Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Can anyone explain what this job is for?
Christmas is coming for someone at Haringey Council – can anyone explain what benefit this job could be to anyone other than the person who gets it, and why it could be worth £50,000 plus p.a?
Could 'democratic services manager' mean 'find new ways of holding public meetings and then ignoring what anyone says'? Or is it just an invitation to bullshit for Britain?
Tags for Forum Posts: council services, haringey council, local politics, waste
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Sarah on
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I thought it was written well, but I come from that world so what do I know?
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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>>leaving the money aside
Hi Nick - this website seems to me to be full of blanket criticism of the Council - people who post disrespect everything the Council does - there is almost no balancing respect. Guess the majority of people (who've voted Labour in at every election for the last 50 years around here) don't care to express their opinion, at least not on HoL. Driven away - HoL would be richer if there were fewer misinformed bleats and more constructive input.
I've met quite a few of the councillors of all the parties and can pretty much guarantee that they would all make a big stink if they found civil servants we employ were abusing their jobs in the way you highlight. The opposite is probably true.
How do you think those 4,000 civil servants employed in our borough would feel were they to read your contempt? You seem to think that it needs someone like you to point out the bleeding obvious fact that the job you quote is a waste of money when in fact a moment's thought should have brought you to the realisation that you don't have the magical power to be able to see faults where others can't. We don't live in a world where they post fake jobs - it probably does sound Kafkaesque but that could be because you simply haven't noticed what's been going on.
Given that there have been massive council job cuts and even greater budget cuts (with more to come), are you actually doing damage trying to advance the lie that they are deliberately wasting our money - no wonder you get the support of the Tories and the ConDems, who want the state shrunk so business can extort. Do you really want, say, the Police, sponsored by one of the banks (who themselves are criminals)? You imply that in the 'real' world jobs like this would not exist.
Now you are embroiled in this mindset, you sentence yourself to decades of irrelevant and distracting fuming at uselessness and, implicitly, corruption. Do yourself a favour m8, find the benefit to you personally of having a viewpoint - don't waste your time blowing in the wind. Try to accept my point of view that it's a diversion to post on HoL blaming the Council for wasting money, especially if that means you feel your civic duty is done.
The Council are closely surveilled - watched over more than they ever have been before and that scrutiny is increasingly at an intense 360 degrees. They work for us - we pay them. They do their best. We could help more.
There's bound to be value in putting forward your point of view but please, do the research first.
The real challenge is to bring about beneficial change - go on Nick, you can do it :)
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>>many of them aren't fit for purpose
Billy we don't ask our Councillors to be good at anything - they have not failed any sort of test, they're just people, good and bad. If you want a test introduced then we're in the deeper trouble of heading towards Fascism, aren't we?
I completely agree that there is a fundamental problem with putting people who know nothing in charge of things. The Leader of the council has never been a Council Leader anywhere else. The Cllr nominally in charge of the money in Haringey (billions of £) has no accountancy qualifications whatsoever I suppose. The Cllr 'leading' the multi-million regeneration probably has no professional knowledge of housing at all. The woman dealing with education in the borough may never have been a teacher etc
Come to think of it, none of our politicians at the National level are qualified to do their jobs either - we do not appoint politicians because of their expertise.
This is one reason that the civil servants have such a strong grip - they are the only ones with any sort of qualification at all and some of them are notable experts. It must be very hard for them to put themselves in a situation where they get overruled by some moron who will be booted out of office tomorrow so I bet they take steps to avoid that at all costs and effectively emasculate any Cllr who dares to 'lead'.
I think the biggest fault stems from the idea that a group of 'ordinary' people sitting round a table together can direct the world - it's a 'command and control' mentality we get from the military and is bankrupt and deeply sexist. The problem is, they are very, very good at holding onto the power they have and I see no real chance to dislodge them, so we're stuck with the situation where anyone, no matter how incompetent, can rule over us.
More fool us. Unles we are prepared to do something about it (and insulting them on HoL really, really makes no difference at all) then it is our own fault and we are the idiots who vote away our responsibilities and get screwed because of it.
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These people are voted in by other ordinary people who for the most part have no specialist knowledge. It's how democracy works and it's the best we've got.
It's Council officers' job to make sure members are well briefed enough to make the appropriate decisions. It's the public's job to participate in consultations, sign petitions, write to their councillors, and hold those decisions to account to make sure they've got what they thought they were voting for.
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Permalink Reply by Nick Rider on
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Uff, I seem to have set off a bit of rage when I posted this ad up... which surprises me, other people I showed this to in the non-admin world had had a similar reaction to mine.
