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At this time of year, every year, we have our Annual General Meeting; we get a new Mayor, and we make changes to the Cabinet and other parts of the Council.
This year is particularly important because we have so many of our key projects coming to fruition over the next twelve months.
We’ve got Chelsea Academy which will start construction, aiming for opening in September 2009. We’ve got the planning application for Holland Park School that will lead to a development that will create one of the finest schools in the country with the greatest facilities for our pupils. And then we’ve got Exhibition Road, which is really at the first stage of construction, and that will not just create a wonderful streetscape, which we have a tradition for in Kensington and Chelsea, but actually create a new cultural and intellectual quarter not just for London but actually for the whole nation. This is fantastically exciting and we’re at the key stages of these projects.
These are big projects and they’re ambitious projects. But there’s another area that I’m particularly interested in hearing your views on, and that’s a more difficult area. It is how we as a Council use some of the powers that national Government has given us. The powers of enforcement of regulations and the powers of surveillance, of gaining evidence by use of cameras and other such things to find out whether people are breaking the law, and to use that in evidence.
It’s a very tricky balance for local authorities. We’re under a lot of pressure, often from residents, to take action against things that they think are wrong or disagree with. We also have to balance those with concerns about civil liberties and whether we’ve got a proportionate response to problems.
And I’d like to hear your views on this area; whether you think Kensington and Chelsea Council has the balance about right, whether we intrude too much on your day-to-day life or whether we’re frankly not doing enough to make sure what you think should happen in the area actually happens, by using the law effectively.
You can give me your views through our website or through my email address, which I will see personally.
So 2008 – a big year for us with big projects; but also an interest in what you think about the powers that we have, and how we use them.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
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