Streatham Area Committee

At the Streatham Area Committee this evening, frustrations around the latest delays to the Streatham ice rink were voiced loud and clear by the handful of residents who came. It was irritating that no officer from the council was there – as they should have been - to respond to questions. It was also irritating that nobody from Tesco was present, as they are, shall we say, at the centre of this project.

Luckily, knowing he would want a chance to set the record straight after much misinformation and rumour-mongering from the opposition, I had asked my Cabinet colleague Cllr Paul McGlone (Regeneration and Enterprise) to come along and he was able, within the constraints of commercial confidence and legal negotiations, to explain the complexities of the situation.

The key thing is that the £1.2 million needed to fill the funding gap we inherited is secure in Labour Lambeth’s forward plan. There are big tensions between the existing planning permission, how we can achieve the most desirable outcome for local residents, customers and other local businesses and the most logical way of building such a complex project.

As a Streatham councillor I have always been clear that there should be continuity of ice provision in Streatham. That is what residents and skaters want. The scheme also requires a number of permissions and licences – not all of which have been secured (because these processes take time, as if this process hasn’t taken a huge amount of time already, even allowing for four years when the Lib Dems seem to have sat on their hands and left the negotiations to officers), and the cost of building large projects is accelerating, partly as a result of the Olympics.

Nobody can deny the invaluable resource that the ice rink has been in the past and must be for Streatham in the future. It is aggravating to see the existing rink deteriorating state, and I would urge Tesco to listen to the people of Streatham and work with Lambeth to expedite the new facility that local people want – after all, these are the very people Tesco want to shop in their store.