User forum November 2012

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

Filter Beds and Walthamstow Marshes User Forum, Sunday November 25, 2012, from 1pm.

It is hard to know why the forum exists, even harder to say what it does or what happened at a particular meeting.

From the very word go the latest forum meeting started out with mind games. The meeting was scheduled to be held at the ice rink but was then re-located to the Waterworks Centre. This might be regarded as unfortunate were it not for the fact that this is not the first time this has happened. Shifting the meeting around makes the participants feel less in control (particularly those unfortunates who accidentally go to the wrong location first and then arrive late). Add to that the disruption it causes when you shift the day and time (from a weekday evening to a weekend afternoon) and the result (in management terms) is that it reduces the feeling of ownership.

Having arrived and tasted the coffee, mince pies and chocolate chip biscuits generously provided by LVRPA, we then embarked on a lengthy sprawling discussion partly about the generally tiresome projects LVRPA is going to use the £72k of ill gotten rewards obtained from renting out much of Porters Field to the Olympic Delivery Authority for the summer and autumn of 2012, and partly about the function and structure of the forum itself. The most interesting thing we learned was that Martin Page, LVRPA greenspace manager, has been given a hint that there may be possible rewards from a Section 106 agreement and that this money could be added to the project pot. Whilst it was not possible to pin Martin Page down on this point, it seemed likely that he was talking about the Essex Wharf development (a Section 106 is so called planning gain, a sweetener developers give public authorities to ease the path towards planning permission).

One suggestion was that a small amount of this Section 106 money should be used to erect a cheap plastic memorial to be placed on the banks of the Lea in recognition of the fact that the Essex Wharf development has virtually killed off any chance that the Lea can be used as a serious commercial waterway for the foreseeable future. This is because Essex Wharf used to be one of a very small number of key transit locations in the London canal network. However, this suggestions came from the floor rather than the LVRPA team, so don't hold your breath waiting for it to actually happen.

To return to the tiresome projects themselves, these were mostly described in the report of the previous forum. People at the November forum had the idea that they were going to prioritise the ideas, and they might have done it if the meeting had been a little bit more disciplined. But Martin Page, LVRPA greenspace manager, made clear that even if the forum prioritised, it would have made little difference

(a) because he hoped to do all the projects and
(b) because he was not going to be told how to do his job.

This is an unconventional position for a local government officer to take. Mostly they at least pretend that they are just carrying out the wishes and commands of their political masters, the councillors who actually run the show. To be charitable, he probably meant he was not going to be dictated to by the forum. But it was clearly an important issue to him as he repeated the observation almost word for word, just in case we missed it first time.

Was LVRPA humiliated by the public drubbing it got over the basketball court and has it decided to recapture the high ground by asserting its dominance? If this is the strategy it is a very stupid one. In PR terms the basketball court debacle was the best thing that ever happened to LVRPA because more people became aware of the regional park in a few weeks, than had heard of it in the previous four decades.

Crushing dissent is OK so long as you have got your own army of supporters with whom to replace the malcontents. LVRPA would find it hard to fill an old fashioned telephone box with its fans.

The only decision that seemed to get made was to prioritise the re-wilding of Porters Field. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, on a par with re-virgining or a very noisy silence. Wild is what people don't do. What people do is not wild.

There was a long pointless discussion about National Grid's plans to tunnel 60 metres under Lea Marsh. We are promised more on this at future forums, which will be thrilling for all those who need a cure for insomnia.

Finally, the author of this account put forward the rather worrying idea that since the LVRPA byelaws were not in force any more, LVRPA was ultra vires in paying for security staff. Martin Page, LVRPA greenspace manager, stated that the bylaws were in force.

The meeting concluded at 3:35pm. We are promised another meeting to discuss almost exactly the same things in early January. When might that be according to LVRPA? Why the third week of January!!!! Goodness only knows when it would have been if it had been mid January or late January!

Jonathan Brind