Update 13 February:

Met with the occupying group several times last week. It seems that the council went in last weekend and changed the locks on the building doors, so now the occupiers are locked out – as is anyone who hopes to use this community building. The occupiers’ posters have also been taken down. The building is empty and unused. Amazingly, it seems that the council would rather have an empty community building than one utilised by community groups. The occupying group said that there were still several years to run on the council’s lease of the building, so they can’t understand why the council is so keen to empty the building out.

Updated Friday 3 February

A newly-formed group of centre users and Hammersmith trades council members occupied the Hammersmith information and visitor centre in Hammersmith on Tuesday (the centre is in Unit 20, Hammersmith Broadway, W6 9YD).

The council planned to close the information centre down as part of its austerity cuts programme, but protestors denied the council entry when removal staff arrived to clear the building on Tuesday.

The occupiers have a set of keys to the centre and the council does not.

Gwen Cook, a Hammersmith trades council member and occupier told me that the occupiers planned to continue their protest past this week. They expected things to get more difficult next week if the council made a decision about gaining access. “What can they do, though? Are they going to kick the doors in to a building on the Broadway?”

Cook said it was “disgusting” that the council was planning to close the information centre. The information centre had been a vital public space for voluntary and community groups in the middle of Hammersmith for many years. Meeting space and public building options for voluntary groups in the borough were reduced considerably last week when about 20 voluntary groups were forced out of Palingswick House on King’s Street to make way for Toby Young’s freeschool.

“People think the Tories win everything, but they don’t. We don’t want to just hand it [the information centre] to them.”

From the occupiers’ press release and subsequent interviews (they were still there on Friday):

“The Hammersmith information and visitor centre has served the borough for many years. During that time, it has hosted new community organisations and helped them to grow. It has provided a resource for small unfunded local groups to meet. It has provided a gallery space for local artists and photographers to showcase their work. Above all, it has served as an information and visitor centre helping visitors and residents to find their way around the borough, to seek out social and commercial services and has been a friendly face to thousands of people seeking help.

The centre has been staffed entirely by experienced and expert volunteers during its lifetime.

In this 2012 Olympics Year and Royal Jubilee year, many more visitors are expected in the borough. Is it a good idea to close the only place visitors can go to get information and help in this vast city of ours?”

Update Thursday 2 February:

Went down to the information centre this evening after work and spoke to the occupiers.

Chris Tranchell, from the Hammersmith Community Trust, said the trust, which had used the information centre for about nine years for meetings and community activities, had known for months that the centre was likely to be closed. (For several years now, the council has been closing and selling popular public buildings, in the face of major opposition from local people. The council inevitably argues that buildings and services are underutilised. Service and building users always say different. Tranchell shows me artwork, folders, signs, pictures, photos and other material belonging to community groups which use the centre. They’ve left their equipment and stocks in the centre for now, because they have no other buildings or rooms to move things to. The centre is just full of those belongings. That was the material that the removal workers were meant to take away on Tuesday.

Tranchell says the council told the trust that the centre would be “given back” to Hammersmith Broadway’s landlords, so he and other members of the trust went to talk to the landlords to ask if they and other community groups could somehow stay on at the centre. Tranchell says that the landlords were surprised to hear that the building was to be “returned” to their custody – that seemed to be news to them.

He said Labour MP Andrew Slaughter was looking into this for them. Tranchell and his group want to negotiate continued community use of the building with the council and the Broadway’s landlords. He said the council gave the trust a list of about 140 alternative community buildings to use, but that a lot of the organisations in charge of those buildings were charging commercial rates. “They don’t seem to be making these decisions [about closing public buildings] with the community in mind.”

More soon.

An article in the Guardian by me today on the closing of the Tamworth supported living hostel in Hammersmith and Fulham.

40 tweets

So.

You’ll be pleased to hear that even as Call Me Dave liberates the grateful people of Libya, his ground troops in the UK continue to target the most vulnerable of his own citizens. Nothing like consistency, as I consistently say.

Tomorrow night, Hammersmith and Fulham council’s Tory cabinet will take a decision to close Tamworth – a 14-unit hostel for people with mental health issues. These people are among the borough’s most compromised as far as mental health goes. They need medium to high-level supported accommodation and care.

Tough titty for them, though: the council has decided to close the Tamworth hostel in the interests of strafing Supporting People funding for a £300,000 medium term financial strategy saving.

“The closure of Tamworth will allow the Supporting People funding to contribute towards the mental health placements budget savings,” tomorrow’s cabinet report tweely observes, for all the world as though mental health care budgets should be encouraged to hand themselves in. Existing residents will be shifted into alternative accommodation, and the council will flog the building off – generally its aim with useful community buildings. Continue reading →

Following my tweets from the Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting this week, here’s a take on that meeting and the cabinet’s decision to give council rights to sell community buildings.

