Penguin68

Royal Mail has just been fined £5.6m for failing to meet its delivery targets. A bit late in the day, mind you.

Not everyone subscribes to the idea that over promotion of active travel is a good or necessary thing. Removing obstacles to active travel is I believe appropriate, where those obstacles make a (free) choice of active travel difficult or dangerous - and making progress on pavements without obstructions or hazards is clearly an appropriate use of tax payers money. But deciding to travel 'actively' should be a personal choice (which is supported by society) and not an imposition. For many people such a choice, through age, infirmity or other social obligations or work requirements may not be possible or desirable. To focus only on active travel options at the expense of other choices is not, to my mind, the mark of a free or democratic society, and to pretend that we are all in favour of such prioritisation at the expense of others is simply not true. I will not stand in the way of your active travel, if, and only if, you are prepared not to stand in my way in making different choices. And choosing to favour only one 'brand' of active travel is a further, and undemocratic restriction. As it happens, I do walk, for pleasure, but not, necessarily, or at times at all, as my prefered choice for getting from A to B (I walk from A, scenicly, back to A again!). I find being told what I should do, in the eyes of others, an imposition. And an unwelcome one. Where one brand of active travel, cycling, occupies discordant amounts of road space against other forms of transport, including public transport, and where the use of that space is not meeting, or coming close to meeting, planning expectations, it can and should be challenged. And a mindset which believes that making other forms of transport impossible, so as to force users into a choice they have not entered into willingly, is simply undemocratic. I do not want self appointed health police deciding what health choices I should be forced to make. And the idea that the active travel of anyone on this board, in Dulwich, is actually improving the health of others is simply absurd. Particularly where all that is happening is traffic displacement (e.g. LTNs locally) or buses being late.

Libretto's the butcher in Wood Vale sells them. He opens on Tuesday at 10.00.

There is a lot of sick leave being taken, apparently, normally a symptom of a very demotivated workforce outwith a general epidemic.

An earlier poster wondered what our MP could actually do about the Royal Mail postal delivery service. And obviously it's falling apart across the country, from reports. But one thing MPs could do, if they were so minded, was to enact legislation which would stop a presumption of delivery being made when an item is posted. That is how 'the authorities' can penalise individuals for e.g. non payment of fines, when the notification has been posted but not received. Under law, at the moment, proof of posting is sufficient (as indeed it used to be, in truth, when we had a proper service) to 'prove' delivery. No longer, evidently. So maybe urge Helen Hayes (if it is she who is your MP) to lobby her party to propose such legislation - the removal of this 'presumption of delivery' is not only now fair and equitable, but would help put further pressure on the Royal Mail as I imagine this legal fiction is still a selling point for them.

Because they can? - In general locally the number of patients to GP have increased, as the number of full-time GPs have decreased. This has caused a problem, exacerbated by poorly implemented IT 'solutions' and very poor administration. Covid allowed local GPs to shut their doors and close-down personal contact doctoring; many chose to work from home at that time. They, like so many other workers are very reluctant to come back to work in the workplace, and since they work for themselves have no incentive to.

And it lasts a short time - normally mainly over by 7:00 - as it's the younger children in the main who do it, normally with parents. This is not a wide scale, nor in the main a teenage phenomenon locally in ED.

Isn't it quite likely that it is cyclists being sampled as to what puts them off cycling - they are less likely to site aggressive cyclists, I'd have thought, than non-cyclists who had considered, or even tried cycling, and had been put off by others. People who don't (now) cycle are rather less likely to be sampled on polls about cyclists attitudes to cycling.

So a shout-out (which I entirely endorse) for Veolia

Does that mean you've never lived in Southwark?

I believe Kings is in Lambeth. as is Ruskin Park.

Actually if you look a couple of posts up you will see I'm recommending Krystal Pharmacy myself. Where I had my Covid vaccination.

Krystal Pharmacy in Nunhead, near Sopers is doing Covid, via the NHS app and flu as a walk in. Covid might also be walk in. Seemed very efficient.

Anybody who thinks that splitting Oxford into 6 neighbourhoods, residents of which would be restricted to 100 private car movements out of those neighbourhoods in the course of a year has nothing to do with the concept of creating 15 minute mini-cities within Oxford, whatever the council claims, needs to review their thinking - unless you believe that Oxford Council intends to create a different set of15 minute city neighbourhoods from the 'restricted' travel neighbourhoods it also plans to implement - which would be more perverse than even local councils can normally manage! Local actions against travel restrictions in Oxford have been extreme, matched in the UK now only by anti-ULEZ actions in Greater London. And I'm afraid that our own (local to Dulwich) experience (for those readers who are local to Dulwich) seems to suggest that Council statements, truth and reality seem rarely to be bedfellows nowadays.

The questions you have to ask yourself are (1) Does this raise revenue for the Council which is not covered by statutory limits and (2) does this remove privately owned cars from Southwark? If the answer to both is 'no' than I wouldn't be holding my breath for any positive response. Just not on their radar, I'm afraid.

