“Six in bits”? Greenbelt grab nodded through with barely a wimper

Bristol City Football Club are to get a new stadium on the city’s greenbelt at Ashton Vale after councillors voted 7-2 in favour of the controversial development last night.

At a very long meeting featuring a very short debate – skillfully dominated and dictated by Labour old-stager John Bees – the lack of experience of some members of the committtee proved to be a predictable problem.

Lib Dem rookies Fi Hance and Simon Rayner, both clearly unhappy with substantial elements of the plans, failed to ever really assert themselves or their views much at all during the debate allowing Bees to seize the meeting by the scruff of the neck and force a result for the football club with the minimum of fuss.

Ultimately, Rayner and Hance failed to convince their own Lib Dem colleagues – let alone the Labour and Tory establishment figures who were always unlikely to turn down the application – of their genuine concerns.

However, the football club didn’t get it all their own way, the councillors followed officer advice and turned down the ‘Southlands’ housing ‘enabling development’ section of the application that might leave the football club with a funding headache.

The meeting also helped draw out a few facts about the considerable levels of public subsidy going in to the project.

After considerable pressure from councillors, planning officer Richard Mathews finally agreed that waiving £7.5m of s. 106 planning gain payments represented “a public subsidy”.

“If you want to call it that,” he insouciantly told the meeting revealing an odd attitude to large sums of public money and very little interest in the importance of properly funded public services.

Well yes actually Richard, we do want to call it that. If developers are not paying for basic public services like transport, education, health, libraries and so on then the public have to. We can’t just go without them. Therefore developers are being subsidised.

It’s not like most of us are on senior planning officer wages so can afford private education for the kids and private healthcare for ourselves and are in a position not have to give a toss. The majority of people need public services to exist and new, large scale housing developments without them represent an expense for us all to cover.

Under further pressure, when he resorted to making little sense, Matthews appeared to admit that the land at the council-owned Alderman Moore’s former allotments, which will be turned into a housing estate called ‘Moorelands’ by the club, is worth at least £5m and he indicated that this land would be given away by the council to the club for nothing.

That’s £12.5m of public subsidy floating around there then.

Meanwhile, it was something of a personal nightmare evening for Matthew Cockburn, the council’s transport development supremo.

Either poorly briefed or with a lot to hide, he apparently had little idea of the cost of anything to do with transport on the development, and stumbled and mumbled hopelessly through his presentation and then questions from councillors.

However he did eventually confirm – when pressured – that a stadium development would add £5m to the cost of the proposed BRT across the stadium site. Although he claimed some of this cost would be offset by land the football club was setting aside for the BRT route. When pushed on what the value of this land might be, he gave no answer beyond saying that avoiding compulsory purchase of the land would save us some money in legal costs.

So what? It doesn’t even cost in the hundreds of thousands let alone millions to pay lawyers to compulsorily purchase land. Compared to the £5m costs involved, we’re getting little in return if we believe – the admittedly unreliable – Cockburn.

He was equally vague about the impact of the club’s totally flawed transport and travel plans too and offered little in the way of enlightenment about what we might be paying for in terms of transport at the site.

Although most of us probably went away from the meeting with some vague impression that the club would be paying something towards something to do with something transporty at the stadium.

On the basis of this woefully inadequate performance on our behalf, perhaps Mr Cockburn should consider taking a job a little more suited to his abilities? Working on the council’s Park ‘n’ Ride hotline maybe? He certainly shouldn’t be planning complex and costly transport solutions for major developments that’s for sure.

I wonder how much Mr Cockburn’s vagueness and waffling is going to cost us? It’s in the millions anyway.

Ring-a-ring-a-roadsies

Today’s Cancer provided an uncritical platform for editor Mike Norton’s wealthy mates to make their latest announcement about what we are being asked to call the ‘South Bristol Link’.

For starters, this is quite possibly the world’s most pathetically inept rebranding and spin exercise, in which we’re invited to believe that a ring road is not a ring road if some thick twat down the council calls it a ‘link’ instead.

