Cllr Peter Thompson: full interview

It's been demanding because I still have a job as a teacher. But I have been able to negotiate things at work so that I only work there four days a week and then have one dedicated council day on top of all the 1001 evening meetings that we have to do. Balancing the work, school, council work demands is not straight forward but so far it seems to be going alright.

Being a councillor full stop is a thing you could easily make into a full-time job but I'm not quite sure that is always a good thing. I think it's helpful to have a bit of outside perspective and not to spend your entire life in meetings. Hopefully that will work well.

School is flexible up to a point ... and we also have fairly generous holidays. In an ideal world, it would be nice to have more days in the Civic Centre. On the other hand, Colin Ellar my predecessor worked here five days a week and I honestly don't think he was a terribly effective leader of the council. It's not just to do with how many days you put in.

But can you be an effective leader with just the one day?

I hope so. In a sense, we'll have to wait and see.

I think it's been a very difficult change for the council. The previous administration had a leader on tap who could be there at any time and they could meet left, right and centre. But we had to get the message through that it is different now.

Many meetings aren't actually necessary. I think that one of the problems that local authorities do have is the meetings culture' when you have to have meetings ... rather than doing any work. I think all of us are trying to break that down a bit.

One of the frustrations I always found as a councillor is that you can revisit and discuss things year in, year out and actually nothing has ever changed. We're trying to create an organisation that is a bit sharper, a bit better on delivery.

I'm finding already that people want to meet ... and then you sit there for half an hour and think there is no real value or purpose because it could all be put into print or an email. I'm a bright bloke, I can read.

I find that these days people are so much clued in to email and most of the communication we have is through that.

What has the council's relationship been like with local MPs Ann and Alan Keen since they threatened to cease co-operating on issues if Councillor Phil Andrews was allowed to remain on the executive?

- For the full story about this dispute, click here

They stated they had the right to withhold co-operation from the executive but they still said they wanted to work with the council. But we said that actually we are the council and you can't work with elements of it and not the whole administration. It's like working with the civil service and not the government - it's a bit bonkers.

We said that unless we heard otherwise we will assume you don't want to work with us, and we haven't heard otherwise.

In reality, even before the letter, they weren't very pro-active. They did bugger all to be honest with you. A very senior officer said to us: "Don't worry about it, you wouldn't notice the difference anyway." They are not overly interested in local stuff.

We haven't refused to work with them. They were just being silly and making an issue where there wasn't one. I think they came across as looking very childish.

I'm not interested in playing games with them. They seem to want to use the council to generate for them photo shoots, openings and publicity shots but I'm not interested in that. I'm interested if they want to work with us constructively on particular issues.

What changes will residents see over the next few months under the Conservatives?

What we have done is stopped and looked at what we have inherited. That's why in a sense there hasn't been a massive tangible difference. Hounslow is not different in many ways. There were lots of decisions in the pipeline that we had to say Do we want to go forth with these?' The most obvious thing was the conference centre at the Civic Centre which the previous administration were happy to spend £4million on and we thought we would stop that from day one because we don't want to have a conference centre. It is not a priority as far as we are concerned.

We have been doing a lot of things behind the scenes looking at the options and seeing what we can do on a whole raft of things. So I think we are now moving towards a stage where we can go out to discussion and consultation and making public a whole series of areas where we want to make real changes.

What are those areas?

We need to do a lot more in terms of the green agenda, particularly on recycling. All local authorities have to get their recycling levels way up or we get financially penalised. There are many variations of schemes. We have started to look at what possibilities there are. I don't think we are going to come along and say This is it. This is how it is going to be.' We actually want to go out there and say We need to recycle more.' It's the right thing to do on lots of different levels. We have to get the targets up, we have to recycle more. We have to focus a bit more on kitchen waste and garden waste. We want to find out what people think of it. We don't want to come along and say This is the plan. Like it or lump it.' There has to be real consultation because, unless you get the hearts and minds behind you, it's not going to work.

What other areas will you be looking at?

The other major thing is going to be the annual issue to do with council tax. Hounslow has, I think, the fifth highest council tax in London and one of the highest in the country. We inherited that and we know there are lots of reasons for that to do with the decisions of the previous administration. We aspire to be efficient and lower-taxed. We can't here and now give a commitment to say what council tax will be in five years time. One of the things people sometimes don't appreciate with government finance is that a lot of it is out of our hands. A lot of it is down to what the policies are in central London in terms of the grant they give.

In your manifesto, you say there is a massive backlog of road reviews, social services are underfunded, crime rates are too high and that Hounslow has £200million of debt. With all those things, will it not be pretty impossible to lower the council tax?

