Category Archives: Blog

Local planning application

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Off to Wood Vale tennis club to look at the court for which the club wishes to apply for flood lighting. It is very remote from the houses and as the club has written to all the likely affected residents and received only one and a half objections – I should think it will be OK. But don’t know and will consult planning department for their view. They did originally send someone, but he seems to have looked at the wrong court – i.e. the ones near houses as opposed to the single one furthest away.

Rush round leaflet deliveries to our deliverers in middle of lightning and thunderstorm. Have a stinking cold and matters not helped by opening car door and said leaflets falling out into major mud puddle. Elections – don’t you love ’em?

A typical day at the GLA

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Committee Chairs meeting at the GLA. This is the first of this term of office and is an opportunity for the chairs of the various Assembly committees to meet to discuss budget items for scrutiny work and other matters. There is pretty consensual agreement that money spent on occasional consultants, polling on issues as they affect Londoners, London-wide expert seminars etc is money generally well spent, Actually, the Assembly spends a very small amount on anything. However, if you look at the Mayor’s expenditure…!

I raise the issue of a looming constitutional crisis if the Parking Enforcement investigation falls as a consequence of pressure from the boroughs. I believe we will be able to come to agreement at the meeting later this afternoon – but want to raise the issue in the generic rather than the specific. ie If the boroughs don’t like what the Assembly is doing and effectively veto it thus making the scrutiny work untenable – what is the legal position and more importantly, what is the constitutional position. I leave that hanging in the air as we all rush off for Assembly Plenary Session.

This session of the London Assembly is on the Olympics. Seb Coe is the star turn – but we get a message just before commencement that his father has been taken ill and he cannot therefore attend. We plough on with the Mayor and reps from the Olympic Bid committee. No news really. We all support the bid. The Tories then undermine their support by being over negative about the bid. Not the most scintillating of sessions.

Informal meeting of the Transport Committee to look at the first draft of our response to the consultation on the West London tram. My mission here is to try and get the five political parties to agree that this response should reflect the evidence we received rather than be just an opportunity for us all to restate our party positions on the tram. A consensual report raising the concerns we genuinely have will be far more useful and effective than a political rant. We can all do that in our separate party responses to the consultation.

Anyway – so far so good. The draft is well written – and when chapter 5 is concluded (at this point unwritten and about traffic displacement) we will meet again to see if we have enough common ground for a unified response. Otherwise it will have to be the majority think x and the minority think y – which is OK – but I think loses its punch.

High noon at the London Assembly. The three political party leaders (or their reps) came with officers to meet myself, and the Labour and Tory transport leads from the Transport Committee to see if there was a way forward on the parking scrutiny – with ALG/borough cooperation.

The main issues seemed to be that the ALG (the Association of London Government) felt that the Assembly should not examine areas where the boroughs had been democratically elected to operate in an area. Whilst I understand the sensitivities, the remit of the London Assembly is to raise issues of importance to Londoners as well as scrutinise the Mayor and TfL. This scrutiny had passed through all the appropriate and public stages to reach this stage and had been unanimously approved. And parking is unquestioningly of importance as an issue for London.

The second area where they were unhappy was because of remarks I had made in the media which to them seemed to indicate I might have made up my mind in advance of the scrutiny. All I can say about that is that the boroughs didn’t like the bits about my suggesting if they didn’t want to comply with the scrutiny they may have something to hide – but as I pointed out – equally, motorists who thought they had a hard deal might interpret the fact that I am on record as saying I support restriction, penalty and fine as biased against them. Both are wrong.

I believe I assuaged their concerns and both my Labour and Tory colleagues backed me up as being a fair and scrupulous chair.

We then moved onto business – and we were quite happy with the ALG’s suggestions for amended terms of reference. All parties will now go back to their groups for agreement and hopefully that will go through the next Transport Committee and finally get the show on the road.

