Mary Reid

I've been getting to grips with my new rôle as joint Chair of the South of the Borough Neighbourhood. I share this with Cllr Rob Lee, and Cllr Kevin O'Connor is in support as Vice Chair.

In Kingston, Neighbourhoods were always seen as a way of increasing citizen participation, so I have been wholeheartedly behind them from the beginning. In fact, Kingston led the way on this 13 years ago, and we have been intrigued to see the idea copied elsewhere, although in some places they are called Area or Community Committees.

Most of our meetings are well attended by 50 to 100 local people. This was a recent Neighbourhood meeting in the Hook Centre...

Another feature of Neighbourhoods is that they enable decisions about local matters to be taken by the relevant councillors in discussion with local residents.  Our four Neighbourhoods have committees, not forums; in other words they have executive powers and substantial budgets. All the local planning applications (apart from the very large ones) are dealt with here, as are traffic schemes. Neighbourhoods also have some responsibility for housing, parks, libraries and youth services. Anyone can speak at any meeting, on any item (with just some constraints on planning applications). And we consult widely on local schemes as well as strategic issues.

Finally, we invented the concept of local community leadership by expecting Neighbourhoods to act as the hub for discussion and initiatives about all local public services, whether provided by the Council or not. So over the years we have brought agencies together to provide adult education at Chessington Community College, to create a new health centre at Winey Park, to set up a joint youth centre and activity centre for older people at Devon Way, to improve Tolworth Broadway, amongst others. Perhaps our proudest achievement has been the development of the Hook Centre which includes a library, community hall, Council information desk, adult learning, voluntary sector advice sessions, a crèche, a café, and a thriving music and recording studio facility managed by Kingston Music and Arts Service.

Over the years Neighbourhood meetings have got rather bogged down with traffic schemes and sometimes we've missed opportunities to exploit our in-depth knowledge of the community and the potential for solving problems through intelligent networking - in other words, in spite of our achievements,  we could exercise our community leadership better.

Rob and I have outlined to officers the way in which we want to take things forward. There will be more topic based meetings which bring together all the professionals and voluntary organisations, as well as interested citizens, around themes such as health provision. We will also hold more problem focussed workshops, like the one last week about Hook Parade. We will try to spread items more evenly across agendas, so that meetings don't drag on until past my bedtime. We will also be looking carefully at the management of small local projects, especially at their processes for consultation and data gathering, so that the Neighbourhood councillors can make decisions confident that they meet with the approval of local people.