Labour Councillor asks for opposition members to be expelled from Sub-committee on Ladywell
On Monday 3rd October 2005 the sub-committee set up by the Overview and Scrutiny Education Business Panel to look at the Ladywell issue met for the third time.
This time it was for the Head of BSF program and the Head of Property to give their version of events.
But the meeting's most significant event was to be another.
It was Councillor Madeleine Long's attempt to remove 2 other committee members accusing them of ‘prejudicial interest’.
According to her the opposition members Councillor Helen LeFevre and Councillor Julia Fletcher had personal interests in the outcome of the sub-committee’s findings and therefore both of them should remove themselves from the meetings.
In Cllr Long's accusation, the two members were guilty of undisclosed association with campaigns like the Save Ladywell Pool Campaign and the New School Campaign.
She said that members of the public belonging to these two residents' campaigns regularly attend those meetings with the intent of reporting the events on websites like the Save Ladywell Pool Campaign website.
In that moment we felt honoured for such passionate mention!
Having been officially recognized as fore-bearers of information about the Council's behaviour by a distinguished member of the majority at Lewisham Council marks our coming of age.
They're evidently scared stiff of our activity.
Knowing that information is power, they don't want it to cross their doorstep and run away from them.
But, putting this pride on the side, the moment was for the two opposition Councillors a tough one.
Though such attempt sounds completely preposterous, they had to take it seriously and try to avoid that real damage be done by it.
Both Councillor LeFevre and Councillor Fletcher responded to this accusation with dignity and refuted it in its entirety.
Councillor LeFevre explained that her interest in local education hardly needed to be declared as she had been voted onto the council as a member of LEAP, a single issue party centred on local education.
Councillor Fletcher explained that she has made no secret of her views and had already declared that she was on the email list for the Save Ladywell Pool campaign.
She also stated that she objected to her integrity being attacked.
The Council's Head of Law was asked to deliberate on the matter. Reading aloud the relevant passages of the code of conduct she found the two councillors to be innocent of any wrongdoing.
Nobody spoke in support of Councillor Long and the matter was closed.
We can only read this extraordinary behaviour as a rather desperate attempt to get rid of two very effective members of the sub-committee and we're not surprised that these sort of things are starting to happen now that the sub-committee is bringing to light a picture of this Council's works very different from the one painted by Lewisham Life.
The main part of the meeting commenced with questions for Tony Freeman, Head of Partnerships and Investments, Directorate of Children and Young People.
Tony Freeman agreed that there was a difficulty in choosing 2 incompatible uses for the Leahurst Road site, firstly for the new school for three years and also for the annexe to Northbrook school, being funded under the Building Schools for the Future programme on contradictory timetables.
In explanation for why the plan for Leahurst Road for the new school was omitted from the Outline Business Case (OBC) for the pathfinder wave of BSF, he explained that it would have added unnecessary complications and would have ‘invited enquiries’ when their objective was to secure the funding for the expansion of Northbrook as soon as possible. From this statement one can assume that the intention was to get Treasury approval for the BSF programme at the expense of accuracy within the OBC.
Tony Freeman was keen to explain, as was his boss last week, that the OBC is just an outline and is subject to change. What neither he nor Frankie Sulke were prepared to admit was that this document is several hundred pages long and significant changes to it can result in delays in getting Treasury approval.
From the BSF website:
The aim of an outline business case (OBC) is to set out in detail the scope, cost, affordability, risks, procurement route and timetable of the project, such that it can be approved by us and the project review group (PRG), with approval to procure being granted on success.
The second person to be interviewed was the Head of Properties for Lewisham Council and was interviewed mainly on the failure to acquire the Ladywell Police Station.
His explanation that the Council actually never heard back from the police after their offer for the site only moved the members to question why the Playtower had stood for 16 months as the preferred site and why there had been upbeat reports about its deliverability to Mayor and Cabinet until the change of plan and the advice to close the Ladywell Leisure centre to make space for the new school.
Sadly, it seems that the Council was acting very complacently, knowing that they had a fully council owned option to fall back in the rather foreseeable event of failure in purchasing the old Police Station>
