‘Funding to improve the area is squandered…’

• YOUR front page report (Lying dead, alone on the street, January 5) is perhaps the stark reality of the vulnerable in our borough.

Helping the homeless is a very difficult problem as many have a wide variety of complex problems, including mental health issues.

Some do not respond to offers of help. To blame the Tory government is a cop-out when the problems are on our doorstep. The need is to approach the issues and their causes facing our most vulnerable.

This can only be done locally by the council, voluntary agencies and pressure from residents. As a prerequisite there is a need for an awareness of what the issues are, for example eviction by landlords, debt, and employment.

Unfortunately there is, seemingly, an unwillingness by Camden Council to acknowledge these issues and, moreover, to remain silent about the failures to address them.

Take council housing. There are, I understand, more than 120 empty council properties in Gospel Oak and Haverstock wards.

Funding to improve the area is squandered on highly-paid consultants and useless projects such as painting the crescent then ruining it, never mind planning to spend some £50,000 on tree pits.

My letters identifying such “maladministration” are never responded to, except of course, by your January 5 respondent, John Stratton, who finds it “tiresome” that such information is published.

Presumably the logic is if we pretend the issues do not exist we do not have to do anything about them. As to his advice that I should become a councillor, at the next election I shall be 85 years old.

If he would like to come and see the evidence of the “tiresome” situations and “maladministration” in Gospel Oak let him contact me for the grand tour.

All it requires for maladministration to triumph is letter writers sneering at those who try to prevent people dying alone. Hopefully publicity will put pressure on the council.

MICK FARRANT,
NW5