Has Council lost the plot?

Tower Hamlets Council has announced that it is consulting residents on Open Space in the Borough. Residents will be able to “have their say on shaping future investment into parks and open spaces in Tower Hamlets,” the Council promises. Don’t get too excited, though: it won’t happen until the autumn – unless you want to express an opinion about Bethnal Green Gardens.

The process which the Council has revealed is almost impossible to understand. Apparently the Council will begin refreshing its Open Space Strategy by commissioning “an independent audit of open spaces in the borough.” On the other hand, it has also announced that this audit is “required by national and London-wide planning policy.”

The Council says that community involvement “is very important” and that residents will be able to add “further local knowledge to the independent audit” – but not until the autumn. This is a strange concept: when Mayor Lutfur Rahman tried to offer “local knowledge” on the grant-making process, the then Labour opposition was horrified.

Residents will also “be invited take part in a consultation and give their views in the autumn,” says the Council, adding, “This consultation will include workshops and drop in sessions for residents. Feedback from the consultation will be used to help identify improvements the council makes to existing open spaces, and provide direction for how new open spaces should be developed.”

It seems that residents will help the Council choose which improvements to make to the open space at that same time as the independent audit (with resident input) is carried out to identify where all the open spaces are.

The timescale then gets worse: apparently the Council improves open spaces each year! So why is there no consultation on those? There is a consultation! There are separate local consultations on improvement projects.

OK: so we have local consultations that are improving the open space and later this year we shall find out where the space is and have a general consultation on how to improve it. Yes? Have we got it straight now?

No. The next part of the announcement is: “A public meeting will take place in May with local stakeholders to discuss improvements in and around Bethnal Green Gardens.” After that local consultation, we can independently find out if Bethnal Green exists and then have a general consultation on how we could have improved it, if it did exist.

There is no alternative. We’ll have to follow the advice in the final part of the announcement, which states, “To find out more visit www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/consultation”. We visited the quoted web page – where there was nothing about consultation on open space. And now we are going to lie down in a dark and quiet room. Our head hurts.

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