Minutes of the Public Meeting - Monday 12th September 2005
Minutes: Max Calò
The meeting took place at the Palms Bar room of the Ladywell Leisure Centre on Monday 12th September 2005 at 8 pm.
Chair of the meeting was Ian Crosson.
More then 60 people took part to it from start to end.
The majority of the people were new faces.
As the meeting was held in the bar area and the door to the terrace was open, before the meeting start we all took a stroll outside.
From there we could all admire the large and unused part of the Leisure Centre.This includes also a spacious and well kept green space that is in all probability maintained so using public money.
This brought us to consider how the Council is preventing the residents of Lewisham from enjoying a large part of their Leisure Centre and we drew a parallel between this and the issue of the sauna and turkish baths that used to serve the residents until the recent closure for refurbishment and never re-opened.
The meeting proceeded with a report from Max about the present situation and the vision for the next steps to take.
The points touched where:
- unreliability of delivery dates for council projects (i.e. Downham, new school)
- issues surrounding the background of the choice to site the school at Ladywell. this touched on the financial implication for not buying a site, the incoherent advises expressed on the Ladywell Playtower and the alternative sites saga.
- effectiveness of campaigning. We delivered 15,000 informative leaflets in the past 10 days and they are meant to inform the Mayor's potential voters. We are sourcing information to provide the content and with volunteer work we can deliver this information to a large number of residents. The area in walking distance of the LLC has an estimated 25,000 households. That must be the target for the next rounds of leafleting.
- we want the labour party to sort out its own troubles. To encourage them to do so we keep on collecting evidence of inappropriate conduct. Should we realise to have a compelling case we'd have to consider starting a procedure involving the Standards Board.
- proposals for the next campaigning season. It's a Christmas season and we'll do community initiatives to involve, inform and celebrate the festive season and the 40th anniversary of the opening of the pool.
Three different strains of campaign for the future activities where therefore identified:
- Council activity (questions at council meetings, requests under the freedom of information act, lobbying)
- Information (newsletters to inform the residents of the findings of the above mentioned council activity, press)
- Community involvement (petitioning, Christmas activities)
Then Mary Paul, reported on the Council's disaster with the BSF program and explained in plain english the problems with Council's plans about school expansions.
This included why the Ladywell Leisure Centre is the wrong site for a school and why the Council's recent failure in delivering a new secondary school was completely predictable.
She summed up the background of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) program in Lewisham and its mistakes. The content of her delivery is the subject of the downloadable pdf Idiots guide to BSF.
This was followed by questions and proposals from the public.
Wolf liked the leaflet and said that he found it informative indeed. He brought the attention on the sign on the former Police Station in Ladywell road that says "you're nicked" and how that was appropriate to express what's happening to Lewisham residents.
He express bewilderment at the Council not acquiring the Police Station.
This sparkled a discussion on the quality of the advise to the Mayor and how this allows politicians to get away with blaming and eventually sacking the top officers for their lack of scrutiny and effective programming.
Jenny asked if any of the sites submitted to the Council were still available.
Yes they are.
At this point John Hamilton, the secretary of the New School Campaign, took the stage and referred on the Council giving untrue reasons for dismissing alternative sites and how an excellent one is now not look at as there is a developer that expressed interest.
The Mayor choose to ignore this option for a school to help a group of land developers.
It also emerged that this expression of interest for the site post-dates the school proposal.
The program of expansion of all the other secondary schools in central Lewisham was then discussed.
Northbrook will incorporate the former Ennersdale primary building in Leahurst road and Crofton and Malory will also expand.
Another consideration made was that if the Council was serious about building a new school urgently they would have already done so on the Catford Dogtrack site that lies empty.
Fact is that the site has been acquired by English Partnership, a quango tightly related to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister that want to use it for high density housing and the Council is too weak to ask to use it for a school. They rather keep their friends happy then do what they preach.
The reality is that the council is not making any effort to look for an alternative site.
Then it was the turn to analyze the short-sighted policies of LC about schools in the last years and the knock on effect of the closure of Telegraph Hill secondary.
That was a failing school that had gone through a badly thought fresh start plan (the predecessor of BSF) that closed it, made it re-open half-way through building works with major disruption to teaching and then closed it again to build a new Academy on the site.
As the Academy caters for another age group this provoked a deficit in secondary places that has never been healed.
Mary spoke about the dangers of PFI program in school projects as other complex projects.
The Council just spent £1m in consultants only to go through the Downham contract because it was so complicated that they couldn't read it by themselves.Joyce proposed to vote "en masse" for the Ladywell Pool as the preferred building in a BBC pool voting online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/yourlondon/maxfiles/
Amina spoke about the Council closing not only schools, but also other social places like the Mornington Centre, Youth clubs and now aiming at the Leisure Centre.
A reference was made also about the large developments that have been allowed to spring up without considering social provision for the inhabitants or weighing up properly the consequences of increased density.
Some other pointed at the greatly increased power in the hand of only one person with the new system of the executive Mayor.
We were reminded that the referendum to change the system saw a 18% turn up for the vote and the majority that expressed the new system was only 51%. This means that this system was favoured by 9% of Lewisham voters.
The recent style of administration then came into discussion.
The excessive use of external consultants, with Capita making much of the reports for the Mayor was highlighted as top-down rather then bottom-up style of governance.
We went through the result of our research at the Council and expressed concern for this and other dubious practices that are taking hold of the Council.
Another being the fraud consultation done after decisions are taken or done and disregarded altogether, more or less to fulfill a duty.
Cllr Ian Page said that the people of Lewisham is unanimous in rejecting the Mayor's decision about the Ladywell
Leisure Centre and the people's voice need s to be heard.
He encouraged people to go and populate Council meetings from the public gallery but warned that it's not an activity for the faint-harted as recently the Mayor referred to the public as "trotscum". General laughter.Cllr Mark Morris reported about Downham Pool and how that area is now 10 years without a pool, 3 years without a library and the people there feel let down and suffer the consequences of the appalling incompetent action of Lewisham Council.
Left to itself lewisham Council would do another disaster like that in Central Lewisham with the closure of Ladywell and we must not allow this to happen.
We drew hope from the effectiveness of resident's
associations like the Save Ladywell Pool and the New School campaigns
and expressed resolve to use these tools to put the Council under
increased pressure to have the people's will upheld.
An appeal for donation was made.
Max gave a run down of the expenses the campaign faces and a forecast for the next leg of the campaign.
It's expected that the campaign will cost up to £1000 until the end of
the year and another £1000 between the start of the new year and the
council elections in May.
We collected £199.79 at the meeting.
The meeting ended with an appeal to get involved with the next campaign activities and it seems that the appeal was heard indeed as most of the people left their contact details>
