Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Neighbourhood Forum
Out of interest, has anyone got the ball rolling to create a Harringay Neighbourhood Forum in line with the Localism Act? Or perhaps an existing organisation is putting itself forward for the role (as the Highgate Society are doing)? There are a couple of such initiatives west of the tracks, and I'm curious who else is doing so locally.
Ben
Tags for Forum Posts: neighbourhood forum, neighbourhood planning
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Arkady on
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Nothing in the Act prevents that. For instance a Neighbourhood Forum could be a pre-existing body, and the Act could hardly compel that body to wind up after 5 years.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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This from LInked in via my colleague Kevin Harris:
Tim Ward - Round my way the gossip is that various people have looked into neighbourhood plans and come to to conclusion that they can't afford them.
My authority (I am the planning portfolio holder) is encouraging anyone with ideas that they think appropriate to a neighbourhood plan to feed them in to the current local plan review instead, on the grounds that that's a lot less hassle for all concerned and that way it'll be the council, not the residents, paying for the urban designers, planning consultants, laywers etc.
We think we can see the relevance of neighbourhood plans to some councils, such as large rural unitaries where the planning authority can be tens of miles and hours of driving away from some towns, but we're struggling to see how the concept is relevant in a small compact district where everybody lives within cycling distance of the town hall.
So although our officers are keeping up to date with the emerging procedures we are rather hoping that we won't have to use them.
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Useful post in Guardian yesterday - ostensibly about regeneration, but picks up on some of the key issues we've touched on in this discussion
http://www.guardian.co.uk/local-government-network/2012/mar/05/rege...
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It was announced this week that Stamford Hill is in the fifth wave of neighbourhood planning front runners.
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Permalink Reply by matt on
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Seems Neighbourhood Forums are another tory/lib dem coalition divide & confuse strategy, aiming in this case to push through major development with less bureaucratic red tape (as they clearly see the current planning system). By the time most of us have understood what this coalition is up to re the planning process & major development their goals of pushing through far more development will be well on its way.
Nimby-ism has, we are told, stalled or stopped a lot of house building and infrastructure projects in this country in the last few decades (as well as for other reasons of course, such as lack of strategic planning from govt; e.g. power station replacement).
Maybe a big reason for railroading through development is because of a panicked reaction by govt to the lack of 'progress' over the last several decades.
The council is currently consulting on broad ideas for marking out areas for development. Anyone can feed into this directly. Question is, are individuals listened to as much as say a resident's association ... or indeed a Neighbourhood Forum? ...
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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If you are going to tell a lie, tell a big lie and the Tory "We are all in it together" is a lie of big society proportions. Neighbourhood Forums (NFs for short) are another way to remove any vestige of power local people have over developers. The ConDem religion is "small government" and the frame is an "end to red tape" but what actually happens is that it is made dramatically easier for the rich to get their noses in the trough of public resources. If the Govt gave you free money to exploit the poor, why wouldn't you?
The main issue an NFs would face around here is the need for affordable housing that renders communities more sustainable but will they be able to? Overcrowded, unhealthy and poor value accommodation is wrong, damages all of us and costs a lot of money. That money is not paid for out of landlords profits, it is paid for by the whole community, giving the landlord a subsidy that makes them "benefit scroungers" on "parasite street" too. If you have an hour to spare for a Panorama:
Or another hour to watch the BBC Aug 2011 doc: The Great Estate - The Rise and Fall of the Council House. Or any of the many vids that abound on this topic.
As Councils throughout the land have not rebuilt after the Tory sell-off, would NFs be able to? The "triple whammy" of Tory propaganda of a "property-owning democracy", the right-wing hoodwink of "cut red tape" and the ConDem religion that business is the answer actually lets those with money exploit the poor and disadvantaged.
Source: Savils Report
The gradual sequestration of local decision-making power, the years of propaganda vilifying local councils and the putrefaction of the political class have discouraged us from engaging. We turn away in droves.
Result? Here is one telling stat from among many - the number of people living with their parents until their thirties has climbed to nearly one third.