Day ends off with stuffing envelopes for our council by-election in Haringey. The fun never ends…

Archway Road

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I leave the GLA at about 7pm to rush back to the inaugural meeting of the Archway Road Residents’ Association which is being set up tonight.

A good thing to come out of the controversies over the Highgate Tube station fence is that residents and businesses have decided to form a local group to ensure they have a voice on similar matters in future.

Their three main campaigns are to be on the fence, the local CPZ and hanging baskets on the Archway Road. It was a good meeting and I am sure it will make a difference in their representation in future over matters of local import.

New school for Crouch End?

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Breakfast meeting at a Crouch End resident’s house to discuss the TUC building. The community, the LibDems and even the Exec Member for Education on the Council are all campaigning for the TUC building to be bought by Haringey Council as a site for a new school. Crouch End is desperately short of places and we have been calling for a new school in the area for quite a few years.

The fear is though that the TUC – despite its supposed left-wing position and social conscience – will just want to make oodles of money from the site and sell it to a residential developer rather than for the common good of the community in the form of a new school.

Haringey Council as the planning authority would have to grant it permission to sell to such a developer by changing the covenant which currently prohibits it. At first sight you would think, phew it’s protected – but in reality Haringey can only refuse to do so ‘within reason’. So it’s really no protection at all.

I have gone to meet some of the key campaigners to see where I can add some value or do anything more to help. Apart from continuing to campaign and finding information – the only other avenue is to try and embarrass the TUC into doing the right thing rather than trying to cash in. I will write to them this week to remind them of their social duty…

Muswell Hill Area Assembly

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Lots of familiar faces as I walk into Lauderdale House at the bottom of Highgate Village and in Waterlow Park. I am there to address the North London branch of the University of the Third Age on “Transport Challenges in London”. Funny really, as I grew up in Highgate and used to go to the park every Saturday when I was little to feed the squirrels and the ducks. Home beat.

These are the sort of occasions I love – firstly because I love my subject and also I find groups of the not so young often make a fascinating audience. They are interested, intelligent – and have reached a stage in life where more often than not they say exactly what they think.

I enjoyed it. They enjoyed it. It was a really pleasant morning.

In the evening, it was the Muswell Hill Area Assembly. The main item of the day is the bids for how to spend the £50,000 allocated to the Area Assembly to spend on local projects in the current financial year.

Haringey Council has ‘given’ this amount to each Area Assembly. Although the Muswell Hill Area Assembly covers a larger area than others, it has the same amount of money. Anyway, local residents have sent in suggestions for small projects to be funded.

They were listed and pinned up on the wall with space for people to stick their little green sticker dots – so they can indicate which ones they support the most.

The first thing that happened was some bloke jumping to his feet and saying it was disgusting that Wayne Hoban (the chair of the Assembly and a Lib Dem councillor for Alexandra ward) had put information about the Assembly on a LibDem website. ‘This was political and disgraceful’ the chap said.

Wayne handled this really well – and explained calmly and rationally that he had put the information out to a wide email base of local people so that lots of people could know that the vote on the bids was taking place and not just the usual suspects who come to area assemblies. And in fact attendance was higher. The full details of the bids were put up on the web so people could see them – if they wished – before the meeting.

Given that people normally complain that there isn’t enough information about what Haringey Council is up to, it was a pretty strange sight to see someone complaining about someone making an effort to distribute more information! But all became clear…

The bloke continued and continued to harangue Wayne when another chap from the audience (who were getting fed up with this interruption to the business of the day) demanded that the bloke making the accusation state who he was. He said his name and that he was chair of the local Conservative Party – at which point the whole audience turned on him.

The meeting then continued with a presentation on a review into the condition of pavements. I have often taken council officers to view pavements that are dangerous that residents have phoned in about but about which no action has been taken – and then it is done within 24 hours.

This is not just because of my nagging (!) but also because pavements which are too uneven can leave the council open to being sued if someone trips and hurts themselves.

