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Listening?
• I HAVE followed with great amusement if not with sadness the stories about how well Camden Council is striving to listen to residents.
Now, the council is grumbling that deputations residents submit to the full council and the executive meetings take too long. How inconvenient that a time-honoured and democratic right residents posses to get the elected politicians to listen to them should get in the way! I can’t help wondering if they are really striving to listen or if are they preoccupied with getting rid of all mechanisms to hold the executive to account?
The council, with its leader at the helm insists that it is listening to residents and hails as example the vast amount of council tenants supporting their council homes sale programme to raise the cash for the much needed repairs.
They maintain that seven out of eight tenants supported this in the recent council survey. What they fail to say is that fewer tenants responded to this survey then voted yes for the arms-length management organisation in 2004, and that the questions were biased and constructed by officers and presumably consultants behind closed doors and asked if tenants wanted improvements to their flats.
Well, who in their right mind would say no? Interpreting this as support for selling off council homes is dishonest. I maintain that the survey is invalid but, more importantly, Camden has breached the Tenant Participation Compact it has with tenants, as there was no involvement from elected tenant representatives in constructing this survey.
The agreement to involve us in decision-making within a framework of empowering tenants through bottom-up and partnership working is binding on the council and I fail to understand why they would ignore it in this case! Does it have anything to do with the fact that we may have asked questions they don’t want us to ask?
Hearing is the real art, not just listening. Anyone can pretend!
But if one is struggling with even pretending then we really are in trouble.
MERIC APAC
Chair Camden Federation of Tenants & Residents Associations, NW1
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