Southall Stories

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.

What Happened to Southall?

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

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

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

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

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

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

📣 THIS FRIDAY

FREE TICKETS AVAILABLE

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

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

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

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

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

communitypoweredreporting@proton.me

Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-tipping

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:41:26 +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?

Ealing's Burning

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:33:53 +0100

It’s getting heavy around here, so time for some light relief.

Ealing likes to call itself “the Home of Loud.”

It is a reference to Jim Marshall, valve amps, and the glorious feedback of British rock music history.

But after reading a few years’ worth of Leader’s Notes, another title suggests itself:

The Home of the Same Song.

Because every week, the column strikes the same chord:

Fighting inequality. Tackling the climate crisis. Creating good jobs.

Sometimes the intro changes.

One week:

“We are declaring war on fly-tipping.”

Another week:

“Together we are stronger.”

Another:

“We are all creative.”

And occasionally:

“Funding has been slashed by government.”

But the chorus is always the same.

The housing crisis is severe. The council is taking action. Targets are ambitious. Times are tough. We are on your side.

By the time you’ve read a dozen columns, you start to feel like you’re listening to a greatest-hits album with only one track on it.

The municipal remix

It goes something like this:

Track 1: Fighting Inequality (Extended Mix)

Track 2: Tackling the Climate Crisis (Radio Edit)

Track 3: Creating Good Jobs (Feat. High Streets Taskforce)

Track 4: Funding Has Been Slashed (Acoustic Version)

Track 5: We Are On Your Side (Christmas Special)

By the end of the playlist, you realise something:

The title keeps changing. The artwork keeps changing. But the times…

The song remains the same.

There’s a rich popular music heritage in Ealing, and in Southall — the home of Misty In Roots and The Ruts. I channeled my inner rock star and wrote and produced a late-70s/early-80s inspired Southall sound song.

Have a listen and share if you like it.

In the Home of Loud, the amps may change, the posters may change, the slogans may change.

But the setlist never does.

And somewhere in the distance, if you listen closely, you can hear the chant forming:

Get Mason Out… Get Mason Out…

And a special Bangarang Remix:

Lyrics

Verse 1

Every week
Another note
Different words
Same old quote

Fightin’ this
Fixin’ that
Three big pillars
Copycat chat

Housin’ crisis
Waitin’ list
Another promise
Easy to miss

Targets risin’
Bricks not laid
Same old song
Just remade

Chorus

In!
Ee!
Qual!
Ee!
Tee!

Ealin’ is burnin’ with
Inequality!

Ealin’s burnin’!

In!
Ee!
Qual!
Ee!
Tee!

Ealin’ is burnin’ with
Inequality!

Ealin’s burnin’!

Verse 2

Nine thousand
Families waitin’
Hopin’ to move
Straight in

Four thousand
Homes is the plan
Many half-built
More knocked down

Council tax
Up again
Kids’ clubs cut
Pay for friends

Mason’s pay
Up seventy
Leader’s tone-deaf
Melody

Chorus

In!
Ee!
Qual!
Ee!
Tee!

Ealin’ is burnin’ with
Inequality!

Ealin’s burnin’!

Bridge

Fundin’s down
Demand is up
Another promise
Another cut

Miss the target
Raise the bar
Next manifesto
Same old guitar

Final outro chant

GET!
MASON!
OUT!

The Broken Manifesto Promises that show how Labour is Failing Ealing

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:35:12 +0100

You’ve got to hand it to Peter Mason.

Every four years he manages to regenerate, reinvent and transform himself and Ealing Labour into a new and improved version of reality.

He has a creative imagination. His ambition is unbridled. He is resilient and resourceful. Nothing, it seems, can stop him recycling ever more of the same old rubbish manifesto promises while simultaneously presenting them to the public as successful achievements we should want more of.

Of course, it would be unfair to pretend Mason is alone among politicians in this kind of performance. We’ve seen it all before. And that’s really the crux of the problem.

As the loyal leader of the local incarnation of the “Party for (Short) Change,” he is the continuity candidate — the one person most likely to ensure that things stay exactly as they are. Or get even worse.

Let’s take a closer look at the record.

By his own admission just two weeks ago, Ealing has had sixteen years of cuts to frontline services under Labour control.

Julian Bell was leader until 2021, but it was Mason who coordinated the 2018 manifesto, and it’s clear he was heavily involved throughout all sixteen years.

It is hard to believe the 2022 manifesto, under his fledgling leadership, was written by anyone else. His fingerprints are all over it.

The priorities themselves have remained broadly the same, even if the labels have been given makeovers.

In 2018, Mason was cabinet lead for Housing, Planning and Transformation, while colleagues held traditional portfolios for:

Finance and Leisure
Business and Community Services
Health and Adult Services
Environment and Highways
Schools and Children’s Services

By 2021, and with an open and transparent promise to uphold the most basic Nolan Principles of public life, the same machinery had been repackaged under a new set of slogan-based titles:

Genuinely Affordable Homes
Decent Living Incomes
A Fairer Start
Healthy Lives
Climate Action
Good Growth
Inclusive Economy
Thriving Communities
Tackling Inequality
Tackling Crime and Antisocial Behaviour

There were further cabinet reshuffles, deckchair rearrangements, and revolving door entrances and exits at Perceval House - the seat of local democracy in Ealing - in 2022 and 2024.

The top table now looks like this, and there’s even some detailed descriptions about who is responsible for what.

Here’s a rough guide to who does what in Peter Mason’s brave new world of local democracy:

Cabinet portfolios: then and now

2018 functional role	2021–2026 slogan title	Core services underneath
Schools & Children’s Services	A Fairer Start	Children’s services, early years, education, SEND
Health & Adult Services	Healthy Lives	Adult social care, public health, disability services
Housing, Planning & Transformation	Genuinely Affordable Homes / Good Growth	Council housing, planning, regeneration, development
Finance & Leisure	Inclusive Economy / parts of Thriving Communities	Finance, procurement, culture, leisure, economic strategy
Business & Community Services	Thriving Communities	Libraries, community centres, voluntary sector, neighbourhood services
Environment & Highways	Climate Action	Waste, recycling, transport, highways, air quality, green policies
Employment / regeneration functions	Decent Living Incomes	Skills, employment, apprenticeships, local economy
Cross-departmental social policy	Tackling Inequality	Housing need, welfare support, public health, children’s services, community development
Community safety and enforcement	Tackling Crime and Antisocial Behaviour	ASB teams, enforcement, CCTV, regulatory services, police partnerships

Instead of departments and delivery, the focus had shifted to something else: a story.

And it’s a very attractive story.

Who doesn’t want genuinely affordable homes? Who would argue against decent living incomes? Who could oppose a fairer start or healthy lives?

But if you wanted to know who was actually responsible for delivering those promises — and how much had really been achieved — the answers were often harder to find.

While Mason crafted an elaborate tale out of aspirational slogans, and promised ever greater numbers of homes, parks, swimming pools, sports pitches, nature reserves, school streets, living wages - and even beavers - a different question lingered in the background:

How does the beautiful story match up to the rather grimmer reality?

The easiest place to look for an answer is the manifestos themselves. Unlike the cabinet titles, the manifestos came with numbers attached. Clear targets and deadlines. Promises that were supposed to be measurable.

And both the 2018 and 2022 manifestos were written under the same leadership, by the same man. Same party. Same council. Same housing crisis.

So they can be compared directly. Not as political ideology, or as spin, but as numbers. And once you put those numbers side by side, the story starts to look very different.

From 2,500 to 4,000 to 180

What changed between Ealing Labour’s 2018 and 2022 manifestos?

In both the 2018 and 2022 local elections, Ealing Labour asked voters for a fresh mandate based on a new manifesto. Both documents were ostensibly written by Peter Mason, and both were built around big, measurable promises — especially on housing.

But when the two manifestos are placed side by side, a pattern emerges.

The targets got bigger. The delivery got blurrier.

The central promise: affordable homes

In 2018, the commitment was simple:

2,500 genuinely affordable homes by 2022

A number. A type of home. A deadline.

It was one of the centrepieces of the manifesto — presented as one of the most ambitious council housebuilding programmes in London.

Four years later, the new manifesto raised the stakes:

4,000 genuinely affordable homes across the borough

A bigger number. A new deadline. A fresh promise. But what happened to the original one?

2022: the council’s own figures

By early 2022, as the 2,500-home deadline approached, the council’s internal performance dashboard showed the housing target marked:

RED

The number displayed:

1,277 homes completed or on site

A Freedom of Information response to Ealing Independents gave a clearer breakdown:

1,217 homes completed and occupied
The rest still under construction
Some not due until 2024 or 2025

So by the actual 2022 deadline:

Fewer than half the promised homes had been completed
Hundreds existed only as construction sites
Others were still years away

The moving numbers

Over the life of the programme, the public totals shifted repeatedly:

898 homes
1,355 homes
723 homes
1,965 homes
2,442 homes
2,700 homes

Different announcements. Different definitions. Different counting methods. Sometimes the figures included homes:

Not completed
Not occupied
Or not yet built at all

In some cases, a “new home” meant:

A hole in the ground with foundations poured.

The 2,700 claim

During the 2022 election campaign, Labour publicly claimed:

“Over the last four years, we’ve built 2,700 genuinely affordable homes.”

