Don’t withdraw Pensioners’ Freedom Pass – means test it

Highgate Village, London N6, 271 bus terminal

This is going to be one of those blog posts that will see me deserted by 75% of my, more well-healed, good friends. To compensate, it should also cause my daughter’s friends to offer me a never ending stream of drinks down the newly reopened pub round the corner. It’s a generation thing.

But, whichever colour of politics you daub it with, my view is based entirely on logic coupled with an ingrained sense of fairness. As it is also a guaranteed loser of pensioner votes, it will never come to pass, unless more Millenials suddenly decide to check out the inside of their polling station on election day,

Conservative London Mayoral Candidate in next week’s elections Shaun Bailey is suggesting that the Pensioner Freedom Pass be scrapped. The pass allows pensioners free travel on all London transport but has been suspended during peak hours since the Covid breakout.

This was meant to ease congestion and was ‘only temporary’. There are now mumblings about making the withdrawal permanent.

Withdrawing the Freedom Pass from pensioners must be the worst kind of economic stupidity. The resulting cost of fixing cash strapped pensioners’ mental and physical health as a result of being cooped up 24/7 is incalculable.

If funds need to be redistributed, by all means tie the Freedom Pass to an affordability database like the pension credit calculator, for example, but don’t just kick the crutch out from under already struggling pensioners.

The pension credit threshold already applies to the BBC licence fee, and should incidentally be used to calculate the winter fuel payment and prescription charges as well. 

British pension provision is spectacularly unequal, due to its reliance on privately funded pension plans. Wealthier pensioners are comfortably cushioned against the economic realities of life in retirement, while less well off retirees on a state pension, often of less than £100 a week, depend desperately on free travel when it is often difficult to get around. 
The same souls also need help towards keeping their home warm in winter, access to television for news and a little entertainment and obviously free health provision. 

Many better off pensioners complain about the prospect of having to pay something towards their travel card, while merrily forking out several thousand pounds a year for medical insurance. They don’t need a free travel pass.

Calculated properly, this is a zero sum game. Instead of universal support, based purely on age, let’s redistribute funds saved from those who don’t need them, to those who do need them. 

No one should have too much, while someone else has too little. Surely that is the fair way to move forward.

And I probably have too many friends anyway. But to the rest of you, mine’s a Bloody Mary round the corner at the “Drum and Trumpet”.

Fares’ Fair!

2021 Mayoral and London Assembly Elections

Postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic, now scheduled to take place on May 6 2021

I represent the Greens for the GLA constituency of Barnet and Camden. Barnet is in Zone 5 and Camden is in Zone 2.

My current favourite Green Party policy is to introduce flat fares across the public transport networks, buses, tubes, overground.

It’s ridiculous that half my fellow constituents pay £1209 more for their annual season ticket than the other half. That has to stop and Greens are leaning hard on the other parties to join us in this essential campaign.

London – A Never Ending Story

London is now the only English region where more people are leaving than arriving from other parts of the country – only immigration is keeping the population steady.

According to Wikipedia, A city is a large human settlement. It can be defined as a permanent and densely settled place with administratively defined boundaries whose members work primarily on non-agricultural tasks. Cities generally have extensive systems for housing, transportation, sanitation, utilities, land use, and communication.

I have called many a great city my home over the years – Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Sydney, Los Angeles…Birmingham (not Alabama) and London. I have swung by countless other metropolises on the way but, in the end, I chose to hammer my tent pegs into the vibrant and verdant London turf.

Several decades, a nuclear family and much career action later, I look at London and wonder what the hell happened?! I can still sense the muffled echo of 70s music, the 24/7 crazy madness, the cool challenges, delicious opportunities, the daunting jeopardy.

But today all around me, instead of exciting curiosity, I detect an exhausted scowl on our collective face, leaving me to wonder if all the great London quotes we know so well, still hold true, fashioned as they were, by fabulous Londoners throughout this city’s illustrious history?

Did Samuel Johnson ever scowl at London life? “You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”. Certainly no regrets there for Johnson, having relocated south from his native Lichfield.

Yet more than a third of a million citizens got tired of London in 2018, the largest number since data collection began in 2012. Surely, they can’t all be tired of life? London is now the only English region where more people are leaving than arriving from other parts of the country – only immigration is keeping the population steady.

So let’s look for a better answer. Do we need to swap Samuel Johnson for Jane Austen? “The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.”

Our Jane penned those words a cool couple of hundred years ago, but she might as well have brought them into the world yesterday.

