Back local businesses, says Hackney Citizen

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The Hackney Citizen has launched a ‘Be Loyal Buy Local’ campaign to encourage people to support their local shops, cafes and other traders.

As we all know, local shops, cafes and pubs are community hubs where you can catch up with friends and get the lowdown on what’s happening in your neighbourhood.

Local shops are good at a more  material level as well: they are quite likely to have what you want. Shopkeepers as part of their local communities are able to respond  more effectively to shoppers’ requests, and smaller traders  can often stock a wider range of the products that people actually want. Prices at corner stores and other local shops can compare well with supermarket ones, especially when you take into consideration the time, cost and effort associated with getting to and from a chain store.

So local shops are good for us; they are also great for the local community. Small and often quirky businesses help neighbourhoods retain their unique character. They also provide much-needed jobs and play a vital role in supporting the local economy. Of course we all buy things at supermarkets or department stores, but it’s good to buy things locally when we can.

So be loyal, buy local – and look out for our Hackney Citizen campaign posters in shops and cafes near you.

5 Comments

  1. Binjons on Wednesday 7 July 2010 at 00:40

    Love it!

    Goes nicely with my latest favourite: Get Excited & Change Things (a refreshing take on the omnipresent Keep Calm & Carry On)



  2. Jed Keenan on Thursday 8 July 2010 at 00:01

    Loyalty is low, low reason for anything and very easily leaves people open to accusations of being less loyal or even disloyal before then being excluded or targeted. It also hides the actual, and completely correct, opinions of us customers about the domestic supply of goods and services, its disorganisation, and the much wider failure of governance when it is compared to the offer made elsewhere. 86% of domestic customers are ‘disloyal’ and shop outside of the Borough in all the well marketed commercial centres across the city, and amazingly 50% of all our food is purchased outside of our Borough; I really don’t understand how this can happen but then these really are the numbers.

    The Hackney Economy is atrocious, it doesn’t supply our goods and services, it doesn’t supply sufficient employment to meet demand, it has no representative body – the Hackney Enterprise Network contractor said so at G&R, there still is no strategic governance, no marketing, no communication of the domestic offer to tenants and residents, I can go on and on and on, no visitor economy strategy, no street markets strategy, no inward investment action plan to go with the inward investment strategy that for good reason isn’t available to public scrutiny, and on and on and on and on.

    The Department for Communities and Local Government Committee report on the Survival of Traditional Street Markets identified the effect that empty pitches cause on existing traders. It wrote that customers are not attracted to half-full markets and this then reduces the turnover, profit, and efficiency of traders, reduces any opportunity to afford additional employment provision, and finally reduces the numbers of traders either continuing to trade or newly entering the market. All of this in a vicious circle of ineffective governance and poor management by, in Hackney’s case, it’s Parking Department, but parking is about enforcement and markets are about enforcement right? Not ever about the effective supply of goods and services to tenants and residents and the broader visitor economy? Did you know that the performance of Parking is measured against ensuring the availability of parking spaces to permit holders and not by enforcement of the rules, the fixed penalty notices, but that markets aren’t measured on the availability of market traders but on the enforcement of the rules? This is clearly completely nuts so I am glad to see this Hackney Citizen campaign but let’s not muck about scratching the surface and then wondering about all our failed outcomes.

    This Borough has 500 empty pitches and these cost the Council £500,000 every year to maintain this total drag on our Economy, but then Broadway Markey has a waiting list 900 strong. What in the world are they able to provide that attracts that much interest in our domestic and visitor economy, and remember in the teeth of 86% of Hackneyites commuting to shop elsewhere? Well they have an effective governing organisation, and that’s it folks, the only variable. From this they have a marketing strategy, and development strategy, strong management, high standards of customer service, supplying a wide range, at reasonable-ish prices, and high quality offering. The very healthy waiting list for commercial participation very importantly ensures adherence by traders to high standards of service; arriving on time, not leaving early, and keeping up the flash. Now with all due respect to the exceptions around the Borough, in general standards of service and the range, price, and quality of the current offering is pretty low. A poor range of overpriced tat is what we get offered, give or take, in the Hackney Economy.