Note the various betrayals people refer to – the Irish cultural centre’s horror at finding the council had not signed an agreement to extend the lease on the Irish centre and so on. Note also the nature of the vote at the end of the meeting – the cabinet simply stood up, broke for recess and agreed the decision. There wasn’t even a show of hands.

More “Tough Shit, Scrubbers” from Hammersmith Town Hall this week, as that borough’s appalling cabinet ignored pleas from locals to delay a decision to sell much-loved local community buildings.

Locals (thousands of them, if their petitions are anything to go by) wanted the council to give or extend leases on the Sands End community centre, the popular Irish centre and the Shepherd’s Bush village hall. Several hundred turned up at a cabinet meeting to make that point (rowdily) in person. Lease extensions would give community groups the chance to fundraise and buy the buildings for community use – à la the Big Society, one would have thought. Certainly, that is what locals thought: statements like “the government is talking of the Big Society – well, we ARE the Big Society,” went down a storm all night.

People also wanted the brakes put on a decision to throw 20 or so community groups out of King Street’s Palingswick House and move Toby Young’s proposed West London free school in. Some are bigger than others in Big Society.

The cabinet gave people a hearing, even though the decision to ignore them had clearly been made. Let us walk you through the charade.

We heard a passionate speech from West London school of dance director Anna du Boisson, who paid tribute to the many groups that use the Shepherd’s Bush village hall: church groups, karate, yoga and tai chi organisations, tea-dance groups and exercise classes – “all have a good, loyal membership,’ du Boisson said.

Her dance school (now 25 years old) has 750 children on its books and an admirably egalitarian take on entry criteria: the school offers “a scholarship programme [which] means that nobody is turned away on the basis of the inability to pay fees.” (The school is run and funded by a charity). There is literally nowhere else with the space and wooden floors (for dance) in the borough – with the possible (and ironic) exception, as du Boisson pointed out, of the very room we were sitting in at the Town Hall.

“We would like the opportunity to raise the funds to buy [the village hall],” du Boisson pleaded. “The government is talking of the Big Society. Well, we are the Big Society and selling this hall runs exactly counter to the letter of their objectives. Grant us the lease and we’ll do the rest. Give us the chance to buy it.”

Continue reading →

Via Hammersmith and Fulham Unison:

Leading Tory Hammersmith and Fulham council members will meet tomorrow evening to rubberstamp the sale of four big community centres. Thousands of residents oppose these sales.

Community members who want to run the centres as community-based Big Society projects have been ignored – local MP Andrew Slaughter is reporting that supporters of the Shepherd’s Bush Village Hall made an offer to lease the building commercially under a charitable trust, but have had no response. The Shepherd’s Bush Village Hall is in one of the borough’s most deprived wards. Yours truly will have to try and catch up with some of the players in this story tomorrow. If the Shepherd’s Bush group is struggling to get hold of a building for community use, but Toby Young is not struggling to get hold of Palingswick House for his free school as below – well, we’ll have to spend some time deciding what that all means.

The four threatened community centres are:

Palingswick House: home to more than 20 charities in Hammersmith and Fulham. Slaughter is reporting that Toby Young’s controversial West London Free School has been identified as the likely buyer.

Sands End Community Centre: includes the Sands End library, children’s and social services, an affordable gym and adult education.

The Irish Centre: a self funding arts and cultural centre. About 7000 people signed a petition asking the council to reconsider this sale.

The Shepherd’s Bush Village Hall: used by about local organisations and offers Sure Start services and the Shepherd’s Bush Families Project.

There will be a protest outside Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall in Kings Street tomorrow night before the cabinet meeting: 6pm Monday 7 February W6 9JU.

So…

I’ve been forwarded an email by a number of people who are desperate to protect the Hammersmith library service from cuts, and jobs and service downgradings.

The email exchange is between a local union rep and H&F Tory councillor Greg Smith, cabinet member for the (deliciously-named) Residents’ Services department and the councillor responsible for the libraries ‘restructure.’

In the email, the rep pleads with Smith to visit staff at the very popular, but-soon-to-be-disbanded, home library service (this dedicated service, which is run centrally from Barons Court library, will be devolved to other Hammersmith libraries. They’ll have to find time and staff for home deliveries – at a time of cuts and staff downgradings).

The rep suggests that Smith join home library staff on one of their rounds to the housebound people who rely on the service for delivery of library books and DVDs (at any one time, there are 6000 books on loan to service users).

Smith’s answer – a resounding No Thanks – turned up just 12 minutes after the rep sent the original.

I reproduce the email here – not just because it demonstrates the airy Tory dismissal of service users and staff that speaks – if you will – such volumes, but because it points up the worrying lack of interest in consultation that I’m finding more and more. Continue reading →