

On Whose Side?

Why did the former and current council leader accept over £30,000 in gifts and hospitality from developers including Berkeley Group to fly (!) to the south of France for what Private Eye Magazine describes as a booze and hookerfest?

The new council leader claims he went there to negotiate hard. If that’s the case, what did he negotiate? He also claimed that it wasn’t what he expected and that it was a mistake to go. If that’s also the case, why was it a mistake?

How can we be sure that the new council leader and his administration won’t continue making these mistakes and taking the side of developers rather than standing up for the residents they are elected to represent?

Local Action

If the soil is now clean and the air is safe to breathe, why would stopping works during hot weather (which didn’t happen in 2018), and covering stockpiles (why weren’t they covered already?) be given as examples of possible mitigating actions?

There must be a new commitment to work with and for residents where these are issues. Air pollution and odour nuisance reporting and investigation procedures need to be overhauled as they are currently not fit for purpose (reporting process too convoluted, each one investigated as a single, isolated incident rather than as part of an ongoing problem, residents are simply not believed and our reports are minimised and invalidated).

Work on the Gasworks site is due to complete in 2038. Why is the date for net-zero emissions set for twelve years after this date in 2050?

There’s a similar commitment to target zero-emissions for construction vehicles by 2040, which is two years after the new draft local Plan period for new developments ends.

What has Ealing Council done to date to campaign for greater regulatory powers and for a Clean Air Act? Please give examples.

This draft Air Quality Strategy is fine in many respects in terms of the words it contains, but what concerns me is that these are empty words if they are not acted on and enforced.

Recent history strongly suggests the council doesn’t have the leadership, organisational culture or political will to act in the interests of its most vulnerable residents in Southall.

Active Travel

There’s a lot of talk about active travel and Ealing Council’s multi-million pound Let’s Go Southall campaign in the draft Strategy, but very little on its real cost and impact. They seem to have about 50 regular weekly activity groups. Over two years that’s 5,000 sessions. 30,000 attendances (not individuals). So average of six people per session? 1,000 people attended at least two sessions (repeat attendances). My guess would be not many more than 1,000 in total, most will be repeaters (thinking GP referrals, lots of organisers?). If it’s helped 1,000 individuals, that’s £5,400 per person. If 10,000 it’s £540 per person (still seems like a lot of money). And there’s no evidence that it’s helped anyone!

The council must be open and transparent with residents that Let’s Go Southall is a top-down neoliberal behavioural change (“nudge theory”) programme led by a retired stockbroker, and not the “grassroots social movement” of the council’s Orwellian publicity.

If the Council is serious about improving safe active travel options in Southall, then it must improve road and pavement conditions and safety first. Many of the roads and pavements are not fit to cycle or walk on, especially for children and families, older people, and people with disabilities.

Air Quality Action Plan

The 2017-2022 Action Plan

a. Included a number of no-or-low-impact schemes such as Low Emission Neighbourhoods (LENs), implemented in 2021 as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). The Action Plan itself states that there is no (or, elsewhere, conflicting) evidence that LENs/LTNs reduce air pollution within the designated area, and that there is evidence that they increase air pollution outside it. The Action Plan also states that LENs/LTNs are often implemented in areas of relatively low air pollution. Surely it would be better to reduce traffic in areas with high levels of air pollution?

b. Similarly, a 20mph zone was implemented borough-wide, yet the Action Plan states there is no evidence that speed reduction zones produce a reduction in emissions. The Plan states that there is a perception that road safety is improved. Perhaps the Council will reflect on the road safety issues associated with its promotion of the uptake of much heavier electric vehicles while reducing road space for vehicles.

c. Another low impact scheme was Play Streets. How many Play Streets are there now? How often do they run? Where are they?

d. How many Pocket Parks are there? Where are they?

e. How many Green Screens are there? Where are they? Why were green screens not erected at Southall Gasworks even after residents complained of dust from the site in their homes?

f. How are these schemes evaluated in terms of reducing air pollution? Where are the air quality monitors located to record baseline measurements to compare against air pollution levels during or after the scheme is in place?

g. Enforcement of anti-idling laws was deemed “not cost-effective”. Smoke control was not deemed a problem and therefore not promoted or enforced. Who made these decisions?

h. What is the wider ‘cost’ to residents in not taking enforcement action against these criminal behaviours?

