For some compulsive gamblers, it's the spin of the roulette wheel. For the council, it's the prospect of World Cup Bristol 2018.
For some, it's their own money. For Bristol City Council, it's ours.
And for both, it gets to be an obsession that denies reality.
The bid by multi-millionaire tax exile Steve Lansdowne and his Bristol City Football Club to own a new stadium complex at Ashton Vale really has got the council hooked. A half promise of hosting some World Cup preliminaries (terms and conditions apply) in eight years time has turned normally fairly rational people into obsessives . So now, at a time of severe cuts in public services, we're still throwing money at Lansdowne. The multimillion giveaway has been beautifully lampooned on the Aurea Mediocritas blog
No matter that the new stadium could been built by the city's football establishment without public cost. There's no reason why Rovers and City couldn't both achieve their ambitions by sharing a spanking new stadium and splitting the cost. And there was no reason why the fans couldn't invest in the club to seal the (alleged) funding gap. No public subsidy either way.
In February, the Planning Committee (South and East) gave the OK to Lansdowne for his stadium, hotel, fast food outlet, and housing estate. In the process, they accepted that Bristol's Green Belt is expendable, by taking a chunk out of it. I can't guess what money value Green Belt has as a 'community asset', but most would say it's substantial. That's just in terms of health, wellbeing, and quality of life.
What's more, to help the club finance the scheme, the council agreed to waive the rules and let them build houses that will be 100% unaffordable to the people who need them most. Lost value to the community - £3.2m. Value to the club - 1.25m. That's business. (source, p13.)
In the next week or so, the council intends to gamble away even more. The next stage is to hand over the freehold of council-owned land to the football club. That's a big part of the Ald. Moore allotment site (where the unaffordable houses will go) and the part of the present stadium site that BCFC lease for car parking.
To enable the deal, both sites have been given capital valuations. Alderman Moore (rebranded 'Moorelands' by the developers) comes in at £3.4m - inexplicably reduced from the £5m quoted last November.
The car park site is said to be worth £1.15m, though that presupposes that the planning committee will do its bit to bring the World Cup to Bristol by letting Sainsburys build a megastore there. That's another 'community cost' of course - the impact on retail centres throughout South Bristol and beyond.
None of this cash will help replenish the council's depleted reserves, though. Instead, we'll be settling for 'services' provided by the club - like the occasional use of rooms, subsidised gym places, even the pitch itself (once a year). Expect to see more council 'events' move here from the usual venues, like @Bristol, the Pavilion, and Broadmead Baptist Church.
The test should really be whether the council would have bought these services from the club anyway - otherwise the notional 'value' of the services is meaningless. My guess is that, when cutting back on so many relatively essential services, and with a broad range of providers ready to offer competitive services, they wouldn't dare.
I always thought there were rules about competitive tendering for council contracts. But then I'm not that fussy about the 2018 World Cup (why should I be, I was in Middlesbrough in 1966?). Maybe I've got the wrong priorities.
6 comments:
Peter. Please explain. Right from the very first plan of the new stadium and its surrounding developments, there was this estate called Moorelands. I naturally assumed this land belonged to the developer so was somewhat surprised to find at a later date that infact it belonged to our council. So my question: what made the developer so confident that he would be given this land that all his plans included the land that he did not own. Is this common practice in business, because to me it seems like arrogance in the extreme. Any ideas?
Hi Paul
I'm sure your explanation's as good as mine... and near enough identical!
"...[T]hey accepted that Bristol's Green Belt is expendable, by taking a chunk out of it. I can't guess what money value Green Belt has as a 'community asset', but most would say it's substantial. That's just in terms of health, wellbeing, and quality of life."
Absolutely right Pete, and furthermore, at the very basis of all these is that essential commodity: food, and the land and fertile soil which is indispensible for growing it.
Now some of your less eco-friendly commenters may, in another place, complacently dismiss food security as "just another ploy by the green brigade to sell their organo-self-sufficiency schtick", but to say this is to stubbornly ignore the twin elephants in the room; peak oil and climate change, as well as many people's reasonable desire to grow or otherwise obtain healthy fresh food at reasonable cost.
Fortunately BCC is at least trying to face these grave issues, and recently commissioned a report called ‘Building a positive future for Bristol after Peak Oil’, which is available online.