The greater problem is that Haringey Council has had no program for replacing ordinary cracked pavements that are not legally dangerous. Now, seemingly, there is a planned program of replacement. I asked what they were going to do about replacing paving stones where they had done a repair in an emergency and whacked down tarmac / asphalt – and left it like that for years. The response was somewhat half-hearted I thought – i.e. yes we will get round to it sometime.

In the break the audience took their green stickers and voted on the bids for projects. The results will be published in due course after the councillors look at all the bids to fund as many as possible of the most popular ones.

Citizenship ceremony

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Bump into my sister and brother-in-law at Haringey Civic Centre where he has come to take British Citizenship. Dan is American and has been here for decades and finally decided to do this. Very significant day.

I am there to meet a member of the Bangladeshi community who wanted to talk to me about a range of issues. Very interesting meeting followed by meeting with a young guy who wants to set up a Welfare to Work program in Tottenham for unemployed, young ethnic minority residents. I wish him well and support the idea. Finding funding will be the issue.

Then off to the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) for a meeting of the EODB (Equal Opportunities and Diversity Board). We discuss informally the work program for the next few years. Loads of good ideas around for investigation and keeping the Met to account ranging from policing terrorism to forced marriages.

At end of meeting get to gossip with the members about who will be the next Commissioner. The members who are on the interview panels will not divulge anything to us who weren’t. So we adjourn to the pub – where still not a word passes their lips!

Transport in West London

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Informal workshop with Transport for London (TfL) looking at traffic modelling in West London to see if you can ram a tram without causing a jam. So far – they can’t. One interesting notion came to light. TfL’s traffic modelling consultant kept assuring members of the Transport Committee that people made choices that meant once they couldn’t use the tram route, they would change the way they drove, where they worked, the mode they travelled, etc, etc.

When I pushed him in saying that if you stick a giant tram down a main road – people actually had no choice but were being thus forced to change their life patterns – he conceded. I wish they could get over some of the pinch points – but I don’t see them being able to do it well enough not to ruin their business case for the tram. The business case is shaky anyway and hugely expensive. They ought to take a look at a modern electric trolleybus for one quarter the price. Particularly as the experts said at the formal scrutiny session that the tram would be out of date virtually by the time it was built.

Anyway – it was a really useful meeting and the TfL director of the project is really working hard to try and get this through. In the end, if the Mayor says it goes ahead, it does – regardless of consultation. We’ll see. I don’t think he will have the money anyway. Ken can faff about for a few years with inquiries and feasibility and on and on. By the time to real funding is needed who knows where we will be…

(To see further details of my view on the tram, have a look at http://www.glalibdems.org.uk/news/178.html).

Hornsey Town Hall

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Just a note about the Hornsey Town Hall Advisory Panel meeting on Wednesday 6th October for information.

There was a presentation from a ‘developer’ – but a developer with a difference. She had a heart and developed in partnership with the community and the needs of that community – whilst still making a living.

This was Sylvie Pierce from a company called Capital Providence. Sylvie told us about her work, specialising in the development of heritage buildings. Shoreditch New Deal for Communities Trust had come to her and asked her to look at buildings in the area. She’d identified a Grade II listed building she felt she could develop well.

The similarity with Hornsey Town Hall was that in order to make the development work, 20% of the site had been allocated for residential development. This provided the funding for making the best of the rest of the site – including both a community space and a restaurant called the Hoxton Apprentice involving Pru Leith (a bit like Jamie Oliver and his training restaurant). The restaurant profit goes to running the whole scheme. She put two super-duper apartments on the top to bring in some loot – and Bob’s your uncle.

I know I have truncated the story – but the picture painted was of a different approach to development from the usual approach of developers. It was one where the developer worked with a trust and with brilliant architects. They delivered a great project and produced something which generated the money to pay for the scheme.

