Stockwood Pete

The Silencing of Mr Grouchy

2012-01-26T15:57:00.000Z

It was a bad evening for Mr Grouchy.

First, he wished it had been him that used the platform of the Neighbourhood Puppetship to point out to our councillors that it's the City of London where businesses elect them to do their will. Not Stockwood. It's people that vote here.

It was Miss Moneypenny that got in first with that line. The occasion was the 10 minute discussion of one local shopping parade, brought under the heading 'You Said, We Did' which is usually reserved for items raised by residents in the Ward Forums. This one hadn't gone anywhere near a Forum. It turned out that our Stockwood councillors have taken on board a raft of business proposals that not only include all the things the council should be doing anyway to look after the highway; they also want to grub up Stockwood's only tree-lined public square to provide an extended car park (although, if some businessmen are to be believed, those parking spaces would become an informal park and ride, permanently occupied during the day). The whole package, said the councillors, should be added to the Puppetship's Local Action Plan - we had only to rubber-stamp the councillors' wishes before the ten minutes were up and we could move on to the next business.

It all brought echoes of the Great Double Yellow Cover Up of 2010

Miss Moneypenny, getting into her stride, also managed to point out that the very same councillors are desperate to stop new homes being built in the derelict car park behind the shops, although they've complained loud and long about the anti-social behaviour that now plagues the site, and about the failure of the owner to make it fit for the cars of shopkeepers, shoppers, and school-run mums who park on it uninvited.

Not that either of Miss Moneypenny's comments made much difference; the chair-councillor quickly abandoned the neutrality of her role and started arguing. In the end, the whole thing was put on ice for a couple of months. I think. Perhaps the Minutes will tell us. We don't do voting here.

With one item left on the agenda, Mr Grouchy was still determined to have his day. Even before the Partnership had gathered, he'd been trying, and failing, to get the four ward councillors interested in facing up to the biggest decision they're to take so far; which, if any, of seven green spaces in Stockwood they'll agree to sell off, and how they'll test public opinion on the matter. Mr Grouchy himself doesn't want them to sell any, but that's not the point. Anyway, he'd secured a foothold in the agenda - an item about the sell-off, to be used by the NP business managers to explain that since confirmation from the City Cabinet wasn't due for another 48 hours, it couldn't possibly be discussed now. 48 hours, in this case, becoming 8 weeks in the slow-moving cycle of the puppetship.

Anticipating this, Mr Grouchy put his Cunning Plan into action. It was a public statement briefly explaining the things that should have been in a background report - had one been written. How we've won the right to have these decisions made locally, how quickly the ward councillors are expected to reach a decision, and how any income will be split between the central pot and the Hengrove and Stockwood parks (the local share rises from near-zero (few sites sold) to 70% (all sites sold)). There was mention that the occasional meetings of busy NP committees wouldn't be enough to sound out popular opinion in this whole new ball-game; and, for good measure, an appeal that during the hoped-for public debate, an option should be considered to ask for 'voluntary' Town Green protection for saved sites.

But Mr Grouchy got nowhere. His statement had to be delivered in bits, because the councillor chair once again abandoned the neutrality of office, interrupted, challenged, refuted, made speeches, and filibustered. The other councillors looked a bit uncomfortable, but didn't intervene. Eventually it all petered out, as the 9pm scheduled end of the meeting passed. There was no vote, no conclusion, and plenty more problems for the minute taker.

So, with the fate of seven of Stockwood's green spaces hanging in the balance, there is still no plan to involve the wider public. The councillors who make the decisions are showing not the slightest interest in how best to involve the rest of us.

And Mr Grouchy is grouchier still.

(Mr Grouchy also tips his hat to Mrs Angry, in Broken Barnet )

[Added late on 26/1/12]

Cabinet confirmed decision this evening, as expected.

More background in this blog 6/12/11 and 26/11/11

Join Local online discussion on the HandS ON Forum

Transport Planning

2012-01-17T22:51:00.000Z

You wouldn't believe it.

Question to Bristol's Cabinet Member for Transport: of bus passengers travelling into the city, what proportion continue their journey beyond the central area on a) the same bus, or b) by another route?

Answer. Don't know. No idea.

Supplementary question: Wouldn't it be a good idea to find out? It would help, for instance, with deciding what the need is for better interchange facilities.

Supplementary answer: Maybe. We could ask the bus operators, but even if they know and they tell us, we couldn't tell anyone because of commercial confidentiality.

How on earth can we ever get a fit for purpose public transport network if we can't even find out where people actually travel?

Imprudential borrowing

2012-01-12T10:29:00.000Z

It's barely credible that these days, such things as providing school places and 'extra-care' provision for the elderly should not be a routine part of a council's budget.

Not in Bristol, though. Not in today's climate, under today's government. It seems that the only way to provide such things is by borrowing. What kind of sustainable economics is that?

Still, there is one part of the proposal to borrow an extra £50 million that is easily explained. A £10 million chunk of the £83 million-plus local contribution towards completing a South Bristol Ring Road and an under-used loss-making rapid transit. It's the first cut in the plan to raise cash from a city-centre workplace parking charge.

Take a look round the back of the Bristol Evening Paste, and you can see one good reason.

Met de Stroom Mee reaches the Council Chamber

2012-01-10T12:13:00.001Z

Just published - the Greens' first 'golden motion' on the council order paper, i.e. the one that's sure to get debated. It brings together the linked issues of fuel poverty, renewable energy, climate change and peak oil in one neat package in which Bristol could take a real lead.

Here's what the council is being asked to agree at next weeks meeting (Tues 17th, 2pm):

COUNCILLOR T GREEN TO MOVE:

Background

The costs of energy are rising steadily, leading to widespread fuel poverty in the UK and at the same time we are facing serious climate change caused by our profligate use of fossil fuels.

For many ‘shopping around’ for the best energy tariffs is confusing and time-consuming and it is often those working the longest hours or earning the least who are unable to take advantage of cheaper rates. This motion aims to address this issue of energy injustice. We also aim to stimulate the UK renewables market and make us a world leader in providing our citizens with affordable clean energy.

For the purpose of this motion we define clean energy as energy derived only from renewable resources i.e. excluding all fossil fuels and nuclear processes.

We propose that BCC leads the way to co-ordinate a national ‘energy bulk-purchase’ scheme of clean energy on behalf of UK residents based on an existing Dutch scheme ‘Met de Stroom Mee’. We had hoped to implement this solely for Bristol but cheaper tariffs have to be available nationwide by law.

A network of councils would be able to negotiate cheaper costs through bulk purchase both for their own needs and those of citizens. The scheme should also include incentives to reduce consumption.

This scheme will require investment to set up, but it is intended that this will be shared across authorities and it is likely that savings from the scheme will make it self supporting in the future.

Action

This council requests the Sustainable City team (a team within Bristol City Council) prepare a report to consider the above and to consider how to:

· Initiate and form a national network of authorities able to negotiate together a good rate of clean energy purchase

· Implement a scheme with this network to allow all UK citizens to buy cheap clean energy (where clean energy is defined as energy derived from non-fossil fuel and non-nuclear sources)

Council regards this a matter of urgency and requests this report if at all possible, be presented to the June Cabinet meeting and that the report specifically considers the possibility of implementing the scheme by December 2012.

_____________________________________

There's a pdf. summary here of Met de Stroom Mee, prepared by the New Local Government Network, a think tank supported by a number of corporations and local authorities (not including Bristol)

Council Questions:

2012-01-04T23:48:00.000Z

Asking questions for written reply in council meetings isn't always what it seems.

Sometimes you already know the answer, just want to get them to admit it on paper so it becomes part of the written record.

Sometimes, it's a way of putting a Cabinet member on the spot; the question's less important than the opportunity to put a 'supplementary' verbal question in the meeting itself. Cabinet ministers are adept at avoiding such traps, though.

Sometimes it's a bit of grandstanding (yes, I've seen it happen...) to score a party political point. This kind of question is especially favoured by councillors.

Sometimes it's designed to bring a Cabinet Member's attention to a particular issue that they'd otherwise ignore.

And sometimes it's simply an attempt to find something out. Here are three such questions, all transport related, that I've tabled for the next council meeting, on the 17th:

Bus journeys

Through journeys by bus via the city centre
[This question tries to validate (or not) the importance of having through cross-city bus routes that pass through the city centre ]

Do the city's public transport surveys, or other data made available by the bus operators, indicate what proportion of passengers on buses entering the city centre are continuing their journey beyond the central area, on either
a) the same route, or
b) another route?

Callington Road (Cycle) Link

The Cycling City programme included an ambition to use the 'Callington Link' alignment (the old Whitchurch Railway trackbed) to provide a safe off-road alternative to the present 'Whitchurch Way' route with its crossing of the A4 Bath Road at Arnos Vale. We were told at the time that negotiations were in progress to acquire the land.

a) Has there been any progress in acquiring the land? and
b) What is the current situation regarding this project's development?

Predicted usage of the South Bristol Link Road

In an answer at the full September council meeting, you confirmed that only 10% of peak hour journeys on the South Bristol Link Road are expected to start or finish in those more deprived suburbs of South Bristol which the road is purported to regenerate (ie 90% would be through traffic either diverted from other cross-town routes or newly generated through journeys.) You agreed (webcast 2hr 20min) that these figures were a cause for concern and that you would revisit them for further analysis.

Have you discovered anything new?

Confrontation at the Hollway Road shops

2012-01-02T22:15:00.001Z

It's time for a Town Brown application at Stockwood shops.

Here we are, accustomed since the year dot to park our cars, collect the kids, do the shopping, dodge the delivery vehicles and the potholes, and set fire to the waste bins behind the shops, and what happens? Some developer fellow from London comes along and wants to build all over it! Turns out that he actually owns it.

