Councillor Tony Belton’s Battersea June 2023, Newsletter (# 168)

1. It’s just one year since Labour won control of Wandsworth Council, for the first time since 1974. One friendly, but jaundiced, critic has said to me “And so what? I don’t see any real change.” Well, if the expectation was that we were all going to wake up on 6^th May last, to a completely new dawn, in a new world, when it only rained at night, and the sun shone serenely on an untroubled world, then Russia’s war (then only 10 weeks old) on Ukraine and the consequent inflation put paid to that.
   

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2. So, what have we achieved? A fair amount. There could have been more, no doubt, but it seemed a busy year to us at the coalface. I list a few of my favourites:-

• We froze our element of Council Tax, that is the element of Council Tax that we control and is not set by the Greater London Authority, or in effect by the Government, or by the Wimbledon Common Conservators. But more importantly we removed over 10,000 of the poorest householders in the Borough completely from the burden of Council Tax AND we reduced CTax by £150 for another 5,000.
• We established a £5 million emergency fund to tackle the worst of the cost-of-living crisis. This is the biggest such fund in the country (the same size as that of the 4 times larger City of Birmingham) and much of it has been spent (about £3.0 million at the last count) on supporting the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, and numerous voluntary agencies, including foodbanks, community groups and the South-West London law centre.
• We spent £250,000 raising the wage level of all our contracted workers, so that all now earn at least the London Living Wage.
• We had a manifesto commitment to provide 1,000 new council homes during our four-year term. Currently, we are building, or have planning consent for, or have in the pipeline over 500 of those new homes, of which 106 are currently going up in the Surrey Lane estate, with a similar number on the Patmore and along Garratt Lane.
• We are installing bike sheds as quickly as the manufacturers can supply them – and, much to our gratification, we just cannot keep up with the demand for more. (I know cycling and cyclists are not universally popular, but the climate crisis demands that more and more of us must switch to sustainable transport and we should thank cyclists for easing the pressure on public transport and for not using a car instead for their commutes.)
• We have introduced regular mega-skips. They are successful in that they get filled very quickly. And in addition, fly-tipping in Wandsworth is 15% down on last year. We are soon to start our first, belated, food waste disposal pilot.
• We have started a public debate, with a people’s assembly, on the problem of air pollution. The report on this debate will be out later this year. (We’ve also received an international A-rating for our work on climate action, though I must confess I don’t quite know what that means).
• This year Springfield Park will open to the public; just off Burntwood Lane, this will be the largest new park in the Borough (I think) since the creation of Battersea Park in the mid-nineteenth century.
• You might claim that the Park is a result of Tory groundwork prior to May 2022 – and fair enough. But if you do that, then please don’t blame us for the extensive works on Wandsworth Bridge and Tooting Lido, which will mean that both bridge and swimming pool will be closed for some months – since their states of disrepair were due to Tory negligence for the previous 50 years!
• We have provided free breakfasts and provided help to buy school uniforms for many who are eligible for free school meals.
• As chair of the Planning Applications Committee (PAC), my own part in all this is limited in scope, as PAC is a re-active committee; we depend upon people and organisations applying to us for permission to develop. But we are the busiest Committee with 11 meetings in the last year, in which we considered 92 applications, approving 77 with 10 refusals and 5 yet to be resolved. We also deal with failures to comply with the rules and have taken 14 enforcement actions against ‘bad’ developments – one of the highest rates of enforcement in the country.
• In addition, I try to make the very technical business of planning applications as accessible as possible. We conduct our business on-line and have been watched by approximately 2,200 viewers, or about 200 for each meeting (one of the 11 meetings was not broadcast because of technical problems). I have also devolved the chairmanship of Wandsworth’s Conservation Committee from me to one of the amenity societies – actually, the Battersea Society.

As you can see, many of these actions are both very simple and very basic and aimed to help the hard-to-reach – not headline but lifeline stuff.

3. Sunday, the 7^th May was not bad, weather-wise, for our street’s Coronation party. It featured good vibes and friendly chats plus a splendid dog race. Here are two of the contestants cornering at speed. I think that they capture something of the chaotic, innocent pleasure of the occasion. The spectators laughed a lot and all the dogs had a really good great time.

4. On the 10^th May I had a club dinner in town of ex-GLC employees – very enjoyable but hardly of great public interest. On the 12^th May, I went to the Shrubbery, in Lavender Gardens, for the unveiling of a blue plaque, marking the residence in Battersea of Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927), a nineteenth-century model and Pre-Raphaelite painter of considerable distinction. The plaque is on the west wall of the grand house, facing onto Lavender Gardens but this picture is of the ‘opening day’ celebration, taken from the balcony, looking down into the hall.