But at the same time:

The council’s own dashboard showed around 1,217 completed.

The target was marked RED.

The higher 2,700 figure appears to have included homes still under construction, in the wider development planning pipeline, and possibly other programmes beyond the core council build.

In other words, it was a number that was pure “political theatre”, and absolutely not a number that bore any relation to any lived in reality.

The £100 million question

In 2018, the council received a major grant from the Greater London Authority:

Around £100 million in funding
A target of 1,138 new affordable homes

But by early 2026 just 180 of those homes had been completed - about 16% of the target.

According to a Freedom of Information response, £71.9 million had already been spent and work had started on 836 homes. But only a small fraction were actually finished.

So even within the programmes underpinning the manifesto promises, delivery lagged far behind the headlines.

Despite the huge number of new developments across the borough, including over twenty tall towers, and housing potentially over 100,000 people, the proportion of genuinely affordable homes is actually tiny.

Reality doesn’t match fantasy.

2022: a bigger promise

Instead of a clear public reckoning with the 2,500-home target, the 2022 manifesto announced a new, bigger and better promise:

4,000 genuinely affordable homes

But without a single, consolidated figure showing how many of the original 2,500 had actually been delivered, or how many families had moved in, or what the real baseline was.

2024–25: still “contributing”

By 2024, the council’s own delivery plan still listed the same commitment, but the document itself showed something that is, perhaps, revealing. It said the council would:

“Contribute to delivery of 4,000 new genuinely affordable homes”

Not deliver or complete or achieve, but contribute. The 4,000 figure was still a target. Still a work in progress.

2025: target off track

A 2025 scrutiny report confirmed what the delivery plan implied.

The programme was supposed to deliver 4,000 genuinely affordable housing starts by 2026.

But the report also stated the target was off track. It was now expected to reach around 3,000 starts, or 75% of the target. A shortfall of 1,000 homes.

The housing reality behind the manifesto promises

The manifesto comparisons show a simple pattern:

2018: promise 2,500 homes. Deliver around half.

2022: promise 4,000 homes. 2025: target off track by 1,000.

But the manifesto numbers only tell part of the story. Because over the same period, two other housing trends were unfolding.

The waiting list that kept growing

Across public statements, the housing waiting list figures moved steadily upward:

Around 9,000 families. Then 10,000. Then 11,000.

Then the official number suddenly dropped.

Today, the council says there are: around 7,500 “live applications”.

At first glance, it looks like progress. But the reason was not a wave of new homes.

The register was tightened

In September 2023, the council introduced a new allocations policy. Under the new system all Band D applicants were removed from the register. Band D was the lowest-priority group. It included thousands of households in housing need. Those families were not rehoused. They were simply no longer counted.

Via a private communication from a reliable source, I was informed that councillors were told:

Currently there are over 12,000 applications on the Housing Register, and this grows by over 100 additional applications per month.

So the waiting list dropped:

From around 12,000 families to about 7,500 applications with the stroke of a pen. Not because homes were built or delivered, but because the list was redefined.

The demolition factor

At the same time, another trend was taking place. According to analysis by the London Tenants Federation:

12,050 social-rent homes were built in London over ten years
22,895 were demolished

Nearly twice as many homes were lost as gained.

And the borough with the highest number of demolitions?

Ealing.

The study found almost 5,000 social homes demolished in the borough. Many were cleared as part of regeneration schemes, where older social-rent homes were demolished, replacement homes were built later, and often at higher “affordable rent” levels rather than at “social rent” levels.

The long view: 9,000 families, then and now

The waiting list has been high for decades. A local newspaper report from 1996 recorded 9,000 families on the waiting list.

Nearly thirty years later, the number had risen above 12,000. The later drop to 7,500 came only after thousands were removed from the register.

So by the early 2020s, the waiting list was higher than it had been in the mid-1990s.

The same argument, thirty years apart

When challenged about the waiting list, council leaders point to funding cuts.

In 2021, London Councils said boroughs had seen a 25% real-terms fall in core spending power since 2010. At the same time, Ealing claimed its direct government grant had been cut by 64%. Both figures can be technically correct. They measure different things. But the deeper pattern is harder to ignore.

Back in 1996, councillors were already saying:

“The Government has the money. All that is lacking is the political will to spend it.”

They blamed Whitehall (central government) spending restrictions. Nearly thirty years later, the waiting list is still at similar levels, and the same arguments are still being made.

Climate: bigger numbers, similar story

The 2018 manifesto spoke in broad ambitions about carbon neutrality, cleaner air (!), more trees, active travel and green spaces.

By 2022, the targets were far more specific:

50,000 new trees
10 new parks
800,000 m² of rewilded land
2,000 EV charging points
50 School Streets
Retrofit 750 homes

Some progress has been claimed, with around 50 School Streets delivered, 1,000+ EV chargers installed and more than 40,000 new trees planted.

But for several targets - new parks, rewilding, retrofit numbers, tree canopy targets - there appears to be no clear public scorecard.

Jobs, apprenticeships, and the missing scoreboard

In 2018, economic promises were broad: support local businesses, attract new industries, expand apprenticeships.

By 2022, the targets were precise:

10,000 new jobs
2,000 apprenticeships
12,000 training outcomes
£12 million per year developer levy

Again, no public scorecard I could find.

According to Ealing.News, “Employment in Ealing stood at 176,690 in December 2022 before increasing to 182,992 by December 2023, a gain of more than 6,300. Figures for December 2025 show there were 181,325 people employed in the borough, down 2,195 compared with the same month a year earlier.”

The developer levy: a late arrival

The 2022 manifesto promised a new “developer tax” raising £12 million per year.

But the Community Infrastructure Levy was only approved two months ago in December 2025, to begin in March 2026.

Opposition councillors say this followed a 15-year delay and estimate up to £90 million in lost infrastructure funding.

The exact figure is disputed, but the timing is not.

It’s certainly true that by far the largest new development - the massive expansion of the Southall Gasworks site from 3,750 new homes to 8,100 - was approved by the planning committee in November 2025, despite around a hundred local objections.

Another three or four months, and that would have been necessitated Berkeley Group making a very large CIL payment to the borough.

Council tax: the quiet background story

Across both manifestos, Labour presented itself as shielding residents from austerity. But since 2018, council tax has risen repeatedly. Several increases were close to or at the legal maximum. The 2023/24 rise was nearly 5%. The council attributes this to social care pressures and reduced government funding.

The big picture

Under Ealing Labour and under Mason’s watch:

The housing waiting list rose from 9,000 to 12,000
5,000 social homes were demolished
They have been replaced by far fewer than 5,000 “genuinely affordable homes” (the social rent proportion likely to be much less than 50% of that figure) completed and ready to live in
Housing targets have been repeatedly missed, and half-built homes will have to be demolished
Developer tax has been wasted and essential large infrastructure projects were simply abandoned
All of this while Mason was cabinet lead for housing, planning and transformation while qualifying as a town planner at the prestigious Bartlett School of Planning before he became leader.

He had the expertise. He had the power. He had the resources.

What he lacked was the political will to prioritise residents over developers.

Council tax has gone up 22% over five years
Fly-tipping has more than doubled
It costs more to clean up the rubbish than was saved by switching to fortnightly waste collections in 2016
Children’s centres cut
70% pay rise for Mason

But the gap between slogan and reality was perhaps clearest in environmental policy.

The 2018 manifesto promised to “use our powers, as we have in Acton and Southall, to go after polluting industries that show no regard for the quality of our air.”

One year later, Mason was accepting Berkeley Group hospitality at the MIPIM property developers festival in the south of France, all while Berkeley poisoned Southall residents with benzene and naphthalene at levels way above legal limits.

When residents complained, his response was: enforcement “wouldn’t stack up in court.”

Mason didn’t go after the polluting industry. He went partying with them in Cannes.

Not on your side.

The transparency gap

The biggest difference between the two manifestos is not the promises. It is the absence of a clear, public scorecard showing:

Which promises were met
Which were missed
Which were quietly rolled forward into the next election

Instead, to find answers to make informed choices, residents must dig through Cabinet reports, budget papers, scrutiny documents, and press releases just to piece together partial answers.

The obvious question

Between 2018 and 2022, the housing target rose from 2,500 to 4,000 homes. Between 2022 and 2026, many of the new promises still lack clear public outcomes.

So the question for voters is simple: are targets being delivered? Are manifesto promises being kept? Or are they just getting bigger each election?

And if targets are not being met, and election promises are repeatedly broken, why is that? Because it’s not actually all Peter Mason’s fault. The same happened ten years ago under Julian Bell. The same happened thirty years ago when Virendra Sharma was a councillor before he became an MP.

Peter Mason knows why:

[E]ver since the 1980’s, and Thatcher’s dismantling of the social housing sector, local authorities have been starved of the funding they need to build the next generation of council housing.

Under Blair and Brown’s New Labour, under the Tory/LibDem austerity coalition that forced ordinary people to pay for crimes committed by Wall Street bankers, and under Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, the political will has consistently favoured mega rich housebuilders over the needs of people to live in decent housing.

Change will be hard. And it won’t happen overnight. But the mainstream parties are all gatekeepers for the status quo, developers and the ruling classes.

We need people in local and national government who will actually stand up for the needs of ordinary people.

Section 106 money: where did Southall’s “developer tax” go?