You really wouldn't credit it! Thank heavens our councillors are there defending the motorists and the juggernauts against the landowners.

Lets face it.... if the speculators get away with this, Tesco may decide there's not enough access to go ahead with their (rumoured) takeover of the Post Office. And the school-run mums will spread like a plague throughout the neighbourhood, as they fight for the nearest alternative parking that will keep them free of any obligation to walk the kids to school.

Planning Application
Evening Post article
HandS ON forum topic

2011 meets 2012

2011-12-26T17:02:00.000Z

The climate change deniers always (and rightly) warn against taking warmer weather as conclusive evidence of a warming trend. Not that it stops them citing every cold snap as evidence of the opposite!

I'll just settle for these images. Another local sign of the impacts of human behaviour on the global climate? Or just plain weird?

This Christmas, we still have (well, until we ate them) a few raspberries and nasturtiums in the garden.

Down the road at the Callington Road nature reserve, 2012's primroses are already showing.

Keeping the Lord Mayor mobile

2011-12-22T23:03:00.000Z

At last, the answer to the question that's got all Bristol talking.

What to do about the Lord Mayoral Limo? The tired old Daimler has been all but written off, since a little contretemps with a traffic bollard at the foot of the Council House ramp damaged its underside beyond economic repair.

Finding a replacement in these times of austerity was never going to be easy. The civic leader of Bristol must have a civic vehicle to match the city's international standing. But we're skint.

The answer is inspired by Chooseday.

Remember Chooseday? Probably not. It was launched with a big fanfare a few years ago by the great and good of Bristol. The idea was that Chooseday should be a the brand (yes, brand) for sustainable initiatives in the city. For starters, motorists were asked to give up their cars one day a week (on Tuesdays, believe it or not), and use their legs, bikes or public transport. Once that habit got established, other initiatives would be developed to expand the Chooseday brand.

It was never going to work, of course. Can you imagine if it did? Every Tuesday, instead of the usual congestion crippling Bristol, everyone would be piling on to buses and trains that simply weren't equipped for the sudden influx. Result... public transport totally discredited as an alternative to the car.

Within a few days, Chooseday became history.

Until now. Using the Chooseday model, the Mayoral Limo can be resurrected for nowt. The city and its Lord Mayor get a 'timeshare' vehicle, different on each day of the week, provided by the good example of the city bosses.

For three days, the leaders of the main parties will set the Chooseday example, putting their own vehicles at the Lord Mayor's disposal, while they find more sustainable ways to get around.

The fourth day, it's the Greens' turn. Tess Green, in fact. Sorry, Tess, you'll have to walk. Just pedal up to the Mansion House in Clifton, and leave your bike there.

Days 5 and 6, lets have the real city bosses join in.

Merchant Venturer John Savage should certainly be up for it - he was one of the first spokesmen for the Chooseday launch. On the day he volunteers his own car for civic use, he can still get to work at Business West on the newly upgraded 357/358 bus. No problem there then.

On Day 6, perhaps it should be left to the business community to select one of their own. Maybe by ballot among members of the Local Enterprise Partnership?

For the seventh day there can be only one volunteer - and one vehicle. Steve Lansdown already owes a debt of gratitude to Bristol, for all its efforts to turn his dream stadium and the assets around it into a reality, and to oppose anything and anyone that might get in the way. Steve, it is said, has a part share in a private jet based at the airport. He must be able to spare it one day a week; come here too much and he might have to start paying taxes, and anyway, he could always use the Weymouth train and the ferry to get home to Guernsey. So let this jet plane be the cherry on the mayoral transport cake - something to reflect the very special stature of the city, and to help attract the most ambitious candidates if, in future, we're to elect an all-powerful city Mayor. What other city could compete with that?

Not that the Lord Mayor should use the Lansdown jet, of course, other than for photo-opportunities. Just keeping it on the ground would do the city, and the planet, a favour.

Headbangers of the world unite

2011-12-18T11:29:00.000Z

As falls go, it wasn't a big one - just a tumble off a pushbike onto concrete a few yards from home on a quiet residential street. The biggest immediate response was embarrassment - did anyone see?

After lying there a few secs, I picked up myself, then the bike, and went home. Checked for injury - just a grazed knee and elbow.

After a few minutes, though, everything went fuzzy. I wasn't sure who I was or where I lived, let alone what had just happened. I vaguely remember a paramedic asking me questions, an ambulance arrived, and my wife and I were whisked off to A&E. On the way, memories returned - though not (and still not) of the half-hour or so blank spot after the bump.

Walked cautiously into A&E where some routine tests and checks were quickly done, all of it very reassuring. There was a wait for the CT scan (others' need were greater than mine) but after a few hours all was declared OK, and we caught the bus home.

The lessons:

Value the NHS - it's marvellous. Don't let them kill it.

Always wear a helmet, even for little low-traffic local trips. It was by chance I'd had one on this time, and it took enough hammering in the fall enough to split the side. If I'd not been wearing it, this would have been another, much darker, story, if it had been written at all.

Now, off to get a new one.....

The price of a kiss

2011-12-13T22:19:00.000Z

TescoValue - £3

Street price - zilch

The 54 bus goes national !

2011-12-13T18:47:00.000Z

....... or at least it's attracted plenty of comments on fixmytransport, after one Will Spurr used the site to ask for 'real time' displays along the 54 route.

The comments have brought plenty of info about what happens elsewhere in the UK, about different costs, and some original suggestions for making real time info more accessible.

No response yet from BCC though.

Neighbourhood Partnerships? or Councillors holding court?

2011-12-06T23:55:00.001Z

The city council's decision to delegate the controversial green space sales to 'neighbourhood' level will thrust these emergent local democratic structures into a very public spotlight.   Will they deliver? In this corner of the city, the indications aren't good.

Even at the council meeting, Cllr Gus Hoyt (Green) had to correct the euphoric Labour speakers with a reminder that they'd passed the big decisions not to the people, but to the Neighbourhood Committees. That is, to the four or six councillors for those wards where sales will be considered.   How those councillors pick which (if any) sites to sell will be their own responsibility. As will the converse - which sites to retain, thus losing a share of whatever income they might have produced to improve what's left.

In Hengrove and Stockwood, there's no sign that the residents will be involved to any degree.   My own attempt to start a dialogue between councillors, partnership members, and residents, fell at the first hurdle at the 'Stockwood Ward Forum' a couple of weeks ago.   There's no rush, said our councillor, we don't yet know the details, and we already know what our electors think.   No need to be alarmed that the government wants to force councils to sell everything in sight. Calm down, dear, don't worry, we'll tell the people about it in our Conservative ward newsletter.

Sadly, our Stockwood councillors keep well away from 'open access' fora - whether third party public meetings, like election hustings, or on-line discussions (including even the Neighbourhood Partnership's own 'HandS ON' forum). Party-funded ward newsletters offer a much more tightly controlled medium to set the agenda, the words, and the response.

But while Stockwood has seven sites on the parks hit list, our Hengrove partners have none, not since a group of residents succeeded in getting Brierley Leaze off the list by forcing a reluctant council to admit it met all the criteria for a Town Green.   So Hengrove has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from Stockwood's land being sold for development, and their two councillors – one LibDem, one Labour - must be aware of that.   And they form half the Neighbourhood Committee, alongside our two Tory conservative councillors.

Each Partnership meets four times a year for the Neighbourhood Committee to make formal spending decisions.   In practice, the agendas are long and there's no time for in-depth discussion, let alone consensus building at the 90-minute meeting, especially on complex site-by-site issues such as this.   We're assured that land sales won't be rushed into the January meeting.   The next ones are in March and then nothing till June.

So for now, it looks like any decision will be down to four councillors, with little or no reference to the park users or, indeed, to anyone who might put a case for development. They will, of course, take representations from anyone who cares to make them, including their close local advisers and their 'party line'. But the Neighbourhood Partnerships, set up for the purpose, look like being excluded from the discussions.

There will be no attempt at the tricky task of building a popular consensus. Leave that sort of radicalism to the College Green Occupiers.

Cosmetic Surgery

2011-12-06T23:50:00.001Z

This new sign appeared outside our local GP practice. What does it mean?

OK, the words are clear enough (though fingers crossed that 'we care' relates to the patients). But what on earth is the blue hexagon about? It can't be a cube - the yellow disc and the letters would be angled differently. Has the practice manager been on a course about blue sky thinking, perhaps? Or was it just some novelty drawing software ? I think we should be told

Power to the People?

2011-11-24T00:29:00.001Z

Tuesday's council meeting handed a new and challenging responsibility to the city's fourteen Neighbourhood Partnerships - they're to decide on the thorny issue of selling off some local green spaces for development. Well, not the Partnerships themselves - it's actually down to the ward councillors who sit within the Partnerships as 'Neighbourhood Committees'.

The word is was (see note below) that they're to reach a decision by the end of January. They'll also be offered incentives to sell as much as possible - because the more they sell, the greater proportion that comes back to improve the land that's left.

This is where I get parochial; I'll stick with what I know (and the Cabinet and central administration clearly don't) - the threatened open spaces of Stockwood. Here, seven spaces are on the target list:
Burnbush Close (bus terminus field)
Ladman Road (turning circle)
Ladman Road/Bagnell Road
Gillebank Close (pictured above)
Craydon Road Triangle
Hazlebury Road/railway path
Sturminster Close

As I told the council on Tuesday, only one of the seven could possibly be described as a 'backland' site, such as they love to describe as 'low value'. None of them has significant antisocial behaviour problems. Most are well used by the public, and with a little work all of them could be.

