Barnet Council latest - Lets bash the disabled in secret !

Barnet Council just gets worse and worse, when it comes to treatment of the disabled. I did my weekly scour of DPR's and saw one entitled "1780 - Disabled Parking Bay_Exempt". What is it all about?

Well the council website says - http://barnet.moderngov.co.uk/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?ID=4276
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Purpose:

This report details objections to the proposals to provide disabled parking bays. 

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And what are these objections? Well sadly the council has decided to keep these objections secret. So we are not allowed to know why the council has objections to disabled parking bays.

The reasons for keeping it secret

• By Virtue of Paragraph 1
  Information relating to any individual.
  
  Condition:
  Information is exempt to the extent that, in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.
  Information is not exempt if it relates to proposed development for which the local planning authority may grant itself planning permission pursuant to Regulation 3 of the Town & Country Planning General Regulations 1992(a).
  
• By Virtue of Paragraph 2
  Information which is likely to reveal the identity of an individual.
  
  Condition:
  Information is exempt to the extent that, in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.
  Information is not exempt if it relates to proposed development for which the local planning authority may grant itself planning permission pursuant to Regulation 3 of the Town & Country Planning General Regulations 1992(a).
  

So lets get this clear. Someone has objected to the creation of disabled parking bays. We are not allowed to know why they have objected. The reason is because it might reveal the identity of the person of the person objecting.

Now I was under the impression that Barnet Council had a policy of inclusion. If someone wants to object to disabled parking bays, fine. If they have a good reason to object. If the justifications are valid and the public interest is served by not creating disabled bays, then that is all well and good. 

The implication of this is that the objections were extremely specific and localised. The identity of the person was likely to be exposed by their complaining. Of course the council should not expose the identity of individuals, but should we have no idea at all of the nature of the issues? 

Presumably the disabled people affected by these objections are also kept in the dark. This means that they will not be able to state their case and work towards a compromised solution. My suspicion is that the objections are either one of two things

a) A next door neighbour has complained because their own parking rights are being compromised. Whilst this may be a valid concern, presumably a decent person would realise that a less mobile person has a need to park close to their house.

b) There is a political objection on ideological grounds to the creation of the spaces on the grounds that the complainant feels the disabled should not be given special access. 

Clearly in both of these cases, the complainant would not want anyone to know of their mean spiritedness.

In both cases, I personally would like to see their lack of community mindedness and lack of support for the less well abled members of society exposed. Unlike Prince Harry in the nod, I believe that this is in the public interest to be exposed. But then, there is no chance of that is there.

I will however be sending an FoI to ask for the location of these spaces, that may shed some light, mightent it?