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£20m to spend, but just where is the cash going?
• THE government has handed £20.8 million in grants to the Islington Strategic Partnership to spend on the borough. The partnership is made up of chief executives of the main statutory services, including fire, ambulance and the Primary Care Trust – and two Lib Dem councillors.
The panel meets once every four months but we know very little about it. What is happening to this money? How is it being spent? I’ve been trying to find out without success. Are there any pensioner representatives on the 25-member panel?
John Worker
N1
• ISLINGTON Pensioners Forum meeting in March had a lively discussion regarding the Local Area Agreement (LAA) and the so-called Islington Strategic Partnership (ISP). There was a strong feeling that there is not enough known about either. It was apparent that a great deal of our money was involved but little is known about who spent it and on what.
The first thing that came out of the discussion was that out of our 40-plus elected councillors only two
(5 per cent) serve on the ISP and by some strange chance they are the Lib Dem leader and deputy leader of Islington Council.
Not exactly representative, given the make-up of the council or the community. One major problem was that, although both were invited to discuss the issue at our March Forum, apparently they couldn’t spare the time.
We learnt about LAAs and the ISP mainly by accident when our representatives attended a conference organised by the Government Office for London on the subject in December and the alarm bells began to ring.
Since then we have learnt that apparently there is no representation on the ISP from any organisation such as Help the Aged, Age Concern or even our own Islington Pensioners Forum. So who is fighting the pensioners’ corner?
The third problem is that there is little “transparency” about how the ISP meets and makes these decisions. This was once again exposed last week when the so-called “overview” council committee met to confirm the final LAA. The majority of them are not ISP board members.
It does beg the question: how can our elected representatives have an overview on an agreement when they have no idea how this was arrived at? They will be accountable if it goes pear-shape.
Given that the issues surrounding this have been around for at least a few months, it would have been helpful if someone, particularly the leader and deputy leader, had the courtesy and decency to inform us so we may have had a bit of an input into the process.
George Durack
Chairman, Islington Pensioners Forum
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