Lambeth Liberal Democrats

At a time when young people in Lambeth need all the support they can get comes worrying news that the Council's entire Youth Offending Team faces the sack.

The shock revelations come in the wake of a damning report published by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation, which led to an unidentified manager of the troubled Lambeth youth service leaving the Council's employ at short notice.

The youth offending team is charged with protecting young people and the wider public from harm and to reduce reoffending rates, but the damning report said that the underperforming Lambeth team was in need of 'drastic' or 'substantial' improvement in many areas.

The youth offending team has been given four weeks to demonstrate how it can improve but may face being monitored by the national Youth Justice Board.

The report by the Inspectorate exposes Lambeth Youth Offending Team as having one of the lowest scores in the country in terms of its effectiveness - 42 per cent compared with the national average of 63 per cent. Only one quarter of reviews into whether an offender risked harming members of the public were carried out within required time limits.

Failures to update records with new police intelligence were highlighted and, alarmingly, action to assist identified victims or potential victims were effectively managed in less than 20 per cent of cases.

Against this background of failures it is perhaps somewhat baffling that Labour have reduced the number of youth workers providing support to 'at risk' young people in the Borough from 16 to 12.

Labour has also slashed more generalised support to youth services, youth centres and libraries by some 60% in its 2012 Budget. So at a time when support is actually most needed from the Council by our young people, they find themselves in the front line for cuts.

We'd hate to suggest that this is a cynical political ploy to manipulate an already sensitive area but the likely result is, literally, playing with people's lives.

Labour can try to blame everything on Government cutbacks but our own Lib Dem Alternative Budget underscored our different priorities and restored all of Labour's inexplicable cuts to youth services by rigorously reducing waste.

Let's face it, as priorities go, building shiny new multi-million pound office blocks for council staff and Labour Cabinet members as currently proposed will not save a single wasted young person's life.

Loadsamoney - Harry Enfield-style - is not a phrase generally associated with Labour-run Lambeth, which is more usually linked with crippling debt and continuously passing round the begging bowl.

Indeed, things are apparently so bad at the present time that Labour has been 'forced' to cancel much-needed public services that support young people, the elderly and people with disabilities, propose scrapping libraries that have served the community for generations, and to deliberately hamper growth in our Town Centres.

Lambeth Lib Dems have announced an officially approved alternative budget for the 2012/2013 financial year challenging Labour's muddle-headed and wasteful approach to the Borough's finances, while delivering a real saving on Council Tax for hard-pressed local residents.

Liberal Democrat Councillors have wrestled with exactly the same budget issues and demands as Labour politicians, yet we have come-up with novel solutions that protect more vulnerable people and valued services while delivering better value for money.

Labour's own choices have been to slash departmental budgets in a crude and simplistic manner but not to look closely at how wasteful bureaucratic practices can be reduced or even eliminated or to investigate new ways of working that could deliver services more smartly.

We have reversed Labour cuts of some 60% to re-provide youth centres, day centres and restore funding to parks and libraries. We have boosted residential street cleaning, retained funding for our valued Town Centre Managers, and built-in cash to bring back the popular 'ward-purse' scheme that allowed small scale local improvements to be made with community support.

To enable us to do so we have opposed Labour's unnecessarily high level of reserves - money just held for a 'rainy day' - cut Labour's fervent Town Hall publicity machine and waged war on waste.

On top of all this we have cut £23 from Lambeth's share of Council Tax, which together with Lib Dem proposals at City Hall and the raised income tax threshold being delivered by Liberal Democrats in Government, puts back around £688 a year into the pockets of a typical working family.

Leader of Lambeth Lib Dems in Opposition in Lambeth, Cllr Ashley Lumsden, said: " This is a budget for local residents that shows that we are the ones who are truly on their side, by rejecting Labour's stale protectionist 'Can't Do Attitude' with fresh thinking aimed at excellent service delivery and value."

Ever since Lambeth Labour Leader, Cllr Steve Reed, espoused his personal Co-Op Council philosophy - after a quick history check suggested that this rebrand might go down better with any remaining socialists in his party from his original John Lewis Council idea - most Lambeth folk have been scratching their heads to understand what on earth it all means.

In a nutshell, the 'beloved leader' in Lambeth opines that in a changing world of fewer resources - pause to add a barbed insult or two at the Coalition Government - there is now a golden opportunity for the community to share in the running of local services or to take over existing premises that the Council can no longer afford to run.

All fine and dandy - who could possibly have a problem with that?

Except that some recent actions by Lambeth Council suggest that local community representatives are not seen by Labour as exactly equal partners in this so-called John Lewis Council and that there's even less of a dividend for various community toilers in this latter day local authority Co-Op.

Take the Beaufoy Institute, a fine Listed Arts & Crafts Building, located in Black Prince Road, in Princes Ward betwixt Kennington and Vauxhall. This historic educational building has lain empty for years while Labour politicians have argued about what to do with it.