The purpose of delegating the decision to local councillors is to allow local people, who know the sites best, to get involved. But in practice the younger NP's (like ours covering Hengrove and Stockwood) haven't so far excited a lot of interest from residents in general.

I'll try using this blog to point to where the local information is and where to join the discussion - on and offline. Starting with the under-used 'HandS ON' forum where the stage is set to host comments on the Stockwood and Hengrove site sales. If you're a Stockwood or Hengrove resident, please use it.

Note, 24/11/11. The word now is that there will be a little longer allowed for the NP's to reach decisions. In Stockwood that means it's more likely to reach decision time in the April round of NP meetings. It still isn't long, of course. So it was all the more disappointing that at tonight's Stockwood Forum, neither the ward councillor nor the officers showed much interest in launching any kind of dialogue with the residents about it. Power to the people? Huh!

The Whipping Boys

2011-11-24T00:18:00.001Z

As council meetings go, Tuesday's turned out unexpectedly uncontroversial. There were even a few fleeting glimpses of sweetness and light, that the usual suspects, goading the opposition at every opportunity, couldn't entirely dispel.

For most of us, the big issue was, again, the threatened sale of green spaces. When it came to the vote, Members would be faced with a tricky balancing act, weighing up issues of localisation, social justice, quality of life, revenue, home-building, maybe even soil, wildlife and water conservation. Oh, and electoral advantage!

In the public forum, we strutted our stuff as best we could in the very limited time available. I'd wondered, not for the first time, if there was any point in this ritual, and this time I seized my moment with the mike to ask them to declare (for once) whether the vote was being 'whipped'. After all, if that order's already gone out, what's the point of debate? What's the point of the public forum?

In the event, it turned out that a deal had been struck before the meeting, and it finished with a unanimous vote. Whipping would have been irrelevant anyway - just like the statement I introduced on behalf of Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces. The deal was already sealed.

OK, my whipping question wasn't 100% innocent. I knew that the two Greens on the council ('Leader' Tess Green and 'Whip' Gus Hoyt) had formed independent and different views as to how to vote on the choices in the original motion. Fair enough. They'd both looked at the complex issues in great depth, the voters and the party had entrusted them to use their common sense, so why try to override that with some kind of whipping system that forces either of them to go against their consciences?

The three bigger parties don't seem to operate like that. I don't doubt that most of their members joined up because they found something in the party line that chimed with their own world views. But on an issue of parkland sales, which had been endorsed years before by all three, (only the Greens questioned it then) it's hard to see why any of them should have changed their views... what is so different now from the situation then?

The only thing I can think of has nothing to do with principle, it's simply electoral opportunism. Those party groups, as always, seem to define themselves primarily in electoral terms, and don't hesitate to silence any possible dissent within their ranks by telling their councillors how to vote. They even see such enforced obedience as a virtue.

How long before I'll witness in the Bristol council chamber what I once saw happen in my (then) local town hall? The debate was staged, the party positions were pre-defined, and the whips were out. The Leader of the majority Labour Party returned to the chamber after answering a call of nature, just in time to hear the mayor call for the vote. He put his hand up. Falteringly, his fellow members followed his example. So, to the Leader's surprise, did the opposition benches. By that time it was too late to rectify his mistake. Council policy had been dramatically and unexpectedly changed.

After that he listened much more carefully to what vote was being called.
They still routinely use the whip, though. They're still proud of their party discipline, too.

Saving the NHS

2011-11-10T11:13:00.001Z

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/5911

Quick.... this e-petition needs to get 100,000 signatures to force the government to debate the Health & Social Care Bill again in the House of Commons.

Though the bill was passed at its Third Reading by a majority of 65 in the House of Commons, opposition continues to grow as public understanding of the implications of the bill spreads more widely.

Forcing a government re-debate will at the very least throw another spanner in the works - and who knows, constituents may be able to persuade their MPs (with the threat of not voting for them at the next election) to vote against the Bill this time around.

Let’s make this Very Viral to get the numbers Very UP.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/5911

Evening Post Shocker!

2011-11-05T15:58:00.000Z

Pro-occupations

2011-11-04T08:59:00.000Z

Bristol's LibDem contortionists are getting plenty of practice as they try to deal with the embarrassment of the Occupy Bristol encampment on College Green. Barbara Janke has had to retreat into an embarrassingly patronising "understanding" of their cause, while seizing on the excuse of marking Remembrance Sunday as an emotive reason to 'geroff my land'. Characteristically, Gary Hopkins is, as always, much more bellicose, with his aggressive dismissal of the Green Party's open approval of what the occupiers stand for.

Labour seems to follow broadly along the Janke line, while the Tories lean heavily to the Hopkins approach. None of them are talking seriously about the underlying issues though.

The Evening Post is playing a predictable part in its own reporting of the encampment. Next to nothing about the reasons it's there, but with negative headlines that belie the nature of the occupation, and draw a disproportionate number of ill-informed comments on the website.

There's been a much more thoughtful and adult approach on Bristol24/7

Yesterday, College Green and the tents had suffered from the heavy rain; and the occupiers were busy laying new temporary boardwalks to protect the grass.

Meanwhile, over in Cannes, the G20 were also busy attempting to patch up the increasingly slippery foundations of their own very temporary looking structure - the economic system.

Of course, everyone wants the College Green 'occupation' to be temporary. On the other hand we also want an economic system that's fair and just, that won't come crashing down around us. That will take more than a few pallets.

One thing that could give that international house of cards a little more stability, damping down some of the market tremors that could bring it down, is the so-called Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions - those deals that have no substance in terms of real goods or services, they're merely abstract and often incomprehensible 'products' dreamed up by the financial establishment to produce a quick profit for some and the illusion of economic growth for others.

Originally known as a Tobin Tax, this always seemed a very obvious way of tackling some of the world's most serious inequalities and injustices, while at the same time slowing down the dangerously erratic tides of the money markets. And at last it's gained very respectable and influential support from those who really can do something to make it happen. Sarkozy, Merkel, Soros, Buffet, Gates, the Vatican, and now our own Archbishop of Canterbury, writing in the Financial Times on Wednesday.

There's the opportunity to do it at Cannes - if they're not too distracted by the debacle of the failures of the Greek economy. Lets hope.

Unseasonal Fruits

2011-11-04T08:26:00.001Z

Last month was the first time I recollect seeing ripe strawberries still growing so late in the year. But this is the third time I've been able to blog about picking outdoor tomatoes in November.

Creative

2011-10-09T20:19:00.000+01:00

Dedicated to everyone who's travelled on a 36 bus......

We believe that buses are the future | First bus from Frame Digital on Vimeo.

BMX for the Under-70s

2011-10-01T12:25:00.000+01:00

[between-the-lines mentions that today is the International Day of Older Persons ]

One of the great things about younger people having to go to school, college, or work, is that their playthings are left for us older ones to enjoy....

Result!

2011-09-28T09:16:00.000+01:00

I'd like to claim the credit, but more likely it should go to the new 'Fix My Transport' website.

The real time bus departure boards at Temple Meads are working again after many months out of action. Being one of that minority of Bristolians lucky enough to live within a single bus trip of the station, the board's very useful - it tells you whether to rush or to linger awhile. That's all the more important these days with curtailed evening buses (for instance the now hourly Sunday evening No 1 service to Broomhill). But I'd been merely passing by the defunct screen with a long-suffering grumble, without breaking through the inertia barrier and actually lodging a real complaint.

Until, that is, 'Fix My Transport' was launched by UK Citizens Online Democracy, the same people who brought us TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, What do They know and FixMyStreet

"FixMyTransport represents an experiment to discover whether a sufficiently well designed internet service can help tip people over the edge from grumbling about a problem to taking action to resolve it."
It tipped me over the edge on September 6th. And now the screens are working again.

Unless it's just a coincidence, of course......

Still, is there any reason why this simple device shouldn't be provided in other public places too? Say, in the main shopping malls... or the bigger pubs (Wetherspoons, just adapt one of your rolling news screens). It makes good business sense, if people choose to spend time on your premises instead of out at the bus stop. Or even put one in the council house foyer, to help councillors after one of those interminable evening meetings. If the buses are still running, that is.

The Lord Mayor's Show

2011-09-11T08:58:00.000+01:00

There was no green political capital to be made from the Visitation to open Stockwood's just-built BMX park - which is probably all for the good. The Mayoral Car didn't take a short cut across the field; instead Cllr Gollop made his stately way on foot, protected by the mayoral wellies. The only signs of party politics was the icefield that spreads from the council house even into this corner of Bristol, cutting certain councillors off from even talking to each other.

Otherwise, it was all celebratory; though among local establishment figures, only the vicar had the nerve to bring a bike and gingerly try out a bit of the new track.

Here's the mayor wielding the Civic Scissors to open the 'BMX Park' (while missing the show behind him).

The figleaves are falling on the South Bristol Ring Road

2011-09-08T00:12:00.003+01:00

It's official.

90% of the peak hour traffic on the South Bristol Link - "a new road linking the more deprived suburbs of South Bristol to the existing road network at the A38 and the A370" - won't serve those suburbs, it'll just go straight through.

And even if becomes impossible to provide the promised Rapid Transit buses along it, the council will still consider building the road.

These two disclosures came in reply to questions I put to Executive Member Tim Kent at Tuesday's full council meeting. They show emphatically that, despite years of denials, a Ring Road is the ambition. Bus Rapid Transit and a half-promise of economic development were mere figleaves, designed to hide the ugly fact that in an age of climate change, peak oil and congestion, they still think it's good to increase traffic.

............................
References:

Q. Does traffic modelling indicate what proportion of journeys on the two sections of this new road will originate or end in those 'more deprived suburbs'?

