| Topic: | Re:'HH Contract | |
| Posted by: | Guy Lambert | |
| Date/Time: | 09/09/23 14:47:00 |
| I think John is quite right and I believe the contract was signed by Colin Ellar, who stopped being a councillor in 2018. All this was way before my time as a councillor and I became responsible for the Hounslow Highways contract in 2018. My understanding is that the negotiations of this, which included a heavy involvement of the Department for Transport who allocated some funds to support it probably started a couple of years earlier - John and I think Peter Thompson would know more because they were both on the council at the time and it may have been initiated before 2010 when they were the ruling party. These complex contracts take a long time to negotiate. I am not knocking the contract: it gave Hounslow access to funds for investment which replaced every street lamp in the borough and gave us an investment in roads and pavements which put us in a position when we were independently assessed as having the best of these in London for several years. This is probably still the situation but the body that used to assess this seems now to have stopped doing it. As to a 25 year contract, it can obviously be inflexible but most people who own houses either have or previously had a 25 year contract, known as a mortgage. It is certainly common in commerce for complex contracts having a long life. As to the decision to stop using Glyphosate, this decision was made by the council. It is of course controversial but where I live I see bees and butterflies which were not seen anything like as often a couple of years ago. There's a useful article here talking about Glyphosate, it's legal control (somewhere) and what's likely to happen in future. https://naturaler.co.uk/is-glyphosate-banned-uk/ If you want my opinion, we will not be buying it in the 2030s and why it wasn't banned years earlier. |