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:18:46 +0100

With council elections less than three months away, Ealing Council is busy using “Ealing Council’s magazine for residents” to promote news of Ealing Labour’s local “achievements” in an effort to persuade voters that, despite national Labour’s dismal regurgitation of failed and cruel Tory government austerity policies and shameless political scandals going right to the heart of the UK establishment, Peter Mason’s Ealing Labour are still “on your side”.

Yesterday I looked at fly-tipping data after the council announced in its draft 2026-27 budget yet another “crackdown” to solve an expensive problem that appears to be largely of its own making.

A week later the council trumpeted its “success” in securing £27m from developers to create much-needed infrastructure to cope with the circa 100,000 new residents expected to live in the more than 120 new tower blocks approved for development across the borough.

Graphic from Stop The Towers campaign

Section 106 money - described as a “developer tax” by Ealing Council - is paid by developers as a form of mitigation for being allowed to build schemes that would otherwise place extra strain on local infrastructure.

The national Planning Portal defines S106 thus:

“Planning obligations, also known as Section 106 agreements (based on that section of The 1990 Town & Country Planning Act) are private agreements made between local authorities and developers and can be attached to a planning permission to make acceptable development which would otherwise be unacceptable in planning terms.”

In plain English, that can sound less like mitigation and more like a system where developments become acceptable once the right cheque is written.

In Southall, they’re known euphemistically as “brown envelopes”.

In theory, it works like this:

A developer gets planning permission.
The council negotiates a Section 106 agreement.
The developer pays contributions for things like:
- Schools
- GP surgeries
- Parks
- Roads
- Air quality
- Training and employment

The idea is simple:

if you add thousands of new residents, you help pay for the infrastructure they’ll need.

In practice, the numbers for Southall tell a more complicated story.

Southall’s Section 106 balance sheet (2019–2024)

Using Ealing Council’s own Infrastructure Funding Statements, we can track how much S106 money Southall generated and how much was actually spent there.

Five-year totals

2019–20 to 2023–24:

Category	Amount
S106 income from Southall developments	£13.1 million
S106 spending in Southall	£4.9 million
Net position	+£8.2 million

Over five years, Southall generated at least £13.1m in developer contributions but received £4.9m in spending—a net outflow of £8.2m.

The spike year: 2022–23

Year	Southall income	Southall spend
2022–23	£7.15m	£0.78m

So in that one year alone:

Southall generated over £7 million in developer contributions, but less than £800,000 was spent locally.

That’s a net outflow of £6.3 million in a single year.

Where the money actually went

When you look at the project lists, most of the Southall spending falls into a few categories.

The biggest single project

Southall Market affordable housing

Around £899,000 in S106 spending
The largest single Southall project across the five years

This scheme:

Stalled in 2023
Is now at risk of demolition

So a large share of the town’s S106 spending is tied up in a project that may never deliver homes.

The next largest item

Southall foot and cycle bridge

Around £225,000 in S106 funding

After that, most projects are much smaller:

Outdoor gyms
Running tracks
Tree planting
Small park upgrades
Air-quality monitoring
Training schemes
Minor highways works

Many are in the £5,000–£100,000 range.

Big allocations that never materialised

Some of the largest Southall allocations were not actually spent.

For example:

Southall health hub: £1.81m allocated (2022–23), unspent at year end
Public realm works: £328k allocated, unspent

So even where large sums were earmarked, the infrastructure often wasn’t delivered.

Southall vs Acton: the growth areas compared

Over four comparable years (2020–21 to 2023–24):

Town	Total income	Total spend	Net position
Southall	£12.4m	£4.9m	+£7.5m
Acton	£15.6m	£6.1m	+£9.5m

Both of the borough’s biggest growth areas:

Generated huge S106 income
Received far less in spending than they produced

Southall Gasworks (aka The Green Quarter): a flagship scheme

The council’s own FOI response gives a rare scheme-specific total.

Southall Gasworks (aka Green Quarter) S106 (2015–2022)

Total received from the development:

£1,749,584

For one of the largest housing developments in West London, delivering thousands of homes, that’s:

Under £2 million in S106 contributions over seven years.

What that money paid for

Contribution	Amount
Education	£840,363
Swimming pool contribution	£188,558
Employment & training	£256,955
Air quality	£129,226
Highways and bus lane	£146,000
Signage & CPZ review	£138,482
Contaminated land officer	£50,000

Total: £1.75m

But:

There is no new swimming pool serving the development.
The education funding is not tied to a clearly visible new Southall school.

The council’s £27 million claim

Recently, the council said:

“£27 million has been invested in our borough since 2022, paid for by developers.”

But the official figures show:

2022–23 S106 spend: £3.9m
2023–24 S106 spend: £11.5m

Total spent since 2022:

£15.4 million

So the £27m figure appears to include allocations or commitments, not just actual spending.

Year	Southall income	Southall spend
2022–23	£7.15m	£0.78m
2023–24	£0.83m	£1.49m

Two-year totals:

Southall income: £8.0m
Southall spend: £2.3m

Since 2022, Southall has generated almost £8m in developer contributions but received only about £2.3m in spending.

The bottom line

Across five years:

Southall generated at least £13.1 million in S106 income.
Only £4.9 million was spent in the town.
Net outflow: £8.2 million.

And much of that spending was:

One stalled housing project
One foot and cycle bridge
A scattering of smaller schemes

Meanwhile, the biggest allocations - like the Southall health hub - remain undelivered.

The £11.8 million bridge that was never built

One of the biggest infrastructure promises tied to Southall’s redevelopment was the widening of South Road bridge, the main road over the railway near the station.

This was not a minor improvement.

It was a core mitigation project secured through a Section 106 agreement on the former gasworks site — now the Green Quarter.

According to the council’s own report:

“The widening of the South Road Bridge is a S106 planning obligation on the Green Quarter site (formerly Southall Gas Works) and was secured in 2010.”

The logic was simple:

Thousands of new homes were planned around the station.

Traffic levels were expected to rise sharply.

The bridge widening would help reduce congestion and improve access.

The council report explained:

“With the considerable volume of new housing currently being developed in Southall… additional measures and infrastructure is required to reduce traffic congestion… South Road bridge widening has been long proposed as a measure to help reduce the congestion.”

What went wrong

Originally, around £11.875 million was available for the project through S106 and housing zone funding.

But costs spiralled.

By 2021: The estimated construction cost had risen to £29.6 million.

By 2022: The council had already spent £2.58 million on feasibility studies, design and pre-construction work.

But concluded the project was no longer viable.

The report recommended:

“The Council should not commission any further technical or design work on this project… and close the project.”

The outcome

Item	Status
S106 obligation secured	2010
Infrastructure promised	South Road bridge widening
Budget available	£11.875m
Spent on design/pre-construction	£2.58m
Final estimated cost	£29.6m
Outcome	Project abandoned

The housing went ahead.

The bridge widening never did.

This is a textbook example of how Section 106 is supposed to work in theory - major development is approved because infrastructure will follow - and how it can fail in practice when the promised mitigation is never delivered.

The council says the developer tax is working.

The figures suggest something else: millions flowing in, much less flowing back, and a bridge that was meant to arrive before Crossrail that never came at all.

With the elections just weeks away, Southall’s voters may want to look past the slogans and ask a very old-fashioned question: where did the money go?

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

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:44:37 +0000

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 12:02:00 +0000

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 15:01:05 +0000

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.

Demolition Man: Peter Mason's Legacy of Half-Built Homes and Hollow Promises

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 10:05:37 +0000

This is the story about how a council leader failed to deliver the new homes he promised to build, and how he wasted hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money in doing so.

It’s also about how he ended up demolishing half-built homes and with them the hopes of homeless families on the housing waiting list.

Building Bingo

Five years ago I began documenting Ealing Labour council chief Peter Mason’s construction counting conjuring tricks and bungled building bingo under his watch as housing and planning cabinet lead, and later as leader.

Was it 898 genuinely affordable new homes in October 2019?

Was it 1355 genuinely affordable new homes available by May 2020?

Perhaps it was 723 in September 2020? Something is terribly wrong.

2185 or 735 in December 2020? Confusing.

1965 or 1228 in March 2021? I have no idea what’s going on.

Or 1277 in September 2021? Down 78 from 1355 in May 2020.

Maybe it was a miraculous 2442, an increase of 1165 new homes just five months later in January 2022?

Officially, it was a target-busting 2576 by end of March 2022.

Or was it the perfectly timed, election-friendly 2700 (April 2022)? Housing target demolished! “On Your Side!”

Just two days before the elections, the numbers decreased again to 2500 and then to 2000 from Mason’s own mouth (May 2022)? Reality check? Pre-election day honesty?

HOUSE!? Anyone?

Who knows?

Hitting The Target

Well, now we know.

Thanks to some erstwhile digging over at The View From W5, local investigative journalist Conal Urquhart has revealed that the number of genuinely affordable new homes built by Peter Mason’s Ealing Labour during the period 2018 to 2026 is…

🎯🎯🎯 ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY!!! 🎯🎯🎯

Conal has been doing some really tremendous work across Ealing. As his recent article “Ealing delivers 16 percent of its affordable homes target” explains.

While Mason’s numbers ballooned on social media, the reality was brutal: £100 million was allocated to build 1,138 homes - and by 2026 Ealing has delivered just 180.