A. The traffic modelling indicates that in the morning peak, approximately 10% of trips would be to/from the more deprived deprived suburbs. In the inter-peak this would be approximately 20% of trips and in the evening peak this would be approximately 10% of trips.

A further answer showed that the Link could be threatened, unless 'certain aspects' of the Ashton-Vale-to-City-Centre bid go ahead. A supplementary verbal Q&A (which will be on the webcast) showed this means BRT on the Link won't work without BRT on the rest of the line - but doesn't rule out going ahead with the road anyway.

Crying all the way to the Happiness Bank

2011-09-07T23:17:00.002+01:00

Why does this email make me even grumpier?

Dear [contact name],

CONGRATULATIONS! [name of group] has been identified as a particularly brilliant part of Bristol Life and somewhere that develops Happiness.   We've arranged an AMAZING OPPORTUNITY for you to feature in the forthcoming Happiness Bank AND have the chance to have FREE film training resulting in a film made about what you do.

READ ON….

Happy City has been working with communities all around Bristol asking them what are the best things in their area, and what projects, ideas, initiatives are doing great things that increase happiness in all sorts of diverse ways.   Your project has been put forward as an all round brilliant thing.

We are currently busy building the soon to be launched ‘HAPPINESS BANK’ online – which will be a place where everyone can share what works and how it’s done. This is so that others can learn from it, support it, be inspired by it, replicate solutions and develop their own ideas with the help of this shared wisdom.

We will be featuring your work in the bank of solutions and would love it if you could enter the details on our development site so the real story can be shared and your top tips for making change happen can be made available to other people across the city.

It should only take around 5-10 minutes to make your deposit in the Happiness Bank and in return we can promise:

·         Publicity – we will be sharing the best of the stories with all our contacts in local press, radio, tv and online media outlets

·         Social Media – we’ll be tweeting, facebooking and Youtubing the best of Bristol

·         When the Happiness Bank is launched in autumn 2011 your project will be showcased to people across the city and beyond interested in supporting growing happiness by volunteering, supporting or funding the best projects around.

In addition, the TOP 5 projects (judged by members of our trustees and partners) will be offered the opportunity to have a bespoke FREE FILM MAKING WORKSHOP resulting in a short film about their inspiring work which we will be sharing extensively and you will be able to use for your own publicity, recruitment, funding bids, evaluation… This is worth £1000s to the 5 chosen projects, as part of a pilot Community Voice project funded by Lottery Awards for All. Plus, EVERYONE who shares their story in the Happiness Bank will be in the running for this opportunity when the full Community Voice project is launched next year (subject to further funding). More information about Community Voice is on the website at http://www.happycity.org.uk/happy-city-community-voice.

To share what you do on the Happiness Bank and enter your project for the Community Voice film workshops please sign in athttp://www.happycity.org.uk/user/register and create your own username and password.

Once registered click on the Happiness Bank tab and then on the ‘deposit’ button (or go straight to http://www.happycity.org.uk/node/add/solution) and fill in the online form. The site should do the rest – and your story, your wisdom and your ideas will be available to everyone who searches for an answer to their challenge, or an idea or activity to support.

Thanks in advance for adding to the Bank and to the Happiness of communities everywhere. We’ll let you know by the end of September if you’ve been chosen for the Film project and in the meantime we’ll keep telling people about what you do.

Best wishes

The Happy City Team
..................................

In case you don’t already know about us, we are Happy City, a small grassroots organization, based in Bristol, aiming to:

·         Enable communities to focus on happiness, and the things that positively influence that.

·         Share pre-existing sources of happiness and support the growth of new ones, through uncovering, highlighting, celebrating, and sharing the learning from what is already working across the city and use that learning to support change to happen faster, better, with greater participation and fewer natural resources.

For more info go to www.happycity.org.uk, or call 07836 706978

Tories for off-road biking

2011-09-05T08:43:00.011+01:00

On Saturday, we'll have Lord Mayor Geoff Gollop here in Stockwood for the Grand Opening of the new bike track, set into the slopes behind the Whittock Road allotments. It's rumoured (well, I'm starting a rumour...) that he'll hurtle down the course on a penny-farthing borrowed from the M-Shed, to symbolise our rapid descent into the Tory World of Victorian Values.

No doubt our own Conservative ward councillors will be there too. The real credit for the new course, though, should go to the young people who put such effort into creating and improving the old one. It was enought to earn themselves Youth Opportunity Fund backing, to pay for all the earthworks on this impressive new run.

Question 1 is - will this new-found Tory enthusiasm for bikes off the road be matched by keeping their own cars on the road?

The new track's a good 100m off Whittock Road, across level grassland. It was always going to be tempting for those arriving by car (and it looks like there'll be plenty, this won't be a wholly 'Stockwood' track) to drive those final 100m over the grass, summer and winter. Will Bristol's Conservatives set them a permissive example on Saturday?
...........................

It certainly seems that Bristol's Tories are wedded to their cars. They've been pretty silent, but (like their Labour and LibDem counterparts) generally supportive of plans for Bus Rapid Transit for the city. Until, that is, they got round to reading the Cabinet papers for last week and realised that the cost wouldn't come out of general taxation - a big chunk of it must now (thanks to George Osborne) come from Bristol itself. And the only realistic way of doing that is to levy those businesses in the central area that have workplace parking, at a rate of (wait for it....) a pound a day a parking spot. Cue Tory Shock Horror.

Of course, there was no plan B from the Tories; why bother when you're not in power, and there's some easy political point-scoring that's there for the taking?

So Question 2 is, does the Tory reluctance to raise funds from those car-driving commuters blessed with free workplace parking in the city centre stretch as far as opposition to the South Bristol Ring Road which is an integral part of the BRT bid package? I think we should be told. After all, that road would have a far greater impact on the quantity of traffic in Bristol than all three BRT schemes put together. IMHO.
.............................

Back to the bikes. The conservatives' enthusiasm for the off-road bike track riders clearly doesn't extend to the safety of those who cycle to get from A to B on real roads. Stockwood Cllr David Morris, who's written to BaneS about proposed new housing development between Whitchurch and Stockwood, takes the opportunity in his objection to blame congestion on Wells Road on "the installation of cycle tracks along the A37 reducing the flow of traffic into and out of Bristol".

And there I was, thinking it was caused by too many cars and heavy lorries!

Riding Out Review: ftr-metro, Swansea.

2011-09-02T23:38:00.007+01:00

We were keen to try out the new ftr-Metro over at Swansea - largely because the same outfit is tipped to open up in Bristol before long.

ftr-metro is a new offering from the First chain, which already provides this more specialist choice to its customers in York, Leeds, and Swansea - to mixed reviews.

In Swansea, as in Bristol, First already has a near monopoly trading position, so for our starters we thought we'd try their basic buses, and as we expected there is little to choose between Swansea and Bristol. One difference, though, was that holders of concessionary fare passes had only to touch their cards on a reader to board the bus; no need to tell the driver their destination, so boarding and dwell times were marginally quicker.

Next came the eagerly anticipated main course of ftr-metro.

We'd done our homework and knew already that we should expect our existing perceptions of public travel to be challenged - making the terms bus, tram, and train redundant for this journey. The goftr website had told us.

As we waited for our neither-bus-tram-nor-train, we did note that perhaps there had been a bit of a cash shortfall in the preparatory phase; the raised kerbs offering easy boarding for buggies and wheelchairs had, here at least, been substituted by temporary rubber sloped steps on the low pavement. That seemed fairly typical of central Swansea; what isn't modern, anonymous, and cloned from other centres looks pretty seedy and uncared for.

Then we saw our 'new mode of public travel' approaching.

It comes presented in stylised blue and purple cladding, par for the course and straight out the First Colouring Book. The illusion that this is not a normal bus is further stressed by the lack of anyone called a driver. Instead, the vehicle is controlled by a 'pilot', who sits in a separate and spacious air-conditioned cabin. The more menial task of dealing with the passengers falls to a 'customer service host' - bringing nostalgic memories of the conductors who did the same job when I were a lad.

Fortunately, we'd had the foresight to buy a 'PlusBus' add-on to our rail tickets, so we didn't have to pay the usual First prices, which are much the same as here in Bristol.

No-one would deny that the interior of the ftr-metro was clean and reasonably comfortable. Possibly the presence of a customer service host discourages the jetsam of bottles and old newspapers that litter other buses. Otherwise, though, the ride quality wasn't much different from our local 54 bus in Bristol. And you get a better view from the upper deck of a 54.

Dwell time at stops was very short, thanks to the two entry/exit doors and the absence of any need to buy or show tickets on entry.

Outside, there's been extensive re-engineering of the road layouts to provide a clearer run for ftr-metro.

There's even a new section, isolated from the public roads by automatic gates. It doesn't really live up to its 'rapid' promise, though. If it's true that ftr-metro triggers green lights as it goes, it certainly didn't show up on our trip.

Swansea's modern central bus station can't accommodate the ftr-metro, because its layout requires buses to back out. Instead, this most central ftr stop, where drivers changeover, is on the road skirting the bus station. We noticed one would-be passenger racing dangerously (and illegally) across the busy bus apron in an effort to reach the ftr before it set off.

Remarkably, ftr-metro doesn't come packaged with real time information, which they don't seem to have heard of yet in Swansea's public transport system. Nor is there any expectation of prepayment of fares, as is the norm in London, and is planned for the Bristol BRT. No cross-ticketting either (except within the limits of First's own day and season tickets) and no smart cards.

As the flagship of Swansea's public transport provision, ftr-metro may be eye-catching to the visitor, but it really doesn't live up to the hype. It smells like a bus and it looks like a bus and it does what buses do.