5. I assisted with Marsha de Cordova’s Saturday surgery at the new Battersea Chapel on 13^th I must say in praise of Marsha’s team, that it is much better organised than in her earlier days as the MP. Every councillor, and/or adviser, had a supporter taking notes. There was a clear plan for following up cases – well done Marsha; it was the best surgery of this kind that I have seen over many years.

6. That afternoon (13/5/23), I dashed off to play chess for Surrey against Middlesex at our home ‘ground’ – a nice church hall in Cheam. I won with, believe it or not, a refined version of the old staple Fool’s Mate. Unfortunately, both of us were later disqualified – me because my phone pinged during the game, which meant (for the Rules’ Committee) that I could have been cheating – I wasn’t but I learnt a lesson about switching off the mobile! He was also disqualified for a technical but irrelevant (to the result) technicality! Surrey, however, won.

7. Later in the month the chess team played Middlesex (20/5/23) at Wembley. We were hammered. When I left to go home, we were on the way to a whitewash (12-0 as I recall), which over 16 boards is some kind of an achievement. I regret that I just do not have the time, to play a game as wonderfully complex and demanding as chess at the level that I used to play.

8. On 23^rd May I chaired the May meeting of the Planning Applications Committee. The committee featured an application for a 16-storey building, delivering high-quality office and affordable workspace, in Havelock Terrace, opposite Battersea Park Railway station; and also additional residential units in the Springfield Hospital grounds; and a further group of council homes in the Atheldene development, off Garratt Lane. The Havelock Terrace development involves demolition of ‘old’ industrial units – a nostalgic moment for me as I can recall opening the then-new industrial building in 1977-78 (see photo). I can date it fairly accurately as the Mayor on the left was Bill Ballantine, a Labour councillor for Earlsfield and his mayoral year ran from May 1977 – 1978, and the coat that Bob Cryer, a junior Industry Minister in the Callaghan Government, is wearing suggests that the date was either autumn ’77 or spring ’78. It was also a building, where I cut the first sod, and formally announced its construction, and I am now agreeing its demolition – a first complete building life-cycle I have seen all through!

9. The following day, I am afraid that I missed fellow councillor, Juliana Annan’s, inauguration as Mayor of Wandsworth, because I was off to Geneva on the morning train from St. Pancras to Paris and then on to Geneva. The train from Paris to Geneva leaves from Gare Lyon, where one of the delights of the journey is eating at the station café, called Le Train Bleu. It’s a bit pricey but not extravagantly so. It is hidden away upstairs – they are not desperate for custom, they don’t have to be. It does have character.

10. Geneva? Because Penny had business there. The city is beautifully positioned, with the lake dissecting it, and with the Jura Mountains as a back-cloth in the north-west and the Alps, and particularly Mont Blanc in the south. It is everything that one might expect from Switzerland; it is pretty, scrupulously clean, quiet for a large, but not very large city, efficient – everything works smoothly and quietly, expensive, but bus, and boat, travel in town is free – if you can get a pass from your hotel; and surprise, surprise everywhere one can hear hundreds of sparrows cheeping. One even stood on my knee, being fed an ice cream cone. Geneva was also, of course, the home of the League of Nations, where we came across

• • demonstrators protesting against Iran’s Islamic Republic and
  • the broken chair statue, designed as a protest against land mines and cluster bombs to international diplomats,
  • but for us more of a symbol of the failed League, which did not get the support that it needed.
    

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11. And apologies to several of you, including Hazel, who sent their best wishes about what I, last month, called yet another ‘special medical operation’. I was mocking Putin, and not being serious – it was real but very, very minor medical process and took a nurse about 2 minutes! But thanks to all for the best wishes.
    

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My programme for June

1. My Surgery at Battersea Park Library on 3^rd
2. A reception at Providence House on 8^th
3. The Junction Jazz, a Battersea Labour Party fund-raiser on 11^th
4. On the 12^th June I will be at a Design Review Panel about a Tooting development.
5. On the 20^th June I have the Planning Applications Committee.
6. And although not strictly my programme, for anyone keen to know what’s on in Battersea then can I recommend the Battersea Insider from the Battersea Society.

Did you Know?

Last month I asked, ‘Which social reformer lived in Battersea; has a block on a Council estate in Battersea named after him; and made a great speech against the slave trade in the House of Commons, ending with the ringing words: ‘You may say that you didn’t know. Well, you know now!’’

I was surprised to get so few replies to what I thought was an easy question. It was, of course, William Wilberforce (1759-1833). The former Battersea Council named a now rather anonymous block of flats on York Road, after him; and a plaque to mark the site of his Battersea (not Clapham) house can be seen on the side of 11 Broomwood Road.

And this month?

As well as naming one block after the leader of the British abolitionist movement, the old Battersea Council named six blocks on another nearby estate all after supporters or sympathisers of the Abolition Movement. Can you name all six, or even three of them?