Not quite a bullseye, Peter.

How can this be? How did Mason miss his target by so much?

How did Peter Mason build just 16% of the new homes that he promised over and over again to deliver?

New Homes That Are, In A Sense, NOT New Homes

Mason’s sleight of hand was what counts as a new home.

Any normal person might reasonably expect that you count a new home as being built when a family on the housing waiting list moves in.

You would be wrong.

A new home, in Peter Mason’s world, is when a digger breaks earth on site - it’s literally a hole in the ground.

When Mason claimed in May 2020 that there were “1,355 new homes available”, the council’s own performance dashboard shows this figure included homes that were merely onsite, started but not completed.

Unfinished building sites were presented to the public as available homes delivered.

As it turns out, many of Mason’s claimed 2,700 or 2,500, or 2,000 new homes were never completed.

Now you could say that this is not Mason’s doing, it’s just the way councils count new homes. And that’s true. However, Mason was elected on a campaign where he promised not only thousands of new homes, but “to create a more open and transparent way of doing things”.

Like many of these new homes, Peter Mason’s promises turned to dust.

Building foundations do not house families. Concrete frames do not reduce waiting lists.

Counting holes in the ground as “available homes delivered” is performative theatre, playground pretend politics not grown-up housing policy.

This accounting trick allows failure to be repackaged and sold to the electorate as success - while families remain stuck in overcrowded, inappropriate and expensive temporary accommodation.

The Southall Housing Disaster

Four years ago, Mason had ascended the greasy leadership pole (metaphorically stomping on his predecessor and mentor Julian Bell’s head on the way up) and found himself perched precariously at its summit.

Giddy with power, perhaps, and desperate to retain it just before the upcoming local elections, Peter proclaimed that he had built some beautiful and very much needed family homes in chronically overcrowded Southall Green, the ward he is elected to represent.

As is common with Peter Mason (and emperors with new wardrobes), all is often not as it seems.

Unfortunately for Peter, and for the families desperate for a proper home of their own, the builders Peter hired went bust before completion. For three years we’ve been left with this half-built eyesore rotting in the rain.

What makes this so much worse, is that Henry Construction’s owners had form. Only a few years previously they pulled the same stunt with insolvency and unfinished buildings.

The question has to be asked: what due diligence was undertaken by Ealing Council prior to awarding these contracts?

Like Norwood Road, we now find that the much larger development site Southall Market Car Park, may have to be demolished, too, and built all over again at great extra cost.

From Funding to Failure

2018 - £100 million funding awarded to Ealing for 1,138 homes

2018 - Mason and Bell set 2500 new homes target

2019–2022 - Mason and Ealing publicly claim between 700 and 2,700 “homes delivered”

2023–2026 - Norwood Road and Southall Market contractor collapses, site abandoned

2026 - Council admits just 180 homes completed across Ealing

The Due Diligence Question

What makes this debacle more serious than simple bad luck is who was awarded the contract.

Henry Construction did not fail without warning.

As documented by Conal Urquhart in “Demolition of Ealing homes part of trail of chaos” and “History of insolvency and £10 million dividend”:

The controlling figures had prior insolvency collapses
A £10 million dividend was extracted shortly before one such collapse
Similar projects had previously failed
This information was publicly available.

Given Henry Construction’s documented insolvency history, it raises serious questions about Ealing Council’s contractor vetting process - and who signed off on the risk.

Public procurement best practice normally includes:

Financial stability checks
Director background reviews
Track record assessment
Risk protection through bonds or guarantees

If those safeguards failed, or were bypassed, voters and taxpayers deserve answers.

Norwood Road is not an isolated incident.

Across Ealing we see:

£100 million funding → 180 homes delivered
Multiple failed construction schemes
Inflated delivery figures
Politically convenient announcement timing

This looks less like misfortune and more like a culture of optics over outcomes.

The Human Cost

Behind the charts and press releases sit real families:

Stuck in overcrowded, inaccessible temporary accommodation
Waiting years longer than promised
Watching public money vanish into failed builds
Living beside abandoned construction sites

A mother of a nineteen year old boy and a six year old girl with difficulty walking and a developmental delay was placed by Ealing Council in an inaccessible one bedroom Southall flat on the first floor.

The McCreesh family were made homeless and face financial ruin after Ealing failed to deliver their promised accessible new home in time. “Mr Mccreesh said he received emails from an Ealing Council housing officer stating they were “not responsible” for new-build properties and could not provide a completion date.”

Southall Green was promised regeneration. Instead, we got Peter Mason.

What Happens Next?

Norwood Road will likely be demolished. Millions more will be spent rebuilding what should never have failed. Waiting-list families will continue waiting. The housing crisis in Ealing will deepen.

Why should Southall Green voters trust Mason to deliver housing when his track record demonstrates the opposite?

The Norwood Road site isn’t unique - it’s symptomatic. Across Ealing, the same patterns repeat: grand announcements, botched delivery, zero accountability, and working-class communities left picking up the pieces.

This is governance by press release, and it’s time someone demanded better.

A Fire We Were Warned About

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Literally within a couple of hours of posting my update on the Southall Gasworks / Toxic Town scandal yesterday, the recycling site just behind our home burned to the ground. My wife was terrified the fire would spread to our home with our two young children and now my elderly mum, too. Fortunately for everyone living nearby the emergency response was rapid and effective, and while the fire caused a great deal of inconvenience for weary travellers due to the closure of the adjacent Great Western railway line, the fire brigade got it under control fairly quickly.

Before:

After:

The major fire at a recycling facility on 11 January 2026 was not an unforeseen accident. It was a predictable outcome of prolonged regulatory inaction, despite repeated, documented warnings from residents about unsafe waste burning, poor storage practices, toxic emissions, and escalating fire risk at this site.

On the evening of 11 January, approximately 15 tonnes of mixed recycling caught fire at Sam’s Recycling, Johnson Street, Southall. The blaze required eight fire engines and around 60 firefighters, produced dense smoke across nearby residential areas, and led to the partial closure of the Great Western Main Line, disrupting services to Heathrow. The London Fire Brigade has stated that the cause of the fire is “not yet known”.

This site has a long, well-documented history of complaints and warnings, including:

Repeated resident reports (since at least 2022) of burning plastic, treated wood, pallets, and mixed waste at Sam’s Recycling and neighbouring units.

Photographic and video evidence submitted to Ealing Council showing open or poorly enclosed incineration, smoke plumes, and unsafe waste handling.
Formal correspondence confirming regulatory confusion between Ealing Council and the Environment Agency over responsibility for overseeing waste burning at the site.
Written warnings issued to the operator, followed by no meaningful enforcement action, suspension, or closure.
Explicit warnings from residents that poor waste handling and incineration practices posed serious air-quality, public health, and fire risks—particularly in an area already burdened by multiple pollution sources.

These concerns were escalated repeatedly through:

Formal complaints to Ealing Council (2022–2024)
Environmental Information Requests and Internal Reviews
Correspondence involving Clean Air for Southall and Hayes (CASH) and local councillors

The fire released smoke from mixed recycling, a material known to emit fine particulate matter (PM2.5), toxic organic compounds, and other hazardous combustion by-products when burned. This occurred in a community characterised by:

High asthma prevalence
Prolonged exposure to cumulative industrial and transport pollution
A well-established history of complaints about toxic odours and respiratory symptoms

Residents had repeatedly warned, publicly and privately, that so-called “normal operations” at this site were already causing harm. The uncontrolled fire dramatically intensified those risks.

Given the documented history of complaints, evidence, inspections, warnings, and unresolved regulatory confusion, the central issue is not why the fire happened, but:

Why was this site allowed to continue operating in a way that made a major fire and toxic smoke release entirely predictable?

This incident represents:

A failure of enforcement, not a lack of information
A failure of precaution, despite sustained warnings
A failure to protect a vulnerable community, long accustomed to being told pollution levels were “within limits”

The Johnson Street fire should be treated as a sentinel event. It exposes systemic regulatory failure and confirms the validity of years of resident concerns that were minimised, delayed, or ignored. Any investigation that treats this as an isolated or unforeseeable incident will itself be incomplete.

Toxic Town - Have You Been Affected?

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 15:11:23 +0000

Last week I watched last year’s Toxic Town series on Netflix, and then the Horizon documentary from 2020 (available on DailyMotion).

For anyone unfamiliar with it, Toxic Town tells the story of families in Corby, Northamptonshire, who were exposed to toxic dust during the reclamation of the Corby steelworks in the 1980s and 1990s. Nineteen families had children born with limb differences or other serious health problems - at least one resulting in the death of a newborn baby.

Over time, those families gathered enough evidence to prove that Corby Council had been negligent, and that the birth defects were caused by exposure to toxic waste released into the air during the clean-up. Their case became one of the most significant environmental justice rulings in UK history.

There are many obvious - and unsettling - parallels with Southall Gasworks.

---

For ten years we have been exposed to toxic waste exposed to the air as dust and odours. I’m not aware of any children being born with birth defects, but I know there were lots of reports of health problems including:

eye, nose and throat irritation
nausea and vomiting
chest infections and breathing difficulties
heart problems
cancer
ectopic pregnancy
non-epileptic seizures
sudden death of previously healthy pets

I know that some people reported worsening of asthma and other health conditions.