Disappointed by our main course, we decided to complete the trip with an open-top ride around Swansea Bay to Mumbles Head. That made up for a lot!

Ratings (Nottingham=5):
Buses: 2
Rapid transit (ftr-metro): 2
open-top bus: 4
infrastructure: 2

Ain't nature wonderful?

2011-08-30T17:48:00.008+01:00

The footpath runs through a nature reserve. Among the wealth of wild flowers and trees, there's an abundance of birds, insects and mammals. At this time of year, there's plenty of wild blackberry and elderberry be enjoyed, too, to be followed by the sloes, and, if the squirrels don't get there first, some nuts.

There's not much unnatural noise, either; just the constant hum of traffic on the A4 at the Bath Road Park and Ride.

In the southern part of the reserve, volunteers from Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces have spent months clearing some of the thick undergrowth of bramble to regain access to the old orchard.

So far around 100 apple trees have been rediscovered, plus some pears, plums, and damsons. In October, there'll be an apple pressing day - locals can bring their own apples, or those freely gathered from the orchard, for pressing and go home with bottles of the fresh juice.

The Open Space is a free luxury - somewhere to escape to, to enjoy, to value - even to feed from.

But put a spade in the soil, and as likely as not its blade won't sink right in - there'll be a brick or other rubble, or a bit of old iron in the way. Between 1954 and 1978 this was the Stockwood Lane municipal tip, taking industrial, commercial and household waste. The footpath in the picture was the main access road, down which a procession of loaded wagons would bring the city's rubbish. Strictly, it isn't a landfill; like most tips, it was really a 'land-raise' operation, altering the natural topography of the countryside.

I'm not a great fan of landfill - it's generally the worst possible of options for all the 'stuff' that we no longer have any immediate use for. But thirty years on, this part of the Stockwood Open Space shows little evidence of this ugly period of its history. The wildlife and the fruits thrive, and the local people (those in the know) come to enjoy it.

Four or five miles to the west, another more controversial one-time landfill site, Parsonage Farm, is not being returned to nature so easily. Like Stockwood, this one was farmland commandeered for refuse disposal, and it received the same kind of treatment - but without the household waste. Now, it's become the battleground between those who want it protected as an Ashton Vale Town Green, and those who see it as a vital stepping stone for Bristol City's future success in the upper heights of English football. Possibly others see it as a way of making lots of money, but that's another story.

This Ashton Vale ex-landfill site is once again being dismissed in the comment columns of the Evening Post as a muddy field, a rubbish tip, a dog's toilet, or worse. Just the place for a dream stadium, fast-food outlets, car parking, a hotel, and the rest.

I don't doubt that the Stockwood Open Space could have been dismissed just as strongly a few years back.

It's our good fortune that it wasn't.

Caring for Chatterton's Birthplace

2011-08-02T21:51:00.003+01:00

Above, a picture taken on 14th July of Thomas Chatterton's birthplace on Redcliffe Way. Looking well cared for, and with a nice bit of local food production outside.

Below, the same place this last Sunday. The veg have been thriving, but everything else has gone downhill. The place is derelict.

Anyone know the story?

Stupidity? Irresponsibility? Ticking the boxes for Plot 6.

2011-07-29T23:05:00.005+01:00

Plot 6, alongside Temple Meads rail station, is arguably the finest opportunity to do what bendy buses won't do, and what trams or Portishead reopening wouldn't do; to turn around Bristol's woeful public transport network so that everyone can get everywhere in two hops at most, with safe and comfortable interchange on the way. The sort of thing that might actually be better than using the car. Cross-ticketing and good real time information can offer 'soft' infrastructure to make it all seamless, and an Integrated Transport Authority can provide the essential governance. Not rocket science. Easy. Job done.

Except.... that the soft infrastructure is being developed only very slowly, sometimes actively opposed by key players, and the ITA isn't being pursued at all. All the energy and the public money is going into Bus Rapid Transit (and, in the case of the South Bristol Link, into the completion of a southern ring road masquerading as sustainable transport).

Worst of all, the Plot 6 site itself, and all its potential, is set to be buried for ever under a new development of retail, office, and car parking.

You might think such folly is impossible. After all, don't the politicians of all parties now officially recognise that Plot 6 has fantastic potential as a transport hub? Didn't the new Local Enterprise Partnership at their very first formal meeting acknowledge the importance of the site for transport interchange to serve economic development? . And they're the unelected quango gifted with the powers to turn this designated 'local enterprise zone' into an employment hub at the heart of a transport network. Everything's in place to make it happen.

BUT this last week, Bristol24/7 published a story that had until then only circulated informally; Plot 6 will not be used as a transport hub. Best we'll get (perhaps) is a BRT stop over in the Friary (Pipe Lane) to serve the station, while the 8/9 buses and the airport flyer that currently stop on the main station approach ramp would be relegated to the same place.

Significantly, the council's rapid rebuttal unit, and the Executive member, have remained strangely silent.

And today, we've seen the pictures of the Prime Minister re-enacting the Thatcher 'Walk in the Wilderness' alongside Temple Meads, in the company of the Local Enterprise Partnership's chair, Colin Skellet. Again, the covering press statements are full of promised opportunities for commercial development across the zone; not a word about its transport potential.

So where's the debate, where's the accountability?

Over on 'Ask Bristol' we've just been invited to discuss the pros and cons of the three bendy-bus routes, just after the council's made its decision to bid for them (while committing to raising the best part of £100 million locally to pay toward the cost). And the politicians are just starting their annual August break from public meetings.

Treating the public with contempt is nothing new, and neither is breaking promises - but the Plot 6 debacle takes stupidity, short-sightedness, and irresponsibility to quite unprecedented levels.

A Stockwood Miscellany

2011-07-23T23:44:00.009+01:00

Time to catch up.....

Recycling
Residents of Harden Road will welcome the reports that we'll 'soon' be getting the long-promised kerbside recycling service for plastics. The inadequate bin behind the Co-op does get overfilled, or more often just littered by people who can't be bothered to actually put stuff into it.

Meanwhile, across Hollway Road, Leadbitters, the contractors for the new Chestnut Court complex, have put in their own fairly comprehensive recycling bank. It's only a few large bins set behind slots in the site fencing, but it's a welcome addition to Stockwood's barely existent recycling facilities. The same contractors have offered to provide a recycling centre at the completed site, too.

Down at the Orchard.....
Looks like we can expect a good harvest from the 'official' fruits of the orchard on the Open Space (some 'unofficial' crops of nettles, elderflowers and plums have already been put to good use). A recent count of the trees along the informal path north of the new picnic table (thanks, FoSOS, Parks, and the Neighbourhood Partnership) found fifty apples, four pears and a plum; and there are plenty more in the uncharted scrublands to the east of that.
In October, Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces expect to bring in an apple press to make the most of it. If enough people help organise the day, it could be our own Oktoberfest.

Stockwood Green School buildings

.... are not to become the community resource that we'd hoped for. Instead, from September, they're the new home for the Whitehouse Centre, a 'pupil referral centre' which is moving from inadequate premises over in Hartcliffe. It's a short stay unit for pupils who haven't coped with mainstream schooling (or vice versa), who'll be bussed to and from the new unit each day.
A new head teacher and staff are keen to build good relationships with the Stockwood community. The Evening Post quotes the acting head: "We will be able to make extensive use of the tranquil grounds and hope to create a kitchen garden and outside space which would benefit from community involvement." A good oportunity for allotmenteers! "I'd also welcome any local people who would like to take an active role in our management committee." . Looks like there'll still be opportunities for community use of the buildings in the evenings, too.

Local Food Project
It looks like the Whitehouse Centre and the two primary schools will be leading the way with initiatives to put local food on the table, and maybe in the shops. It coincides with members of the Neighbourhood Partnership actively encouraging the use of public sites to grow food to share - one of the first signs of that will be planters/raised beds in public places. There's also whatever we can gather from the orchard and the sprinkling of fruit and nut trees around the ward. But in the end it's people power that's the key.

Nice to see this bit of thriving guerrilla gardening alongside Chatterton's house on Redcliffe Way. All the more so on such a busy public site that must be vulnerable to vandalism. Presumably the work of the people occupying (and looking after) the long-neglected building?

High Growth Investments?
One initiative that doesn't tick the right boxes is the arrival of hanging baskets around the Stockwood shops. They're absurdly high up, and ridiculously awkward to maintain and water. Fail.

Write your own news....
The badly revamped Evening Post website makes it possible to dream up your own news story and present it as fact on the main news pages.
I was briefly delighted to see the announcement that the 55 bus (Stockwood via Wells Road) is to be restored. Until it turned out to be a bit of mischief from an anonymous contributor to their 'forum' pages, elevated to the news page because it attracted comments.
The fiction seems to be a response to improvements made to bus stops along Wells Road - which are, I guess, more to do with introducing a 'showcase' route between Bristol, Midsomer Norton and Radstock. That won't be before time, though you have to wonder what it will do to the Wells/Street service.

and thinking of buses....

What an asset Alan Peters' A-bus service is! Cheap, but never predictable.
........................
(and, added a day later)
Work should be starting (at last) on the upgraded BMX track behind the Whittock Road allotments tomorrow (Monday).

AVTG - The Biggest Fix Yet? Probably

2011-06-18T10:06:00.001+01:00

It was, by any measure, an extraordinary way of reaching a decision. So much so that the term 'fix' looks like the right one. On the balance of probability, of course.

Right at the start we had Cllr Peter Abraham dismiss the widespread concerns that he might not be fully open-minded (bearing in mind his declaration last month that he is "convinced we should reject the inspector's advice. I don't think this qualifies as a town green and it brings the process into disrepute."). That, he explained, was before he joined this committee and was invited to chair it. Now, he is 100% open minded. He's taken advice and is confident that he is beyond any legal challenge.

