Once again Haringey Council have let the local residents down by their unprofessional behaviour. The invitation to St Ann’s and Harringay Area Assembly for Thursday 28 May 2009 at St Ann’s Library Hall, Cissbury Road, sent to me as a resident one week before, contained an Agenda which was not actioned on the night of the meeting. There was no one to feedback on the special Traffic Area Assembly or the Green Lanes Festival and Local Charter or the HMO Working Group. As I live in a road of HMOs and shop everyday locally in Green Lanes, they were the items I wanted an update on. I am interested in plans to bring some sort of value back into a street which has become full of polluting noisy traffic, estate agents and betting shops.
Instead I sat through a very poorly attended meeting of mainly St Ann’s Area residents and listened to their problems of anti-social behaviour , rubbish dumping , Polish workers who have now become Bulgarians surrounding Wickes, the need for a hospital in Haringey and a necessary one way traffic system. The meeting as usual became rather heated but Cllr Gina Adamou chaired it in a very able manner.
Which is more than can be said for the inarticulate mumbling and hedging around the answers to residents’ questions of the other council members sitting at the table. Once again questions were not answered because no one is professional enough to do their homework or even a walk around the Borough having a look at what is happening on the streets and a chat to those who need to walk there and a bit of doorstepping might help. One question was asked as to what qualifications certain councillors had for the cabinet positions they were given and on reflection that worried me a great deal too. Do councillors need any qualifications to fill any roll on the council other than a sort of do-good feeling? It doesn’t often look as though councillors in Haringey know much about the area they are in charge of. I do not include Cr. Brian Haley in that statement. I would certainly be interested in knowing what qualifications, vocational and academic and life experience each member of the Council has and especially those elected to the cabinet. I read in the Totenham Journal that the Leader of the Council has appointed the cabinet herself in this reshuffle so I would be interested to know how she came to her decisions. Why is she in a position to make judgements which affect all the resident s of Haringey?
I am not saying that the problems brought up at the meeting are not important, of course they need to be solved for those residents who live with them daily, but there were not many Harringay Ward residents who made the journey into their neighbouring ward so we only got dog dumps in the Harringay Passage and the need for CCTVs from that direction. There were probably other things too but I had given up listening by then.
Is it time for Harringay and St. Ann’s to be covered by two separate Assembly meetings? The problems are the same issues of antisocial behaviour , traffic, rubbish, pollution, but they come from slightly different perspectives of the residents and need to be sorted out according to their actual location. Residents of St Ann’s Ward may not visit Green Lanes often and those in Harringay Ward may not be particularly concerned by the crowd outside Wickes or the anti social behaviour in Victoria Crescent.
The issues raised at each meeting take a lot of time to answer coherently and councillors need to be properly briefed to satisfy residents’ concerns. This is not being achieved at present and maybe could be done in a professional manner, so that residents did acknowledge their councillors had some worth, if there was more time for feedback and informed discussion at meetings.
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