    Broadway Market was engineered not to compete with Ridley Road Market, which is the reason it is slightly snotty and gets away with charging £2 for an almond croissant, that and the weakness of competition in the local breakfast pastries sector. The dynamic illustrated by 900 enterprises waiting to enter this market is that we want to shop here but three things are necessary for us to do so. The first is that there needs to be effective governance of the commercial and third sector goods and services offering, and not just more expensive cosmetic capital projects. The second is that this effective governance will need to assume the responsibility for, and the dissemination of, information about the domestic commercial and third sector goods and services offer, in the form of a self-sustaining and fully inclusive goods and services directory, something that happens almost everywhere else and as an example I very much recommend seeing South Gloucestershire County Council’s directory for how extravagant these directories can get, to all customers in the off-contract public, commercial and third sectors as well as to us tenants and residents. Thirdly it needs to supply training and the organisational support to tenants and residents of social housing so that we can access and populate our own empty street markets. This should be in the form of a Community Interest Company (CIC), as an inclusive, democratic, and membership governed social enterprise with its own specific tax regime, instead of an exclusive, undemocratic, appointee governed commercial operation which is currently the only thing on offer right now.

    There is one last thing which is the supply of start-up capital. The Hackney Credit Union, governed in just the same ways as a CIC, on Mare Street at the corner of London Lane, has a fund set up for exactly this purpose supplied by the Department of Work and Pensions of a couple of hundred thousand pounds, but the reason for its utter underutilisation because of this question: How do we draw up a business plan without having the data from trading, but then how do we get that data without having the capital and the capital without having the business plan? Catch 22. We only need to break the cycle to release our potential. We are the most entrepreneurial, cohesive, and diverse community the world has ever seen EVER, and we have the best international contacts, the best human resource, and the greatest loyalty to each other found anywhere.

    Now if that is all way to microeconomic then how about this for some macro bottom line; the City of Westminster’s rateable value, the cost of its commercial property if it was all for rent per year, is £1,067,000,000, Camden’s is £317,000,000, and Hackney’s is £62,000,000, but all our domestic markets are about the same size. We are simply not pulling our weight and here is how Tory logic works: Decisions on who gets what aren’t based upon need, but on ability, and Hackney has one of the most generous 3 year (ending next year) central government funding grants of any local authority in the UK. We are going to be hit worse than any other local authority when the axe falls in 2011 and if we won’t ensure the development a more self-sustaining local economy, fully capable of contributing much, much more to the Treasury than we currently do, there is actually the possibility of civic unrest, and not just simply large numbers of job cuts, a long-term economic depression, and much, much greater levels of multi-generational inequality.



  3. blood and property on Thursday 8 July 2010 at 12:35

    Crumbs! Jed, interesting stuff. Just wondering how long you might have been pointing this stuff out to the people who need to know and whether they have been listening?

    On a slightly different note, do you suspect that you are not a Labour councillor yet because you say things like: “The Hackney Economy is atrocious, it doesn’t supply our goods and services, it doesn’t supply sufficient employment to meet demand…”

    and “All of this in a vicious circle of ineffective governance and poor management by, in Hackney’s case, it’s Parking Department, but parking is about enforcement and markets are about enforcement right?”

    Could the current leadership handle someone as forthright as you appear to be? In the mean time I’m still trying to stay out of Tescos – it’s proving difficult.



  4. Jed Keenan on Saturday 10 July 2010 at 13:30

    Hello B&P

    You do set a tough old personal question and thanks very much for calling my effort interesting.

    Firstly, who exactly are the people that need to know? We are all familiar with the people that have their photos and surgery dates listed in the Hackney Today, but which senior Council Officers are you alluding to? Well, very helpfully a schematic diagram of the top tiers of management (1st thru 4th) at Hackney LBC is being published later this month. This tree diagram won’t identify the division of responsibilities and will take some effort, which means having to attend public forums and identifying who’s who before then pinning down their personalities, capabilities, and levels of responsiveness and helpfulness on offer from these courteous, respectful, intelligent, well paid, and busy professionals.

