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Learning How Not to Drown, or: Another General Election, in Broken Barnet 25 Jun 2024 10:48 AM (10 months ago)

It's been a while, I'll grant you, but - for one night only -  here we are. The Great Unpleasantness is upon us: another General Election has come along and all of us here in Broken Barnet must do our electoral duty.

Since the last GE I have moved - from Finchley and Golders Green constituency to Chipping Barnet, once home to the nest of vipers that was the Barnet Tory association, now dying on its feet, due to changes in demographics, a lack of members and activists, and a change in the political climate.

So what, I hear you ask, of the other two Barnet constituencies? (In fact, Friern Barnet has now been joined to Hornsey, so strictly speaking there are three others in total). 

In Hendon, Matthew Offord has seen the train coming and bailed out. Good riddance.

 The new Tory candidate, Ameet Jogia - ha ha, is espousing the cause of clean air through less development, ignoring the mass profit driven development of Labour areas of his ward by the former Tory councillor, and now, hilariously, trying to endear himself to the residents fighting the long threatened development of the conservation areas in the Burroughs, by the pointless Hendon Hub plan. He assures them he can lead their fight against this terrible development. Which was, let me think, created by ... the Tory council and their contracted service providers, Capita. Hopefully the local Labour candidate  David Pinto-Duchinsky will see him off. 

And good riddance too to Finchley and Golders Green MP Mike Freer, also standing down. The godfather of the disastrous mass outsourcing of local council services, when Leader of Barnet council, who spent his Parliamentary years trying to further his career, getting no further than a couple of insignificant appointments, while watching his brighter colleague in Chipping Barnet ending up as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Tory candidate who replaces him is Alex Deane, a self styled 'political commentator' who apparently pops up on GB news, from time to time.

 He looks exactly like an AI designed photofit of the sort of Tory candidate that is guaranteed to appeal to loyal Tory voters (if there are any left in FGG) and to do the opposite for anyone else. Good luck, old son. Might be kinder if it wasn't for the company you keep: take a look at who is out canvassing with him. Yes, Freer, but also, second left - Brian Coleman, disgraced former councillor and AM, once thrown out of the party (by CCHQ) after this incident. 

Back to Chipping Barnet, then.

Saturday night was the occasion of the Barnet Hustings, and once again we gathered in the historic parish church at High Barnet, packing the pews so as to hear the arguments from electoral candidates. Or some of them, anyway: Tory MP Theresa Villiers, Labour candidate Dan Tomlinson, David Farbey for the Green Party, and - ah: Hamish Haddow for Reform. The Libdem candidate could not attend, due to family care commitments. 

This was a re-run of a similar event, some years ago, when Villiers faced a young Labour representative, Amy Trevethan, who performed admirably on the night and in the election itself: with some support from the local party, she may even have beaten Villiers. This time round, as the local Labour party and London Region have slowly woken up to the novel idea that there might be votes in Chipping Barnet, the candidate has had at least two visits from the Leader, with Keir Starmer visiting Whetstone twice, once filmed in a cafe that had not yet opened, and then for some reason in Boots, our local branch where there are usually more bored security staff than customers. 

The Labour candidate is a young guy, Dan Tomlinson, whose selection was probably unintended by the unaccountable London Region officers who oversaw the somewhat undemocratically edited long listing of candidates (only one woman and three white men) - complaints were made about this by several local members, but ignored. Not his fault, however, and he spoke well on the evening. 

The church was packed: a reassuring sign that despite living in an increasingly virtual world, people still want to take part in real life political debate, in their local communities.

A couple of police officers stood at the back and perhaps due to Villiers' previous post as NI secretary, at the front, a couple of plain clothed security men in suits spent the evening visually scanning the audience, and, or so it seemed, staring suspiciously at our row, with at least two people of Irish descent shifting uncomfortably in their seats and thinking of bad times in Kilburn, in the 1970s. To be fair, at least one of us was also thinking about Villiers's forbear who was so disastrously in charge of Ireland during the Famine, and without whose mismanagement my mother's family and so many other Irish migrants would not have arrived here, in unstoppable boats, so long ago.

Stopping boats, of course, is the obsession not only of the Tory right, but of the limited company that is the Reform 'party', whose representative on Saturday night, a Mr Hamish Haddow, seemed curiously reticent about his movement's more controversial beliefs and policies. Perhaps he has learned to be more circumspect about his views. By a strange coincidence, it seems there was, once upon a time in Welwyn Hatfield, a Tory candidate also called Hamish Haddow who was dropped by the local Conservative association due to allegedly offensive tweets. This Hamish Haddow then stated he had stepped down voluntarily, due to 'online abuse'. 

The hustings debate at St John's proceeded not just with the assistance of unacknowledged security, but watched by the all seeing eye of the Almighty and his agents in the church of England: stern rules for behaviour were laid out by the presiding ministers, and a volley of prayers and blessings was discharged over the heads of the slightly perplexed audience at the beginning and end of the event. The thought occurred that these hustings might really be some sort of covert harvesting scam: harvesting souls, that is, rather than email addresses and personal data. Probably an unproductive venture, in the dark heart of Chipping Barnet, for so long, but no longer, the stronghold of self serving suburban Conservatism - of the worst kind, when Brian Coleman was its star turn at fundraising strawberry teas, and Theresa Villiers was always returned to power, effortlessly passing through all electoral hurdles, on a fragrant cloud of feudal loyalty.

At this hustings, however, Villiers sat to one side, no longer the supreme embodiment of that self serving suburban Conservatism, dressed in her usual Thatcherite blue business wear, but now rather a forlorn figure, pale and nervous, peering through old fashioned specs and wearing a light pink, floaty dress, a look chosen perhaps to engage sympathy, in her hour of need. Blue, of course, is a forbidden colour now, for Tory candidates. Her leaflets are printed in green and do not mention The Party Which Cannot Be Named.

A few Tory councillors, including former council leader Richard Cornelius and his wife took their places: a a bus load of white haired, white middle class Tory activists had already hogged the front seats, primed to support their candidate - although on one side they had to compete for space with a hard rump of hard eyed Reform supporters, keen to see their man, in his shiny new turquoise Reform tie, fill the ancient church with Faragist heresy. Interestingly, some of the members of this cohort also applauded some of Villiers' pronouncements. 

Rather puzzlingly, and clearly in honour of the Euros, the hustings organisers had decided to deploy a referee, standing in the aisle, waving red and yellow cards at the participants. No one was sent off, unfortunately.

Only six questions were allowed: they had to be submitted in writing and vetted before the event, which rather put a damper on proceedings. In their own way, however, the responses perfectly demonstrated the character and indeed the relative chances of the candidates in succeeding in their campaigns. 

For the Greens, David Farbey spoke well, but clearly is experienced in addressing an audience, and his common sense views, unfortunately, appear to be atypical of the party's usual circus of barking activists and leaders. 

Reform. Well. Mr Hamish Haddow was not experienced in addressing an audience, and indeed after a couple of sentences, some bad tempered members of the audience yelled that they couldn't hear him. Good, I said. Probably too loudly. When he spoke up it was to tell us, in a heavy South African accent, that "there was so much to be proud of, here in Britain". He claimed a family association with Barnet: his ancestor was Thomas Ravenscroft, he said, whose memorial is In This Very Church. We sat and listened then, for the rattling sound of ancient bones, spinning in their marble tomb. 

Theresa Villiers, when it was her turn to answer questions, stood and addressed an unseen entity hovering high up, at the back of the church, with a curious sort of theatrical fervour that seemed out of step with the tone of the event, and reminiscent, perhaps, of Joan of Arc about to to be tied to the stake. She spoke with great conviction, about nothing very much, reverting to the dark magic power of saying the names of Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer, as if this in itself would manifest some sort of hellish fury on Labour's campaign. To be fair, it provoked a mild round of cheers from her loyal Tory friends in the front pews. 

She was, she said, 'a strong opponent of Ulez expansion'. Presumably she had been a big fan of the original Ulez scheme, run out by her man Boris Johnson, but now doesn't want the residents of Barnet to breathe clean air. In fact she explained, learning nothing from Susan Hall's campaign, that her sympathies lay with those who 'cherished a car'. 

In contrast, Labour's Dan Tomlinson spoke of the worry he had, when walking through the traffic fumes of Whetstone High Street (part of the Great North Road) with his three month old baby. Who is more cherished? A dirty old gas guzzling, polluting car, or a new born child? Again, Villiers is simply out of touch with the reality of life for most ordinary families in Barnet. 

There was a question about police numbers. The Labour candidate pointed out that yes, numbers had dropped because the Tory goverment had cut London's policing funds. He could have added that our stations and officers had been cut by Villier's mate Boris Johnson. When she tried to suggest she was going to save Barnet police station, she was roundly booed, and many people reminded her - loudly - that it had been Johnson who had first put this station on the list for cuts. 

A question about 'communities'. Responses from the more sensible candidates referred to the importance of facilities for young people. Villiers ignored the impact of cuts on community schemes and waffled on about 'Prevent'. The Tory approach seems to be that it is better to grass up kids with dangerous thoughts than investing in preventing young people from forming those thoughts in the first place. 

The Reform candidate thought the solution to community problems was youth clubs, Barnet FC, Saracens - Grow them, he suggested, of the latter, clearly unaware that the previous Tory council had lent them £26 million of public money to subsidise their private rugby club. His biggest idea, however, was that children should be taught to swim, so that - as he explained - they would 'learn how not to drown'. 

The image of a child washed up on a beach facing the English channel suddenly appeared in my head, for some reason. 

A question about integrity in politics. David Farbey referred to the Nolan Principles, a model which has been totally abandoned by successive Tory governments - and listed just some of the terrible scandals associated with these administrations: expenses, duck houses, MPs watching tractor porn in the House, Johnson, the betting scandal ...

Villiers, who not so long ago was one of a group of Tory MPs given a suspension from Parliament for trying to influence a judge presiding over the trial of a former colleague for sexual assault, began her response dismissively by commenting that we had all been worrying about this issue 'since the Roman Republic' ... Decline and Fall, Theresa, decline and fall ...

I thought about my own correspondence with her last year headed, in regard to her acceptance of a donation from Mrs Chernukhin, the wife of Putin's former associate, and the potential for, or a possible perception of, a conflict of interest in Villiers' membership of the committee tasked with overseeing/suppressing the (redacted) Russia Report. I had asked her why she did not recuse herself. Her response was that Mrs Chernukhin now has a British passport, and claimed that the report had been drafted before she joined the committee. Checking this out it seems she joined in June 2020, the report was (sort of) published on the 21st July. 

Her career has drifted in the doldrums since then, after backing the wrong candidates for PM - what do we want? Andrea Leadsom! 

In her closing comments she seemed to accept that things weren't going to go well for her: she made a comment about us having heard from three men explaining 'why I should step aside' - as if the constituents' votes had nothing to do with the electoral outcome. She had also pleaded with the audience to let her be their voice against - erm - Sadiq Khan, and Keir Starmer, implying that although she accepted there was going to be a massive Labour victory, she, Theresa, would remain in her rightful place as the appointed champion of Chipping Barnet. Noblesse Oblige, after all.

I think not. I think the majority of people in the audience and in the constituency will prefer a message of hope of something better, someone, as Labour's Dan Tomlinson put it, 'on the side of the vulnerable' and wanting 'a just and fairer society'. 

Villiers sat down, defeated. She knows the game is up. 

If I wasn't a heartless woman, with a long memory, I might have felt sorry for her. But I am, and I don't. 

There is no choice, on July 4th. Don't waste your vote on Greens, or Independents - and if you think Reform has any answers, please give your head a wobble: choose the only candidate who can remove Villiers from her seat, and help elect an alternative to the years' long succession of corrupt, incompetent and cruel Tory governments. 

We thought Britain was broken when Cameron was in charge, didn't we? Now we know we are at the threshold of something much, much worse. Do I think Labour is practically perfect, in every Poppins like way? No. Is Starmer without sin? No. I don't like his u turns on so many policies: but - he wants to be elected: politics is always, and will always be, the art of the possible, what can be done, rather than what we want. 

Welcome to the Borough of (Hopefully No Longer Broken) Barnet 24 May 2022 8:52 AM (2 years ago)

Ok. I've been putting it off, but here is a sentence I've wanted to write for ... at least twelve years. Well, longer, in fact, much longer.

We now live in the London Borough of (Hopefully No Longer Broken) Barnet.  

Yes. As you know, Barnet Tories have been given the order of the boot, by residents, on a scale that was unthinkable, before May 5th, and is still hard to comprehend. They now have only 22 seats - and Labour has nearly double, with 41. By any measure of success, this is quite extraordinary: by Barnet standards, it is nothing less than sensational. 

As predicted in the previous post, the Tory group Leader, (for the time being, anyway), Dan Thomas, has blindly led his group into political oblivion, despite his magnificent manifesto, based on such gambits as  a false claim about freezing council tax, and a fatal misreading of the rules of #angryaboutbins, and boasting of doing something that absolutely no one thinks twice about, ie emptying said bins, ie a service that we pay for, but somehow something for which they think they deserve congratulations, and four more years in charge of the borough.

Thomas was asked on the live BBC election results show for his opinion on the reasons for his party's disastrous performance. With a face like a slapped you know what, and through clenched teeth, he issued a carefully shaped response which blamed 'a perfect storm' of issues - which naturally had nothing whatsoever to do with him, or his party's performance in power. It was pleasing to see him use this phrase, however, as clearly he was subliminally remembering the prescient tone - and titles - of Broken Barnet's previous posts, here and here,  in which the Hendon Hub development fiasco, and the Tories's mishandling of it,  served as an appropriate metaphor for their looming nemesis.

It is true that national issues helped turn Barnet residents into Labour voters: or possibly, as Thomas would have us think, encouraged his loyal electorate to stay at home, sulking, rather than vote at all. 

Covid, Brexit, the incompetence, corruption and lawlessness of the Johnson government, all of this and more has had a major impact on the local elections this time. And yes, the boundary changes here were beneficial to Labour, to a certain extent. 

Whether or not Barnet Tories want to admit it, however, they are entirely responsible for the way the borough's local services have been mismanaged, and the way in which engagement with the democratic process has been made virtually impossible for residents at a time not only of increasingly dreadful standards of services, but also while witnessing, helplessly, an unprecedented level of monstrous over development - and most significantly, now encroaching on areas where formerly Tory leaning residents live. 

The tower blocks marring the skyline, the relentless demolition of much loved landmarks like the Medical Research Centre in Mill Hill, the White Bear pub in Hendon, the Lodge in Victoria Park; the replacement of perfectly usable housing for non affordable housing; the lack of enforcement of planning breaches in their neighbourhoods: all of this has begun to annoy and alienate the sort of people the Tories needed to keep onside. And here we are, and there they are, sitting on the opposition benches. 

Unnoticed by most, no doubt much to his chagrin, former disgraced Tory councillor, AM and village gossip Brian Coleman has taken his stubby little pencil and written a new blogpost (full of grammatical errors) with his thoughts on the election catastrophe. 

Rather to my alarm, he has somehow reached a point of view in agreement with me on quite a few issues. You ok, Brian? Or maybe it's me that needs a lie down.

No, I won't link to his blog as really, one should not encourage him. 

He focuses, anyway, on the ruthless (and pretty stupid) deselection of Tory members - especially women. He commends Hendon's Nizza Fluss for "her  principled and vocal opposition to the so called "Hendon Hub" , the absurd joint development with Middlesex University which post pandemic looks even more unnecessary ..." 

What he has to say about new Hendon councillor Alex Prager, I could not possibly repeat. Of course I didn't laugh.

Fascinating to see that the library cutter Reuben Thompstone's well deserved fall from grace, after standing in the unwinnable Underhill ward, was reportedly preceded by being turned down by three other areas, as well as his own ward of Golders Green. Awful shame. Brian advises him to ditch the 'silly moustache', amongst other things. Mmm. Not sure that will help. He is the moustache: the moustache is he. There is nothing else.

Dan Thomas, who not so long ago was happy to be seen with Coleman escorting the losing Tory candidate at the London Assembly count, gets little comfort from his chum now. He reckons he can only stagger on for a year at least, and then will have to return to his sun lounger (I paraphrase ...) And then:

I wish the new Labour Council well especially as they undue (sic) some of the dafter decisions of the last few years, Hendon Hub , North Finchley regeneration and of course the horrendous partnership with Capita that has proved a disaster and has had Tory Councillors tearing their hair out . 

Goodness me. Did you vote for it, Brian?

Over the last twelve years of publishing this blog, there has been nothing but a slow, insidious, incremental inevitability that the Tories would reach this point of self generated folly - and lose control of the council.

Twelve years and a thousand posts: so much awful stuff to report -  first from the time of MetPro, and the illegally operating, jackbooted thugs that the Tory councillors appointed to keep residents out of the Town Hall, a scandal which led to the discovery of thousands of missing contracts.

Next up: the late, much missed blogger Dan Hope spotted, late one night, that the Tories had sneaked onto a council agenda a proposal to award themselves massive rises in their allowances, even while lecturing us about the need for 'austerity'. We wrote about it: they were forced to retreat.

Then came the strategically organised embedding of the idea of mass outsourcing of services: facilitated by senior officers, consultants and representatives of potential tendering companies. Next came the courtship by Capita, in circumstances never fully understood. The Tories were easily fooled into signing up, without reading the contract that contained so many cleverly designed ways of squeezing every penny out of local taxpayers. We warned them, the unions warned them: they didn't want to know. But we were right, weren't we? And taxpayers have had to pay the cost: more than double the estimated cost.

We sat and watched, and reported, as Capita drew up a long list of 'development opportunities' - opportunities for themselves, camouflaged as 'regeneration'. The mass overdevelopment began, every last corner of the borough that could be grabbed was marked for use. They are only giving up on regeneration now because the opportunities themselves have dried up. Planning has become the favourite cash cow, with a system so saturated with conflicts of interest the entire borough has become helpless before the predation of major developers, pushed by lobbyists, and agents, and none of this in ways which are transparent or accountable. Labour must wrench this service from the hands of Capita, and take it back in house.

We sat and watched and reported, as Capita looked for every last gainshare payment and reward they could muster from such heartless measures as snatching the Freedom Passes of disabled residents, many of them with learning difficulties, some left stranded, helpless, as they discovered their passes had been summarily stopped, without warning. After the fuss we kicked up, this nasty trick was reversed. 

Another shameful episode was the attempt, in order to make a pre-election bribe via a tiny cut in council tax, (the cost of one cup of coffee a month) to take away the desperately needed respite care funding for families of children with severe and complex disabilities. Some of the parents came to the committee to beg the Tories not to do this, their children in wheelchairs. The children, as part of their conditions,  made a lot of involuntary noises - and were told twice by the Chair to be quiet. We reported this story: the cut was restored.

We sat and watched, reported and protested, as our once magnificent library service was gutted, and destroyed, by the hopeless philistinism, one might say hopeless nihilism, of the Barnet Tory councillors. They didn't care. None of them valued libraries, or the local museum. If only they had read more as children, or been taken to visit museums, maybe they might have developed a greater degree of imagination, and empathy, and not ended up as such a bunch of soulless fools, of course.

There have been many, many more stories like these: the millions spent on a depot that was bought for a song only just beforehand, the highly curious tale of the £23 million loan to Saracens, when they could not get a commercial loan; the absolute scandal of West Hendon, where social tenants were tricked out of their homes, and the land given away in secret to developers - throughout all of these we - bloggers, activists, residents, campaigners, have tried our best to question and report what is happening and engage with members, in order to take a meaningful role in the local democratic process. 

But the more successful we were in raising these issues, where so much was at stake, politically and financially, the more repressive were the measures taken by Barnet Tories to silence any challenge, or even debate. The Standards regime was effectively dismantled. The consultation process was trashed, and outcomes ignored. Worse, they amended the council's Constitution, to prevent any challenging questions of policy proposals or decisions: we were gagged, by our own elected representatives. In the end the only voice left for dissenting residents was at the ballot box.

So. My advice to Barnet Tories? 

Kick out Dan Thomas, and elect someone as Leader who has clear judgement, respect for the views of residents, and is prepared to work hard at communicating with those residents, listening to their views and putting their best interests at the front of every policy decision. 

Remember that representation as an elected member is a privilege, and conveys a duty to the community that put you in that position, and that you need to demonstrate to that community that you understand this. Find a modicum of humility, compassion for those in need, and a sense of civic pride - not the sort that relies on the pantomime of council meetings, and slap up dinners in the Haven, at our expense, but one that has a vision of a better place, and a map that might show us how to get there.

Learn from the mistakes of the last few administrations: put up candidates with some life experience, and some degree of competence in handling large budgets, rather than coopting chums or relatives who fancy a life of performative civic functions, rather than working hard for the community. 

Accept the concept of community, in fact: embrace 'the other', get to know the wide and wonderful diversity of the people of this borough, all cultures, faiths, ethnicities. Understand the needs of those who are less advantaged, vulnerable, disabled, and now struggling simply to survive. Show some consideration for older residents, who are excluded from the virtual world of technology in which you live. 

Learn to appreciate the value of culture, heritage: the need for social hubs - for a properly funded library service. 

Wean yourselves off a dependency on the lie of 'private good, public bad'. Don't listen to the whisperings of consultants, lobbyists, and senior officers. Easycouncil was a crashing failure: Your Choice Barnet was a crashing failure - admit it. You can't make profit from a public service - nor should you try.

Stop despising the very concept of social housing. Stop seeing the role of councillor as an agent for development, and developers. Immerse yourselves in the principles of integrity, honesty, transparency and accountability. Here's a novel idea: all of you declare ALL of your pecuniary interests. What have you got to hide?

Oh. 

Moving on. 

We are now in uncharted waters, with a Labour council set to run the borough for the first time ever. Unless you include the Labour-Libdem coalition which lasted from 1994 to 2002, of course. But this year's election saw the Libdems wiped out: hardly surprising as the two former councillors were both defectors from other parties, and the Leader, Gabriel Rozenberg, who apparently thinks he will be Libdem MP for the new Finchley and Muswell Hill parliamentary constituency, (he won't) was not elected in West Finchley, where he chose, rather foolishly, to stand rather than in his previous ward of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where he might at least have depended on some personal support. Now for the first time in many, many years: there is no third party represented on the council.

Mrs Angry's advice for the new Labour administration, then? 

Stand by, comrades.

Things have perhaps not got off to the greatest start, from my point of view. Let's hope it is just a misunderstanding. But I reserve judgement, at this stage - and I have to remain critical, as I would be with a Tory administration.

Because you see, the council agenda for tonight's first Full Council meeting, as spotted by fellow blogger John Dix, has put forward changes to the Constitution in regard to the rights of residents to engage in council meetings. Good, you might think, remembering the extraordinarily drastic restrictions imposed by the last, hard right Tory council.

But they have kept the restrictions - and worse, have devalued the already devalued Residents' Forums by amalgamating them with area committees. This means effectively that residents will still be unable to question, in any meaningful way, their elected representatives at any council meeting.

You may recall that Labour members joined residents in expressing their outrage at the gagging laws brought in by the Tory administration. 

We then discover that they are adopting the same measures. 

