Would you choose a school recommended by this man?

The message from Michael Gove above appears on the website of the Kings Science Academy, captured by me today in case it disappears.

The Independent today carries a story that Michael Gove has been accused of covering up allegations of £80,000's worth of financial irregularities at the school.

Michael Gove is a great fan of Katharine Birbalsingh who is presently touting for custom for her Michaela Academy Free School which is due to open in an old College of North West London buiilding next to the railway line at Wembley Park next year.

Rumour has it that she is having difficulty in recruiting pupils.

Action on 'colour bar' estate agents

On top of the 266 bus returning from the Harlesden Incinerator protest I spotted a Brent Housing Action picket outside the National Estate Agents. The protesters were drawing attention to the discriminatory practices of the lettings agency revealed by the BBC.  The picket was supported by Kingsley Abrams, Unite executive member, and one of those competing for the Brent Central Labour nomination today.

The office remained closed and barred.

Pickets are set to continue and an official complaint about the racial discrimination is to be made to the police.

Stay in touch with the campaign on Facebook LINK

Harlesden Incinerator: Residents ready for Round 2 of battle for clean air

If Clean Power and Ealing Council thought local residents would forget about the plans for an incinerator at Willesden Junction on the borders of Harlesden and Park Royal, this morning's demonstration should give them pause for thought.Cllr Zaffar van Kalwala and Cllr Claudia Hectors joined residents, cancer patients and environmental protesters to give notice that they were up for a fight to defeat the plans.

It is hoped that 500 people will turn up to line Channel Gate Road next Saturday, November 2nd at 10am  the morning when the Ealing Planning Committee pays a 10.30am site visit.  A huge turnout is needed for the Planning Committee meeting itself on November 6th. Details on this blog when available or follow @NOincineratorNO  and @NoNW10dump on Twitter.

Labour's Brent Central battle begins in earnest this weekend

PHOTOGRAPH REMOVED AT REQUEST

OF CLLR. JAMES POWNEY

 available HERE

This weekend the Stonebridge Hub sees the first stage of Labour's selection of its candidate for Brent Central which aims to produce a shortlist which includes male, female and BME candidates. From his campaign blog photograph (above) it appears that Sundar Thava is armed with rather more than just arguments while Imran Ahmed may not have exactly chosen the people to win the Labour Party's rank and file's hearts and minds. He has published a 'Labour Doorstep' photograph on his blog showing him campaigning with James Powney and Lesley Jones.

So far males far outnumber females in the names I have been given but my list is not yet complete. Readers are invited to send in any additions or corrections. Dawn Butler, with only two other women in the race according to my information, is likely to make the shortlist.

Adeniran Abebaya*
Adel Abouharb*
Kingsley Abrams
Imran Ahmed
Femi Alese
Liaquat Ali
Sitarah Anjum*
Tony Breslin*
Mike Buckley
Dawn Butler
Bernard Collier*
Parmijit Dhanda
Dr Patrick French
Vikram Grewal*
Zaffar van Kalwala
Naheeratha Kano
Mike Katz
Sabina Khan
Khevyn Limbarajee*
Ramon Madharon*
Dan McCurry
Paukl McGeary*
Tony McNulty
James Mills*
Steve Mitchell*
Hanif Mohammad-Abbas *
Rodwan Mohammed*
Martin Morris*
Maddy Raman
Prem Sharma*
Inder Singh-Nijhar
Teidy Singh*
Dr Sundar Thava
Bobby Thomas
Patrick Vernon

* added by readers

Greens should get behind Project Wild Thing

This evening, along with other members of LEEF I viewed the film Project Wild Thing that was released today. The film sets out to do for children enjoying nature and the outdoors, what Jamie Oliver did for healthy school meals.

David Bond, concerned that his children are glued to their screens and seldom venture out of the house and the impact that this will have on their future health, decides to market 'nature' in the same way that big corporations market their consumer products.

Getting past this initial irony it soon becomes apparent, despite free advertising space and marketing help, that he cannot possibly hope to match the spending of multimillion multinationals. He sets off on a sticker campaign, slapping a 'WARNING: Material goods may make you fat and depressed' on consumer posters. At Speakers' Corner, heckled by a socialist speaker about the irrelevance of what he is saying to the fight against capitalism, he retorts, getting kids outside and outdoors is one of the best ways of avoiding capitalism.

