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We’ve only three days to sort out kids’ needs
• MUMS and other carers, and our kids, were never consulted about how the closure of much-loved and needed Kilburn Grange Play Centre would affect us, our families and the community.
Councillors on the children, schools and families scrutiny committee were sufficiently concerned to call for the council to “guarantee suitable alternative local places”. At that same meeting officers told us we were to be “consulted” after the decision to close was formally taken on February 28.
Now, Camden Play Services is finally coming to speak to us, but only after the council received another letter from lawyers pointing out that even this final so-called consultation had not taken place. How are we meant to sort out with them what our kids need, just three days before the closure takes place?
Twenty-four children currently use Kilburn Grange after school. Other new children have not been allowed to take up places and mums on the waiting list have not even been informed that they are waiting for precisely nothing.
Originally, only 10 after-school places were offered at next-door Kingsgate. How was the council going to determine who got them? We did not want to be set against each other – waged working mums and unwaged working mums.
Our campaign has won us the full 24 places at Kingsgate but our worries about its safety and suitability remain. The council’s responses to these have been evasive and even untrue. Most worrying is the offhand way it has brushed aside Ofsted’s identifying the “hazard of insecure gate entrance/exit from main playground leading to a busy road”. We pointed out that adults could get in the same way.
The council claims that “anyone entering the site is challenged”, but this is not true.
Staff are already too pressed to act as security guards. They only knew about the 24 extra places they were to provide, after the “guarantee” of these places had been made.
This is just one example of how there has been no real “scrutiny” of the decision to close Kilburn Grange. We could go on and on.
Not one of the councillors who voted for the closure, including our local councillors and those on the scrutiny committee, took up our invitation to walk up to Fortune Green with our kids and buggies, where the replacement holiday service is to be held.
It took us 50 minutes to get there and 40 to get back, putting a massive hole in the day for mums who have to go there twice a day or a £14 hole in our purses each week for the bus, which is out of the question for anyone on benefits or low wages.
There is such a thing as society and we mums are its carers and backbone. We are entitled to support and resources. Our kids are the future community. As we have been saying all along, Save Kilburn Grange, because we are worth it.
HANNA DEMEL
Save Kilburn Grange Play Centre
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