For London and we Londoners anno 2020 are in serious trouble, and not just due to the  Covid-19 pandemic. Far from bubbling along merrily, our city is slowly imploding but, in true Titanic style, the music keeps playing over at the Albert, while across in Hyde Park the deckchairs are being straightened meticulously.

Ever more gazillions of pounds are hoovered up by a shambolically delayed Crossrail project, while the existing London Underground is collapsing under the strain of five  million Londoners trying to get to work every morning, in order to create the wealth that pays for it all.

Gleaming apartment blocks, built for profit, not for people, stand empty while the numbers of homeless and poorly housed families go through the roof. Housing charity Shelter’s 2019 calculations estimate that 1 in every 52 people in London is homeless.  I know. Surely that can’t be right, you say? Go on, look it up. It is right.

How much more will it take before we get a grip?

Perhaps those 370,000 Londoners, who now leave town every year, just want their kids to be able to breathe some old fashioned fresh air? The kind of sweet fresh air we are breathing right now, courtesy of the Corona lockdown. That’s not too much to ask. Except that in London, in normal times, it is too much to ask. London typically reaches the legal air pollution limit for the whole year around the third week in January. Yes.

The Mayor of London’s figures show that more than two million Londoners live in areas exceeding legal air limits – including 400,000 children. Bizarrely, according to recent air quality measurements, one of Camden’s worst spots for air pollution is the leafy junction of swanky South Grove and Highgate West Hill. Here, the pollution level frequently reaches double the legal limit. And to think that I always imagined that once I got out of London and up to the top of Dick Whittington’s vantage point, I could start safely filling my lungs again.

But CO² and especially the really nasty, but nimble NO² don’t quite work like that. It’s all to do with the appliance of science, molecular weight and air currents. Apparently.

Nevertheless, we North Londoners who salute the old adage “A bad day in London is still better than a good day anywhere else” are so lucky to have scores of Green residents, who care deeply about our environment and the welfare of our fellow citizens.

And there never was a better time for rolling up our civic sleeves and start setting to work fixing our great city. Campaigners in the civic societies, the neighbourhood forums, the Transition Towns groups, the tenants’ and residents’ associations and the army of truly amazing unsung legends, all, in their own way, shine a light into the murky corridors of power, asking tough questions wherever decisions are made.

For “It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them”, Wikipedia never mentioned the people. George VI did!

So, to all you community spirited people: Please don’t stop doing what you’re doing! London is a never ending story.

Waterlow Park, Highgate

Why do London’s Greens oppose HS2?

I recently met up with Sam Willis from OnLondon. He wanted to know what I think of HS2. Read his full article HERE 

Meanwhile, here’s a taster:

It is perhaps unsurprising that someone of De Keyser’s political background might lack trust in the good intentions of the government. But her stance also reflects her peculiar position as a Green parliamentary candidate in one of the safest Labour seats in the country. “I’m the one-person awkward squad,” she says. “Where you have these big safe seats it’s really important that you have an alternative voice, otherwise no debate is ever had.” As she sees it, in safe seats the incumbent party gets complacent: “Their own people don’t ask them the awkward questions.”

Thanks to Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, environmental issues have been pushed to the foreground of political debate. This might help the Greens  – oppositional, mistrustful of government and sceptical about development – to pick up voters and send a message to the Big Two parties. In the meantime, the battle over HS2 continues.

Five years is a very long time to wait for a bus service review

 

The London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced that the review of bus services in outer London will take five years to complete. The review for inner London, where bus use is falling, is already done and dusted, so this news is yet another example of how City Hall is failing miserably when it comes to London’s greener boroughs.

 

We managed to fight an entire World War in five years, so taking half a decade to run the numbers on a bus service, which already has ample computerised documentation available, with a myriad of time tables, measured ticketing information and closely recorded employee activity, is a scandal that must be challenged.

 

City Hall and Transport for London will have to learn to work smart to meet the ever increasing public transport demand in boroughs like Barnet. Communal transport is the future and private taxi companies are already ahead of the game with their ‘Share & Ride’ services.

 

To combat the wastefulness of large buses carrying few passengers, apart from during crush-hour, we need more, smaller Hopper style buses, even mini buses that whizz about where and when people need and want them.

 

For those, who are happy to pay a small fare uplift, Hail & Ride services are ideal in quiet backwater neighbourhoods, where regular large scale communal transport is not viable. Such services have already been running successfully in many cities – including parts of London, for years.

 

Coupled with a London wide flat fare system, this would be twice as fair, and would also cause such increased uptake in passengers, that it would practically pay for itself.

 

Taking five years to get this going is nothing short of an admission of either incompetence or complacency. Whatever it is, we expect better for our hard earned tax money.