saveladywellpool.com

Whitewash opportunity presented at Council

Tonight Wednesday 1st February at 7:30 pm at Catford Town Hall the Overview and Scrutiny Sub-Committee that has been reviewing the background of the decision to site a school at Ladywell will meet for the last time.

This time they are supposed to agree on a common document summarizing the findings of their work.

Extraordinarily this document has been written by the Chief Executive Barry Quirk CBE.

Mr Quirk, that has been the chair of the Lewisham BSF Project Board and as such has presided over many of the decisions that led to the necessity to investigate in the first place, is probably one name that would have been better avoided for the penning of the report.

This report clearly represents the subjective view of Barry Quirk CBE, that as Chief Executive has the greatest interest in giving the lowest of profiles to the most important findings of the sub-committee works.

The report opens with a dismissal of all the concerns of the committee members with a few sweeping statements but no evidence to back them up.

It also contain a number of factual inaccuracies.

At one point he writes:

"...the conflation of school and pool issues needs to be avoided if the adequacy of consultation is to be assessed. Consultation on both issues has been adequate."

This is just one of the 'understatements' included in the report but it gives the feel of the document.

It is clear to all Lewisham that the Council has not done any consultation with the residents and users of the Ladywell Leisure Centre about what they thought about the future of their swimming pool.

The decision to use the site for a school is based on the assumption that the site is available to them.

An assumption that has been supported by the pretense that a consultation had been done.

If that is adequate for the Chief Executive, well, it means that Lewisham Council needs an urgent injection of democracy.

Shall we hope that the members of the sub-committee will decide to reject it?
Maybe that's hoping too much from this Council.

The sub-committee reflects the composition of the Council and therefore it has an overwhelming number of Labour members that are traditionally reluctant to criticize the work of the Mayor and the Council officers.

Using some of the words of this report we could say that the member's propinquity to the executive could over‐ran best standards of practical considerations.

Still, surprises sometimes happen (we wouldn't be campaigning if we weren't optimistic) and we hope that tonight the members won't decide to look the other way and undersign this whitewash. ...read more...