Lewisham London Borough Council

Proposals to cut 24/7 CCTV footage monitoring have been labelled as “appalling” by Lewisham councillors.

It is one of three proposed cuts to Lewisham Council’s crime, enforcement and regulation directorate, and is expected to save the council £161,000 in 2020/2021.

This comes as the council looks to cut £30m from its budget over the next two years, following reductions in Government funding.

Other cuts to the directorate include a £215,000 cut to staffing for the service team which work in licensing and trading, anti-social behaviour and nuisance service in 2019/2020, and a £40,000 reduction in funding of money allocated to medium-term crime projects.

Speaking to a safer stronger communities select committee, Cllr Joan Millbank said the proposals to cut CCTV were “appalling.”

“The focus on CCTV will be a big issue on the estates, [in monitoring] domestic abuse, Prevent (counter-terror strategy), gender-based violence – hard stuff. It is just appalling,” she said.

Cllr Sakina Sheik said she found the cuts “quite worrying. With the CCTV camera – in losing this we could be losing an essential tool in providing crime prevention,” she said.

Lewisham Council head of public protection and safety, Geeta Subramaniam-Mooney, said the proposal would not see CCTV turned off but viewed proactively for 12 hours, and recorded for 12 hours.

She said council officers had a year to establish what the options might look like.

Cllr James Rathbone said the committee would need more information about the impact of the cuts in order to comment.

The proposals will be considered by the mayor and cabinet on 21 November.

LDRS

Funding to fix the platform two gap at Lewisham Station could be approved as early as 2019, a rail boss has confirmed.

Lewisham Station users have long bemoaned the large gap when alighting on platform two, with station users on Twitter describing the gap as “human-sized” and “so wide you need a running start.”

At a meeting held by Lewisham Station Users Group and attended by representatives from Lewisham Council, Network Rail, Southeastern and MPs Vicky Foxcroft and Janet Daby, the platform two gap was named as an “urgent problem.”

This was alongside gate lines, congestion and overcrowding at the station.

Alex Hellier, strategic planner for Network Rail, said the Department for Transport-owned company bid in five year blocks for funding to make improvements to its stations – with Lewisham Station a priority for the next round of funding.

“One of the things we are bidding for is the gap on platform two. The next five year period starts in the middle of 2019,” he said.

Google

Lewisham Council plans to make £500,000 from its parks, as it faces £30m of cuts from its budget over the next two financial years.

The council is proposing to increase the number of large commercial events in Blackheath from one to two per year, and to market Beckenham Place Park to promoters as a new venue.

The council sees increasing the number of events in the borough, of which there were 499 in 2017/2018, as a means to “generate much needed additional revenue,” according to a council report.

But at a sustainable development select committee, Cllr Alan Smith questioned whether the council’s head of environment Nigel Tyrell had considered a recent court ruling against Haringey Council which ring-fenced money raised in Finsbury Park.

The ruling established that, under the Open Spaces Act 1906, money raised from the hire of Finsbury Park can only be spent on Finsbury Park.

Mr Tyrell said he was not aware of the details of the case.

Cllr James Walsh said there were a number of events taking place in parks which could be used to generate revenue.

“I currently have a lot of events happening in my local park, Ladywell Fields,” he told the committee.

“Six mornings a week there is an outside gym that’s popped up and no one’s charging for. There is a football tournament with referees which they have paid for…they are not paying for the ability to do it in the park.

“We need to be looking at this as a borough wide proposal as whole host of things. They do cause damage – the grass in Ladywell Fields is having to be resewn as they have destroyed it,” he continued.

Lewisham Council is “not at financial breaking point” despite needing to cut £30m from its services over the next two years.

This comes as the council proposes £20.8m worth of budget cuts – which does not include the £17.4m overspend reported for July 2018, £15.6m of which related to an overspend on children’s services.

In a statement, the council said it was experiencing significant pressure for its services, with the number of children in care increasing by 5% in the last year alone.

