Gating the Avenues alleyways

Over the last few of years, we as local Councillors have been working with a group of enthusiastic residents and Council officers on improving community safety in ‘The Avenues – First, Second and Third Avenues and associated roads off Acton Vale.

The key concern for residents was the use for anti-social behaviour of alleyways that run between The Avenues. The obvious solution was to introduce a ‘gating scheme’ to control access to the alleyways – which has had a major impact when used elsewhere. We’ve got together the funding for a comprehensive gating scheme. However, for reasons that aren’t clearly understood, these alleyways had been adopted as “public highways” by the former Acton Borough Council before 1965, and had to have this status removed before the gates could be installed.

Today was a formal hearing at the Acton Magistrates Court of the Council’s application to “unadopt” the alleyways and enable their gating. This should have been in December, but a cock-up at the Council meant that it was deferred to today. There was surprisingly one objector to the proposal, but having heard both him and the Council evidence, the Magistrates ruled in favour of the application “to extinguish the right of way”. There’s now a formal period that has to be left for a potential appeal, and we can then finally get the gates installed.

I couldn’t attend the proceedings in Court because I had to attend a PCT meeting with our Professional Executive Committee and leading PCT staff. We were discussing the local implications and implementation of one of the keystones of the Government new health reforms “Practice-based Commissioning” (PbC). This is designed to put the commissioning of hospital and other health services in the hands of either individual GP practices or groups of them, rather than the current “service level agreements” negotiated direct by PCTs. In LB Ealing, the emerging position is that GPs appear to be getting together into three local commissioning groups – one based on Acton and central Ealing, one based on Southall, and one for the rest of the Borough.

We’re still working in a bit of a vacumn because key government guidance is still awaited, but agreed some early action to try to allow flexibility for the new arrangements to reflect both local and Borough-wide issues and concerns. Like much of the new NHS changes, there’s much here to welcome in identifying problems, but more uncertainty about the solutions that they are prescribing.