Oxford's population is about half that of Southwark, but their proposal - in Southwark terms - is that you would be allowed 100 trips a year out of your electoral ward into other Southwark wards by car, but no more (fines would follow) and non Southwark people would not be able to enter or cross Southwark by car, without a fee (I think, though there may be a blanket ban). Oxford only has buses for public transport, whereas North Southwark has tubes, and both North and South have trains, so it would be easier to cope with in Southwark. You could walk or cycle without restriction. Oxford people, who live and work in Oxford may find that their work and, for instance the schools their children go to are in different 'wards', as may be the shops or healthcare or leisure centres they visit - tough! The car option is to drive out of your 'ward' (away from the centre) and then go round very restricted ring roads to enter your next 'ward' destination (adding a lot of time to your journey - and miles with the concomitant emissions). This is fine for fit people who don't need to transport stuff, maybe. But not for others. And of course in London there are no 'Southwark specific' ring roads - if implemented across London travelling anywhere by private vehicle would be stopped, as boroughs would exclude 'foreigners' entering their borough. The idea that you can create self contained villages (with are 15 minute centres) inside large conurbations is entirely mad, of course. But entirely mad appears to be a qualification in local government nowadays.

At least that has a cost to it!

This type of sampling (one in 10 households) is entirely legitimate, so long as the 'first' household is chosen at random and then each subsequent household is 10 households further on (to take into account flats etc.) The researcher should have no choice in the matter. However you can set up sampling rules, so that if the next household to be chosen is empty you choose the next household after, and then again step through another 10. In street sampling this should mean that you get a representative semi-random sample for each neighbourhood. Oh, and the researchers should be independent of the entity commissioning the research. What is more worrying is the nature of the questions being asked - you can massively distort responses in the way you question - both in terms of not asking some questions (such as not asking whether you want a CPZ at all, but just how 'bad' it might be) but also about juxtaposing questions - for instance about children's health and then asking about car emissions. Ideally the questions should also be derived from an independent source (more difficult to do, actually, as everyone has a view, even if they don't acknowledge it). If I actually wanted a fair result I might ask opponents to my view to vet the questions to remove obvious bias - don't hold your breathe on that one! I don't actually expect any such research to be fair, or to be reported fairly, but it is possible to do. I write as a former member of the Market Research Association.

If the leak comes from pipework in an upstairs property (and not, for instance from a hole in the roof!) then the liability is with the 'owner' of the upstairs property and their insurer - either the landlord if it's a tenant, or the leaseholder if it's a leasehold property. You should find out who is the insurer for the relevant property and contact them. Repairing your damage should be their responsibility. If you are a leaseholder you could also contact your own buildings insurer who will follow up with the insurer of the property above you. There's always a complication when there are separate properties within a building and leaseholders, as there can be two buildings insurances, one for the 'exterior' of the property (roof, walls etc.) and one (or more) for the interiors of the apartments. But if it's not your leak, you shouldn't have to be paying!

There are clearly issues to do with Council funding which need addressing, even for well-run councils, but attempts to use traffic measures as a way of boosting funding, through fines and charges, when these stand outside the law as proscribed, and where they are not subject to the usual external checks for proper governance is simply wrong. Local Councils are not allowed to undertake social or fiscal engineering which fall outside their legal remit. There are suggestions, possibly well founded, that Southwark is acting, or trying to act, outside its legal powers. If so it is irrelevant whether you support their long-run intent or not - it would be illegal. The law circumscribing how monies 'earned' through traffic measure can be deployed are clear and restrictive. As are the reasons why traffic measures can be deployed at all. Forgetting (if you can) the dubious methods, in some opinions, that Southwark are deploying in defence of their actions, or to weasel them through, (their method), it is still possibly the case that what they are trying to do, for whatever reason, is not actually within their legal powers.

As my GP is still silent on the matter (I belong to the only Trappist GP Practice in SE London) I am booked into my local Pharmacy. I've just discovered that those eligible for the normal round of covid vaccinations (i.e. those over 65) will have NHS invitations rolled out from 18th September).

I believe it was the LTN designers that forced more traffic onto the south circular - by blocking off other east: west routes - and not the anti-LTN campaigners. There is no anti-LTN logic that argues that there are too many and there should be more. It is the pro-LTN argument that the east west traffic displaced by the LTNs has 'disappeared', and has not turned up anywhere else. Which is self-evidently a lie.

I'm afraid if you look at Bolshevik history you will find that class hatred, bile and murder are high up on the list of their 'socialist' group think. When you want to review their 'socialist' ideology, don't look to William Morris as their ideologue.

It is a shame that, considering this is seasonal vaccination time my own surgery does not feel able to share any information on this - I had, by last year, already been called and and had received my flu vaccination, if memory serves. And they were flagging that they wouldn't be doing Covid but others would. They really do seem hopeless.

I note (a) these are in the news and that (b) there are no notices in FHRGP about them, indeed searching on key words flu and Covid is a pointless exercise. Are any other local surgeries offering these (I'm over 70 and do qualify)?