Not impossible. A lot of work is going on but there are real areas where savings can be made. One thing we are conscious of is the people that we employ and the staffing levels. We are looking very carefully at the structures we have inherited. We want to look at the backroom services. We are not particularly interested in cutting front-line services that really affect people. I think it is important to look at the bureaucracy and see where savings can be made there.

Local government has changed a lot over the past few years. Many authorities have a lot more in terms of outsourcing or, as we used to call it, privatising certain functions. Hounslow have done quite a lot. Labour never called it privatisation but they have privatised elements of what we have here. And there is scope for manoeuvre.

We are also very keen to pursue the idea that obviously now we have lots of Conservative councils in west London and there are, perhaps, economies of scale to be made by combining services.

What kind of services?

Well, it's all a bit up in the air in a sense. But we have our own fleet of binmen, so do Hillingdon, so do Ealing. If someone wanted to come in and bid for that contract and do all three, they could provide the major services. We want to try to make savings in the centre, try to think a bit more creatively about how we could work with others in London to cut costs. Do we all have to have our own printing departments, as we do? Is there scope to combine?

A major thing we have pledged to do is to work on the potholes and the pavements. That matters a lot to people. We also had this all-party agreement last year to bid for PFI funds. If we get that - and there is a thought that one of them will go to a London authority - it would help us, over a period of time, to rebuild and repair every single road and footpath in the entire authority. It's a very ambitious scheme. It's not ideal because it is tied in over 30 years.

We will hear about it by the end of this year.

Till then, are there still shorter term schemes going on to improve the roads?

There are. On top of all that the council spends millions every year on maintenance. We are looking at other ways to boost that. Obviously we are constrained financially but it was one of our key priorities. We want to make a visual difference to people's quality of life. We have inherited the previous crowd's budget and a lot of the money has already been allocated. But we are trying to work within what we have already got. We're looking at our own budget for next year and try to see how we can focus on highway maintenance. Graffiti is also a big priority for us.

When will more of your proposals and plans be shown to the public?

We are looking from the autumn onwards. We will be producing a five-year Hounslow plan which will focus on things like graffiti. We also want to continue and move on with the regeneration of the borough. I'm conscious that a lot of development has happened in Feltham but areas like Brentford need to be looked at. There are issues to do with Brentford Football Club. We have had meetings with them and they have proposals to redevelop their site to make the stadium fit for the 21st century. They have ambitious plans. There are areas we want to regenerate.

We want to make some real difference in terms of planning issues. Again we are rather constrained and we have actually had powers taken away by Mayor Ken Livingstone.

What do you think about the increase in Ken's powers? What will the changes mean for Hounslow?

I live very close to Kew Bridge where there was a hideous proposal which everyone was against - residents, Richmond Council, Hounslow Council. Everyone who had a view was against it, apart from the Mayor. I think it is those large scale schemes that he can now override. In principle, they are powers that he shouldn't have been given. I am very much committed to localism. People in the immediate area should make decisions. It has always struck me as wrong that national politicians can step in and override local authorities. At the end of the day, you have to trust people and local residents tend to know what is best for their area.

And you don't trust Ken Livingstone?

No I don't. He is on record in support of high density, high rise developments which work ever so well in the City but they don't work well in Hounslow. People don't really thrive and develop that well when they are packed like rabbits in a large 20-storey whatever. Speaking about Chiswick, when we had some proposals for high density, high-rise type things, it has always been the Mayor who has been quite supportive of it. My own view is that if you build lots of high-density developments, you are actually not creating or encouraging stable communities.

Would those developments not provide more affordable housing?

In some ways, but it's not affordable housing for families. What we need and one thing I am keen to encourage is family development. We are short of family homes - 2,3,4 bedroom places. We are packing people into one bedroom flats. Therefore you have a younger population, a more transcient population and you are not actually building sustainable communities who stay put.

I just don't think ultimately in this country that people thrive in that sort of environment. We want more truly affordable housing but our focus is a lot more on family homes.

What effect does immigration have on Hounslow?

There is an issue in a way. Our grant from central government is based on population figures and not based on reality. In this part of London near to Heathrow, we have a very transcient, moving population. But people come here and they use the schools, get sick, travel on the roads and they use all the services but we are not getting the funding because officially they are not here. There is a real debate which has been taken by the previous crowd and ourselves to ministers that population figures don't truly reflect what we know to be happening in Hounslow.

So some council services are underfunded?