"The global food production and distribution systems on which Bristol relies are utterly dependent on oil. For every calorie of food energy delivered, 7-10 calories of fossil fuels are used to produce it. According to a July 2008 government report, the transportation of food alone accounts for a third of the 20.6 million tonnes of oil used in the UK food chain each year. Any interruption in food supply or an increase in cost risks devastating consequences."
"Options include farming methods which build soil fertility and don’t rely on pesticides and artificial fertiliser; protection of productive farmland on the outskirts of the city; promotion of more seasonal food from more localised producers; a switch to a less meat-based diet; encouraging people to grow their own food in private gardens, community gardens and allotments; and even using some public space to produce food." pp 6-7.
And on p 44 the authors state that:
"It is essential that planning decisions keep sufficient cultivatable land available in and
around the city to allow for a low energy local food system. This is already at risk as developers move to buy green belt land around the city from farmers in anticipation of more relaxed planning laws."
Given that the disastrous Regional Spatial Strategies have now, at last, been rightly scrapped, and that the Council's own reports are telling them that they need to be protecting green space land, when is Bristol City Council going to start joining the dots, take responsibility, and put a stop to any building on precious green belt land?
"...[T]hey accepted that Bristol's Green Belt is expendable, by taking a chunk out of it. I can't guess what money value Green Belt has as a 'community asset', but most would say it's substantial. That's just in terms of health, wellbeing, and quality of life."
Absolutely right Pete, and furthermore, at the very basis of all these is that essential commodity: food, and the land and fertile soil which is indispensible for growing it.
Now some of your less eco-friendly commenters may, in another place, complacently dismiss food security as "just another ploy by the green brigade to sell their organo-self-sufficiency schtick", but to say this is to stubbornly ignore the twin elephants in the room; peak oil and climate change, as well as many people's reasonable desire to grow or otherwise obtain healthy fresh food at reasonable cost.
Fortunately BCC is at least trying to face these grave issues, and recently commissioned a report called ‘Building a positive future for Bristol after Peak Oil’, which is available online.
"The global food production and distribution systems on which Bristol relies are utterly dependent on oil. For every calorie of food energy delivered, 7-10 calories of fossil fuels are used to produce it. According to a July 2008 government report, the transportation of food alone accounts for a third of the 20.6 million tonnes of oil used in the UK food chain each year. Any interruption in food supply or an increase in cost risks devastating consequences."
"Options include farming methods which build soil fertility and don’t rely on pesticides and artificial fertiliser; protection of productive farmland on the outskirts of the city; promotion of more seasonal food from more localised producers; a switch to a less meat-based diet; encouraging people to grow their own food in private gardens, community gardens and allotments; and even using some public space to produce food." pp 6-7.
And on p 44 the authors state that:
"It is essential that planning decisions keep sufficient cultivatable land available in and
around the city to allow for a low energy local food system. This is already at risk as developers move to buy green belt land around the city from farmers in anticipation of more relaxed planning laws."
Given that the disastrous Regional Spatial Strategies have now, at last, been rightly scrapped, and that the Council's own reports are telling them that they need to be protecting green space land, when is Bristol City Council going to start joining the dots, take responsibility, and put a stop to any building on precious green belt land?
Well said Nick.
Oddly enough I'd just been collecting some handy quotes from the council's 'Peak Oil' report to use in a challenge to the Ashton Vale Rapid Transit (responses have to be in by Thursday). BRT is claimed to cater for growth - meaning more land, more travel - of the kind that the Peak Oil report very clearly says won't be possible in future. If I was a conspiracist, I might even believe that this BRT is really about
an Arena and a World Cup game or two.
In practice, the BRT does nothing to stem the increase in road traffic anyway, but that's another story....
This term 'food security' needs far more investigating.
A creeping militarisation of the food supply chain may have consequences.
In most other areas,'Security' tends to trump freedom, liberty, democracy, choice etc.
It also allows for huge and unquestioning levels of government intervention and centralised bureaucratic control as well as increased censorship, surveillance etc.
We need to start minding our language here.
The Bristol Peak Oil report's food section, by the way, is very limited concentrating entirely on low-tech, localised solutions that are unlikely to ever make up more than 5-10% of our food supply needs if we're very optimistic about it indeed.
It entirely ignores the incredible technological advances in food production since the 1960s. Believe it or not, we have been producing far more food using far less resources at an incredible rate for the last half century now. There's a big success story being ignored here.
and it is not going to go away. Technology and science will continue to be absolutely central to our food supply and to any serious thinking about 'peak oil', the environment and long term food supply.
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