Lambeth Liberal Democrats

With all the expected fanfares, Labour's much-delayed Streatham Hub Leisure project with Tesco is, apparently, finally under way. We wish it well.

Streatham badly needs this rebuilt ice rink and leisure centre to restore some of Streatham's lost pride and provide much needed state-of-the-art leisure facilities for the area's rapidly increasing population.

That's why Liberal Democrats pushed so hard with Tesco (owner of the Ice Rink and Bus Garage) for a joint venture to replace the aging and run-down leisure facilities. That's why a scheme was devised whereby Tesco agreed to open the new leisure facilities in advance of even building their new store.

That scheme also allowed continuity of ice-skating in the original rink without any disruptive move to Brixton because the new Leisure Centre would be built alongside.

And it was on that basis that planning permission was given way back in 2003.

When Labour came back into power down at the Town Hall in 2006, they could have easily moved this agreed plan forward. Instead they just sat on their hands.

With the 2010 local election looming, the lack of progress looked embarrassing. So the agreement with Tesco was torn up and the Council allowed Tesco to save more money and demolish the whole site in one go. And somewhere along the line Tesco got an even bigger superstore approved.

Labour is crowing that this desperate action has saved three years and that the old scheme would have meant no leisure centre in place until 2017. Except that under various Labour promises since 2006, the Streatham Leisure centre would have been built any time between 2010 and 2014. So someone cannot add up.

The grand classical façade of the Streatham Swimming pool built in the 1920s -by Wandsworth Council it should be noted - is now consigned to history and the demolition trucks. Soon the striking Art Deco façade of an Ice Arena that was known nationally, and put Streatham on the map, will suffer a similar fate.

It remains to be seen whether the replacement building will engender such affection or, indeed, stand as proudly alongside its supermarket neighbours.

However, the die is now cast. At least we will have new swimming and skating facilities again in Streatham.

We just wish that Labour had made up their minds a bit sooner.

Lambeth Labour is currently trumpeting that our libraries are safe in their hands following publication of the Library Commission's findings.

On the face of it, these are fine words but, like many of Labour's high profile public utterings, they require much closer scrutiny. For instance: " We will protect the library service in every part of the borough by working more closely with the local community as part of our plan to make Lambeth Britain's first cooperative Council."

Once upon a time Lambeth Council offered residents three annual Fireworks displays held at Clapham Common, Streatham Common and Brockwell Park. These events were really, really popular and regarded as a small Thank You gesture to parents and children boroughwide in return for all the horrid nasty taxes they levied.

Then mean-minded Labour - freshly re-elected - cut the three lovely and popular pyrotechnic displays (ooh-ah) down to just one last year (boo) as a so-called cost saving measure, while promising to save £35,000 along the way (oh?).

Of course in Labour-run Lambeth, where almost everything is not like normal councils, the facts never quite fit the way that they are initially presented. In 2009, for instance, three gorgeous fireworks displays cost £87,000 and 90,000 happy smiling families attended - and went home, we suppose, even happier.

This year's stingy single display should have at least only cost £52,000 to stage by factoring-in the promised cost-savings, but in fact cost the best part of £105,000. What's more attendance was down to 80,000, so that the both the overall cost and the critical cost per person value-for-money indicator actually rose.

So that's Labour Lambeth in a nutshell - half the fun for twice the cost. What should have been a right little sparkler turned instead into a proper old damp squib. We were promised more bang for our bucks but instead the costs simply sky-rocketed.

Let's hope Labour doesn't come up with more brilliant ways to save our money.

With an air of mystery surrounding the future of libraries in Lambeth worthy of the best Who Done It to be found on the shelves, various interested parties are currently reduced to picking up the few sparse clues left by Labour and analysing them like a fictional detective.

Some keen amateur sleuths noticed, for instance, that official Council images of the future new library in Clapham revealed a very bare and modernist interior making some ponder whether this new Council 'facility' might prove somewhat lacking in the crucial book department.

Pure logic may dictate that Lambeth is a bit of an oddball in Parliamentary Constituency terms.

However, the borough which is located just across the river from the Victorian Gothic parliamentary pile and which might just as well be another country, is an oddball that is steeped in history and home to one of the most vibrant and diverse populations in the Capital.

Many of its inhabitants fail to relate to the borough as a corporate entity, anyway, preferring the village identity of their immediate local area - and the very name Lambeth is probably more historically linked with its northerly marshy grazing lands for sheep.