In what you say here Chris you assume I'm guilty of various things that I don't think I am, but I haven't time to argue the toss about it here (and I'm not avoiding the issue, I don't).
Only.. 'beneficial change'. Well, what first grabbed my attention about this ad was all the references to democratic services, democracy, blah blah.. In my experience, I'm sure less than yours, of exercises in democracy organised recently by Haringey Council – public consultations over planning applications for example – they are pure box-ticking exercises, lip-service to public involvement held to give an image of 'consulting' without any real interest in what people are going to say, because the relevant decisions have already been taken. The relevant department sends along very junior staff who are completely uninformed on whatever the important issues are, and only smile sweetly, offer to make a note of our concerns and maybe push forward a leaflet. Senior staff never attend these things (certainly not a 'democratic services manager', so anyone attending just goes away dissatisfied. So when I saw all that verbiage about democratic scrutiny etc, I though, well, this is ridiculous, they've got some xxxxx nerve. That's all, gotta go.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Nick, on planning decisions I think there is a bit of a misconception (probably not helped by local authorities) that people can vote against something they don't like. If an application meets certain requirements for the site it's very difficult to turn it down. Planning law has always been framed in favour of the developer. For instance if a developer has their application refused they have the right to appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. They can even appeal if the local authority takes too long to reach a decision, one of the reasons why consultation is often a very quick process.
We as consultee have no such right if something we don't approve of is agreed. The only recourse we have is an expensive and potentially financial ruinous judicial appeal purely on the basis of whether law and policy were followed, not in the merits of the proposal. Staff may well turn up and smile sweetly. That's probably because they can do little in the face of the laws they must operate within other than try to negotiate with the developer on our behalf but ultimately the applicant holds most of the cards in the deck.
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I don't know if anyone is still looking at this thread but I can't let you get away with this familiar narrative of oh-developers hold all the cards and force themselves on poor councils who are struggling bravely to resist, a storyline the Labour Party is particularly fond of.
This is not remotely my experience of recent large developments in Haringey. I'm referring specifically (who guessed?) to the Hornsey Depot development on Hornsey High Street (call it 'Smithfield Square' if you want) now taking shape and pushed through in two brain-jarring Planning Committee meetings totalling over 7 hours at the beginning of last year.
Without going over all the gory details, this development contravenes three levels of relevant planning guidelines (national, the GLA London Plan, and the council's own 2013 Haringey Plan (which actually suggests that the London targets are not enough, and that Haringey can do better!). You don't have to take my word for it, this was acknowledged in the planning departments re-assessment of the application between the two meetings, and publicly during the second meeting, and all this must be on record somewhere.
The fundamental issue is density. The London Plan says there should be a maximum density of 450 habitable rooms per hectare in this kind of site: at Hornsey Depot the figure will be over 600. The Haringey Plan – which uses words like will and must, not 'maybe' – says that all such developments should have an 'adequate mix of dwelling sizes' with 33% of private market properties made up of 3-4 bed units. In the whole Hornsey development of over 400 flats just 4% will be 3-4 beds. Affordable housing for rent will be only 16% of the development.
When it was put to council officials in meetings leading up to the big ones last Jan-Feb that the plan was so out of line with all published guidelines, they came back with 'ahah, but these guidelines are just targets, subject to negotiation'. However it became clear in all this process that the 'targets' followed by the developer St James estates had actually originated with the council itself. Information about this key question – density – was always hard to come by, council staff at the various 'public consultations' said they knew nothing about it, but when it was obtained from the developers and they were asked why they thought this figure of 4% larger units was acceptable, they were always very clear that it had been given to them by Haringey planning department. And this was eventually acknowledged by council officials in the second of the two mammoth meetings. Again, this is all on public record.
In other words, Haringey Council and its planning department were not weakly defending noble targets against a powerful developer. They had ignored and so deliberately undermined all the objectives in their Haringey plan from the outset, reducing it to so much waffle.
They then had the nerve in the 2nd meeting, when all this had come to light and it seemed the application might be teetering, to come up with the argument that, given that St James Estates had acted on council advice, if the planning committee dared to reject the proposal, and St James went to a judicial review, they would inevitably win because they would bring it up in court, and the council would be liable to a shed of money! Some kind of Catch-22...
During the 2nd meeting in particular some of the most penetrating questions that revealed the failings of the project were made by 2 Labour councillors, McNamara and Brown, who clearly saw that the thing stank. However when it finally came to a vote they abstained, and the application went through on the votes of the rest of the Labour group with the casting vote of the chairman.