So that was all right, children.

The meeting papers did not include the report of the independent Inspector, Ross Crail, who had (together with two barristers) thoroughly tested the evidence of witnesses brought by the applicants and the objectors - and concluded that the land does qualify as a Town Green. Someone, somewhere, had decided that the committee needn't bother with that.

Nor did the papers include the 'further evidence', crucial to the officers' recommendation. Why read it when you can be fed a carefully chosen selection?

There was only the officer's 13 page report, and of that only three pages were dedicated to the 'further evidence' of objectors and applicants - roughly in the proportion of 4:1 - as summarised by the council's own chief finance officer, who doesn't seem ever to have been involved in a Town Green application before.

Public statements came first. Most of the committee looked bored, even when our Stockwood councillor ignored all the reminders that this is about past use of the site and waxed enthusiastic about its development potential. The Green Party statement was listed at No 80 (of 80) so I never got the chance to speak to it.

The Chief Executive, Jan Ormondroyd, told members what their options were. When she said one is to approve the whole site as a Town Green, she added 'but that wouldn't take the new evidence into account'. A serious misdirection there, Jan. Of course they could do both.

After a few desultory questions (at least one of them showing the papers hadn't been read or absorbed), and a comment from Cllr Alex Woodman that the information was wholly inadequate, we waited for the meat of the discussion. What did members actually think? What value did they attach to the evidence, and why? Would they question the Chair's integrity?

It didn't happen. From the Chair, Cllr Abraham simply took it straight to a vote on the recommendation before them. Six hands were raised. The deed was done.

The two dissenting members were Alex Woodman and Neil Harrison. Neil gives his own perspective on his own blog

AVTG - The Biggest Fix Yet?

2011-06-13T11:39:00.005+01:00

Over the last couple of years, we've got used to the council insisting on getting its own way, whatever the evidence or the legal niceties might do to get in the way. As Harry commented on this blog, "The council doesn't care anymore. They can break any law. Break any convention. Do anything they want. "

How far can they go with it? Back in March of last year, building a ring road on the shallow pretence that it's really to get jobseekers in Hartcliffe a bendy bus to find work in Ashton Vale seemed to me to be pushing the limits.

But that was easily capped by the long drawn out saga of the Green Space sell-off, which for sheer consistency of denial in the face of reality broke new ground, only to be halted (perhaps - but that's another matter!) on May 5th when the electorate made it impossible to continue with the charade.

Now they're set to go one better even than that, with the Ashton Vale Town Green decision, to be considered by the PROWG Committee on Thursday.

I and others have already commented on the self-evident 'predetermination' of the decision by key Committee members. But now we can also see the advice those members will be getting. It's carefully honed to give them an excuse to reach the decision the Administration (not to mention the landowners) want, while simultaneously rejecting the independent opinion of the expert assessor brought in by the council. In fact that expensively gathered opinion doesn't even seem to be among the meeting papers.

This new report to PROWG members relies instead on the council's own 'in-house' expertise to analyse the case for and against a Town Green. Expertise? Well, not quite. Instead of getting the report written by its most senior expert in planning matters and law, the council's commissioned it from a colleague on the Strategic Directorate; Will Godfrey, the Strategic Director of Corporate Resources. Planning isn't part of his brief; his corporate task is 'overseeing the Finance, Human Resources, Shared Transactional Services, ICT, Integrated Customer Services (including Benefits and Council Tax), Legal and Procurement functions. He also leads on work relating to Value for Money and Commissioning across the council'.

Handed this (for him) novel task, the Strategic Director has obligingly delivered just what the Administration wants. He recommends 'partial registration' of the site. This would fully meet the wishes of the Objectors (being, in effect, Steve Lansdown and the football club); they can build the stadium exactly as planned, while the remaining land would be a managed soakaway (or wetland) to cope with the drainage from the main site. This is, as ever, presented as a social benefit for residents.

But that's not what the original professional assessment, by Ross Crail, decided after ten days close examination of all the evidence. How does the Director square the two conflicting views? Simple. He rejects 'on the balance of probability' the original determination that the northern part of the site, at one time used as a landfill, meets the criteria for Town Green Registration.

Then he goes on to conveniently redefine the northern part of the site - not just as the one-time landfill, but as exactly the area required for the new developments and the linked infrastructure. It becomes bounded by the outer line of the proposed BRT route from Long Ashton Park and Ride.

Should any committee member be tempted to ask for the evidence of the public's failure to use this redefined area 'as of right' in the last twenty years, the report tells them that "There is no statutory requirement that a Committee reads this documentation". Trust me, I'm a lawyer. Trust me, I'm a finance expert. Trust me - but I'll not trust you.

Committee members are, however, offered a summary of the 'new' evidence, at Appendix B. The objectors side comes in some detail; the applicants side is so curtailed (and so misrepresented in the Evening Post) that they've since released the detail (linked from the Bristol Blogger's Indymedia post)

If there's a hole in the Strategic Director's report caused by the absence of any examination of this alleged evidence of non-use, it's been filled instead by an enthusiastic claim of what new development will do for the club and the city; 1,000 new jobs, £150 million investment.... you know, you've heard it before. Not of course that Members should let that promise sway their decision! These wonderful developments, the Director adds cautiously, are 'not a material consideration'. He just thought it was worth mentioning.

So on Thursday we'll have a prejudiced committee, and a prejudiced and inadequate report, a sidelined recommendation from a qualified inspector, along with huge pressure on the councillors involved to reach the decision that the landowners and the current administration and the Evening Post want.

You'd think, if there was a real case against Town Green registration, it would be easier than that.

NB. The meeting's at 4pm on Thursday at the Council House. A webcast is promised.

GetaCab 2

2011-06-12T23:59:00.002+01:00

The webcast, for some reason, didn't happen. The council's press office has remained silent. So all we passengers know so far of what the Cabinet decided for us is what the media chose to publish. From that...

On First's 'service' routes, it sounds like all those journeys marked with a £ sign in the paper or online timetable, will be reduced to hourly - except those on Sunday evenings, which will disappear completely unless First sudenly decide they were economic after all.

The 500 Harbour Link bus is no more. Intriguing that it should be axed to save a few bob, when the same council is promising to find £17 million MORE for the Ashton Vale rapid transit, to provide vital public transport in the same area, guaranteed to lever in squillions of inward investment etc etc. that wouldn't otherwise materialise.

Intriguingly, though, the Park and Ride contract has been won by a 'not for profit' company, HCT (Hackney? Community Transport).

And - totally outside the council's influence - Freebus was successfully launched yesterday, providing a half-hourly Saturday daytime service on a loop around the city centre. So there is something very positive to report.

Otherwise, even without the detail, this thirties Labour Party poster pretty well sums up what's happening across the board.

GetaCab

2011-06-08T18:21:00.007+01:00

Expect to see cabbies dancing in the ranks tomorrow evening. The Cabinet will be handing them a wealth of new business, as key bus services for this major city are dismantled to appease George Osborne.

The Cabinet's being asked to decide between two intolerable options - both of them cutting deep into those services deemed (until now) to be "socially necessary". In the process, it will hit everyone from schoolchildren to the elderly and disabled, make nonsense of any pretensions to fight climate climate change, to cut air pollution, or to reduce congestion.

Right now, we don't know which option the Cabinet (are there any non-motorists among them?) will impose on us (I'll add to this post when it happens). The papers in front of them at the meeting won't help them choose, they don't spell out out what will be cut, only, scattered about the documents, what might be retained. Sir Humphrey would be proud of it.

It's clear, though, that after September, it will be much harder (if it's possible at all) for any Cabinet Member to catch a bus home after a meeting. At best, evening services on the main city routes will be heavily reduced in the evenings, so that (say) to get back here to Stockwood will involve waiting for the next HOURLY bus. At worst, the last bus will leave around 9.30!

Early morning services face the same threat, while Sunday buses are likely to be halved.

This may all be good news for First; unless passenger numbers are cut pro rata to the number of buses, they'll be able to squeeze more passengers on fewer buses, and pick up a city subsidy at the same time. It's an ill wind....

Meanwhile, over in Nottingham......

......I had the chance last week to try their city-run public transport - the bus and the tram. Cheaper than Bristol, city-wide, high frequency, excellent buses, stops, and information. Routes are branded by colour, and terminate in the centre.

There's a flat fare (£1.60, or £3.40 all-day) plus a whole range of cheaper seasons and group tickets, operating as smart cards, often valid with other operators too. The buses are much quicker, because no change is given and most people use smart cards anyway. And so far as I can see, it's all unthreatened by cuts.

That's what happens where a city has the wisdom to keep its transport operation 'in house'. Tomorrow, Bristol City Council will agree to abandon its last council-owned vehicles, the specialist vehicles dedicated to community transport. Ideological insanity.

Countdown to Zero

2011-06-08T10:19:00.004+01:00

At the tender age of twenty one I, like most of those around me, was contemplating imminent death. We were helpless to prevent it, the decisions would be taken many thousands of miles away. It was the time of the Cuba Crisis, the most public cold war confrontation between the nuclear armed governments of Russia and the USA. Either one side gave way - and they were showing precious little sign of it - or global nuclear war would be triggered. The unthinkable horror that would end our civilisation was never more thought about.

Nearly half a century later, nuclear weapons remain, in quantity, and have spread much wider across the globe. The 'MAD' dogma that Mutually Assured Destruction ensures that war is not an option has been abandoned; first strikes and tactical use of nuclear weapons are part of military language. There have been a number of 'near misses'; it doesn't need an international crisis to provoke a launch, just an 'accident, miscalculation, or madness' as JFK put it.