    An almost universal public ignorance about the business of the Council and the serious absence of any informed opinion about local affairs are absolutely one and the same issue. The people you describe as needing to know are not our Representatives or their Officers, and it isn’t my self-selected role to be a thundering columnist, cub reporter or pro hack covering the Hackney beat. There are at least two local magazines and three local newspapers published in Hackney that purport to cover current affairs but then not one of them has thus far ever offered, as far as I have noticed, an informed opinion on the strategic or operational business of the Council. Are you thinking Ed Case or the letters page’s unabridged Arthur Shuter, or maybe the sort of wishy-washy nonsense that provoked my original response? We are literally being kept ignorant by the lazy, ineffective, counter-productive owners and management of our own media, and now it is time for an excuse: low/no budget, no page space, no readership interest, or a defence: we know best, it’s incredibly complex, and you are not the only person we need to consider.

    Secondly ‘the current leadership’ are a group of public spirited individuals that are carrying the burden of our entire population. The support they receive from Council Staff and Officers is patchy and from their political parties should be much better, but most importantly they would be infinitely more effective if the wider capable public took on more of their responsibility and shared the burden of governance. We naively expect 58 people to effectively govern a £1,000,000,000 per annum turnover organisation with responsibility for almost every aspect of our lives including our social, environmental, and economic outcomes. We are all simply making excuses for ourselves by belittling both their efforts and them personally, while defending ourselves by writing that they’re the ones that stood for office, receive an allowance or a wage, and have all the mechanisms of the Council to affect change, and so really don’t deserve any help.

    So do become informed and have an informed opinion, not on everything because that would be impossible; try housing governance and management for example, a goldmine of bonkersness where just some small effort can make a huge difference. Go and check out the state of the internal decoration in Lea View House up by Springfield Park and ask everyone including yourself how the internal decorating budget disappears year after year while tenants and residents, our community, remain so utterly disempowered. Join a mainstream political party, any will do, and support its efforts to provide better non-executive opposition or non-executive scrutiny and have a proper effect on the governance of the Council and its strategic partners. Of much more importance, very seriously plan to stand for election in 2014 or in the half dozen by-elections being held over the next three years, and seriously campaign to be selected and to win, by which I mean being well informed and serving the community you will want to be voting for you. My question for you is this; does being a leader now seem to be too much like hard work? Undoubtedly this is the reason why over two thirds of the local election candidates in May were paper candidates, candidates in name alone. This really is an intolerably limited range and poor quality of democratic offering and is having an adverse affect on the outcomes of us all.

    There are no qualifications for democratic office and of much more significance is that our greatest strength by far is our cohesive diversity, which means that forthrightness is in fact cautiously well received, not by everyone of course but then they have their own diverse set of reasons for being overcautious. The fear that a publicly held opinion is a vulnerability in our ‘solitary, poor, and nasty’ world is actually completely incorrect, actually the vocational opportunity for self-enlightenment, in the western sense, is second to none. Public debate in public forums are not an exclusive preserve and when the self-defined sensible people don’t like this freedom of expression then this is the reason why it is sometimes discouraged. I hold in the greatest esteem the people that both facilitate these forums and take full advantage of the very broadest set of contributions when formulating and making their decisions about the most complicated of issues. This is truly a very good definition of what a political party actually is, and so do join one to join in. Listen and learn, as well as speak and teach, you have both more to learn and more to offer than you or anyone else realises.

    Finally as for why I wasn’t a candidate in the local elections in May here is one of the reasons given: ‘Good listening (sic) and being a communicator (sic) is a key skill (sic) for a councillor, particularly when dealing with constituents, we felt the candidate would struggle in this area.’ None of us is perfect and any bitterness is entirely focussed on my inability to meet anybody halfway. No defence, no excuses, it was my fault and I let the side down, but hey-ho, there’s no electoral mandate required to being well informed and to be actively engaged in the business of the Council, which was my primary reason for applying to be a candidate anyway. It would have made my family very proud and I have to admit that I did, and still do, like the sound of Councillor Keenan, but I don’t confuse the tableware for the meat and drink.

    Yours sincerely

    JK.



  5. blood and property on Sunday 11 July 2010 at 02:58

    Hi Jed, I’ll have to have a proper look at what you’re saying – it may take a while! But thanks for what looks like a brutally honest answer.



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