The 2022-2027 Action Plan (AQAP)

If air pollution monitoring data cannot inform the efficacy of individual actions, how can it be used in combination with secondary data to do so? I’m sure there must be a sensible explanation, but to most people I suspect this statement makes little sense. In Southall, we have continuously been asked to ignore our own lived experience of health and quality of life problems attributed to the open-air ‘cleaning’ of a hundred years of petrochemical waste at the Gasworks site, in favour of the developer Berkeley’s assurances that it’s own monitoring of air quality is ‘within acceptable limits’ and harmless to health. Public Health England published four risk assessments based on Berkeley’s data, and came to similar conclusions, although neither looked at any secondary data. The air pollution data has still to be published so that the public can make up their own minds.

I’m not sure how imperceptible changes that cannot be detected by monitoring or modelling can be interpreted as Low Impact or a step in the right direction.

The Action Plan here seems to contradict the Strategy by stating that changes in the levels of air pollution above a certain level can be attributed even to individual actions (although more likely to be due to multiple actions).

If the council is serious about using air pollution data and secondary data to establish efficacy of its air quality strategy and action plan, (which sounds sensible enough), then it must explain what measures it will use, and publish baseline data and regular updates.

Like it does with its performance dashboard.

Looking at the Council’s own evaluation of its 2017-22 Action Plan, I would suggest that its achievements are minimal, and misleading.

Electric Vehicle charging points (p. 30 of 2022 AQAP) were not actually a specified target in the 2017 AQAP, so I’m unsure how this can be claimed as an achievement? Similarly with School Streets and specific cycle lanes. LENS/LTNs were specified as a target, but there is no mention of that fiasco here. Air quality monitoring data must be used to locate pollution hotspots for any future implementation of LENs/LTNs

The 20 mph speed limit was implemented borough-wide, but only since December 2021. Why did it take so long? What is the use of it if it isn’t enforced, especially in Southall?

Weasel Words on Air Quality Monitoring

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 13:28:00 +0100

Weasel words from Ealing Labour Council, who for six years have shown utter contempt for the health and wellbeing of Southall’s schoolchildren forced to live in the toxic stink created by Berkeley Group’s unsafe development of the old Gasworks site. 1/11

aroundealing.com/news/240000-in…

Take Blair Peach Primary School, adjacent to the highly contaminated old Gasworks site in Southall.

In 2016, Ealing Labour Council removed a functioning air quality monitor from the school grounds.

2/11

Shortly after, Berkeley Group began digging up the toxic land in the open air.

The head teacher of Blair Peach Primary School reported to the school governors very strong smells from the gasworks site caused headaches and asthma among staff and children.

3/11

At the same governors meeting, Berkeley’s head of construction at the Gasworks site was accepted as a Local Authority appointed school governor, with special responsibility for health and safety.

4/11

The governors had questioned whether there could be a conflict of interest, but were persuaded there wasn’t — as the Berkeley employee’s role as school governor was to prevent any issues coming to light.

5/11

He also arranged for two dead rats to be removed from the nursery playground.

6/11

Berkeley Group are funding Ealing Labour Council to the tune of £12m, and paid over £100k expenses to Ealing Labour Council leaders and council officers to attend property festivals in Cannes every year since 2013, which Private Eye describes as “a booze ’n’ hookerfest”.

7/11

After the digging and cleaning of the poison land was completed, Ealing Labour Council installed a new air quality monitor a couple of hundred yards from Blair Peach Primary School — inside the construction site.

8/11

Paid for by Berkeley Group (who also paid the salary of Ealing’s Contaminated Land Officer, whose main role was to ratify Berkeley’s paperwork).

9/11

The new air quality monitor doesn’t directly monitor any of the pollutants found in the contaminated land and which caused the headaches and asthma.

It records “urban background” emissions from cars.

10/11

High readings of pollutants including ozone have been deleted from the public record by the company responsible for their maintenance without any investigat ion.

Ealing Labour Council refuse to engage with local residents and community on these issues.

11/11

Questions for Cabinet Leads

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 11:03:00 +0100

Questions for Cllrs @_petermason, @DrAyshaRaza, @jkblacker, @JasbirAnand2 and @kamnagpal on tackling inequalities, healthy lives, thriving communities, a fairer start, specifically in reference to the ongoing air pollution and odour nuisance from the old Southall Gasworks site.

1) Why was there no Equalities Impact Assessment, taking into account the local area's existing economic and health inequalities?

2) Why weren't local residents informed about the risks (including potentially fatal genetic vulnerability of some Asian and Black people to naphthalene poisoning) beforehand?

3) If there are no or minimal risks to physical health as Public Health England claim in their risk assessments, why is independent air quality monitoring being commissioned now, nearly five years after earthworks began?

4) If Berkeley/Atkins/Blackwell's data is trustworthy, as Ealing Council has always claimed, why spend £200,000 on independent air quality monitoring now?

