Mo, Mar 6, 2006Alyson's Wonderland
At last Wednesday's Council Meeting we asked the Cabinet Member for Culture Cllr Alyson McGarrigle to explain why Lewisham Council had decided to close the Ladywell Leisure Centre without consulting the public.In her reply Cllr McGarrigle wrote that:
"Local residents had already been consulted on the possibility of closing the Ladywell pool and relocating it elsewhere in the Town Centre prior to the decision to build a new school on the site.
The decision to nominate the Ladywell Leisure Centre site as the preferred location of the new school was taken by Mayor and Cabinet on 30th June, 2004. It would have been disingenuous for the Council to enter into any further formal consultation on the issue."
For this answer to have some resemblance of truth, please subsitute the word never to already in the first paragraph and honest to disingenuous in the second.
This matter of the Council's pretense that the people of Lewisham was asked their opinion has already been the subject of many questions at Council, requests under the Freedom of Information act and research in the local archives.
The consultation that McGarrigle probably refers to was done by Lewisham Council in the year 2000 and was a squalid and fortunately failed attempt to stitch up the residents with having a police station built instead of the local swimming pool.
The cover sheet of the consultation paper that Lewisham Council sent to the residents specifically stated that the residents were consulted in order to know what they wanted in a new leisure centre and not, as McGarrigle says in her unbelievable answer at last week's meeting, on the possibility of closing the Ladywell pool and relocating it elsewhere in the Town Centre.
That consultation questionnaire had indeed one question asking people if they would find it acceptable to have a gap between the closure of the Ladywell Leisure Centre and the opening of the new one and 63% of the consulted said no.
Read here the full results of that consultation.
At the time sport and Leisure was already under Cllr McGarrigle responsibility.
We researched the matter and here is a timeline of the events that 6 years ago, under the leadership of Cllr McGarrigle, unfolded in front of the horrified residents of Lewisham:
22 February 2000 Consultation sent out
06 March 2000 Closing date for responses
08 March 2000 The Mercury reports its had calls from Ladywell users concerned about the haste.
12 March 2000 Council sent letters to residents of Rombough Way & Gardens plus allotment holders giving them till the end of the month to respond to an outline planning application to demolish the Leisure Centre and build a police station.
13 March 2000 Results of consultation given at a public meeting.
22 March 2000 The Mercury reports on the public meeting:
....the audience were told a planning application to build a police station on the site of the Leisure centre could lead to an "opportunity" to create a better pool replacement somewhere in the town centre. Council officials at the the meeting accepted that insufficient questionnares had been distributed about getting a new leisure centre for Lewisham, and they've pledged to reconvene the meeting as soon as more comments have been sought and received.05 April 2000 The Mercury has picture of protesters outside the leisure centre with almost 1,000 names on a petition, along with bundles of letters opposing the demolition of the building.
24 May 2000 The Mercury reports on the Met police director of property services Trevor Lawrence saying:
"The Ladywell site is too small, its boundaries are not secure as it is too close to houses, there has been a petition of more than 1,000 signatures against developing it, and we still have no confirmation that the site is available."
If the police was not supporting the plan for a police station on the pool site, who was it that submitted the planning application?
That planning application was withdrawn and everybody thought that the pool was safe.
Still the Council kept on trying to evict the allotment holders for quite some time.
Read here what Cllr McGarrigle wrote to them in November 2000.
...4 years later:
20 October 2004 Mayor Bullock writes:
"The decision to relocate Ladywell Leisure Centre to the Sundermead estate was taken following a public consultation in late 1999. The consultation meeting was well attended, with strong support for relocation and modernisation of the facilities"
...2 more years later:
...read more...1 February 2006 Chief Executive Barry Quirk CBE writes in his report to Overview and Scrutiny:
"...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."