In our latest councillor’s column, Oakwood’s Conservative representative Julian Sampson laments the council’s slow response to local complaints

Oakwood councillor Julian Sampson was first elected in 2022

All politics is local; so says a well-worn phrase, telling us that no matter how high-minded our political views, what really matters to people is what happens at street level.

Since I was elected in May last year, I’ve received more than 300 emails from Oakwood residents. Of those, approximately 20% were about bin collections, another 20% about trees and verges and 12% about local planning issues. These are the local issues which are on residents’ minds every day and these are the local issues that politics is about. But that doesn’t make them easy to resolve.

Another 20% of the emails I have received were about an outbreak of Japanese knotweed in an area maintained by Enfield Council. This invasive plant species can cause significant damage to property and people were understandably concerned. Residents first brought this to my attention in July, when I raised it as a formal enquiry with the council. But we didn’t get a substantive response from the council until late September, and that was only after we’d highlighted the issue in a story published by the Dispatch.

Sadly this isn’t the only issue on which the council has been slow to act. A resident also contacted me in July to say the grass verges opposite his house had not been cut. No big deal, you might think, and a typical western Enfield issue. But these verges had grown so much that they were trapping litter, obstructing sight lines and causing a hazard to traffic and pedestrians. After we got involved, it took a further six months for the council to carry out this relatively straightforward task, and this only took place after an exhaustive chain of formal enquiries, correspondence with relevant officers and finally an email to the very top of the council.

In both of these cases, residents told us that they’d been trying to get the council to take action for ages, to no avail. Why does it happen like this? Why do issues like these take so long to resolve? It’s as if local residents’ concerns don’t matter to the council. You can also see this in the Labour administration’s persistence with plans for tower blocks at tube station car parks, to lease Whitewebbs Park to Tottenham Hotspur for a pittance, and to continue with its low-traffic neighbourhoods, all in the face of clear local opposition.

To try to avoid debating these local issues, Labour councillors often submit emergency motions on national issues, be it Boris Johnson (full council on 13th July) or Liz Truss (full council on 12th October). While they are subjects on which Enfield residents may have an opinion, they are not issues on which the council can do anything other than virtue signal.

Going back to those 300 emails, can you guess how many mentioned Boris Johnson or Liz Truss? That’s right, none of them.

Julian Sampson is a Conservative councillor for Oakwood, alongside Tom O’Halloran. If you live in the ward you are welcome to get in touch:
Call 020 8132 1081
Email [email protected]

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