Lib Dem nerds’ paradise

To Streatham Town Centre Forum at St Leonard’s Church this evening to hear Labour’s deputy leader Cllr Jackie Meldrum explain the plans she has developed for better community engagement and for the replacement of Area Committees.

In Lambeth the Area Committees, as introduced by the Lib Dems, have turned out to be little more than talking shops for councillors. They are poorly attended and what work they have financed has been poorly publicised. They are an extra layer of bureaucracy that cost much and deliver little. They have also lessened the effectiveness of community-owned structures, like the Streatham Town Centre Forum.

So we are replacing them, with town assemblies, which with have much less of a councillor bias and more of a whole community focus. They are also planned to be much more representative of Lambeth’s diverse residents, rather than the same faces or “usual suspects” as one Lib Dem at this evening’s meeting called them. Meetings will be themed around one or two big issues rather than the overcrowded, underwhelming agendas the Area Committees tend to have – effectively ending the nerds’ paradise which the Lib Dem councillors favour, tending to the nerdist persuasion as they do.

The reaction at the Town Centre Forum was mixed, partly because the plans are at an early stage, and partly because some of the presentation tended towards the well-meaning but off-putting gobbledegook beloved of officers whose plans are at an early stage.

Some concern was expressed about what would happen to the kind of work currently being done by the Area Committees. The idea is that none of the work would be lost. In any case, I can imagine the new assemblies being able to achieve more without the hand-wringing and flip-flopping of the Lib Dems. If the Streatham Area Committee experience is anything to go by, the work has happened at nothing like the level or pace the Lib Dems would have people believe.