Deputy Mayor leads where Wood follows

YOU COULDN’T see the trees for the Wood at the November meeting of Tower Hamlets Council. The trees are surrounded by wonky paving stones: and Isle of Dogs resident Andrew Wood was petitioning the Council about them.

However, Mr Wood’s Cunning Plan fell flat when Cllr Maium Talukdar, Deputy Mayor and Cabinet Member for Education, Youth and Lifelong Learning, revealed that he had already noticed these problems and had raised them, almost word for word, within the Council’s confidential “members’ enquiries” structures – weeks before Mr Wood had turned up with his petition. How did Mr Wood hit on the same concerns?

Mr Wood explained that his campaign began when he noticed some comments about the path that leads around Millwall Inner Dock on his Facebook page. People had a number of complaints: the pavement was uneven, there were no bins and there was litter everywhere. It was something of a relief to know that Mr Wood was just responding to local concerns, albeit after Cllr Talukdar had already raised them, and had not had access to Cllr Talukdar’s in-tray.

The pathway, Wood explained, was supposed to be looked after by the Canal and River Trust, which is a charity. Funded by donation, it could no longer afford to keep the pathway in good order. It was trying to scrape some volunteers together to do it, but even that was not working. Mr Wood didn’t bring any violins, but everyone was silently imagining them, to help him out.

The broad pathway widens out to include viewing areas and this “pocket park”.

Then Mr Wood spoiled it all: he suggested the Council help the charity out by taking over the maintenance of the pathway and funding its care. Let’s be clear: the Millwall Inner Dock pathway, which runs around the docks in the middle of the Island, is a broad path around two miles long and includes the said trees and seating and viewing areas. The Council is working hard to improve street cleaning and infrastructure as well as waste disposal all over the borough. How is taking on an extra two miles of pedestrian areas and pocket parks going to help?

Above all, it was a question of money. When the Thatcher Government tried to “regenerate” the Isle of Dogs in the early 1980s, it took over all the land owned by public bodies and handed much of it on to other parties. It handed the pathway to the Canal and River Trust. The Council can’t just waltz in and take over management of the area. And what would the Best Value Envoy think about a Council that went out taking on extra work that it wasn’t responsible for? Next you know, we’ll be offering to sweep up in supermarket car parks.

Cllr Sabina Akhtar opened the questioning well for Aspire, addressing that question and asking why the Council should spend taxpayers’ money on private land. Mr Wood said that the pathway used to be public land and the Government had given it to the Trust because the Government thought the Trust was the best organisation to manage it. He added that all local parks are important, for example – but huge numbers of people use this walkway. This was indeed an answer, but not to the question Cllr Akhtar had put.

If the blue bridge were to fail, the Island would be cut off…

Cllr Peter Golds asked how the Trust was doing looking after local bridges, which it is also responsible for. The answer wa that the Trust couldn’t afford to instal public litter bins: so how was it going to afford the money to look after bridges. It would be a disasater if the blue bridge (the audience switched from hearing violins to imagining disaster movie sound tracks) were to fail. And then there’s the pumping stations. And buildings next to the dock walls could collapse. The audience was almost on its feet, asking Lutfur Raham to stop the next ice age – but that’s not very British, so we sat still.

Labour councillor Mufeedah Bustin asked if he had spoken to the Trust or to local councillors. Mr Wood had sent the Trust a copy of his petition but they had not replied, and he had not spoken to local councillors. Mufeedah Bustin is a local councillor, so she presumably appreciated knowing that Mr Wood had not spoken to her. It’s as well he told her: how else would she have known?

Cllr Shafi Ahmed, Cabinet Member for the Environment and the Climate Emergency replied to the petition on behalf of the Council. He was conciliatory. He did point out that the pathway is not under the jurisdiction of the Local Authority, so the Council could not just barge in and do stuff to it. But he went on to say that the Council wanted to support the Trust to manage the land and he would meet them and discuss how the two parties could co-operate and keep the open spaces in good order.

This rather misses the point. The Trust is the body responsible for managing them, but it does not have the money to look after these two miles of pathways. The pathway has not been included in the public area of Tower Hamlets that the Council is funded to manage. If the Council was supposed to take over managing this area, it should have been funded to do so as part of the legacy of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC). The Council should stand firm and not squeeze the taxpayers of Tower Hamlets to make up for this government neglect.

●See the petition (Petition 2) here:
Petition

●Read more about it:
Island Network calls for safety upgrade in dock
I saw an eyesore 1: the ugly side of Docklands
(The “eyesore” is a report on the poor state of the Millwall Inner Dock pathway area from 2021!)