A range of experts including Susan Greenfield, George Monbiot, Chris Packham and Chris Rose give their views; the latter arguing that it is not enough to take kids out to nature: you have to enable them to engage with it.

There are several poignant moments. In one a 10 year old boy takes Bond to the only tiny patch of green grass on his estate, and to the site of another larger patch which is now being built on. He says that if you play ball games where there they are forbidden 'you will get an ASBO'.

Visit the island of Eigg he finds that children there are still influenced by advertising and fixated on the screen, but the difference is that outside play is much more accessible. One Eigg Primary School school child remarks that with outdoor play 'the risk is part of the fun'.

However 'risk' , or rather adult fear of risk, seems from the interviews with adults to be the main reason why children aren't allowed out. Apart from the usual 'stranger danger' fear of cars and traffic is the main reason chidlren are kept in.  As Anna Porch from LEEF said in the discussion 'the freedom that cars have givenm to adults has been taken from their kids'.

The film is well worth seeing but most usefully used as  a discussion starting point in community organisations, parent evenings at school, or campaign meetings. The Wild Network LINK of organisations supporting the campaign have issued the following manifesto:

The Wild Network exists to champion and support connection with nature and wildness in children and young people.

The Wild Network mission is to support children, parents and guardians of children to roam free, play wild and connect with nature.

We believe all children should have the right to access the outdoors for play, learning, expression and development of healthy mind and body.

We encourage, provoke, nudge, support, innovate and campaign for children, kids and young folk to get up and outside.

• To wander freely
• To look up and around
• To find wonder, awe and empathy in all life
• To nurture, steward and protect
• To run, jump, climb, crawl and explore the world on our doorsteps
• To seek imagination in wildness
• To find inventiveness in the woods.
• To grow happy healthy minds and bodies.
• To find comfort in solitude.
• To become truly connected.

 Roam Free. Play Wild

You can sign up to the manifesto as an organisation or an individual on the website.

Harlesden Incinerator: Open letter to Ealing Council leader

Guest post by Mark Walker

Open letter to Julian Bell, leader, Ealing Council

Mr Julian Bell

Leader

Ealing Council

Town Hall
New Broadway
Ealing W5 2BY

Dear Mr. Bell

I am writing to ask that you take account of the serious health and pollution risks to the North Acton ‘island triangle’ community from Clean Power Properties Ltd’s proposed energy recovery plant and withdraw your council’s consideration of it.

As you will know, Clean Power plans a combined anaerobic digestion (AD) & advanced conversion technology (ACT) plant at the Willesden Freight Terminal, which facility would handle 198,000 tonnes of commercial & industrial waste annually. Food waste in tanks will be turned via AD into biogas while the ACT process chars non-food waste also to produce gas which is likewise burned for energy.

The plant is wholly unsuitable for our residential area of 200 homes as it will generate low level gases like sulphur dioxide and benzene for many years. Your council’s own environmental health department advised in August that the application be rejected since the developer cannot prove that it will not harm the local community.

It’s well-known that AD plants cause pollution, as DEFRA itself admits in its recent research. ACT plants have never been successful operated within communities and those in construction are large scale and well away from people’s homes. Some of ACT’s pressurised autoclaving operations carry particular risks, as the fatality at the Sterecycle plant in 2011 and subsequent collapse of the operating company has tragically shown. These are not technologies to be located next to local families’ homes.

Clean Power’s waste site will be fed by an average of 67 lorries every day, using the narrow Channel Gate Road, passing only 3-4 metres from local people’s small Victorian houses. Residents have for years been troubled by day and night noise, vibration and lorry pollution from the freight yard’s operations. Approving this proposal would lock local families into 16-hours-a-day vehicle pollution for a generation.

The North Acton community has already been plagued by odours of rubbish from the Powerday materials recovery site on the other side of Old Oak Lane - for almost a decade. Local people know, far better than your planners or an offshore developer’s paid advisers, the stupidity of siting waste plants by people’s homes – where the quality of life is frequently spoiled by simple (to an outsider) matters like a lorry that isn’t cleaned or a containment building not being correctly sealed during a shift.  Powerday’s operations have generated over 300 telephone complaints to the Environment Agency in the last three years alone. For Clean Power to now propose another waste plant - only 300 metres away from an existing one - is highly inappropriate, as East Acton ward local councillors and our local Ealing MP Angie Bray have stated already. The Powerday experience shows beyond any doubt that where waste sites are located in the midst of residential areas, unpleasant odours and other polluting impacts cannot be mitigated by planning conditions or environmental regulations.

