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How do you want the police to operate? Local police on the beat in the
same area week after week, or ever-shifting faces occasionally popping
up from a distant mega-police centre? And what about health services? A
local site where you can see the same doctor time after time, or a
distant one you have to travel to where you never see the same person?
Or what about benefits? A local office where you can talk to someone who
remembers your case from visit to visit or an anonymous automated
telephone system where it takes ages even to talk to a person - and it's
never the same person as last time?
The answer time and time again is that what people want - and what
delivers the best services - is for public services to be delivered
locally, by people who know the community and are rooted in the
community. People don't want to get in their cars or on a bus to access
postal services, their local GPs or have access to a police front
counter - especially in an age where so many roads are clogged up and
where curbing pollution is so necessary.
But our Labour government, so often want to centralise - stripping away
local services, closing local facilities and undermining local
communities. The Labour steamroller seems to believe that ever more
distant services are desired - but they aren't.
The latest travesty (and tragedy) will see (if they get their way) Post
Offices after Post Office close in Haringey and all across London.
Before that it was polyclinics - and the idea of moving GP practises
like the Highgate Group Practice and Dukes Avenue Practice away from
their patients and on to the site of the old Hornsey Central Hospital
instead. Thankfully, I think the Health Trust may by now have got the
idea that local people don't want to lose their local GP practice.
And I don't think there is a person in Highgate who isn't keen on the
Highgate Safer Neighbourhood Team being stationed in Highgate rather
than as currently at Muswell Hill. And having stomped the Archway Road
with police officers looking at likely properties (shops mainly) it is a
plain as the nose on your face that the best and most suitable place to
station our local team is on the ground floor of the old Highgate Police
Station.
So - who is the Government doing this for? Not us - for sure. It's time that
the powers that be realised that they are not there to destroy our lives as
we want to live them. Our communities are just that - our communities - and
police, health and postal services are integral to our everyday lives
and everyday needs. To take just one example: our local parades of shops
are supported by people using postal services. Older people, mothers
with buggies and people with disabilities would have enormous extra
burden to have to get to services further away - let alone all of us
waiting in ever-lengthening queues.
It doesn't have to be like that though. It's not a question of local
services not being financially viable - some of the Post Offices
earmarked for closure are actually making a profit, and the long term
financial (let alone any other) cost of seeing areas spiral down into
decay and neglect as services are stripped away is huge.
What we need is real energy and inventiveness being applied to
supporting local services - such as by making our local Post Offices the
hub for the provision of a wider range of public services, bringing them
to our doorsteps whilst also safeguarding the Post Offices. Essex County
Council are leading the way on this - looking to take over some Post
Offices that are threatened with closure, and to then combine them with
local council services to end up with Post Offices that are local, open
and pay their way: it's a case of win, win, win. That's just the sort of
imagination we need in Haringey too!
(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008
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The answer time and time again is that what people want - and what delivers the best services - is for public services to be delivered locally, by people who know the community and are rooted in the community.
