I think it’s high time we in Camden looked more closely at how power is wielded in our community in our name. The current Executive model of politics used in Camden – where ten councillors wield all the power - is unbalanced. We need to decentralise power away from the Executive. Let’s have Junior Executive Members who can share the workload. Let’s give Scrutiny Panels more power.
Above all, we need to find a way to be more receptive to ideas coming from residents or extra-constitutional bodies like the Sustainability Task Force. I’ve seen too many residents frustrated by the Council’s response to their suggestions. When residents and backbenchers are prepared to put hours of time in to help find solutions we need to bring them in to the process not freeze them out.
Full council meetings have become meaningless talking shops so let’s scrap them and instead beef up Local Area Forums. Instead of the public having to listen to councillors talk in the Town Hall let’s have “Peoples’ Parliaments” in every ward where politicians are obliged to listen to residents. Every councillor should have to attend at least one parliament in every ward during the year to make sure they understand Camden as a whole. And these new “Peoples’ Parliaments” should be responsible for real budgets.
Let’s break up council departments that are too big like the Environment Department and create units which are smaller to manage and which have names that residents are more likely to understand. Most of the work of the Environment Dept is actually about parking, highway maintenance and rubbish collection; very little of it is about action to help the planet.
We need to get away from the mindset that big is beautiful and lowest cost is best. If a housing estate like Maiden Lane wants to turn its food waste into compost to use for food growing we should be happy rather than complaining that it’s too expensive and doesn’t fit the one size fits all model officers prefer. As most residents will by now be aware, the jewel in the crown of the Environment Department – the highest recycling rate among inner London boroughs – is actually an eco disaster. Mixing up recycling in the back of waste trucks simply creates rubbish by another name and pushes the problem off to someone else. A solution has been on the table for months – more separation at source - but it’s not coming in until April 2010.
Every report written by a council officer is currently checked by our legal and finance departments. But there should also be a sign-off for climate change and resilience (our ability to cope when cheap oil disappears and supply lines break). Might there be a less resource-intensive way to carry out a particular policy, one which produces less waste or pollution, and one which human beings are more likely to enjoy? At the moment we don’t know because it’s nobody’s responsibility to ask those questions.
Instead of mouthing the words “we are putting sustainability at the heart of everything we do”, we should actually do it. The pace of change in Camden is painfully slow. Tiny steps in the right direction rather than bold leaps forward. I could weep when I read the latest climate change science or when I look around Camden and see how much our lives depend on cheap oil. Let’s get serious about preparing for a world where oil is going to become prohibitively expensive and climate change an everyday reality.
We need a Chief Executive who understands the urgency of these issues and who’s prepared to put what’s right for Camden ahead of what central government wrongly requires. The Leader of the Council needs to be clearer about where we’re going and make more of an attempt to show that, if we prepare for it together, if we are bold, if we accept that dramatic changes will have to be made by all of us, then the future can be a better place.
Could we in Camden even pioneer new ways of measuring human progress; why don’t we focus on wellbeing rather than highest tonnage at lowest cost? As a society we are no happier today than we were in the 1960s. By some measures we’re even less happy. So let’s stop focusing on meaningless economic statistics and the accumulation of stuff. Let’s get real about what makes us happy and plan council expenditure and policies around that.
It’s time for renewal at every level. We should begin by cleaning our own house.
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