The
coalition puppeteers in London may be pulling the strings,
but maybe we can guide the Mayor's knife-arm a little, using the budget consultation?
Here's
one small suggestion. It's about Town Greens, and the work and
income they provide for an often irrelevant bunch of lawyers.
At
the moment the city council, at public expense, immediately calls in its
own lawyers plus the inspectorate whenever anyone has the nerve to
suggest a bit of council owned land deserves 'Town Green' protection. All too often, it means getting the barristers in, too. Top barristers
It
doesn't actually have to be like that. They can simply take a look at the request, and agree to register.
Just do it. Voluntarily.
True,
registration means that the land in question immediately loses some
of its 'book' value – because it won't attract premium development
prices. But that's never a relevant factor unless the council is
actually contemplating selling it. And it can, instead, recognise
that public 'wellbeing' should come first, and consolidate that
through registration.
Not
all open spaces would deserve such preference – but it's not beyond
the capability of the PROWG Committee, which adjudicates such things,
to establish whether a particular open space merits voluntary registration,
without first having to call in the lawyers and setting up a protracted
legal fight with the applicants.
In
fact, among the last four applications that have gone right through
the process, the PROWG committee considered that two (Castle Park and
Cotswold Road) may not fulfil the legal tests to the letter, but
nonetheless merited voluntary registration. (By the time they
reached that conclusion, the lawyers had already taken their slice
of the council's budget).
In
a third case (Briery Leaze / Whitchurch Green) the council threw a
six-figure sum at 'protecting' its asset against market devaluation
and local residents, and still lost. The public benefit of that futile and costly exercise is that Hengrove people now have a
much valued 'Town Green'.
I
don't know the sums involved (it would probably need a persistent
and long-winded FoI request to get anywhere near the truth), but
they're obviously substantial, and could be used to offset some of
the unkinder cuts to more sensitive parts of the council's body.
Any
change would, I'm sure, be strongly resisted by the main
beneficiaries of the present system, the City Hall lawyers and bean
counters. But it only needs a small change to the present procedure, and, crucially, an
acknowledgement by the mayor that (as PROWG already knows) sometimes voluntary registration is the right
thing to do.
I've put it in the budget consultation, anyway.
1 comment:
+ 1
Couldn't agree more
(Except for the bit about the lawyers. Not "all" of them)
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