These are all consistent with exposure to benzene, naphthalene and other volatile organic compounds known to be buried at the gasworks site.

Despite resistance from Berkeley Group and Ealing Labour Council, we eventually managed to get the air quality data.

The problem was that it arrived as thousands of pages of scanned PDFs, making meaningful analysis almost impossible.

Last year, I tried using AI to process the material. Even then, it couldn’t reliably read it.

Recently, I tried again using a different technique - and this time it worked.

What’s emerging is striking: high levels of benzene and naphthalene closely match the dates and times when people reported odours and health effects, both publicly (on social media) and privately (by email or message). I kept all the records.

I’m now working through around 1,300 pages of data, alongside every report of odours or illness I can trace, to match them up fully. In truth, many of us always suspected or knew in our hearts - and lungs - this connection - but for years we were told by authorities that:

it was all in our heads
the air was safe and the odours harmless to health despite levels being over legal limits.

I’m writing this now for two reasons.

First, to reconnect with some of you I lost touch with over the past five years - life happened, including a second child arriving right at the start of the pandemic.

Second, to ask how things are now.

Has anything changed?
Is it still happening?
How’s your health?

For me personally, I was diagnosed with chronic lung disease last year. I honestly don’t know whether it’s related - but I can’t help wondering. I sincerely hope it’s just me, and that everyone else is healthy and well.

Either way, I’d really like to hear from you - whether you’ve been quiet for years, or are reading this for the first time. This isn’t about blame or legal action, although that could change. At this stage, it’s simply about gathering all the available evidence and people’s stories, for the record.

You can respond:

in the comments below
by email: david@davidmarsden.info
via WhatsApp: https://wa.me/qr/4MUTFBX64DCIB1

If you’d rather not revisit this period, I completely understand.

All private conversations are confidential unless you explicitly consent to attribution.

Ealing For Sale

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 10:16:20 +0000

Peter Mason’s foreword to Ealing Council’s 2023-2027 Land and Property Strategy [pdf] promises to “retain assets for maximum resident benefit.” It’s a reassuring commitment from the council leader who styles himself as protector of public services.

But scroll through Mason’s 26 page document, and you’ll find the reality: 760+ community assets across Ealing marked for “strategic review” - the euphemism that precedes disposal. The strategy reads like a corporate restructuring plan dressed up as community empowerment.

The strategy isn’t the beginning of Ealing’s asset stripping programme - it’s the public admission that the programme has been running systematically for almost two decades.

The Dominion Centre Template: New Labour’s Greatest Hit

The blueprint was established in 2007 with Southall’s Dominion Centre - where Ealing Labour’s genocide supporters now pose for their group photos. The original Southall library was closed and the Dominion community centre “repurposed” into this shiny multi-service hub that offers library services alongside “study areas, exhibition space, community centre facilities, public computers, free WiFi, and service advisors for council enquiries.”

It was perfect New Labour thinking: consolidate services, cut costs, and rebrand the reduction as “modernisation.” The Dominion Centre became the template for what the 2023 strategy now calls “one-stop community hubs” - the model being rolled out to replace purpose-built facilities across the borough.

This is where Mason’s true inspiration comes. In January 2014, he posted a photo of Tony Blair’s 1994 “Change and National Renewal” manifesto, adding: “Its content is as true now as it was 20 (yes, 20) years ago #tony.” That Blair document became the blueprint for New Labour’s PFI (private finance initiative) obsession - and Mason has been implementing its asset disposal philosophy ever since.

—

This was Thatcherism enacted by Ealing’s own fanboy of Thatcher’s greatest achievement, Tony Blair. Public assets re-conceptualised as “underutilised resources” requiring “optimisation.” The Dominion Centre pioneered the PFI dogma that would define New Labour: why provide dedicated public services when you can cram everything into one building, call it efficiency, and sell off the valuable bits?

Mason, himself a town planner, has perfected this model beyond Blair’s (and Thatcher’s) wildest dreams. Under his and his mentor and predecessor Julian Bell’s leadership and direction, Ealing Labour has systematically disposed of or attempted to sell off libraries, children’s centres, leisure centres, community golf courses, nature reserves, football and cricket pitches, town halls, community centres, and youth centres. It’s PFI without the private finance - just the asset stripping.

The 2011 Monopoly Meeting: Developers Set the Agenda

By 2011, the programme was ready for acceleration. My investigation into the “Ealing Monopoly” meeting revealed unelected businessmen mapping out the systematic disposal of £20 million worth of public assets. Berkeley Group’s Tony Pidgley advocated a “don’t waste a good crisis” approach (later echoed by Julian Bell with regard to covid and implementing low traffic neighbourhoods) to public asset disposal, targeting “buildings used for services for vulnerable adults, children and families.”

The same Tony Pidgley who later boasted to a meeting with residents at the height of the Southall Gasworks poisoning scandal that he could “phone Julian [Bell]” and tell him “to put a councillor on it”.

The meeting wasn’t secret - it was just conducted in the language of management consultancy that residents couldn’t decode. They discussed “strategic asset review,” “portfolio optimisation,” and “community empowerment” - the same euphemisms that now fill the 2023 strategy document.

What’s remarkable about the 2011 document is how precisely it predicted what’s happening now: Victoria Hall bundled into hotel developments, children’s centres facing closure, community assets transferred to “community ownership” (meaning communities pay maintenance costs while losing democratic control).

Here’s long-time community activist and defender of local democracy Eric Leach explaining the sheer insanity of Ealing Council’s position on their attempted sale of public heritage asset Victoria Hall. It’s so bad, a high court judge had to intervene.

The Strategy Document: Making It Official

The 2023 strategy transforms thirteen years of ad hoc disposals into official policy. It establishes a “corporate landlord model” that centralises control over all assets, removing departmental protection that might preserve community facilities.

The document’s genius lies in its presentation: every disposal is reframed as “community empowerment.” Closing children’s centres becomes “empowering communities to own and manage spaces.” Selling off Victoria Hall becomes “optimising heritage assets.” Cramming multiple services into inadequate spaces becomes “creating inclusive hubs.”

Mason’s leadership allows him to be simultaneously the protector of services and the person implementing their systematic disposal - a remarkable administrative innovation worthy of his New Labour pedigree.

The Children’s Centres Madness: Libraries and Faith Centres as Nurseries

The strategy document’s euphemisms become even more absurd when applied to children’s centres. Ealing proposes to “improve” services for under-fives by closing purpose-built, award-winning facilities and relocating services to libraries and faith centres.

As I documented in the children’s centres campaign, this means expecting toddlers to attend sessions in overcrowded libraries where “small children like to make a lot of noise and run around” next to people trying to read. Or pushing mainly female service users into “highly patriarchal” religious venues “not known for confidentiality, and not designed for children’s safe and secure play and development.”

The strategy presents this as “empowering communities to own and manage spaces” while the council sells off the purpose-built, safe, inclusive buildings that actually work. It’s the perfect inversion of public service logic: destroy what works, replace it with what doesn’t, then claim you’re “improving” services.

The Pay Rise Principle —

---

But perhaps Mason’s most revealing statement comes in a video where he promises to “work with developers who will help us deliver what we need.” What Mason needs, it turns out, is substantial personal enrichment. His Special Responsibility Allowance rose from £32,100 to £54,860 - a 70.9% increase that brought his total council remuneration to £66,874.

The Victoria Hall Test Case

Victoria Hall represents the perfect test case for this systematic programme. Eric Leach’s legal challenge has exposed the governance failures that enable it: councils acting as “sole trustee” approving their own asset disposals, rubber-stamp committees with no real power, and qualified community candidates ignored when they apply to join oversight bodies.

The £120,000 the Friends of Victoria Hall have raised for legal challenges represents communities learning to build the independent power necessary to challenge predetermined outcomes disguised as consultation.

But Victoria Hall was never an isolated case. It’s the implementation of a plan mapped out by developers in 2011, trialled with the Dominion Centre in 2007, and now formalised in the 2023 strategy that targets 760+ assets across Ealing.

“People Before Buildings”: The Perfect Slogan —

Mason’s genius lies in his messaging consistency and ideological clarity. On January 15, 2015, he tweeted: “Think its really important that we put people before buildings. Important we keep activities going & that can be done in a different way.”

It’s the perfect slogan for systematic asset disposal. Why preserve purpose-built children’s centres when you can relocate services to overcrowded libraries and faith centres? Why keep Victoria Hall when you can bundle it into a hotel development? The activities continue - just in worse conditions, with reduced access, serving fewer people.

“People before buildings” becomes the rhetorical cover for disposing of the buildings where people access services. It transforms every closure into an act of progressive politics. Mason has been refining this argument for a decade, and the 2023 strategy represents its ultimate expression: 760+ assets under “review” while claiming to prioritise community needs.

The MIPIM Pipeline: From Bell to Mason

The systematic disposal becomes more sinister when connected to the £33,000+ in “gifts” and MIPIM conference attendance that Mason and his predecessor Julian Bell accepted from developers, including Berkeley Group.

---

The visual evidence tells the story perfectly. At property conferences, Mason sits listening intently as Bell explains developer’s “long-term vision” - not for residents, but for profitable disposal.

---

Elsewhere, Mason and Bell enjoy a pint together down the local pub, the mentor passing on his expertise to the protégé. At MIPIM-style events, they share champagne and development plans with property interests.

