Council refuses to take public questions

At this week’s cabinet meeting Southwark Council Cabinet Meeting 9 March 2021 - YouTube, Council leader Kieron Williams decided to keep members of the public on mute rather than answer tricky questions and listen to deputations. Requests to be allowed to speak were made by two LTN community groups, including the Dulwich Alliance (which includes One Dulwich) and Lordship Lane residents and businesses, and no fewer than 24 questions from the public were sent in for the Cabinet’s regular Public Question Time slot.

You can see all the questions, and the Council’s written answers, in the minutes which have now been published.

At the meeting, instead of allowing the public to ask their questions as usual, Cllr Williams refused to listen to them and passed on to other business, even though all questioners had been invited to attend. The public voiced their anger in the meeting’s chat room. One would-be questioner wrote, “It is unbelievable that the public questions have not been addressed. This is not democracy and our voices aren’t being heard”. Another wrote, “This has had a massive impact on our lives and needs to be addressed, not swept under the carpet.” A third person called Cllr Williams’s commitment to a proper public consultation into question, saying, “You say you welcome full engagement. Really?” and, “We are very disappointed not to be heard.”

The Dulwich Alliance had asked the Council for permission to speak for five minutes, hoping to outline suggestions on how to ensure the public consultation would be carried out in a fair way. 

Denied the opportunity to speak, the Alliance sent the presentation it had intended to make to all Cabinet members. This asked for the consultation to be genuinely independent, and called for immediate modifications to the experiment, including access for the emergency services, and an end to the choking levels of traffic and pollution on what Southwark calls the ‘displacement routes’.