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Bureaucrats are in fear of plain, forthright language
• SO, apparently, in our four-star rated Camden a conscientious councillor who looks out for how effectively taxpayers’ money is being spent on repairs cannot write a robustly expressed letter to his fellow councillors without fear of being referred to the Standards Board of England.
In the case of Councillor Paul Braithwaite, he has been subjected to a nine-months’ long standards committee disciplinary procedure, because one officer was offended by his forthright language.
What, I wonder, does it mean for my freedom, as a Camden taxpayer since 1963, to speak out about what concerns me?
I hope it means nothing that limits my freedom because I have got awfully used to free speech, as I imagine had Cllr Braithwaite.
When he saw how badly a repair job on a wall on a council estate in his ward had been done, he said so in admittedly plain words.
The pointing, he said, was “crap”. Not elegantly expressed but not obscene either. It’s a word used far and wide, including in newspaper headlines and stories and on television.
What concerns me even more that is that Cllr Braithwaite fell foul of a regime which I suspect very few residents of Camden know exists, which could have resulted in his being removed as a councillor.
I doubt that many New Journal readers know that our elected councillors are subject to a draconian bureaucratic code which prevents them from writing even to one another in words that could be construed as not treating any one of Camden’s thousands of assumed-to-be perfect employees with the respect they apparently deserve as a birthright.
I’d like to know how the standards board came by this power and procedure over my elected councillors and frankly, I’d like it done away with.
Like Members of Parliament, local councillor accountability should be through the ballot box and not administered by some central quango enhancing the power of our local petty-minded bureaucrats.
Priscilla McBride
Chalcot Square, NW1
A waste of space
• YOUR even-handed report about Councillor Paul Braithwaite’s travails with the Standards Board for England (How the ‘crap’ wall email built up into a huge investigation”, October 16) reinforces my view that the clunking regulatory apparatus applied by Labour to local government is a bureaucratic waste of space.
The trouble with Labour is that it loves to regulate but (as we have seen with the Financial Services Authority, and increasingly find with the Criminal Records Bureau) it regulates things that don’t matter at all, while letting things that really do matter slip by unnoticed.
In Cllr Braithwaite’s case the slow grinding wheels of bureaucratic interference were set in motion for the sole purpose of protecting the over-fragile sensibilities of a local government officer, whose privileged employment and pension rights might be thought compensation enough for having to get on and do his job right.
It was three months before Cllr Braithwaite even knew he had been complained about, and even then he was told he must not contact the offended party with an apology, which would, in the real world, have been enough to clear the matter up. (Part of Cllr Braithwaite’s offence, of course, was to suggest that for some council officers “the real world” is not part of their experience).
In total the process, over something that could have been resolved in hours, dragged on for nine months.
In Camden we have good reason to know that “crap” workmanship on walls can have fatal consequences. Remember two-year-old Saurav Ghai, killed by a boundary wall on the Wendling estate, Gospel Oak, which collapsed on him in January last year. The wall which Cllr Braithwaite complained of was perhaps not so blatant a danger but one fact omitted from your report which should interest readers is that, in the end, that whole wall, on the St Pancras Way estate, had to be taken down too.
Who has been reprimanded or named and shamed for that?
Robin Young
Bedford Avenue, WC1
PC insanity
• I CONGRATULATE Councillor Paul Braithwaite for voicing his concerns about Camden Council and putting his constituents’ perceptions above of Camden’s political correctness insanity.
As a tenant and community representative I have on endless occasions found myself having to fight a system which closes ranks at the slightest hint of holding Camden officers to account.
This chronic disease is particularly rampant in Camden’s housing department, and those officers who are genuinely dedicated in working positively with its tenants unfortunately are overshadowed by those who believe they are untouchable.
It is sad that in this day and age it appears our housing managers have been failing to manage effectively services manned by a few untouchables and instead we find ourselves fighting a department opting to chuck the baby out with the bathwater by trying to privatise those very services in stages.
Shame on you Camden for choosing the easy way out!
Perhaps executive members approving those decisions should take a page out of the likes of Cllr Braithwaite’s book.
Meric Apak
Chair, Artisan Dwellings Tenants Association
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