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Markhouse Centre Building
Markhouse Centre, 247 Markhouse Road, Walthamstow E17 8RN


On Wednesday 11th September the Save Markhouse Centre campaign held a public meeting at the Centre to hear the views of the service users, their parents and carers, and the staff of the Centre, i.e. the people most involved and affected by the looming closure of the Centre, both on their own behalf and as representatives of those who are not able to speak for themselves. Forest Radio made a sound recording the whole of of the event and a version slightly abridged for length can be heard at:

Help Us Save Markhouse Centre

Since then there has been a public meeting of the Council's Health and Adults Scrutiny Committee to discuss the proposed closure on Wednesday 2nd October in the Council Chamber of the own Hall, which Forest Radio also recorded but the acoustics in that hall are so atrocious that the recording is not usable. There was also a public meeting organised by the Waltham Forest Chamber of Commerce at the William Morris Hall on Greenleaf Road on Thursday 17th October which discussed the Markhouse closure proposals as well as the borough's provision for children with special educational needs. This was recorded successfully and the relevant parts of the two-hour meeting, not duplicating too much of the previous discussions, can be heard below.


Public Meeting Organised by Waltham Forest Chamber of Commerce

After moving the deadline back to allow more time for consideration the final decision is now scheduled to be made at a public meeing of the Council's Cabinet at the Town Hall on Tuesday 3rd December at 2.00 pm. Our plan is to arrive one hour early and assemble on the steps of the Town Hall with banners and leaflets at 1.00 pm, then go in when the doors open to the public. This will be the last opportunity to influence the people deciding on the future of the service users and everyone involved.

We would recommend that you attend this meeting with your family and friends and the service users themselves if that is practical. Let the people with the power to reverse this cynical and unnecessary attack on the lives of some of the most vulnerable members of our society and those who devote their lives to caring for them meet their proposed victims face to face and try to justify what they are proposing to do to their lives. Let us try also to attract the local and national press and any other media representatives to attend and explain the issues to the wider public.

Perhaps our so-called Labour council can be shamed into protecting the interests of the people who voted them into office.

Please sign the petition to stop the council from taking this action.

The Petition

It's too late to sign the online petition, which was part of the "consultation" arranged by the Council and discontinued some weeks ago in accordance with their published deadline.

However, you can still download a PDF file of the "paper petition" created by the Save Markhouse Centre campaign which has no formal status but which we know has been acknowledged and referred to by certain individual committee members and can not be entirely ignored, especially by the press, if the number of signatures becomes significant. You can use

THIS LINK

to download the file in PDF format to print off for yourself and and others to sign by hand. You will then need to post or hand deliver the completed sheets to Saima, the manager of the Centre (address at the top of this page). Please do as much as you can to save this exemplary and first class service from destruction at the hands of the bureaucrats of the Town Hall.





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