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From landmark building to a pile of recyclable bricks
• THE two items dominating your correspondence columns last week are linked.
The council, reasonably enough, trumpets its improved rate of recycling, and the government is to be commended for reversing the perverse financial incentives that discouraged recycling when I was a councillor. However, the purpose of recycling is to reduce or preferably eliminate waste. Recycled paper is not as effective as using the back in preference to a clean sheet.
Similarly, it is far more sustainable to modify the use of existing buildings than to pull them down and salvage the bricks. Unfortunately, Islington Council has a lamentable record in this regard: witness Ashmount School as well as the Sobell Centre. In both cases, there is to be a net loss of public space as well.
The Primary Care Trust (PCT) is equally wasteful in its plans for the pioneering Finsbury Health Centre. And the government is at fault as well. The Treasury cannot or will not see the effect of its ludicrous policy of charging VAT on works to existing buildings while allowing new build to be zero rated. Having disposed of one perverse incentive, it needs to tackle another. However, it is not a sufficient excuse for the PCT and the council to reject the options of retaining and maintaining these important buildings.
Sir Michael Sobell made a generous gift to the borough. It ill behoves us now to treat that gift with such contempt.
Architects Lubetkin and Cadbury-Brown also contributed to the borough and deserve more respect.
Andrew Bosi
Chair, Islington Society
• ALEC Forshaw makes a number of inaccurate statements about Finsbury Health Centre and the Primary Care Trust’s plans to relocate some community health services in Islington (Save this jewel of a health centre for next generation, October 31).
We need to significantly increase the amount of clinical space in the community, as more and more health services that used to be provided in hospitals are being moved into the community. If it was possible to transform all available space at Finsbury Health Centre to create many more clinical rooms than it has at present, then we would. However, because it is grade I listed, only minor, sensitive alterations are allowed. The PCT believes it would be impossible to create enough modern clinical space at Finsbury.
A grade I listing ensures that any changes or repairs are made using original materials or materials which match those originally used. It would not be possible to use off-the-shelf, cheaper materials to refurbish the health centre. Indeed, its grade I listing is designed to prevent that type of thing happening. Grade I-listed buildings are always more expensive to refurbish and maintain.
The building is indeed in a very bad state of repair. It needs significant structural work as well as the replacement of every window frame, the 20,000 tiles that cover the building and the crumbling 1930s concrete. On the inside major changes are needed to meet current NHS estate code standards.
Mr Forshaw is also wrong in saying that there have been no discussions between the PCT and English Heritage, especially in relation to funding. We have worked closely with English Heritage for many years. We received a grant from English Heritage to produce conservation management guidelines for the preservation of Finsbury Health Centre. However, we have been unable to get the significant funding needed to preserve, develop and maintain the health centre.
The PCT has actively pursued other avenues of funding, but as a statutory provider of health services we are not eligible for major charitable funding to refurbish the health centre and keep it running.
The two GP practices based at Finsbury Health Centre will be relocated to a new building next door. All of the local services (podiatry, dentistry, physiotherapy) currently in the health centre will remain in the Finsbury area – local to all the existing Finsbury residents who currently use them. Only the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children (which sees children from all over the UK) and our orthotics and biomechanics services (which see patients from all over Islington) will move to other health centres north of Finsbury. Our proposals are absolutely not about stopping, reducing or privatising any services.
The PCT has spent many years trying to come up with a viable plan to develop Finsbury Health Centre into the modern and accessible clinical building it needs to become. We strongly believe that moving to more suitable premises where we can provide better quality and more accessible healthcare services is the right choice.
Mr Forshaw’s projections on population growth in south Islington are significantly higher than the council’s own figures. Our plans for the future will always ensure that we have the services to meet the needs of the local population.
Tony Hoolaghan
Locality director, Islington Primary Care Trust
• Dr RICHARD Noble’s letter referred to every increase in the size of the “rebuild” of the Sobell Centre being related to the number of units in the housing development, so clearly money from the housing development is being used to subsidise the sports centre (that was going to be closed down) (More flats for outsiders as Sobell shrinks in size, October 31). He goes on to say that units will be sold “on the private market to people from outside the borough”, who therefore are paying for the very sports centre that local people are using.
Of course, the social housing he was referring to can also be subsidised by the private sector, in the same way as the Sobell, for people from this borough. However we may have more pressing problems than providing social housing.
Valerie Hammond commented about the “felling of 30 mature trees” in the Sobell project. The Sobell project is costed at about £30million. Replacing two or three trees for every one of the 30 lost at the Sobell would cost £360 or £540 at Woodland Trust rates, less than 0.002 per cent of the total budget.
Greens write about the felling of trees, but when wildlife is lost they do not organise an alternative habitat in a different location.
It should be more important that there are trees rather than where they are. Greens will declare defeat and lose possible replacement trees in the countryside, which could at least help look after our overall contribution to the environment.
Maybe an extra private unit on top of the others would pay for some of these trees,
Mike Heeneman
Seven Sisters Road, N4
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