Once this was revealed, excuses were made, we are going to consult people on engagement before making changes - well, changes to the Constitution have been made, with no consultation - and that 'governance' wouldn't let them make more changes at this stage. 

The truth is that some of the more right of centre members of the Labour group have always somewhat resented the way in which bloggers, activists and campaigners have held Barnet Tories to account - that is to say, feeling obliged, at times, to take on the function of an effective opposition. 

Latest news on this, however, is, as the meeting looms large this evening, that hints are being dropped that the gagging rules now will now be dropped, at the next Constitution meeting. Wot, no consultation? Ok with the Monitoring Officer, is it, whose contract was renewed, just before the end of the Tory administration? 

If this is the case, it really should have been made clear and indicated right from the off, so as to manage expectations.

Watching the Labour Leader on election night telling the BBC that it wasn't so much Labour who won the council as the Tories who lost it was an astonishing moment. Apart from the somewhat  message it sent to all those activists who worked so hard to canvas for Labour before election day, it struck a warning note: being too comfortable in opposition is perhaps not the best preparation for delivering the radical new administration that is needed in order to undo the damage of so much reckless, heartless Tory policies imposed on this borough.

Labour must ignore the blandishments and assurances of the senior management team. In fact, get rid of as many of them as you can. They have become too used to directing policy, rather than implementing decisions taken as part of the democratic process, by members. This suited the Tory administrations, due to their natural tendency to laziness, and apathy. This is how we ended up with the disastrous Capita contracts - consultants and senior officers - with the help of one or two key Tory councillors manoeuvring behind the scenes - senior officers were relentlessly pushing through the proposals, meeting in secret, making major decisions about the shape of the mass outsourcing, without even informing the then Tory Leader, as we saw at the time of the second contract proposals. 

As fellow blogger John Dix has predicted, the senior management team is likely to try to lure the new Labour administration into thinking they have no option but to extend the contracts. This is not true. And it will be a sharp test of judgement, if they listen to this, and do allow any extension. The benefit will be to Capita's increasingly worried shareholders, not Barnet's range of failing council services. 

The Labour group is without question a collection of decent, well meaning people, and there are some excellent new members now going to be put in positions of great responsibility in the new council. 

Barnet is lucky to have hard working, conscientious Labour councillors who, unlike  many of the previous Tory representatives, are fully dedicated to their roles, and have a genuine sense of civic vocation and duty, as well as an acute understanding of the needs of the residents of this borough whose voices have been overlooked for so long. 

A council which has people like Ross Houston, Anne Clarke, Sara Conway and Arjun Mittra, and newcomers like Liron Vellman, in positions of influence, will be in safe hands. And I hope one of them will soon take over as Leader, for a newly confident, newly enthused administration.

Is Barnet still Broken? Yes: look at the state of us - but at least now we are, at long last, on the road to recovery.  

Welcome to Broken Barnet: soon to be under new management 4 May 2022 5:03 AM (2 years ago)

The London Borough of Broken Barnet has always been of interest to the media, especially at election time, partly because of now fading memories of the area's association with Margaret Thatcher, and more latterly because this borough has been seen as a flagship model for some of the more radical (albeit failed) Tory policies of recent years - the large scale outsourcing of public services, for example: the so called 'EasyCouncil' mode of local authority administration. 

This May, however, Barnet is once more attracting a lot of attention for a different reason: because it is the most marginal borough in the London local elections, and the former Tory stronghold looks likely to be taken by Labour - an extraordinary development, in truth. 

The factors that are seem certain to deliver such an outcome are both local and national: clearly there is widespread dissatisfaction with the incompetence, corruption and dishonesty of Boris Johnson's government, as well as the impact of Brexit, Covid, and the relentless cull of rights we have always taken for granted: the right to free protest being the latest victim of assault.

Locally the picture is perhaps even more acute, with the breakdown in public services and the rampant over-development of the borough now so clearly evident, and increasingly so, crucially, to Barnet Tories' once staunchly loyal voters. 

The Tories have only themselves to blame.

Nine years ago, they decided to give two massive contracts to Capita, for the provision of council services. They signed the contracts without reading them fully, which is why, so many years later, as audited by fellow blogger John Dix, Mr Reasonable, whose forensic pre-election post you can read here, the contract fees have ended up costing us more than £586 million, rather than the estimated £225 million- that's you and me, the council tax payers, dumped with more than double the original cost. 

Value for money? Hardly.

We were promised better services for less money. This was not what happened. 

Apart from the massive overspend, the standard of services has visibly declined. On the way to the polling station, voters will walk on pavements unrepaired, or drive along roads littered with potholes. They have noticed the proliferation of unaffordable development, no longer just in Labour wards, but increasingly, as Capita reaches the end of its 'development opportunity' list, encroaching on Tory voter areas - such as in the heart of historic Hendon, where the now notorious Hub plans have been both promoted and approved by Tory councillors, and which will see the imposition of a 21st century campus, complete with grossly inappropriate, multi storey blocks in the middle of not just one, but two Conservation areas, stuffed with Georgian properties, a Saxon church and a number of listed 20th century civic buildings.

The Hub plans include the wrecking of the listed Hendon Library, once the central branch of the former Beacon Status library service, cut and shrunk in a hugely expensive 'refurbishment' in 2017, this branch now handed over to Middlesex University, as was the local history museum round the corner at the Grade 2** listed Church Farmhouse, whose local history collection, donated over many years by residents, was flogged off at auction. History, and heritage and  are disposable commodities, for our Tory councillors.

The history of the Hendon Hub development, hatched in secret years ago, and ruthlessly pushed, in the face of all reasonable argument, tells the story of the crassly materialistic values of Barnet Tories, steeped in anti-intellectualism, relentless opposed to any sense of community, history or culture - contemptuous of the idea of any public sector service, free at the point of use.

Barnet Tories like to think of themselves as continuing the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. In fact she would have been ashamed of them: a bunch of third rate carpet baggers, with no vision, no conscience, no sense of civic pride, or duty. She would have been horrified at the destruction wrought on the library service: something she saw as vital to self education, independence and social mobility: a ladder of opportunity they have kicked away from those residents in Barnet most in need of access to books, IT support, information - study space: community space.

Here in Hendon, we meet the gaping fault line in the Tory plan of action: the freedom they have given to Capita in terms of their licence to make money out of planning and regeneration in Barnet has expired, as far as the tolerance of residents is concerned, anyway.

The developments being promoted in Barnet might be acceptable, if they met the needs of local people. But they do not. They even fail to meet their own local plans - in the case of Hendon, their own policies deliberately ignored, as they openly admit.

Developers know, moreover, that if they are obliged to offer a small quota of affordable housing in their plans, once planning permission is granted, they can plead 'non viability' and get this requirement quietly dropped. This is just one of the shameless practices promoted by the privatised planning service, along with many other activities which favour developers rather than deliver a fair and open service for the benefit of residents.

Hence we have ended up with a lot of very expensive unaffordable housing, which increases the population, largely by renters living in properties bought off plan by overseas investors, but is not supported by any adequate investment in the infrastructure needed to support the new level of incomers: in schools, healthcare, leisure facilities, parks, retail services. 

As the dissatisfaction with the Tory administration has grown, so too has their determination to become less and less accountable to residents - and voters. 

The right to hold councillors to account has been savagely restricted - the council constitution was amended to make the actions and decisions of elected representatives virtually unchallengeable: effectively there is no longer any right to raise valid questions at council meetings, and to hold our elected representatives to account, no matter how significant and complex the issue. 

Consultations on council policy have become Nonsultations. Legally obliged to pay lip service to this requirement, the outcomes, even if the opposition to their plans is unanimous, are routinely ignored and the Tories and senior officers and Capita simply carry on with their own agendas: agendas that do not prioritise the best interests of the people of this borough, as in the most obvious example of housing. Their own plans say we need affordable homes for families - they ignore all reasoned objections and approve huge, ugly multi storey developments that simply do not address local need. 

Since Covid, Tory members have stopped all surgeries: this no show continues even though their own government leaders lie that 'Covid is over';  Tory members are so unfearful of the virus they largely refuse to attend committee meetings in masks, or to observe any restrictions: indeed some of them are conspiracist anti-vaxxers, and see such sensible measures as unnecessary and an infringement of their liberty. Yet they still hide behind the Covid pretext for keeping their own constituents at a distance.

Residents' Forums are pointless now, with similar restrictions on questions, and the inevitable response to any significant challenge being that the point will be 'noted' - and no further action detailed.

There have been election hustings held locally: barely advertised - and the Tories have failed to attend the last two. This is a grave mistake, as they should remember from last year's Assembly husting, where the Tory candidate chickened out, and Cllr Zinkin had to take his place. Labour's Anne Clarke won, of course. In truth, Zinkin seems to do all the heavy lifting for his group: the current leader Dan Thomas is hardly seen - although now he keeps popping up on Twitter in canvassing photos, with a rictus grin, trying to hold on to hope that the ungrateful residents and taxpayers of Broken Barnet will not kick him out of post. 

Boundary changes have redrawn the wards in parts of Childs Hill, Cricklewood and Golders Green. Zinkin is now standing in the new Childs Hill, with Nizza Fluss (wrongly deselected in Hendon - see below) and former Labour Childs Hill councillorBarnet and Camden AM, the exceptionally hard working Anne Clarke, is now in Cricklewood with former Woodhouse councillor Alan Schneiderman, who is one of the most capable Labour members. A new Tory hopeful in this ward is Yosef David, who seems like a nice chap - but was formerly in the Brexit party, along with Nigel Farage.

Thomas's party's election manifesto appears to consist only of a reverse #angryaboutbins gambit, ie expecting voters to be humbly grateful that their rubbish is taken away, (while also expecting them not to notice their cars bouncing in out of the thousands of potholes littering our roads, as a result of the botched Highways service run by Crapita). Oh and they are claiming they have frozen council tax. This is not true, in fact they have raised it but are calling the increase something else, thinking you won't notice. Always a mistake, to take your voters for fools.

Thomas, it has to be said, shows poor judgement at the best of times, and in terms of political instinct generally. He has failed to become elected twice in parliamentary seats, or to be nominated for the Hendon seat instead of Matthew Offord: he failed in his own bid to become elected to the London Assembly after his chum Coleman's fall - he has only ever held a safe council seat in Finchley. And now he is leading Barnet Tories into electoral peril, to complete the score.

What does it say about the style of administration foisted on this borough by Barnet Tories, when residents cannot engage meaningfully with their elected members through consultation on developments and other major decisions that have direct and lasting impact on their lives? 

It means that those residents are removed from the democratic process, and powerless to share in the governance of their communities. Or so the Tories think. Thought. Now there are two Judicial Reviews being taken by local campaigners, one in regard to the Hendon Hub, and resident Franca Oliffe is standing on behalf of residents infuriated by the Tories' behaviour over the Hub plans. Franca has reportedly been receiving a warm welcome on local doorsteps: Tory candidates should be worried. Ignoring the opinions and the  best interests of your local residents - and voters - is never a good move. 

The other JR is as a result of the planned development on the community green space at Finchley Memorial Hospital, approved by Barnet Tories last year. Yes, the same party whose leader, Dan Thomas, claimed in an infantile motion put to Council recently that:

 "This Conservative Council would not and will not build on our parks or green spaces ..."

Both developments are in middle-class, residential areas: the sort of area Tories must retain to have any real hope of electoral success. Many of those behind these legal challenges are the sort of people who would normally be Tory voters: their votes have been lost. And that is part of the problem: Tory members have allowed Capita and developers free reign in this borough to the extent that they have undermined their own electoral stability. Labour councillors have told me that overdevelopment and planning has frequently come up on the doorstep, when canvassing Tory and marginal areas.

As well as residents pursuing legal challenges, there have been several, very serious complaints now made to external bodies regarding the way in which the Hendon Hub was alleged to have been promoted and approved by the Tory group in Barnet, following a refusal by the authority to admit any wrongdoing after investigating itself, and finding itself innocent of any charge. 

Watch this space.

Looking at the wards as they are now, redrawn, and favouring Labour, it is pretty clear that even without national and local factors bearing down upon them, Barnet's Tory councillors are going to be hard pressed to do well in this election. Riven by factionalism within and between the three constituencies, they seem to have made some very odd choices for ward candidates. 

Barnet Tories' long history of misogyny is not news: at the last election, long serving, loyal councillor Joan Scannell was ruthlessly deselected from her seat, because she was not popular with the right people. This time round, two more older women, have been deselected - one fought back and had to be shoved into another seat, and one was unpopular with her colleagues, was then alleged to have made offensive remarks about another candidate, and left the Tory party to join the Libdems. 

The first of these is Nizza Fluss, who was a councillor for Hendon. Her crime was to refuse to support the Hendon Hub plans: and she was punished accordingly, with deselection. She complained about the way in which this was done, rightly won her case, and is now a candidate in Childs Hill. She has continued to oppose the Hub plans, and deserves credit for her integrity and courage. 

The second is West Hendon councillor Helene Richman: the background to the allegations about her conduct is here. Cllr Richman apologised for the offence her remarks had made - but could it be that there is more to this story than meets the eye?  At all events, she is now standing as the Libdem candidate in the same ward. A ward that the Tories won last time round, but are unlikely to retain. Standing for Labour is the redoubtable Andrea Bilbow, who runs a well known charity, and two other new people.

On the theme of misogyny, it is notable that the seats in which the Tories have the most hope of returning councillors have no female candidates. Unless you are an obedient, younger woman, or married to a councillor, you now stand almost no chance of standing as a Tory in this borough. 

There are in fact many first time candidates in this election, from all parties. As well as a number of paper candidates who might well find themselves elected, by default.

The combination of changes in the boundaries, and the numbers of councillors in each ward, as well as the retirement - or death - of some long serving councillors is the reason for the new intake: the outcome will be very interesting. Standing down is Mill Hill Tory, expert linguist and silver fox, John Hart. The handle bar moustachioed Cllr Hart is as old as time itself, of course, even older than that other scheduled ancient monument, Hampstead Garden Suburb's John Marshall, who is also retiring. 

It seems likely that the loss of old timers and the proliferation of new candidates will not help the Tories. A lot of loyal personal votes will be lost - and some of the sideways moves of current Tory members, panicking at the prospect of losing their council seats, is rather baffling. 

The former library cutter Reuben Thompstone has lost his safe seat in Golders Green (room for two only and therefore baggsied by father and son act Melvin and Dean Cohen). He has turned up as a candidate in Underhill, of all places, which is likely to go to Labour, and this move might look rather suspiciously as if the Tories were not bothered about keeping him in a seat. 

Excuse me while I look for my tiniest of tiny violins.

Mill Hill attracts all sorts of ever hopeful candidates - ie the Libdems, despite coming third last time. Fellow blogger Roger Tichborne is standing again, as well as your man Richard Logue, who was, hang on, let me get this right ... Labour, then Libdem, then Labour and now Libdem again. Keeping up? Rather amusingly, standing against her Uncle Roger, for Labour, is Pascale Fanning-Tichborne. I imagine they have a bet on to see who beats whom.

In two Finchley wards - East and West - Libdems are standing in full defiance of the fact that the best they can do is split the opposition vote and return the Tory candidate. Both wards have hard working Labour members, and this is a pointless exercise, of course.

Oh, and in Totteridge, here is a well known name: former long time Child's Hill member and old chum Jack Cohen, who is not so much a Libdem as a Lib, and a good sort, (even if he doesn't know his rivets from his screws). Clearly I could not possibly suggest that you vote for a Libdem ... but Jack has promised I can be his Mayoress if he wins & miraculously becomes Mayor. Can you imagine? All those free buffets, and the chance to sit in the council chamber, smirking at the Tory opposition ...?

Of course Totteridge (and Woodside, to which it is now joined) is the fiefdom of the Cornelius councillors Richard (former Leader) and his wife Alison. Short of an armed uprising, nothing will dislodge these two from their seats. Also I think the Barnet Libdem policy (which came as a surprise to at least one of their candidates, didn't it, Simon?) of developing the Green Belt, may not go down awfully well in any part of Barnet, but particularly in Totteridge, and Mill Hill, and Underhill and all the other wards blessed with at least one green area where the Tories and their developer partners can't build any blocks of flats.

There are of course other parties standing in the elections: from the Green Party, the Women's Equality Party - and one or two individuals with no party connection. 

Among Labour's new set are some very promising younger candidates: in Whetstone, Liron Vellman and Ella Rose, for example, and in Edgwarebury, Josh Tapper (he of Gogglebox fame). One impressed resident (ok, my brother) tells me that they have noticed Josh regularly working in a local park, quietly clearing up litter. This is the sort of community spirit we need: and something that has been so sadly lacking under the Tory regime. 

In truth that Tory regime has been lacking in so much: gone are the days of old school Tories, doing their best for the people of Barnet: following a vocation for civic service, and even philanthropy. 

One Nation Tories are short in supply, in Broken Barnet, as they are in the House of Commons. The parallels between what is happening in Parliament, and locally, here in Broken Barnet, are hardly coincidental. They are a representation of a vaccum deep in the heart's core of the Tory psyche, in the era of Johnson: a loss of moral credibility - of moral purpose.

If you go to a committee meeting in the borough's Town Hall, at Hendon, bang in the centre of the area now waiting for the destruction to be wrought by the Hub plan, you walk up the stairs, past portraits of Aldermen and women,  and long dead, former councillors, the predecessors of the current hatch of Tory members, who so much enjoy dressing up in the inherited, moth eaten robes of office, and taking turn to play Mayor.

The original Aldermen and women, councillors,  took up their roles because they wanted to make things better: they wanted to give ordinary people a park to enjoy, on their days off, or a library to give them access to self improvement. Post Thatcher, what do we have? Tories with a sense of entitlement, who enjoy the status they think is conveyed by becoming a councillor, and the generous allowances, but feel little sense of obligation to the people who voted them into office. 

The Town Hall, at Hendon, is one of those civic buildings about to be surrounded by the hideous blocks of the Hub plan, supposedly for students, but likely to end up as speculative residential housing. It stands next to the listed library, about to be gutted, its library function removed, and the property given over to Middlesex University. What would the men and women who made such efforts to open this library think of their latter day heirs in the council chamber? I think I know. They would be appalled.

As well as complaints made to the Council about the Hub fiasco, there have also been more than one formal complaint made about the alleged failure by Barnet Council properly to investigate and act upon the non-declaration of pecuniary interests by a number of Tory councillors.

Several Conservative members have been investigated by the Monitoring Officer in regard to such declarations. And several Conservative members have been found by the Monitoring Officer to be in breach of the Code of Conduct as a result.

What happened? Were they sanctioned, for their breaches? No. No further action. 

In at least two serious cases reported to the MO, no proper response was given at all, despite being promised.

Why is that? 

This matter, and other complaints from a number of residents, is now being referred to the Local Government Ombudsman. Again: watch this space.

Barnet Tories have allowed a culture to become embedded in their group, and in their administration of this council, in which there is a refusal to obey the duty of transparency and accountability that they owe to their electors, the residents and taxpayers. 

Conflicts of interest abound, at every level of the council, not least because of the multiple roles that Capita plays in so many areas of council services - particularly in the role of planning and development. And engagement in what should be the shared purpose of a strong, healthy, local democratic process has been deliberately stifled by the Tories, particularly in recent years, to the point where it does not function at all.

The overarching duty of all elected representatives is to abide by the Nolan Principles for Public Life:

1. The Seven Principles of Public Life

The Seven Principles of Public Life (also known as the Nolan Principles) apply to anyone who works as a public office-holder. This includes all those who are elected or appointed to public office, nationally and locally, and all people appointed to work in the Civil Service, local government, the police, courts and probation services, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), and in the health, education, social and care services. All public office-holders are both servants of the public and stewards of public resources. The principles also apply to all those in other sectors delivering public services.

1.1 Selflessness

Holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest.

1.2 Integrity

Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.

1.3 Objectivity

Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.

1.4 Accountability

Holders of public office are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.

1.5 Openness

Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.

1.6 Honesty

Holders of public office should be truthful.

1.7 Leadership

Holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour and treat others with respect. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs.

A party which does not respect and implement the Nolan Principles at every level of its administration, is simply not fit to stand any candidates for election. 

Here in Barnet we have had years of increasingly unaccountable Tory governance, and in the last four years, this antipathy to the principle of transparency, the exclusion of residents from the democratic process, and the abandonment of acceptable standards of ethical governance has left the borough in a state of ruin. 

What is happening in Westminster, led by the amoral, incompetent government of Boris Johnson, is happening here. 

We cannot continue like this. 

It's time for change.

The only way of stopping this borough from further depredation and decline, of calling an end to the  easy pickings for developers, contractors and consultants, and of wrenching back control of our community, our environment, our history and our built heritage - protecting our public services, our most vulnerable and disadvantaged residents - is to vote Labour and put a group of decent, honest, hard working representatives in a place of power to do good, and help rebuild what we have lost.

Labour Deputy Leader Ross Houston, Victoria Park

Storming the Town Hall: Barnet Tories, the lie of 'Regeneration' - and the May Elections 25 Jan 2022 9:19 AM (3 years ago)

 

Last week I was asked by a BBC journalist preparing for the May elections in London about the prospect of a Labour win in Barnet. Yes, this is a real thing. Hold on to your hats.

There has been much speculation in the last week or so about a number of Tory held London boroughs that may well be taken by Labour: my view is that - for the first time in the ten years or so since I've been writing about local politics - it seems more likely than not that such a result is a genuine possibility, here in Barnet, and increasingly begins to look like the most likely outcome. 

Tory canvassers are secretly panicking, and Labour canvassers reporting more and more former Tory voters who are no longer prepared to support the party in this borough.

The reasons for this are pretty obvious: although in the past local elections were about local issues, certainly this time round they will be strongly influenced by national concerns: Covid, Brexit - the universal sense of disgust at the corruption and incompetence of Boris Johnson's government. Another important factor is the impact of new ward boundary changes: in this borough, changes that favour Labour.

Most important of all, however, in Barnet, is the disaffection of what were traditional Tory voters as a result of the dire performance of council services managed and delivered by the authority's contractor, Capita - and because of the ever encroaching plague of manic over development in the borough, a phenomenon which now has even the leafiest areas entirely in its relentless grip. Over development which is not being supported by any adequate level of investment in desperately needed infrastructure and support in terms of schools, healthcare, parks, parking, transport - retail outlets. In many cases the developments are removing such community assets in the course of clearing the way for profit driven 'regeneration'. 

Far from meeting local housing need, this non stop process is being promoted purely for the benefit of developers, and for Capita, which amongst the fat portfolio of contracts it still retains, holds planning the most desirable. Most desirable, because it is the most lucrative: capable, as we have seen, of generating huge levels of profit for the company, in terms of fee based income streams, such as the deeply non-transparent pre-application 'advice' service for developers and their agents: some of the latter having been only recently senior planning officers with ... Barnet/Capita. Applications with fee based advice, data obtained by FOI suggests, are far more likely to be successful.

Remember that, despite the issue having been raised - by me and others - constantly over several years of the contract, it is only recently that the service that Capita Re offered to applicants and agents to 'name your own planning officer' has been quietly dropped, despite the clear risk of 'conflicts of interest' - especially in the case of the agents who are former colleagues of the planning officers with whom they deal.

