Last night at the Area Forum we were ‘treated’ to two presentations. The First by the deputy leader of the Council Cllr Lynne Hillan on the forthcoming budget and the second by an officer on the new Local Development framework.

Cllr Hillan did her best to outline the issues, i.e. less money from central government and growing demand for services.  What was not clear was what would be sacrificed to square the circle or what the priorities of the Council would be. This was neatly sidestepped by moving onto the consultation process which will help the Council appreciate residents’ priorities and concerns. Members of the public swiftly identified the flaws. Firstly the consultation is advertised on the Councils website and will be advertised in local papers, but many residents (especially older people) don’t have access to the web and many people don’t receive either of the two local papers. After the meeting another Cllr remarked that they didn’t know why we were bothering with the consultation as most of the budget is fixed or ring fenced by central government leaving little room to shift priorities.

The second presentation on the LDF was again more about the consultation process on the draft high level documents than anything else. The LDF is the successor to the Unitary Development Plan (jargon alert) which sets out the planning goals for different areas of the Borough. The question of how the success of the consultation would be measured was raised and not answered. The best bit though was when two former Tory Cllrs Robert Newton and Daniel Hope pointed out that the LDF strategy document was very weak on detail and that compared to Westminster Councils it was sadly lacking. The interesting defence consisted of ‘we are not like Westminster’ and ‘central government really like what we’ve done’. Well of course they would as Barnet is offering to build far more homes than the current government target requires.  Further probing by others failed to illicit any further defence of the LDF and the overwhelming feeling was, tell us your concerns as part of the consultation process and we will ignore them.

The meeting then moved onto the more familiar ground of the points raised in advance by the audience, before mental exhaustion brought a halt to the meeting at around 9pm.