Agenda and minutes

Councillor Amrani, the Chair of the Catford South Local Assembly welcomed attendees and drew people’s attention to the agenda booklet they received on arrival. This booklet gives more information on agenda items and includes information and links to take away.

Cllr Amrani explained that Catford South are the first Local Assembly to ‘live tweet’ the meeting using the hash tag #CSAssembly. He asked people to get out their smart phones and follow us on twitter @Love_Catford using the #CSAssembly to tweet us during the meeting. People can see their tweets on the big screen at intervals during the meeting.

We know fly tipping is a problem that is making you feel unhappy about the great area you live in.
We want to give you a chance to work together with the local council, to find solutions to make things better in Catford South.
This is your chance to state your views, get some answers and think of positive ways we can tackle the problem of fly tipping ourselves as a community – come with your ideas for improvement. Let’s have a productive discussion and make some real change!

A ) Corbett RA Fly Tipping,  a community point of view -  Jeanette Kenyon, Corbett Residents Association.

Corbett Residents association have been working closely with Culverley Green Residents Association to find a way to deal with the increasing issue of fly-tipping in the Catford south area. Jeanette gave an impassioned presentation on a community take on the issue. The presentation focused on Research done around National initiatives on fly-tipping, the impact of fly-tipping on Catford South and how frustrated we are as a community. And a look at some successful case studies on other successes in Newham and Downham, to see some good practice examples.

Jeanette gave statistics evidencing that fly-tipping is nationally on the rise, that it is a blight on Catford South and evidenced the issue by showing details from fixmystreet.com which breaks down reports ward by ward. She pointed to increasing residents frustration and detailed the areas worst affected in the ward. Jeanette then detailed research she had done on Newham’s war on Fly Tipping and the Don’t Dump in Downham campaign with Phoenix housing. Jeanette reiterated what we can do as a community and   wanted to acknowledge the good work of the community already happening. There are lots of community clean-ups already where local residents come out and volunteer to clean up their own areas. Only last week Culverley RA held a community clean up day.

Jeanette finished her presentation by reaffirming that the local community want to work with Lewisham Council, not against them. Local community groups want to work together with the council to develop a fly-tipping prevention strategy. The Local Community want to be proactive finding sustainable solutions. Jeanette addressed Nigel Tyrell Head of environment and stated that the residents are throwing the Council the challenge.

b) Lewisham Council Presentation on Fly tipping – Nigel Tyrell, Head of Environment,

Lewisham Council

Nigel gave an in depth presentation around the following items, briefly detailed below:

An overview of the Environmental services as part of the Customer Service Directorate and what the service covered.

Backdrop to Environmental services the pressures and opportunities arising from savings to services. Highlighted that the service had received a saving cut of 26%, resulting a reduction of around 40 or so posts in this area.

There is a perception in the increase in fly-tipping but could be more likely to be a result of the reduction in services due to savings.

Bulk of activity is around investigating fly tipping, enforcing, prosecuting and dealing with changes to legislation that mean on the sport enforcement no longer an option

We do we go from here and improve? We produced the work highlighted for Phoenix housing as mentioned in the earlier presentation.

Cameras can work in selected cases. Only when you can identify the person or people, or the vehicle plate is caught on camera. They cost £8000 per camera. It is labour intensive, can be successful and examples were shown. Signs can be effective but are people dumping because they didn’t realise  ...  view the full minutes text for item 2.

Your ward is working toward becoming the FIRST accredited ‘Dementia Friendly’ Community in Lewisham!
Find out how we are doing this, how your might get involved and the reasons why being dementia friendly will help Catford South be an even nicer place to live and an even stronger community!

Karin Barthel (NHS Clinical Commissioning Group)

Catford South is a fantastic place to live. There is a great sense of community, with lots and lots of local initiatives and neighbourliness that include supporting the more vulnerable residents. This makes Catford South a very special and unique place and we would love to make it an even greater place to live, in particular for your local relatives, friends and neighbours living with dementia.  Catford South as an area is working towards the area being a Dementia Friendly Area where people with dementia are empowered to have high aspirations and feel confident, knowing they can contribute and participate in activities that are meaningful to them in their local community.  A number of actions have been pledged by local groups and individuals saying what actions they will take to contribute to making that happen.

