Richard Wilson

Lynne Featherstone has joined the Stroud Green Lib Dem team in launching a campaign to make the pedestrian crossing on Upper Tollington Park (by the junction with Florence Road) safer.  The campaign was launched after local residents raised concerns about the speed of traffic on the road and a recent accident near the zebra crossing.

This is a key route for children going to Stroud Green Primary School and many years ago the Council employed a ‘lollipop lady’ to patrol the crossing. However, I’m told that when she retired she was never replaced. So as a first step to make the crossing safer, we are calling for the Council to employ a new crossing patrol person.

Thanks to pressure from Lynne, Ed Butcher and myself, the Council have now agreed to put up more warning signs on the road, and the local police are doing extra speed patrols on the road.  However, the real long-term answer is to get the crossing upgraded with traffic lights and measures to slow down the traffic.

To get the Council to take action, we have launched an online petition to demonstrate how strongly local people feel about this issue. Please sign up here.

Everyone I’ve spoken to so far has been extremely supportive of the campaign. In fact, when we took this photo of us launching the campaign, several residents came out of their houses to offer us their backing and tell us their concerns about the traffic.  I hope with such strong support we are able to make a difference.

I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who voted for the Stroud Green Lib Dem team of Lynne, Ed, Katherine and me.  We’ve had a brilliant result both in Hornsey & Wood Green constituency and in Stroud Green ward.  Lynne Featherstone has been re-elected as our MP with a much bigger majority, and a 4% swing from Labour to Lib Dems.

I’m also delighted that Ed, Katherine and I were also elected in Stroud Green ward with increased majorities over Labour (the Greens remain in third place and the Tories in fourth).  Full details of the parliamentary and council election results are on Haringey’s website here.

Ed, Katherine and I would also like to thank our large network of volunteer leaflet deliverers, envelope stuffers and other activists in Stroud Green – as we couldn’t have inspired so many people to vote Lib Dem without their help.

Sadly, we failed to end Labour’s 40 years of control of Haringey Council.  This is hugely disappointing as we had so many fantastic plans to improve the Borough.  But obviously we’ll continue to use ours seats and influence on Haringey Council to fight for local residents.  We remain the only opposition to Labour on the Council, with yet again no Greens or Tories elected, so we are very aware of our responsibility to challenge and scrutinise the Council’s leadership.

I’m absolutely shattered after the hard work of election (and the epic 11 hour count which took from 10pm on Thursday till 9am on Friday) – but really excited about being able to serve the residents of Stroud Green for another 4 years.

It is now over four years since the Council last tried to condemn the play fort in Stationers Park as unsafe. During the election of 2006 the Labour Council promised to replace it – but instead once the election was over the money was diverted elsewhere and the fort was just patched up.  But, as I mentioned in a post back in January, thanks to the work of the local residents on the Friends of Stationers Park, most of the funding to replace the fort has now been granted from various sources (though more fundraising is still ongoing).

The fort has been treasured by local families for years – and we need to make sure it is replaced with something even better.  The design of the new play area should be down to local residents – especially the children who will use it.  To achieve this, Groundwork (the environmental charity managing the new design) wants to engage with the community through Friends of Stationers Park – and has planned a public consultation to present design options to park users.

This consultation event will be held in the park from 11am to 3pm on Saturday 15th May.  Please bring your family along and have your say!

It is brilliant to see progress being made at last.  However, there have been too many years of broken promises on replacing this fort from our Labour Council.  The Lib Dem team of Lynne Featherstone, Ed Butcher, Katherine Reece and I have made it a key election pledge to make sure that this time the promise is not broken – and that the Stationers Park fort is replaced with an even better play area.

I attended a first brainstorming session a few months ago which the Friends group ran with the play area designer from Groundworks. People came up with some really imaginative ideas,  so I think this event in the park could be a really exciting opportunity to get local families’ reactions to these, and to add even more ideas into the mix.

The Lib Dem team for Stroud Green have launched our election pledges for the neighbourhood.  I joined Lynne Featherstone, Katherine Reece and Ed Butcher at the Stationers Park play fort (see picture) – to highlight our top three priorities for the ward.  Our top three pledges are:

• We will make sure the Finsbury Park Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) is reviewed, and that streets outside the CPZ can join if there is residents support.
• We will fight for measures to slow down traffic on Upper Tollington Park and to make the pedestrian crossing safer.
• We will make sure the Stationers Park Play Fort is replaced with an even better play area – ending years of broken promises from Labour.

