Weekly Update From Councillor Guy Lambert

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Appalling landlords, classic cars and mysterious caterpillars

Classic car sale for Hounslow Community Foodbox

Thursday proceeded (after a bit of bicycle-bothering) with three Lampton meetings, a one-to-one with the chair, a meeting of the finance, risk and audit committee and finally a meeting on the development side with the Lampton chair and MD and the LBH director of housing, amongst others.

The development arm has delivered about 75 new homes and is busy with about 50 others now lockdown is easing, whilst the investment arm has acquired more than 170 flats around the borough, every one now occupied by a household that had previously been in temporary accommodation. This is so much better as an outcome than to have these homes taken by private landlords. Some of these landlords are good and others are frankly appalling but none have quite the same motivations and responsibilities as the council. The meeting is to decide where we go from here, and how Lampton fits in with the council's own ambitious plans.

Talking of private landlords, my most difficult and frustrating casework at present relates to two houses in multiple occupation in the ward, both of which are causing real nightmares for their neighbours. It seems some of these landlords are completely without scruples, focused only on extracting the maximum amount of money for the minimum accommodation and with no interest whatsoever in the effect on neighbours and neighbourhood (who knew?). Ownership and management is murky, and seems to pass between related companies with great regularity, frustrating efforts to pin them down even when the council has powers.

It's surprising how wearing these virtual meetings are – I find them much tougher than ‘real' meetings, so I'm delighted to have the excuse to cycle out to Cranford on Friday morning. We are restarting the major road maintenace programme and the Pothole Pledge so I go to see them in action at Berkeley Avenue.

Chiswick and Cranford are the main beneficiaries of the pothole pledge this year but I'm pleased that we've managed to get Lateward Road on the programme. It will save me a lot of electrons because my archive is full of Lateward potholes that I've reported over the years.

In the afternoon I'm down at Brentford Towers for another real meeting of humans. There's quite a lot of green space around the towers but it's not very usable for children to play or adults to chill out in, and part of the commitment with the refurbishment of the towers was that the outside areas would be re-landscaped and made more like a garden. It was great to have a bunch of residents out with us as well as the director of housing and one of them told me she had been shielding and this was literally the first time she'd left her flat for many weeks, so joy abounded! It abounded some more when we were guided by sombody from the London Museum of Water and Steam to take a look around their outside areas. They are very keen to engage with the towers, each of which is named after a giant of the water industry and which are built on the site of the old water filtration beds. Apparently the ‘country house' architecture of the old waterworks/now museum is how it is because the royals didn't want to look across from Kew Palace to a smelly industrial-looking building, poor lambs, so it was a pretend-house. I wonder what their Majs thought of the gas works when that came along.

They will be opening up the outside areas soon and might agree some times when the garden is available exclusively to towers residents – nice 😊

They apologise for it being overgrown but to me it looks gorgeous.

Like so many such organisations the Museum is in really difficult circumstances, a charity relying on income from visitors… at a time when there are no visitors. You can join them for £25, so I did. We're so lucky to have 3 museums in the ward, this, the Musical museum and Gunnersbury so I want to do all I can to keep it that way.

On Sunday, one of our FoodBox volunteers has organised a small but perfectly formed classic car show in Chiswick, with proceeds going to the FoodBox. There was a fine selection of oldsters on show, and some decent old cars as well.

On Monday morning I take an assignment from The Melvinator to visit a resident with a damp problem in her council house. He's still confined to barracks with a swollen foot. The council via Coalo fixed the roof and replastered and decorated one of her bedroom walls but not the others which she says are also damp. So I attend with a surveyor from the council and sure enough, the other walls are damp too, so quite why they weren't fixed in the first place is one of those mysteries of life one uncovers from time to time to which the answer must surely be 42. Unless you're a (late great) Leonard Cohen when of course the answer is Do dum dum dum da do dum dum.

She shows me an infestation of alarming looking caterpillars that hse has been warning her children off messing with. Somebody will know what they are, as contrary to appearances I don't think they'll grow up into wasps, or yellow men wearing sunglasses (or women with black brassieres).

In the afternoon I'm off up the Great West Road again to Heston/Cranford/ Hounslow West, the boundaries blur. As usual there are dozens of cyclists on the cycle lane and not a one on the carriageway – perhaps someone told them I was coming. Anyway, there is a weird bit of the A4 where the houses have a GWR address but they're not actually on the A4 but on a separate service road. Turns out there's argy-bargy about who's responsible for this road – TfL says it's Hounslow Highways and Hounslow Highways say it's TfL, so it's - ahem – not in the best of condition. Whatever, Hounslow Highways are responsible for litter and flytips so officers plant a flea in their ear and tell then to get on with it. There will be another chapter of this shortly.

When I was a boy we used to go up into the Welsh mountains and my dad used to describe roads with tarmac on the side (yes, they had tarmac even when I was a boy) and grass down the middle as ‘3 ply', but this is the first 3 ply road I've seen in Hounslow. I feel a Pothole Pledge coming on as this is the classic case of ‘delamination'.

On Wednesday we have the ‘Network Board' with the honchos from Hounslow Highways and their parent company, Vinci/Ringway. This is our chance to review how things are going and see how we can do better in future. My role is usually to moan about various issues I perceive and I am, of course, true to form but I have to lace the complaining with some thanks, because they have actually maintained a very good service throughout the lockdown, despite having to make a lot of operational changes to safeguard their workforce. Oh, and the workforce have been great, and it's been good to see the public acknowledging them.

Today I was hoping to join the first of the Greener Hounslow iLabs, on lowering carbon, but the technology didn't permit this (broken record) so I had a morning's email and blogging. Planning this evening, but I have not caught the selectors' eye and I'm left on the bench despite being fully fit and raring to go. Anyway, tomorrow morning is the first iLab on Mobility and I must get my tech sorted for that.

 

Cllr Guy Lambert

July 10, 2020