As a step towards this the assembly held an awareness event for key stakeholders of the local assembly and leaders of local organisations in February.  During this event 26 organisations within Catford South pledged to become members of our the Lewisham Dementia Action Alliance and two organisations, The Diamond Club and Deptford Mission have joined us since  and have started becoming more dementia friendly and hopefully more will follow.

The aim behind this is not only to raise awareness for dementia, changing the environment or offering a slow lane in your local supermarket but to make Catford South an even greater place to live for people with dementia but also for everyone else.

If you or your organisation/business would like to get involved in this initiative, please get in touch. You will find any updates on Dementia Friendly Catford South on the Love Catford website, or give your details with Barbara or Lucy before you leave

If you want to learn more about dementia, please see my colleague from Lewisham MindCare who is able to let you know more about dementia but also signpost you to some of our free workshops on a variety of dementia related topics.

I am looking forward to working with you all and make Catford Lewisham’s first formally accredited dementia friendly community.

Lesley Allen from the Diamond Club spoke up about signing up the Diamond Club to the Lewisham Dementia Action Alliance. She stated that it was very easy to do and she is excited about carrying out her 3 actions to make the Diamond Club more Dementia Friendly

Arts space, gallery, cinema, restaurant or even – a theatre…What is happening to the Broadway Theatre?
The Development Manager for Cultural Services is coming along to talk about the future of the theatre and hear ways the local community want it to be used. We all have a stake in this fantastic part of our local heritage – so take your chance to influence its future from the start

Evette McDonald development officer for Lewisham Council

This is about gathering your thoughts. It is a grade 2 listed building built in 1932. Art Deco Design, originally built as a multi purpose civic hall. At that time the borough had a number of theatres and cinemas. All of which has now been demolished or closed. Broadway is the only one left and is important cultural building. There were works done in the 1990 but this was predominantly about bringing it up to code and rewiring etc. there is still lots of work that needs to be done to the theatre as there is been no significant investment in the theatre since 1999. There is some capital funding identified to fix the major problems like the roof, but there is no money identified to fix the seating etc.

We are putting a bid in to the Heritage Lottery fund. Before we do that we want to know what kind of building you want it to be. It doesn’t have to remain the traditional building for theatre productions such as pantomime or comedy etc. there is a lot of potential to change the use, to use it as a place to hire for weddings, or for community organisations, dance and arts companies, cinema and so on.

We want to know have you used it before, what you think about it and what type of venue would you like to see in Catford. There is an online consultation, this is open until the 15^th of March, we have some hard copies here if you can’t get online. We have an open day on Tuesday the 8^th of March, an opportunity to give your views and have a tour of the Theatre between 10am – 2pm.The Theatre is open all day that day to drop in. What do you hope to see in the future.

Q. Why is the open day always when people are working? Why can’t it be in the evening or the weekend?

A. It is purely due to the staff in the Broadway theatre. Only 2 staff and only a few events taking place they are trying to put on events for the evening, so they don’t have capacity in the evenings. We can look at doing something on the weekend

Q. Other boroughs have faced issues and have managed to regenerate by turning them into cinemas, sometimes I don’t think we are ambitious enough as a local authority. The people in the borough are really interested. Is there any chance of it becoming a cinema? Are we looking at other boroughs who have been in the same situation and seeing how they did it?

A. This is exactly the kind of feedback we want and we are genuinely open to exploring anything. There is nothing set, we don’t have a plan in place, we really want to know what you want to see out of that building. If you have not put it in to the consultation,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4.

·  Giving your time for free? Let us know how you would like to celebrate volunteering week this June

·  www.lovecatford.co.uk is now live – check it out now and find out ways you can help us develop the site

·  Upcoming assembly fund – shall we do things differently this year?

