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| NEWS | By KIM JANSSEN |
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Former chief engineer says work is being left deliberately undone THE shocking state of Camden’s roads and pavements has been laid bare in a website designed by the Town Hall’s former top engineer. Dugald Gonsal, who was Camden’s chief engineer until he retired in 2000 with more than 35 years experience, shows how the borough’s roads are frequently left for months in a dangerous state of disrepair, with pot-holes, broken safety barriers and fences and cracked pavements and kerbs all left untended. His website – www.mylocalcouncil.org – also shows how Town Hall contractors are able to collect monthly £25,000 payments without hitting targets. In painstaking detail Mr Gonsal reveals how J M Crowley, responsible for repairing a quarter of the borough’s streets, are failing to both check streets and act on reports of damage. Altogether, he estimates, J M Crowley has avoided doing more than £800,000 of repairs in the last two years. Pounding the streets around his Park Hill Road, Belsize Park home, he has snapped pictures of troublespots, then put them on his website to document contractor inaction. Even though the site has only been up and running for a fortnight, his gallery of shame already includes 10 sites. They include a smashed railing in South End Road, South End Green, which has stood unfixed since October last year – even though it should have been checked four times during that period and repaired within five days. Also included are botched repairs to pavements in Tanza Road, Hampstead, and Constantine Road, South End Green and a spot where trees obscure parking regulation signs in West Heath Road, Hampstead. Mr Gonsal, who used powers under the 1998 Audit Commission Act to force the Town Hall to hand over details of its secret deals with contractors this summer, said: “There is a lot of money involved and the contractors aren’t doing the job they’re supposed to according to their contracts. “I hope the website will get the public involved, so that they will know what standards they can expect and then report problems to the council. “But after all, one does not need a degree in engineering to recognise a pothole, a ‘trip’ or a rocking paving slab or to understand how such defects are rectified.” His website points out that contractors avoid doing expensive work in a number of ways; firstly by not doing it in the first place, secondly, because once unsolved problems degenerate and spread to an area greater than five square metres, the council must pay extra, and, thirdly, because only a sample of streets are checked by council managers, who have neither the time nor the resources to keep proper tabs on workmen. A Town Hall press official said: “We have been talking with Mr Gonsal for a few years now and making repairs at sites he draws our attention to.” JM Crowley were unable to provide someone to respond over the Christmas period. |
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