In the mid 1960s chunks of Clapham and Streatham were carved out of neighbouring borough Wandsworth by the Boundary Commissioners in an attempt to make Lambeth look less like a sliver of real estate sandwiched between two greedy rivals.

Now the Boundary academics are at it again - only this time the poor old Lambeth Lamb is headed for the abattoir.

This time round they do not appear to want to fatten up the endangered beast but to slaughter it and dissipate the parts.

Lambeth's existing three distinct constituencies would disappear to be replaced with six which would not only straddle borough boundaries but make a complete nonsense of established communities.

What real local empathy would a resident of Waterloo have with someone down river in edgy Bermondsey, for instance? Or Balhamite with Battersea cousins? Or, still less, Gipsy Hill residents physically almost in Bromley with distant Tooting?

It's as though the Boundary commissioners have been on a wild night out and conceived a jolly good game of tearing up Lambeth into bits of paper, throwing them up in the air and seeing where the pieces fall on a map of the Capital.

To try to find some positives in the perplexing puzzle they've created, there's some merit in restoring an MP for Brixton but poor old Streatham is really thrown to the wolves.

Can anyone explain to us the logic let alone the sense in having three MP's to represent just one Town Centre or having the interests of Streatham Common overseen by an MP in Mitcham and Mordern?

Liberal Democrats are objecting to this crass proposal and urges local people to kick up a stink that will resonate in Whitehall.

Time for the Lamb to show its teeth.

Lambeth Living, Lambeth Labour's unpopular and unwanted housing ALMO, has just admitted that it has failed to live up to all the hype that surrounded its conception and uneasy birth. The 2011 customer satisfaction survey reveals that satisfaction levels with housing services are shockingly low and have actually declined over the past two years. Worst of all, Labour-run Lambeth records the lowest levels of satisfaction out of all the 32 London Boroughs.

With all the predictability of night following day, Lambeth Labour's cabinet is now finally recommending a ban on new or extended Licensed Premises in Clapham with a so-called Saturation Zone policy.

No doubt this will please some badly affected Clapham residents who have had to suffer all of the attendant crime, anti-social behaviour and drunkeness on the High Road and streets beyond that followed in the wake of the Labour Government's high-profile relaxation of drinking laws only as recently as 2003.

There may be other residents in other parts of Lambeth, though, who may be wondering why only Clapham gets special treatment. Or they may be wondering why it has taken Lambeth quite so long to react to Coalition Government measures to give Councils even more control over Licensing arrangements - especially as neighbouring Southwark was embarking on its third such saturation zone as long ago as 2009?

Lambeth Liberal Democrats, of course, objected to Labour's original Licensing Free-For-All and were roundly castigated for their trouble in the local Press for being 'Party Poopers' - notably by local MP Tessa Jowell who steered the legislation through Parliament. There was more than a suspicion back then that Labour was openly courting the 'yoof' vote in advance of the 2005 General Election. Indeed they were uncovered texting them to 'Vote for the Party Party'.

This cynical move may have got them re-elected but even former Labour Deputy Prime Minister Roy Hattersley was moved to write last year that Jowell's Law was Labour's Ghastliest Mistake - though we're tempted to say not perhaps quite as ghastly as Tony's trumped-up War in Iraq, or Gordon's colossal tally of national debt left behind when he was finally evicted from Number 10.

All these wild excesses have left our country with a monumental hangover of one sort or another that will take some years of careful nursing to get over.

Perhaps when Labour locally finally introduces their much-hyped if tardy saturation policy they may also reflect on the damage they unleashed personally, financially and sociatally, putting undue and unnecessary pressure on health services, policing and local residents whose lives they have ruined just for a cynical round of binge voting?

Lambeth is already a relatively poor, diverse and highly populated inner London borough by virtue of its limited geography.

Yet we sense a growing tide of unease among local residents about the sheer rate of development and the effect of that development upon the character of their area - and even of that fragile and cherished diversity being challenged and diluted.

The north of the borough has been under development stress for some considerable time. Being close to the political, cultural and retail epicentre of the capital, it is perhaps understandable that Lambeth planners and politicians have long identified opportunities for growth in an area that historically was once marshy farmland and then largely home to Victorian heavy industrial and commercial interests, supported by a tight-knit local working community.

As the noxious old industrial mix of brewing, wharves and engineering moved away, so cleaner if larger office blocks replaced the area's warren of derelict warehouses and bomb sites after WW2. Then when offices went out of fashion, larger apartment blocks on even bigger footplates inevitably replaced many of the small terraces of traditional houses but did not always lead to larger settled communities.