5) If there's nothing to worry about, why do Berkeley Group want to install an air quality monitor close to FM Conway's nearby asphalt plant?

6) Blair Peach Primary School's HT reported 'very strong smells' from the gasworks caused 'headaches and asthma'.

Children's lungs may never recover and result in early death.

How is this a fairer start for Southall's mainly brown and black young people?

7) Do #SouthallLivesMatter?

Unroll @threadreaderapp

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)

Strawberries for Pigs?

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 10:33:42 +0100

Little did we know at the time, but these little strawberries were usually engulfed in a toxic plume of benzene, naphthalene, and god only knows what else.

Sensibly, the wife refused to eat them.

We later discovered that official planning documents for the nearby old gasworks, which was being dug up in the open air for new homes to be built on the contaminated land, stated that no vegetables should be grown on the land. Ever!

Ealing Council Leader Julian Bell publicly blamed 'the wrong kind of wind', and – quite possibly – privately blamed 'fucking moaners'. All the while racking up over £30,000 in declared gifts and hospitality from developers including Berkeley Group, who were digging up the gasworks land.

Our soon-to-be local ward councillor and (ex-)Head of Planning Peter Mason knew all about the dangers (he tells us on Twitter) from the contaminated land back in 2009 when he campaigned against its development along with our MP Virendra Sharma (who said the development would be 'a disaster environmentally').

Yet no one told people living nearby to expect to be gassed in our own homes and gardens during the three month heatwave that was shortly to arrive.

In fact, Ealing Council announced on Twitter that the odours, while 'unpleasant', were 'not harmful to health' would be 'gone in a few days'.

I later discovered that there is scientific evidence that some people with Asian and African heritages are genetically more vulnerable to very serious and sometimes fatal health conditions from inhaling naphthalene, a fact acknowledged (although later denied, despite the published evidence) by Public Health England at a packed public meeting in July 2019.

No one told us.

Ealing Council, despite being fully aware of the potential dangers to health (and to the environment) failed to carry out any kind of Equalities Impact Assessment, and only helped Berkeley Group to rush through the decontamination process to maximise their profit from Crossrail in Southall.

Profit over people. Labour Council. Our lives didn't matter to them.

Now, we are being asked to believe that our MP (who has begun making the right noises two years too late – what happened to the nearly 1,000 signature petition I gave you in 2018 Mr Sharma?) cares and is on our side, and that our local ward councillor cares and always has done. Only Bell is – unusually for him – honest enough not to suddenly pretend he gives a shit about anyone but himself and looking after his own family.

At the packed public meeting in 2019, which our local ward councillor chaired, he and Bell refused to declare their financial interests with Berkeley Group, refused to let me speak with the microphone so that people couldn't hear that the Council, Berkeley Group, the Environment Agency and Public Health England had all colluded to cover up the real level of toxic and carcinogenic air pollution – that it was consistently above legal limits and rising – by manipulating, removing, and presenting the air quality data in such a way as to make it look like it was mostly within legal limits.

At the same meeting, our MP arrived late, mostly unseen, sat silently at the back of the room, and left early, mostly unseen. At the same meeting, a strangely truthful Bell admitted that he had 'known about the nuisance, the BAD nuisance, for two and a half years'! Yet nothing could be done.

Now Peter Mason, free from his constraints as Head of Planning after resigning following his failed coup attempt to take the leadership from Bell last year, is telling us that something could and should have been done, yet all of them remained silent and did nothing for years.

Unbelievable!

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.)

Trigger Vote for Sharma

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 15:24:00 +0100

In July 2019, I attended a public meeting with Public Health England to discuss air pollution problems created by the development of the old gasworks site.

At this meeting, I asked Public Health England if it is true that people with Asian and African heritage are genetically more at risk from poisoning from naphthalene – one of the main causes of the stink coming from the gasworks site.

Do you know what they said?

Yes.

Yes, Asian and African people are genetically more at risk from poisoning from naphthalene – one of the main causes of the stink from the gasworks site.

Our MP, Mr Sharma, who had been publicly supporting the need for this meeting, arrived ten minutes after it started. He sneaked in, sat at the back mostly unseen by anyone there, and then left early.

A bit like his time as an MP!

So, at this meeting.

We discovered that Asian and African people, the majority of people in Southall, are genetically more at risk from poisoning from naphthalene.

What did Mr Sharma have to say about that?

Nothing.

For two years or more, Southallians have complained to Mr Sharma about the oppressive stink, and poison air, coming from the old gasworks site. I have suffered numerous chest infections, my wife had serious and severe health problems, and my young son has been hospitalised with asthma and now has to take steroids every day of his life so that he can breathe. I know neighbours whose loved ones have now got cancer, and some who have died from cancer. All, we believe, caused by the poison air.

