Finsbury Health Centre update

There will be information about the Finsbury Health Centre Preservation Trust (which has recently received charitable status) and postcards of Abram Games beautiful 1942 poster ‘Your Britain – fight for it Now” available at the Amwell Street Fete this Sunday, 30 June, 12-5pm at the stall in front of Amwell Books, 53 Amwell St. Do come along to support your community and our work to get FHC finally refurbished.

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Finsbury Health Centre will be part of the Open House Weekend for the first time in about 8 years 21 & 22 September. If you would like to be involved in helping that weekend, get in touch via savefhc(at)yahoo.co.uk.

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Although FHC is now owned by NHS Property Services Ltd. (NHS PropCo – sole shareholder, Jeremy Hunt) so far the estates team set up by the old PCT cluster has simply been transferred over, and they have been a vast improvement on previous officers. FHC Preservation Trust is currently negotiating to set up some kind of formal relationship so that we can get on with raising the money needed to refurbish and modernise the building, and to develop relationships with both the Islington CCG and Whittington Health who run services from FHC, so that the refurb meets the needs of both staff and patients. To say that decision-making about NHS services has become a complete muddle is to put it (very) mildly. The diagram below from the King’s Fund’s report ‘Leading health care in London‘ gives a good idea of the mess, click to enlarge:

Other local issues:

There is a consultation open about a planning brief for the whole of the New River Head site, in the wake of the recent attempt to turn the Pump House into flats. This contraveined an earlier agreement to turn the building into a heritage centre. There is an exhibition about the brief on Thursday June 27 6-9pm & Saturday June 29 11am-2pm at Finsbury Town Hall, and the consultation http://www.islington.gov.uk/services/planning/plan_brief_major/pol_planbrief/Pages/New-River-Head.aspx closes on 8 July.

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The Mount Pleasant site plans are still not out yet, but a very large development of over 400 flats seems to be on the cards. If you would like to keep abreast of what’s going on, send your name/email to Edward Denison edenison13(at)gmail.com

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There was the march, and another consultation, now the wait – Clerkenwell Fire Station, the oldest in Europe, and third busiest in London is threatened with closure along with 11 other mainly central London stations under the cuts plans supported by the Mayor a few months ago. It seems obvious from the map of the planned closures that the main metric used was not call-out times but property prices. One important thing all but left out of the discussion of the fire cuts is the fact that a large proportion of call-outs now deal with traffic accidents (also time-critical). You can still write to Boris Johnson to express your disapproval at mayor@london.gov.uk. After having counter-manded two Fire Authority decisions against the cuts he is due to make a final decision sometime in July.