Many of the more prestigious residential developments were eagerly bought by buy to let landlords or by overseas nationals gaining a foothold on a spiraling property boom continually fed by under-supply of choice property with a river view.

There seemed to be little space amidst this glitz and glamour, glass and soaring concrete, for established communities - still less for those hard-pressed locals with social housing needs.

The really surprising thing in all this is that this unhappy state of affairs has largely come about - indeed blossomed - under a series of Labour administrations running Lambeth Town Hall.

Some critics say that this is borne out of a simple desire to rake in as much Council Tax as possible. Others say that Labour - especially New Labour - was and is still completely obsessed with the god of newness, often at the expense of existing valued heritage assets.

There's some evidence to suggest that Labour politicians play the Regeneration Game to its fullest extent. Wasn't it the last Labour Government that espoused the slightly naïve view that if you allow developers a free reign that this was the only way to ensure that new community facilities like health centres, schools and public open spaces followed?

These same Labour politicians even adapted Planning Guidance to allow for this promised New Age of Developer-led paternalism.

What followed was an orgy of development of swanky private housing blocks and towers in all the prime spots - some with little or no social housing at all and precious little of the promised infrastructural improvements. Developers always seemingly managed to play the hand that these overblown edifices were highly marginal financially, leaving little appetite for serious political opposition.

So the Borough's already meagre open spaces and parks actually dwindled rather than grew, the pressure on school places rocketed and the settled communities got pushed further and further into the margins of these isolated High-Rise Citadels.

There's a war of words going-on currently in Vauxhall between the developers and local communities - the Battle of Waterloo having been lost many moons ago. But some are wondering why certain Labour politicians are getting so hot under the collar right now when they've been largely complicit with a development free-for-all?

And their current bout of public angst does not chime very well given that only recently Lambeth's Planning Department - ironically located right at the heart of the disputed territory - was placed under the control of the Council's toweringly ambitious Regeneration Department.

It may very well be that a future Lambeth will of necessity be a far more crowded place than hitherto with people living in more densely accommodation than ever before. That, however, only underscores the absolute requirement for far more considerate planning - planning that puts people and communities first.

Room sizes, under the rapacious developer's regime, have dwindled in volume so that now, whether in the private or public sectors, people are living in smaller and smaller units of accommodation - the smallest in Europe in fact. Rooms are now so small that standard furniture cannot be shoe-horned in and space is at such a premium that a whole new industry of offsite commercial storage units has been invented just to cope with people's goods and chattels.

That makes it even more essential that the once promised and now even more urgent community spaces and facilities go hand in hand at the initial planning stage. They can never be bolted-on later.

There's been another casualty in this game of regeneration roulette. Quality and design have been largely sacrificed to mediocrity, ease of build and higher profit margins. Many purpose-built modern buildings are now erected with only a 25-30 year lifespan in mind - which means that they will probably not outlive even the once-scorned temporary prefabs built after The Blitz. What a waste of effort and natural resources.

Meanwhile, many perfectly useful and architecturally superior buildings without the benefit of Statutory Listing, are getting torn down just to promote a spurious and preposterous premise that the housing stock is being improved. Planners, under their new Regeneration masters, can apparently simply override the expert views of Design and Conservation officers and local amenity groups and residents.

If all this sounds to some like a monumental recipe for disaster, destruction by municipal wrecking ball, and the slavish onward march towards the slums and social unrest of tomorrow we can only share those misgivings.

For too long Labour's so-called partnership and love-affair with developers has been at best very one-sided and signally unproductive in delivering promised community benefits.

Time to say that building on precious Lambeth soil should be a privilege not a right. Time to recall a long lost sense and pride of place. Time to call the place where we live a living and diverse community, of which we are all part, and have a say in shaping. Time, indeed, to make Lambeth a mixed and vibrant community again, where people live and work and rest and play and not just some lifeless, featureless dormitory commuter suburb located handily across the Thames.

Time to make Lambeth really special and not just anonymous high-rise Anytown.

As if to underscore the current plight of local policing and persistent rumours of local police station closures, hard on the heels of announcements to cease 24-hour police front desks leaving just one per borough, comes news that custody suites are also to be centralized at Brixton.

Last week Lib Dem Candidate for next May's London Mayoral Elections, Brian Paddick, visited Streatham High Road alongside GLA Lib Dem Leader, Caroline Pidgeon, and local councillors to meet residents and shopkeepers.