March highlights

1.  Once again the Council’s threat to close Battersea Sports Centre (BSC) dominated the month. On 10^th February, the Community Services Overview & Scrutiny Committee heard, what were, I am told,  two excellent deputations from the staff (Mandy Le Fondre) and the local community (Andy Beech from Pennethorne House), but unfortunately the Conservative/Tory majority on the Committee were not really listening, or at least were not prepared to change their minds.
2. However, I want to be mildly optimistic on this issue. Since we first heard of the closure threat, the Council has moved its position just a bit. Originally the Centre was forecasted to close this autumn. But faced with strong local opposition the Tories have retreated slightly to a position of promising a “replacement” all weather football pitch, and changing rooms at the south end of Falcon Park before the BSC closure. The Council reckons that this will be in Spring, 2016. I rather doubt that this can be done so soon. There are, as far as I know, no plans yet on the drawing board and, although the funding has been programmed for 2015-16, completion by 31^st March next year looks a little unlikely. But, of course, whilst it will be a great thing to have the football pitch, especially in a rather under-used Park, it will not be a community and sports centre and it is actually a fair way from BSC – the best part of a mile.
3. Of course the community and the Latchmere councillors have argued, strongly, that a soccer pitch is insufficient as a replacement to the BSC community facility. Under this pressure the Council has beefed up its plans for community facilities in the re-designed York Gardens. There is even a hint in the design document for the Winstanley regeneration that the new facility could include a swimming pool and there is certainly a “promise” that it will be ready by 2019. So the gap between closing the BSC and opening a brand new facility is down to a “mere” three years, though that is a long time in the life of a teenager, looking for local sports facilities..
4. We, the community and the Labour councillors, are not, I think one should admit, going to win the battle to save the BSC as it is today. The Council has decided that the site will be used for re-housing people moved from the York Road Estate BUT we can win a battle to delay the closure until the new facilities are ready and open. The Council is now faced with a decision to make – Is it worth £100,000 a year for three years to keep a vital Battersea service? If so then losing the much loved but elderly BSC will not be a great loss in exchange for new facilities just 200 yards away across Plough Road.
5. I know that some people who read this newsletter are card-carrying Conservatives and I suspect that my comments are relayed to MP, Jane Ellison and others. I hope that they do their bit to persuade the decision makers at the Town Hall that it is very, very worthwhile delaying the closure and not souring the local community, whose support is so very essential for making the Winstanley Regeneration a success.
6. On the 2^nd February, I went to a grand launch of the Ram Brewery development. To be honest it was what one might call a “jolly” with wine and canapés, but quite impressive about what is going to happen in the centre of Wandsworth. I quite liked much of the development around the Wandle River BUT to my mind the 42 storey mega-block at the centre is just too large and too over-bearing. It will blight what is otherwise a densely packed but human-scale development.
7. On the 11^th February, Battersea Labour Party had a fund-raising evening at the Chinese Boulevard, just off Smugglers Way. The guest speakers were Tessa Jowell and Dame Doreen Lawrence, and I was the MC. We had a great evening.
8. The next day I attended the Education & Children’s Services OSC. Unfortunately, thanks to various so-called reforms introduced by both Labour and Tory Governments, we do not spend much time talking and thinking or deciding anything much to do with schools. Local authorities are essentially being cut out of the most interesting issues, so we are more and more concerned with such matters as the contracting out of schools’ transport, or school cleaning contracts. There were, however, a couple of items of general interest.
9. One item was the Council’s projections for population growth, and therefore of future demand for school places. On the whole, the Council appears fairly satisfied that its resources will cope, even if it does mean more temporary accommodation being installed in, say, play space. I don’t think the Council is being complacent but we will see in 2019/20, when the population growth hits the secondary schools.
10. The other item was the Ofsted Report into “Lifelong Learning”. Very unusually for Wandsworth, the report was very highly critical of the service and of councillors’ role in monitoring the service. To be fair, the Report’s main criticism was about something that could be called box ticking, about the failure to record what the Council was doing about safeguarding pupils and not about anything that was actually going wrong. I am now on a small committee to ensure that we resolve the problem.
11. The Planning Applications Committee met on the 18^th. There were a number of substantial applications, such as the start of development at Springfield Hospital, but only one was relevant to Latchmere, whilst another will be of interest to some of you. The interesting one was the Council’s decision to oppose a new Wimbledon AFC stadium planned for the site of the Wimbledon greyhound track. The Labour councillors did not agree with this and believed it would be a good thing for Wimbledon football to move back to the Tooting/Colliers Wood area.
12. The local application was for a 14 storey residential block on Gwynne Road, more or less directly behind the Caius Club. On balance I decided to support the application partly because of the 33 flats provided, 11 are so-called “affordable”. It will probably be a different matter when this month we consider the much higher, 28 storey, block planned in Lombard Road. What do you think of this march of giant blocks? Do you think they are largely for rich investors and make very little contribution to the housing crisis? Or are they really part of the answer?
13. The Finance & Corporate Services OSC on February 19^th decided, uncontroversially to freeze Council Tax this year but it also discussed the suggested merger with Richmond-upon-Thames. Personally I am very far from convinced about the whole merger business. There are a number of Boroughs across the country where something of this kind is happening. Westminster & Chelsea, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham have gone some way to merging functions, but they did that when all three were under Tory control. After the Borough elections last May Hammersmith & Fulham reverted to Labour control and then tried to withdraw from the merger. I don’t know the details but they have run into legal and contractual difficulties. However, the problems aren’t just about politics. Wandsworth is one of the largest municipal landlords in the country with a housing stock of some 18,000 properties, Richmond has hardly any. Wandsworth is a very diverse, inner city Borough, with some very poor areas. Richmond is one of the richest, least diverse areas in the country. Wandsworth has a population over 310,000, Richmond’s is 187,000. It is difficult to imagine that a merge of offices, officers and functions can really work between two such disparate authorities.
14. On 23rd February I went to hear Ed Miliband at Battersea Arts Centre giving a speech on Labour’s policy on the arts. Of course I would say it, wouldn’t I but he was excellent and very impressive. He spoke well and he answered questions easily and colloquially. He is so good in this format and so much better than he often appears in Prime Minister’s Question Time that I rather think that David Cameron’s reluctance to engage him in a major TV debate is almost largely because the Prime Minister thinks he just might lose and that his major trump card in the election will fail. Miliband then came over to our Party office on Lavender Hill and talked to us, “activists”.
15. On Sunday 1^st March I went to the flower market in Columbia Road, E2. I’d never been there before but I do recommend it on a Sunday morning. It’s only a short walk from Brick Lane and it is easy to make a morning of it and go from one to the other. My picture shows how colourful it is.
16. On a sad note, one of the Tory councillors, Adrian Knowles of Earlsfield Ward died (on March 2^nd actually). He was a decent and popular councillor, regardless of political affiliation. His loss will mean an early by-election, possibly on the same day as the General Election.