What has Mr Sharma done to help us?

Nothing.

A year ago, a group of us presented Mr Sharma with a petition signed by 900 Southallians and their families and friends begging Mr Sharma to do something to get Berkeley Group, the developer of the old gasworks site, to stop poisoning Southall.

What did Mr Sharma do?

Nothing.

Finally, throughout the last couple of years, while his constituents in Southall Green have been poisoned by the toxic air from the old gasworks site, and getting ill with breathing problems, and cancer, the developer Berkeley Group has sponsored numerous local events, mainly to 'clean up' Southall.

What did Mr Sharma do?

He attended every one and was photographed smiling broadly wearing his hi-viz jacket with the Berkeley Group logo emblazoned across it.

So tonight, I'm voting in favour of the trigger ballot for Mr Sharma, so that we have the opportunity to have a new Labour MP for Ealing Southall, one who will stand up for local people rather than help those who oppress them.

And I ask all of you to do the same.

Solidarity!

UPDATE: Sharma was triggered for reselection, but survived without having to stand again thanks to his old pal Boris Johnson, who called a general election shortly after.

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

Southall under Siege: the Neighbours from Hell

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 22:14:32 +0100

‘A lack of scrutiny,’ says John Freeman, Regulatory Services Officer at Ealing Council.

He’s talking about lessons to be learned from the council’s response to the new asphalt plant built in neighbouring Hillingdon borough in 2014.

‘We didn’t expect there to be so much odour from a new building, or so many complaints.’

Moving swiftly on.

Oppressive odour

The highly contaminated old gasworks site in Southall has been kicking up a stink, too.

Carcinogenic benzene and naphthalene, among a cocktail of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals and particulates large and small, are in the air.

‘The odour is oppressive,’ says Damian Leydon.

There are twenty or thirty people in the room.

No one bats an eyelid.

Upset residents

Damian is the Operations Director at 'Southall Waterside', as the gasworks site is being marketed.

It's wedged between the grand union canal, Yeading Brook and Minet Park to the north-west of the site, and two of the twenty percent most economically deprived council wards in England. Southall Green to the south, and Southall Broadway to the north and north-east.

‘The last thing we want to do is upset residents,’ says Damian.

It’s a bit late for that.

Please stop

Damian previously worked as the Construction Manager on Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset, and the Athletes Village at the 2012 London Olympics.

Presumably, there were no carcinogenic leaks, oppressed, or upset residents there.

Three times I ask Damian, ‘How many residents are you prepared to upset before you will stop?’

No answers

As for almost every question that night, at Ealing Council’s Air Quality Scrutiny Panel meeting in September 2018, there is no answer.

The meeting concludes, and later the ‘minutes’ are published, but such minutiae do not make the cut.

Was I at a different meeting?

The final report of the ‘scrutiny’ panel, six months later, reads as if the problem is in the past, finished, with yet more ‘lessons to be learned’ (and immediately forgotten).

Friends with benefits

As I leave the meeting, I see Damian having a cosy-looking chat in the corridor (of power) outside the meeting room with Julian Bell, Ealing Council's Leader.

Councillor Bell sat through the two hour meeting in silence.

I ask Julian if he’s booking his holiday in Cannes?

The south of France resort hosts the annual MIPIM property developers’ ‘booze and hookerfest’ (as Private Eye magazine calls it).

Julian is a regular attendee, all expenses paid for by Damian’s employer Berkeley Group, despite claiming to be teetotal. Peter Mason, my ward councillor, is a new attendee. He is not teetotal.

‘If my son gets cancer because of this, you better not stand so close to me,’ I say to Leydon.

He rolls his eyes.

‘David, don’t let’s make this personal,’ says Bell.

We can't breathe!

For two and a half years, my family, my neighbours and friends, have been harassed, attacked, and gassed in our own homes and gardens.

Our children have been forced to breathe ‘stinky’, poisonous air in their school playgrounds, and in our public parks.

We have been laid under siege through three hot summers, including last year’s extended heatwave.

Despite many repeated requests to stop, Damian’s uncovered, unenclosed cesspit of decontamination of a hundred years of toxic waste continues unabated.

Good neighbours

‘Be a good and respectful neighbour,’ says Councillor Mason, at the ward forum.

‘It’s unpleasant’ we are told. ‘It will clear in days, and it’s not harmful to health,’ Ealing Council namelessly tweeted. In June 2017.

Round and round we go.

Is this corrupt?

‘It’s the wrong kind of wind,’ claims Bell.

