Over the past 18 months it has become increasingly hard for the public to gain an understanding of the activities and aims of the OPDC.\u00a0 Meetings that are open to the public very rarely question or discuss the critical challenges facing the Corporation.\u00a0 Reports from officers include little detail on these matters.\u00a0 Much of the decision-making appears to take place in private and informal sessions, or via delegation to OPDC officers.<\/p>\n
Questions over the governance of the Corporation have been pursued in depth by the St Quintin and Woodlands Neighbourhood Forum.\u00a0 \u00a0More information on exchanges of correspondence with OPDC Chair Liz Peace CBE and Interim Chief Exective David Lunts can be found on the StQW Forum website at www.stqw.org\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Efforts by OONF to uncover the content of the OPDC\/GLA bid to Government for Housing Infrastructure Funding have so far proved unsuccessful.\u00a0 OPDC refuses to release a copy of their September 2018 ‘Expression of Interest’ for this funding, under the Freedom of Information Act.\u00a0 \u00a0Requests for sight of the conditions attached to this \u00a3250m of Government funding, awarded on a provisional basis in March 2019, have also been turned down.<\/p>\n The London Assembly’s Budget and Performance Committee\u00a0<\/a>has become so concerned about the risks that OPDC are incurring that the committee took the unusual step in September 2019 of issuing a legal summons\u00a0to Liz Peace and David Lunts Agenda item 8a<\/a>.\u00a0 This listed a series of documents relating to the HIF bid that London Assembly Members wish to see.<\/p>\n The Committee has been provided with these documents, but has not met since September.\u00a0 It remains unclear whether part or all of this material will finally be made public.<\/p>\n In the meantime OONF\u00a0 and the StQW Neighbourhood Forum have referred to the Information Commissioner our concerns over the refusals by the the OPDC to release the HIF Expression of Interest and the funding conditions set by Government.<\/p>\n We believe that the public interest case for disclosure of these documents outweigh the grounds that OPDC and the GLA have put forward for refusing our FoI\/EIR requests.\u00a0 These grounds are a combination of ‘commercial sensitivity’ and the ‘manifest unreasonableness’ of our requests.<\/p>\n The detailed letter to the Information Commissioner, setting out the case for disclosure can be found here\u00a0 StQW and OONF to ICO 30.11.19<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past 18 months it has become increasingly hard for the public to gain an understanding of the activities and aims of the OPDC.\u00a0 Meetings that are open to the public very rarely question or discuss the critical challenges facing the Corporation.\u00a0 Reports from officers include little detail on these matters.\u00a0 Much of the … Continue reading “OPDC – a development corporation lacking transparency”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":482,"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions\/482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldoakneighbourhoodforum.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}