When Berkeley Group literally sponsors council events with “PROUDLY SPONSORED BY Berkeley” branding, the capture becomes complete.

---

When your town planner council leader and his mentor take developer hospitality while disposing of community assets, the conflicts of interest become embedded in the planning system itself.

Democracy 2.0: Now With Less Democracy

The system’s crowning achievement is happening right now. In July 2025, Ealing Council rewrote petition rules in direct response to successful community campaigns, removing residents' rights to ask follow-up questions and requirements for senior officers to give evidence.

They’ve solved the democracy problem by removing the democratic bits from democracy. It’s the perfect complement to an asset disposal programme that operates through consultation theatre - predetermined outcomes with participation facades.

The Bigger Picture

What Ealing’s 18-year asset disposal programme reveals isn’t just local government corruption - it’s the systematic implementation of neoliberal ideology through administrative process. The Dominion Centre model of 2007 has become the “community hub” euphemism of 2023, turning public assets into “underutilised resources” requiring “optimisation.”

The 2011 developers' wish-list has become official council strategy. The governance failures Eric Leach exposed around Victoria Hall operate across every aspect of the programme. Mason’s 70.9% pay rise and the £1m+ cost of his and councillor allowances increases while closing half of Ealing’s Children’s Centres to save a few hundred thousand pounds shows exactly whose side Ealing Labour are on. And it isn’t ours!

It’s Thatcherism with a human face - and that face belongs to Peter Mason, the New Labour politician who learned to speak her language fluently while pretending to oppose her legacy.

—

The Victoria Hall campaign continues. The legal challenge proceeds. The 760+ assets remain under “strategic review.” And the machinery of systematic disposal, finally revealed in the 2023 strategy document, operates in plain sight - hidden only by the euphemistic language that transforms asset stripping into community empowerment.

Key Documents:

Follow this story and more with a free subscription: southallstories.uk

Save Ealing Children’s Centres Campaign Update

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 16:39:08 +0000

Save Ealing Children’s Centres campaign raised over £5,000 in just eight days to begin legal action against Ealing Council to prevent closure of ten and of the borough’s twenty-five children’s centres.

An audio summary of my satirical take on what it’s all about.

In English:

In Punjabi:

The Pied Piper of Ealing

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 23:33:52 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, big kid sang at the Royal Albert Hall in “Ealing Together: Harmony in Diversity,” performing lyrics by Jewish socialist and renowned children’s author Michael Rosen in a new song “Ada in Ealing”, a celebration of a former Ealing resident, and the world’s first computer programmer and a pioneer of mathematical logic, Ada Lovelace.

Tonight he performed in his school’s musical version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a story about broken promises and failed leadership. The stage lights went out halfway through, but the show went on - the children kept singing, the story kept unfolding, and somehow the adults pulling the strings behind the scenes got the lights back on.

The biggest laugh from the grown ups watching came when the council leader overcame his cognitive dissonance about political dishonesty by not paying the piper due to budget constraints: “For a politician to lie?! It’s disgusting, disgraceful, dishonourable…. Dis could be the perfect solution!” They all understood perfectly.

Sitting in that school hall, watching children perform a story about adults who make promises they don’t keep, I realised I’d been writing about the same tale in “Perceval House W5.” The Pied Piper isn’t just a fairy story - it’s a documentary about local politics.

The council leader in Hamelin promises to solve the rat problem but refuses to pay when the Piper delivers. Sound familiar? Promise to “put people before buildings,” then close the buildings. Promise “transparent engagement,” then rewrite petition rules to stop residents asking questions. Promise to protect services by cutting them.

From celebrating Ada Lovelace - a woman who saw logical patterns others couldn’t - to performing a story about leaders who’ve abandoned logic entirely. The journey from The Royal Albert Hall to the primary school hall, from Ealing to Hamelin and back again, from songs about a mathematics logician to tales about a corrupt politician.

Ada Lovelace would have spotted the flawed algorithm immediately: spend £1 million on councillor allowances to save £750,000 on children’s centres. The logic doesn’t compute.

But she’d also have recognised the pattern in the Pied Piper story. He who pays the piper calls the tune. In Ealing, we’re discovering who’s really been programming our decision-makers.

Unelected developers and council officers concocted a plan to sell off community assets. Berkeley Group paid for MIPIM trips. The council issued compulsory purchase orders to demolish people’s homes to make way for a new road and Berkeley’s marketing suite opposite the new Elizabeth Line station. The council is “powerless” to prevent Berkeley Group poisoning the Southall community, like the rats in the nursery playground. The algorithm executes perfectly.

In the original tale, the children disappear forever when the adults break their promises. But big kid’s generation might rewrite that ending. They’ve already shown they understand the contradictions better than the politicians creating them.

When then five year old Zion asked the Council Leader directly about the gasworks poisoning and got a “too sciencey” response, he understood perfectly what was happening. Tonight, performing as part of a story about broken promises and failed leadership, he understood it perfectly, too.

The lights failed, but the children kept going. The system breaks down, but the community adapts. Sometimes the show must go on until the grown-ups remember how to keep their promises.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the lights come back on.

URGENT support to fund a legal challenge to Ealing Council’s decision to close 10 children’s centres.

So it Goes: AI on the Absurd Logic of Ealing Council

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:17:01 +0000

🎧 I fed my satirical piece about Ealing’s democratic innovations into Google’s NotebookLM.

Two AI hosts discovered how perfectly logical it is to close children’s centres while voting yourself a 70% pay rise. They marveled at the mathematical elegance of spending £1 million on councillor allowances to save £750,000 on community services. They found it remarkable that one person could tweet about “putting people before buildings” and then close the very buildings where people access services without experiencing any cognitive dissonance whatsoever.

The AIs were particularly impressed by Ealing’s latest innovation: rewriting petition rules to prevent residents from asking follow-up questions. Democracy 2.0 - now with less democracy! Much more efficient than the old system where people could actually influence things.

But here’s the thing the machines found most puzzling: impossible things keep happening in Ealing. Communities save their Young Adult Centre. They protect their Town Hall. They refuse to accept that decisions have been made.

Mrs. Patel might just save her children’s centre too.

The Save Ealing Children’s Centres campaign is live. The AIs think this is statistically improbable. Mrs. Patel understands perfectly.

Listen (mp3 audio)

Listen, then read why resistance isn’t futile.

An artificial conversation about very real absurdities.

Also available in Punjabi:

Listen (mp3 audio)

URGENT support to fund a legal challenge to Ealing Council’s decision to close 10 children’s centres.

Perceval House W5: Where Local Democracy in Ealing Goes to Die

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 12:50:30 +0000

The Children’s Centres Crusade

Chapter 1: The Art of Political Contradiction

In the London Borough of Ealing, our elected representatives have perfected something remarkable: the ability to hold completely contradictory public positions without experiencing any apparent cognitive dissonance.

Take our Council Leader. On January 15, 2015, he tweeted: “Think its really important that we put people before buildings. Important we keep activities going & that can be done in a different way."

Ten years later, he’s closing children’s centres, buildings where people access those activities.

This isn’t hypocrisy - it’s innovation. Why limit yourself to consistent principles when you can have all the principles, simultaneously?

Mrs. Patel, a parent trying to save her local children’s centre, discovered this when she attempted to navigate Ealing’s democratic processes. What she found was a system so logically perfect that resistance had become mathematically impossible.

Chapter 2: The Democratic Möbius Strip

“Who decides about children’s centre closures?” Mrs. Patel asked at a council meeting.

“The Cabinet,” she was told.

The Cabinet explained they were implementing officer recommendations based on budget pressures created by government policy following community consultation showing residents wanted services maintained differently.

“So who can change the decision?”

“The decision-makers.”

“Who are the decision-makers?”

“The people with authority to make decisions.”

“Who has that authority?”

“The decision-makers.”

Mrs. Patel found herself trapped in a perfectly circular system. To influence the decision, she needed to identify who made it. But everyone who appeared to make decisions claimed to be implementing someone else’s decisions. The decision seemed to exist independently of anyone actually deciding anything.

Image: Jono Hey, [Sketchplanations](https://sketchplanations.com/mobius-strip)

It was like a democratic Möbius strip - no matter which direction you followed, you always ended up back where you started.

Chapter 3: The Mathematics of Progressive Budget Management

The numbers, at least, were clear:

Cost of councillor allowance increases (2022-2025): Over £1 million
Savings from closing children’s centres: £750,000
Council Leader’s pay rise: 70%
Number of children’s centres being closed in Southall: 3 out of 6

The Council Leader had discovered something revolutionary: you could simultaneously claim budget constraints while voting yourself substantial pay rises. The secret was treating these as completely unrelated mathematical operations.

“We have to make difficult decisions due to budget pressures,” he explained, while awarding himself £58,000 annually.

“But you spent more on pay rises than you’re saving,” Mrs. Patel pointed out.

“That’s a different budget.”

“It’s the same money.”

“You don’t understand local government finance. And we need higher calibre councillor candidates.”

Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly.

Chapter 4: Environmental Priorities - A Scientific Approach

The Council Leader’s environmental consciousness follows a precise hierarchy, documented through his public responses:

Tier 1 Emergency Response: Eels gasping in the River Brent receive immediate action [pdf) and public concern.

