Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
27 Days left to action: Our health cannot wait
Every restaurant has received a letter explaining the harmful impact of its pollution on children, residents, customers and staff.
So what has changed?
The data says no. Our lungs say no.
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, pollution was pumped across homes on the Ladder at levels residents found completely unacceptable. Then the wind changed — and we know the Gardens bore the brunt.
This cannot continue.
This is not a choice between restaurants OR residents’ health.
It can be restaurants AND clean air.
But that requires the restaurants to take responsibility and install proper filtration systems on their grills. This is not an unreasonable demand. New restaurants would be expected to meet modern standards — so why should older businesses be allowed to operate to a lower standard simply because they were here first?
We will not accept “legacy” being used as an excuse for pollution that affects people’s health today.
Haringey Council: it is time to act.
We are asking you to require these businesses to install appropriate filtration so that they can operate safely and responsibly alongside the communities they serve.
You have 27 days before you report back to residents.
In those 27 days, we want clear answers.
Which businesses are going to take action?
Which businesses are refusing to act?
And what exactly will Haringey Council do if businesses continue to pollute without adequate controls?
Residents are watching.
We will be paying close attention to what happens next — because this is no longer simply about restaurant operations.
It is about whether residents can breathe clean air in their own homes.
27 days. Let’s make them count.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Sixfaces
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Hi Alice,
From your posts about this topic, you have some brilliant information on the subject - if you kept them as replies to a single thread, it may be easier to keep track of updates and progress.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter
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Council staff are probably working flat out on an action plan (in draft), that could be published in pdf form as soon as the end of this year.
More concrete proposals could be in next March's Budget, with consultations following hot on the heels over the Spring and a finalised action plan by the Summer.
A metaphor for the robust progress the council is making, is here.
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Permalink Reply by Dan77
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Thanks Alice,
It has been pretty disgusting on the gardens over the past month. Look forward to hearing what action, if any, the council proposes, and what residents' other options are to force the restaurants to act. I think many of us really value the food scene on Green Lanes - but not the illegally polluted air.
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Self-serving and the public interest
Haringey Council has been teetering on bankruptcy since well before the election. And not all is due to government-imposed austerity.
With respect to this council, one of the difficulties faced by public health campaigners is the lack of money for enforcement. Under the previous Administration there has been wasting of scarce public money, both big and small.
There has been massive expenditure that—ceteris paribus—may in good times have been nice and desirable, but spending that could and should have been shelved, postponed or mothballed.
There has been reckless waste, not all we may know about, but the Daddy of them all is New Labour's cost-no-object money-pit: the council Civic Centre.
£520,000 on (luxury?) seating alone.
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Public Health and Enforcement Action
Council staff are normally reluctant to spend money on legal fees, where that spending bears directly on the public interest.
By public interest, I certainly include public health in the above context and also defending challenges—or even the possibility of challenges—to Council Committees Decisions. Our elected representatives come to majority conclusions on behalf of the public.
Quasi-legal Decisions for example, of the Planning and Licensing Committees. The reasons for this are normally the actuality of internal costs plus the risk of costs being awarded against council funds. However, our council has less money for this than it otherwise would, due to factors which don't alway relate to the merits of a case.
(incidentally, in respect of Freedom of Information Requests, council staff see themselves as final arbiters of the legal-disclosure-test known as PIT: The Public Interest Test).
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Litigation, reputations and enforcement
By the same token, the above background rarely prevents this council spending current account cash on litigation defence where those legal fees serve the interest of corporate reputation and/or officers'.
The egregious, standout spend was the rumoured £3 million on lawyers in their strenuous effort to defend their internal conduct, the subject of which was the Lord Laming Enquiry. If £3 million was the lawyers' total bill in 2003, then that would be almost £5.7 million in today's inflated money. The intense and self-serving defence did not prevent Lord Laming publishing a report damning council conduct.
Whose interests do municipal Legal Services … serve?
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