RESIDENT ASSOCIATION CHAIRMAN ATTACKS THE LEADER

Dear Dame,

When elected Cllr Campbell promised a new 'listening and hearing' era: she has not delivered on that promise.

You will be interested in this letter from the chairman of one influential RA chairman who claims the wishes of residents have been ignored in the interests of 'big business'.

Cllr Campbell has also presided over the extraordinary state of affairs whereby the Labour Group refuses to participate in Scrutiny Committee work. 
This is not good news for residents.
I see that our Council is spending over half a million a year on public relations. No amount of money wasted on PR disguise the truth that old habits die very hard.

A concerned Conservative resident

Dear Member,

The Council has recently circulated a newsletter announcing that the Cadogan Estate's scheme to provide parking spaces outside its luxury shops in Sloane Street, rebranded by the Council as a "public realm improvement scheme", is to go ahead. Work will start on the southern section of the scheme, from Sloane Square to Cadogan Gate, later this year. The newsletter can be read here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/veh1i0ubqvqi8km/Newsletter%20July%202019.pdf?dl=0

This decision has been made notwithstanding strong criticism of the scheme from MISARA, the Brompton Association, the Chelsea Society and other residents' groups.

We have been badly let down by our local ward councillors, who have chosen to support the scheme, based on the results of the Council's consultations which purport to show "a very favourable response" from those consulted, particularly from local residents. We know that your own views are very different: we have explained many times that the Council's consultations were so manipulative and one sided as to provide no basis for decision making, but our explanations have simply been ignored.

In response to the last consultation, individuals and organisations wrote letters and emails to the Council showing opposition to the scheme by 19-7. We have repeatedly asked the Council to publish the appendix containing these letters on its website, but the Council continues to refuse to do so.

In recent months our priority has been to try and persuade the Council to remove the unsightly "planters" from the scheme. Sophie Andreae, the chairman of the Brompton Association, and Stephen Baxter, representing MISARA, have argued the case for this at several meetings with Cadogan and Council officials. On 15 July 2019 they sent an email to Cllr Thalassites, Lead Member for Planning and Transport, pleading for their removal, which can be read here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/63en9x6mtxk03kv/Email%20to%20RBK%26C%20re%20Sloane%20Street%2015.7.19.docx?dl=0

At one of these meetings the Council furnished pictures of the street resurfaced not in York stone but in porphyry, the second most expensive material after marble. This shows what can happen when Council officials are given the freedom to spend a large amount (£18 million!) of someone else's money.

Readers of Country Life will have noted a recent article by its former editor Clive Aslet, a patron of Save Sloane Square, referring to a moment in the 1950s "when the Cadogan Estate had a rush of blood to the head and proposed replacing most of Sloane Street and Sloane Square with a mini Swindon of concrete towers and walkways reached by escalators". Evidently its destructive tendencies have history behind it.

On 24 April 2019 Dr James Thompson, the chairman of the Chelsea Society, wrote a trenchant letter of criticism to the Leader of the Council calling on her to abandon the proposed narrowing of the carriageway in the northern section of the street: 

http://chelseasociety.org.uk/sloane-street/

The letter concludes:

"Elizabeth, we recall that you made a number of speeches, before and during the local elections, in which you acknowledged that the culture of the Council needed to change, and promised that the Council would “take greater care to listen to residents’ views” and become “a truly listening borough” and that “we will be judged by what we do and not what we say”.

In the matter of Sloane Street however, the Council seems to have reverted to its pre-election behaviour. It organises a consultation designed to show support for a particular outcome, rather than to discover the residents’ views; it ignores those views when they are expressed; it pretends that support exists when it doesn’t; and it fails to engage with organisations which genuinely represent local people.  It also seems to have been unduly influenced by a conditional offer of third-party funding.  These are all matters which I am sure will be debated at the Society’s next AGM.

I am therefore asking you to review this Key Decision, and not to proceed with any narrowing of the carriageway of Sloane Street north of Harriet Street. If the choice is narrowing the carriageway or doing nothing we would prefer doing nothing".

The Council is hosting two meetings at Cadogan Hall at which visitors will be able to ask questions about the construction programme and the detailed works. These will be on Thursday 18 July from 15.30-19.30 and Saturday 20 July from 10.00-14.00.

We regret that our efforts to stop this unwelcome scheme have been so unavailing. We will continue to try and influence the details, but we are not optimistic.

Best wishes,

Richard Grantley

Chairman, MISARA