Extraordinary start to the day. Email in my in-box from Josie Irwin, a Labour councillor in Stroud Green ward, Haringey and former deputy leader of the council.

Attached was her letter of resignation from Haringey Council and from the Labour Party. The disillusionment with both was crystal clear in her letter of resignation and she left nothing to the imagination as to just how sick to death she was of Labour both locally and nationally. All credit to her – as she has been a loyal Labour activist for 27 years. Her partner worked for the local Labour MP Barbara Roche for many years too – and he too resigned from the Labour party earlier in the year. Like her, Iraq seemed to play a big part in his decision.

Of course, that leaves us with a January by-election in that ward. Fab! A golden opportunity for the Lib Dems to expand our councillor base. We have done a lot of work in the area over the last couple of years and hope to win – naturally!

One very interested issue arose. The cleaning / rubbish contract for housing estates in Haringey is with Accord. Apparently – and I have already raised enquiries as to the accuracy of all of this – they have been penalised financially for not doing what they were contracted to do on the estates.

The point raised by the leaseholders was that if the work wasn’t done or was done poorly, and the Council levied a financial penalty, would the leaseholders get a rebate on their service charge? I have posed the question to Haringey Council and I await their response. I trust that the council policy will be to rebate in some portion – otherwise it is simply not on!

Part 2 today of the Congestion Charging scrutiny on the Mayor’s extension and also the Assembly’s review of the original Congestion Charge scheme.

I suppose the outstanding feature of the day was the inability of Transport for London, in the form of Michelle Dix and Malcolm Murray Clarke’s, to convince us that all was well with Capita.

The Evening Standard had revealed a couple of days earlier that it had sent an undercover journalist into one of Capita’s call centres. He had found a woeful tale of failure: complaints not logged as complaints unless the caller used the actual word ‘complaint’ – otherwise it was counted as an ‘enquiry’; call centre stuff giving out wrong information was common; call centre staff hanging up when they didn’t want to continue a call; call centre staff promising that someone would ‘phone back when nobody virtually ever did, and so on.

When we put all of this to Transport for London, they simply continued to say that it was all being put right and that they were stepping up their monitoring. Oh please! I asked for a monthly report to my committee to keep an eye out on this.

One of the few lunches I go to is the Westminster Property Association lunch and today was the day. John Gummer was the guest of honour.

I was sandwiched between two Tory councillors at the top table – and very charming they were. John Gummer in his speech argued that any idea of taxing the increase in land values when the owners benefit from new transport infrastructure was an unacceptable blow to the freedom to make money.

Needless to say, I thought he was entirely wrong. I believe there should be some way of capturing some of the financial windfall that comes from transport infrastructure – be that Site Value Rating or Land Value Taxation. (I’m not going to bore you with the details of these anorak schemes – but it is the way forward on this issue).

Rumours were rife. The Tories were going to make political mincemeat of me this evening. In the event – not a peep!

What’s the story? I held an extraordinary meeting of the Transport Committee tonight to hear representations from Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster – politicians, residents’ associations and businesses – about the Mayor’s proposal to extend the Central London Congestion Charge westwards across those boroughs (although not all of K & C).

The Tories had appealed to me to hold such a meeting in advance of forming the Assembly’s response to the Mayor’s consultation. They were clearly upset that I agreed to hold a meeting – much easier to berate me for not doing so.

I thought it was important to hear the objections to help the committee form its views – along with questions to Transport for London itself on the Wednesday following on finance, technology, Capita’s customer service (ha!) and other critical issues.

But what was really upsetting the Tories was that the Lib Dems are opposing the Mayor’s plans for expansion – because it is too soon to judge how the main scheme is working, financially the scheme doesn’t add up and the area is very different from the existing scheme. Two thirds of the new area is residential – not the obvious in and out to work area that the first scheme area covered.

Anyway, the current technology is not what we need for any extensions to the scheme. An area charge is a blunt instrument and was acceptable to launch the scheme and in an area of in/out work journeys. But what polling across London shows is that there are many, many congested areas in town centres and there are specific times of day or days of the week that are congested. We need to move to a system – such as using satellite technology – that can target congested hot spots.

Then those boroughs where residents have reached the point where they need something as drastic as charging to resolve a particular congestion problem should be able to join in the scheme. Moreover, the poor motorist who does need to use a car, should not be faced with lots of different schemes across London, but with a transponder in the car automatically charging to an account as the car enters a charging zone.

As for the meeting itself – it went very well. Excellent presentations from the small businesses there – a butcher and a fishmonger. And we really heard all the angles. Whether I will be able to get cross-party agreement on the Assembly response to the Mayor’s statutory consultation with us, who knows? I am hopeful that we do, at least, all agree that it is too soon to move forward with too much unknown at this point in time.