‘It’s not our responsibility, it’s the Environment Agency.’

‘It’s not us, it’s Public Health England.’

‘I’ll phone Julian and get him to put a councillor on it for you,’ Tony Pidgley, founder and chair of Berkeley Group tells us.

“Cash. Always cash.” (Tony Pidgley)

We started a campaign. Clean Air for Southall and Hayes. CASH for short.

‘I DO NOT TAKE CASH! I DO NOT TAKE CASH!’ is our MP Virendra Sharma’s frankly bizarre opening statement, shouted at us when we go to meet him.

What’s going on?

When is remediation NOT remediation?

Back to the future with John Freeman.

I email John to ask him when remediation of the soil (the cleaning of the contaminated land) is due to be completed. It’s the excavation, the turning, the moving of the toxic waste that has laid at rest for fifty years or more that we’re told is likely to be the main source of the odour nuisance and air pollution.

‘March 2019. It’s finished already.’

‘But it still stinks.’

‘Did you leave the cooker on?’

‘But I’ve seen the planning documents where it says remediation is scheduled to be completed in 2038.’

John consults his colleague, James Potter, Ealing’s Contaminated Land Officer, whose post was initially funded by none other than Berkeley Group.

A very simple explanation as it turns out.

‘The remediation for the next nineteen years is, in a sense, NOT remediation.’

Berkeley bribes?

Then there is the fact, confirmed (and denied) by Public Health England, that the majority Asian and African population of Southall, due to genetic factors, have an increased risk from exposure to naphthalene.

And then there’s Berkeley Group's track record of paying off their former finance director to keep quiet about allegations of bribery and corruption at the top of the company.

Understandably, we doubt the veracity of their own reports of the air quality monitoring data recorded by their business partner, data which they refuse to share with us.

Enough is enough.

Stop the work at the gasworks site while it is made safe.

Stop poisoning Southall.

Please donate to our legal campaign for justice: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/cleanairforsouthallandhayes/

PHE cover-up, continued

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 19:39:00 +0100

Original Atkins report data doesn’t add up, and is full of holes.
PHE’s method of presenting data is unscientific and misleading, and appears designed to minimise the levels of toxic emissions.
Average levels of benzene and naphthalene at the southern boundary near the soil hospital have been up to 2 times higher than the legal limit for at least seven months.

This is a follow-up post to my previous PHE cover-up note.

Here is a graphical representation of what my earlier post found - increases in toxic emissions, over and above the legal limits:

All data taken from Public Health England’s three reports

It’s important to note that the above graphic uses data averages from ALL site air monitors, so values are LOWER than they would be for, say the two monitors closest to the soil ‘hospital’ (and my home).

Increases in toxic air

This is cause for concern in and of itself. Berkeley Group, we have been told, put extra measures in place to reduce odour and emissions of toxic air.

But the result is the opposite - more toxic air than ever before (Berkeley didn’t bother to record individual hydrocarbon emissions prior to June 2018. Or if they did, they are not releasing the data.)

PHE’s third report, published somewhat (in)conveniently the day before our public meeting on 10 July, made no mention of these increases, and in fact did not even publish the data for the third period from January to April 2018. I wonder why?

More covering-up

So, I thought I would look again, more closely, at the data provided in the original (who do the actual air quality monitoring), and at PHE’s subsequent three reports.

What I found is truly shocking.

Atkins led us to believe that the summer months would be the highest levels of emissions

Location of air quality monitors:

Air quality monitors ‘ES014’ and ‘AIR 1’ directly to the north and north-east of my home

The data in some of the tables provided by Atkins simply doesn’t add up:

If you add the weekly figures in the highlighted row together and divide by 15 (the number of weeks with data), you get 4.5 average not 7.5

What’s concerning here, is that PHE used the correctly calculated averages. I know they did, because they are the same averages I calculated from Atkins’ data.

The question is, how did Atkins come to present incorrect (mostly higher) averages than the data provided shows?

My own theory, is that they removed some data showing very high levels, but forgot to adjust the average. That would explain the missing data in week 2, for example.

This would also make the overall picture look even worse than it already does.

I haven’t checked all the data tables provided by Atkins. There is one table for each monitor, in a PDF. I asked Tony Pidgley for the data in spreadsheet format, but he failed to deliver on that simple request. It takes a long time to transfer the data from the PDF into a spreadsheet manually.

What I did look at is the data from the two air quality monitors closest to my home - ES014 and AIR 1 - about 150m to the north and north-east.

These are also the two monitors which PHE used the combined data from to show the levels ‘at the soil hospital’ in their first report (p. 5).

