A Camden man is facing prosecution for putting up posters that urged tenants to vote against the council’s arm’s-length management proposals.
Alan Walter, a council tenant on the Peckwater estate, stuck the posters up in a bus shelter three months ahead of the ALMO vote in January 2004, which the tenants voted overwhelmingly against.
If found guilty of flyposting when he appears in court later this month, he will have to pay legal fees of £460 and a £1000 fee.
In a letter to the Camden Journal newspaper, he said he had put up posters “many times over the past 20 years” but had never before had a complaint from the council.
He said: “It is one thing to go after companies using commercial flyposting gangs to make money.
It’s totally different when local people tape up posters as one of the few means we have to participate in the democratic process.
“This is an outrageous attack on democracy. The campaign against the ALMO had a tiny fraction of the council’s resources, while £500,000 was spent promoting it.”
A council spokeswoman said its policy was to prosecute all cases of flyposting that breached the 1990 Town & Country Planning Act “whether carried out by a private individual or a large corporation”.
She said 140 cases had been prosecuted last year and 60 cases had started this year.
But the council was not able to say why Walter’s case has taken eight months to come to court.
Source
Housing Today
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