The article itself was a typical piece of Norton’s recycled PR tosh. It will “unlock millions of pounds of new investment in South Bristol,” gushed the newspaper.

Palpable nonsense. The Blogger has looked at the economics of this dual carriageway to nowhere before and a small congested road through south Bristol’s residential neighbourhoods will not create the huge investment opportunities claimed.

The road that will is an M4 – M5 southern link. A project way beyond the skills, experience and vision of Norton’s shower of small-minded, small-time business cronies and their patsies on six-figure salaries down at the Council house.

Chris Hutt over on the Green Bristol Blog, ably assisted by some clued-in commenters, has also been looking at other aspects of the economics of this road today.

But here, what interests us more is not the economics of this road but the politics. Here’s two quotes from the Cancer article:

John Savage, chief executive of Business West, which represents regional businesses, said: “A link road that opens up south Bristol has been a vital ingredient we’ve needed for transport and economic growth for 50 years. Any delays in making this link available would be robbing people and future generations of a better chance of getting a job.”

David Bishop, Bristol City Council’s strategic transport director, said he wanted to see the new road go ahead.

So that’s an unelected quangocrat and Merchant Venturer John Savage and an unelected bureaucrat David Bishop behind the project.

Meanwhile there’s no comment whatsoever from the politicians we elect. Instead they seem to have passed all the decision-making power on the issue over to Savage and Bishop and an obscure and constitutionally arcane quango, the West of England Partnership.

What exactly is the point of voting in this city?

“I’m ten years younger, two stone heavier, and I haven’t had my nuts taken off by academia”

A list of great literary feuds would be a long one. They’re all at it aren’t they?

Who can forget Salman “somewhere in Las Vegas there’s probably a male prostitute called ‘John Updike’” Rushdie? The effervescing Barnes vs Amis relationship or how about Tibor Fischer vs Amis or in fact just about anyone vs Amis? Then of course there’s Germaine Greer vs anyone Amis hasn’t got around to having a go at yet and – an all-time personal favourite this – the greatest living Bristolian Julie Burchill-Camille Paglia fax war of 1993, ending with those immortal words:

Dear Professor Paglia,
Fuck off you crazy old dyke.
Always,
Julie Burchill

But now Bristol can at last lay claim to its first literary feud of the online age as the The Bristol Blogger and Bristol Traffic size each other for a heavyweight bout over the exact words used in George Orwell’s 1941 essay on patriotism The Lion and the Unicorn.

Orwell had no room for cyclists in his vision of Britain says Bristol Traffic. They say the most famous line in the essay went:

old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning

Before telling us:

No mention of bicycles. They are a foreign invention. Possibly even Scottish. No, what Orwell celebrated included “the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road”, windy country roads, and the motor car.

Bollocks says the Blogger. Orwell’s line is:

old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning

Comments and emails have been exchanged and alas the two titans of the local blogosphere are still at loggerheads.

So there’s nothing for it but a duel …

And to give it not only a certain Jules Vernesque literary quality but a proper Bristolian feel, we propose a hot air balloon duel with blunderbusses. We’ll settle this at 1,000 feet above the city.

So come on Bristol Traffic, let’s us know when you’ve got the hot air balloon and blunderbuss and we’ll meet you at Ashton Court at dawn.

The Blogger’s already getting serious sponsorship enquiries from Parking Services and the Association of British Drivers!

Certainly not spelling city are we?

City council: filling their boots but not emptying the bins

Fancy that! Bristol City Council is predictably sitting on its hands doing nowt to support their own bin men asking for less than twenty quid a week extra in their pay packets to help feed their families during a recession.

Idle Lib Dem leader, Barbara “Call me Ma’am” Janke, even went on BBC radio this morning to explain she hasn’t even bothered to get properly briefed about the strike and was doing nothing whatsoever about it.

Instead she’s bravely leaving everything for her officers to sort out. Presumably on the basis there’s nothing in it for any of her rich friends so why bother?