PHE refer to monitors AIR 1 and ES14 [sic] (ES014)

These air monitors are really quite close to my home.

Soil ‘hospital’ emissions

Even more concerning about the data PHE have published, is that they are not comparing like for like, and appear to be deliberately trying to minimise the published levels of toxins in the air:

For the first report, the data for the soil hospital used data from two monitors, AIR1 and ES14.
For the following two reports (from October 2018 onwards) they included data from another three monitors, two of which are further away from the soil ‘hospital’, and therefore likely to give lower readings. I say likely, because the data hasn’t been published, only a summary.
The final report, for 2019, includes 4 weeks of data when the soil ‘hospital’ had closed, further diluting the data, and having the effect of further lowering the published averages.
Since the soil ‘hospital’ closed, three new off-site monitors are located, one in Minet Park to the north-west of the site, and two in Randolph Road to the east, and behind several rows of houses. Again, including data from these sites further reduces the overall site average.
The above is all highly unscientific, and again I wonder what was their motivation for doing this?

Locations of additional on and off site air monitors

There’s probably other stuff I’ve missed, and I haven’t looked at the data from the other air monitors located near Blair Peach Primary School, or elsewhere.

One aspect of the Atkins weekly average data I noticed, that struck me as being odd, is that while levels of benzene and naphthalene varied quite wildly from week to week and between AIR1 (above) and ES14 monitors, readings for other chemicals are often exactly the same at the two locations and in some cases for consecutive weeks. Maybe that is possible, but it just seems to me unlikely, and therefore raises more doubts about the integrity and validity of what we have been told.

If you’re interested, you can see my Atkins spreadsheet.

Naphthalene Poisoning Risk in People of African and Asian Heritage

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 09:55:00 +0100

Scientific and medical research shows that people of Asian and African ethnicity are genetically more susceptible to naphthalene poisoning via inhalation.

@PHE_London representative Robie Kamanyire falsely claimed this is from ingestion only.

youtube.com/embed/ZdTj-l3S…

@PHE_London 50% ingested, 50% inhaled vapours.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…

@PHE_London Roby Kamanyire has emailed the following response to my query.

@PHE_London It beggars belief, his response. Firstly, he admits that people of Asian and African origin (or 'people with a Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency' as he calls them) are at risk.

Then restates his false claim that it's all about children swallowing mothballs. Or is he now referring simply to long-term health impacts in general? I've asked him for his sources, but he's on holiday now until 7 August!

The source I found is a literature review from 2013, which quite clearly talks about inhalation as the main risk (and even the single research source linked to for the genetic factor describes inhalation as the main pathway, as well as ingestion).

Then to exclude the soil hospital (which is/was always claimed to be the main source of the odour), and by which measurement PHE themselves stated that levels of naphthalene were well above legal limits and need to be 'urgently reduced' to prevent long-term exposure. Astounding!

Unroll @threadreaderapp

PHE cover-up?

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 19:09:00 +0100

Levels of benzene exceeded the EU and UK ambient AQS of 5 ug/m3 during January to April 2019.

Public Health England’s third report released today is a cause of real concern.

Of course, it basically re-states its position in previous reports that there is nothing to worry about.

But in PHE’s second report (p.11), it showed a handy comparison table between weeks 1-16 and 17-27:

This table shows significant increases in average and maximum (range) recorded

levels of benzene and naphthalene in the 17-27 week period (October to December 2018), compared to the 1-16 week period (June to September 2018).

In their third report, though, there was no such useful comparison table for weeks 28- 47, merely a total for weeks 1-47, which includes 4 weeks where the soil treatment ‘hospital’ was no longer in use.

So I made my own comparison table (please feel free to share, edit, copy, download - I have my own separate version, too):

My numbers are rounded to make it easier to read.

Assuming my calculations are correct (and if anyone cares to check, that would be fantastic), what it seems to show is that:

Levels of benzene exceeded the EU and UK ambient AQS of 5 ug/m3 during January to April 2019.
Levels of benzene were about 3 times higher between January and April this year, than between June and September during the heatwave last summer.
Levels of naphthalene were over one and a half times higher.
Levels of trichloroethene were 4 times greater.
Levels of ethylbenzene were 2 times higher.

This is contrary to what Damian Leydon, Berkeley Group’s Operations Director assured Ealing Council’s Air Quality Scrutiny Panel (p.12) in September 2018:

Why didn’t PHE produce the comparison table in their third report like they did in their second report?

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!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics?

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 22:54:00 +0100

From my original Facebook note.

Berkeley Group founder and chair Tony Pidgley promised to share their onsite air quality monitoring data with us almost two months ago. We’re still waiting.