Last year, raising the question of why details about pre-planning advice, and the name of the planning officer who was dealing with it, had vanished from Capita Re's application forms, I was told that this was due to changes by the government. Lo and behold, last week, on checking the application form for another awful development - six blocks plotted for the former Homebase site in North Finchley - there again was the question, on the form, but ignored. Yes, fee based advice had been paid for. Tick. What was it? 'As advised.' Who gave it? 'Mr.' Mr Who? They weren't saying. Why not?

Back to the old Barnet/Capita tradition of counter transparency then,  and a practice that obscures and obstructs our right to know how large developments are enabled and encouraged by the privatised planning service. On raising this again and complaining about the practice, I was offered no explanation but - a meeting with the Head of Planning, to discuss the matter. Nothing further has happened about that, funnily enough. 

Until very recently, as well as planning, Capita ran 'regeneration' in Barnet. This is an activity which purports to bring new life to failing communities, but does this by removing the people who live there - and any of those community assets that get in the way, like libraries - and inviting in developers to make whopping profits from luxury housing developments: the taller the better, although the tallest only in Labour wards, of course. 

Regeneration, for Capita, went by the name of 'development opportunities', and there is almost no town centre, suburb or open space in the borough which has not been targeted for these appalling schemes. 

In West Hendon, land worth millions was given to Barratt London in a secret deal, secret, that is, until revealed by the requirement for disclosure at the CPO Inquiry. 

Finchley Memorial Hospital: plans hatched in secret, again, and accidently exposed some years ago, were last year, during Covid, slipped out under the clever cover now of providing homes for NHS workers - to be built on the local community green space. There is nothing to stop these properties being sold on the open market, in fact, rather than to key workers, who are very unlikely to be queuing up for them (as other attempted developments of this type have shown) and it is highly likely this will happen, after the usual plea of non viability is put in, at a later stage. 

North Finchley is now being laid wide open to another assault in the name of 'regeneration': more unaffordable housing, and developers being given, by our Tory councillors, the local Arts Depot, and ... the lovely, historic library. Which brings us back to ... yes, the Hendon Hub. 

The story of the Hendon Hub development is hugely significant, because it perfectly demonstrates almost every rotten element of what has gone wrong not only in this Tory run authority, but on a national scale, encouraged by the current government.

Conflicts of interest in abundance, at every level of the council; hidden agendas, mass development given a free hand, regardless of the impact on the built environment, our built heritage, and our communities, all promoted by commercial interests, and here in Barnet, too many Tory councillors with little or no interest in representing the people who elected them, nearly four years ago. 

Unfortunately for the Tories in Barnet, their failure to restrain the extent to which their privatised regeneration and planning services operate has now fatally compromised their own electoral chances in May. 

The council's contractors will hardly be bothered what happens then. They have had a good run in Barnet: most of their fees came from the process of organising 'Regeneration' and planning, rather than the end result itself.

Recently the inevitable moment came when more failing services were taken back from Capita, as well as Regeneration. This is no major loss to them at this stage: there is pretty much nothing left that they can develop - but it has happened too late to prevent the detrimental impact on many residential areas and town centres. And in Hendon, the Hub land grab, memorably described by one resident last week, as a 'brutal acquisition', cooked up years ago, but kept under cover until late on in the process, has infuriated local residents who live in the heart of the oldest and most historic part of Hendon, which has dozens of listed buildings, and comprises not one but two Conservation Areas. And of course these residents are the sort of people the Tories desperately need to support them, in order to hold on to their seats.

Only one Hendon Tory councillor, Nizza Fluss, has had the courage and integrity necessary to oppose these plans, and truly represent her constituents, who, as the ludicrous 'nonsultation' process demonstrated, are outraged by the attempt to force a development of crashingly ugly, modern multi storey blocks - supposedly intended as student accommodation and other campus space for the ever expanding Middlesex University. Ever expanding in the past, that is: post Covid, post Brexit, these plans are clearly no longer viable, you would think. It makes no difference. Development must be pushed wherever there is an opportunity for profit.

Cllr Fluss was deselected by certain fellow party members in the Hendon Tory association, following her opposition of the Hub development.

Barnet Tories don't like women who answer back, or do the right thing, instead of doing as they are told, by the men, of course. 

On the 10th January, at a meeting of the Strategic Planning Committee, at Hendon Town Hall, in the centre of one of the two Conservation areas at risk from the Hub plans,Tory members ignored the unanimous, detailed and clearly articulated opposition to the plans from residents, and approved the plans in a remarkable show of unity on a planning decision which of course is supposed not be whipped.

One thing that emerged from the (strictly limited by the Chair) farce of pretending to consider the arguments for and against the plans, at this meeting, was that the much vaunted replacement library, which is allegedly going to be squeezed into the ground floor and basement of the planned Rotunda building opposite the Town Hall, is still shrinking in size, almost as if it will completely disappear, in the end. (Which is quite likely, in fact, like the Invisible New Library not built as promised in North Finchley).

When such fierce local opposition to the Hub plans had become apparent, half way through the Nonsultation, the developers tried to persuade residents of the benefits of having their listed library taken away - given away, and gutted - they attempted then to make the scheme seem more 'community focused' by declaring the library would now accommodate a Safer Neighbourhood police unit. 

Whether or not they checked if the Met can actually afford to staff such a unit is not known - but clearly this eats into the space meant for the substitute library. 835 square metres reduced to 675. Which must accommodate every other library function: adult & children's borrowing, PCs, stacks, storage, staff space, study areas, printers, a community area & all the other lovely new functions they dangled in front of residents, like 'Makerspaces'. Ah: but hang on - we've forgotten Local Studies and Archives, which currently require 160 square metres - and specialised storage for documents. Which leaves ...  515 square metres - not even a third of Hendon Library's original space. To put it in terms that are easier to visualise, this is less than the space of two tennis courts - for all the normal library functions, of what was once the central borough library, plus the extra wonderful things they claimed would be there. It just doesn't make sense, does it?

You can listen to a recording of this meeting here - and marvel at the way the Tory members pushed through the hugely unpopular plans, ignoring all reasoned objections. Some light relief is afforded by the Chair who steamrollered the meeting to its conclusion failing to remember her mic was picking up her whispered remarks, throughout the meeting, to senior officers ...

There was a pronounced sense of somewhat desperate, blind determination from those pushing through this proposal at the meeting, that night. I suppose they were keen to get the plans underway before May - if indeed they go ahead. 

As this meeting and other related matters are now understood to be the subject of more than one very serious complaint, I am not going to comment in detail on what happened, or the further implications: but it is reported that there are some deeply alarming issues which have emerged from the meeting itself, and from the process of 'consultation', over the last year or so. 

Watch this space.

One characteristic of Barnet Tories is that, like lemmings, they will head towards danger with free abandon, thinking that they are immune from any consequences. Frankly, most of them are pretty dim, and don't care about much other than retaining their seats., which usually requires nothing more than unquestioning loyalty to the current leader - and a safe seat, of course. None of them are politically astute, and the current leader is particularly tone deaf when it comes to gauging the mood of voters. Still, it came as a real surprise to see their latest idiotic move. 

You may recall that a few years ago, the Tory group supported a truly awful Motion to Full Council, proposed by the golden boy himself, Cllr Longstaffe, claiming that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is 'An Enemy of the People'. Bad enough, you might think. Here comes another one., this time proposed by the Tory 'Leader', Dan Thomas, and due to be 'debated at tonight's Full Council meeting. 

This puerile nonsense reads as if it was written by Thomas, in biro, on the back of a shopping list, to be honest: publishing it all here, however, so you can see the extent of sheer childishness and mendacity of this motion, and this Tory group, attacking the Opposition, with rather touching lack of awareness of the theory of Freudian projection (to say nothing about the curious accusation of 'impotence' ...)

Political Discourse Within Barnet

Council notes that:

1. The Barnet Labour Party and members of the Opposition have made misleading claims about this Administration’s policies and achievements.

2. Contrary to Barnet Labour’s misinformation:

a. Barnet has not only maintained weekly collections of refuse and recycling under this

Conservative administration, unlike any neighbouring borough – which are all run by

Labour– but we also have the lowest number of missed bin collections in London.

This is of course a feeble attempt to play, without permission, a round of 'Angry About Bins' (© Mrs Angry) but scoring an own goal, from the council which has stupidly stopped collecting food waste, and now charges householders an annual fee for the privilege of having their green waste collected - occasionally.

b. Council Tax in Barnet has been kept lower than that of any of our neighbouring boroughs for

the past decade, and will remain so. In real terms, Council Tax in Barnet has been reduced by

5.2% over the past decade — despite the Labour Mayor of London taking an ever-increasing

sum from Council Tax.

Barnet Tories kept council tax so low, they were unable properly to fund basic council services. In one particularly infamous incident, they cut desperately needed funding for respite care for the families of children with profound and complex disabilities, so they could boast about reducing the tax bill by the equivalent of  a few pence a week.  The families were reduced to having to go in person to the council to demand this funding restored - only to be told that their children were making too much noise in the committee room. Public outrage saw the cut grudgingly reversed, after this appalling move: but what a thing to do ...

c. Barnet has zero “non-decent” Council homes, while our neighbouring boroughs have

thousands. Labour Enfield alone have over 4,000.

'Zero non decent council homes'. Got that? Apart from the fact that thousands of homeless residents have been kicked out of the borough, the Dear Leader seems to have forgotten his own appearance on the Victoria Derbyshire show (after refusing to appear the week before) trying to defend the truly abominable condition of flats in West Hendon, in which council tenants' children were forced to live with cockroaches biting them, rats running around their homes, and their walls covered in mould.

d. Barnet’s outsourcing has saved millions – ensuring value for money for our residents.

Ah yes. The old story. Utterly untrue. The short list of guaranteed savings is restricted, and minimal, and pales in comparison to the many, many millions surplus paid to Capita, so far, that was never foreseen, although it should have been, by the Tory councillors who signed the contracts

e. Barnet has successfully stood up to developers and has been successful in having storeys

removed from proposed towers. The ineffectual Labour group is impotent to influence the

Labour Mayor of London’s desire for ever larger tower blocks in London. This is evidenced by

the Mayor’s support for the original B&Q proposal and those regarding tower blocks over

tube stations, such as a recent High Barnet application.

Frankly this is so risible, it is hard to know where to begin. Or end. It is reported that the Monitoring Officer removed the word 'wilful' in regard to the idiotic accusations against Labour - but why was this Motion allowed to stand at all?

'Barnet has successfully stood up to developers' ? What a f*cking joke.

Tory Barnet has actively welcomed and encouraged, with the help of Capita, a scale of over development that has ignored the real housing needs of ordinary families. The needs of developers are put before all other considerations.

Clearly the Labour group - and the Labour AM, Anne Clarke, are able to communicate effectively with the Mayor of London to moderate any multi-storey plans, or he would not have done so, in regard to the tube station developments. Perhaps if the Tory group were not set on smearing the Mayor as an "enemy of the People", he might be more inclined to include them in a grown up discussion about the borough's needs.

For Thomas even to dare to pretend to oppose multi storey blocks is absurd. These have gone up all over the Western side of the borough, carefully avoiding the Tory areas elsewhere - except in Hendon's Conservation areas, where clearly something has gone awfully wrong in their judgement, and someone's influence has convinced them to commit electoral suicide, rather than listen to the overwhelming objections of their local residents. 

f. This Conservative Council would not and will not build on our parks or green spaces. This has been made clear a number of times over the past year in various committees and at Full Council.

This statement is on a Johnsonian scale of 'fiction'. The Tories approved the development of the community green space at Finchley Memorial Hospital last June, despite fierce opposition from local residents incensed at the loss of their amenity. They were caught considering the use of 'low value' parks and green spaces for placing solar energy facilities and battery storage. And last year saw the construction of a block of flats in Victoria Park, after they sold off and allowed the demolition of the historic, Arts & Crafts style park keeper's Lodge. 

3. The above are responses to only some examples of the mistruths stated by the Labour group.

4. The Labour Party and Labour councillors made exaggerated claims during the East Barnet by election, which the people of East Barnet clearly saw through. However, such claims risk causing polarisation, unnecessary upset and worry amongst local residents.

Ah. Presumably a reference to the hugely inappropriate Gas Works development, which proposes more of those blocks Thomas claims to oppose, but is apparently happy to see in an area with too many Labour voters. The only affordable housing here will punish the undeserving poor by shoving them right next to the railway line, with windows that can't open, (because of the noise levels being too high for approval). Once they realised the flats will over heat, as a consequence, they have designed a cooling system that the already disadvantaged tenants will have to pay for. 

But just imagine: Barnet Tories accusing someone else of 'causing polarisation'!

And on we go:

Council believes that:

1. Misinformation about the state of the Council, and this administration’s policies and history, are little more than a sign of desperation from the Labour group.

Misinformation from the Council, and its contractors and consultants, (eg in the case of the Hendon Hub - Historic England, anyone?) are ok though. Ok.

2. Over the past term and beyond, this Conservative Council has consistently made decisions based on value for money for our residents, while ensuring that they receive the best possible services.

Quite clearly decisions are not made on the basis of value for money, nor do they deliver the best possible services. Again, this is Johnsonian inversion of the truth, up ending the story of their own dreadful performance. 

Tax payers' money has been extracted on an eye watering, industrial scale from the Capita contracts, via income opportunities hidden at the time of signing in the form of contractual variations, unnoticed and by Tory members, before approving for a ten year term of bondage to the conditions. As fellow blogger John Dix can tell you, you and I and all the other residents have already paid hundreds of millions more than the expected amount.

That services are not the best possible is evident to anyone who walks along a tarmac patched pavement, or driven along the thousands of pot hole scarred roads, or tried to phone a council department, or had to chase enforcement of flagrant breaches of planning permission conditions, or visited a relative in a care home like Apthorp Lodge. 

Rather than in invest in new social housing that would benefit the most needy residents, or borrow state money in order to do so, Tory members preferred to borrow £22 million from the Public Works Loan Board to lend to their 'partners' at Saracens to build a lovely new stand at their Stadium, which was our Stadium, and for which they only pay a peppercorn rent. Value for money? Meanwhile families in West Hendon were living in utter squalor, and the Housing committee did not meet for eight months, because - 'there were no urgent issues'.

That over the last few years Tory members have sought to stifle challenge, engagement and consultation with their own residents is undeniable: changing the Constitution to prevent questions at committees where hugely important and controversial plans are decided being the keystone of their shameless and deliberate strategy of gagging dissent. 

This gagging has not only coincided with a period of increasing decline in the standard of council services, but also with a period of hugely expanded proposals for so called 'regeneration' and development. What a stroke of luck! 

Except that the Tories' luck is now running out. 

Poor leadership and recklessly poor judgement has made them complacent, and to take risks  that can only damage their electoral prospects. Tory voters are now queueing up to fight developments in their areas: the snatching of the community green space at Finchley Memorial is facing Judicial Review, and the Hendon Hub is being legally challenged, in various ways, as well as now being the subject of very serious complaints over ... related matters.

Roll on May: it's time to clear out the Augean stables, and rid ourselves of the rotten stench hanging around this Tory council and their collaborators. 

Time to bring the council back under democratic control, return local services in house, where true value for money can be achieved - and give a voice back to the residents whose representatives have, for so long, so blatantly betrayed them and their well being.

A Perfect Storm: Barnet's Tory pro-development council ignites an unprecedented scale of rebellion in its heartland voters 26 Sep 2021 9:29 AM (3 years ago)

Local residents Professor Blitz and (hiding behind the poster) Gabbie Asher

Local Tory councillor Nizza Fluss, who has opposed the Hub plans - and who has now been deselected by Hendon Tories.

Bla bla bla: a photo taken of an uncharacteristically quiet Ballards Lane shows the location proposed for an alleged 'town square' ... with a busy road in the middle, surrounded by all the new development they forgot to mention ...

North Finchley Library, 'refurbished' at vast public expense in 2017 - in fact robbed of its children's library - now to be flogged off by Barnet Tories

Hendon campaigner Hayley Blitz

Countdown to failure, for Barnet Tories, and Casting the Net: a Week in Broken Barnet 18 May 2021 10:29 AM (3 years ago)

Labour Cllr Anne Clarke, AM

Hubble Bubble: More toil and trouble in Hendon - Historic England sidelined by the Hub developers 28 Apr 2021 5:13 AM (4 years ago)

Almost every day now, a new revelation about the Hendon Hub development emerges from the shadows. Today's story is about the heritage and conservation issues which are so central - or should be - to the consultation process that is required for such proposals. 

Last week I wrote to Historic England with my concerns about the threat posed by the Hendon Hub plan to the two Conservation Areas in the Burroughs and Church End, Hendon, and the plan to demolish all but the facade of the listed Hendon Library.

To my astonishment, a prompt response informed me that they knew nothing of these proposals.

This was despite the fact that they had, as recently as February, been in communication with Barnet about the associated local SPD plan - the draft plan of the Burroughs and Middlesex University Planning Framework Supplementary Planning Document. 

They forwarded a copy of the letter sent to Barnet, in which they highlighted the fact that the SPD did not sufficiently address matters of heritage and conservation. Here is the summary of points made:

My spies tell me that Historic England has now contacted Barnet/Capita Re to discuss the proposals.

Let's take another look at this letter. 

You will note that it criticises the inclusion of 'Key Opportunity Sites'. 

These are sites Capita has identified for development potential. In the draft SPD, significantly, there are no less than 67 references to development - and only 11 references to conservation. 

Proof, if any were needed, that Capita's management of planning in this borough, even in the heart of this uniquely sensitive historic area, is deliberately prioritised, not as you would expect, so as to preserve the built heritage, but in order to identify potentially lucrative sites for development, from which the company will benefit financially, not least in terms of contractual fees.

These plans have been known about since at least June 2019, when a resident raised questions about it at a committee meeting, after the council accidentally published information which should have been exempt, and let the cat out of the bag. They refused to answer his questions. 

But what this means is that the covert plot to push a massive development into the heart of the two conservation areas has been a long time in the making. And yet they had not consulted Historic England, even as they were obliged to discuss the draft SDP with them. 

It is also significant that the draft SDP has been criticised by HE for preparing the way for what we now know had already been designed for the Hub, ie high rise buildings - the ugly and obtrusive student accommodation blocks, up to seven storeys high - buildings absolutely out of character with the surrounding historic area, which boasts a large range of early eighteenth century buildings, a thousand year old parish church, with possible Saxon origins, and a Norman font; a group of almshouses, and the Grade II* listed seventeenth century Church Farmhouse, as well as two other churches, and several listed early twentieth century buildings - including the Library.

The impact of the Hub development clearly would be profoundly detrimental, adversely affecting the natural context of the Burroughs and the Church End conservation areas in so many ways - and leaving residents trapped in a virtual campus.

The plan to demolish all but the facade of Hendon Library, even thought it is a listed building, is in itself of course a hugely controversial proposal - and even the slightest alteration to a listed building, let alone one this radical, must be agreed with Historic England. 

How have the plans got this far, with no approach to them? And why?

In any other development, the plans  for such a sensitive area would have been formed after discussion with heritage advisers. Here we see our Tory councillors and their contractors trying to do their own thing, however, and in so doing, sideline Historic England, in their determination to see these ill begotten proposals through a farce of a consultation process, with only limited information given to residents, and crucial information withheld. Now we know that HE, which clearly is a hugely important 'stakeholder' has also been denied a role in this so called consultation. 

There is in addition, of course, the question of whether this plan is financially viable, grounds for objecting to the whole Hub proposal. 

We are being nonsulted, without adequate information, only a heavily redacted business plan, and vague sounds about possible sources of cash for the £90 million costs. Costs which almost certainly will be much more than that. 

Why do we need what we are told will be accommodation for 800 students, and why do we need them, several storeys high, in the centre of conservation areas? 

Why not build in nearby Colindale, where there is already accommodation for Middlesex Uni - and no built heritage at risk? 

Will they even be able to fill these halls, post Covid, and post Brexit? 

Or is this just a wheeze to get approval for planning approval in this area, which will slowly morph into yet another highly profitable luxury housing development?

There is an election in a few days time. 

If Tory activists come knocking on your door, between now and then, I would suggest that you ask them why it is that developers and Capita, and not elected representatives, are running this borough. 

And then vote for the Labour candidate and local library campaigner, Anne Clarke.

Makerspaces and Make Believe: more on the Hendon Hub and the threat to Hendon's Listed Library 24 Apr 2021 10:56 AM (4 years ago)

Hendon Library

More news on the story of the Hendon Hub, and Barnet Tories' plan to help Middlesex University turn the most historic part of Hendon into what will effectively be a campus site, regardless of the impact on residents, and regardless of the impact on the unique and highly sensitive character of the area, and its built heritage. 

Why Tory members and their privatised planning and regeneration services, run by Capita, feel it is appropriate to seek to impose such an incongruous proposed development in the heart of not one but two Conservation areas is impossible to understand - or would be if we had not already experienced years of seeing developers being given a free run in this borough, and the planning system being allowed to become entirely focused on creating and promoting development for the benefit of developers, and Capita, rather than local need.

In this case, the Hendon Hub plans are being created by the same bodies that will decide whether or not planning permission will be given. Yes, a massive conflict of interest, you might think - compounded by further conflicts within the council and the local planning process itself. 

Beyond that point, however, there are - theoretically at least - external safeguards which should review any approval - and then of course there is the judicial system, through which legal challenges may be made.

Residents are determined to fight these proposals, in whatever form is necessary, because so many feel totally excluded from what should be a fair and open process of consultation. Enter the Hendon Residents' Planning Forum: a group of highly focused local figures, whose spokesperson is Brad Blitz, Professor of International Politics and Policy at UCL's Institute of Education, and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Global Affairs, at LSE.

This time, Barnet Tories & their chums have picked on the wrong people. 

I can reveal that the Forum has already begun a process of engagement with the UN's 'Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee' to report what it believes is a failure in consultation by the London Borough of Barnet in regard to the Hendon Hub plans.

The UK is bound by the terms of the Aarhus Convention, which is meant to safeguard the rights of citizens to the disclosure of information, meaningful participation and access to justice, in any decision making process which has an impact on their environment, either nationally or locally. 

It is too early to proceed with a full submission, but the Forum will be pursuing the matter once the appropriate moment arrives: and to show how seriously this move has been taken, we can report that representatives of the UK government, as well as LB Barnet, have already been required to take part in the preliminary stages of the process.

That this UN committee takes very seriously the principle of meaningful participation in consultation and decision making is evidenced by a recent ruling, sought by Kazakhstan, as to how such consultations should proceed during Covid. The outcome of the Committee's considerations was clear: 

" ... any shortcomings in ensuring effective public participation in decision-making under the Convention during the pandemic may be subject to challenge by members of the public in accordance with the provisions of article 9 of the Convention."

Local residents are not going to keep quiet about this issue, and nor should they. Apart from the threat to two highly sensitive Conservation areas of these utterly crass proposals, and the virtual destruction of a listed Library, the refusal to hold meaningful consultation, or to disclose the full details of what such plans entail, is clearly a failure which must be addressed. 

