Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Area Forums and Committees: a letter from Cllr Bernice Vanier, Cabinet Member for Communities
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Area Forums and Committees
Dear Resident,
We’re writing to you as you’ve previously attended a Haringey Council Area Forum and we want to explain some changes that we are looking to introduce.
The council agreed this month to bring the existing Area Forum & Committee arrangement to an end and to instead explore how we can find better ways of engaging and working with residents, businesses and partners – and giving local people a greater say over community projects.
While we understand that the Area Forums were popular with some residents, in many areas they have not been well attended.
Over the coming months we will be looking at different ways we engage and involve local communities on issues that matter to you the most, recognising that what may work in one area may not work in another. We will be discussing with your ward councillors different ways we can do this, using local knowledge and expertise.
Kind regards
Cllr Bernice Vanier
Cabinet Member for Communities
Tags for Forum Posts: area forums, local democracy
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Cllr Emina Ibrahim on
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Thanks for posting this and it would be great to hear ideas from residents about how we can move forward.
Cllr Emine Ibrahim
Harringay Ward
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Long time no see. Good to hear from you again. I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear what thoughts you and your colleagues have at this stage.
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Permalink Reply by Heather Martin on
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I am currently awaiting details of the "re-provision" of my mother's day centre service following "consultation" prior to the passing of the Council's budget. To say that this experience has left me disinclined for any sort of community engagement is an understatement. Even if this were not the case, if the outcome of "re-provision" is that I have to supply a shortfall in my mother's care, I would not have the time.
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Permalink Reply by Karen Alexander on
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Love them or loathe them, Area Forums were at least a way of engaging with local residents, letting them have discussions about things that affect them in their ward and an important way of getting feedback. I'm not particularly surprised the council has decided to discontinue them, Haringey aren't particularly interested in residents views so this is just another erosion of local democracy.
They weren't particularly well chaired in Harringay & St Ann's and often decended into chaos, though Zena Brabazon did a good job of delivering something tangible in often challenging conditions.
It will be interesting to see what they come up with to replace them, I won't hold my breath - the whole concept will be allowed a slow death and then silently buried.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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What might have succeeded Area Forums and Committees – if anything succeeded them – might have made a fit subject for an Area Forum. Instead, there was no consultation with the public: either at Area Forums, or anywhere else.
The Overview and Scrutiny Committee is chaired by a Member of the Majority Group, so there's not much scrutiny going on there either.
The bureaucracy and the Majority Group will move forward, but local democracy has taken a step backwards.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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I stopped going to our local Area Forums because they seemed pointless. It seemed to me that councillors and senior officers had clearly ceased to listen and saw their task as defending the leadership 'line' - even when privately they might agree it had weaknesses; or was probably wrong. In some cases they had to defend the indefensible.
Failures could be spun as success. Consultation was often no more than "selling" decisions which had already been taken.
I realise that other Forums had different experiences; and that there were some positives and achievements in what was, after all, an experiment over several years.
So there could have been a pause while people assessed the experiment and - as Emine Ibrahim and Bernice Vanier suggest - considered new ideas.
Professor Robert Chambers - who I have read though never met - strikes me as a very wise man. He has spent part of his long career in developing participatory tools in the International Aid field. Chambers is fond of using the term "failing forward". And also keen on finding ways of learning from failure.
Sadly, Haringey is not a learning Council.
Cutting the Forums - added to the Pension changes - generated small but real savings which could have been spent on front-line services. Instead, as we know, it was used to line the pockets of councillors - especially the Dear Leader and her "cabinet".
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Cutting the Forums - added to the Pension changes - generated small but real savings which could have been spent on front-line services
Alan, the worthwhile goal you seek could have been achieved by significantly reducing the generous SRAs paid to chairmen of Area Forums – and for those forums to have continued and/or reformed.
Sally Billot – a former Stroud Green Labour Councillor - has written an excellent letter in yesterday's Ham & High Broadway on the subject of the [summary execution of the] Area Forums she helped to set up.
Clive Carter
Haringey Councillor
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I've known Sally Billot for many years and respect and like her. She's independent-minded and principled. Back in 2006 Sally explained to the Guardian why she stopped voting Labour and resigned from the Party after the Iraq war. When so many of us marched in protest that we clogged the London streets.
But when Sally was a Labour councillor people sometimes spoke and voted against the party whip. It was part of the cut and thrust of healthy debate. The sky didn't fall in. Few of us felt the need to routinely self-censor our views. Or get down on our knees to a control-freak nonentity always addressed deferentially as "Leader"; who has been given barely checked legal powers and a dangerous amount of patronage.
Which perhaps would matter far less with a Council leadership which was confident and competent enough to welcome criticism and dissent - saying so and meaning it. But the current Leader has obedient party flunkies and senior staff. Plus a well resourced publicly funded "comms" machine to churn out Newspeak propaganda. The last thing she or her pals want is real consultation at neighbourhood level if that means giving an even minimally effective platform to voices and views which oppose the assumed rightness of their plans.
Unfortunately they're not alone.
I naively thought that losing national elections might shake the smug certainties of each party's politicians. Their conviction that they'd got it 'right' and that it was the electors who were wrong.
There's another letter in this week's Ham & High Broadway which is worth reading. (Click on it to enlarge.)
As sometimes happens, By chance there's an interesting juxtaposition - a tweet in the column on the right. Real life intruding into the comfortable world of politicians who confuse political debate with echoing strings of vacuous buzzwords.
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I often agree with your views, Rachel. But I know there were ways to make the forums work a bit better. And sometimes they worked well.
A lot depended on who chaired. In particular, whether that person was willing to experiment and - crucially - to properly involve local residents and facilitate dialogue among them and between them and invited speakers.
Having said that, I realised the format would probably never succeed with the present councillors when I went to a Harringay and St Ann's meeting to hear Liz Ixer present her view of changes to the waste collection services. Liz gave a balanced and evidenced presentation, broadly welcoming the policy behind the changes, but pointing out many of the - very real - problems.
It seemed to me that, instead of listening to Liz and other residents with an open mind, many of the councillors and officers were defensive and dismissive.
So I agree, Rachel, that resident-led forums could be great. But only if they successfully resist colonisation and co-option by the control-freaks who infest our local political parties.
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P.S. By coincidence Mr Mustard - one of the famous Barnet bloggers - has tweeted a link to a Guardian article about Frome in Somerset where independents have now made a clean sweep of the Town Council. How Flatpack Democracy beat the old parties in the People’s Republi...
There was a lot interest in this a few years ago when a "quiet revolution" began. So it's interesting to get an update. And to see that it continue to be successful. (Though I'd prefer more of a critique than John Harris gives.)
Plainly, what works well in a town with 25,000 people may not be directly applicable to a London borough with some 250,000. But there are things to learn. Not least the reasons for the apparent spread of the Frome model. With others elsewhere fed up with what one independent councillor in Arlesey Bedfordshire called a "dysfunctional" "ancien régime".
Now that's an apt description for Haringey's coagulation of time-servers and ambitious apparatchiks.
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There is information available about the plans and which Childrens Centres will be cut or retained. Initially the Ladder Childrens' Centre was to be kept and Woodlands Park was up for the chop but this has now been reversed, and Centres will be cut by about half. A survey of parents about child care is apparently also being conducted on behalf of the Council but parents don't appear to have been contacted!!! There is also a film about the campaign and I'll post details separately.
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