Today,I finally received a response to my email of 29 September, in which I asked Tony to confirmm what his trusty sidekick Karl Whiteman told us when we met with the both, that benzene levels were ‘averaging 3.25 parts per million (ppm) [sic], and never exceeding 5ppm.’

‘Dear David,

I trust you are well.

I appreciate that you have been awaiting the release of data for some time and I do apologise for the continuing delay. I am afraid there is a great deal of data and the insurers are still going through the detail.

In the meantime, as I think it is unreasonable to keep you waiting any longer, I have asked our advisers to produce resumes of the information which I am enclosing and which I hope you will find helpful.

If you would like to set up another meeting with me, please liaise with my PA, Jo Potton.

With kindest regards,

Tony’

Update for residents on monitoring.

docs.google.com/document/…

FAQs - Air Quality Monitoring.

In these ‘resumes’, Atkins restate what they said at Ealing Council’s Air Quality Scrutiny Panel meeting in September - that during the period July to September, average levels of benzene did not exceed 5 micrograms per cubic meter (mg/m3), and that this is ‘well within the UK legal limit for benzene’ [sic].

The UK Health and Safety Executive states that the legal limit for benzene is 1 part per million (ppm).

Converting ppm to mg/m3:

Conversion Calculator

$\text {“mg/m3}$ to ppm” or “ppm to $\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}$

The conversion equation is based on 25 °C and 1 atmosphere:

$Xppm=(Y$ mg/m3)(24.45)/(molecular weight)

$\mathrm {Y}\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}=(\mathrm {X}$ ppm)(molecular weight)/24.45

Fill in either the $‘ppm”$ value (X) or the $\text {"}\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}$ value (Y) AND the molecular weight of the compound. Then press the “Calculate” button.

ppm:1 $\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}$ molecular weight:78.11184

Calculate Reset

ppm value	$\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}\mathrm {valu}$	based	on the molecular weight of
1	3.19		78.11184

Remember to consider significant digits in your use of the answer.

$$1\text {ppmbenzene}=3.19\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}_{3}$$

Molecular weight of benzene = 78.11184

So, Berkeley Group, via their sub-contracted ‘independent’ air quality monitoring partner corporation Arkins are stating that the average level of benzene during the summer months was less than 5 mg/m3, or less than 1.57 ppm:

Conversion Calculator

" $\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}$ to ppm" or “ppm to mg/m³”

The conversion equation is based on 25 °℃ and 1 atmosphere:

$Xppm=(Y$ g/m3)(24.45)/(molecular weight)or

$\mathrm {Y}\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}=(\mathrm {X}$ ppm)(molecular weight)/24.45

Fill in either the $“ppm”$ value (X) or the $“mg/m3”$ value (Y) AND the molecular weight of the compound. Then press the “Calculate” button.

ppm: mg/m³:5 molecular weight: 78.11184

Calculate Reset

ppm value	$\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}^{3}\mathrm {valu}$e	based on the molecular weight of
1.57	5	78.11184

Remember to consider significant digits in your use of the answer.

$$5\mathrm {mg}/\mathrm {m}_{3}\text {benzene}=1.57\mathrm {ppm}$$

1.57 ppm is $57%$ higher than the UK legal limit of 1 ppm.

The reason Atkins and Berkeley presented data for benzene over the summer period is because they believe this was the period with the highest levels (due to the heat), and that they say it can reasonably be deduced from this that the average over the year, therefore, must be even less.

I would like to see the monthly, weekly, daily and real-time data.

I believe it could reasonably be deduced that the average for July was over 5 ppm, and that the levels of benzene could be significantly higher on many occasions over shorter periods. But we will never know, unless we are given access to the data.

And none of the above tells us what is causing the smell of petrol.

My gran used to mothball all her clothes, and I think I would recognise that smell. So, while I’m sure naphthalene may well be part of what we smell, it’s not the whole story. And naphthalene is just fine isn’t it?

And then there are all the other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons like xylene and toluene that they haven’t mentioned. Because, we all know that sniffing an unknown, uncontrolled chemical cocktail every day for eighteen months is bound to be safe, too. It just stands to reason!

