This Week 10, 20, 30 years ago
10 Years Ago
People living on a dozen estates are to become the first in the country to be given responsibility for financing their own development and repairs.
Southwark council’s cabinet voted on Tuesday to enable the estates, managed by the Leathermarket Joint Management Board (JMB), to run their own affairs entirely independently of the council.
This will mean residents’ representatives setting their own rents and service charges, as well as determining plans for repairs and redevelopment themselves – independently of fluctuating Government funding.
How many millions does it take to change a light bulb – and thousands of others?
Southwark council is to spend £2.5million on its lighting during the the next three years.
It has decided to tender all of its communal lighting work to one contractor at an expected cost of £847,431 a year.
The contract will be for the maintenance of essential lighting in all communal lighting on estates, including lamp posts, emergency and security lighting, electrical power systems and wiring.
The previous annual figure was £731,540, although the new contract will include a brief for lightning protection for high-rise buildings. LED lighting, which is more energy-efficient, brighter, and cheaper because bulbs need changing less frequently, is also being mooted.
The contract, to run from October 2013, will now go out to a Europe-wide tender, with at least five companies to be shortlisted.
20 Years Ago
Traders in Streatham launched a scheme to combat credit card fraudsters in their high street.
The Thumbprint Signature was set to see shoppers using thumbprints instead of a signature to pay for goods.
In the event of a fraud, police would then check the print against their database. Twenty-three traders in Streatham were among the first in the country to pilot the scheme.
Police announced plans to pose as hookers in a borough’s clamp down on kerb-crawlers.
Arrests for vice had rocketed in Lambeth according to senior police officers with 105 prostitutes arrested and 32 drivers arrested for vice crimes in just one month.
Police set themselves a target of making 50 arrests every month for a year to send a lasting message to people who paid women for sex in the borough.
Police top brass also said they wanted to bring all of the cases to court on the same day so that they could tip off the media who could then name and shame the men.
Green-fingered South Londoners hit out at plans to build more homes on an allotment site.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone supported many high-rise schemes to meet the capital’s homes shortage.
But gardeners said allotment popularity was on the rise and councils should not allow “over-development”.
For the first time, waiting times in some parts of South London had risen to more than 10 years, prompting calls for more sites to be opened up.
30 Years Ago
A long battle to save a hospital ended in failure after its last four wards were closed for good.
Junior health minister Tom Sackville rejected an appeal by the Camberwell Community Health Council (CCHC) to save North Dulwich Hospital in Dog Kennel Hill.
One hundred and twenty beds were cut at the hospital in 1990 with Dulwich South Hospital in East Dulwich Grove expected to take on extra patients.
The CCHC planned to sell North Dulwich Hospital to raise more than £4million.
A school announced plans to become the first in a borough to break free from council control.
Governors at the 450-pupil St Francesca Cabrini Primary School in Forest Hill Road, Honor Oak announced that they would ballot parents over plans to cut ties with Southwark council.
The move sparked a host of other Catholic primary schools to think about opting out of council control. Bishop Thomas Grant School in Belltrees Grove, Streatham and St Thomas the Apostle School, Hollydale Road, Nunhead also mooted plans to become independent.
The future of the long-awaited extension of the Jubilee line through South London was thrown into jeopardy when a company went into receivership.
Troubled property developer Olympia and York gave up control of the Canary Wharf development on which the extension plans depended.
Receivers, Lambeth-based Ernst and Young were given just 90 days to make Canary Wharf financially viable, and critics said it would not work without proper transport connections.