You may recall that over the last couple of years, by coincidence the period in which development has reached a peak in this borough, Barnet Tories have made concerted efforts to change the authority's Constitution, so as to remove many of the rights of participation that residents had always had, such as being able to submit questions to councillors at committee meetings and Residents' Forums. Tory members took these rights away, restricting the number of questions to only two at any meeting, regardless of the importance and scale of the issue. This was despite the One Barnet Judicial Review finding in which, although lost through being out of time, the judgement was that consultation had been inadequate. Since then the ability to scrutinise council actions has been even more curtailed - which will be a useful argument in future JRs. 

The irony of Kazakhstan being more acutely aware of the need to safeguard the rights of public participation in decision making than the burghers of Broken Barnet hardly needs spelling out. Yes, this is Tory Barnet, rather than Borat. Just about.

One of the criticisms made by residents of the so called consultation in regard to both the local SDP and the Hendon Hub plans is that the proposals fail to give sufficient detail to be able to engage in an informed way. Clearly pushing this through during Covid and lockdown has restricted access to the process itself, but the would be developers have also restricted access to information in several ways: overly redacted reports, only a handful of strictly limited Zoomed presentations, where onlookers cannot ask questions, and so on.

One example of a crucial lack of information is the case of the proposed new library, which is supposedly meant to replace the Grade II listed building, built in 1929, and which was, before Tory cuts slashed it to pieces, the central library for the Borough - until their meddling, it was the busiest branch in the service. This magnificent building they propose to demolish, other than the facade: the back of the building is not listed, so they intend to knock that out in order to cannibalise the library carcass, and integrate what is left into a brand new development for Middlesex University. 

As well as being part of the Hendon Hub Nonsultation, a separate exercise specifically about the new library proposals was launched, with questions suggesting that residents could have a 'state of the art' new branch, with all sorts of new functions and services offered as well as a replacement library, Archives and Local Studies centre, study areas and community space. Their own information boards promise:

By making use of the development

opportunity, the library service will be

able to:

• Expand the library offer – for example,

potentially creating ‘Makerspaces’ where

children and adults can learn how to use

creative technologies like 3D printers,

or spaces where community partners

can deliver services such as job clubs or

health advice ...

And all of this in one small space, shoved in the bottom of a student accommodation block, on the site of parking spaces, opposite the Town Hall?

Really?

Well, could we be told exactly how big the area in the ground floor of the student block will be, so we can engage in this so called consultation, with some sort of point of reference? We could not.

One resident attempted to ask for the capacity measurements, via the Hub 'helpline'. 

She was told that these figures do not exist, because the building has not been designed yet. According to the architect, who had not yet drawn up plans. Nor did they know how big the site was. Early days, see? Just some vague idea scribbled on the back of a packet of fags.

Well: not being minded to believe such tosh, I made a Freedom of Information request for the measurements which do not exist - and guess what? They forwarded the measurements which do not exist.

Response Information request (ref: 7180100)

Please tell me the size and capacity of the new 'teardrop shaped' student building that is intended to be built on the old council car park, opposite the Town Hall.

Please note that design is at an early stage and plans that may well change for a variety of reasons before any construction might begin. They are also subject to the planning application process, at which stage they would be publicly consulted on in a final form. At this point in the design process the following information is relevant:-

• At the base of the building (the teardrop element) the length (at the longest point

of the Library) is 40m

• The width of the building ground level is currently 30.5m

• The general diameter of the circular element at ground level is currently 28m

• The height of the building is currently 16.15m

• The diameter of the rotunda at the upper levels is currently (floors 1-3) is 32m

stepping back to 27.7m at the upper level (4 th Floor)

• The capacity is currently 110 student accommodation rooms plus the ground

floor library element (see below)

Please give me a copy of the physical dimensions of the ground floor, and the

metric capacity.

As above. The teardrop currently has the following dimensions:-

• The Gross Internal Area of the Library at Ground floor is currently 657 sqm with a

further 173 sqm potentially at a lower ground level (830 sqm total)

• The footprint area of the building at ground level 847sqm which includes Library,

cores, circulation, storage and back of house areas.

Please give full measurements of the size of the site on which the new 'teardrop'

building is going to be placed.

The teardrop building sits on the combined Parade / Carpark site which is 2200 sqm in

size.

Now then. On Page 22 of the (redacted) Business Plan, we are told:

The new facility will provide c. 200 sqm of additional gross internal space compared to the current 622 sqm GIA library provision.

We know now, however, that the promised additional 200 sqm will only happen if another basement level is added. And that would just bring the capacity up to the size of the minimal library space left in the original building after the cuts. Not including Archives & all the many other new functions they claim to be offering.

So: not only does this prove that crucial information was deliberately withheld from the Nonsultation, but that the 'Helpline' was misleading residents - and the proposed space, as suspected, is simply not big enough to offer anything like the range of services they say they want to offer - let alone represent a reasonably sized replacement for what was once a magnificent library.

In other words, they are taking residents for fools, and the so called consultation itself might reasonably be considered to be a farce. 

My own view is that the proposed new library is unlikely ever to be anything other than a temporary replacement, in the Portacabin, and will probably never move into a new space, as it will be at some future date considered to be a non-viable part of the plans and dropped. If it does move, then it will be on a temporary basis that can easily be revoked. 

The history of developments in Barnet, ever since the West Hendon fiasco, is that over time, commitments to community benefits or affordable housing are discreetly removed, on the pretext of the project no longer being on line to meet the developer's targets - profits. Agreements to allow this are recommended by planning officers, rubber stamped by Tory weighted committees. There is every reason to expect the same may happen here, in some form.

Looking at the business plan for the Hub - or rather what little of it we are allowed to see - it is impossible to see how it was viable before Brexit, and Covid. At the point where we are now, it  is not. Middlesex University, like all other universities, will now face significant financial challenges, and risks being unable to pay the returns Barnet Council expects as its part of the deal for brokering the loan to support the development. 

You might wonder why a local authority, in such unprecedented times, feels the need to act as a developer, with all the risk it entails, rather than restrict its ambitions to balancing the books, and providing an adequate standard of services to residents and taxpayers. They claim the plans will 'only' cost £90 million: this is highly likely to be a very (Barnet) conservative underestimate. And if it goes wrong, and the debt is not repaid by the development, who pays? You and me.

If permission is given for the Hendon Hub, but the university backs out, will the development shapeshift into yet another collection of luxury housing blocks rather than student accommodation?

If Tory councillors really want a state of the art library in Hendon, why did they spend what we were told was half a million pounds of public money, tearing the heart out of the old building, and decimating the size of the library area, in order to suit the needs of Middlesex University? * Who will repay that? This was done on the pretext that a decent library was no longer needed in the area: so why would they now pretend it is? Do you trust the Tories, after what they have done to our libraries? To our borough?

(* In fact the contractors' website says it was a project worth £700,000 ...)

One of their own local Hendon councillors objects to the proposal, which is brave of her, because she will be shunned by them, if she continues to stick her neck out. But she knows how important the library is to the local community, and that residents do not want the ugly and intrusive buildings allowed in the conservation areas.

'Save Barnet Libraries' is a local residents' campaign group that has fought for years to try to block Barnet Tories' unceasing assault on our public library service. They have now issued an open letter to Barnet residents and library users: 

Dear Library Lovers

We write to ask for your support for Hendon library: the Grade II listed building faces demolition (apart from protected features) while the library will move to modular buildings, i.e. portacabins,  on a car park. Due to move in October 2021, there will be “reduced service” for two to three years while the massive £90m Hendon Hub development proceeds. Eventually, the library will be sited on the ground floor of a new block of student accommodation opposite the Town Hall.

Will the new library ever be built? The full business case for the development isn’t yet published and, when it is, the public will be prevented from proper scrutiny, as with the Brent Cross fiasco.  Currently, the plans are so non-committal that it is possible the new building will not even have planning permission before the existing library is demolished.

The Council’s website offers “An outstanding new public library for Hendon, with more modern and improved services”. There are no concrete promises behind this; no commitment to additional investment in the library service. The Council’s own evaluation stated that the 2017 cuts to staffed hours had “gone too far” and resulted in the exclusion of key groups who depend on libraries: particularly children, users with disabilities and some older users. Prior to the cuts (including the removal of the historic children’s library), Hendon Library had been the most well-used branch in Barnet.  

 Another Council “promise” needs unpicking: “The current Hendon Library is a beautiful building, but its maintenance and upkeep costs a lot of money that would be better spent on providing a modern library service.” Again, there is NO commitment to spend this money on the library service! In fact, in 2017, the last time the Council trumpeted library "refurbishment", it spent £500k on slicing up the building so it could be rented to Middlesex University (maintaining only 13% for library use). The £155k per year gained in rent hasn’t yet covered the outlay, but the purpose was clear: the library was an asset to be exploited, not a service to be supported and we believe this approach continues.

We suspect, along with the newly formed resident’s group, Hendon Residents Planning Forum that the Hendon Hub is developer and Capita-led, reducing social housing while hoping for profit from privately-managed student dorms, as well as earning fees for processing the scheme. For more information see also Mrs Angry’s blog. Residents across Barnet must oppose these priorities or we may be left with facades and temporary libraries in place of heritage and community in other areas too.

 PLEASE TAKE ACTION:

Sign and circulate this petition: https://www.change.org/p/barnet-council-last-chance-to-save-old-hendon-library?recruiter=48178792

 Respond to the Hendon Hub consultation on Hendon Hub | Delivering for Barnet  - the deadline is 21 May 2021. Oppose the demolition and move of the library and the failure to invest in the service.

 The Library Service is running a separate survey about what residents want in the new library. We are concerned this presumes the outcome of other consultations, including the planning process. If you fill it in, please use the (limited) comment boxes to demand increased staffed hours, library space and resources, as the Council’s own evaluation recommended.

 Please email your concerns to your local Councillors and to Reuben Thompstone, Chair of the Communities, Leadership and Library Committee on Cllr.r.thompstone@barnet.gov.uk and copy your email to us. Whether or not you live in Hendon, you can also email your MP as such a major development has implications for the library service and heritage buildings across the borough.

 Thank you for your support.

Emily Burnham

On behalf of Save Barnet Libraries

I would also suggest that residents write to raise their concerns about the threat to the listed Library and to the two Conservation areas with Historic England, which you can contact here:

customers@HistoricEngland.org.uk 

There are currently proposals, believe it or not, to demolish and develop part of Fleet Street, despite being in a Conservation Area. Similarly to the context of the Hendon Hub proposals, the plans were both submitted by the City of London Corporation, and approved, this week, by the City of London Corporation. This highly controversial plan, however, is likely to continue to meet robust opposition - and Historic England has stated: 

Major impacts such as this can progressively and fundamentally erode the character of a conservation area, and it is important to recognise therefore that moderate harm in the context of a large and highly significant conservation area is a very serious issue ...

This principle clearly applies in the case of the Hendon Hub, and the proposed installation of a crassly designed campus development in the middle of an historic area, marked for conservation purposes for its wealth of early Georgian properties, and the number of unique, listed, early twentieth century civic buildings.

The time has come to stand up to fight those who are putting profit before the protection of our history, and our built heritage. If we do not oppose this now, soon not one listed building, nor any conservation area will be safe from the rapacious grasp of developers, both here in Barnet, and nationally. Please do what you can. And remember when you go to vote next month that the candidate who has a long history of supporting Barnet library campaigners is Labour's Anne Clarke.

The Teardrop Explodes: the new Hendon library that is, and is not 30 Mar 2021 10:35 AM (4 years ago)

Well then. A short update to the previous post on the Hendon Library fiasco.

As you know, the Broken Barnet web of  informers spreads far and wide across the borough. And so we learn, via this network, of the experience of one resident attempting to contact the Hendon Hub consultation, in order to ask some very reasonable questions about the size of the fantasy new library alleged to be our Tory councillors' 'offer' in replacement for the listed, former flagship library next to the Town Hall. Which we know now they want to knock down.

We know now, from the careful investigation of local residents and campaigners, that not only do the plotters intend to try to demolish all but the facade of Hendon Library, but that rather than, as we thought, replace this with a purpose built 'state of the art' new library on the old council car park, it will merely consist of something shoved in the bottom of a block of student accommodation, on this site. 

As you will have seen in the previous post, there are remarkably detailed, albeit carefully presented, illustrations of what the new buildings in the Burroughs would look like, if the plotters get their way, and there are images of the new student block which apparently will host a library on the ground floor. It is perfectly obvious that this new block is not huge, and is largely a rounded building, with restricted space. How much space? Doesn't say.

One curious resident, let's call her Mrs X, rang the Hub phoneline. No response. Ansaphone. Left a message asking someone to call her back with more information about the new library. Someone did call her back later that day to say - person didn't know anything much about it, but would ask. Oh. About this new building then ... Was it a completely round building? She was told no, it was in fact a 'teardrop' shape. Ah. 

Rang back next day and told Mrs X that sadly, she couldn't give her 'any numbers', because everything was 'too early 'in the planning stages, and the architect didn't know, and of course it all depended on what people wanted to see in the library. It wouldn't be smaller than what we had (how could it be?).

So what is the measurement of the site? Surely that gives some indication of the size of the footprint of the new library, or at least the new building? 

Mmm. Will have to go and ask about that.

What about the size of the so called 'temporary' library? You've got a floor plan of that on the Hub Information Boards, after all, so you must have some idea of how big that is? 

Will have to go and ask about that too.

And, you know, pointed out Mrs X, you can't really run a consultation with residents on the basis of not providing basic information like the size of the library you say we can have. How can we be properly consulted if we don't know what is realistically achievable, in what seems to be an  awfully small space for a library, a community space, areas for study and areas for new functions that you say might go in - as well as the Local Studies Centre and specialist storage space for archival material?

The Helpline person said that more information, including size, would be released in the next round of ... information release. Oh. When? Mid May. After the elections, you mean? Yes. 

Aha! You may be told how big your tiny new library will be, readers, but not until this explosive information won't upset the Tory voters, (well: too late for that ...) and equally significantly, only days before the consultations end ...

So: the architect has designed but not designed a building which may or may not fit the space intended for it, which is an awful gamble, isn't it? Still, as Tory library Chair Cllr Reuben Thompstone says here, "The Hendon Hub project is a fantastic opportunity to improve our offer to Hendon residents ..." Our offer. 

Fantastic. In its truest sense.

The architect has not designed the new building they claim will accommodate the new library, and the design that does not exist, suitably, as we see below, is in the shape of a teardrop. Got that?

A representation of the grief of the people of Hendon, for their lost, listed library, and the memory of their built heritage? Or is it, Councillor Thompstone, the teardrop slowly running down the cheek of Eileen Colwell, watched by new  generations of children robbed by the Tory councillors of Broken Barnet of their right to a comprehensive and efficient library service, as guaranteed by the Public Libraries and Museums Act, 1964?

The new building may or may not accommodate all the lovely things they are encouraging us to believe might be put there, if only they get planning permission. Similarly to the fantasy library which still stands, invisible to all but true believers, in the cursed landscape of North Finchley, it is a library, but not a library: it both exists, and does not exist. It is Schrodinger's Library, an eternal paradox, left dead and alive in a sealed box made by mad scientists in the Barnet Capita Laboratory of Broken Dreams. 

In other words: this is not just any sort of consultation, readers, but a Barnet Tory consultation: a Nonsultation. Verging towards an Insultation. 

Nevertheless: more than a thousand people have already signed the petition organised by residents determined to stop the demolition of the listed Hendon Library. If you haven't already done so, please sign here.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: the Burroughs, the Hendon Hub - and Barnet Tories' planned demolition of Hendon's listed Library 25 Mar 2021 8:56 AM (4 years ago)

Sometimes it is hard to know where to start, when writing about the political scene in Barnet. But the ending is always the same. Increasingly, so many stories now lead back to the same problem, lodged deep in the core of the current Tory administration. 

There is no longer even any pretence of political principle here, no vision for the borough, no democratic accountability: this borough is nothing more than a vehicle for delivering profit to developers - and through this process, profit to Capita, their outsourced planning and regeneration service. 

Everywhere you look there are conflicts of interest, lobbying, undeclared interests, declared interests that are left unmanaged: at every level, within a planning system that is neither accountable nor transparent. 

Want to choose your own named planning officer? (Why?) Well, pay a fee and name your man, or woman. 

Planning officers leave Barnet/Capita and immediately set up in business here, in Barnet, as agents and consultants - sometimes for the same developers they dealt with professionally weeks before. Some even advertise on their websites their former roles as local planning officers. 

A well run authority is meant to mitigate not only the risk from conflict of interests, but also the perception of risk from conflict of interest. But then - Barnet is not a well run authority. 

The biggest conflict of all, however, arguably, is present within the context of the Capita contracts themselves. 

The company is desperate to retain its outpost in Barnet, as it is so lucrative: so many opportunities to exploit, especially from services related to development, planning and regeneration. And with a Tory group in charge who are happy to help them milk as much profit from our borough as possible, therein lies the danger. There is barely an inch of Barnet's landscape that has not been assessed for development opportunity by Capita - even our parks now are at risk.

Most of Capita's income from the Barnet contracts comes from planning and regeneration: clearly the more there is of that, the better for Capita. But what is good for Capita and its shareholders (who have seen the value of their investments plummet over the last year or so) is not necessarily good for Barnet's residents and communities: or good for their built heritage, now at risk as never before.

Every where you look, there are monstrous new developments springing up, pushed through regardless of impact on the community, regardless of whether or not such developments meet the needs of that community, and very often in blatant defiance of agreed local plans for the area drawn up by the authority itself. 

Planning and regeneration, housing and 'growth' are now shaped to suit developers, not residents. There is no coherent strategy other than to push developments: no care for the huge problem of less advantaged families unable to find truly affordable, decent accommodation.

Multi storey towers are imposed in Labour wards, vehemently opposed in Tory wards. Endless blocks of flats have appeared, unaffordable for the vast majority of Londoners, let alone Barnet residents. Family houses, which are desperately needed in many areas, are not built, because there is a lesser profit for developers. Inappropriate conversions of family houses are pushed through, regardless of the impact on the surrounding residential area - again, unless you are lucky enough to be in a Tory ward, but even then, now, this may offer little hope. And Tory voters are beginning to get very, very annoyed by the encroachment on their residential areas. The landscape is changing around them: and they don't like it.

Where are the new schools, GPs, clinics, parks, libraries, needed to support all the new development? Well, who cares about that? Apart, of course, from the residents already suffering from lack of provision of healthcare, especially in the western, poorer side of the borough, whose hope of access to a decent state school is already minimal. Parks? The Tories, as we have seen in the last blog, want to stuff the ones they consider 'low value' with solar farms and electric battery storage. Or sell bits for development, as in my local park. Libraries? 

Ah. Now then.

Yes, here we are again, back with the story covered here, and the truly gobsmacking decision made - before consultation - by the Tories, during Covid, to launch a massive development in the Burroughs, in Hendon, in league with Middlesex University. This is estimated to be going to cost the authority, at the very least, £90 million, which adds to the already whopping pile of loans it will undertake from other development projects, including Brent Cross-Cricklewood, (and of course not forgetting the £23 million lent to Saracens, for a new stand. Any sign of it yet, btw?)

You can read about the council's plans for the Hendon Hub here.

Interesting how some Tory members and senior officers are so keen to play developer with other people's money - public money, taxpayers' money - yours and mine. In the private sector, none of them would be likely to be entrusted with such huge undertakings, certainly almost no councillor in Barnet has any experience or expertise in managing such large scale projects, and probably no senior officer -  but of course in the public sector, if it all goes wrong, they will not carry the can. You won't see them for dust.  You and I, the local residents and tax payers, will be left paying the cost of their folly. Again: no transparency, no accountability, to us, the residents. We are just the mugs who have to bankroll all this development. And they have made sure we can't ask questions, altering the Constitution to make sure we are effectively bound & gagged. Or so they imagine - if you really want to speak out, then you will find a way. 

The idea, or rather the excuse given for these high risk ventures is that they will generate income or interest for the authority. But such ambitious plans were high risk even before Covid and Brexit: now we are where we are, anyone but a fool can see that these plans, even though they may be awfully alluring to Capita, amount to a breathtakingly stupid gamble with public funding. The example of councils like Croydon who have played the same game and ended up in catastrophic circumstances ought to work as a warning to Barnet Tories and their management team. It hasn't. 

The Burroughs scheme - known as the "Hendon Hub' - is centred on completing the apparently unstoppable expansion of Middlesex Uni in this area, linking the properties they have now and those they want to annex - and building a load of new student accommodation. The income from the new accommodation is supposed to pay back Barnet's investment in the development.

Again, these plans were made before Brexit and Covid: there is no reason to think that student numbers will remain stable, and every reason now to expect numbers will plummet, especially from overseas, a market depended on by so many London universities. And there is every reason to question why students coming to Middx Uni would want to pay to live in what will be very expensive accommodation - many of their students come from comparatively poor, BAME backgrounds, and either live at home, or house share.

Looking at the very carefully limited information supplied by the authority,  we learn that they consider it necessary to shove these new buildings up in the Burroughs because ... the old ones they want to get rid of are SO awful, and really should not be in a Conservation Area. Let alone two Conservation areas. Oh yes, did we mention this? The planned new blocks, which are truly awful, but in a new and more dramatic way, are going to be in the oldest and most historic part of Hendon, full of listed buildings, many of them from the early eighteenth century, or earlier - some later, in a grouping of thirties civic buildings, such as the Town Hall, Library, Fire station, the church and other properties.

You might recall that, not so long ago, developers got away with knocking down the lovely 1930s pub in the Burroughs, the White Bear. An inn with this name had been on the spot for hundreds of years. Tory councillors allowed them to demolish and develop it. The developers were told they had to leave the front wall, but somehow ... it was accidentally  knocked down too, and when residents tried to contact council enforcement to save what was left ... too late, there it was, in a pile of rubble.

So what do the new Hendon Hub plans now propose to put in the middle of this historic area? 

Buildings so ugly and intrusive they cannot even bring themselves to put them in the foreground of any of their whimsical, deliberately faded illustrations (which cleverly cut out the large number of eighteenth century buildings which survive beyond the cropped frame ...)

Just look at this: what they plan to put right slap bang in the centre of the Burroughs Conservation area, right opposite the listed Town Hall, and the listed Library ... you'll need to enlarge the image, and squint ...

RAVENSFIELD AND FENELLA 

"The Ravensfield and Fenella buildings are currently leased to the university for administrative and teaching purposes. The buildings will be reaching obsolescence by the end of their current leases, are not of any architectural merit and do not complement nearby historic buildings, failing to make the most of their key position on The Burroughs. 

Barnet Council is proposing to redevelop this important site and create a trio of architecturally outstanding landmark buildings that will greatly improve the look and feel of this part of The Burroughs, ranging from four to seven storeys in height. They will greatly improve the frontage onto The Burroughs compared with the current buildings and improve the local environment with high-quality landscaping and a boulevard atmosphere ..."

So: this illustration chooses to flood your view of the Burroughs with some of the lovely listed buildings that are included in the Conservation area: the Town Hall, the library, the Methodist church, all presented in a charming, helpfully smudged ink and watercolour image, with some of the new and most ugly blocks, tall and rigid, relentlessly out of character with the area, carefully hidden behind a sponged out blur of trees. 

These blocks, frankly, can only have been imagined by someone determined to ignore the context and architectural language of the surrounding historic buildings.

