| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:FAO Paul | |
| Posted by: | Phil Andrews | |
| Date/Time: | 16/02/12 11:13:00 |
| The bottom line is they don't want communities to have it. Even though it is not their money and cannot be spent anywhere else they move Heaven and Earth to create obstacles. The reason is that money is one of the key components of community empowerment, and the Environment Department at LBH has been almost pathologically obstructive towards any initiative that has threatened to help empower our communities. During the administration of which Paul and I were part there existed a permanent state of open warfare between the Department and the community councillors. That we received no assistance in this battle from our coalition partners, and sometimes indeed opposition, was the primary cause of bad feeling in what was otherwise a good and sometimes quite productive relationship. At Area Committee on which, usually working in alliance with the excellent Liberal Democrat member Andrew Dakers, we held a majority, Environment would more often than not fail to send along officers that we had requested attend, or send the wrong officers, or send the right officer but without the information to make his or her presence worthwhile. This was the rule rather than the exception. Chief officers even wanted to have the Secretary of The Isleworth Society branded a "vexatious complainant", which would have resulted in them being able to ignore all correspondence from her (not that they didn't on many occasions anyway). We only found out about this from other officers who thankfully were feeding us information about what was going on. On the Worton estate there is, as Paul says, £419k just waiting to be injected into community initiatives and we have held public meetings to discuss how to spend it, but to date it has not been released. At one stage a proposal was mooted to use it to offset service charges incurred by tenants as a one-off, which would have the convenient effect of being welcomed by some members of the community who are struggling to make ends meet whilst having no generic empowering benefit for the community itself. At the same time it would help them pull the rug from under the feet of the residents' association. They are clearly still at it now. And don't get me started on Mogden! |