Ladywell Village Improvement Group hosted a hustings for the Ladywell ward candidates on 21st April 2010. Our candidate – Helen Mercer – spoke and answered questions from local residents and the audience.

Below is the text of her two minute description of the policies of Lewisham People Before Profit and her answers to the questions.

Introduction

“Thank you for inviting me. My name is Helen Mercer and I am the candidate for Lewisham People Before Profit. Lewisham People Before Profit is a new group – we are the new kids on the block. We don’t have funds for glossy leaflets with a few catchy soundbites; what we have are people who have been involved in campaigns in Lewisham for a long time, people who are close to and understand the concerns and needs of ordinary people.

Lewisham People Before Profit is basically an alliance of people from a variety of campaigns – the key ones are probably Defend Education In Lewisham, Keep our NHS public, Brockley PFI Leaseholders Ass, Lewisham Gateway Action Group, various campaigns against the selling-off of council estates, Hands off Lewisham Bridge School as well as the Ladywell Pool and the New School campaigns. We came together because as campaigners in these groups we could see that we were all basically up against the same thing - privatisation, PFIs, handing over council land and services to private profit-seekers.

Our key theme is NO to privatisation and we say that once we abandon this idea of making PRIVATE profit from  PUBLIC services, you can SAVE money. Why? Because there is no-one to skim off profits and it reduces bureaucracy: these privatised contracts impose a cost on Councils of monitoring and renegotiating what they mean all the time.

So we are against privatisation and we are against cuts. And we believe that pandering to the profit motive all the time distorts the provision of public services and also makes environmental solutions harder to find.

But we are not against ALL private enterprise – in fact we have a strong programme to support small business against giant firms. The large firms in Lewisham take money out of the local economy. Tesco, for instance made £3.4bn profit last year, but those dividends will not be spent in Lewisham. Small firms on the other hand can put life into local high streets, and spend whatever money they make in the area.

So our policies.

For Lewisham as a whole:

• Abolish the mayor
• Build council houses, health centres and schools
• Create secure jobs by ending contracting-out
• Defend small businesses against the multinationals

And in Ladywell our key policies are:

• To oppose the siting of a 3-16 school at Lewisham Bridge; oppose to oppose the demolition of the Grade II listed building; and to oppose the transfer of the school to an unaccountable Trust outside of local authority control.
• To bring the contract for maintaining Hillyfields in-house – providing properly paid jobs and apprenticeships
• And to oppose all the major redevelopment proposals for Lewisham Centre and Catford Stadium. We would have a programme of taxation and compulsory purchase for vacant properties and sites.

Q. What specifically would the candidates do to improve Ladywell - and if you were to be judged on your first 100 days, what would you want to have achieved?

• Get shops occupied – programme of compulsory purchase / taxation. Do this in a balanced way so that existing business don’t face wasteful competition.
• Take management of parks and leisure services away from Glendale / PL
• Campaign for Playtower to be made youth centre
• Campaign to save Ladywell Pool – even with new pool at LV going ahead – we need an extra pool.
• Save Lewisham Bridge – many people living in Ladywell send their kids there and the overwhelming feeling is against the bussing and against the plans

Q. What more would you do as Councillor to support Ladywell businesses and improve the environment on Ladywell Road for local people?

3 aspects to what we would do:

• Reasonable rents – small business often seen as a soft touch for Council money-raising – we’ll go after the big businesses for tax
• Bank of Lewisham – would provide long-term loans at low rates of interest – reduce reliance on overdrafts which are short-term and at higher rates of interest.
• We need a range of shops – greengrocers, butchers, specialist clothes – want people to come to Ladywell to shop – really shop. One of our plans is for Lewisham Council – hopefully in conjunction with the Co-op to set up a Wholesale Food Co-operative. This would source food from nearby counties – London’s hinterland as it was called when I was doing geography – we would buy from them at rates which support those small farmers, and then sell on to local greengrocers at wholesale rates. This policy reduces food miles, and we could also use the produce for council-provided school meals service.

Q. Do you believe that the current decision about Ladywell Conservation Area will benefit all?

I understand concerns about being made to comply with extra building regulations – but I for one am happy to do that for the community. So I favour the creation of the Conservation Area but would warn you not to put too much faith into them. English Heritage recently issued a warning that Conservation Areas were not being conserved – being allowed to deteriorate or threatened by developments nearby – eg Blackheath and Belmont CAs will have their character completely changed by Gateway – and Loampit Vale will impact on Ladywell’s. We also mustn’t allow Conservation Areas to mean that houses outside of these areas become 2nd class citizens.

Q. Do the candidates think that the current local assemblies are any more than a PR exercise designed to keep residents focus on small local projects and off the bigger strategic decisions that will really determine what Lewisham looks like in 10 or 20 years time.

I’m afraid at present they are not much more than a PR exercise. They should be expanded to be able to make a real input into strategic decisions about the borough as a whole where the real money is being spent.

Q. What would the candidates do to bring about more localised decision-making (not just consultation) in a borough that has a centralised mayor and cabinet decision-making process?  

Abolish the mayor.

But we need to strike a balance: on one hand development plans must be done with local consultation and decision-making input. But the problems we are facing – unemployment, the environment, homes, schools, transport require a strategic overview. However, that strategic overview should be done to fulfil ordinary people’s needs and aspirations – not with the purpose of identifying niches for private profit

Q. What do the candidates propose to do about delelict sites and empty properties in Lewisham? What do the candidates propose for sites that have been made vacant and/or derelict by receiving planning permission, but have delayed building?

Lewisham People Before Profit would introduce a programme of taxation and compulsory purchase. I very much welcome the ideas that LVIG and Max Calo are pushing for the Playtower to become a youth centre.

Q. Now that the Lewisham Bridge Primary School building is to be saved from demolition due to its grade 2 listing, what are the candidates’ views on the proposal to build a secondary school within its grounds? This question was combined with asking us to comment on the future of Gordonbrock.

Labour’s record on schools is nothing short of scandalous. We know that we have been short of a secondary school since 2001 and now we’re short of primary places too. John Hamilton put forward a list of possible sites for the secondary school and Bullock dismissed them all.

Lewisham Bridge is not a suitable site for a 3-16 school, but what we should be doing is expanding primary places there – if the bungalow were redeveloped and adaptations made to the main building – which English Heritage and the Victorian Society have all sorts of ideas for and are very open to – it could become a 3- form entry school.

This would then relieve the pressure on Gordonbrock.  I think it’s very sad that the parents there are fighting each other when it is Labour’s incompetence that has created the situation. Bussing is miserable.

Q. What constitutional changes would make things like road repairs happen faster?

I think the problem here is less any constitutional issue and more the problem of the contracting out. Once there are private contracts any repair become much harder to get going because it has to be agreed with a company who can start to quibble as to whether or not that particular thing is in the contract. Also the private companies carrying out the repairs do not train and pay their staff as well as the old Council system, so there is not the same level of commitment to the job and repairs can be done shoddily.

Q. What do the candidates think should be done to control the private rented sector?

They key issue is to revive Council house-building. I think the high rents and poor state of private housing, the homelessness is taking us towards a situation of the end of the 19th century. As a result in Birmingham that well-known socialist Joseph Chamberlain built the country’s first municipal dwellings. This is what 30 years of neo-liberalism has brought us back to.

Q. Do the candidates support brown composting bins?

Yes – Lewisham has been much too slow, but no things like a bin tax