·  Much more besides

Website update and call for volunteers - Website group

Cllr  Amrani introduced the Catford South Assembly website and stated he would like to commend the web team and volunteers all on the excellent work they have done

Gareth Newton Williams presented the following

These Assembly meetings happen irregularly, they are complicated and expensive to put on, you have to sit through agenda items that you don’t necessarily care about to get to the thing that matter to you. Although these meetings are an important forum and we don’t want to lose them, we wanted to try and modernise the experience of people in Catford South where they can find out about important things happening in their area, find out more about issues that matter to them and for it to be more responsive to the changing needs of the community. So we created www.lovecatford.co.uk

There is now a twitter account @Love_Catford to engage with people about the things they want to see

This is what the website looks like – Gareth showed people a number of pages

The website went live in January. It is still very new. It is starting to pick up steam. It has ‘pages’ which are fixed pieces of info, such as the local amenities local groups, history and so on. Part of the idea is that people who are new to the area can find out about things happening in their community right away, rather than hearing about things over a number of years through word of mouth. This is where the static pages are used and give information about permanent things such as schools, library community groups and so on.

There are then ‘posts’ about things going on things that are happening or have recently happened. If you are involved in something - you have a reading club for example - you can post things about what you are doing, there is an events calendar so people can post their own events. You can all help organise yourself in one hub place so you are reaching the whole community not just people specifically searching for a reading club

People are reaching out, we are averaging about 100 visits per day but that is unique visitors, a month ago it was 50 people a day now it’s a 100. For every 2 people that come to the website one of those is finding something of interest and clicking on it – this will only increase over time as the content develops and more people become involved in adding items of interest

We get information about what people are interested in. the most viewed page was of course the home page but the Catford tower article was the second most popular piece of content, next was this assembly meeting. The news page is a feed of all that is posing and this is also viewed a lot.

We have made it very straightforward, it is free technology so it is a very cheap implementation and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.

If you would like to update the assembly on anything, please let us know and we will try and give you a forum to promote your news – either at the assembly meeting, on www.lovecatford.co.uk or on twitter @love_Catford

Q. Any suggestions how we make people enforce the speed limits in the area, the speedbumps are not efficient in Sandhurst Road, speeding is a real problem, does anyone else see this as a problem?

A. Cllr Alan Smith responds. On Sandhurst Toad the av speed is 24 miles per hour, we are introducing the borough wide 20mph zone, apart from the TFL red routes, It is enforceable at the moment but once the borough wide 20mph restrictions come in it will become significantly easier. Speed humps don’t work, put in after a public consultation, and almost immediately people wanted them removed. We have to look at different ways of doing it. we are looking at different ways other than speed humps such as the way pavements are planted and so on.

Q. People seem to like to accelerate quickly then slow quickly leading up to humps. There are lots of people with very loud cars, they make a lot of noise in the early hours. Is there a law about how noisy cars can be and can it be enforces.

A. Cllr Alan Smith responds. There is a law about noise but the level is very, very loud, much louder than most cars. The equipment is very expensive, a lot of noise you hear may be quad bikes, this is something that needs to be looked at. You can drive quad on the road if they are registered.

Statement: Peter Ranken from  Abbotshall Road Healthy Lifestyle Centre

Thank you so much for all the community support since the HLC opened in June. Thank you everyone for the support you have given us. Would like to draw your attention to the Urban Wildlife Retreat we are working to develop and get funding through Tesco bags for help.

We have been successful to receive £8000 -  but we need your help to raise that up to £12000!

What you have to do is go to your local Tesco and the voting closes tomorrow, please go down go to the till ask them for a token and then put it in the box for the Urban Wildlife Retreat at Abbotshall Road.

Statement from local resident I would like to make sure that everyone knows and has the opportunity to make a comment by the 16th of March on he planning application that is in at the moment to demolish Phoebes Garden Centre and build 20 flats on the site. I live right opposite so if anyone wants to help out with that it will be brilliant.

Chair of Culverley Green RA corrected that the last day of comments is the 23^rd of March.

A. Cllr Alan Smith responds. You can put comments in right up until the day of the planning meeting up to that point. I have called for a public meeting on this [LF Checked this after this meeting and a decision to go ahead with a public meeting dose depend on how many objections planning receive]  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6.