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Lambeth Liberal DemocratsNews, views and contact information for the
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Labour Lambeth Sucks Life-Blood from Lambeth Living
June 24, 2010 11:52 AM
As a creature Lambeth Living was always slightly more grotesque than Dr Frankenstein's Monster. It was the hurried invention of some half-crazed individual that has since consumed vast sums of public money on itself that could have been much better spent restoring people's derelict homes and now seems totally out of the control of its Labour masters.
So much so that huge piles of unanswered Council Member Enquiries on behalf of frustrated tenants have been allowed to build up - nearly 1400 separate pieces of correspondence we hear at the time of the May elections.
Such scandalous neglect exposes the poorly thought out relationship of the Arm's Length Management Organisation, the Council and its elected representatives, and, indeed, of the tenants who have always seemed like a bit of an afterthought.
With this poor fatally injured creature flailing around causing even more mayhem, Labour's Doctor Frankenreed seems powerless to kill it off and has instead told it to "shape up" within a year or be wound up. Which is a bit like wagging a finger at a rabid dog. So that's a whole year, at least, for tenants to endure a steadily worsening situation that many of them didn't want to go through in the first place.
Many would have hoped that Dr Frankenreed would have pulled the plug from the life support machine by now to save everyone from further misery. But that would be to admit to a monumental political failure or to have a Plan B in place.
As if to underline his current impotence, Dr Frankenreed has cut the £1 million July payment to Lambeth Living citing LL's pile of unopened member's enquiries. Which gives him something of a dilemma come August when the world will wait to see whether this death by a thousand cuts is repeated or whether LL will get another dose of expensive serum to keep it alive a bit longer.
Meanwhile in true New Labour fashion a whole series of forums is now being set-up around the borough to look at Labour's exciting plans for the reorganisation of Lambeth Living - for reorganisation read (or reed) CUTS.
That's cuts in frontline staff, cuts in income, cuts in service levels but not we imagine any cuts in senior officer or consultant's pay or even that of the Labour politicians responsible for this scandalous shambles.