Archive | June 2022

1. The Council Election on 5^th May was a triumph for the Wandsworth Labour Party. After 44 years of Tory control, Labour has at last won back control of the Council. You may not know it, but I was the Leader of the Council when we lost the election in May 1978 and now my fellow ex-Latchmere, now Falconbrook, councillor Simon Hogg is the new Leader. (PS, thanks to those who voted for me!)
2. I am the new Chair of the Planning Applications Committee (PAC) and Kate Stock (fellow ex-Latchmere and now Falconbrook councillor) is the Cabinet Member for Children’s Services.
3. I intend to continue with this newsletter, hopefully in the same vein as in the past, but as Chair of the Planning Applications Committee, I may have to tread a more neutral path about new developments than I have done in the past. This is because of something called ‘pre-determination’: the point being that if I, or any member of PAC, declared our position on an application then, at appeal, the applicant could, and probably would, argue that we had a pre-determined view on their application before we had seen the officers’ recommendation or heard the debate. It is a good principle, which, as Chair of PAC, I will certainly uphold.
4. Meanwhile, some of you have asked me to write a couple of lines about my fellow re-elected and newly elected Labour councillors – just so that the names mean something more than simply names. So: jumping in where angels fear to tread: here are short pen-portraits of my Battersea Labour colleagues, starting with my ward colleagues in Battersea Park, who are