Scaffolding ‘takes away natural light – people are very tired of it’

• WHEN Partners for Improvement in Islington had finished putting scaffolding up in Chadwell Street on March 23, it wrote to residents saying that work to the houses, which is more cosmetic than structural, would take 10 to 12 weeks.

Twelve weeks on, 14 houses in the street still have scaffolding up, but on a typical day you may find six men working on just one or two houses. At any given moment, most of the houses under scaffolding are not being worked on.

And it’s not just Chadwell Street, it’s other streets in the Amwell Triangle as well. On Tuesday this week there were 13 houses under council scaffolding in Claremont Square with not one worker in sight, and 14 in Amwell Street with just one worker in view.

The men are quiet and polite, and their work seems good. But the job as a whole is not even half done, and the scaffolding simply sits there unused. At this rate the work won’t be finished until 2019.

And the point is: scaffolding costs money. For every week it sits there, somebody is paying rent on it, and somebody else is raking it in. And it’s us – the taxpayers – who are doing the paying.

There are two other disadvantages for residents in all this. First, scaffolding takes away natural light – people must live in its shadow, and here they are getting very tired of it.

Second, it offers plentiful chances for burglars. The letter from Partners had the cheek to suggest that residents “might wish” to notify their insurance providers about this scaffolding. Well, thanks a million. If burglaries take place, the liability should surely fall on Partners, not on us.

Is Islington Council aware of this completely unnecessary drain on its overstretched finances? If not, it should come round and take a look.

MICHAEL CHURCH
Chadwell Street, EC1