Of course, there are a million other things we want to do, from improving our children’s centre to fixing our pothole problem, but speaking to residents – its the council’s failure to sort out these three problems that is causing the most frustration.  Residents are angry about the parking situation, want action on speeding traffic on Upper Tollington Park, and want an end to the years of broken promises on Stationers Park play fort.

I hope local residents will back these positive pledges to improve Stroud Green.

Stroud Green campaigner Katherine Reece joined our local MP and hundreds of local residents to march against the closure of the Whittington A&E last weekend.  The march gained lots of media attention, which has hopefully sent a clear message to the Government about how unpopular these health cuts are.  Sadly, I couldn’t make the march as I was at a school governors away day, but I’ve just been sent some great pictures (such as this one of Lynne) which show how the strength of feeling at the event.

Lynne also organised a public meeting which took place last night to give residents the chance to put questions directly to the health bosses responsible.  This is a great move by our MP to try to make these people accountable, but it is outragous that unelected quango appointees are having to answer these questions rather than their political masters in the Department of Health.  Given that Labour Health Ministers have refused to lift a finger to save the A&E (and it is Labour’s policy to cut A&Es by reducing the number of ‘general’ hospitals), I think the hypocrisy of senior Labour politicians going on the march is astounding.

Yesterday I had to take a late night trip Hornsey Police Station after narrowly avoiding my bank account being emptied by cashpoint criminals.  On the way home from a night out at the theatre, I decided to get some money out from the cashpoint at the Post Office in Crouch End (on Topsfield Parade), at about 11pm.  The cashpoint made lots of whirring sounds but didn’t give me my card back.

This made me suspicious and I suddenly realised there was a device attached to the card slot.  A little look around and I also spotted a concealed camera positioned to video the key pad.  With my card and a recording of me typing in my PIN, they would have had everything they needed to empty my bank account.

The hidden camera was only attached to the cashpoint with a magnet so I took it off and stuck it in my pocket and scarpered – slightly worried whether the people who were trying to steal my money were nearby watching me.  Fortunately, I knew Hornsey Police Station was up the road and has a 24 hour front counter so I went in and gave the criminals’ camera to the police.

The officers at Hornsey Station who helped me were great, and it was very reassuring to speak to the police face to face.   Sadly though, I’ve just had a call from CID to say they think its unlikely they will be able to identify the culprits – as there is no CCTV camera facing the cashpoint.

So I’m posting this story to remind people of the need to be vigilant when using cash machines in the area and to look out for devices attached to the card slot.  They are very cleverly concealed and I only noticed at the very last minute just as I was about to walk off thinking it was just a faulty machine.

And I’m also posting this to highlight the importance of police stations remaining open 24 hours.  This has been a big issue in Haringey recently with Lynne Featherstone battling to keep the front counter at Wood Green Police Station open 24 hours (story here).  I think I slept sounder last night because I’d been able to speak to the police and hand over the criminals’ hidden camera.  I’m not sure what I would have done if the police station had been closed.

For many Stroud Greeners today will be the first back at work after the Christmas break, and time to dust off the oster card and get commuting.  The good news is that the oyster machines at Harringay have been switched on at last and oyster pre-pay can now be used.  This is long overdue -Transport for London (TfL) and First Capital Connect (FCC) have been wrangling over its implementation for years.  Lynne Featherstone helped push things along with a campaign launched in 2008 to get them to commit to a date (see picture and Lynne’s website posts).

However, the bad news is that if like me you have a travelcard on your oyster and want to use pre-pay to go beyond your travelcard zones, then TfL and FCC have designed a fiendishly complicated system to make it almost impossible.  Apparently you’ll have to load something called an ‘oyster extension permit’ on to your card just before you travel (details of TfL website here).   So, if you have a zone 1-3 travelcard and want to travel from Harringay Station out to say New Southgate in zone 4 you’d need to get a permit.  However, it doesn’t look like you can actually get the permit at Harringay  Station.  Instead you would have to go to a shop with Oyster facilities, which defeats the object of oyster by making it less convenient than buying a paper ticket!

To me it looks like oyster fares are still being designed around the needs of the train companies and TfL rather than the needs passengers.