“Lewisham Council is not yet at financial breaking point like other councils but the government has cut its funding by 60% since 2010, this means that by 2020 the council will have lost £190 million per year,” it said.

“The council has seen a marked increase in demand for services including children’s social care as cuts to preventative services like youth work and Sure Start centres start to be felt.”

The council said it was keeping Lewisham library open, although the library will see a reduction in staffed hours – saving the council £450,000.

The community services directorate will see an 8% reduction, with the council also proposing to cut the £1m grant funding for culture and community services.

Homelessness provision will be reduced by £1.1m between 2019 and 2021 – 20% of its total budget.

Other services to be cut include air quality funding, which will see a reduction of £60,000, as well as £300,000 cut from housing advice and support

The proposals will go through the council’s six select committees and its overview and scrutiny committee before Lewisham’s mayor and cabinet on 21 November.

The budget for next year 2019/20 will be set at a meeting of the council in February.

Thirty “priority” roads across Lewisham are set to be “traffic-calmed” through the use of speed humps, speed cushions and road curves.

This comes two years after the 20mph limit was introduced across the borough, with Lewisham Council now focused on enforcing the speed limit.

Council officers are looking into the use of speed cameras where physical speed deterrents, like speed humps and speed cushions, are too expensive or would make it difficult for emergency service vehicles to access roads.

ldrs

Campaigners occupying Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden to stop a housing development have received a notice to appear in court on Thursday.

The case at Bromley County Court on Thursday, comes after Lewisham Council lodged possession proceedings to get them out of the garden, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Save Tidemill, Save Reginald campaigners have been occupying the Lewisham Council-owned garden in Deptford since 29 August.

The garden is part of regeneration plans to demolish 16 council homes at Reginald House and the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden to make way for a 209-home development, 117 of which will be affordable.

A council spokesperson said: “We remain committed to building more than 100 new social rented homes on the site.

"These new homes will bring safety, security and improvement to the lives of local families who have already been waiting for far too long for a home of their own.”

But campaigners say they will challenge the eviction, crowdfunding £13,000 of the £21,000 needed to appeal a court refusal for a judicial review of the council’s decision to grant planning permission.

They want new plans drawn up for the development to both build new social homes and keep the garden.

A Save Reginald Save Tidemill spokesperson said: “We are not going anywhere.

“We are here to protect the garden and Reginald House and to stop the council recklessly destroying them.

“The council doesn’t have the support of the local community, yet they bullishly continue to try and force through these plans.

“The garden is a priceless green space in an urban area that is woefully short of green spaces.

"The residents don’t want to lose their homes, they just want them refurbished."

Lewisham Council will need to find 90 fostering households over the next three years to address the shortage of carers in the borough.

The council is now seeking to make itself the “agency of choice” for prospective foster carers as it competes with the private sector, a council spokesperson said.

Lewisham Council uses registered fostering agencies as well as its own in-house fostering agency to home children.

Around 170 children and young people are supported by foster carers in Lewisham, but an increased demand for placements has meant there is not enough in-house foster care placements to meet the needs of the population.

But speaking to the children and young people committee, Lewisham Council’s interim director of children’s social care Jean Imray said the authority needed to compete with the private sector for foster carers.

“Fostering nowadays, it is a business and it has to be run in a much more business-like way if we are to compete with our competitors who are businesses – and they are profit making organisations,” she said.

“The days are gone when you hand out leaflets at the school gate. Now we have to compete with marketing strategies employed by the independent sector.”

EPA

Labour increased its hold of both Lewisham and Hackney.

In Lewisham, the party gained all 54 seats, taking one from the Greens.

In Hackney, the party won two more seats to take their overall number on the council to 52.

The Conservatives also won another to take them to five while the Liberal Democrats lost all three of their seats.

With a few wards still to be declared Labour have won enough seats to retain Lewisham.