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.”
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