"It's Saturday morning. Actually Saturday lunchtime now.
"And we've been out all over West End Ward today with dozens of supporters talking with residents about all of the issues that they care about.
"We've heard from people who have been dismayed by the national Labour government's decision to withdraw the Winter Fuel Payment from quite so many of our older residents.
"We've been hearing about local issues, such as the failure, for TfL, controlled by Labour's London Mayor to start a pedicabs consultation, delaying the ultimate introduction of a licensing regime for the sort of lunatic and generally very unhelpful pedicabs by at least a year from when it could have been.
"But the big issue has come up really this week, more than anything else, has been about e-bikes and specifically the way in which the rental e-bikes predominantly Lime are being just left and parked everywhere.
"We've had an extraordinary double set of comments by the responsible Cabinet Member, Councillor Paul Dimoldenberg, who has really admitted this week two huge issues that that are really occurring.
"The first is that there is an agreement with Lime for about 2,000 of their bikes to be in Westminster every day, but they're regularly exceeding that and hitting 3,000. A 50% increase. One thousand more bikes than they should be using, each day.
"And that comes on top of the second revelation, which is that the council hasn't actually enforced against Lime in over two years, since August 2022.
"It's no wonder that Lime feel that they can do whatever they like, if the council won't take the action that they have the power to do, and they have that power, they've shown it.
"They carried out an enforcement action against them in 2022, but they haven't bothered doing so since.
"This is mismanagement and this is really letting down residents. Instead, they're complaining that they need more powers, and that makes no sense whatsoever when there has been successful action in the past. So my challenge, in this week's Diary of a Candidate to the Labour Party in Westminster, is simply this:
"'Why not at least use the powers that you've got before demanding other new powers?'"The answer to this can't always be just to give more legislation and more powers to the state, if the state isn't even using the powers that it's got.
"Come on, Paul, you can do better."
Copyright 2024 Tim Barnes for the West End. All rights reserved.
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