What an outstanding leader.

But meanwhile the council have managed to find plenty of spare cash for yet another inflation-busting pay rise for yet another senior officer who has done nothing for the city.

It seems the council’s Human Resources Committee agreed, in secret obviously, on Friday that a post – the grammatically challenged, ‘Service Director Transport’ – deserves what they call a “market supplement” – or a whopping pay rise to you and me – “in order to secure the appointment of the best person for the job”.

Since the decision was conveniently taken in secret, we don’t know how much this “market supplement” is, but rest assured it will be somewhere between £10-20k a year over and above the £80-100k a year the post already pays.

This idea that we, the council taxpayer, should pay alleged private sector “market” rates for an underachieving, unsackable career bureaucrat is patently absurd and is yet another example of the council’s senior management team fleecing the council taxpayer and looting the public purse with the total acquiescence of the city’s politicians.

Why are our politicians only too happy to give all-party support to these puzzling and unnecessary pay rises while turning their backs on the low-paid?

Especially when the simple fact is that this transport bureaucrat will make very little difference to anything. There’s two things that need to happen in the city as far as transport is concerned: (1) The First Bus monopoly needs to be challenged and dismantled and (2) we need to attract huge sums of investment.

These are not management problems. They are political problems that quite simply will not be solved by paying a manager any amount of money. They will be solved by decent politicians. Something this city patently lacks.

This latest pointless management job, we also learn, will be recruited using specialist (ie. expensive) CONsultant headhunting firms, who also seem to have been the prime movers behind the demand for this “market supplement” after they apparently failed to headhunt anyone suitable at the standard (already excessive) pay rate.

But rest assured they got a fat fee for failing anyway and no doubt will receive another increased one for this latest recruitment scam.

We’re being ripped off blind.

RTPI

It looks like the city council’s planning officers are off doing whatever the hell they feel like again to help their private developer friends without going to the bother of consulting elected politicians.

It says here that the Royal Town Planning Institute’s networks, “provide a forum for linking planners in the public and private sectors with representatives of the wider property and development industry”, which is nice isn’t it?

But, we’re told, these poor multi-millionaire property developer types are apparently having a bit of a hard time, what with the state of the economy and everything else at present.

And would you believe that just last month the RTPI debated, here in Bristol with attendees from across the UK, the future of section 106 agreements – which dictate how much developers should give to us, the public, in terms of cash, benefits and services in exchange for building their profitable blocks of buy-to-let high-end flats?

And would you believe, “the opening proposition was put by Bristol City Council head of major projects Gary Collins”?

And would you believe he said, “his authority has devised a concordat with the local property sector that aims to reduce the burden of existing planning conditions and section 106 agreements in the hope of maintaining delivery on key schemes.”

Is, by any chance, a city council CONcordat similar to a city council CONsultation?

All nice and cosy isn’t it? Private property developers – who are supposed to bear risk – get hit by the recession so, we, the public, thanks to the city council, have to immediately pick up the tab and forego various public service and infrastructure necessities we might need as a direct result of these major development schemes.

So forget, for the foreseeable future – courtesy of our poor, downtrodden private developer friends at least – any new schools, public transport improvements or the affordable housing we still urgently need despite what must have been the boom time S.106 deals negotiated by the council until recently.

Oh, and did we miss it? Where was the announcement from the city’s political leadership of this new policy favouring private property development interests and profits over our collective needs?

Or are major policy announcements for the city now made by unelected town planners at obscure networking events?

Ormondroyd: the interview

Shambolically useless interview with Chief Exec Bum Disease Ormondroyd in this week’s issue of Venue.

Unfortunately I’ve left my copy at work so can’t post it in full until tomorrow but mainly the interview’s a study in what happens if you let an uninformed arty-farty twit from Southville conduct a political interview and I’ve twittered various comments on it already.

