Councillor Brian Gordon (‘Wide range of the discussion’, Your Views, October 13) must have been at a different Hendon Area Forum to the one I and others attended. At the meeting, he started by saying he wanted to let people have their say, but continually interrupted from the very first minute.

The business would have progressed much quicker and less confrontationally if he had let people have their say.

The agenda was ludicrous.

Two months ahead of the meeting, I submitted a short list of items, asking if it could be confirmed they were in order.

No reply came, despite several reminders, until the start of the meeting.

Item one on my list — how the new standing orders were to be interpreted — was disallowed. It would have been helpful to have this sorted from the beginning.

Yes, we discussed the Edgware War Memorial, but we will not be able to follow up the promises made at the next meeting, if they are not honoured.

Other items of importance to local people could only be raised in a tangential fashion, by putting the English language through Olympic standard gymnastic contortions to bring the subjects within the new rules.

We could not discuss the closure of Church Farm Museum, or the future of the Watling Boys Club building, or the former Child Guidance building on North Road estate, but we were allowed to discuss “the implications for local security of the buildings being kept empty”.

We were not allowed to discuss the closure of the ticket office at Hendon Thameslink, but could discuss “the traffic and parking implications” of its removal. We were not allowed to discuss the proposed move of Saracens to Copthall, or the increase in parking charges at all.

It is clear the council and Cllr Gordon wish to kill off the forums, which inconveniently used to raise matters or decisions they were uncomfortable in attempting to explain or defend, by making them irrelevant to those who wish to have their say about their communities.

Andrew Dismore
Labour London Assembly candidate for Barnet and Camden