You more than anyone will also be aware of this application’s non-compliance with the West London Waste Plan, the ongoing strategy for the area’s waste processing that comes under your direct remit. The WLWP has identified possible waste sites but Clean Power’s chosen site never made the study’s shortlist.  This application is thus based on a discredited site and goes against your own council’s three-year investment in strategic waste options, consultations and expert conclusions.

Clean Power talks repeatedly of its clean, green technologies but offered the planning committee no evidence whatsoever of safely working sites among residential areas, in Britain or anywhere else.  Your members’ bemusement at the lack of any plant performance data or site approvals from the developer was plain to see.

TITRA residents’ group has repeatedly asked your planning officers for Clean Power site certificates or fact-finding site visits and received nothing – not one sheet of paper or one working waste site address. What person, still less a responsible London borough, would buy goods from a tradesman without industry approvals and proper references?  Clean Power appears to be a salesman without any proper goods, let alone any satisfied customers.

Your council’s approval of this ill-advised energy recovery plant would be to condemn local people to a risky experiment in ‘green’ energy that will harm residents’ health and degrade the area with polluting activity. The pragmatic option would be to site a waste processing plant on an industrial estate next to food producers and other manufacturers’ operations – not in the middle of an existing residential area.

I urge you to seek safer and more practical alternatives to Clean Power’s unproven waste processing technologies. Approval of this high risk development would be a disaster for the already-blighted North Acton triangle. And it would demonstrate beyond doubt that you and your council have abandoned our community and your own principles of giving people a decent hearing and looking after their well-being.

Yours sincerely

  

Mark Walker

Member of Island Triangle Residents’ Association committee

North Acton

Ealing

London NW10

Call for action on air pollution at local, national and European level

A Green member of the European Parliament has called for increased urgency in the fight for clean air after the World Health Organization (WHO) labelled polluted air as carcinogenic.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the WHO, pointed to data confirming that 223,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide in 2010 resulted from air pollution. [1]

Air pollution, which is primarily caused by emissions from vehicles, has already been linked to other lung problems as well as heart failure and premature death. In the UK alone 29,000 people every year die because of air pollution. [2]

Despite air pollution’s impact on people’s health the UK Government has been accused of trying to water down European laws which could reduce the levels of the noxious fumes in the air. [3]

Keith Taylor, the Green Party’s MEP for the South East of England and a leading campaigner for clean air, said:

The evidence from the WHO suggests that the risk from air pollution is similar to that from second hand tobacco smoke. Surely then we should expect controls on air pollution from transport similar in strength to those brought in to protect the public from passive smoking. With this new evidence being published it's clear that failing to act on the air pollution problem would be utterly unforgivable. 

Try as it might the UK Government can no longer pretend that the air pollution problem can be ignored, not when the World Health Organisation classify it as a group 1 carcinogen.

It’s time for the EU to adopt stronger air pollution laws that fall in line with World Health Organization guidelines and it’s time the UK Government works on behalf of the health of its citizens and stops trying to undermine this vital legislative programme.

I'll continue to campaign for clean air across and fight against any moves to weaken vital air pollution laws.

Neasden, North Circular Road and Park Royal are areas of Brent which already suffer from air pollution problems and this will be exacerbated by proposals such as the Harlesden Incinerator. Brent Green Party wants to see action at national, London and borough level to tackle the issue.  We believe that within the council a joint approach through the environment and public health departments, supported by transportation and planning, could result in an effective medium and long term solution to the problem.

Ends

1)     “Air pollution is a leading cause of cancer”- http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/17/us-cancer-pollution-idUSBRE99G0BB20131017

2)     Government report on deaths in UK linked to air pollution: http://www.hpa.org.uk/ProductsServices/ChemicalsPoisons/Environment/Air/

3)     Blog post by Keith Taylor (with links to government proposals to weaken air pollution laws): http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/keith-taylor/air-pollution-kills_b_2457096.html

URGENT: Support the anti-incinerator campaign Saturday morning

It appears that the Harlesden Incinerator proposal will go back to Ealing Planning Committee on November 6th, following its postponement at the August meeting.  Anti incinerator campaigners will be assembling near the proposed site in Chanel Gate Road (turn left from Willesden Junction station and on the opposite side of the road) at 11.30am to demonstrate their continued opposition.  Supporters are urged to bring placards and banners.

