Last night's CELS Committee

This is my report of Monday 21st's Children Education Libraries and Safeguarding committee It is a rather partisan perspective but for some reason no one from the Press gallery or Barnet Bloggers turned up not even Dan, so this is a Barnet Green Party exclusive. The meeting started late due to the clock. The chair. is sporting an impressive beard. There are 3 suits sitting in the gallery waiting to speak, and a pile of recycling on the desk for anyone who doesn't have a way of reading the megabytes of reports on an electronic device. (I let my dad have a flick through afterwards). There was a quick presentation on a youth centre which is envisioned to be built on Montrose playing fields. Questions were raised about access which will come back to Planning and there'll be a consultation. They said it will cost £6m to build. I am not sure if this is in Northern money? The football pitches at Pavilion Way are also being encroached on, by an academy. Schools first. Much time was spent discussing how the improvement director is improving the exam results. One way of massaging the figures is to exclude foreign children from the primary school statistics. Great lengths were spent to scrutinise the exam results at different sorts of schools and absence for religious holidays, cheap holidays, and other reasons. However I did not hear the word "refugee" or "migrant" once. When asking questions I would expect the Labour Group to be on our side. This time they seemed content to stick to the same agenda. They had had a private briefing and discussed the difference between acadamys, free schools, and so on. I was half expecting them to mock the Tory leader for leaving his child in a pub, or even saying "I have crowd sourced my questions from thousands of residents emails and I have a question from Steve who is a TA." New school places are being created with a new primary in West Hendon which the locals know is not going to be built until the very end of the phased demolition and gentrification of the estate. There's also early indication of a secondary on the ruins of Grahame Park or Whitefield Estate. Labour asked about Hendon College and FE which is not the responsibility of the council. When I was a NEET I felt like a statistic and it seems nothing much has changed on that front. Libraries wasn't on the agenda so there will be a separate meeting. Safeguarding was left till last, finishing at about half past 8. By which time most of the Councillors had run out of energy for asking questions. The report contains some shocking figures. However I personally have issues with the language used to talk about risk in an unscientific way. I think too much focus is on safeguarding and not enough on the real issues families face; things like neglect, digital safety, things officially priorities but at the coal face that's not the experience we've had with social workers. We're told to look at the Barnet Website for a new campaign to recruit new social workers. One plank is higher pay, another is being supported by a computer system. Hardly a good pitch to come and join Barnet's team; personally if I was a social worker I'd rather work temporarily for an agency and get on with the work. Ben 22/9/15

- Green Thinking from Crop to Crumb

Green Party members Natalie Bennett (left) and Ben Samuel (right) visited the Bread Factory this week to show their support for this important project providing healthy food to local people while investing in a fleet with zero carbon pollution. The Green Party passed new policy at its recent National Conference offering more support to local food initiatives. The Greens recognised the vital role they can play in providing fresher, more healthy food, addressing growing food poverty and greening local communities. Of course the new fleet is also more environmentally friendly, relying less on dirty diesel (£110 a tank) and making our food distribution systems less reliant on fuel. Ben Samuel, 25, who lives in the Brent Cross community said ‘We would like to see more of these fleets and see them getting better infrastructure from Barnet Council. The Council should be supporting local food by ensuring their procurement process makes use of local produce. The Brent Cross Cricklewood regeneration should also be used to encourage the inclusion of food growing spaces that can be used by the community and unused land should be made available for people to grow their own food, whether you're into rocket or coleslaw sandwich fillings’. 
The director of the Bread Factory said,  "This initiative came out of thinking about how we take care of the environment.   We have here two electric vans.  We hope to get two more.  The other thing is the electricity it is fed by is now fed by solar or wind, so as I was saying to the Green Party it is zero emissions.  We hope to do our small change from our small perspective here in Hendon"
Alon from Oreo V representing the new vans said... I think this is an historic movement.  We believe the revolution of electric cars starts here.  Electric vehicles are more efficient.  All trains are now electric.  It is very brave to be taking that first step.
Natalie Bennett, said "John Lewis had electric delivery vans.  Back then there was hundreds and hundreds of different sorts of vehicles on our roads, especially adapted by their manufacturers to be suited to the job.  We got away from that with mass production and so what you have now is vehicles that are probably designed for running around motorways at high speed and high energy capacities and I was hearing earlier today lots of them do 60-80 km a day around London and the average speed in London is 7 mph (12 kph).  So what you are doing is going back to the future! Back to the right vehicle for the right job which means that we are also producing on a small scale with the right thing for the right job.  Now this is the sort of industry that we in the Green Party believe we need and that of course mirrors what you are doing with bread too because you are employing lots of (300) people and you said earlier that you value your people too.  And what we need is we need jobs, we need energy efficiency and we need quality products and you are delivering all of those, congratulations."
The manufacturer told me informally the battery now weighs only 150 kg, and I asked him if there was evidence that it goes 100 miles; of course the answer was yes.  I also asked them if the Bread Factory had any plans for green roofs.
Stop press: The Greens are now the third party in London ahead of the Lib-Dems, according to the last Assembly Poll which uses a proportional system.  The Green constituency candidate for the Assembly got nearly 11% of votes cast, behind local Tory Brian Coleman, but ahead of the Lib-Dem.

Greens warn young people ‘Beware of ID cards’

Zain Sardar

Barnet Green Party is urging young people in the borough to shun the government’s new offer to sign them up to the national identity card scheme.

The Home Office this month invited 16- to 24-year-olds in London to apply for identity cards at a cost of £30. For any young person who does apply, up to 50 categories of personal and biometric details about him or her will be added to the National Identity Register. These will include finger prints, National Insurance number, current and past addresses and full history of the card’s use.

There is little or no practical benefit for young people in having the card over other current forms of ID, as shops, bars and other premises don’t have biometric scanners. However, even more worrying than wasting the upfront £30, is that while getting a card will be voluntary, once on the National Identity Register, young people will not be able to get off it, will have to keep the register up to date with their personal details for life and not doing so could lead to a fine of up to £1000.

Also, the life-time cost to the card holder of updating the register and obtaining replacement cards is completely unknown.

Barnet Green Party Youth Officer and Council candidate for Colindale, Zain Sardar says, ‘With the current economic climate, and the pernicious effect this had had on youth and graduate unemployment the last thing we need is for the government to be wasting money when it could easily have been used to help universities fund extra places for students that are currently out of work.

“The London School of Economics estimated the costs of the scheme will be between £10 billion and £20 billion but there is no evidence that this scheme will reduce terrorism or benefit fraud. Thus is a smack in the face for students and young people, who really need the government to invest in their future right now.”