Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Friend of Parks petition to trigger full council debate on parks cuts
Following hard work by Dave Morris (Friends of Haringey Parks) and no doubt a cast of many more, the 'No cuts to Haringey Parks' petition has exceeded the 2,200 signatures required to trigger a debate by full council. There were more than 700 online signatures and apparently over 2,200 on paper.
As far as I'm aware this is the first full council debate that's been triggered by a residents' petition.
Well done to the organisers!
Tags for Forum Posts: parks, petition, public spending cuts
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Result? It depends on what people want to achieve.
Please bear in mind that most so-called debates at Council meetings are dispiriting and pointless. They rarely rise above a low-level yah boo party political point-scoring. One time I was hoping there might be a real debate - on the Council's budget - the Council chamber was occupied so discussion was almost completely prevented.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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I'm glad this cut is not going ahead without any opposition. Unfortunately, the council is unlikely to reverse this. Parks are an easy target because they are a genuine service for the public and of no benefit to the council.
Contrast this with other things which are of direct benefit to the council and of little or no, or only indirect benefit for the public: high salaries and pensions, cash-for-developers, £3,300,000 for new computers and similar largesse for the PR budget including their own (self-regarding and self-promoting) magazine – its no contest. For some time, the council had advanced plans to build over one third of Down Lane park, such is their love of open space, let alone green space.
The exception to this general pattern is, against expectation, the council's commitment to the library service, which is to their credit. Stroud Green & Harringay library opens under the new name on 5 October.
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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I think my initial result comment was related to the fact that through sheer hard work and tenacity, the requisite number of signatures was collected. To some extent, it helps people to feel that it is worth putting a signature on a petition.
In terms of the council debate, one would hope that a debate that has been triggered by a residents' petition would be conducted in a mature manner. The message to all of them should be 'hold on, your voters are not behind this measure' and they should respond accordingly. As I know you agree, talking and responding to the electorate shouldn't stop the day after the election.
What we hope to achieve is in the petition:
"We call on the Council to halt the plans, and put adequate resources into our vital local parks and green spaces"
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Liz: I agree that our “voters are not behind this measure”. If this means anything like: “approving”, “supporting”, “pleased to see”, or even “reluctantly okay about”, then I suspect most Haringey voters were not behind most of the cuts in this year’s budget.
Osborne: “They" means the Council meeting as a corporate body which can make (or unmake) decisions. though, like King Cnut it can't reverse a tide of Coalition cuts. Although, yes, we could take money from somewhere else and put it back into the Parks budget. (Though I doubt we could simply re-employ staff made redundant.)
At minimum I hope we will all find out exactly what cuts have been made in this area, how many frontine and management staff have lost their jobs. And exactly how our parks, greens, open spaces, planters, street trees, shrubs etc will be looked after and kept safe. Getting such information without needing Freedom of Information requests would be a welcome bonus.
Clive: Can I partially correct your comment about Down Lane Park. There was a plan to build on about a third of the southern part. But it was always clearly and explicitly a “land swop” with the promise of an equivalent area of land added to the north of the Park following the relocation of the Reuse & Recycling Centre in Park View Road.
I used Google Earth’s helpful tools to measure the two areas. Seamus Carey (co-ordinator of Friends of Down Lane Park) and I went to the Planning Office where council staff checked our approximate measurements using mapping software. This confirmed that the land proposed to be added was significantly smaller than the area lost. (One reason was because open space inside the proposed development had wrongly been counted as 'park'.)
Cllr Claire Kober met with FDLP and agreed on a public consultation. This came down firmly against the proposal, and the Council “cabinet” decided not to go ahead with development on the southern end of the park.
There were several other stupidities associated with the proposal. For example, the new Play Area was held up. And we are still threatened with the unneeded Green Link - devised not to further the Council’s interests but those of the developers of Hale Village. I've no idea whether or not public money is still being wasted on consultants doing feasiblity studies on this nonsense.
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Alan: I hear what you say about Down Lane Park. I attended one of the earlier meetings chaired by Seamus and was impressed with the local resolve to fight that crazy proposal. They knew then that the proposed land swop was a poor deal where the community would be short-changed. One of the understandable irritants for locals, was the suspicion that the council would be unlikely to attempt such a stunt in a wealthier area.
I think you have overlooked the point I made about the council having advanced plans to build (over a third of the park). The plans were well beyond the gestation stage. The officials were offering a multiple choice survey, the choices comprising how much of their park would they prefer to lose!
For any objective person outside the council bubble, the idea was crackers, a non-starter. But one can only wonder at how much time and money was wasted by council officers in drawing up the plans before common sense took hold. It seems to me that some of officialdom is out of control.
I wonder when local councillors were first informed about the plans?
If it was at an early stage, then it has implications for democracy (i.e. whose views do councillors represent?). If it was at a late stage in the process, that also has implications for democracy.
I would like to hear about council plans for new parks in our Borough. An excellent start could be made with the council-owned waste land behind Hornsey Town Hall – in an area of maximum open space deficiency.
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Clive, you can sometimes be clinically accurate. Your dissection of Cllr Charles Adje's role in the Firoka scandal was exemplary. But at other times your anger seems to tip into inaccuracy and exaggeration.
There was never an intention by the Council "Cabinet" to offer residents "choices comprising how much of their park they would prefer to lose". This was the proposal made to and adopted by the Cabinet:
"While new development on some existing open space will be part of the proposals, that open space will be re-provided in the area ensuring there is no net loss of publicly-accessible open space".