Tier 2 Public Complaint: Someone’s “bag and/or small child” taking up a tube seat merits a public tweet about “Some people.”

Tier 3 Busy Schedule: Children gasping from toxic air [YouTube] in bedrooms get told " I’m very busy.” [YouTube)]

When five-year-old Zion asked him directly, “Peter, why didn’t you help us?” [YouTube] about the gasworks poisoning, the response was so technical that Zion said it was “too sciencey” to understand.

This established a clear principle: if environmental concerns can’t be explained to five-year-olds, they’re probably too complex for five-year-olds to experience.

Chapter 5: The Southall Paradox

Only in Southall can carcinogenic benzene, and naphthalene - which is known to be potentially fatal to some people with African and Asian heritage - be released into the air from the Gasworks development at levels way above legal limits and be simultaneously “not hazardous” according to Ealing Council.

One moment the Headteacher at Blair Peach Primary School is reporting asthma and headaches [p. 10] caused by very strong smells from the Gasworks site; in another moment, the developer’s head of construction is appointed to the school’s board of governors [pp. 7-8] and arranges to remove dead rats from the nursery playground [p. 11]. These events are clearly unconnected.

It’s all perfectly normal in Southall, where kids can be locked in class without ventilation on hot days to protect them from the harmless petrol odour, and the developer’s “community liaison officer” can simultaneously be the chair of Southall’s charity umbrella organisation, an ex-Tory tobacco salesman whose former employer paid for our ex-MP’s research assistant to attend a jolly. Nothing to see here!

Here’s where things get even more interesting. The Council’s own “Southall Reset” [pdf] document acknowledges that “challenges of deprivation, low pay, are particularly acute” in Southall, contributing to “deeply embedded health and wellbeing challenges.”

The Race Equality Commission Report “highlighted the need for an investment in adequate primary care in Southall” and “deeper meaningful engagement, and better conversations with residents.”

The Council’s response to this need for MORE investment? Close children’s centres.

“So you know we need MORE investment?” Mrs. Patel asked.

“Absolutely. The evidence is clear,” they said.

“Then why are you closing children’s centres?”

“Budget pressures.”

“But your own report says we need more investment, not less.”

“That’s a different report.”

“It’s your report. You wrote it.”

“Different department.”

“Same council.”

“Different budget.”

“Same money.”

“You don’t understand local government.”

Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly. They could officially acknowledge that Southall needed more investment while simultaneously cutting investment. They could document the problem and implement policies that made it worse. Each document existed in its own logical universe, disconnected from actual decisions.

Chapter 6: The MIPIM Negotiations

Every year, the Council Leader attends MIPIM in Cannes - what Private Eye calls a “booze ‘n’ hookerfest” - with expenses paid by Berkeley Group, the company behind the gasworks development that’s been poisoning Southall residents.

He goes to “negotiate hard” with developers.

The documented results of these negotiations:

More developments approved
Continued toxic air from gasworks
Larger councillor allowances
Closure of community facilities

Either he’s a remarkably poor negotiator, or “negotiating hard” means something different in Cannes than it does in English.

Chapter 7: The Zionist-Anti-Zionist Synthesis

The Council Leader represents Southall Green - 69% BAME, one of the most ethnically diverse wards in Britain. Many of his constituents have strong views about Palestinian liberation.

His attitude? “People who commit themselves to being opposed to Jewish national self determination / liberation aren’t my cup of tea. They can exist, sure, just outside of the Labour movement.”

So he simultaneously represents a diverse community while working to exclude people from that community based on their views about Middle Eastern politics.

It’s a masterclass in representation: represent everyone, except the people whose politics you disagree with.

Chapter 8: The Protection-by-Destruction Innovation

The Council Leader has pioneered a new approach to public service: protecting things by eliminating them.

“We’ve made the decision to protect the front line by working with what we have, rather than allowing Govt Commissioners to slash and burn services,” he explains, while slashing and burning services.

It was like watching someone slash the low-hanging fruit on the trees and then set fire to the orchard; then selling the “infertile land” to developers when there’s nothing to eat.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. Mrs. Patel had discovered something even more troubling. Back in 2012, a group of unelected businessmen had met to play Monopoly [pdf] with public assets. Not the board game - though the principle was identical. They wanted to “sell off our public assets for £20m profit.”

Their target included “buildings used for services for vulnerable adults, children and families.”

“So they planned this years ago?” Mrs. Patel asked the councillor.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” the councillor said.

“But you’re closing children’s centres,” Mrs. Patel said.

“We’re protecting services by cutting them,” they explained patiently. “We’ve made the decision to protect the front line by working with what we have, rather than allowing Government Commissioners to slash and burn services.”

“But you ARE slashing and burning services.”

“We’re protecting them by cutting them responsibly.”

“How is closing them protecting them?”

“If we don’t close them, someone else will close them worse.”

“Who?”

“The Government Commissioners.”

“Have they said they’ll close them?”

“Not yet.”

“So you’re closing them to prevent them being closed?”

“We’re protecting them by cutting them.”

Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly. Round and round she went, trapped in a perfectly logical system designed to make resistance impossible.

The beautiful thing was that everyone was telling the truth. The councillor really didn’t know about the 2012 meeting. The 2012 meeting really had happened. The plan really was being implemented. Nobody was really in charge of implementing it.

Somehow, a decision made by people who didn’t officially exist was being executed by people who officially couldn’t stop it. This allows him to be simultaneously the protector of services and the person closing services - a remarkable administrative innovation.

Chapter 9: Democracy 2.0 - Now With Less Democracy

But the system’s crowning achievement is happening right now. This month - July 2025 - Ealing Council is rewriting the petition rules in direct response to successful community campaigns.

On page 294 of their July 15, 2025 council papers [pdf, see p. 294], you can see democracy being crossed out in real time. They’re removing:

Residents' rights to ask follow-up questions
Requirements for senior officers to give evidence
Meaningful participation in debates about their own petitions

They’ve solved the democracy problem by removing the democratic bits from democracy.

The timing is perfect: after communities proved they could win by building independent pressure (Save Southall Young Adult Centre, Save Southall Town Hall, Save Warren Farm Nature Reserve), the council is changing the rules to prevent it happening again.

Soon residents will be able to petition - they just won’t be able to ask questions, get answers, or participate in discussions about their concerns.

It’s democracy in name only, which is much more efficient than the old democracy where people could actually influence things.

Chapter 10: The Southall Young Adult Centre Miracle

But here’s the thing - resistance is still possible. In 2022, the Council wanted to demolish Southall Young Adult Centre to build 60 flats. The usual process commenced: consultation theater, predetermined decisions, official helplessness.

Then the “Save Southall Young Adult Centre” campaign launched. They didn’t try to work within the impossible system. They built independent pressure. They refused to accept that “decisions had been made.”

They won.

The centre was saved.

“How?” Mrs. Patel asked.

“We stopped playing by their rules,” the organisers said. “We built power they couldn’t ignore.”

Chapter 11: The Impossible Solution

Mrs. Patel realized the children’s centres could be saved the same way. But it would require doing something the system said was impossible: organising outside the official channels, building independent power, refusing to accept predetermined outcomes.

The Council had just changed the petition rules specifically to prevent another people-powered victory. But that only proved they were afraid of effective organising.

The system’s weakness was its strength: it was so obviously absurd that anyone paying attention could see through it.

The Council Leader could tweet about putting “people before buildings” while closing buildings where people accessed services. He could claim to protect services while cutting them. He could represent diverse communities while excluding their political views. He could prioritize eels over children and call it environmentalism.

All of this was only possible because residents had been playing by rules designed to make them lose.

But the campaigns to save the Young Adult Centre, the Town Hall and Warren Farm proved the rules could be broken.

Chapter 12: The Choice

Mrs. Patel had a choice. She could continue navigating the impossible bureaucracy, filing petitions that couldn’t ask questions, attending consultations about predetermined decisions, lobbying councillors who claimed to have no power.

Or she could do what the other campaigners did: build independent power and refuse to accept defeat.

The children’s centres could be saved. But only if parents stopped trying to reason with an unreasonable system and started building the power to change it.

The Council Leader would continue inhabiting his world of simultaneous contradictions, where closing centres meant protecting them and cutting services meant investing in communities.

But Mrs. Patel had learned something important: impossible things happen every day in Ealing politics.

If the Council Leader could be simultaneously progressive and regressive, protective and destructive, representative and exclusionary, then maybe Mrs. Patel could do something equally impossible.

Like save a children’s centre.

The Young Adult Centre campaigners had already shown it could be done.

Now it was the children’s centres' turn.

Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly. Even this right wing authoritarian Labour government thinks it’s a bad idea to close children’s centres.

Chapter 13: The Engagement Paradox

The Council Leader had perfected the art of simultaneous engagement.

He could tweet about “absolutely committed to engaging, listening and compromising” while sharing photos of residents protesting his refusal to engage, listen, or compromise.

He spoke frequently about “transparent engagement” and “finding the compromises everyone needs to make” - usually while explaining why the compromises residents needed to make were accepting whatever he’d already decided.

Even councillors who were “most responsive” resigned rather than “effectively endorse his toxic brand of politics.”

But the real innovation was tweeting “Welcome to Dystopia” while creating it.

