Sunday 28 August 2011
Ward Working Again
I see that former councillor Robert Dunwell has been attacking the ward working budget. He shares this approach with his former Tory colleagues as well as Cllr Paul Lorber. They all seem to see the budget as a piggy bank to be raided for their own pet schemes. In fact, it is intended to help councillors to engage with the public, as I have explained before.
2 comments:
Why do you need to spend £830,000 to 'engage' with the community? Is that not part of your (paid) job? Especially in 'austere' times how can this spend be justified? Could you just not talk to people? For free?
While I must agree that some of the attacks on Ward Walking are unfair and perhaps even misunderstood I think there is a bigger point to be understood.
As you pointed out, Ward Walking has been around for some time having been set up by the previous Labour administration. It's only in recent months that I see it under such large attack from so many quarters. If we ask ourselves "What has changed?" the answer is obvious it's the current financial climate.
At a time when residents feel that the executive is so easily axing and contracting many local public services, and moving to gradually centralise so many others, many people see Ward Walking as something that we simply can no longer afford. Given a choice (and I know the current executive doesn't really like giving residents a choice, and will most likely ignore their views anyway "it's not a referendum") I think people would rather we save some more of their public services such as libraries or street cleaning rather than Ward Walking.
I actually think the idea of Ward Walking is a good innovative idea. I think the big problem, from the perspective of someone that hasn't had much to do with it, is that it hasn't been implemented very well and if it does not adapt to the current climate/circumstances then it will continue to be attacked again and again.
For a scheme that has gone on for so long, it's not at all been advertised very well. Surely there should be a _regular_ feature in the Brent Magazine letting people know that it exists and how to make suggestions for spending/projects in their own ward?
Furthermore, a few weeks/months ago when I was looking at the sorts of things the money had been spent on in my own ward/wards nearby the thing that struck me was that while many things were worthwhile there were also a lot of very niche projects. I think this sort of spending can be justified to a degree (e.g. helping residents secure their alleyways by funding gates), however there seemed to be a lack of projects that benefited the majority of ward residents as a whole. I think that's the area where the scheme needs to somehow work better and it's only by improving in that area that you can really effectively combat the attacks on the scheme.
Take the Preston ward as an example. Whether it be true/deliberate/organised or not, many residents feel that it's currently under "attack" with its Library due to close and its high street due to turn into a ghost town with the introduction of parking charges (hmm I never thought of it like this but perhaps parking charges are being introduced to prevent Preston Library passing the "must be in a high street location" test :-p). If some of the ward walking money was spent on a ward wide project to help people take pride in their ward and see some positive investment to improve the look and feel then maybe people would start to improve see the benefit in the schema _and_ maybe people would realise that nobody has anything specific against Preston, it's just the bean counters sitting in their ivory Brent Council tower creating grandiose homogeneous corporate minded plans without a real understanding of what residents want.
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