The idea that we could all join "white van man" by buying our Council House was a nasty joke. It is simple, if you let business thinking have its head, it rips us apart, furthering the inequality that is the root cause of the problems that affect us all in our daily lives and beyond. Generally, the larger the business, the worse.
That has brought us where we are today, with, for instance, one third of the council houses that were sold off being rented back to us at a profit by private landlords. "Selling the family jewels" seemed to be a short-term Tory vote-winner and not even riots can stop the rich feeding off the rest of us it seems.
I am depressed by the lack of public involvement - it is always the usual suspects that get involved. Why can't the majority of people even be bothered to vote in local elections let alone national ones? And yet they feel empowered to "legislate" for a better world on forums like this.
The NFs strangle opinion in a mess of procedure - it is centred on a planning system that is so complex it cannot proceed without loads of planning expertise. Most planning processes are beyond ordinary mortals. Who has the necessary expertise? Only Council Officers and their future employers -private planning consultants. So the real decision making power lies with the experts, not the public. The forum becomes irrelevant and unaccountable, run by a tiny minority of people with good intentions and lots of spare time on their hands.
I see that the nearest example, the Highgate Neighbourhood Forum, approved over a year ago, have formed a small group to create the heart of the matter - the Neighbourhood Plan. I think we can all learn from our neighbours - what do you think?
Another approach
We could go back to that dreadfully old-fashioned, irrelevant-sounding, religion-inspired apparently right-wing body, the rural "Parish Council". Maybe because of the connotations, Parish Councils have never been allowed in London until recently. A London "urban" version can drop all the bad old stuff, keep the good bits and mould the purpose to suit us.
Queens Park (an area of London between Kilburn, and Kensal Green, similar in some respects to local wards here) are celebrating three years as a "Community Council". According to the Electoral Commission, the election process is similar to that for Haringey Council, except it is entirely local to Harringay of course.
It would be able to be called Harringay Council. This body could then choose to form an NF and do a wider range of things. Among the interesting possibilities they have is to control how a proportion of the Council Tax is spent locally.
I nominate Hugh and Liz as joint Mayor of Harringay!
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My impression is that Neighbourhood Forums are designed precisely to harness the power of the ‘usual suspects’ who like to get involved in the community and have some skills to bring to the table. Their powers are fairly limited – they cannot override anything in the London Plan or the local Borough Plan.
Neighbourhood Forum’s don’t represent any kind of right-wing conspiracy, or any sort of ‘divide and rule’, or any kind of deprivation of power. To the contrary, they are about creating consensus.
What they are good for is creating Neighbourhood Plans, which give local people more say in where certain kinds of new housing (as mandated by the London & Borough plans) should go, and what it should look like. Once the plan has been passed by a referendum it can give confidence both to the locals – who have an agreed plan that can be legally enforced – and the developers, who can work to the plan and no longer have to worry about their proposals (often developed after close co-operation with the Council) being overturned by NIMBY campaigns. In theory it should prevent the kind of kerfuffle we are seeing at Hornsey Depot.
What Neighbourhood Plans won’t do on their own is solve the broader housing crisis identified above. That require an enormous amount of house-building, well beyond the levels already planned. And yes, part of the solution to that is new council housing. Part of the solution is to develop a better sanction/incentive scheme to encourage developers to build on the enormous amount of land that they already own. The developers have been sat on the whole Greenwich Peninsular for nearly 15 years, for instance, but have done almost nothing because – according to them – they housing costs are not yet high enough for them to make sufficient profit. Many countries charge commercial taxes on undeveloped land to prevent this sort of skulduggery.
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>>to harness the power of the ‘usual suspects’
The problem is that it is only a certain type of person who actually gets involved locally. Those people have not significantly improved things and you could say they are part of the problem, not the solution. We have a situation where a tiny minority (those who can be bothered to turn up) are supporting decisions that affect all of us. That is what is wrong.
>> they are about creating consensus.
There is no consensus - that is the problem. You write as if there had already been successful NFs - can you cite any because I don't think there are.
