Public meetings are being held over the next few weeks to discuss the 3 sets of options for closure of A&E units and reconfiguration of the hospitals in this area (see the earlier post below for more background).

RBKC has organised a meeting of its Health Scrutiny Committee on Tuesday 11th September at 6.30pm in the Small Hall, Kensington Town Hall, Hornton Street W8.  This will give people a chance to question the NHS team.

The NHS consultation leaflet for RBKC residents can be found here.  Under all three options, St Marys remains a ‘major’ hospital and Hammersmith a ‘specialist’ hospital.  Residents in Hammersmith have been mounting a major campaign to keep A&E at Charing Cross, as a ‘major’ hospital.  This risks of losing the existing A&E service at Hammersmith Hospital look high.

The six week consultation period on the application for designation of a new St Quintin and Woodlands Neighbourhood Forum ended on July 20th.

Both councils have now published the details of the responses that were sent in from local residents and businesses.  You can find these here for RBKC and here for LBHF.

Responses to RBKC were all positive, other than that from the Westway Development Trust.  The Trust supports the idea of a Forum and Neighbourhood Plan, but wants the proposed boundary changed to exclude the strip of land that the Trust manages, immediately behind the gardens of houses along the south side of Oxford Gardens.

We will continue to argue that this land should remain within the Forum area, so that local residents can have more say in the detailed planning for what is due to become a major east/west pedestrian and cycle link when the planned new subway from the Imperial West site to Latimer Road is built.

On the Hammersmith and Fulham side of the boundary, responses to the proposals for the Forum were much more mixed.  There are residents strongly in favour, and others who have signed up to a common response which opposes the Eynham triangle being included in the Forum area.

This joint response says that they ‘wish the St Quintins area well in their aim to create a neighbourhood forum’ but ‘we do not believe our interests are so tightly conjoined that we ought to form a common neighbourhood forum’.

SHRA management committee members met with this group in June, to explain our thinking on the proposed boundary for the Forum, but clearly we did not succeed in convincing everyone to support the idea.

Proposals for the cross borough forum including the Eynham area have been supported by the Hammersmith Society and by local MP Andy Slaughter.

Hammersmith & Fulham’s Planning Applications Committee at its meeting on July 25th approved the Imperial West application. Thank you to all those association members who came to the meeting and made our objections known through being an unruly and unhappy audience.  (The council is finally now considering allowing the public speaking rights at these meetings — too late for us).

For more information on what happens next, see our campaign website at www.imperialfolly.org.uk