Locals point to the specific aims of the Beaufoy Trust and the Covenant on the building that the premises are to be used in perpetuity for the education of the local poor. Just the ticket, you might think, for the first outing of Steve Reed's cooperative creed to find a community educational use for this still highly deprived area of the Borough?

Yet a recent shock announcement says that Lambeth's beautiful Beaufoy building has just been sold to a religious sect, while the much larger and more useful area of land immediately behind has just been sold for a cool £9 million to Bellway Homes.

Neither action entirely fulfills the Covenant's clear educational brief, you may think - but then, the pioneering Beaufoy Trust itself is managed in these more enlightened times by none other than Lambeth Council.

Then there is the long-running saga of the former, and now recently Listed, Annie McCall Maternity Hospital in Stockwell, aka Stockwell Studios, that has been used on a temporary basis ever since 1987 by a group of artists that have received both plaudits and Lambeth and European Union Funding.

The artists were also trying to raise funds to purchase the premises after receiving clear signals from the Labour-run Council in 2010 - an election year remember - and spending £70,000 on much-needed repairs. Then, last month, the shock news came through that Lambeth had secretly sold the building to housing developers for an undisclosed sum.

Further south, the fine Clapham Library building in Old Town - soon to be made redundant when the library facility moves to the council-owned Mary Seacole Clapham High Street site - is also fighting for its life.

Now the man (or woman) on the Clapham Omnibus might easily think this was an ideal community project for the John Lewis/Co-op Council to share a vision for a bright new future use. Indeed a local group called Omnibus is even now trying desperately to raise money so that the landmark building can be retained as a cultural and arts space.

Sadly for high-minded Omnibus, rumours abound that hungry developers on adjacent sites would dearly love to snap-up the strategically-placed building from a Council only too willing to sell to the highest bidder. Indeed, the recent fate of the Beaufoy and Stockwell Studios further along the A24 doesn't bode well for the group's lofty aims.

We cannot help but feel that Labour's grim underlying message to the community, for all their fine words, actually seems to be 'Cooperate With Us - and on our terms - Or Else'.

The often neglected South of the Borough looks set to be left high and dry once again by Labour as it fumbles to find match funding for a second stage in the Mayor of London's Outer London bonanza worth a cool £6 Million.

The Special Fund set up to benefit Outer London boroughs that are not directly benefitting from the Olympics is awarded to Streatham and Norwood because they just fit inside the qualifying radius around central London.

Yet while many London Boroughs would bite the hand off anyone offering such a bounty in hard times, Labour risks losing the lot while it argues about whether or not to find the necessary cash to support the initiative.

The Mayor's Office has already announced that Streatham has been awarded £1.58 Million which Lib Dems would like to see spent on regenerating the High Road, including shop front revamps and restarting the key but stalled central reservation remodeling towards Streatham Hill Station.

In West Norwood £1.33 Million has been allocated by the Mayor which would go towards a raft of measures aimed at revitalising a Town Centre that has been in some decline and boosting The West Norwood feast - a popular food market.

Labour was quick to publicise the award as 'excellent news' but appears to have gone cold on the idea and has been back-pedaling ever since.

Lib Dem Opposition Culture Spokesman, Cllr Jeremy Clyne, has now written to Labour Council Leader Steve Reed calling on him to sort out the mess and make an urgent public statement. He said " It would be absolutely disastrous if this funding was lost."

Jeremy Clyne, a Streatham Hill councilor, added, " Labour's dithering over 20 per cent of match funding is seriously putting at risk numerous much-needed projects in Streatham and West Norwood should they fail to meet the April deadline. This is a high profile muddle, even by Lambeth Labour standards."

Some readers may be familiar with the BOGOF acronym, which is supermarket-speak for Buy One Get One Free - however we hadn't expected the term to be applied by Lambeth Labour quite so literally in our local Town Centres.

Repeated promises have been made by Labour Cabinet members that our Town Centre Managers were safe in their hands - a bit like Libraries we guess - and in particular that Brixton and Streatham, the Borough's two prime retail destinations, would retain dedicated retail experts.

Tony Robinson's hapless character Baldrick, in TV black comedy Black Adder, was always coming up with a cunning plan - and now it seems that Labour-run Lambeth is using similarly desperate means to achieve their ends.

Back in October we commented upon rising disquiet among residents at the direction that the Labour-run Council was heading with its full-on regeneration gold rush in parts of the Borough. Critics complained that in the stampede for more revenue streams from redevelopment, the Council seemed increasingly remote to legitimate complaints from residents about the local authority's often, literally, towering ambitions.

Since then, Labour Cabinet Members have seamlessly merged Lambeth's Planning function into the Regeneration Department. And Lambeth has issued a number of statements suggesting that Planners will from now on need to take account of the overriding Corporate needs of the Authority.