As an example of the kind of 'democracy' so rosily painted by Sarah up above this was utterly dishonest and frankly shocking – I was far less cynical before those sessions than I am now. Even down to the way the meetings were run – local opinion was overwhelmingly against, and a lot of people wanted to speak, so a quick lottery was run to reduce the numbers and we were told we had 20 minutes each. Fair enough, OK, but then when we were speaking the chairman kept reminding us our time was limited even when only 10 minutes had gone by, and interrupting... and then when it was the turn of council officials, they had endless time to hum and hurrr, shuffle papers, repeat themselves and otherwise wear the clock down.
This one incident also has general implications for the idea of local democracy as portrayed by some writers in this thread. Councillors and their party stand for election on the basis of their published policies, in this area the Haringey Plan, with all its commitments to sustainable communities etc etc. However, if councillors and officials completely ignore and actually act against these policies in practice, what are voters supposed to make their 'democratic' decisions on? Since those meetings I have written to councillors to ask, since the council itself has driven a coach and horses through national, London and its own local planning guidelines, what then are the current valid planning guidelines in operation for large developments in Haringey. No answer.
Large planning developments are not imposed on councils by wicked developers. They are conceived in cooperation/collusion between councils and developers, from the start.
Please, no more fairy stories.
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Nick, I wish you would stop being angry with me. I know nothing of your experience on this particular planning application and nothing about the development you are talking about. I can only draw on my own experiences which are not fairy stories.
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This is a bit rich - what, developers are not evil, it's Labour Cllrs and civil servants that are both dishonest and incompetent? You are holding them to account and finding them wanting, mainly on 'moral' grounds - you're in cloud cuckoo land if you think it matters that you are unhappy and just plain wrong about public opinion.
We have to assume people are content with what happens here or they would vote - they don't vote.
What's with you that you cannot accept that we have a process, however flawed - what, because you don't like the way it was done/the outcome it's wrong? How do you feel about crime, education, jobs? The point is to change it...
You're not going so far as to claim in any sense that anything illegal has happened, are you? If you look at our borough (and every borough) a small group of vociferous people are up in arms about whatever the council do. They rarely affect the outcome - the planners/politicians know in advance what people are likely to say and scheme in private in advance and generally outflank us before we get to hear of it - often by simply declaring the details secret.
I'd probably do the same if I was involved on the Council side, when faced with a small stream of baying residents who think they have right on their side. It must be hard not to form a low opinion of the public and I guess I'd gradually come to see myself as a custodian of the borough's resources and do my best to prevent local Cllrs and small groups of mainly white, middle-class mortgage payers getting their way at the expense of the silent majority.
But mainly I'd cover my back by sticking rigidly to the process. Of all the civil servants, it's the planning department that get the most detailed, vociferous public scrutiny - they are the only ones I can think of who actually stand up in front of people and try to give expert advice without expressing any personal preference.
>>They are conceived in cooperation/collusion between councils and developers, from the start.
The root cause of all of this is this process - as regards planning you surely must accept that the right wing government have abolished regulation and savagely cut the civil service workforce and budgets. People must have a great fear of getting sued, because this is one of the many things neoliberalism leads to - the market cannot cope with people doing good so we end litigious.
You seem to want to cling to a conspiracy theory - infamy! The council and developers are not colluding, they go by the rules. If you have any real evidence of wrongdoing (you say it 'must be recorded somewhere'), alert the constabulary. Otherwise, get involved and change things so we all have a better system - don't sit on the sidelines ranting about how bad everyone else is.
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Michael, I wasn't angry with you, I just found your version of the planning process different from reality as I'd seen it.
Mr Setz – amid your sneers and contempt you talk around my main point without ever going near it. Current councillors have been elected on the basis of their manifestos and the current published policies of the council, of which the Haringey Plan is a big item. It has been completely ignored in practice. Therefore we do not know what the actual current planning guidelines for big developments are. So how do we make informed 'democratic' decisions, or take part in any way?
And, if information is withheld (the close participation of the planning department in a development that broke guidelines from the beginning) or presented very misleadingly – including to councillors, since it was clear from the committee meetings that the details of this deal came as news to them, but by then it was a fait accompli – then this is an obstruction to any democratic involvement too.
And I don't have any statistics but I reckon the 'small stream of baying residents' you despise so much included a large number of people round here, of all sorts, not just your cheap middle-class stereotype (fine this coming from the defenders of the great 50K), who had the temerity to question the value of the insertion of a speculative buy-to-let investment development that will only add to private rent inflation in the area. It looks as if part of it will even be a gated estate, bully for socialist Haringey. Rather than our views being taken into account by the democratic powers that are, we were fed misinformation, manipulated, ignored and then told to shut up.
