| |
Transport wake-up
• A wake-up call to Boris Johnson.
Ken Livingstone created a dinosaur in Transport for London.
Why on Earth does it need more than 230 “executives” on six figure-plus salaries?
TfL now employ 17,000 staff, many of whom duplicate the roles of staff in the London boroughs. In Camden, we have one of the very best traffic planning teams but they are not allowed to propose joined-up infrastructure schemes. Instead, they are required to work up individual proposals and submit them as one-offs.
Then, the staff in TfL match and mark our borough staff’s evaluation, thus duplicating effort unnecessarily and running up vast extra cost to Londoners.
But there’s worse. TfL poaches large numbers of our staff, particularly engineers, having used this borough as its training ground, and then pays them way over the boroughs’ market rate – thus creating staff shortages here in Camden to prepare and install schemes at the grassroots. TfL has literally dozens of excellent ex-Camden staff and this is causing us real recruitment and retention problems.
This monolithic body that disseminates our money to transport schemes across the capital should desist from doubling up on the process and stop fileting the best of the borough’s engineering staff. Let’s hope Boris will get on with the inherited investment in the cycling infrastructure, which is “win win” for everyone.
CLLR Paul Braithwaite
Lib Dem, Cantelowes ward
|
 |
|
| |