>> ...Neighbourhood Plans, which give local people more say
Local people can have as much say as they want under the existing system. There is even a system for a last minute intervention if they have missed all the notices etc.
The planning dept had a consultation recently about how they conduct their process. Hardly anyone even noticed, let alone participated.
The problem is, people do not want to get involved.
>> Part of the solution is to develop a better sanction/incentive scheme to encourage developers
That is part of the problem, not the solution. Developers are hard hearted bastards who will evict heavily-pregnant women onto the street for money. In this ward there are property businesses who have been caught doing appalling things and you want them to prosper?
We have tried under the right-wing ideology to give property businesses money in tax breaks and subsidies, in discounted loans and reduced VAT rates - in any way the ConDems can think of and things have got much worse, not better. Whatever your political affiliation it is surely obvious that a market-driven economy spells disaster time and time again, through boom and bust and by moving debt from the rich onto to the mortgage payer - why promote it?
Businesses are actively prevented from anything that does not make a profit and are not subject to any moral imperatives, so they act inhumanely - it is in their articles of association.
These sorts of documentaries are worth watching if you have an hour - Chomsky, for example, comments that the individuals concerned may be nice people; nice to their kids, to their servants etc but they are monstrous because the institution is monstrous - the corporation:
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>>to harness the power of the ‘usual suspects’
>The problem is that it is only a certain type of person who actually gets involved locally. Those people have not significantly improved things and you could say they are part of the problem, not the solution. We have a situation where a tiny minority (those who can be bothered to turn up) are supporting decisions that affect all of us. That is what is wrong.
I think it’s fair to be concerned that too few people who are not, for instance, white and middle class ‘get involved’. I don’t think it’s fair to criticise the actions of those who do get involved. If you take the local CAACs for instance, they are mostly hard-working volunteers with the good of the community at heart, who just feel powerless.
>> they are about creating consensus.
>There is no consensus - that is the problem. You write as if there had already been successful NFs - can you cite any because I don't think there are.
It’s too early to say – I’m a little out of the loop these days but I don’t think any NFs have got to the NP stage yet. But the point of a NP – and the referendum that must pass before it is implemented, is clearly to create a consensus.
>> ...Neighbourhood Plans, which give local people more say
>Local people can have as much say as they want under the existing system. There is even a system for a last minute intervention if they have missed all the notices etc.
Mmmm. They can express their views about planning policy, and about individual plans, but they don’t get the chance to vote on the planning policy in the way that they do for an NP – not separately from an election, anyway. You might, for instance, support Haringey Labour but thuink that their planning policy and Haringey Planning department were terrible.
>> Part of the solution is to develop a better sanction/incentive scheme to encourage developers
>That is part of the problem, not the solution. Developers are hard hearted bastards who will evict heavily-pregnant women onto the street for money. In this ward there are property businesses who have been caught doing appalling things and you want them to prosper?
Saying that the root problem is capitalism is all well and good – I might not even disagree with broad parts of that thesis – but I’m working under the assumption that planning policy is important now, in the actual world that we live in today. I’m also aware that other countries with mixed economies have much more successful relations between citizen, government and developers. And some have much worse.
Also, for what it’s worth, there are people working for developers who are passionate about creating great architecture and improving or creating the foundations for communities. I know it’s tempting to see them as faceless evil corporate behemoths, but it ain’t so.
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Be careful about party political jibes, too, particularly when examining the local situation. In Haringey it is the local Labour Party who have been epically resistant to building new council housing since the 1980s (as they were nationally from 1997-2010), and the Liberal Democrats who have long argued that it should be built in order to reduce waiting lists and slow the growth of house prices. The alternative budge presented by the Lib Dems last year contained a fully-costed proposal for building the first wave of such housing, only to be voted down. Now, as the local elections approach, lo & behold the Labour party has reversed its position and adopted the Lib Dem policy in full. I suppose we ought to be thankful, but not as thankful as if they had done it in the first place – indeed years ago.