You have twice challenged me to 'get involved'. What do you mean exactly? 'In any campaigns personally approved of by C. Setz'?
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Permalink Reply by tigha on
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sorry havent read all of the previous lengthy posts, as Im too annoyed but £50,000 is just so so much money, and its for shuffling bits of paper
No wonder our poor junior doctors are threatening to go on strike, just to perserve their mere income of almost £30,000, which also includes lots of antisocial hours over wkends etc- And they are the ones saving lives daily, making life and death decisions all day long. Not o mention the 6years training to qualify
How can any little bit of this be right
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First of all Nick I'm sorry if I come across as sneering at you or contemptuous of your point of view- that wasn't my intention and does not reflect how I feel - in fact I wrote this because I consider that you are a reasonable and intelligent person whose contribution I want more of.
You're still of the mindset that Cllrs 'should' have done something you think they haven't done - you write that they have not delivered what they promised in their manifesto and contravene their own policies, which prevents you from making informed decisions.
You seem to live in a world where people need to behave using standards you set for them and if they don't, you feel they are guilty of something, even if they have not acted illegally.
The truth is that they can do what they like within the law - it's as simple as that. Worse, they sit as judge and jury - you claim they are misleading but it's their judgement that counts - if they don't think they're misleading, if they think they're doing a good job and you don't, it's their view that prevails. If they think it's a good idea to advertise in the way they have for a job they think they need, it's their call. If they think they should spend £50k on rebranding, that's up to them.
You write that:
'Rather than our views being taken into account by the democratic powers that are, we were fed misinformation, manipulated, ignored and then told to shut up.'
This is more pure fantasy and I fear for you if you believe stuff like this because it undermines the rest of your opinions - if you're so wrong on this, why are you likely to be right on other stuff?
You don't have any right to be treated any differently to the way you have been treated. Nobody is telling you to shut up because nobody cares what you think. The elections were last year. You has a chance to stand up and be counted and those elected earned the right to decide on things, not you.
Your opinion is just that, your opinion and if they disagree with you, they are right and you are wrong. You write about what you say you think are 'large numbers of people of all sorts' - you seem to have convinced yourself that you are the voice of the people but again you are wrong - the council are the voice of the people and if the people don't make a fuss, then the council presumes themselves to accurately speak for us all. On our behalf.
What annoys me is the damage done by those who are predisposed to hate on the council - whatever the council does they use as justification for horrible views about how the council are wasting money, that the Cllrs are corrupt, that the people are being abused and ignored etc etc etc.
The only absolute truth is that, if any Cllr is caught doing anything illegal, then they have done something illegal. I therefore accept that they are not acting illegally. We get the Council we deserve.
If I cared more, I could stand for election. I would have to stand as a Labour Cllr because if I won as a member of any other party then I would not be able to make any difference here. The sitting Labour Cllrs presumably have a big say in who is selected to stand and they wouldn't choose me. So I depend on them to represent me. If I cared enough I'd go and see them in their surgeries and/or email them and lobby for change - are you doing anything like that? If I felt as you do I'd make it clear to them and listen to their response- are you doing that?
I suspect you are not doing anything at all but find it easy to post here as if your views deserved attention but they don't - neither do mine. If I was a Cllr or a civil servant I'd have a very low opinion of the public because of posts like yours, which could easily be read as ill-informed nonsense - you simply are not aware of the reality. How many people got hired this month? Did you know that the salary multiple within our council is a good one (6:1) or does that not fit in with your predisposition to dump on them?
Whilst you fume and confirm the prejudice of others on this site who are equally ready to blame the council for everything, you are not working to change anything and seem to think that your posts are a call to arms - 'people' will see them and join you in a consensus that the Council are rubbish and should be castigated.
The very idea that you or I should scan a Council job advert and come to an important conclusion as to whether or not they earn our support is just silly - one what planet does that happen? There are huge opportunities for you to be part of the democratic process but you don't seem to want to go that way - would that be because it's really, really hard to get people to agree about anything and therefore to represent them fairly? I think being a Cllr must be an awful job, particularly if you have to deal with people who think like you do. And you have to put your mobile phone number on the Council Website so residents can call you 24/7 - yikes!
So, don't waste your time blaming the Council by posting about what you think they've done wrong without a lot of justification - try to find a way forward that benefits us all, don't feed the trolls.
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