The key claims made by Ormondroyd consist of what she sees as “the challenges” for the city. These are congestion, which she says we need to have “a debate about”. Education, which is “improving” (go tell that to parents of four year olds) and “selling the city”, which we don’t do enough of apparently, as if anyone really cares.

The one that caught the Blogger’s eye was this idea that we should have a debate about congestion. What? After Jan’s sent a Transport Innovation Fund (TIF) bid to London agreeing to “demand management measures” – or a congestion charge as normal people call it – for Bristol?

So it’s decide first and debate afterwards is it? What’s the fucking point of that Jan? You’ve already taken the decision. Now you want us to have a false debate for PR purposes. You really think we’re stupid don’t you?

Perhaps a better debate we might be having is one about whether we need these mendacious little shits running the council on six-figure salaries any longer?

Unfortunately not a debate we’re likely to get in our abominable local press.

RED TROUSERGATE: Bishop proposing multi-million public money favour to ol’ Red Trousers!

Despite Bristol City Council officers still quite deliberately failing to take a decision regarding the sale of our protected public park land to developers Square Peg (Blogger passim), the controversial Chocolate Factory development planned on the land at Greenbank is back before the Development Control (South and East) Committee on 1 April.

The decision on this planning permission was deferred by the Development Control (South and East) Committee meeting on February 18 because there was no S.106 planning obligations package properly in place.

An S. 106 agreement basically lays out how much a developer is going to spend on roads, traffic calming and public infrastructure – including affordable housing – and is therefore of significant interest, value and benefit to the public.

Here’s what Ferguson and Square Peg originally signed up to deliver as part of the development last year:

• Between 10 and 30% affordable housing
• Approximately 25% of the commercial floorspace to be managed workspace, (see below for definition)
• Provision of community space within Building 6
• A contribution of £210,000 towards improvements to highway infrastructure and sustainable transport
• A contribution of £721,134 towards education facilities
• A contribution of £58,212 towards library facilities
• A contribution of £514,943.35 towards public open space
• Provision of an on site car club
• Provision of a Travel Plan
• Provision of Public Art
• Provision of a Landscaping scheme

And here’s what they’re now proposing to deliver this year:

• 10% affordable housing (a total of 25 units including a variety of unit types and tenures)
• Approximately 25% of the commercial floorspace to be managed workspace
• Provision of community space within Building 6.
• A contribution of £50,000 towards improvements to highway infrastructure and sustainable transport
• A contribution of £40,000 towards public open space
• Provision of an on site car club
• Provision of a Travel Plan
• Provision of Public Art
• Provision of off-site Landscaping schemes

This means that Ferguson and his Merchant Venturer gang – who only really want to build housing for wealthy snobs anyway – are proposing to deprive the city of up to 50 units of much-needed affordable housing; £160,000 of the money needed to get the roads up to scratch to handle the development; £720,000 worth of educational facilities they can’t be bothered with (that’s enough to go a long way towards a new primary school concerned parents please note); no money toward a library and a lot less than a tenth of the amount required to sort out public open space around their tower blocks that will cover the current open space.

The Blogger’s back-of-a-fag-packet calculation says this adds up to around £1.4m worth of improvements we were promised by Ferguson that won’t be delivered.

And remember, some of these improvements have to happen. If Ferguson and Square Peg ain’t paying the bill for highways improvements then we are.

So Ferguson and Square Peg are havin’ a laugh aren’t they? Not according to David Bishop’s planning department they’re not. Planning officers say, “an approval based on the planning obligations package offered by the applicant can be supported.”

Yes it will be supported. By us the council taxpayer forking out over a million quid to subsidise a bunch of multi-millionaire developers pulling a fast one.

Is this report an April fool?

Bishop and his planning team’s justification for this multi-million pound council tax giveaway to some of Bristol’s wealthiest men appears to be contained in a section of the committee report entitled ‘Viability Appraisal’.

