LBWF’s perfidies in microcosm

A couple of weeks ago, one of my neighbours showed me the letter pasted below.

The story it relates to begins some months ago.

LBWF announced that it wanted to place a cycle storage pod in Odessa Rd., and contacted 100 households living on both sides of the road near the proposed site in order to get their response.

As the letter reveals, 12 households replied, and of those, the (albeit narrow) majority were against.

At that point, LBWF could have gracefully admitted defeat.

But what it actually did – as the letter candidly admits – was fiddle the figures.

Outside of the consultation, some residents had apparently written in asking for a pod. Never mind that the point of the consultation was a way of settling the matter fairly, with everybody given an equal opportunity to express their opinion in a structured and transparent process, or that (even more significantly) some of the correspondents did not even live in Odessa Rd. What LBWF did was simply lump together the ‘for’ votes in the consultation with these other expressions of support, and declare a victory.

Odessa Rd. now has its pod.

The second part of the letter is equally disturbing.  Council tax payers need to be able to assess how their money is being spent. Yet when questioned LBWF bluntly states that, though its managing agent monitors the pod’s usage, ‘we do not publish this information’ – as arrogant and unhelpful an answer as it is possible to give.

Mini-Holland in general may or may not be a good thing. There are many competing claims, with most seemingly dependent on assertion rather than evidence.

But one thing is for sure: if this is the way that LBWF is proceeding across the borough, then it is without doubt a public disgrace.