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Our voices silenced
• AT Monday’s Camden Council meeting the opportunity for backbench ward councillors like me to raise issues went out on a vote.
Usually at council meetings there is a section on the agenda for oral questions when we can ask for information on issues affecting our wards and constituents and then there is a two-minute slot when backbenchers and, indeed, council members generally can speak on issues affecting our residents and the area we represent.
These are the only two real ways to voice opinions and ask questions and to try to change council policy. We can speak on executive members’ reports but few of us get called.
On Monday, the oral questions were cut down to five. One I was to ask – about post offices – was not reached as it was question seven.
I was then going to ask another question about post offices in the two-minute slot, but we had gone a couple of minutes into that with one speech when that too was cut, on a vote by Lib Dems and some Tories.
Why were oral questions and the two-minute slot cut and we were not allowed to raise issues of concern to residents? So that we could spend more time in the last quarter of hour on some motions which frankly could have been raised at another time.
So, democracy on Camden Council is no longer allowed and we grassroots councillors have virtually no chance of raising issues affecting you.
Thanks, Camden Council. I have never seen such a travesty and disgraceful attitude since I first came on the council in 1964. No wonder the public galleries are empty every council meeting.
Cllr Roger Robinson
Labour, St Pancras and Somers Town ward
Time for flat refusal
• CAMDEN Council is consulting neighbours (for the fifth time in 10 years) on a variation to plans for three flats at 80 Falkland Road, Kentish Town.
If approved, this commercial development will bring needless misery to council tenants and owner-occupiers whose homes and gardens are directly affected.
In a Town Hall meeting between officers, councillors and neighbours on November 6 last year, Councillor David Abrahams, vice-chairman of the planning committee, admitted that, if he had “only taken the trouble to consult colleagues on the level of local opposition to the plans” when approving planning permission the previous March, he “would have acted differently”. His regret was understandable, if a little late.
A solicitor from the Environmental Law Foundation has now informed me that, in sharp contrast to what I was told by the previous case officer, local authorities do in fact have the power, under Section 97 of the Town and Country Planning Act, to revoke or modify planning permission.
It is time for the council to do the decent, honourable thing by demonstrating that it is listening to and acting upon the valid objections of dozens of neighbours. The council must now revoke the full planning permission it granted last March.
David Price
Leighton Crescent, NW5
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