We estimate that we ought to get about £3million more than we do based on what we think our population is.

Is that caused by immigration into the area or into the country?

It's both. It's partly because all these people are illegal immigrants. They don't exist officially but they are out there using the things we provide so it is a bit bizarre that we suffer for it. I think quite a few west London authorities do.

Has any action been taken about that?

Strong representations have been made. I was part of an all-party group last year talking to the government. The government relies information from the Office of National Statistics but we just disputed it because it doesn't ring true.

What other problems does this cause in Hounslow? A couple of months ago, we did an interview with community cohesion officer Sabin Malik after the council announced it was putting together a report looking at the roots of terrorism and spread of far-right groups in Hounslow. The report expressed concerns that disaffected white Feltham residents would be attracted to political groups like the National Front or the British National Party. Are you concerned about that?

It is a danger, isn't it? In the last local elections, there was a National Front candidate in one of the Feltham wards and they got a few hundred votes. I think it was actually a ward that the Conservatives won but if we hadn't worked hard in that ward, there could even have been a National Front councillor. I think we managed to take on board that disgruntlement with the council.

I think there is a perception - don't think it's quite true - that maybe the council under the previous administration were too interested in particular sections of the community.

Which sections?

Ethnic groups. The Labour administration was pretty much based in the centre which is where the largely Asian population are.

I think it's interesting that there is a national debate about the way in which race relations is moving forwards. For a long time, it has rightly focussed on and celebrated diversity in different groups and different parts of the world but we haven't done enough to bring people together. Ruth Kelly was talking last week about how we should think twice about how we approach and relate to other people.

I think it's a lot more important nowadays to stress what people have in common. What matters to most people, no matter what background or where they come from in the world, is the quality of education, what transport is like. They are not particularly interested in some of the more tokenistic stuff that has happened in the past.

How can the council promote togetherness?

We would like to say a little bit less about race and ethnicity, and just get on with the job that we're here for - providing better services. I think there is a danger when you spend too much time focussing on the differences between people. It actually divides and separates people. It is potentially difficult because there are hundreds of languages spoken in our schools but we want to give people something they have in common. A common sense of belonging to this country and borough, and not focus on social, religious or racial differences.

What do you think about the national changes going on in the Conservative Party?

I personally find it encouraging. The way that David Cameron is moving the party is in some ways away from what people are comfortable with. But at the end of the day, he is a Conservative and what he has realised is that we aren't going to win anything unless we appeal to our core voters. I think the more modern, progressive, green-type approach has a lot of merit behind it.

Generally I think we are doing well in the opinion polls and people do see David Cameron as a bit of a break with the past. There is also that increasing disillusionment with Labour. I don't think that will disappear if they change their leader.

How big a part do you think that disillusionment played in your victory in Hounslow?

It worked a bit both ways. There was both local and national disillusionment. Nationally it was quite good timing for us with the scandals and all the rest of it. Locally they didn't really help themselves. They had a very lacklustre campaign. They didn't really fight very hard in the areas where they needed to. They were a little bit complacent. I think they just assumed they would walk in. There was really tangible shock on the night when they lost all those seats in Feltham and Hanworth and so on. They didn't see it coming.

Also, I think we as a party are a lot more organised than we have been in the past. Perhaps for the first time in a long time, we seriously fought for seats in Feltham which we hadn't held for years. That's really encouraging.

In your manifesto you say that you want residents to get a better deal' for parking. We have had a lot of complaints that parking charges have gone up recently. What has happened?

They went through in the previous crowd's budget. You would be hard pressed to find them in the budget. They are not particularly listed or clear. We obviously voted against the Labour budget. But it went through in March and came in quite recently. Therefore, they came pretty much out of the blue to ourselves and residents. They particularly impact on Chiswick and I what particularly strikes me was that there was no consultation with anybody. There are 1001 ways to consult people but there was no consultation on these changes and they are making an impact. I think the carer's permit went up by 250 per cent and the changes to the visitors parking were done on the nod.

We are going to review that and that's important for us. We have promised anyway to review parking across the borough and it is going to be discussed at a forthcoming area committee meeting. One thing about the new administration is that we have a sizable number of members who are from Chiswick. So we are fully aware of the problem. I don't think you can change charges mid-year, it has to come through in the next budget. But I think by then we will have some concrete proposals. Parking shouldn't primarily be about raising money, it should be about giving people the chance to park somewhere near their house and to deter commuters.

I also want to look at the differential system we still have in Hounslow where it costs more to park on one side of the borough than the other. That doesn't strike me as terribly fair. That will be part of the review.