But in 2011, the risk of nuclear war gets little public attention. For most of the UK population, Hiroshima is history, nothing more.

All the more reason to take a look at 'Countdown to Zero', a new film being premiered across the UK on Tuesday June 21st. In Bristol, it's at the Watershed, at the Chessels Community Cinema in Southville, and at CoExist in Hamilton House, Stokes Croft

Fettered Discretion?

2011-05-28T22:57:00.004+01:00

Tory group leader Peter Abraham has been around the council chamber for many years now. Long enough to know the council's constitution backwards, and quick to remind his colleagues of it whenever they threaten to stray from doing things strictly by the book. More than once I've seen him reminding fellow-councillors that the public will judge them by the way they conduct themselves, and that all too often it leaves a lot to be desired. Amen to that.

Peter will certainly be well aware of the rules governing councillors who might be thought to have 'predetermined' views on the decisions they take on the council's regulatory committees, like those dealing with development control. So when he comes to chair the Public Rights of Way & Greens Committee on June 16th, he'll want to ensure that such a sensitive decision (whether to register land at Ashton Vale as a Town Green) is beyond any possible reproach.

He could start by reminding members of Part 5 of the City Council constitution:

"Members who sit on a development control committee must be careful not to fetter their discretion and by consequence their ability to take part in a planning decision. Members would fetter their discretion if, for example, they made up their minds, or clearly appear to make up their minds ...... on how they intended to vote on a planning matter prior to the development control committee’s consideration of the matter and the hearing of the evidence and arguments from all the parties."

If that doesn't sink in, he could add that

"If such a member fetters his/her discretion then that member will put the Council at risk of legal proceedings on the grounds of bias, predetermination or a failure to take into account all the factors to enable the proposal to be considered on its own merits and/or a finding of maladministration by the ombudsman."

Of course, if he'd come across a piece in the Evening Post earlier this month, attributing to one of his committee members the words:

"My personal view is that I am convinced we should reject the inspector's advice. I don't think this qualifies as a town green and it brings the process into disrepute."

then he might make a special effort to make sure that his committee's decision wasn't put at risk by the self-evident pre-judice of that member.

Some Extra for Tesco

2011-05-26T10:17:00.006+01:00

A small splash in the Bristol Evening Post followed my story (below) about Tesco's takeover of the council recycling banks at their major stores. The Post's theme was that Tesco are diverting the value of the materials to their own profits, instead of to the council.

They were right. It's a takeover that's being rolled out across the country, and it's drawn well-deserved criticism.

The Post article drew more online comments than you might expect, some of them well-informed - pointing out, for instance, that collections from large recycling banks are one of the few truly profitable (as against less costly) recycling services. The council could use that income to subsidise the more costly elements of recycling collections. Tesco will use it, in part, to make selective contributions to local schools, presenting it as an altruistic measure while actually imprinting the name Tesco on impressionable minds. The rest will go into the corporate coffers.

This takeover also features a novel way of 'externalising' a commercial cost, so it doesn't have to be borne by the company. Under Tesco's usual business strategy, this usually means squeezing suppliers, but with the recycling banks it means getting the supply totally 'free'; we punters bring it along gratis, bearing the whole collection cost ourselves.

I asked the new contractors about the quality of this Tesco version of recycling. Two questions:

First, could we still deposit a whole range of plastics in the banks, as before?

Answer came there none, in spite of sending a second reminder.

Second (having ascertained a while back that there are checks in the council service to guarantee that the materials really are recycled) could we expect the same of the Tesco service - or might there be circumstnces where materials would be landfilled or incinerated?

Back comes the reply "Severnside Recycling/DS Smith Recycling have no investment in landfill, and are the market leader in diversion from landfill strategies, we always aim to return material back into the recycling stream." .

Not exactly a straight answer, then. And no word about incineration. Not even a fortnight after a second request.

So it looks like Tesco are providing us with an inferior recycling service, with no guarantees that the materials we take the trouble to provide will be recycled, and with the profits dedicated solely to Tesco's corporate aims instead of cross-subsidising the public recycling service.

Thanks, Tesco. Every little helps.

I've asked if Stockwood's only alternative plastics recycling skip (behind the Co-op) can be expanded; it's now the only place we can take many plastics. It's also the only place we know they'll really be recycled. And also the only place where the income goes to help provide council services at a time of deep cuts.

[Added 30th May:]
The tidy appearance of the recycling banks after the Tesco takeover was short lived: here's what it looked like today.

Not entirely Tesco's fault, of course, part of it's down to the punters who seem to see every recycling bin as a handy spot for a bit of flytipping. Even so, you'd think that if they can run the whole retail operation on a bank holiday, they could extend it to covering their own recycling operation.

The 'trolley' bins are newbies, just arrived - and they hold the promise that plastics of all sorts deposited here will be recycled, as when under council control. The contracting firm is based in Chippenham, and specialises in skip hire; it will be interesting to know what happens to the plastics that are overflowing from these bins. If they tell us.

The Hadge is dead. Long live the hadge....

2011-05-26T10:14:00.002+01:00

.....or, more accurately, the azada, or the djembe, or the Chillington hoe. Somehow this tool, bought by chance as part of a job lot of second hand garden tools at a pre-millenium auction, became know to us as 'the hadge'.

Heaven knows how many years it had been around before it became my first choice in the garden and at the allotment. But it met its end as a tough tool among the rubble and bramble roots at the Open Space Orchard; too hard a battleground for such an aged veteran. Now it will be retired to lighter pastures.

The new one had to be bought online. I can't understand why such a useful tool isn't available locally. I once saw one at Bath's Green Park market - but that's about it.

This one's sold as a 'trenching hoe' - seems like the design's unchanged (the blade's much thicker and half-an-inch longer than the old one, but that's probably down to wear and tear). It's beauty is in its functionality - it makes many tasks easier, but above all, cultivating neglected ground. One swing into the soil (at a slight angle if the soil or the weeds are extra thick skinned). A quick lever up or sideways, using the leverage offered by the long handle, to detach the clod and draw it forward. A twist of the hoe and a downward thwack to break the clod up and separate the roots. A lighter pull to bring the rooted weeds to my feet, for disposal. Job done. If you have the self discipline, you can even dig over a four foot bed without treading on it.

Cross-Party Progress!

2011-05-17T21:23:00.001+01:00

The new council is already showing unusual, and welcome signs of cross-party co-operation. Long may it last.

The 'Statement' setting out the basis of the other groups support for a minority Lib Dem administration is set out here. It's good to see at least three items that were put forward by the new Green Group.
110517 Statement

Recycling gets that little bit harder

2011-05-11T08:24:00.007+01:00

A couple of years ago, there was a welcome, if under-publicised, step forward in Bristol's provision for recycling. Selected 'bring sites', including the big one at Tesco Brislington, were extended to take more than just plastic bottles - a whole new range of non-film food wrappings could now be recycled.

Then last spring it got better; the system was extended so that every recycling point could take the larger range of 'soft' plastics - even Stockwood's sole recycling bank (which had survived the attempt by our councillors to have it removed altogether).

So what's happening now?

Down at Tescos, the big Recresco plastics containers have disappeared. Instead we have half a dozen dual use 'trolley' bins. One aperture for plastic bottles, one for cans.

They're arranged so that it's difficult for two people, near impossible for three, to use them simultaneously (the third person in the picture, waiting his turn, eventually decided to go to Asda instead!).

The 'dual use' doesn't work either, because people are so close to the bins that they don't read the distinguishing signs, and the carefully segregated recycling streams get cross-contaminated at the first hurdle.

I'm waiting for a council response to these concerns - let's hope it was a cock-up, not a cutback.

[Added 13/5:]
It turns out that Tesco have taken the recycling banks 'in house', employing their own contractor. More on that later....

....in the eye of the beholder

2011-05-10T00:09:00.002+01:00

A contrast here, discovered on the back of a kale leaf. Eggs beautiful? Bugs ugly? I don't even know what they are, or if they're related, but it's an intriguing picture anyway.

So it's back to the Allotment (while they still exist..)

2011-05-06T11:50:00.004+01:00

Clearly, yesterday's vote shows that the 'sleepy backwater' that is Stockwood is not yet ready for a Green councillor!

Congratulations to Jay Jethwa - and especial thanks for her generosity on polling day, giving a lift home from the polling station to a disabled green voter (it was that or a ride on my crossbar....)

Congratulations to Yvonne Clapp, too, who attracted far more Labour votes than might have been expected for a newcomer from outside the ward.

No congratulations to the Lib Dem candidate, Michael Goulden, whose election publications on paper and online showed the very worst of his party's electoral strategies, the sort of thing that is so negative, dishonest, and potentially libellous that it makes cross-party co-operation impossible.

---------------------------------------------

Much better news on the wider Bristol front - most of all Gus Hoyt's landslide victory in Ashley, bringing the Greens their second city council seat, and, with it, the status of a 'party group' on the council.

The balance of the council is once again of 'no overall control', with the 70 seats being split 33 LibDem, 21 Labour, 14 Tory and 2 Green.

It raises many intriguing prospects - most of all about how Labour, Conservatives and Greens can combine to fulfill their joint campaign promises to cancel the centrally enforced open space sales, so that Neighbourhood Partnerships can decide.

The LibDems' Unique Special Offer

2011-05-03T22:27:00.006+01:00

I needn't have wasted my time. And the same goes for hundreds of others here in Stockwood. Every one of us objected to the proposed sell-off of publicly-owned green spaces in Stockwood.

Just one of the spaces - the 'Craydon Road North Open Space' - actually was saved.