Opposite the Library, painted in colours which are similar to the shades of the older properties, but otherwise again in a crashingly modern style, is another student accommodation block, shoved on the only remaining car park in the area, which is relied on by visitors to the Town Hall attending meetings, events, weddings or registration of births and deaths.

Ravensfield and Fenella, by the way, are the names of early nineteenth century properties that once stood on those sites: with a very interesting forgotten history. But our history, in Broken Barnet, is meant to be forgotten. It gets in the way of development, and profit.

Still, looking forward to the promised new 'boulevard atmosphere', aren't you? Reminiscent of the old days, cafés in the Boulevard Montparnasse, Paris in the thirties, (we'll always have Paris, won't we?) Maurice Chevalier tipping his hat as he passes, Piaf standing forlorn on a street corner, warbling La Vie en Rose, and - oh. Look at this. 

Maybe not, then. 

We are informed that the buildings that will be knocked down 'are not of any architectural merit' and 'do not complement nearby historic buildings'. The absurd implication being that the new ones are of architectural merit and do complement those historic buildings ... And of course, as we are told, they are not only going to (greatly) improve the 'look and feel' of this part of the Burroughs, but will provide something called, what was it  ... 'an exemplar high street' ... Oh. At the same time as a Boulevard? 

Who are they trying to kid? In what sort of way could this possibly be compared to a local high street?

Round the corner in the  centre of the old parish of Hendon, known historically as Church End - there is another Conservation area - and the Hub proposals plan new crashingly modern buildings here, around the ancient parish church of St Mary's and the Grade II * listed Church Farmhouse. (This latter property was formerly our local history museum, which Barnet Tories closed and ransacked in order to sell off the collection and then sell off the building, which they couldn't, so they gave it to ... can you guess? Yes, Middlesex Uni ...)

Church End, Hendon

This part of old Hendon has been the site of a settlement for at least two millenia: there is evidence which suggests there was a Roman temple here, somewhere around the area of the church, and clearly this site is of uniquely important archaeological and historic significance. But who cares? Not our Tory councillors, or Capita. All that stuff in the Church Farmhouse Museum, our local heritage, donated by local residents, was declared to be 'of no value' by then Tory leader Richard Cornelius, and flogged off. Why would they care about the layers of history that lie beneath the soil here?

One of the few remaining community amenities in this area which has not been pushed out by the Uni or the council is the much relied upon PDSA centre. This they propose to demolish, and offer in replacement something plonked on a council car park in far away Osidge.

Osidge really is an awfully long way from Hendon and there is no easy transport link: the people who use a bus to get here with their sick animals (and lots of them do, as anyone who uses the 143 will know, almost always with a mewling, panicking cat in a carrier on its way to see the vet) will have to subject them to a long and difficult journey miles across the borough. Having the PDSA in the less advantaged side of the borough makes sense: after all it exists to provide medical care for animals whose owners cannot afford expensive vet fees - moving right across to the affluent area of Osidge, in the east, does not. 

But let's go back to the Burroughs. Take another look at that rounded student block opposite the old Library. Yes, the old Library. The listed Library. The one they are going to demolish. 

What?

Yes. Demolish. Leaving all but a shell.

They intend to knock down Hendon Library, listed or not. 

All they intend to leave is the facade of the old building. And let Middlesex Uni build their own monstrous carbuncle inside, behind, and attached to the remaining, pointless front wall - and possibly some of the sides. We don't know for sure, because the plans are so carefully vague.

This is a favoured ploy adopted in the course of some of the most terrible assaults on historic properties now being perpetrated - although only in areas with compliant councils - in London and elsewhere, at the moment. 'The Gentle Author', who writes the fabulous 'Spitalfields Life' blog, has published a book on the subject, entitled 'The Creeping Plague of Ghastly Facadism', in an effort to shame those responsible into some sense of remorse for their architectural vandalism.

These villainous plans for Hendon Library, and the attempted destruction of another part of our built heritage, hidden behind a fake frontage, of course presents the perfect metaphor for everything wrong, in Broken Barnet. Behind Barnet Tories' facade of lies and faux democracy is nothing but a naked contempt for our history and sense of community. Worse still: behind the hollowed out library there is not only a total lack of respect for the idea of a public library service, but for the very idea of the public sector, as we have seen in their failed agenda of mass privatisation, the now discredited, hollowed out council model, meant to save money, now costing us more and more each year.

Of course our Tory members will point to the fantasy new library they claim will be built to replace the one that they want to knock down. They said first of all that a 'state of the art' library would be built on the car park across the road from the Town Hall. Now they admit it will be something shoved in the bottom of the rounded off building you see in the illustration, on that car park.

They are remarkably vague about the timing of this proposed new 'library' and have made plans to stuff a few books in a Portacabin as a 'temporary' replacement. A bit like the five shelves bunged in the Arts Depot that was meant to be a temporary replacement for the new, 'state of the art' library at North Finchley, that was the pretext for shutting South Friern Library. The Invisible Library, as it was known, is still Invisible, and indeed, non existant.

Even if a mini library space is put in the student block, clearly it will be very small, and certainly not 'state of the art'. Plus: this ground floor is supposed also to accommodate the borough's Archives, which require a lot of room, and specialist storage conditions. There simply isn't enough space. And where will the archival material go in the meanwhile? Given by Capita to their subcontractors to store, and never seen again, like the Heritage Collection, and the Grass Farm stained glass windows?

The illustration looks an awful lot like the replacement for the old Church End Finchley library, now next door to Waitrose. There was nothing wrong with the old library, in fact: it only needed refurbishment. But the developers who bought Gateway House wanted planning permission for a luxury development, which they were given after they offered something we did not need, ie a library room on the ground floor, on a leasehold basis. There is absolutely nothing in the new library fittings that could not be removed in the course of a day's work - and they will be, when the Tories think they can get away with closing it, in another round of cuts, simply allowing the lease to revert to the freeholder. They didn't even bother to put the sign for a library on the building above the door. The same temporary feel will be true of the Hendon replacement - if it ever appears in the intended new student block.

If you recall, when they recently spent hundreds of thousands of pounds gutting Hendon Library and reducing the library space in the building to a tiny fraction of its former size they did so claiming there was no real demand for anything better. When reminded (by me) of the legacy of Eileen Colwell, the Hendon librarian who pioneered the international children's library movement, they shrugged, reduced the children's area to a couple of shelving units and stuck a picture of her in the corner.

Now here is the biggest demonstration of the complete hypocrisy of this council's new plans: they claim they want to pay 'tribute' to Miss Colwell, by demolishing her library and putting up a plaque to commemorate her work. Her work, and her legacy, they have already systematically trashed in this borough, in the rounds of savage cuts which even their own consultants told them had gone too far. Children's libraries? In some branches now this consists of a table and two chairs, and a few bookshelves. In North Finchley, and Golders Green, the purpose built children's libraries were gutted, and closed, on the pretext of creating space for income generation - which never happened.

It is absolutely sickening to see these people pretending to give a sh*t about her legacy, while actively complicit in working to destroy it, not just in demolishing the building where she launched her vision of the children's library movement, but in so cynically cutting our library service to pieces, removing from the borough's most disadvantaged children the right to free and easy access to a library, and the joy of reading, having cut and shut our library service, effectively removed professional librarians from the management of the service, sacked workers and replaced them with unstaffed opening hours - and slashed the book stock to the point where there is simply no adequate supply of material for those children.

It's only right and fitting, perhaps, that they should take this rampage to its ultimate conclusion, and start demolishing the libraries, in order to facilitate the progress of development, and engineer further fat fees for contractors. 

Problem is: they can't actually knock Hendon Library down. Inside or out.

The listed features are not simply the external features of the front wall. There are other listed features - (I happen to know because a close friend was the conservation officer who listed this property, and the Town Hall, and so many other properties, before his job was deleted ... but you can see the listing for yourself here). These include external features, not just at the front of the building - but also internal ones. And it is interesting that the brief for the proposed demolishment has in the last few days been tweaked with weasel words glossing over this unfortunate obstacle in the way of demolition. 

So what can be done?

You can stand up and be counted, if you object to these plans, as residents already are: there is a very vocal, very well informed and determined group organising objections to this outrageous scheme. They have started a petition to stop the demolition of the library, which you can find here.

The horrified reaction of residents should send a real warning to the Tory councillors - one of whom, a local Hendon ward member, also objects to the proposals. This part of Hendon has always been considered a safe Tory ward. There are no safe wards for anyone, anymore, and increasingly it is the case that the scale of development in the borough now is so out of control it is affecting the Tory core vote. 

And in Hendon, the residents who will be affected by these plans are not going to tolerate their area becoming nothing more than a campus for Middlesex Uni, with the last community amenities steam-rollered out of existence. 

There is currently, in the time honoured tradition of Tory Barnet, a Nonsultation exercise taking place that claims to be seeking the views of residents in regard to the Hub and the library plans. 

It is clear, however, that the decision has already been made. Looking at the minutes of the Policy and Resources Meeting of December 8th last year, we find this: 

You will note that it states the OBC is approved, and a FBC is to be developed. In my view that suggests a decision in principle has been made, prior to consultation. In regard to the library, it is even more clear: the Committee took the decision to approve the move of Hendon Library to a temporary location - subject to consultation. The separate library consultation, however, did NOT consult residents on the question of whether or not they want the library moved, merely what sort of new library they want. The decision has already been taken to move, however they try to fudge the issue now - and no alternative has been offered. 

And there is absolutely nothing to stop them turning round after a couple of years with the library Portacabin, wringing their hands and saying, sadly, with rising costs, we can no longer offer a new library after all ... Like they did with North Finchley. Remember that this apparent new enthusiasm for a lovely library in Hendon hardly fits with what they did to the old one, and all the rest of them, only a couple of years ago.

You can find the Nonsultation survey here. Be careful, as always with Barnet questionnaires, as to how you respond.

Oh yes: and guess who is organising the Nonsultation? A company called GE Hearn. 

Owned by Capita, of course. 

Which means that the roles played by Capita, in regard to the Hendon Hub are: in planning, regeneration, and consultation with residents - the latter function being undertaken by the development side of Capita. We should also note that they are in charge of the management of council buildings, including the library portfolio.

Does this multiplicity of roles, with all the extra fees it will generate for the company, in the course of these proposals, present a conflict of interests? You might reasonably think so. Has this risk been assessed, and addressed? 

If you object to what is being planned for the Boroughs, and the Library, make sure you speak out: write to the Tory councillors, and write to Hendon MP Matthew Offord, who lives in the area, and has reportedly said he is 'keeping an eye' on the matter, whatever that means. 

Write to Historic England, and tell them to protect the listed Library from these vandals.

Oh, and there is an election coming up in a few weeks. Please remember how much depends on Tories being kept out of power in London, if we want to avoid further overdevelopment of our city: I will be voting for Anne Clarke, who has always fought against the Tory cuts to our library service.

And here again is the link to the petition to save the Library building: please sign and encourage others to add their names. 

Petition to Save Hendon Library.

Hendon Library, photo credit Museum of London

In a green shade: Barnet's open spaces under threat - again - from Barnet's Tory councillors 31 Jan 2021 10:43 AM (4 years ago)

Highlands Gardens, New Barnet: of 'low value', according to Barnet Tories

Pic credit here and last pic, Lucy Bridgers, High Living Barnet

Lovely.

Apologies for poor quality - blame whoever uploaded this to the council/Capita report.

Elm Park: 'low value', according to Barnet Tories

Highlands Gardens, low quality, and low value. 

The Treasure House: Barnet Tories resume their war on libraries and plot the closure of their former flagship branch 28 Dec 2020 7:36 AM (4 years ago)

Updated 26th March 2021

It has since emerged that not only is it intended to close Hendon Library, Barnet Tories and their development partners want to demolish the listed building, and leave only the front wall as a facade ... See new post here.

There is a time for everything, in Broken Barnet: a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot. All of these rites of passage, fittingly, are now supervised and monetised by Capita PLC, the council's outsourced provider.

There is also, of course, a time to roll out controversial proposals that might cause fury amongst the populace, if not carefully managed, and pushed through, while everyone is otherwise engaged. 

Normally the optimal moment for such plotting is in the summer, while (so the Tory councillors and their masters in the senior management team and Capita imagine) everyone is away on holiday, and not interested in what is going on. 

This year, of course, the year of Covid, offers an unprecedented opportunity to roll out any controversial proposal, and hope to get away with it, unopposed - and that, as we now see, is exactly what our scheming Tory councillors have attempted. 

They tried this tactic earlier in the year, when they disposed of local planning committees - removing even further the extent to which ward residents and their representatives may take part in any democratically run planning process. As much as was possible with a Tory majority loaded committee, of course. But interfering  opposition councillors and their pesky residents were getting in the way of the best interests of Capita and the flock of predatory developers who are grabbing every piece of land available in the borough, and screwing out of it as much profit as possible, regardless of whether or not their ghastly buildings meet the real needs of the local community. As with so many other anti-democratic measures taken by this administration, it becomes clearer and clearer whose interests are now prioritised in this borough. And it is not the residents and tax payers.

In the latest example of Covid opportunism, Tory members have turned their attention to another pet project.

After some effort by Labour councillors to secure an independent review of the devastating library cuts which have turned the former nationally recognised, value for money service into a parody of its former self, a report was published a year or so ago which criticised the depth and severity of the actions taken and highlighted the impact on users, especially children, elderly and vulnerable residents. 

The consultants concluded that the cuts had gone too far: not only had staffing been minimised to a barely workable level, and book stock savagely reduced, the physical space for library functions in their own buildings had been shrunk to a nominal and totally inadequate level, with unstaffed hours having a clearly detrimental effect on the standard of service. 

Perhaps the most obvious example of what the cuts had destroyed is demonstrated by the plight of Hendon Library. A handsome building that stands next to the Town Hall, (both of them listed properties), this was once the flagship of an outstanding, beacon standard service: the central borough library. As well as a large volume of books for borrowing, it had a reference library, and a music library, a lecture room, and a children's section that covered half of the ground floor. 

Above the door lintel is an inscription:

Non mimima pars eruditionis est bonos noscere libros: 'not the least part of learning is to be acquainted with good books'.

The idea of opening a library in Hendon had first been suggested in the early 1920s, at a time when providing free access to books was seen as a civic duty, not simply for the leisured classes, but those less advantaged, as we see in this extract from a local newspaper report from February, 1923, of a meeting of the 'Childs Hill Ratepayers Association', and a motion proposed by a Mr Widlake:

I sure that any opponents of the scheme on the score of cost will be ready to admit that public libraries are not only a necessity, but that their cost is not to be reckoned an expenditure, but an investment.” Councillor Taylor seconded the motion moved by Mr. Widlake, and said that personally he would not mind seeing an increase in the rates provided benefits were given. “Poor people,” he said, “should be enlightened as well as the rich.”

A copy of this resolution was sent to the District Council, and in due course plans were made for the building we now know, which was opened in December 1929 by Lord Elgin, President of the Library Association, and chairman of the Carnegie Trust, from whom a grant of £7,000 had been made towards the overall cost of £30,000. A newspaper report of the opening filled three columns, listing dozens of local dignitaries who had attended the ceremony, begun in the Town Hall, and moved to the new building, which was unlocked by Lord Elgin, after he had been presented with a golden key, which Councillor Mrs Bannister, heady with civic pride, explained would 'unlock  our treasure house' ... 

Oh, Councillor Mrs Bannister: what would you make of the barbarians in the Barnet Tory group who have so thoroughly trashed your treasure house, and thrown away the golden key?

Post war, Hendon Library had been the base of the magnificent Eileen Colwell, a widely respected professional librarian who pioneered the international children's library movement - of which I was later a grateful beneficiary, in Edgware, as a child with few books at home, liberated by access to endless supplies of reading material at the new library I visited every Saturday, devouring my allotted three books usually by Sunday evening, re-reading them throughout the week until I could borrow more. I would never have passed the eleven plus, or progressed to grammar school without this resource: and that was true of generations of children from all backgrounds, whose standards of literacy, and educational well being, were entirely dependent on the provision of such libraries.

This is all destroyed now. Ironically, Barnet Tories think, if they think at all, of themselves as the natural heirs of their heroine, local MP, PM and milk snatcher extraordinaire, Margaret Thatcher, but fail to remember that she embraced and defended the public library system as crucial to the cause of social mobility, through access to education and self improvement. 

They have effectively torn away all chances of disadvantaged children having somewhere safe and quiet to study, somewhere to have free access to books, to guided information. They have removed a vital social hub for lonely or isolated older residents. Many disabled users no longer feel able to access the unstaffed libraries, let alone remain inside one, without assistance. But the Tory members do not give a f*ck about any of this.

The innate materialism and anti-intellectualism of the average, intellectually challenged Barnet Tory councillor means that even if an ideological hostility to the very idea of the public sector was not deeply embedded in their clockwork mechanisms, their antipathy to anything that hints of cultural values, equality or community, would ensure that their war on libraries would continue. 

And so, continue it must, spurred on by the other motivation of their abominable administration: profit. In case you need reminding, a library is not, to the Barnet Tory councillor, and their contractual partners Capita, who now manage the portfolio of library buildings, a temple of education and learning, or leisure. It is a potential property development, or generator of income. 

When councillors first began selling off the family silver, and turning their beady eyes to the council owned properties they could flog off, one of the first targets was the historic Church Farmhouse Museum, just yards around the corner from the Town Hall, and the Library. It was the only local authority owned museum of local history, and held a unique collection of historical artefacts, much of it donated by residents. The then Tory leader Richard Cornelius said this collection was 'worthless', and it was sold (for a tidy sum, as it turned out) at auction, while the listed building was put up for sale. But not all went to plan: no one wanted to buy the building, with all the listed features they would have to preserve: such a nuisance! So they tried leaving it empty for a few years, decaying, a perfect metaphor for their contempt for our local heritage, defiant in its refusal to comply with their would be procurement of its history. 

In desperation, they tried selling or leasing the property to Middlesex University, the usual customer in the marketplace of council properties in the Burroughs. Like any sole customer on whom the retailer depends, despite much pleading from the council, the Uni stuck out for a deal which was entirely beneficial to them, and a sorry bargain for the residents and taxpayers of Broken Barnet, robbed of a museum, and their heritage. 

The relationship between Barnet Council and Middlesex is very close, and often secretive. They have been awfully helpful and bailed out the council in one or two scrapes, not just in regard to the Museum: their involvement in the curious Saracens story is a crucial factor in propping up that very interesting loan of £22 million which Barnet officers brokered between the authority and the private rugby club, when it was refused commercial funding for the new stand they wanted to build - but which has still not appeared.

Middlesex Uni, in the course of its apparently unstoppable colonisation of the Burroughs, has taken over Hendon Town Hall, in all but name: the Tory councillors still cling to the council chamber and a couple of committee rooms, due to their primary reason for becoming councillors, that is to say, to pretend to be very important members of the community, jostling every year for a nomination to become Mayor, and the chance to be carried about the borough in a limousine, with the grateful populace bowing before them, and a never ending round of all you can eat buffets, at other people's expense.

It was only a matter of time before the University got its foot in the door of Hendon Library, of course. During the massive programme of cuts that they pretended was a 'refurbishment', but which slashed the the service to shreds, in which millions of pounds were spent in order to - ha ha - 'save money', the 'reconfiguration' of Hendon Library was prioritised. The library functions were cut down to a tiny part of the footprint of its own building, and all that was left, in effect, were a few rows of bookshelves. The once outstanding children's library was gutted, and a useless, miniscule replacement shoved into a corner of the building, Eileen Colwell's legacy trashed and thrown in a skip, along with her vision of educating and empowering new generations of children through a love of reading. 

As a final insult, they put her photograph on a wall looking down at the two boxes of picture books and the couple of stacks of shelving that pass for the newly 'refurbished' children's 'library'. 

After the review's damning report was published, you might have hoped that the Tory councillors would have been shamed into some sort of plan to repair the damage they had done to the service. You would have been wrong to entertain such hopes. They feel no shame, and indeed are incapable of ever admitting they are wrong. They now decided, therefore, to double down on the same course of action, thinking they could push through the handover of Hendon Library to Middlesex Uni while the borough was in the grip of Covid, and not in a position to protest. 

As you can read in this account in the local Times, Reuben Thompstone, the pantomime Tory member in charge of (cutting) libraries, informed a meeting on November 18th that 'moving' Hendon Library was an 'exciting opportunity'.  

In the now usual Barnet Tory tradition of take a decision first, then pretend to consult afterwards, they have already agreed to go ahead with the proposal to remove the Library from Hendon Library, and stuff a token replacement in a portacabin, in what they claim will be a temporary measure. Their scheme includes a vague plan to build something on what is now the tiny Town Hall car park, across the road, which they say would accommodate a small library and house an even bigger nuisance, the borough's Archives. 

The latter function, ie the preservation of council documents, is a statutory one, or you can bet your last penny that they would flog off anything of value they found in the Archives, delete the archivist's post, and restart the history of Broken Barnet from Year Zero, in a cultural revolution with no culture, no past, no future - and no responsibility for heritage. 

We do not know where these fragile and irreplaceable documents will be placed, during the 'temporary' decantation of the library into a portacabin. But before the retelling of horrible histories becomes forbidden, in Broken Barnet, let us remember what happened to the civic heritage collection, and the Grass Farm stained glass windows, left in the similarly emptied and abandoned Church End Finchley library. 

Capita was given charge of the safekeeping of all the civic heritage collection. They handed the items to a third party contractor, and, showing at least some regard for the art of ironic gestures, shoved everything in the derelict Finchley mortuary, a few yards across the road from where I live. (Later sold for development, of course). And then - guess what? The items were stolen, and/or destroyed. 

After we raised concerns about the Grass Farm windows, an irreplaceable piece of Finchley's history, taken from what was once the home of the family which included arts and crafts designer Ambrose Heal, and left to the local council, many years ago, it was admitted - after a lot of prevarication - that these too had been stolen, while supposedly in the safekeeping of live in guardians contracted by Capita. Were there any sanctions, or penalties for the loss of these objects? What do you think? 

We have every reason to worry about what would happen, therefore, to the historic material currently in our local Archives, and it seems that questions raised by Labour councillors about this have not been adequately addressed.

Recent history tells us there is little likelihood of any permanent replacement being built for Hendon Library. We were assured, when Friern Barnet branch was closed, that a wonderful replacement library would be built in North Finchley. A temporary arrangement of shelves in a room in the Arts Depot was the only thing to come out of that - and then disappear.

The authority will simply not be in the position to afford to build any replacement, for the foreseeable future and eventually the 'library' portakabin will be run down and 'disappeared'.

Save Barnet Libraries campaigners have issued a statement (forming part of a letter published in the local press) on the proposal for a massive six-year £90m “Hendon Hub Redevelopment” to expand Middlesex University, and the removal of the library from the listed, purpose built building:

In October 2021, perhaps even before the first tranche of planning approvals, the library will be rehoused in “temporary” portacabins on the Burroughs Large Car Park near the A41.

Residents are meant to be happy about this, on the Council’s promise of a new library with “curbside appeal” in either Autumn/Winter 2023, or May 2024 – the date is vague. The description of the new library is also vague, promising to “facilitate the provision of a broader and enhanced library offer” that will attract more visitors, incorporate the borough’s archive and be “rent free in perpetuity”. This sounds very like the old Hendon Library which until 2017, was the most well-used branch in Barnet with over 233,000 visitors and 146,000 book loans per year. 