This information is from the Stop the Incinerator website LINK

Q and A’s about the application and the story so far

What is the application for?
The application by Clean Power UK Ltd is for an Energy Recovery Centre.It will handle 195,000 tonnes of waste per year
Where is the site?
The site is in Chanel Gate Road, NW10 6UQ. This is technically in Ealing Borough but is within a ¼ mile of properties in Brent. The site is within 150 yards of a densely populated area of Victorian houses. The facility would also be close to a primary school
Why should Brent residents be concerned?
There will be approximately 67 HGV lorries going to and from the site every day. This will add to the already congested road network in Harlesden and on Old Oak Lane. Apart from the noise, vibration and possible smells from the waste, the exhaust emissions from these vehicles will cause severe damage to the air quality in the area
There will also be gases such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emitted from the waste plant itself, from the FOUR 25metre high chimneys
The polluted air will drift across homes in Ealing, Brent and even Hammersmith and Fulham
What have residents done so far to object to the scheme?
Residents from a wide area have sent over 700 letters of objection to Ealing Council about the application, raising the issues of damage to the air quality and to their residential amenity, noise and smells. A petition has also been forwarded hy HEART of Harlesden with 1324 signatures of objection
What stage is the application now?
Ealing Council are required to make a decision on the application. They have discussed the application already, on 14 August, 2013, but could not reach a decision due to several of the councillors on the planning committee demanding more detailed and concise information about the impact that the facility would have on local residents
It is possibly that they will discuss the application again on 6 November 2013, BUT THIS DATE IS NOT YET CONFIRMED. We will keep this page updated, and notify you by email as soon as we hear
What can residents do now?
Keep spreading the word about the scheme so that as many people as possible in the area hear about it. If the planning meeting does go ahead on 6 November 2013, then there will be a SITE VISIT on 2 November 2013. This is when residents should turn out in force to show the members of Ealing’s planning committee that there is colossal opposition to the plans
If they don’t think that WE CARE – why should THEY CARE!
Why do they call it an Energy Recovery Centre and NOT an Incinerator?
Essentially because it sounds a lot better! The 2 processes that would be used at the facility are pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion – decomposition of food materials in sealed containers to release gases plant. Pyrolysis – thermal decomposition of waste material.  Whilst it can be argued that the anaerobic process is not incineration, the pyrolysis IS considered in many countries to be a form of incineration for more views on this go to
http://park-life.org/2012/12/heard-about-the-new-incinerator-a-very-dangerous-neighbour/
How is the west London Waste Plan involved?
The West London Waste Plan was drawn up by six London boroughs, including Brent and Ealing to agree a waste strategy and identify suitable sites. They are required by Boris Johnson, to have a strategy in place for dealing with waste. Clean Power and Ealing think the WLWP has no weight and but Brent does. Clean Power uses the mayor’s London Plan, which wants to promote so-called green businesses (waste treatment plants) as its guide
What have the local councillors been doing to help?
Brent councillors have been a huge support to residents. Cllr Claudia Hector and Cllr Van Kawala have worked extremely hard to raise awareness and object to the plans,  Similarly Ealing councillors have supported residents in the campaign against the scheme, and Cllr Kate Crawford spoke in support of Ealing residents at the last planning meeting in August
What is Brent Council’s position on the application?
Both Brent Council and Hammersmith and Fulham Councils are strongly opposed to the plans and have sent their objections to Ealing
What about HS2? Surely that means that the Incinerator cannot be built?
Firstly there is no absolute certainty at this time that the rail link WILL go ahead. There are still consultations and legal challenges taking place
Secondly there is a chance that even if the HS2 rail link was built, the Incinerator could still be built on the site. It would depend on the actual route of the HS2 and, for example, if the link to Northolt is overground or via tunnel
Lastly what does Boris Johnson have to do with the application?
It has been agreed that whatever decision Ealing Council reach, the application will then be passed to the Mayor. He will then make the final decision. This does not bode well as Boris recently approved a similar facility in South London, and the location there was a nature reserve!
So can we win?
Absolutely YES – it is possible for Councils to refuse these applications
A few months ago the residents in Brierley Hill, Dudley, West Midlands fought a long battle against Clean Power and – thanks to the support of their councillors – they won!
We can win too, but we must keep up the fight and show we care about the area we live in