An eagle eyed resident was kind enough to point out that the Council's consultation on opening up our gardens is both very short and taking place entirely during the month of August when many residents are likely to be away.
The letter from Patrick Sean Sullivan is dated the 6th of August. The deadline given is the 28th of August. That is, at best, 22 calendar days. And all within the month of August.
The consultation period is also unusually short. The equivalent letter for a proposal to paint some shed and garage doors was dated the 16th of July and set a deadline of the 14th of August. That's 29 calendar days.
The proposal to paint shed and garage doors will not have a negative impact on anyone. Not all residents have a shed or a garage and many simply won't care whether the Council paints them or not.
The proposal to open up our gardens to the general public (for that is what it is) will have a detrimental impact on all residents, and particularly those living next to the gardens, for the many, many reasons we have cited previously (see our previous post for the gory details).
Would any sane person believe that a proposal to paint some shed and garage doors is worthy of a longer consultation period than a proposal to open up our gardens to all and sundry? We suspect not.
But the Council's Housing Management Department clearly do.
Why? Because they are perfectly aware of the fact that a significant number of the estate's residents are likely to be away for some or all of the month of August. And they are quite cynically taking advantage of the situation.
They are hoping that those likely to object will be away and will miss the consultation altogether.
Dissenting voices are very clearly not welcome. And if those likely to dissent are intentionally (ahem, accidentally) excluded by rigging (ahem, setting) the dates of the consultation in this way so much the better.
They are quite simply trying to engineer the end result they want.
The consultation is really a non-consultation. It is designed to tick a box not find out what most residents actually think. Because it's quite clear that Housing Management don't really care what anyone thinks. They simply want to have their way.
This is the kind of behaviour that you might expect of dodgy property developers with questionable planning applications who submit their planning applications at the height of Summer in a cynical attempt to try and avoid any opposition from those affected (and we've had plenty of those before), not the Council.
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