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I apologise if it comes across as a party-political jibe - it is not intended to. I agree that all parties make huge ideological mistakes, most notably when in the hands of strong leaders. Dont get me started on what is wrong with the left wing
I respect the right of the ConDems to promote whatever they see fit and grant all politicians leeway to be human, to be corrupted by power, make faulty decisions that seemed reasonable at the time and that, with hindsight, were crazy, be swayed by circumstance etc
and yet retain a high degree of personal integrity.
There will always be rotten apples in the Police, among Judges, head teachers - in every area of our society where power is wielded it will be abused.
I have met many local Cllrs and all three in my ward are fine people. In fact I don't think I have met any Haringey Cllr who isn't - they're certainly not in it for the money.
Thatcher tried to convince us that the Council House sell-off was a good thing and we now realise it did much more harm than good. She created the conditions for the wrong-headed idea that, left to the market, our housing problems would disappear. What actually happened was that the rich got richer and the poor got thrown out.
>a fully-costed proposal for building the first wave of such housing
I doubt that very much - can you provide more details? There are some LibDem-controlled Councils aren't there? How come they haven't built? The nearest I can find is Labour-controlled Islington, who seems to have been built a lot more Council Houses than most. I do not know why Councils across the UK stopped. Could it be that Thatcher proved it to be a vote-winner so it became toxic?
If any party is well disposed to council housing, putting the interests of the poor and disadvantaged and working people above the already-wealthy developers it is Labour, surely, based on their track record. I suspect other factors were at play - do you know?
I confess to being suspicious of Haringey Lib Dems though. Every time the Council agrees something, it seems that the Lb Dems claim they forced a U Turn from the Council, issuing leaflets that say "Lib Dems force Council U Turn".This seems like a pure lie to me, some of it is breathtakingly blatant. Don't they realise the harm false claims do to their cause?
The Lib Dem strategy as an opposition in the borough seems to be to propose things that they know that the ruling majority will not agree to and then blame them for not agreeing. What would you do if you a local govt opposition with no chance of getting any of your policies enacted because your opponents in government always outnumber you when it comes to a vote?
What is worse for me is the culture of Council-bashing that the Lib Dems seem to have nurtured. If by some miracle they gained a majority (highly unlikely given the voting record over decades in the borough) they might experience what they have created - an anti-council feeling that is the worst thing about modern politics. That is mainly why people will not get involved I think. They hate on the council like they hate on traffic wardens. It is so childish - why don't people realise that it is our future they are organising, and that we are giving them a shedload of our money to do it with? The Lib Dems seem to have actively encouraged this, using derogatory-phrases that were presumably intended to hate on Labour, but give people the impression that all councils are to be despised.
A byproduct of our system seems to be that, if you are in power, you make sure that nothing the opposition wants ever gets delivered. If the opposition has a good idea, you take it over and rebrand it as yours. That is why the Green Party will never gain power. As soon as they have great ideas (and they have plenty) the mainstream parties take them on board as their own, driving the Greens back to the minority view.
Politics seems to be about holding on to power at all costs. Cherry-picking the most popular policies whatever their provenance. Adding "spin" to fit your ideology. Then ridiculing those who disagree with you.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Chris, There's an old joke about a politician who is invited to tour a splendid new corporate skyscraper. On the roof of the building a gust of wind takes him over the edge. As he falls past a window on the 34th floor one of the staff hears him muttering: "Well, so far, so good."
Your cheery optimism is refreshing. But do you really believe the contempt many people have for Haringey Council's leaders is always "so childish"? Isn't at least some of it deserved?
Including voters' low opinion of politicians who conduct the PR/spin games you describe. And of lobbyists, apparatchiks and various hangers-on, whose ambition consists not in doing anything constructive for the community, but joining or pleasing whichever party bosses they think will serve their personal interests.
Yes, there are some "fine people" in the Haringey Labour and LibDem parties. But also some not so fine people - the inner circle. Who also happen to be enormously damaging.
C.S. Lewis once described this and gave some good advice in a lecture in 1944. http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php
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