As a member of Friends of Down Lane Park I opposed this proposal. So did FDLP members Reg Rice and my partner Zena Brabazon. (Now councillors.) In discussions with cllrs Claire Kober and Lorna Reith it was very clear they wanted an equivalent area of land added to the north of the park as would be lost at the south end.
But I saw nothing inherently wrong with the notion of a land swop. The present Down Lane Park includes land added to the park from the former Down Lane school site. This was intended to compensate for land taken from the park to build the Technopark in Ashley Road. But Seamus Carey (FDLP co-ordinator) and I spotted what the "cabinet" had not. "Publicly accessible open space" - in this case a green area inside a housing development - is not the same as a park.
Where I hope you and I would agree is on two key issues. One is transparency. In respect of cuts to the Parks Budget, before we have a debate we need full information to be publicly available.
The second is the need for an urgent root and branch review and reform of the Council's Regeneration Service. In contrast to the Council's planning function - which is heavily constrained by the law - Regeneration should be clearly and unequivocally on the side of Haringey residents. For large numbers of residents - including me - that does not appear to be the case.
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I've attached the FDLP flyer (below) which reproduces the Haringey Council leaflet with the two options on offer: buildings or even more buildings (sorry if this sounds like anger tipping over the edge into inaccuracy and exaggeration).
The full council document, that offered the two options (only), is here
Note, there was no option without building. I was not really surprised at the limited "options" presented.
Consultations, in order to be lawful, need to be undertaken at the early, formative stages of proposals and not after development proposals are well advanced, which appears to be the case with the Down Lane Park Proposals.
Rather than involve residents early, its clear from the "Consultation" that they were an afterthought. The assumption by council officials was that development will take place and the Consultation was a tendentious document.
As the internal proposals were clearly well advanced, it would be interesting to know at what stage in the process that council officials shared their plans with local representatives. Is this aspect being glossed over?
- Attachments:
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park flyer_5.pdf, 522 KB
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Clive, Now you've lost me. The leaflet says:
Option two: The area of open space in the existing Park is 6.69 hectares. Reconfiguring the Park in this option will provide at least the same amount of open space – the red outlined area in the above plan shows a slight increase in this area – 6.72 hectares.
As I recall, this was the second version of the plan. It was redrawn after Seamus Carey and I made our discovery about the measurements. They redrew the proposal to relocate a green area inside the development so it was adjacent to the park.
Of course, our response was a raspberry. In Tottenham Hale we know the difference between a park and a green area which is part of a housing estate. Even if senior officers in Planning & Regeneration do not.
Yes, you're right that the original proposal involved new homes on the site now occupied by Park View Road Reuse & Recycling Centre. So what's your point? Do you think the Council should ignore the needs of residents who desperately need homes or housing transfers?
Hol members can follow your link and make up their own minds about whether or not this particular consultation document was tendentious. But in broad terms, as you've read the comments on my Flickr pages, you know that I have yet to find anything positive to say about the "Tottenham Hale Masterplan". Nor about its various offspring: Hale Village; the Green Link; and the Tottenham Green Cultural Quarter.
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In terms of what was asked of residents on the actual Consultation Leaflet, with tick boxes, Option 2 reads:
Option two: focus new development closer to the Station (building on part of Down Lane Park) but not before the Park is extended (by at least the same size) on the north side when the Ashley Road depot relocates to Marsh Lane in 2012.
ANSWER (in tick boxes): Agree OR Disagree OR Neither Agree nor Disagree
The two options were outnumbered by the usual questions about that have nothing to do with the matter in hand, including whether or not you've had a sex change operation.
This thread's about the council's commitment, or otherwise, to the parks of the Borough. Housing is a big subject in itself. IMHO, new housing needs to go on brownfield sites rather than green fields and better use made of large old buildings. Otherwise we would have no parks left.
I'm still wondering when local councillors first learnt of officers' proposals about Down Lane Park, and therefore the first opportunity councillors had to express their views on a subject that had such large local ramifications.
(In the Ward in which I live, "officers" concealed their plans in 1999 to close Stroud Green Library from our local councillor, Jose Irwin, who was even the Deputy Leader of the Council. This leaked and when Jose found out, she was none too pleased to learn of it. This episode suggests some contempt for councillors and for the democratic process. The fortunes of our library have improved since those dark days.)
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Forgive me, Clive. I'm mystfied. "Build on the [south of the park ] but not before the park is extended by at least the same size on the north side." In other words, no reduction in the area of the park. And Park View Road Reuse & Recycling Centre (Also known as Ashley Road Depot) is a brownfield site.
Or perhaps I'm being exceptionally slow-witted today. And missing something either very subtle or very obvious. Perhaps you'd email me and explain!
In the meantime, have a look at a comment posted by Alan Mead on my Flickr pages. Alan grew up in Tottenham during WW2 and later emigrated to Canada. He called the Ashley Road Depot "the Dust Destructor". He walked through the park to his school - later the southern brownfield site added to the park.
You ask when local ward councillors first heard about the park proposals. I honestly don't know and haven't time to trawl through the papers. (Let alone ask former councillor Josie Irwin about something which happened in 1999.)
Yes, there is sometimes contempt by officers for councillors. Although in some cases this is wholly justified. And yes, sometimes there is unnecessary secrecy; with officers who, like the Wizard of Oz, stay behind a curtain pulling the levers. And sometimes councillors - including me - have our eye off the ball.
So to return to subject of this thread, let's agree that we all need to find ways to make the Council more open and accountable. And on the Parks budget, this means a lot more clear, reliable and timely information.
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