A long but productive meeting of Overview & Scrutiny last night. There are good councillors on the committee who I get on well with, which helped made the three and a half hours (almost) fly by.
The first hour and a half was taken by questions to the Labour Executive Member for Community Involvement. Some of my colleagues got quite exercised about the new council logo which was passed around - not particularly the logo itself, but how they arrived at it.
The Labour Executive were consulted, but no other councillors. The Executive Member even said something along the lines of "if we had asked more people then we would have got more opinions and it would have been difficult to please everyone" - an interesting comment from someone resposnsible for consultation in Haringey.
But in the greater scheme of things, a new logo is not that important. I asked several questions of the Executive Member, particularly about neighbourhood management.
The borough is split into 7 "Area Assemblies", many of which contain 2 wards, some 3 and just 1 contains 4 - ours, covering Muswell Hill, Fortis Green, Highgate and Alexandra. This means that the money spent is not evenly spread.
There is obviously justification for spending more cash in more deprived areas. But as well as having 4 wards to split the money between, the Muswell Hill Area Assembly also gets half the amount of money spent on it as some other Assemblies. We were told that they made "no apology for deliberately skewing the money".
Perhaps an even bigger problem, which I've repeatedly highlighted, is that our Assembly is too big an area geographically, making listening through it difficult.
Also on neighbourhood management, I raised the problem of political interference. These teams of officers do work on the ground in linking the council and other agencies together and often work extremely well with ward councillors.
But I gave an example, one of many, showing how Labour have been compromising this good work.
My Lib Dem colleagues in Hornsey ward proposed a meeting about crime on the Campsbourne estate a few months ago. The neighbourhood management team were enthusiastic and helped set up the meeting - but the Labour Executive Member for Crime and Community Safety hijacked it. The end result was that, despite protests, the letter went to Campsbourne residents from the Executive Member without even a mention of the ward councillors - that they were even attending, let alone it had been their idea. That wouldn't have happened if the ward had been Labour.
On a discussion about encouraging benefit take-up, I disagreed with two Labour colleagues on an important point. Last year the council ran a sort of "it's okay to claim" campaign, to help remove the perceived stigma of claiming benefits and make sure vulnerable people get what they're entitled to. I think that's important too.
But Labour colleagues were concerned about the conflicting messages of that campaign and another to crack down on benefit fraud, thinking the second set of posters would increase the stigma and make the first campaign worthless. I disagree - they are complementary messages. One of the main reasons claiming benefits is stigmatised is because of the minority of benefit cheats. Cracking down on them will increase confidence in the system, both for potential claimants and others.
I don't usually write much about council meetings - if anyone ever wants to know more they can ask me, see minutes on the website or even watch the webcast (!). So I'll leave it there - although there were other important discussions about the Bernie Grant Centre, home adaptations for disabled people and unemployment, to name but three!
...doesn't look very sunny in this picture I took this afternoon, but it really was, honest.