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

7/7t2m.io/z6shGyFn

Health Risks of Exposure to Benzene

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 22:23:00 +0100

'Benzene evaporates easily, and most people can just detect its distinctive smell at concentrations between 2.5 and 5 parts per million (ppm) in air.' (hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg329.… [PDF])

aresok.org/npg/nioshdbs/c…

convertunits.com/molarmass/Benz…

#Benzene #Cancer #SouthallWaterside #Southall @berkeleygroupuk @EalingCouncil @EalingCustSer @pejmason @juliangbell @EnvAgencySE @PHE_London @kamnagpal

hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg329.…

- short term exposure to benzene in air may cause irritation to the eyes, nose and throat, cough, a hoarse voice and breathing difficulties
- benzene [is] a cancer causing chemical
- inhalation [of] benzene may cause neurological effects

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

@PHE_uk vs. @berkeleygroupuk

- feeling and being sick
- stomach pain
- drowsiness, dizziness or weakness
- headache
- irritability
- skin rash
- seizures (fits)

'Harmless' @damian_leydon?

#SouthallWaterside #MakingSouthallStinknhs.uk/conditions/poi…

The longest exposure period for which there are recommended limits is 8 hours.

There's nothing to say what are the effects of being exposed to lower levels over 14 months, day and night.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

Oops! Sorry.

I forgot cancer. And Anaemia.

Chronic exposure:

'The assumption is made that there is no threshold to such effects and that any
exposure results in some increase in risk, albeit this may be very small.'

Don't take my word for it:

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

Benzene also causes miscarriages.

[x.com/EalingCou...](https://x.com/EalingCouncil/status/1072457795621060611?s=20)

Unroll @threadreaderapp

Visit to Southall Waterside (aka The Green Quarter)

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 20:10:00 +0100

Visit To #SouthallWaterside

1:40 @damian_leydon 'We had to shut the site for 2 days when it snowed, it was unsafe... it cost me a lot of money to shut the site, but it was the right decision... We all know that ice can be dangerous!'

#SouthallLivesMatter

2:07 Visitor: 'Can we go into the soil hospital?'

@damian_leydon 'Er... no. No we won't be able to go in there today.'

#SouthallWaterside #MakingSouthallStink #Southall

Old story, but: 'Berkeley Homes is threatening hundreds of homebuyers with bankruptcy...' @BerkeleyGroupUK #SouthallWaterside #BuyerBeware #BrexitShambles

.@VirendraSharma said, 'We need to oppose the development of the gas works site' by @BerkeleyGroupUK:

1:20 'It will be a burden on the local community, it will be a disaster environmentally...'

less than a minute later, @VirendraSharma was all for it, of course, cosying up to 'Mr Boris'.

Of course, it was that clown, @BorisJohnson who undemocratically overruled elected local authorities @Hillingdon and @EalingCouncil @juliangbell. #SouthallShambles

We all know that ice can be dangerous. Of course. What about benzene and asbestos, some of the contaminants being 'cleaned' in the soil 'hospital' @damian_leydon @VirendraSharma @juliangbell @journo_martinp? #SouthallWaterside

Of course, it was Tim Metcalf, aggregates and asphalt director at @FMConwayltd who said, 'Only water vapour is emitted by the [Heathrow] plant’s chimney stack.' #MakingSouthallStinkgetwestlondon.co.uk/news/west-lond…

Which doesn't tally with what @Hillingdon's environmental protection officer told me, that @FMConwayltd increased the height of the chimney by 10m, 'to better disperse the odours.' Oops!

So, we know that @FMConwayltd, best buddies with @BerkeleyGroupUK, are lying shits, who don't give fuck about people. Who knew? #SouthallLivesMatter

Tim Metcalf, again: @FMConwayltd's Heathrow Asphalt plant has 'never been closed down for any infringement of our environmental permit.'

.@EalingCouncil 'leader' and @VirendraSharma researcher @juliangbell: 'FMConway were shut down by Hillingdon Council for around 2 weeks after being served an enforcement notice in spring of this year.'

[x.com/juliangbe...](https://x.com/juliangbell/status/1010621649111183360)

And then we @VirendraSharma, himself: '...placing them in breach of their environmental permit...' #MakingSouthallStink #Southall @journo_martinp

Known effects of asphalt fumes (cancer, asthma, nausea, etc.):

Tim Metcalf of @FMConwayltd: Heathrow Asphalt 'does not pose a hazard to the health of our workers or residents.'

#SouthallLivesMatternj.gov/health/eoh/rtk…

My apologies. It's not @damian_leydon playing to the camera, it's his sidekick @Rickwatler...

Excerpts from a @PHE_uk report from 2015 into @FMConwayltd's Heathrow Asphalt plant.

#greatpeoplegreatwork #MakingSouthallStink #SouthallLivesMatter

The same applies to toxic emissions and air pollution from @berkeleygroupuk's #SouthallWaterside as far as I can see (I'm no expert, of course).

#CleanAir for #Southall

@BerkeleyGroupUK Unroll @threadreaderapp