• CAMDEN Council’s concern to protect itself from being sued for lack of fire safety has reached manic proportions. Women’s rights and the rights of the disabled will be hugely restricted. Can this be lawful?

In May a pregnant woman feeling tired left her three-year-old child’s scooter and helmet in their communal hallway. Camden’s residential safety team, with its now renowned harsh tactics, removed the child’s scooter and helmet.

They cannot be returned, it is claimed, as the items have been “disposed of”. The parents are challenging this case, now in the hands of our Primrose Hill councillors, with little progress and no communication to date, July, other than an acknowledgment of receipt of the complaint.

On Tuesday July 4 more purges were carried out. The occupants of the Victorian terrace in Winchester Road, a crumbling row of flats converted in the architectural style known as Heath Robinson from Victorian properties, had letters delivered.

A few hours later an official came to inspect the communal hallways, all of which were kept by respectful tenants safe from clutter. Ten-day removal warning labels were plastered everywhere, even on the most unlikely objects.

The official then littered the hallway with removal labels stuck to wall pictures, mirrors, and even the shelf that our post sits upon, a shelf fully approved previously by Camden, and well out of the way of our instructed route out should a fire occur. Post will have to lie on the floor, so that a disabled resident will be unable to pick it up!

A metal ladder, Camden’s own, kept on the top landing for workers’ access through the skylight to the roof, also received a removal label.

Does Camden realise that our post is made of paper which can burn? I wonder if it has plans to stop the Royal Mail from delivering to these flats?

Camden, while ostensibly encouraging cycling in general, offers residents of this terrace row nowhere secure for bicycles. Prams and pushchairs must be kept inside flats. A previous top-floor tenant with a baby and toddler was ordered to lift her pram up the stairs along with her baby and toddler.

No discussions, no plan to accommodate bikes, and no idea of where prams can be stored has been thought through. Has anyone working for Camden got the capacity to imagine?

To set in place rules that are hard to comply with, for example, where to put your bike if you live in a flat with no lift; to set in place rules that cannot be complied with, for example, about your baby’s pram which is too heavy to take up stairs to your flat, is unintelligent and lacking in common sense. It may well be legally unviable because it’s near impossible to comply with such rules.

By taking this approach to cover their backs, Camden is penalising women and breaking equality law. Mothers with prams and pushchairs will not be able to live in anything other than ground-floor flats. Again Camden excels at blind stupidity, the lack of ability to think, let alone plan.

ELAINE CHAMBERS
Chair, Winchester Road Residents’ Association