This long piece of jargon-rich, tortured prose – being presented to what should be a non-specialist committee – probably breaks just about every rule of plain english the council claims to uphold. Here’s a sample:

Taking a pure approach the residual valuation would allow for a positive value to be realised for the site before the site was deemed unviable. However, to take a reasonable approach and having considered other Bristol sites where some kind of an element of “Enabling Value” is required to bring it forward, the Council’s team have modelled this in reflection of similar sites where there was only redevelopment value. While this level is not agreed by the applicant we have had to make a reasonable value judgment based on other sites in a similar position to arrive at a base value. This followed the fact that both parties agreed that the price paid is not considered relevant to the process which is confirmed in the Council’s Affordable Housing Practice Note (AHPN).

I wonder what it means? And more to the point, do the councillors on the Development Control (South and East) Committee know what it means?

After all, they wouldn’t go making a decision on the basis of a report they didn’t understand … Would they?

Kate Pollard

Sad news arrives that Totterdown community activist/whirlwind Kate Pollard died in hospital in Sydney on January 2nd after a long fight against cancer. Kate died with her family in Australia, which is where she wanted to be.

Kate will be well known to many people in Totterdown – where she made her home – as well as in many other communities across Bristol. Through a long community work career Kate battled daily against injustice alongside other ordinary Bristolians making those small differences that we often take for granted but that really matter.

In Totterdown, Kate’s kindness, common sense, empathy and organisational skills allied to an extraordinary ability to persuade and cajole the people around her to stop watching the telly and actually do something will be sorely missed.

Even up until Christmas, despite a debilitating illness and all the way from Australia, Kate was still contacting Totterdown residents, using those persuasive skills to make sure the things that neeeded doing were going to be done.

Towards the end of 2006 Kate published her book, Totterdown Rising. The full title of the book is revealing : Totterdown Rising: The Story of a Community Enduring and Surviving a Planning Disaster.

It was typically Kate that a book about a community that was deliberately split in half and decimated to make way for a road that was never built, was not about a community beaten into submission by a hopeless council’s misguided obsession with the motor car but a story of how people rebuilt their community and reinvented that special Spirit of Totterdown right there in the face of uncaring and misguided government.

Kate was no victim; she stood on her own two feet. And she understood that people and communities had to stand on their own two feet too. You should never just be the passive and convenient victims of the grand schemes of those in power. Communities and their people, regardless of circumstance, can always rise again and fight for another, better day.

In a time when every two-bit political careerist and calculating bureaucrat perfectly understands the financial value and political utility of ‘the community’ to their own plans and their business partners’ profits, Kate understood and could communicate the real value of our communities here in Bristol – they’re our places to live, work, love, learn, laugh, cry, organise, manage, fight, win, endure, survive and sadly, die.

Friends of Kate in Totterdown will be organising a bash in a few months time with music and dancing and revelry to celebrate Kate’s life. If you knew Kate and want to be involved, email the Blogger and your details will be passed on.

BRT: York notes

Private Eye’s ‘Dr B Ching’ has been taking a look at First Group’s ftr (which stands for “future” public transport!) bendy buses that have been operating in York since 2006.

The system is very similar to the bendy bus BRT scheme proposed for Bristol, and we learn that First Group boss, the maybe/maybe not Labour donor, Moir Lockhead insisted in 2005 that, “ftr is the perfect solution for local authorities in the battle against congestion.”

Alas, now York City Council reveals that there’s been a 1.9% drop in bus use between 2006-07 and 2007-08 – in the time, in fact, since “the perfect solution” got underway.

Satisfaction rates among the public have fallen too. In 2003-04 71% were satisfied with their bus service in York. Today that figure is just 68% while there’s also been huge amounts of complaints about ticketing and delays.

Fans of open government will no doubt be interested to learn too that the architects of this cut-price public transport tripe – First Group boss Lockhead and, then, Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling – met to specifically discuss ftr in October 2005.

But alas we shall never know what was said as department of Transport officials say “no notes were produced” of this meeting.

Nice to see such transparency and openess between big business and government around our future transport needs isn’t it?