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Secrecy over site for drugs superclinic affects us all
• ON behalf of Friends of Argyle Square I attended a meeting last week about the location of a new drug treatment service, somewhere in Holborn, Covent Garden, King’s Cross and Bloomsbury.
However, I am not allowed to tell you the actual addresses being considered.
I left the meeting frustrated and distrustful at the inappropriate method that is being used to select the location.
The procurement strategy decided upon by Camden Council deliberately keeps the locations under consideration a secret until the last possible moment. The selected location will only be announced when the planning application is submitted.
This leaves the residents and other people who may wish to object very little time to do so.
Worse than that, the procurement strategy has, quite unnecessarily, and deliberately, entangled the selection of the location with the selection of the service provider.
The organisations tendering to provide the service have also been given the job of finding a property in which to provide the service.
Thus the final recommendation might be for a provider who meets the service criteria exceptionally well, even though the location only just meets the minimum acceptable criteria.
The team making the recommendation do not even have a view on whether it is a good idea to have the treatment centre in an area already frequented by drug users or not.
Nor have they successfully located all the schools which are close to the suggested locations. They appeared to be relying on this ad hoc meeting of local representatives to do this job for them.
More than once we were told that, in the past, it has proved extremely difficult to select a location for this type of service, owing to local opposition.
One has to assume that this convoluted, secretive, outsourced, method of choosing a location is the council’s attempt to avoid such trouble this time. So much for open government.
John Hartley, WC1
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