Chapter 14: The Investment Paradox

The Council Leader had achieved something remarkable: he could simultaneously remember genocide while investing in it. “Remember Yesterday, Act Today,” his council posted about the genocide of 8,732 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica thirty years ago, while investing £112 million in companies enabling genocide of more than 28,000 women and girls in Gaza today. More than 50,000 children killed or injured in Gaza to pay for his pension.

It was beautifully efficient. Why limit yourself to one genocide when you could remember one while funding another? The children understood perfectly.

Equally impressive was his ability to close children’s centres for budget reasons while sitting on the board as a paid director [pdf] of a corporation that had just received £140 million in public funding. The logic was flawless: children’s services were unaffordable, but corporate development was essential.

The Council Leader had mastered the art of proportional response. Children’s centres closing to save £750,000? Budget pressures, difficult decisions, no choice. Sitting on the board overseeing “one of the biggest regeneration schemes in Europe” with £140 million in funding? That was worth £2,000 a year of his valuable time.

It was a masterclass in priorities: Europe’s biggest regeneration project required his oversight, but Southall’s children’s centres were an unaffordable luxury.

He could simultaneously claim there was no money for community services while helping to plan a “mini-Manhattan” in his own borough. The vision was clear: 54-storey towers, yes. Children’s centres, no.

He’d found the perfect balance: cut services locally to save money, earn money regionally to oversee developers' profits. It was like a perpetual motion machine of fiscal responsibility.

Chapter and Verse: The Evolution of Enlightenment

In 2010, our future Council Leader shared his frustration about “sitting around not understanding all this punjabi” at community meetings in the area he would later represent.

By 2020, he had evolved. “Words have consequences,” he tweeted. “Impact is as important as intent. Culture is defined by leadership.”

Ten years of personal growth had taught him that words matter. Which made it remarkable that he could simultaneously lecture about cultural sensitivity while closing community centres in the same diverse communities he’d once struggled to understand. It was a masterclass in progressive evolution: you could acknowledge that words have consequences while ensuring your own words from the past had none.

Disclaimer

Readers who think this is all a bit unfair, unbelievable, unhelpful or downright unlawful…

The most revealing evidence of how the system works came from inside the machine itself. In 2022, leaked WhatsApp messages [pdf] from the Ealing Labour councillors' group chat revealed what they really thought about their leadership.

Mason’s own Labour colleagues called the Council Leader “callous, ruthless, sectarian.”

They discussed votes of no confidence, referenced “corruption and even theft” regarding the previous leader, and debated “bribes” and “rewards” for loyalty. Meanwhile, publicly, they maintained perfect unity and collective responsibility. It was the perfect illustration of how the system works: private recognition of the problems, public performance of harmony.

Mrs. Patel understood perfectly. The same councillors who privately criticised authoritarian leadership accepted Mason’s cabinet positions and pay rises to sit in silent support during council meetings.The leaked messages proved Mrs. Patel wasn’t imagining the contradictions - even the people inside the system could see them. They just couldn’t say so publicly.

URGENT support to fund a legal challenge to Ealing Council’s decision to close 10 children’s centres.

Sources: All tweets, council documents, and quotes are publicly available and linked in the original post at https://davidmarsden.info/2025/07/11/perceval-house-w-where-local.html

Try your hand at democracy in Ealing with our fun interactive FAQs, budget calculator and decision-making process explainer!

Southall Odours

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 15:19:00 +0000

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 21:44:00 +0000

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.

The Cuckoo's Nest

Sun, 19 May 2024 11:25:00 +0000

Ealing Genocide Supporters Club (aka Ealing Labour Party) held their Southall Branch meeting yesterday at the Dominion Centre in Southall. Under the guise of a “Your Town, Your Voice” community get together, our local elected repellents gathered on masse in all their finery. I couldn’t help myself as they posed for a group photo all gurning inanely as the photographer encouraged them to “say cheese!”. “Say genocide!” I offered. “Genocide supporters!”

Cllr Dr Murtaza of their number aggressively reprimanded me. “What evidence do you have that we support genocide?” he demanded to know. Well, I told him, my main piece of evidence would be that you have done nothing to oppose it.

Ooh! There’s Cllr Martin! Our locally elected anti-Traveller racist! “What evidence do you have to support that?” Well, here it is.

Oh, and while you’re at it, Cllr Dr Murtaza. Next time you are chauffeuring our glorious leader around in your Porsche, try not to park in a cycle lane, please.

Then there was illegal samosa factory proprietor Cllr “I own half of Southall” Anand.

I hadn’t realised until yesterday quite how visceral my revulsion for these people is. The grand cuckoo in the nest arrived about half way through the event. I would have confronted him myself, and previously I have done. Maybe I was just worn down from a week with the ‘flu, but I felt like I really had to keep my distance for my own sanity. In any case, a few council officers made beelines for me and made sure I was busy answering their questions.

Interestingly, one officer suggested to me that resident-led ward forums would be the likely outcome of this event. Fantastic news, if that’s the case. Another officer I spoke to later, knew nothing about this idea, though, but took copious notes. A neighbour and friend told me that she spoke to the cuckoo himself who told her that this meeting was in fact the replacement for he old (councillor-led) ward forums. That’s that then.

The event itself was a repeat of several resident[pdf] surveys and failed plans over the past twenty years or so (for which I’ve seen records, or taken part in). The problems are always the same. The responses from the council are always the same. Nothing.

Developers, if you Really Want to Help

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 15:09:00 +0000

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.

ToryBoy

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 17:35:00 +0000

ToryBoy The Movie is the account of filmmaker John Walsh’s disillusionment with what he saw as the corruption, lies, hypocrisy and general incompetence of Blair’s Labour government, and his conversion to the Conservative (Tory) Party general election candidate for Middlesbrough in 2010.

Under his own steam and £15,000 of his own money, John found his opponent, Sir Stuart Bell, the serial incumbent Labour MP, invisible and unknown to his local constituents who nevertheless voted him back in every four or five years (albeit with an ever diminishing majority). Bell was too busy, it seemed, living in Paris, and employing his family not to answer phone calls at his parliamentary office. Worse, his son stole £8,000 worth of stuff from Bell’s parliamentary colleagues, eventually serving sixty days in prison for the privilege.

Despite this record of failure, Bell was duly elected again, with Walsh coming in third behind the newly Nick Clegg-revitalised Lib Dems.

Last year, I had my own attempt to counter what I (and many others) saw as corruption, lies, hypocrisy and general incompetence of our local elected councillors. Standing as independent candidates, me and my two friends came fourth in the safest Labour ward in Ealing. It was good fun campaigning, and I enjoyed the physical activity of walking almost every street in my ward dropping leaflets, and the social activity of actually talking to people in person. And we helped to reduce Labour’s vote share and majority (not that it makes any difference to the result).

Still, people voted in their thousands for two councillors who have been in post for twenty four years each, while the problems everyone complains about are the same but worse.

Ultimately, it was another failure to add to my CV.

Risks to Health from Remediating Southall Gasworks

Mon, 01 May 2023 11:00:38 +0000

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 14:34:19 +0000

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.

Southall Stories

On the Bins Again

What Happened to Brent?

What Happened to Hounslow?

What Happened to Harrow?

The Structural Reasons

On Recycling

What Happened to Newham?

What Enforcement Can and Cannot Do

The Unasked Question

What Happened to Southall?

Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-tipping

2016: The Spike

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

2022: Operational Success Narrative

2023–2026: The Second Surge

National Context

Is It Population Growth?

What About “Undocumented” Population Growth?

The Counter-Narrative Pattern

Campaign of the Year?

The Unasked Question

Ealing's Burning

Lyrics

The Broken Manifesto Promises that show how Labour is Failing Ealing

Cabinet portfolios: then and now

From 2,500 to 4,000 to 180

What changed between Ealing Labour’s 2018 and 2022 manifestos?

The central promise: affordable homes

2022: the council’s own figures

The moving numbers

The 2,700 claim

The £100 million question

2022: a bigger promise

2024–25: still “contributing”

2025: target off track

The housing reality behind the manifesto promises

The waiting list that kept growing

The register was tightened

The demolition factor

The long view: 9,000 families, then and now

The same argument, thirty years apart

Climate: bigger numbers, similar story

Jobs, apprenticeships, and the missing scoreboard

The developer levy: a late arrival

Council tax: the quiet background story

The big picture

The transparency gap

The obvious question

Section 106 money: where did Southall’s “developer tax” go?

Southall’s Section 106 balance sheet (2019–2024)

Five-year totals

The spike year: 2022–23

Where the money actually went

The biggest single project

The next largest item

Big allocations that never materialised

Southall vs Acton: the growth areas compared

Southall Gasworks (aka The Green Quarter): a flagship scheme

Southall Gasworks (aka Green Quarter) S106 (2015–2022)

What that money paid for

The council’s £27 million claim

Southall’s share since 2022

The bottom line

The £11.8 million bridge that was never built

What went wrong

The outcome

Bangarang! Pirate Pete and the Lost Bin Collections of Southall

Bangarang Pete

A quick recap of how we got here

Residents called it immediately

Fly-tipping doubled when weekly rubbish collections ended in 2016

What the official data shows

The structural break

What the council promised

What actually happened

The timing problem for other explanations

The false economy

The current annual cost

Fine income vs clearance costs