Not those of local residents, it should be noted. Still isn't there always the good old Planning Committee, with elected local councilors on the panel, as a fallback to try to find a path between these competing interests?

Worrying, then, that work is also in train to make the Planning Committee much more of a rubber-stamping exercise. For the past year a guillotine has been invoked, limiting the time that Planning Committee members have available to scrutinise complex applications.

Now Labour - bored with having to sit through long meetings showcasing public disquiet - is trying to hand over even more power to senior planning officers to decide things in the privacy of their offices and limit local ward councilors from 'Calling-In' items for decision at Committee.

We think that Elected Members have a right to raise the legitimate planning concerns of their residents and that Labour's quiet acquiescence at best or deliberate encouragement at worst to put the brakes on proper debate is not only highly questionable but also likely to lead to poorer local decision-making about our built environment.

How is such a move in any way, shape or form, in the spirit of open government, transparency or democratic accountability? How on earth does it square with Labour's avowed aims for a Co-operative Council? How, indeed, will unelected officers ever be challenged by Members over decisions made in private that can affect the lives of thousands of Lambeth's citizens?

At the last Cabinet Meeting on 13th February, Cllr Nigel Haselden, Cabinet Member for Regeneration & Planning, even made the extraordinary claim that it was perfectly reasonable for them to filch money from the Government's Brand New Homes Bonus to fund Lambeth's Planning Service to 'ensure the creation of a virtuous circle of more homes being built in the future and so more Government New Homes Bonus being created'.

In other words Labour has just created a Frankenstein's monster - a Planning service that is arguably now wholly dependent for its very existence on approving more and more developments, however dubious certain aspects of them may be.

Some may very well also come to the conclusion that this sorry turn is also an abject conflict of interest.

Apparently it is 'passion' that has miraculously saved the Lambeth Country Show, according to Florence Nosegbe, Labour's Cabinet Member for Culture, The Olympics and now, apparently, U-Turns. And, it seems, the grand Council 'April Fool' joke, horribly miscast in mid-February, was just a jolly jape by the Labour elite to spark some lively discussion about just how much loved the Country Show really is.

One of the first real tests of Labour's new Co-Op Council credentials will be revealed on Wednesday 22rd February when the Council hosts the first of a round of consultative public meetings on the future of Lambeth Libraries.

The North of the Borough has been poorly served by a down-at-heel temporary library building in Lower Marsh for some twenty years, with as many promises for new purpose-built premises as there have been glossy Council leaflets promising a brighter tomorrow.

Just to add to the feeling that Lambeth's commitment to a library in the North of the Borough has never quite matched the sky-high rhetoric is the fact that the Waterloo 'temporary' library is open only 31.5 hours each week.

Yet despite all the cosy up-front Co-Op 'consultation' sessions, the hot money is that a deal is being brokered to move the old new library back into the old Old Library Building that is currently part occupied by a leading community body The Waterloo Community Development Group.

While this may seem like a convenient sticking plaster to cover the gaping wound of Council Leader Steve Reed's promise that the library in Waterloo would be "relocated to a better building" it does beg the question of what this relocated Back to The Future library would consist of?

Rumours persist that the proposed budget would be some 40% less than the current budget - and that's an even more dramatic Cut than the one alongside the Old Vic almost opposite.

Labour will blame it all on cuts at national level, naturally, but Labour's shabby record on libraries precedes it. Remember the uproar that was caused in 2000 when five libraries were earmarked for closure as part of a library modernisation plan and a further two actually closed for good?

Let us be clear - in a deprived Borough like Lambeth, libraries form a vital link in the chain for meeting the educational and aspirational needs of its citizens. Labour politicians are keen about publicly promoting new schools in Lambeth, but local libraries offer quiet and secure environments to do homework and provide educational opportunities well beyond school years.

Yet there's a sad paucity of ambition when it comes to libraries. You will find very few newspaper column inches filled by Labour councillors calling for bigger and better libraries. Indeed very little Section 106 money ever seems to go to libraries in return for granting planning permission for new buildings by comparison with contributions towards other community needs.

Given the sheer scale of development being approved and encouraged in the North of the Borough, particularly, it seems odd that Labour hasn't brokered a deal for a state-of-the art library on the ground floor of one of these monolithic concrete accretions.

Wouldn't it be nice to hear for a change that Labour-run Lambeth wants to be known as the Council that builds libraries rather than the one that closes them?

Labour's Country Show cancellation calamity is now set for a massive U-Turn as public anger forces beleaguered Council Chiefs to fix the damage with a new Autumn date. With a public petition close to forcing a Council debate, plus our own Lib Dem formal call-in of their hasty and botched decision, panicked Labour Party Chiefs have now signaled a scaled-down Autumn Harvest Festival in Brockwell Park to replace the popular Summer family hardy perennial favourite.