Empowerment and respect: David Miliband on the lovelewisham experience: "Over the next decade, I believe there is a major opportunity to change the way citizens and government communicate and interact with each other. Lewisham Council already allows citizens to text or photo-message a complaint about graffiti, dog litter or abandoned cars and receive a text back confirming the problem has been removed in less than a day. Information about your neighbourhood is empowering." I'm not quite sure what "dog litter" is, but I'm sure you'll know it when you see it and will want to report it to the council!

14.3.06 08:17 Permalink

Chewing Gum You may have seen that Lewisham is to be one of fifteen authorities working with Defra about the problem of chewing gum that people don't dispose of properly. I'm told the campaign will be in August and will involve advertising, a control zone and some street theatre.

9.3.06 08:20 Permalink

Food on the Go One of the (few) irritations I have walking around Lewisham is the debris from fast food meals that don't make it into our many street bins.   Today I had a meeting with two (of the five) town centre managers, a couple of managers from the environment division and another manager from the food safety service to look at putting the Food on the Go scheme into practice.   The scheme is a voluntary agreement between the council and businesses about what each will do to improve litter coming from customers of the business.  So the Council might change the time the road is swept (after schools start, for example) or the business might reduce the level of packaging/bags they give away, or remind customers of the need to dispose of waste in a hygienic manner.   I'm pleased to be able to say the officers are keen to make progress and we'll try and launch the scheme in the summer.

8.3.06 18:26 Permalink

Local Regulation I've spent a bit of today catching up with officers who undertake some of the regulatory functions for the council, these are things like food safety, pollution control and health and safety regulations.  It's one of those areas in the council that has more than one cabinet member who takes an interest - my fellow ward councillor Gavin Moore leads on trading standards, planning, building control and licensing issues and I'm responsible for the others. One of the things I've agreed to do is to present an award a the Lewisham Business Awards for health and safety.  I've also been involved in choosing the businesses involved in the environmental sustainability award which will be announced on the same evening.

20.2.06 19:53 Permalink

Ladywell Fields - skate park I think the skate park at Ladywell Fields should open officially in a couple of weeks but going past today it looked like there was at least one user already. My congratulations to all those - including my Ladywell colleagues - who've worked so hard to get it.

20.2.06 19:24 Permalink

Green Flag Parks This is something that has recently been published in New Start Magazine.

18.2.06 10:20 Permalink

NGDP The reason I couldn't get to the launch of the NLGN publication yesterday evening was because I travelling back from Gloucester after talking the trainees on the New Graduate Development Programme* about how to work with councillors. This is something I did last year and enjoyed so much that I thought I'd try it again. This year rather than question and answer sessions we got a bit longer with a single group and worked through a senario that a few of the trainees had developed. Most of the group I worked with hadn't had much (if anything) to do with councillors in their year on the programme and I hope they got a sense of how it might be to work with us.  As always I was impressed at how bright they are and how quickly they adapted to the task in hand. My thanks go to my fellow councillor, Paul, who drove me to Oxford thereby knocking an hour off my journey.   * If you want to get a sense of what the programme does then why not read what Andy has been doing here in Lewisham.

9.2.06 16:38 Permalink

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