But, unfortunately, the proposals for the future library contain no guarantees at all: no capital budget, design or planning permission. Similarly, there is no commitment to increase staffed hours and library resources - which is what the service really needs to encourage library use. As the Council’s independent evaluation bluntly stated, the cuts to staffed hours have “gone too far”. 

These issues didn’t seem to matter to Cllr Thompstone or his colleagues on the Library Committee (CLCC) on 18 November. After all, they presided over the last decimation of the library service: in Hendon by spending £500k on reducing the library to 13% of its previous size, cutting staffed hours by 72% and leasing the building so that the library became a paying tenant. (One point of this was to make money from the building, but it’s unclear if it broke even, let alone made a profit.) By 2019-20, before Covid, book loans had reduced by half and the Council had stopped counting visitors.

In terms of the so-called “temporary” library, we are only told there will be reduced opening hours which will be, very unsatisfactorily, made up for by the mobile library. We are extremely concerned that the Council gives no consideration to the effect of the move and reduced service on library users, particularly as it appears almost inevitable that the development will overrun on time and costs, threatening the prospects of a new library at all.

They are right to be concerned, and right to articulate the fury that will be felt by many residents and users over the further assault on our library service. Funnily enough, one of the newer local Tory councillors, Nizza Fluss, has voiced strong objections to these proposals. So she should. 

“I can’t see any reason to leave this Grade II-listed building ... I do see why Middlesex want to acquire it, but I can’t see how it will benefit Barnet residents or the residents of Hendon.”

Quite.

She is somewhat naive, and an inexperienced member of the Barnet Tory group and will be ignored, of course, by her colleagues, if she continues to object, and told to vote in line with the party's position. 

Well: if you live in Hendon, or use the library, you might like to write to your MP, Matthew Offord, and remind him of his former pledge to keep all libraries in his constituency open. He claimed, during an earlier Libraries nonsultation, that Unison was to blame for 'scaremongering' in repeating fears about library closures. Of course: blaming a union for telling the truth is the usual fall back for Tories trying to deflect attention from their assaults on our public services.

In the previous cull, library buildings were retained, but with their function as libraries reduced to a small fraction of the footprint of the building, to aid the Tories' assertion that they have closed no branches. The pretence was that the rest of the buildings would be used to generate income. This was nonsense: an excuse to justify the absurd expenditure of £14 million pounds of taxpayers' money, in truth not to make 'savings' (which of course have never made, other than in terms of sacking staff) - but for preparing the next stage in their long term development plans. 

In practice, the Barnet Tory decimation of the library service, the replacement of staffed hours with self service entry - and the massive reduction of the book stock - was far worse, and has had a profound impact, leaving many people with effectively very little or no access to the service.  The longer term effect in terms of the educational and literacy standards of less advantaged children and students, of course, will be equally damaging.

The closure of Hendon Library will have a further, hugely detrimental impact on residents, particularly, as in the case of Golders Green Library, for the families of the local Charedi community. As always with Barnet Tory cuts, however, the consequences for children, the elderly and vulnerable matter not at all, when development or business interests are at stake. 

Oh, and if they get away with shutting the flagship library, you can be sure other valuable library buildings will follow.

Libraries are more than just an easy target for Barnet Tory cuts: they carry a symbolic role in the group's ritualised, instinctive loathing of the very concept of public services, free at the point of use. Although unthinking in their attitudes and half formed beliefs, they naturally object to what is to them a mystifying concept: community, care for others, culture; the love of reading and the acquisition of knowledge, for its own sake, or the importance of social hubs to address issues of exclusion, or loneliness. They see only an unnecessary burden, and a duty they refuse to acknowledge, a cost they do not want to pay. Their emotional distance stands on the same place as every tedious, extreme right wing administration, perfectly demonstrated by the rise of Trumpism (admired by some local Tory members) or the Johnsonian shambles that passes for government in the UK. It is from a heart as hard as flint, and as cold as ice: why should I do anything for others? Only my self interest matters. 

Despite the smouldering contempt Barnet Tories feel for the local library service, with typical hypocrisy, once the Covid crisis was underway, this service, above almost all others, was considered so important that it was the last to close, before lockdown, leaving poorly supported staff - and users - dealing with an unknown situation, expected to carry on, while councillors's surgeries were cancelled. 

On the Saturday before Christmas, Johnson announced the introduction of Tier 4 and warned of an apparently more virulent mutation of the virus: within a short time of this deeply worrying announcement, far too quickly for any proper risk assessment to have been made of the increased risk to health, with all the unknown factors of higher and faster transmission, library staff were told to report to work as usual on Monday. "Click and collect" services continue, which they must administer. Many other library services have closed, of course, in other areas, by authorities with some sense of responsibility for their staff, and the public. But not in Barnet.

So which is it, Tory councillors? A library service of such little importance, that you can slash it to pieces, and leave poorly paid workers to struggle on, regardless, commended by your own consultants for their efforts to do so, in spite of the damage you had done? Or is it so vital that you must now, in the grip of an increasingly dangerous pandemic, merciless in its grip on this part of North London, force those workers to risk their lives, and that of their families, while you sit safely at home with your feet up, cancelling surgeries, holding a few safely Zoomed meetings, but refusing to put yourselves at any risk at all? 

When Hendon Library was opened in 1929, Lord Elgin made a speech, faithfully recorded in the local newspaper report: it was one which would have passed over the empty heads of the current crop of Tory councillors in the chamber of Hendon Town Hall. He observed:

Libraries (are) not mere store-houses of books. They must be centres of social and political life—political in its old and full sense of what pertained to the good of the community. A library should teach us not only that we had a neighbour. It should help us to understand that neighbour, to know his ideals and ambitions, and to know that he wanted to find the best way of making use of the talents with which he had been entrusted. A library service must be treated as the true life-blood of the population. It must the open gateway to all and sundry to knowledge and beauty.

Not content with ransacking the treasure house of Hendon Library, and no doubt leaving the golden key to be stolen with the rest of the civic collection, our philistine councillors are happy to throw the spare key to the building over to their friends at Middlesex University, and reverse the march of progress begun by their predecessors. 

There is no excuse for this. The events of the last year have proved more than ever that the public library service is a vital, fundamental resource for all communities, never more so than in difficult times, and not least for those without means, the 'poor' people that Mr Widmark recognised, even in the 1920s, who deserve access to reading, and information, just as much as those with wealth and privilege.

Just as Barnet Tory councillors care nothing for those without access to books, computers or smart phones, they care even less for Lord Elgin's vision of 'the good of the community'. They do not recognise the idea of caring for one's neighbour, and supporting him or her in their aspirations, or needs. 

And it is fair to say that the paternalistic but caring Conservative councillors of the 1920s would not recognise their supplanters in the chamber of Hendon Town Hall, who are intent on destroying their legacy of philanthropy, and practical help. 

Hendon's 'Treasure House', of course, is the perfect place to start the next phase of their war on libraries: where better than the former central library, that once meant so much to so many people? 

A gateway to knowledge is a dangerous thing, in Broken Barnet: a portal to a world of differing opinions, and the possibility of change. No wonder they cannot wait to shut it down.

Caritas Christi Urget Nos: the Daughters of Charity, and another chapter in the unwritten history of St Vincent's, Mill Hill 8 Oct 2020 4:11 AM (4 years ago)

Of the thousand or so posts published on this website, over the last ten years, still the most frequently re-visited, perhaps rather surprisingly, are those I have written on the subject of the abusive culture in the schools and institutions run by the Daughters of Charity: including the primary school which I attended as a child, and the separate Orphanage which lay behind the school, St Vincents, on the Ridgeway, in Mill Hill. 

http://wwwbrokenbarnet.blogspot.com/2019/04/suffer-little-children-unwritten.html

https://wwwbrokenbarnet.blogspot.com/2013/01/growing-up-in-broken-barnet-making-of.html

These posts continue to be read, on a daily basis, and I often receive comments from some of those who attended such institutions:  whether schools, or, more usually, the residential homes. Some of these I do not publish, either because they are too personal, too distressing - or for legal reasons. 

'Annie', * a fragile, vulnerable survivor of one of these institutions contacted me last year, and spent many hours on the phone, and then in person, slowly disclosing the experiences of her life as a young teenager at Mill Hill: a tale of psychological abuse and physical punishment - the total absence of loving care. She had tried to report what had happened to her to the police, on her own, without support. They had dismissed her account. 

* All names in this post have been changed.

Last year 'Phil', another former victim of alleged abuse: physical, psychological and sexual, suffered while in the 'care' of the Daughters of Charity in the 1960s, wrote to me with details of the truly terrible experiences that he and his brothers suffered, at two different homes run by the Order, one of them Mill Hill.

His account was profoundly shocking, reporting years of appalling treatment, physical and emotional abuse - and predatory sexual behaviour, including rape. I urged him to consider submitting evidence to IICSA, the Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. He has now done so. As I understand it, police have also been informed.

I have read his submission, and it was detailed, graphic, and unsparing: impossible to read without feeling the intensity of pain created by such a perverse and sustained betrayal of childhood, innocence - and trust. 

One of his brothers took his own life, in later years. 

Such is the unbearable legacy of abuse for some victims: one that too often proves impossible to leave behind. Many others are unable to function as adults, burdened with depression, anxiety and intrusive memories of the past: unable to form lasting, healthy adult relationships, unsurprisingly, after grossly abusive, sexualised childhoods, with no safeguarding, no loving care, and no family support. 

That any child should be subjected to such treatment is insupportable. That this cruelty was perpetrated in the name of God, and the Church, is simply, and literally, beyond belief. 

The Daughters of Charity were founded in France, in the 1630s, by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac when they began their work caring for the sick, and the poor, for those abandoned on the streets: observing their Christian faith in practical help for those in need. 

The first mission to England arrived in 1847, invited by a wealthy Catholic cotton merchant to work in the slum conditions in Manchester and Salford that had so appalled Engels in his time there, less than five years earlier. 

The order continued to expand across the world, and and in the UK began to devote itself to education, and the care of children. St Vincent's School for Boys (girls were admitted later) was opened at Mill Hill, in 1887, followed by a primary school. By the 1960s and 1970s, the work the Order undertook was increasingly becoming the statutory responsibility of the social care system, and the Order's residential homes, including the home in Mill Hill, were closed. Now their charitable work continues in social projects, for vulnerable and homeless people.

Somewhere, sometime, during the twentieth century, the vision of Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac was entirely lost, and generations of children left in the care of the Daughters of Charity were subjected to a merciless regime that not only enabled abuse and neglect, but allowed the perpetrators to evade any sanction for their behaviour. 

That some of the victims of such failure in safeguarding have struggled for their voices to be heard, and their grievances to be addressed, is unforgivable: only now is there any formalised process of investigation by the government into this dark history - and the Church itself appears unable still to address the enormity of the scale of this problem. 

St Vincent de Paul

I have noted recently further visits by the 'Holy See, Vatican City' to the posts about the Daughters of Charity, and I imagine that there is some concern, at the highest level, about such reports continuing to appear.

It would be good to think that this was a mark of concern about the traumatised children who passed through these institutions: I suspect, however, that there is a concerted effort in hand to protect the reputation of the Catholic Church from the impact of such accounts - and perhaps defend the Order from compensation claims.

Earlier this week a damning report was published by IICSA, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, in regard to investigations into the abuse of children by those associated with the Church of England. 

Amongst its findings, the following observation is made:

Faith organisations such as the Anglican church are marked out by their explicit moral purpose, in teaching right from wrong. In the context of child sexual abuse, the church’s neglect of the physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing of children and young people in favour of protecting its reputation was in conflict with its mission of love and care for the innocent and the vulnerable.

This statement, in part, in its identification of the failure of religious bodies to live up to the aspirations of their own mission and core values, echoes the comment made by Lady Smith, in 2018, in findings  which identified abuse at Scottish institutions run by the Catholic Order of the Daughters of Charity, as part of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. 

(In 2018, a number of people were arrested and charged by Police Scotland in relation to the alleged abuses at one of these institutions, Smyllum Park).

Criticising the regime at such 'homes', Lady Smith commented:

“To children, ‘home’ should mean a safe place where they know they will find unconditional loving care provided by adults they can trust; a place they will find light whenever life outside has grown dark; a place which does not fill them with fear; a place where they will not suffer abuse.

"The provision, by the Order, of homes for the residential care of children in a way which routinely and consistently met that description would have been in keeping with their mission and with Christ’s teaching. Sadly, I have, in the light of the evidence, concluded that that did not happen. 

The Order's motto is 'Caritas Christi Urget Nos'- which means 'The charity of Christ crucified urges us', or 'the love of Christ compels us'.

It is clear, however, that the vision of 'charity' envisaged in the seventeenth century by founders St Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac was betrayed, in the most profound way, in too many of the institutions run by their followers in more recent times.

Louise de Marillac

The terms of the Scottish Inquiry are broader than IICSA, in that they include allegations of all forms of abuse, not just of a sexual nature. In England and Wales, it seems, only sexual abuse is now, belatedly, being taken seriously and the impact of the full scope of damage caused by other failures in care is not measured by this Inquiry, which is regrettable. One might hope that the Catholic Church would itself instigate an Inquiry into the shameful history of many of the schools and care homes - but there is no evidence they have any interest in taking responsibility for this.

Last November, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster Diocese, and the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, gave evidence to IICSA for the second time, and declared himself to be 'shocked to the core' by child sexual abuse involving members of the clergy, but stated he was 'still learning' about the issue. It seems that the idea that he should see things from the perspective of the victim or survivor had only just occurred to him, after a meeting at the Vatican with other Bishops. Understanding, for Cardinals, it seems, must only arrive via official channels, or in a moment of belated clarity, like a sacrament of faith.

'Annie' had written last year to Cardinal Nichols to ask him to instigate some sort of investigation into homes run by the Daughters of Charity. He did not reply.

The Catholic Church would no doubt, in their defence, point to the good work that has been done by the Order, and others like it, without understanding that until the unspoken legacy of abuse is recognised, and some sort of restitution made, lack of trust in the Church, as it has in Ireland, will fatally compromise what is left of its claim to serve any community in the name of God, or in the spirit of Christian values.

'Giovanni', an elderly man formerly resident in the Mill Hill Orphanage, who has lived abroad for many years, and no longer speaks English fluently, has given permission for his story to be published here, translated by a friend who has encouraged him to talk to her about his childhood. Although he was happy to use his own name, I have changed this and some other details in order to protect his identity, and shortened his account. 

In its way, it represents an example of the culture of abuse, in its broadest sense,  that these children were encouraged to accept as their lot: even without the sexual element, which in itself was only one terrible symptom of a wider system of control: the use of continual punishment and deprivation, of cruelty and humiliation, in order to create total submission to the authority of the Church.

The former Orphanage at St Vincent's, Mill Hill, now a luxury housing development.

"I was born in Italy in 1938. My brother Carlo was a few years my senior. When I was two my dad worked on the ships in the dockyard. One day a workmate asked him whether they could exchange shifts. My dad obliged. An accident happened on that shift, something fell down from a mast. My dad was killed. At that point my mother was pregnant with my younger brother Antonio. Soon Antonio was born, and my mum now had three boys to look after, all on her own. She struggled to make ends meet, with three mouths to feed.

A couple of years passed. Our destitution was such that mum had no choice but to leave one of us at an orphanage. The lot fell on me, since Carlo was old enough to look after baby Antonio, but two brothers would be too much for him. I was left in an orphanage. At the end of the war my mother met an English soldier, and soon got pregnant. She had no choice but to marry him and move to England. She took me out of the orphanage in Italy, to go with her to England together with my brothers, and baby Peter soon on his way. When we arrived in London, I remember there was no one to receive us, which was quite disheartening, and my mum did not speak a word of English. We had to sleep in a cheerless, dismal place, a kind of an old people’s home, on the first night.

My stepfather had neither the wish nor the means to keep his wife’s three Italian boys in his flat. Carlo was old enough to soon find work and spread his wings, but Antonio and I had to be placed elsewhere. My mum left me and Antonio at St Vincent Residential School for boys in Mill Hill when I was in my ninth year and Antonio in his seventh. This was in 1947. Antonio was placed in a ward for younger children, whereas I went with the older kids. The outdoor playground of our separate wards was divided by a fence, so from now on we could only speak to each other when outside, and across the fence. We only knew Italian and I recall being beaten by the other boys in the beginning, because I was different.

I was a quick learner. I was lucky because I had Sister R who seemed to take a liking to me and notice my efforts. I wanted so much to prove that I was worth being loved, so I tried very hard to excel at everything they asked us to do. Soon I became an altar boy. I was good at reciting Latin because of my Italian background. I was good at singing. I was given the responsibility of keeping the classroom neat and tidy. I polished the brass door handles and kept track of three dormitories. There were ten children in each of these. I was set to make sure it was quiet at the requested hour before going to sleep. I was responsible for keeping the rooms clean. I attached pieces of cloths to my knees and hands and pushed myself under the beds to sweep the floors. If any of the kids were stirring, they got a spanking from the nuns. Eventually I took that job myself. By and by I became quite popular, because I was good at football, good at cricket and good at school.

Miss Q kept night watch in the dormitories. She loathed us. She made sure it was all quiet during the night. "Who is that coughing?" "Stop coughing!" I remember I was sick and coughing, I had chronic trouble with my bronchi, and I was punished with a beating on my bare backside because I was coughing. Often, someone had done something wrong, and no one dared to come forward and admit it. We were punished collectively and told to stand on our knees with our arms raised behind our heads. This could last for 10-15 minutes, before we were released and allowed to eat.

I often sang during mass, and eager as I was, I also sang along with the priest when he was supposed to sing alone. I remember one such incident. After mass Mr P, the caretaker, came over and asked me to go and see Sister W in her office. A parcel had arrived for me, he said. Full of joy and astonishment I rushed to the office to collect it. "Come closer," Sister W demanded. "You don't sing when the priest sings". Then she handed me two mighty blows on each cheek for this serious offence. I was utterly baffled and deeply humiliated, since I had not the faintest idea I had done something wrong in the first place.

When it was Solemn Mass, some of the boys carried candles, and I was the thurifer, leading the procession, swinging a thurible with incense alongside another altar boy. When the priest was to turn wine into the blood of Christ, sometimes my role was to assist him. It happened once that I cheated a bit and made sure to spill a little on my hand so I could taste some too. After mass I was scolded by the priest and beaten about the ears: you don’t soak your fingers in wine!

We got up early in the morning and the mass was before breakfast. I remember during a morning rehearsal, Sister R was displeased because the altar boys’ responses to the priest had been faulty. If you can’t do better than this, you will not be allowed to serve at Solemn Mass. I was the best in Latin. I mumbled smugly among the other boys, "phhh I don't care”. Who said that?, A shouted. It wasn't that hard to see, because I was red as a beetroot. Forward with your hands, strike with the ruler. On your knees the rest of the rehearsal. Sister R was furious with me. You will not be allowed to be an altar boy at Easter Vigil until you apologise for your behaviour. I refused. From then on, Sister R gave me a cold shoulder and took no notice of me.

I was broken-hearted. During the breaks I stood there peeking at Sister R, pining for her attention, but she ignored me. This lasted for a long time. Closer to Easter I burst out in tears and apologised. Sister R accepted. She put me on her lap and I cried. No one else had taken over my role for Easter Mass, and I knew they needed me for this task since I performed it so well. She told me I could go on with it, now that I had apologised. Michael was a ginger haired Irish boy. When he saw me sitting on Sister R's  lap, he started to tease me. I leapt at him and wanted to kill him, and someone had to come and separate us.

I remember one more episode; there was a boy who was the biggest and strongest of all, and he was going to beat me up. But Antonio my brother was now on the same side of the playground. A boy was about to attack me, ready with his fist. But what happens? By surprise, Antonio runs up and gives him one on the nose. The boy was put out of play, and I had been rescued by my little brother.

Sundays when we played outside, the nuns would ring a big bell if they had a message for one of us. Johnny, your mum has come! Every time the bell rang, Antonio and I hoped that our mum was coming to see us. We hardly ever had visitors, though. Except for my elder brother Carlo. Once he came and brought me a belt, and I was overjoyed.

My mother now had two children with her English husband, so I don’t think she had time to see us as often as she wanted to. Sometimes we would go home for holidays. We had a dreadful time, because our stepfather, Mr G, was a tyrant. We Italian boys had to stay in a room upstairs when he was home, because he didn’t want to see us, nor hear us. I remember he put our little half-brother Peter in a drawer and closed it, so that the little boy had to be locked up there in the dark for a long time. He was savage to my mum too. She was too scared to oppose his cruel ways. My mum got ill and died when I was 15, and I was glad for her, because she had such a dreadful life with that tyrant. Their two children went into charge of the social services when mum died, I think they were put in foster homes.

At the orphanage we got little food and we were often hungry after meals. I complained to the caretaker Mr P and asked him why we couldn't get more to eat. He said it was how it was supposed to be. None of us were supposed to eat until we were full. Although he tried to say it in a joking way to make me feel better, I still could not understand it.

Mr B owned the farm next door. He kept cows. He delivered milk to the orphanage. Often the milk was off because it was kept in room temperature. I hated tapioca pudding and couldn't make myself eat it. Mr B and Mr P would hold me, while Miss Q forced my mouth open and spooned the pudding into my mouth. I threw up, and got punished for that, too. We were forced to eat everything they served us.

I believe my instinct drove me to defy all the ill treatment I received. I was toughened. I was going to show them that I would not let them break my spirit, I would show them I was the best, even if I was a foreigner. So I got up, brushed it off, and made every effort to do my best, no matter what."

It is interesting, in a grim way, to note from this account, and others, that some of the characteristic details of 'discipline' handed out in the Orphanage post war were still in place when I went to the primary school years later, just as they recur in the Scottish Inquiry's investigation into the homes like Smyllum: the use of rulers to hit children; the arms above the head punishment; the regular humiliation of frightened children who wet themselves; being physically forced to eat vile food - including tapioca - leave nothing at all, or be punished, and made to drink warm milk that had gone off. Any food that was left over in the school kitchen would be taken to feed the pigs on the farm, run by an Irish farmer, tenant of the nuns, whose brood of red headed sons attended the school. I used to feel a sense of comradeship with the pigs, forced to eat such inedible slop. 

But however awful the conditions for us at the school, we could go home at night. There was no one to see what happened in the Orphanage that lay behind us, but which was as separate and alien as a foreign country: a place of mystery, that no one mentioned, the children rarely seen. They were meant to be unseen.

The waxen effigy and relics of St Vincent de Paul. The chapel at St Vincent's had a similarly terrifying glass tomb, encasing the figure of a child, meant to be one of the 'Holy Innocents'. 

Giovanni's friend continued the story, after he left Mill Hill: sent to a home in Essex then run by the Christian Brothers, but which had for many years been one of the Daughters of Charity's institutions. He believed that one of the Brothers regularly abused one of the boys in his dormitory, who would spend time each night in the screened off area where he slept.