My Programme for March

1.  There was a Council Meeting on 4^th March, of which more next month.
2. I am visiting Sacred Heart primary school, Roehampton, on 10^th March.
3. The 16^th March is the day of the Latchmere “Let’s Talk” meeting at York Gardens library. On that evening the three Latchmere councillors, Simon Hogg, Wendy Speck and me, will be at this public meeting along with Tory leader of the Council, Ravi Govindia. This will be your opportunity to cross-question us about what we are doing as your councillors – but also your chance to quiz Cllr Govindia about his policies. Being so close to the General Election, it is bound to be fairly political but I hope it will seem OK to you and it would be truly great if lots of you came to the meeting.
4. On 18^th I have the Planning Applications Committee and of course lots of preparation, canvassing and leafleting in the build up to the General Election. This has been the longest election in British history, as presumably it was bound to be as soon as Parliament agreed to fixed term Parliaments and therefore fixed election dates. I am sure many of us will be happy to get it over and done with, but we do need a positive end to this long campaign.

Did you know?

When I was in Brick Lane I happened to see this blue plaque on the wall of a house. I was immediately interested to read that Thomas Fowell Buxton, the early nineteenth century anti-slavery campaigner, lived in Brick Lane, where he worked in Truman’s brewery, of which he later became the boss. In my experience it is fairly unusual to find a brewer as a left-wing campaigner – obviously not the sort of brewer who in the words of the old song “watered the workers’ beer”. He took over the leadership of the Anti-Slavery Movement when Wilberforce retired in 1825 but also fought for many other reforms and succeeded in getting the death penalty removed from well over 100 offences. I have written about him before and he is of course the inspiration for the name Buxton House in Maysoule Road along with other anti-slavery campaigners, Clarkson, Pitt, Fox, Burke and Ramsey. See my newsletters #4 and 57.

One of my readers has told me off for using the word “Tory”, and told me that many people will understand the description Conservative but not the word “Tory”, so I thought that I would check it out. Please let me know if this is new to you. If it is new then my next question is and why are Conservatives called Tories? The answer is in the picture on the right, which is of Tory Island, which lies 9 miles off the north coast of Ireland. (By the way, before you go further my apologies to the Irish – this is an historic description and not my own views!) In the late seventeenth century when party politics, or something like it, is first introduced to the British Parliament, some of the radicals started describing the right or Conservatives as Tories, that is a bunch of Irish barbarians, living on some small boggy island somewhere off the coast of Ireland. Forgive me – all my Irish friends.