FORUM: Strength in an active community

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Published: 5 May, 2011

COMMUNITY involvement is a very bad title for a set of ambitious guidelines setting out only how a local authority, in our case Camden, modestly proposes “to publish responses, to give feed back to comments made in consultations”.

Involvement really is much more. 

It necessitates getting among people, and finding out what they really want. 

Not always having reasons why something is just not possible. 

The trouble even then is that the law or the politicians, or both, often prevent what the people – not only white middle class home owners – consider to be desirable, from being enacted.

The main aims of the current consultative document, its draft Statement of Community Involvement 2011, enforced on Camden by its reduced resources are to increase the use of email and website communications especially to our many Conservation Area Advisory Committees and a significant withdrawal of notification letters to affected occupiers about proposed developments in their area. 

Not much face-to-face involvement there; lots of new impersonal technology. 

I still had difficulty in finding on the website the appropriate email recipient of the Camden Civic Society’s comments on the draft Statement of Community Involvement now – till Monday May 9 – out for consultation.

There is, of course, a dilemma and it leads to frustration. 

Camden Council is not a totally free agent, though we elect the members every four years ostensibly to do what we want them to do. 

“Community involvement” is better interpreted if it can really “enable people to take an active part in stronger local communities”, a better quote from the draft. 

David Cameron would purr at that! 

Those communities can only be stronger if they can really influence decision-making. 

How can the voluntary sector, the members of the Camden Civic Society and of all the local Conservation Area Advisory Committees and environment groups, contribute to this or be allowed to do so freely?

If labour-expensive direct consultation is to be reduced then the community needs to be expert in what replaces it. 

School governors already have a substantial programme of courses run by the education department, and there are certain of their functions that can only be undertaken if they have been trained. 

If site notices are really to be the prime source of local communication then they must be vandal-proof and last their time. 

Developers should be under an obligation to consult directly those affected, and then to maintain their notices during the consultation period. 

Each local planning application is most important to those round about. 

Professional planners must realise that while developers certainly have rights so also do neighbours, who all too often feel they are too easily ignored. 

The Town Hall is against them – and we pay them to be against us! 

The presumption that a development is permissible unless there are very strong reasons for recommending against, is dispiriting. 

Neighbours naturally feel threatened. 

There should be more of an intelligent partnership in the community to enable people understand this, not a civil war The community may be able to help the council to help itself. 

We have not yet been asked. 

Occasional meetings with the professional planners are fine as a briefing exercise, though all too often on take-it-or-leave-it basis. But why only occasional?  

Can we monitor the council’s consultative processes, applaud its successes and comment on the rest?

There really are ways of making Camden’ governance better. 

As a start it requires them and us to work rather closer together. 

Is now the time to start?

• Martin Morton is chairman of Camden Civic Society