At Mill Hill, 'Giovanni' learned quickly that the way to survive a childhood in the care of the Daughters of Charity was to comply with the regulations, and seek to please the one nun who seemed to care about his welfare, albeit in a way that meant failure to obey led to the instant withdrawal of her favour. Like most of the other children, he knew no other sort of home or family life, and accepted as the norm conditions which to us seem only cruel, and uncaring. 

'Phil' and his brothers all left the UK, after their years in care. But they could not leave behind the years of trauma, or the damage that it had done. Time is not a great healer, in these circumstances: in later life such memories often resurface, as vivid and destructive as before. At least now, with their accounts accepted as evidence in the course of the IICSA inquiry, there is a chance of some belated justice for victims, and some sort of restitution. 

I hope so, anyway.

Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Anyone who wishes to contact the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, perhaps to make their own submission of evidence,  may do so here:

https://www.iicsa.org.uk/

Link to support services here:

Too Long at the Fair: Victoria Park, and Barnet Tories, all on board the Ghost Train 7 Sep 2020 6:17 AM (4 years ago)

And Capita runs many other services for Barnet: including the management of parks and open spaces. 

A couple of summers ago, a group of Gypsy Travellers dared to come and halt for a few days, very neatly, in a corner of the park. They were obliged to do this because in Barnet there are not, and never have been, any legal stopping places for gypsies, even during the many years when it was a statutory requirement.

The Travellers and their caravans were frankly indistinguishable from the fairground people who now park up here, with their own tatty looking vehicles, several times a year, in order to feed the council's income generating machine, run by Capita. The only difference is that the council provides them with facilities, and rubbish bins. But the racist rebellion from a vocal minority of outraged local residents ensured that they were soon turned out of the park: on the day of the eviction some local women stood and literally shrieked at police officers, until this was done.

I stood and watched as this eviction took place. The council officer who was in charge noticed me looking and said, assuming I was one of them: 'Don't worry, they're being moved out'. I replied that I wasn't worried, except that the occupation would not have happened, if there had been an alternative stopping place. He looked back at me blankly, unable to comprehend why anyone would care. I wondered what he would say if I told him that some of my own family used to travel about in this way, once upon a time.

Two years on, and we find ourselves in the year of Covid, and our local park has never been more vital to those of us who live in the area: the only place we can go to, to walk in the fresh air, in safety, socially distanced, and escape from the otherwise full time house arrest many of us are still under.

The last thing we expected to see in the park this summer, at a point when local infection rates are shooting up again, was another occupation - by a fun fair.

The occupation of a park by Gypsy Travellers is a threat to public safety, but the occupation of a park by a fun fair, in the midst of a pandemic, sanctioned by the same officers who organised the eviction of the former, is ok, apparently. Probably because, you might reasonably assume, quite apart from the pandering to racism, the only events allowed in the park are those which generate income for the council  - and more importantly, for Capita. 

Capita manages parks and greenspaces, and receives, for all budget 'savings' it identifies as such, financial rewards, called 'gainshare payments'. This is one of the ways the company extracts profit from our local services - all as part of the massive contracts, thousands of pages long, which our empty headed Tory councillors obediently signed, in 2013, without properly reading the small print. Or even the large print. They relied on the same people who wrote the contract to scrutinise the contract for them: that is how lazy and incompetent they were.

Labour councillor Ross Houston at Victoria Park: he and local members were not consulted about the fair, and are questioning why this event is continuing.

Complaints about the fun fair were made to the relevant officers, and local councillors. It became clear that the local councillors had not been consulted. An officer claimed that they had been 'informed'. This turned out to be after residents' complaints were made to said officers. The approval of such events, said the officers, was made on a basis of 'business as usual'. Despite the fact that we are clearly not living in 'usual' times, and that Covid infection rates are now increasing.

Further enquiries revealed that officers were complacently relying on assurances made by the fun fair organisers: assurances that clearly, on my visits, were not being observed. But this is anyway irrelevant - there is no way in which a public gathering of this sort, with these numbers attending, in their hundreds every day, for ten days, could be safe from risk, in the current circumstances.

At the end of the week, as the fair arrived and started up its ten day booking, the council's own Covid data demonstrated that the infection rate in the borough, and in this part of the borough, were increasing. Their twitter account continued to urge people to #stayalert, and take precautions to avoid risk of infection. Local GPs, for the first time during the epidemic, issued text messages to patients warning them of the rise. 

Still the fair continued, and over the weekend when it was always going to be busiest: hundreds of people attending every day. I visited twice, at a safe distance, and in a mask, watching in horror the lack of social distancing, monitoring of numbers, cleansing: people shrieking on the rides, all unmasked - only one or two ride attendants sporting one, in one case under the chin. At one stall, food was being prepared and handed over by a person wearing no gloves, no mask, to a queue of non socially distanced customers. Business as usual, if the definition of usual is borrowed from the era of Typhoid Mary, perhaps.

One might have sympathy with the people who work on the fair - ironically, originally many fair people were Gypsies too, once upon a time: but many of us are hugely financially impacted by the continuing Covid nightmare - one which will be ending even further in the future if we do not get a grip of it now, in the wake of fatal delays and gross incompetence in the handling of the crisis by Johnson's government, rotten to the core with contracts to private companies that fail to deliver vital PPE, and all the other companies favoured on the basis of croneyism.

Back in Finchley: one resident at the weekend contacted our Tory MP Freer, who lives near to the park. She was reportedly informed that he could do nothing about the fair.

Absurdly, by Monday, the situation in regard to the Covid rate was so critical that the council tweeted that people must not meet up outside in groups of more than six. There have been reports, over the last week, of police fining or closing down large gatherings: yet this one is still going on. Why?

Here is the nub of the matter. 

The local authority's responsibility for public health is clearly being put at risk by by the actions of its own contractual providers, in allowing this fair to take place at all, at this time - of course all responsible boroughs have had control of their own decision making, and cancelled such large scale events. 

This local authority's functions and duties to the public, as with central government, in many respects, are being compromised by the activities of its own privatised services - on a huge scale, most obviously in planning and development. 

Last week the professionally lobbied plans of a developer to build a set of monstrous blocks of flats on the site of the former gas works in East Barnet were rejected by 'outraged' Tory councillors, the same councillors who have approved development of monstrous blocks of flats in areas where their own vote base was not at threat. The interesting thing about this was, as fellow blogger John Dix pointed out, the extent to which the arguments put by Capita planning officers appeared to be in ignorance of so many council planning policies. He posed the question: 'When you outsource critical council functions like planning & make them highly dependent on fees, is this one of the consequences?"

Here in Barnet Tory councillors have outsourced their public services, and outsourced their responsibilities. 

They are no longer running this borough: it is being run by a private company which knows that no matter how poor their performance in service delivery, their clients in Barnet will not withdraw from the contracts, or seek any effective sanction for their losses. It is caught in a relationship of coercive control, from which, or so they maintain, there is no escape.

There is just one problem, from the point of view of the local Tory party. Their own voters are now falling under the wheels of the vehicle they created, by allowing a private company to run the borough. Residents of formerly loyal Tory areas are now being confronted by rampant development right next door to them, and are furious that there is nothing to stop it. They see their pavements and roads left unrepaired, and are furious about that too. They find a fun fair in their local park, during a global pandemic. The Tory councillors and MPs they write to, about all such matters, expecting instant action, are unable to help, because they cannot compel contracted out services to do the work they are paid to do, to an adequate standard. Why would they, when nothing happens when they don't? 

So: come along to Victoria Park. Steer clear of the building site, on your way in. Wander into the fun fair, why don't you, and test out the old herd immunity thing? It's what Dominic Cummings would want, after all. 

This is Broken Barnet, the ultimate wet dream of any slaphead government adviser, hiding in the bunker on his dad's farm: a testing ground of market forces, spaffed up all over the place, unregulated. A former democracy taken over by covert consultants and faceless managers: all the fun of the fair, and all of the risk on us, the poor sods who pay our council taxes, and are left looking forlornly through the park railings for the lost figure of Inky Stephens, hiding in the shadows of the Ghost Train.

Tickets please!

From John Hooton:


Firstly just to be very clear that we all remain very concerned about the prevention of spread of Covid-19 in Barnet, and we are working closely with Public Health England colleagues, looking at cases in the borough, where these are arising, making sure that any links are identified and that our community messaging is targeted in the right way.

There is a system nationally and indeed across London that we work within, which includes escalation points where additional measures are considered in local areas, depending on the intelligence coming through the public health system. This is based on coronavirus infection rate per 100, 000 population.

Barnet has seen a relatively low number of cases over June, July and first part of August, and has been well below the threshold of 20 to 25 per 100,000 cases. At this point, we make sure that we target our communications in areas where there have been more cases or clusters of cases, and work closely with the test and trace system on the intelligence to see if there are any links between cases and any potential risks of increased infection. At this level of cases, events and activities will take place across Barnet and indeed in boroughs across the country provided that they are adhering to national guidelines and that Covid risk assessments are completed if necessary. Many other boroughs in London have had similar events over recent weeks, and this operator was previously in another London borough.

When the threshold of 20 to 25 per 100,000 cases is reached, this is the point at which additional preventative measures are considered. This would include enhanced enforcement in areas of higher infection, more community messaging and reviewing whether things like events or large gatherings should still take place.

As of today, Barnet has seen the rate per 100,000 increase to over 20. That means that our public health team are working with regional colleagues to understand the epidemiological picture and agree the appropriate actions.

The intelligence suggests that the increase in cases is predominantly in 16-24 age group and also particularly in the south and the west of the borough. Transmission is mainly through household members, through visiting friends and private parties and gatherings. Whatever we do in terms of next steps will need to be informed by the evidence that is coming through from the public health system.

Finally, I just want to be very clear that any fee that is paid by the operator has absolutely no bearing on whether the funfair will continue to operate in the borough. On this, a decision will be taken in the next 24 hours on the basis of the information we have on compliance with the risk assessment and the context that I have set out above.


Kind regards

My response: 

Yes, thank you for this but if you will forgive my bluntness, this is just a load of flannel. 

The facts are reducible to one thing. There is an increase locally, amongst largely young people. Yet you have allowed a fun fair to take place, and to continue even as cases are rising, an event which young people of this age group attend, whilst sending out messages telling people not to gather in groups of more than six outdoors. This is absurd. That is all there is to it. 

There was never any argument for holding an event like this during a pandemic. There is enough risk from activities which are unavoidable, and such events as this set a dangerous example to the community, encouraging them to think there is no longer any need for caution - as evidenced by the behaviour of the majority of people at the fair.

 At this precise point it is reckless, and will cause the spread of the virus utterly unnecessarily. Let us hope no lives are lost or serious long term health problems caused as a consequence.


Theresa Musgrove


Update No 2:

Yesterday (Wednesday) it became apparent that national rates of Covid infection have risen to the extent that a drastic revision of measures has had to be adopted by the Government. It was also revealed locally that infection rates in Barnet, specifically in wards adjacent to Victoria Park, have been rising to an alarming level: see the chart below.

After writing to the Chief Executive to ask him to confirm that now, at least, the fair would be stopped, he replied to say that this would only happen on Friday. 

This means that nine out of the ten days the fair was due to run have been allowed, in the face of all common sense - and rising rates of Covid transmission. 

Stopping it only one day short does nothing except allow the council to demonstrate a purely nominal intervention. 

If there is a risk, there has been one right from the beginning - and it has increased as the event has been running. It will not magically change tomorrow: it is already increasing beyond any point that such events could possibly be justified - if there ever was justification, at the time of a pandemic. 

This sorry tale is the perfect demonstration of everything that is wrong with the administration of this local authority, and in its way a reflection of the sickness in our current government: an impotent Tory leadership, policy and decision making being driven by outsourced contractors, and a process of governance unable to put the well being of the community, and its responsibilities for the protection of public health, before the demands of income generation - 'business as usual'. Too many conflicts of interests, too much compromise. Our democratic system is broken.

Finchley Memorial Green Space: Clowning around, Weaving the Landscape - and Nestling into a Rhythm - a presentation from the developers 27 Jun 2020 12:00 PM (4 years ago)

Finchley Memorial Hospital - new proposals to build on our community green space 24 Jun 2020 8:01 AM (4 years ago)

During lockdown, the would be developers of the former gas works in New Barnet, who want to impose a stunningly ugly set of blocks on that site, faced a slight setback when protest from fellow blogger Mr Reasonable and other residents forced an extension to the consultation period. There have been at least 891 objections.

Flats in Victoria Park, Finchley, in place of the demolished park keeper's Lodge, courtesy of your local Tory councillors

Area defined in red is where developers want to put the proposed blocks of flats: pic courtesy CHP.

Doesn't tell you much, does it? Are these 'homes' - flats - for sale, or rent? What is 'affordable'? Rent at 65%, say, of local levels in this part of Finchley (some of the houses in Bow Lane have been marketed at £1 million plus) is not going to be affordable for many NHS or key workers.

1. This is community ground, and was intended to remain so for local residents, of which I am one.

Why not build homes for NHS staff on available ground that does not remove community space?

2. What happens if NHS staff or key worker staff cannot afford the supposedly affordable level of purchase of these proposed properties? What is to stop these properties ending up on the open market?

3. What is to stop changes in use from NHS or key worker staff to open marketing to any purchaser?

4. Please confirm that there is nothing to stop the developers dropping the affordable/key worker designation of these properties, once permission has been granted, claiming it is no longer viable to designate the properties as affordable.

5. Who is paying for the development and building costs of these proposals? 

As of today, a week later, he has not replied. If and when he does, I will publish his responses.

Don't be fooled by the framing of this development proposal. We all want a better deal for NHS staff, and know how much they deserve a decent salary, working conditions, and a good quality of life. But NHS properties, or CHP, or the local NHS trust, have had plenty of opportunity to provide affordable housing for staff, even locally - and on NHS owned land. 

More than a decade ago, the developers of Barnet General turned down the opportunity to convert the former Barnet Workhouse, one of the first built in the country, in the early 1830s, and very probably one of the sources of inspiration for Dickens's 'Oliver Twist', into homes for key workers. The then Labour leader of the council put an emergency local listing status on the building. The developers knocked it down regardless, two weeks later. The site then stood derelict for years: then there were - surprise! - rumours that housing would be built there. Not for NHS staff, or key workers. Last time I had the misfortune to visit Barnet General, it was still derelict.

There was also the former Marie Foster site, not far from the hospital. That was sold no doubt at huge profit, to a private care provider. Why did they not build homes for NHS or key workers there? Or in any of the other large NHS owned estates now being carved up and developed as private housing, all over London?

Alternatively, there are plenty of brownfield sites or other locations which would be suitable for housing development: but our access to open space, to community space, in this borough, in this part of the borough, is rapidly diminishing. Victoria Park, as we have seen, was designated open space, and protected by a covenant, intended to keep it as such. This was ignored. Now we have another precious open space, meant to be for community use, targeted for more profit led development - and please don't imagine profit is not involved in this scheme, whoever the intended tenants of this housing may be.

Just as bad as the loss of this space would be, is the precedent it would set for every other similar remaining site in this borough. Nothing will be safe from development. And the way in which it has been covertly organised by interested parties, over a period of years, frankly, is cynical beyond words: look at those emails again, and wonder at the rare glimpse it affords into what happens under the cover of our local council and their privatised planning service.

We have reached a point now where this service is run entirely to benefit developers and Capita, who milk this borough for every last fee they can generate from us.  In terms of planning there are so many fees they can screw out of development, and some of the practices this encourages are deeply concerning.

Why, for example, has it been made possible for developers to pay for a named planning officer of their choice?

Why are former senior planning officers able to leave Barnet/Capita and immediately go to work for the same developers they were dealing with in their former posts? And to deal with former colleagues in the promotion of their new clients' applications?

Then there is the question of impact on the local community of such large scale development. 

Where is the expansion in infrastructure, education and healthcare provision?

With more and more development and greater density of an enlarged population, is there not a greater not lesser need for green and open spaces, for the physical and mental well being of all residents?

The site of Finchley Memorial Hospital is not just another plot waiting for development - or at least, it is, only in the eyes of developers and those agencies and companies that benefit from the massive, virtually unregulated expansion of such development in this borough.

It is not only a tiny, precious piece of open space, a community asset - it is part of our local history.

This area of Finchley was once part of Finchley Common, and on this particular spot there was a small settlement of cottages, at Fallow Corner. Look carefully at the aerial photo, and you will see  trees and shrubs, which, close up, you will realise are ancient remnants, boundary markers, of a more rural era.

Dickens came here to visit the clown Grimaldi's cottage right here, at Fallows Corner, and later returned to stay at nearby Fallow Farm, then known as Cobleys's Farm, to write Martin Chuzzlewit. Grimaldi's residence is now marked exactly on the site targeted for development with a plaque that no doubt is in the way of the proposed blocks of flats, just as the new war Memorial intended for this spot has been shoved aside, and the installation made impossible, inexplicably, for years.

The very name 'Finchley Memorial' was given to the old cottage hospital here, replaced by the empty modern building carefully located a suitable distance away, across the empty fields. The name was given in order to commemorate the fallen of Finchley, who did not return from the fields of Flanders, in the first World War.

The new War memorial had many names added to it, and should have been in place for 2018. For the last four years, it has been left packed in wooden crates in a stonemason's yard in Scotland. At the time of the centenary, all that was allowed to be put in place was this wreath:

What greater insult to the memory of those local men, than to prevent this commemoration from taking place, without admitting the real reason, that it was in the way of development?

Literally nothing is safe anymore, from the hands of profiteers: our built heritage, our local history: our parks and open spaces.

The only way to stop this madness is to make sure you make your objections heard, loud and clear, even now, at this awful time.

Although the CHP has launched a campaign and website, you will not there are no detailed plans available, so this cannot be considered in any way as proper consultation.

They say that:

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic we are unable to hold a physical public exhibition, but we have provided other means through which you can feedback to us, through this site.

You might think that after all these years of waiting developers might not wish to hurry through plans during a global crisis, but then ... that would be rather naive, wouldn't it?

I am still waiting for a response to my questions, sent a week ago. I will attempt to register for these 'consultations' and 'presentations' - and I hope others will too:

We will also be holding two online presentations on the scheme which you can book to attend by emailing Oliver Deed on finchley@homesforNHSstaff.co.uk. These are taking place on Thursday 25th June, between 7pm - 8pm and on Tuesday 7th July between 12pm - 1pm. You can also email to organise a one to one telephone consultation with a member of the project team by emailing finchley@homesforNHSstaff.co.uk

If you wish to oppose the building of housing on our open community space, there is a petition started by a local resident, which already has more than 800 signatures, and which you might wish to sign: link here.

Tell Us Like It Is: Barnet Tories confronted with the impact of their library cuts. 8 Mar 2020 11:11 AM (5 years ago)

Saving Barnet Libraries: the last battle 4 Mar 2020 10:24 AM (5 years ago)

This was the interesting claim that was written on banners and hung outside library buildings across the borough, two weeks before the general election of 2017, trying to persuade local voters that nothing was happening to this vital community service, other than a few new carpets and a change in upholstery. In one case, seen below, at North Finchley, the banner was hung outside a library being used as a polling station, the paint hardly dry after its beautiful, purpose built children's library had been hollowed out and oh: 'refurbished' - to no purpose whatsoever.

North Finchley library on polling day, 2017

What was happening, in truth, was that Barnet's Tory councillors were spending £14 million on hacking the library service to pieces: sacking staff, chucking out books by the skipload, carving up the library buildings, so as to empty most of the space of any library function, and then installing 'open access' equipment, so that staffed library hours were reduced to a nominal level of coverage. Unaccompanied children under 16 were banned from entry, and study space cut back to a fraction of the former provision.

And for what reason? Ostensibly to 'save money'. Yes: spending £14 million to ... make savings. 

The only 'savings' that emerged from this were in terms of staffing costs: paying off the staff who were sacked. Except: oh dear, as predicted, the risks to library users of unstaffed libraries, as campaigners against the cuts warned, meant that the council ended up paying a fortune every month on security guards - and has done ever since.

The story given that the massive reduction in library space within the former library buildings was so as to generate income from commercial renting soon turned out to be ... just that: a story. 

There never was any serious intention to let the space in this way, as was admitted at the time of nonsultation: senior officers admitted they had done no market testing, and said it didn't really matter. 

Golders Green children's library, after Barnet Tories destroyed it - and above right, the replacement they shoved into the adult library.

It didn't matter, because the long term plan, as many believe, is merely to run the service down to the point where the authority and Capita can find a reason to divest the council of more assets, and sell some of the buildings for development, on the basis of insufficient footfall as a library.

The result, however, is that the income which was part of the original business plan has not materialised, and as things stand, the £14 million 'investment' in the 'refurbishment' of the service will see no proportionate return.

In short, the libraries' fiasco, even if judged only on its financial case, has been a failure. This is the only outcome which will worry some Barnet Tories: but it is not the only, or the most important, consequence, of course. 

Having written to the government minister responsible for libraries to complain about the devastating cuts to our library service, Save Barnet Libraries campaigners pushed for a review of the impact of these cuts, and a report by an independent company of consultants 'Activist Group" has now been published. 

Save Barnet Libraries campaigners, with letters in support of East Finchley library, by local children.

Tomorrow (Thursday 5th March) the report, which you can read here, will be considered by the Community Leadership and Libraries committee (you can see that Barnet Tories have so little interest in the library service they have attached it randomly, as an afterthought, to this committee, rather than allow it, as was once the case, its own committee, or include it, as it should be, with education and leisure).

What does the report say?

It says that everything we as residents and campaigners said would happen, has happened. 

That the current plan for libraries does not deliver the expectations of the council's own stated local policies.

That even if you accept that their intentions in pursuing the cuts were valid, their objectives have not been met, and their strategy has failed to deliver the results they demanded. 

That "the reduction in staffed opening hours has gone too far ..." 

That: "Students no longer have sufficient study space at many branches ..."

It is noted that reduction in book stock can have a detrimental impact on user visits (deliberately so, of course, in Barnet) - although the report perhaps does not fully explore the particularly poor provision of stock for children, especially at libraries such as Hendon, and Golders Green. (see pics below)

Library users who were surveyed, moreover, referred to the range of books in their top priorities for improvement: first priority, unsurprisingly, is the availability of staff:

The impact on children and young people, especially those from backgrounds of social deprivation is made clear in this report:

Prosperity, child poverty and attainment

3.44 

The borough is relatively prosperous and has high levels of educational attainment. However, Barnet contains pockets of deprivation which are concentrated, but not exclusively, in the West of the borough.

This is reflected in turn by the third of children who live in poverty. These inequalities are reflected in educational attainment. The implications for the library strategy are:

• The relative prosperity of the borough means that a substantial proportion of the borough may choose not to borrow books or use free computer terminals.

• While generally prosperous, there are areas with high levels of deprivation which need adequate resources.

• Study spaces for young people are particularly important for those living in the most deprived areas.

• Self-service opening currently excludes, and possibly disadvantages, young people below the age of 15 from accessing quiet study areas.