Now, there’s been some questions about Haringey Council’s attitude towards the town hall. At the meeting, Judy Bax (the Labour councillor who chairs the advisory group) said Haringey’s position is “no profit, no loss” – they won’t put money into developing the site, but neither are they going to insist on making money out of the site either. Many people have campaigned against any plans to just sell-off the Town Hall, so that was good news to hear.

We then had a look at the proposed planning brief for the site. It was only tabled at the meeting and is quite long and complex relating to Haringey’s planning policies etc. It covers what sort of developments on the site would be allowed. It’s really just a framework outlining what sort of things can be done on the site.

This will be presented at the next Crouch End / Stroud Green Area Assembly. It is very, very general – and no one should get the idea that this is in any way the detail of what would be on the site.

The formal consultation on the planning brief runs from 16th October until 15th November. It will be exhibited at the library and the town hall and Haringey Council will be writing to residents most affected. The council are still discussing how far and how wide the consultation in terms of individual letters to residents will be.

It will also be more fully presented at the next Advisory Panel. It will be available on the council website and there will be adverts in the press notifying of all of this.

There was then a presentation by one group with a suggested way forward for the period when Haringey Council moves out and before the new development is ready.

In brief, there was a proposal for an interim management committee to move into the site and let what space could be let for commercial rents (offices, rehearsal rooms, meeting rooms etc) and have some artistic enterprises using some of the space so that there was no down time or loss of earnings during the 3-5 years the project might be likely to take.

Everyone thought a swift operation was necessary – but how and who should do this was a matter to be gone into further.

As for long-term arrangements – this was the crux of the matter as far as I could see. The Advisory Panel has to put a report to Haringey Council Executive in the relatively near future. This is the area which will touch on who makes the decisions, how much is developed for community and how much for commercial; whether the council retains control and chooses a developer etc or whether a charitable trust with skilled trustees carries this all forward.

Andrew Travers, who is the Director of Corporate Finance at Haringey, had made it quite clear that the council itself would not support the trust idea.

However, the clear will of earlier meetings had been for a trust and to remove it from the auspices of Haringey Council. Several people said that the trick would be to get the Labour councillors who form the Council Executive (who will make the decision) on board and that they would be scared of a trust because of their experiences with Ally Pally.

They were reminded by a member of the panel that Ally Pally Trustees were actually councillors and it was effectively still run by the council as trustees – and that this was quite different from the bulk of a new trust which would have mostly independent trustees.

This got batted around for a while. I voiced the view that we had to make a clear statement of the vision (which everyone virtually agrees on as an arts/education/community etc space with some commercial parts) and make it very clear that an independent charitable trust is the only way forward. However, there was a need for a changeover period while the long-term development got up and running.

It was also understood that Haringey Council could not simply ‘give’ a £20million asset directly and without safeguards to a trust – however brilliant that trust might be. By the same token if the trust was to have total control in the end – it too needed to have a transfer program, business plan etc. Additionally, during any transitional phase decisions that would have to be made would have to be joint so that both parties had some controls and safeguards. The third way one could even say!

It did seem that there was some forward movement on this as a way forward to move from council to trust control.

The next meeting is in a few weeks time, so I’ll update you on further progress as it happens.

Profits on the Tube

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Interview for London Tonight on the obscene profits made by Tubelines in their first year of running the Northern, Jubilee and Piccadilly lines. To add insult to injury, their Chief Executive, Terry Morgan has received GBP100,000 bonus.

Now the profit was expected. That’s the consequence of Labour’s tube privatisation scheme, with GBP41million profit taken out of the tube rather than reinvested in the infrastructure.

But in this first year, Tubelines failed to reach 27 of their 39 targets. Of course, the Chief Exec’s bonus was for delivering the profits to shareholders rather than delivering an improved service to London’s poor tube users.

Strangely enough, Mayor Livingstone – erstwhile opponent of the PPP – made no comment. Well – now he’s a Labour Mayor…!