Richard Baum

A proportion of the morning has been spent chasing up the Council’s ever-hassled (by me) Environmental Services department, once again over the St Ann’s Road garden situation, which rumbles on and on and on and on like one of those American freight trains I have seen in films.

To recap briefly, residents have enjoyed gardens backing on to Prestwich Clough for years. The gardens are actually owned by the Council but were given over during the War to grow vegetables. After long-running sagas like this one, I can’t help but feel that several have found jobs at the Town Hall in the years since.

Successive instances of spirit-crushing incompetence by the Council and its predecessor organisations over the decades regarding these tenancy arrangements now means there’s a hotch-potch of arrangements for the residents. The Council tried to resolve this last year with its usual sledgehammer tact by asking everyone to sign agreements with massive rent increases and punitive new terms.

Unluckily for the Council, they didn’t reckon on a couple of smart residents unwilling to be forced into this (or, it turns out, just about anything). The residents contacted me, and so we’ve been trying to get a better deal for them ever since.

So far we’ve succeeded in stalling the introduction of the new contracts, but not got much further. The Council have succeeded in turning so many local people against them that there’s now a residents committee, a “Dig for Victory” campaign, and lots of negative press coverage.

And now after yet another confusing letter was sent to some but not all of the residents, and after the Land Registry were sent erroneous information by the Council on this issue, we are asking for clarity again.

I think this problem demonstrates the difficulties of trying to run a huge organisation (the Council) which deals with a huge amount of little things which matter a lot to large numbers of people. These gardens are infinitesimally small fry to a department which has to manage hundreds of miles of roads, dozens of parks, empty the bins and bury the dead. But they are massively important to the few residents who actually want to enjoy their gardens.

Unfortunately, the Council’s response is not to meet this difficulty and beat it, but to wade around in the mire for months making it ever harder for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. I get the impression that this problem could be resolved very quickly if one person was given the job of sorting it out, and held responsible for doing so. We’re talking about a few hundred quid here. It’s not going to break the Council’s bank either way. So write to the residents, find out what they want, talk to them to see if their wishes can be accommodated, if they can’t then explain why not, and get it done.

What seems to be happening is that the myriad officers, departments and agendas that this thing brings together (financial, legal, environmental) means that there are lots of fingers in the pie, and nobody’s taking responsibility for it. Which is very frustrating for me and much more frustrating for the residents continually knocked back and delayed by Council confusion.

These little things matter and, like the low level graffiti in Prestwich which this same department is also doing nothing about, if they were quickly and sensibly solved the Council would win a lot of friends and a lot of respect without spending much money at all.

Rick