The report highlights one crucial aspect of the failed 'transformation' of the library service: Barnet was one of the first authorities to implement the so called 'open access', unstaffed libraries - but they tried to use the technology in a way that no one else had used it: in order to reduce staffed hours. This is why it has been such a disaster, and has seen the permanent deployment and high cost of security staff. The adoption of open access libraries, incidentally, was based on a lie - reports to committee claiming that such libraries were 'standard' use in 'Scandinavia'. They weren't, and the few that were in existence were used in a completely different context.

Security staff cannot replace the removal of trained library staff, nor can the Big Brother eye of CCTV, which is supposed to monitor these spaces in lieu of staff on the ground. 

The report takes up the issue of 'volunteers': Barnet Tory councillors, some of whom expect generous allowances for little or no work by themselves (for example in the case of one very well paid Chair whose committee did not meet for more than seven months), in their eagerness to make residents work for free - doing work that their council tax has already paid for - thought that they could sack their own trained library staff, and replace them, if necessary, with 'volunteers'. 

The report points out that this did not happen. It didn't happen, as we warned it would not, (and is touched upon in the report) because by and large people do not want to take away the livelihoods of library workers and anyway are not capable of doing the work of professional librarians or trained library staff. 

There is a fundamental failure to grasp, both in the culture of the Barnet Tory 'vision' for public services, and to some extent in this report, the reason why volunteers cannot and should not be asked to run libraries. 

The idea that well meaning residents can take the place of library staff is wrong: the duties of library workers are complex, and require a wide range of skills, including management of safeguarding issues, dealing with users presenting challenging behaviour due to mental health problems, guiding users needing help with benefit or job applications, those in need of social service support - as well as an understanding of data protection issues. That is in addition to having a wide experience in IT and information provision - not just finding you an instant result on google, but finding you the right sort of answer for your needs. This level of qualification and skill is not, and should never be, demanded of volunteers in any form of service, but particularly in a work environment used by vulnerable residents and children.

Part of East Finchley library - as it was

The physical absence of library staff means that library users feel at risk, lack skilled support, and for many users at risk of social isolation, or with mental health issues, for children and elderly users, as we hear from users quoted in this report, there is every reason now not even to attempt to visit their local library, or, as the report points out, even to try to guess when it is open - or where it is.

Where it is? Yes. One important point well covered in the report is the lack of basic signage: a telling absence which reflects the fact that the council would really rather you didn't turn up and use the service. 

My local library is a good example of this: the new Church End branch does not even have a sign outside informing you that it is a library. If you didn't already know, you would never know at all. 

Why is this? 

If you look around you, you will see none of the fixtures are permanent: the space could be emptied of books and stripped back within a short time, with no structural changes. And that is because the space belongs to the development in which it is placed, given planning permission on the basis of offering us a new library we didn't need: there was one across the road - with a sign saying 'library' on the front - which simply required some ... what is the word? Refurbishment ... 

Once the new library fails to be considered to be performing adequately, it will face closure, and the lease returned to the freeholders. Other libraries face closure on the grounds of self generated decline in use - and will no doubt provide an asset ripe for sale - and yet another opportunity for development for the vultures circling what is left of our built heritage and community centres. 

The closure of libraries, in Barnet, is and always has been a very sensitive political issue: it causes alarm among Tory voters, and letters to our MPs: they don't want this, so the cuts were designed so as to leave the library buildings nominally as libraries, but effectively in a state that would make future closures less controversial. 

In terms of impact, these truly devastating cuts to the library service have caused real hardship for many dependent and vulnerable users. Their statements may be found in the report: take for example these comments on unstaffed hours, when entry is only possible with a card and pin number, and there may not even be a security guard on the premises: 

These are all issues we warned would happen - but were ignored by the Tory members and senior officers who wanted to adopt this system. 

People simply do not want libraries to be unstaffed: they don't feel safe, there is no one to ask for help, should there be a problem - but most of all, no one is available should they need advice, guidance, or complex information. 

One of the issues given particular attention is that of toilets: the removal of staff has had the consequence that branches are often left with no access at all, leaving many users, especially those who are disabled, elderly, pregnant, or with children, feeling unable to continue to visit their local libraries. 

Another of the issues probably not given as much attention as it should, but beyond the remit of this review in terms of future outcome, was the impact of such reduced access to libraries on the literacy and educational achievement of the borough's children, especially those in less advantaged families: an outcome whose that will only be seen in the years to come. 

Other forms of impact are not quantifiable: the impact in terms of loneliness and social exclusion. 

What can be measured has largely been avoided: as the report notes, libraries have been left without any system of assessing the level of use, since the cuts were implemented. Now why might that be, do you suppose?

As the report observes, all of this is so short sighted, in failing to accept how libraries can be used in a 'preventative' role, "improving people’s life chances and helping to reduce spending on health and welfare".

But then in Broken Barnet, long term gain is never seen as more useful than short term measures, or political gestures. 

So what is to be done? 

The report is quite clear. It recommends replacing lost staffing hours - at least until the day that will never come, when the mythical volunteer army is ready to take over: but most importantly of all, investing in the library service - yes, investing, not cutting, a difficult concept for Barnet Tories but one - are you keeping up, councillors? - one which in the long term will be more cost effective, in terms of its preventative role, as already noted. 

There is of course the benefit in terms of social value, but that might require some difficult thinking, for some members, being a commodity that cannot be measured, weighed, or quantified in material terms.

Tomorrow is also World Book Day, and an appropriate day in which to make a plea, by the children of the borough, to their elected representatives that evening, to secure their right to a better future, and a future for their local libraries.

Do the Right Thing, or: The Right Thing to Do? - another tale of two Barnets 29 Jan 2020 4:28 AM (5 years ago)

Last week saw a hugely significant development in the continuing saga that is the relationship between the London Borough of Broken Barnet, and Saracens rugby club, owned by Totteridge resident Nigel Wray.

The club has been found in breach of regulations on the capping of players' salaries, and awarded a massive fine, of £5.4 million. 

Faced with the choice of an audit of their accounts, or relegation, the club has chosen relegation: an extraordinary choice, you might think, in the circumstances. The club's new Chairman issued a statement last week in which he said:

We carefully considered the option of a full investigatory audit. However, that inevitably would have involved a long period of more financial and emotional strain and this in turn meant this was not a viable option for us.

This decision, however, is one that has very serious implications for the £22 million loan that Barnet Tory councillors approved last year, so that Saracens could build a new stand for the stadium at Allianz Park, the former Copthall, which the council has given them for a peppercorn rent. 

The £22 million loan was made possible by the council applying to the Public Works Loan Board, a source of government funding that was set up in order to finance the improvement of housing, education, and sanitation, and is used by many authorities still, exactly for that purpose. - or rather it was, as the PWLB is meant to be abolished.

In Broken Barnet, we do things differently, of course. 

Barnet Tories, culturally averse - (if we may suppose that reference to culture is appropriate, in their case) - to the idea of public subsidy in the form of say, social housing, or welfare support - are still open to the idea of helping out struggling private companies in the form of rugby clubs. So what, if, in the case of failure, tax payers may end up paying back the loan?

So much has changed since the agreement between the council and Saracens was approved. Relegation means a drop in income - does this affect the risk level of Barnet's investment, and the future of the promised repayments? And ownership of the club has passed now to a family trust. Today there are reports on social media that even the Allianz sponsorship of Saracens may be under threat, which clearly, if ended, would affect the club's financial health.

What is Barnet's position? They kept suspiciously quiet about the latest revelations - but hats off now to fellow blogger Mr Reasonable for spotting that, sneaked into the agenda for tonight's Financial Performance and Contracts Committee, is an 'update' on the Saracens situation. 

A report, written by the deputy Chief Executive, who as you will know from the FOI material published here, was prominent in encouraging this loan, states that Barnet has temporarily halted payments of the money to Saracens. 

Temporarily.

But the club has already received £3.2 million worth of the loan.

Even if no further payments are made, and it is likely that some will push for this to continue - will Barnet taxpayers receive a refund of this money?

And erm: what has the money been spent on? 

We know that the stand has not been built, nor has the old one been demolished: the stand has been 'on hold' since last summer. It seems an awful lot of money to draw down in that case. 

And are officers suggesting to councillors that this loan should continue, on the basis of assurances that everything is ok? 

According to a story in the local Times newspaper, council Leader Daniel Thomas appears not at all worried by the recent developments. He claims:

... the Saracens loan was well scrutinised. It factored in a wide range of scenarios, including the possibility that the rugby club could be relegated.

That is why the sums drawn down are fully covered by a guarantee from a UK-based company. 

Ah yes. 'Fully covered' by a guarantee from a UK-based company. 

That would be, as we read in the report: 

A Guarantee, covering part of the liability under the Loan Agreement, between Company A and the council capped at £10million ...  

And then:

1.6. Company A’s assets are valued in excess of £20m, consistent with the

requirement for the value of the guarantor’s assets to be at least double the

value of the guarantee. Confirmation of Company A’s net asset value was

most recently provided on 29 July 2019 in relation to the position as at 30

June 2019. Informal assurance that the position is maintained as at 31

December 2019 has been provided, with formal assurance due by 29 January

2020. Oral confirmation that this has been received will be provided at the

meeting.

So, according to the report written by the deputy Chief Executive, Cath Shaw - we had 'informal assurance' (do we? From whom?) about Company A on 31st December, and formal assurance is due - oh. By the date of the committee meeting this week, on the 29th January - but how curious: only oral confirmation will be given that this has been received. 

Is this 'guarantee' - a formal assurance, in the form of oral confirmation, worth the paper it is not written on? 

Why are the elected members of this committee not allowed to see this assurance, which presumably the senior officers will have?

I think this is pretty outrageous. Members and the residents and local taxpayers who ultimately bear the risk of paying back this loan, if Saracens do not, have every right to know the truth of the current situation.

This loan should never have been brokered by the senior management team, and quite clearly the reasons why that is so are now made evident. 

It is time that there was an independent inquiry into how and why we became saddled with this loan, and those responsible held to account. Why so much time, disproportionate to any alleged benefits to the borough - time paid for by residents and taxpayers - was spent pushing this loan, is a question that must be asked. 

Saracens' core values

If the authority wanted to use PWLB money for the purpose it is intended, for the improvement of vital infrastructure, for housing, education, sanitation, things that are fundamental to the well being and basic needs of any community, it would be understandable: especially housing.

Throughout the course of the negotiation for the Saracens loan, all eyes, it seems, were diverted away from the state of the borough's social housing needs. 

The only focus of interest to Barnet Tories and their senior management team, as well as their Capita partners, is in development, on a mass scale, for profit, not as an answer to the real needs of local people, but for its own sake, and that of the various carpet bagging developers flocking to the open opportunities of a borough whose planning and regeneration service is now run by a privatised company focused on facilitating their schemes, and generating a huge income in the process. 

The first of these schemes was in West Hendon: begun as a renovation of a council housing estate, somehow transformed, by stealth, into a luxury development on publicly owned land given away to Barratts, for the sum of £3. 

Council tenants were in the way of this grand scheme, by the beautiful waterside of the Welsh Harp, so any moving in there were put on terms of non secure tenancy, maybe for ten years, with no rights, no knowledge of how and when they might one day be evicted.

As the monstrous tower blocks grew up around them, surrounding them with the dirt, noise and intrusion of constant construction work, the remaining social housing tenants and lease holders were left in decaying buildings, neglected, with no effective maintenance. 

Last year the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire show reported on the state of the slum standard accommodation in which Barnet Tories had left their tenants in Marsh Drive, the last blocks of the old estate: here were families with babies and young children forced to live in squalor that would have shamed a Victorian slum landlord: damp and mouldy walls, infestation of rats and cockroaches - the latter biting the children, and crawling over food and eating surfaces - and no security to prevent drug addicts regularly entering the buildings to shoot up on the stairs outside their front doors.

Other issues were even more fundamental: the safety of the buildings themselves, with evidence of risks of collapse, gas leaks and fire safety. 

None of this had been as important, however, as arranging the Saracens loan, or waving through more and more non affordable housing developments. 

Not one Barnet Tory would appear on the first Victoria Derbyshire programme: in their place, suitably, was the disgraced former Tory councillor Brian Coleman.

The Leader would not appear, nor the Chair of the Housing Committee that had not met throughout most of last year - supposedly due to a lack of 'issues'.

Unluckily for them all, last week the same show decided to revisit the tenants of Marsh Drive, to see what progress had been made. In short, 'progress' consisted of a couple of wardens, inadequate to the task of replacing proper security; some belated attention to the rodent and cockroach infestation - and the news that in ten months they would be turfed out of Marsh Drive. 

Where will they go? They didn't know. Non secure tenants have no rights, effectively, in Broken Barnet. They might be sent to another 'regeneration' estate, with similarly awful conditions. They might be 'decanted' miles away, to become the problem of some other authority - in Peterborough, or Milton Keynes, or anywhere  - so what if their jobs and schools are here? And if they refuse to go? They have made themselves homeless. 

As for jobs ... as was exposed on the second Derbyshire show, and reported here, when Helene Richman, one of the new Tory councillors for West Hendon, was at a meeting with tenants, she informed them:

We don’t want to pay for you to live for free your whole life because you don’t have a job.

Told by the outraged tenant that they did have a job, she then commented that they should 'move somewhere cheaper'.

When asked about this, Leader Daniel Thomas, now forced to appear to defend his administration,  said that such comments were not the view of his party. Oh.

Tory Leader Thomas on the Victoria Derbyshire show

When asked if he could live in conditions like Marsh Drive, he agreed that he could not. 

Which means that he was quite happy to leave others living there, because he had no sense that anything that was intolerable for him should be considered unacceptable for others.

Here in these statements by members is the key to the mind of a Barnet Tory: the absolute lack of empathy, or ability to see others who are different to you as as worthy as you, or as important as you, or to try to imagine what the effect of hardship might be on their lives. 

Thomas stated that it was precisely because of the conditions of Marsh Drive that 'we' are regenerating the estate, and other estates.

This is not true. Marsh Drive has been allowed to deteriorate during the long years of this faux regeneration, which was intended to improve the buildings lived in by social tenants but will see luxury housing displacing those who lived there. 

And the same story is true all around the borough. Rather than invest in new social housing, or borrow the money to invest in social housing, to accommodate them in decent homes, they will decant them elsewhere, waving in an army of developers to build non affordable new housing, at vast profit - for others to live in. 

All of this amounts, for once inarguably, to an act of social cleansing, as was observed on Monday night by Labour councillor Sara Conway, at the 'Housing and Growth' committee at Hendon Town Hall.

The room was packed with angry residents, most of them tenants from Marsh Drive, including three who had featured in the Victoria Derbyshire show, and who had submitted questions. Faced with a furious room of residents, and mindful of the fact that the proceedings were being filmed, the Tory Chair Cornelius, previously the Tory Leader, failed to apply the ludicrous new gagging rules on public participation, as all three asked questions of the committee. 

Simone asked if Cornelius, faced with evidence about the Marsh Drive buildings being unsafe, did not consider that there was a 'risk to life'. With all the confidence of a very comfortably placed man who lives in a lovely house in Totteridge - and who once appeared for a tv interview on the 'grotty' (his word) West Hendon estate in a silk cravat - he answered merely - No. Residents in the public seats (those that had not been taken up, in the usual arrogant manner by the senior officers and Capita managers, before the public are 'allowed' in) erupted in derisive laughter.

Cornelius later commented, with wounded pride, how offended he was at the suggestion that under his leadership Barnet had not achieved anything in terms of housing. I suggested, as loudly as possible, from my seat, while scribbling notes, that he had at least managed to make Barnet the worst slum landlord in North London, which was an achievement, of sorts. He did not entirely welcome this observation.

Marsh Drive residents filmed as they watch the Tory councillors at the committee meeting

Marsh Drive tenant Ahmed Padori, who had so efficiently held Dan Thomas to account on the second programme, managed to get away with a speech to the table, in which he tried, with great articulacy and dignity, to educate the empty headed Tory members as to the impact on tenants of their appalling situation, not just in the squalid buildings in which they have been left, but in terms of the anxiety and uncertainty that hangs over their future. He briefly broke down when talking of the inability of his children to feel secure, to put down roots,  - to be enabled to achieve: all the things you would think the neo-Thatcherite Tory group would want to encourage. 

He pointed out that they should not have to demand things that they deserve by right. He explained the anxiety created by facing homelessness if they refuse whatever terrible place they are offered, eventually, before eviction from Marsh Drive: he claimed tenants on the estate had been threatened with having their children taken from them if they did not co-operate, and spoke of the 'lies and abuse' experienced when dealing with Barnet Homes. He spoke of the fear of not knowing if your children would be able to stay at the same schools - again, he stressed, to achieve their potential. He ended with a plea for support from the Tory members, a request that will always go unheeded by ears that cannot register the sound, in the dust ridden air of the committee room, of this Town Hall:  to 'do the right thing'.

Do the right thing.

Dan Thomas sat defensively at the table, next to the vice Chair of the committee, Sarah Wardle, who quite properly made declarations at the beginning of the meeting in regard to the fact she lives in the new development, and is also employed by the Built Environment Communications Group, BECG, which is active in many developments.

Also present for the Tories was a West Hendon councillor Alex Prager, Cllr Smith, and Group chair Peter Zinkin. They appeared to have little to say. Well: what could you say?

Thomas, who as you may read above, had refused to intervene in the crisis at Marsh Drive,  now filled in the empty space of nothing to say, with a stream of ill judged comments to the effect that he could do nothing to offer any firm offer of a more secure tenancy, in decent housing, that the authority could not give 'lifetime' tenancies anymore - because it wasn't 'fair'. Apparently what is fair is to leave people for years on end, and what must seem like a lifetime, in non secure tenancies in virtual slums, as they have done in West Hendon. Oh, and it would be wrong to prioritise, as Labour proposed, to give priority to the tenants of Marsh Drive, because there might be people in 'greater need' than them. FFS.

After refusing to support Labour's common sense proposals, or to recognise any duty to their tenants, under any vestigial sense of humanity or decency, the Tories turned their face away from the results of their own abominable work, and moved on to the next item. 

The residents left in disgust, and who could blame them? They and their children return to damp, mouldy, infested and unsecured buildings, addicts shooting up on the stairways, and burglaries - there was another one last week. 

As Sara Conway commented, what happened in West Hendon, and what remains in Marsh Drive, is not by chance, or a recent development: it is the result of years of indifference and neglect - the result of choice: a deliberate Tory policy. This council has never hidden their underlying agenda: yes, one of social cleansing - (and some might argue, gerrymandering, I muttered to myself). The previous Tory housing lead (ignoring Gabriel Rozenberg, who was Chair last year, before self identifying as a Libdem, but had almost no meetings to attend) was Tom Davey, who boasted openly about his group wanting only residents who did not need affordable housing. Social housing has never been wanted, or accepted in principle, in Broken Barnet. The very idea! Why would you subsidise the cost of housing? 

Subsidy, as we know, is only acceptable for those we approve of: which brings us back to Saracens, and the £22 million handout from public funding. 

As you can see here, in the material obtained by FOI, two officers who thought this deal was a good idea were the deputy CEO, and Stephen Mc Donald, both of whom were present last night. 

Mr McDonald - who is apparently now 'Director of Growth' - commented in the trail of emails uploaded in the post that he thought the loan arrangement was 'the right thing to do'.

Two stories, two versions of 'the right thing to do'. 

Decent homes for families, or handouts for rugby clubs. 

You know how this ends. 

This is Broken Barnet, after all.

A Walk in the Park: Ten Years of Broken Barnet 11 Dec 2019 2:42 PM (5 years ago)

West Hendon: they call this 'Regeneration' - and: 'Relative Poverty', the Barnet Tory definition 1 Nov 2019 10:30 AM (5 years ago)

The council chamber, full for the Full Council meeting earlier this week, fell silent.

Longstaff shrugged. He repeated himself. Poverty ... is relative.

The public gallery looked on, speechless. 

But he was right, of course. 

Yes, it is true that according to recent studies, children in Barnet are living in utterly unacceptably high levels of poverty. (Here in Finchley and Golders Green, for example, 'End Child Poverty' estimates children are living in poverty at the astonishingly high rate of 34%. In Hendon, the figure is 41.4 %. Other analyses put the rates even higher).

But being poor, as Longstaff explained, just means not having as much as the rich, and as the rich get richer, being poor isn't so bad, see?

Deputy Leader of the Barnet Tory group, Cllr David Longstaff. 

He's got a point, hasn't he? Children aren't employed down the mines anymore, or shoved up chimneys, so they shouldn't whinge, when say, they are housed in a slum property for ten years, on a week to week, non secure tenancy, for anything up to ten years, ready to be evicted on four weeks notice. 

When the rat infested building in which they live is deliberately neglected, pending demolition; when that building is plagued by flooding, and damp so bad the wallpaper in their bedrooms peels away from the walls, and is covered in black mould. 

Or when they wake up, bitten by cockroaches, and have to tell their mums not to cry, every time they see another of these tormentors scuttling across the floor, in the cupboards, or over their food. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0009v42/victoria-derbyshire-29102019

Dorothy, one of the tenants featured in 'The Estate We're In', a young mother summarily evicted by Barnet Council, with her nine year old daughter, sent to a damp, rat infested bedsit - and only allowed back after three weeks to collect her belongings.

Pic courtesy Association of Marsh Drive Residents

Kind regards from the new Tory leader.

Loach was clearly appalled. He said that such an attitude 'shows contempt for people ... I could weep ... to be told you don't deserve anything, the council owes you nothing, is disgusting, Brian Coleman, it's disgusting ...' 

He pointed out that like Grenfell, West Hendon demonstrates 'a contempt for people who are seen to have no power ... (even) if they live in the most squalid conditions - that's Tory Britain.' 

The gothic horror of Hendon Town Hall

In the council chamber of Hendon Town Hall, on the evening of the same day the West Hendon film was shown, despite the usual pointless plea from the Mayor's chaplain to have 'no space for vainglory and arrogance', and to think only of 'the good of their fellow human beings', not one Barnet Tory showed any real sympathy for, or even interest in, the squalor that the fellow human beings who were their own tenants were forced to endure. 

In response to a question from Labour's Anne Clarke, the Tory Leader Dan Thomas could only emit his usual emotionless blather, wittering on about having delivered a newsletter to residents, only two weeks ago, as proof of his commitment to resolving the situation in which he had told them he did not wish to 'intervene': families living in slum conditions, infested by vermin and insects, living in flooded buildings, conditions that would have been condemned in 1919, let alone a century later.

New Libdem leader, and former Tory Housing Chair Gabriel Rozenberg is only interested in opposing Brexit. The Tory leader Dan Thomas is looking forward to it. 

Do something about it: vote these MPs out, and replace them with Labour representatives - not covert Tories in yellow jumpers - who do care about the well being of their fellow residents, and will work to make their lives better. 

The story of West Hendon is not the story of regeneration. It is the story of a war on the poor, and the destruction of a community. It is the story of public land given away for private profit. Don't be fooled. And please: don't vote for Barnet Tories, as MPs, or councillors, ever again.

Links:
http://wwwbrokenbarnet.blogspot.com/2014/04/whose-west-hendon-our-west-hendon-mp.html

Conference, "Common Sense", and a return to Broken Barnet 29 Sep 2019 9:42 AM (5 years ago)

Bound and gagged: Barnet Tories attempt to silence the voices of their own voters 1 Aug 2019 10:16 AM (5 years ago)