But we can't even claim any part in that little victory. It wasn't us, all the credit must go to our LibDem candidate in the elections. One hundred per cent.

We know, because he says so. Repeatedly.
On his election literature....

On his blog....

and again....

and again

.....and, apparently, on the doorstep.

For those who believe him, the conclusion is inescapable.

A Lib Dem administration will respond to one of its own candidates, while ignoring local councillors, community groups, and residents.

Best vote them out on Thursday, then.

Playing Politics with Plot 6

2011-04-29T23:35:00.002+01:00

It turns out that Bristol's 'strategic transport supremo' (as the LibDems like to call Gary Hopkins) was leading us all up the garden path when he confidently told us that Plot 6, alongside Temple Meads railway station, is set to become Bristol's major transport interchange.

Gary based his optimism on 'pressure' he put on Transport Minister Norman Baker in February. But when I wrote a follow-up (on behalf of the Greens) to the Minister in support of the same thing, the reply revealed just how hollow Gary's statement had been.

Not only is the Transport Minister unable to intervene (the disposal of Plot 6 is driven by Vince Cable's dBIS), but Gary's officers in Bristol City Council couldn't give Network Rail any idea of what a transport hub would entail. So you can see how seriously they've been taking the idea

(more - with loads of references - in this news release)

Canine Defence

2011-04-25T23:46:00.005+01:00

It's leafletting time again. So out comes Thrust, scourge of the letterboxes, hand crafted to get election addresses straight onto 90% of doormats without loss of fingers.

Thrust used to be just called 'the pusher', but my marketing consultants advised the change of name. Anyway, in the spirit of co-operation and to help save the NHS lots of time and money, I'm glad to make the idea freely available to all parties.

Yesterday I met the Labour candidate for the first time, on Sturminster Road. Seems nice enough, though her companion feared that Greens' 'extreme' policies might deprive him of electric light. You'd think anyone with enough commitment to distribute election leaflets would be a bit more aware; I had to point out that it's the Labour/Tory/LibDem lookalikes who want to dress us all in hair shirts these days. (Well, everyone but the bankers, anyway. Armani don't do hair shirts).

Leafletting can be a bit dispiriting; plenty of houses had the recycling boxes out, many with a range of election material already prominent. Houses and gardens showing neglect and suggesting a poverty of spirit; paved over gardens so tightly packed with car that it was near impossible to squeeze past; and steps; and more steps.....

At this point, any 'proper' politician would remark on the very positive signals he was getting on the doorsteps from the electorate who are clearly fed up with the candidates of the other parties and see the Greens as the best hope for the future with positive and realistic policies. Truth is, I met scarcely anyone on the doorsteps; most seemed to be enjoying their gardens in the sunshine, which is much the better thing to do.

My black-on-white leaflet, I have to confess, doesn't compare with the multicoloured stuff the other parties are putting out. But it does tell anyone who cares to read it something about me, what I've been doing locally, how I approach particular issues. Which may, of course, be a mistake - the more you put on a leaflet, the more chance there'll be something the reader doesn't like.

The other candidates have a more guarded approach, sticking to highly selective lines and traditional topics.

Labour are suggesting that council money invested in a hydrogen powered harbour ferry would be better spent improving the 54 bus (whether they'd do this, and how, isn't explained).

The LibDems seem, surprisingly, to be pouring money into their hopeless Stockwood campaign with multiple glossy handouts. The usual deceptive graphs, of course, but you expect that, it comes with the brand. Some very imaginative claims, too. But I'll come back to that in another post!

As for the Tories, their handouts are rich in candidate pictures, poor on text; mostly trying to make an association with something good that would have happened anyway. But I won't be too hard on them, my picture and email are on there too - unattributed, of course.
........................................

The election count, at one time carried out at a local school, has been 'centralised' so we'll all have to hang around while other wards (plus the referendum) are verified and counted; Stockwood will be one of the last to be declared, sometime in the small hours.

I'm told that the council doesn't have a room big enough to do all this, so it's using the conference room in the Dolman Stand at Ashton Gate.

Now that should deserve a blog post in its own right! And maybe a taxi, too. SL could pay.

Analysing the NO to AV campaign

2011-04-23T20:20:00.003+01:00

I first tried this link in a Dorset public library - but Websense, the net-nanny, decided it wasn't suitable!

I think it's pretty fair, though...

http://imgur.com/a/hgmbQ

It came out of the woods...

2011-04-15T22:36:00.003+01:00

as the chainsaws moved in.

We call it OAKELA.

Many a Cowslip...

2011-04-15T22:32:00.001+01:00

The cowslips in the new header bar are part of my usual habit of reflecting the seasonal changes. The uncut grasslands of the Open Space is now full of them, from the Burnbush Valley right round to the dipping pond meadow and up to the Coots.

A 3-year study of them also reflects the way climate change is likely to impact on all species. There's close monitoring of the temperature and other environmental variants affecting particular samples across the Open Space, along with a study of the genetic variations that occur in close populations, how they're pollinated and by what insects, etc. The bottom line is about how the species can adapt to a changing environment, or migrate to more hospitable sites as the climate changes, and ecosystems change with it. Can't help thinking that's what our species will have to do, too, unless we act quickly.

It's a Ph.D research project, and there's a request for local people to take part by keeping their eyes open and sending in relevant observations. Photos of pollinators will be especially welcome. Send details to charlotte.bickler (at) bristol.ac.uk

HandS ON the levers of local democracy!

2011-03-30T22:01:00.003+01:00

HandS ON - Hengrove and Stockwood Online Neighbourhood - is our web forum and blog, just launched. It's set up to share news and views across the two wards, and to widen interest in Hengrove and Stockwood's Neighbourhood Partnership in its many forms.

HandS ON has the support of the Neighbourhood Partnership, but it is independent. The ward councillors welcome it; Hengrove's Sylvia Doubell promptly registered, and the others say they will! We've even bribed them with an 'announcement' forum where no-one can heckle!

The sites have been developed by Toni Massari and me (Toni providing the know-how!).

Now comes the real test, getting enough residents interested and putting stuff on it, to make it useful and effective.

The forum's the key to that. For instance, a couple of instant controversies....

The Area Green Space Plans. Parks want to settle on a list of local priorities within the next few weeks (starting at an open meeting next Tuesday). Taking the debate online will make it a little less exclusive!

A BMX track alongside the railway path - great for kids, potentially good for wildlife, threatening for the neighbours. How do we cater for (and involve) everyone?

The forum's public on the web, but only registered users can post to it - and we're asking people to use their real names, not hide behind an anonymous username (else we might get like the Evening Post comment columns!)

If you live in Hengrove or Stockwood, please sign up.

Marching for the Alternative

2011-03-26T23:57:00.008Z

On the massive anti-cuts "March for the Alternative" today, I never made it to the Hyde Park speeches; the numbers were too great and the shuffle from the Embankment far too slow. And this is before the cuts really start biting.

The sheer scale of today's demonstration was enough to raise the spirits; looking across the river and seeing the packed crowds and their banners stretching along the Embankment was like the big antinuclear protests at the height of the Cold War.

And, like them, the life threatening issues that brought us together had inspired creativity and good humour too...

[Added] and one more, not-so-original, for Paul BemmyDown....

Helping an arms dealer create useful jobs

2011-03-24T22:28:00.004Z

There's more than a little concern that as we do our civic duty this weekend and complete our census forms, we'll be contributing to the profits of one of the world's biggest arms dealers, Lockheed Martin. This is the US corporation that provides the worlds military machines with such must-have items as Trident nuclear missiles and cluster bombs. I'm told they do a nice line in torture too. And now they're providing the customer contact centre, questionnaire printing and data capture and processing for the 2011 census.

Peace News has come up with a few ideas to make sure Lockheed Martin don't gain from our freely given part in the contract. There are lots of creative ideas there, and the great thing is that they mean more of the job has to be done by real people instead of by automatic scanners. Blacking out all the bar codes is a good start, so that information will have to be transcribed by hand.

Inheritance - or not !

2011-03-23T23:31:00.004Z

Our efforts to trace our family trees left a lot of mysteries unsolved. One such involved my wife's aunt, Ivy, who was born in 1900. All we knew was that she'd been adopted as an 8-month old baby into the family. We still have the very sad little declaration from the mother, giving up all rights.

Apart from that, no documentary record and next to no anecdotal history, except it was rumoured that Ivy and her husband had been drowned.

Then we got a phone call from a firm of probate researchers. It was a bit guarded... their stock-in-trade is information, and if they freely release too much, bang goes their chance of a cut of the estate. Slowly it emerged that Ivy had lived to be 103, but had no contact with her adoptive family during her long adult life. Her first husband had indeed drowned (later we found the news reports) and many years later she'd married again. No wonder we couldn't find her!

Technically, she'd died intestate (there was a will, but it was a copy, so it didn't count in law). So the probate researchers set out to find surviving 'relatives' who would, in the absence of any other instructions, be entitled to the estate. We're talking about £25K or so here, less the researchers' cut, among at least twenty relatives. They're called the rightful heirs, though it's hard to see what's right about it - as she'd never met us or even known we existed. !

In the end the claim turned out to be a non-starter; there was no such thing as a legal adoption in 1901, so there was no claim. What's more, justice was done - Ivy had led a very full life, with many friends right up to the end. The copy will named them as beneficiaries, and the Treasury eventually gave them discretionary payments to the same value. It's what she would have wanted.

We got a lot out of it too; most of all the answers to the mystery that was Ivy. And some very powerful reminders of the absurdity of the whole, rarely challenged, concept of 'inheritance'; the only decision you can make that only comes into force when you're dead. It perpetuates so much that is divisive and unjust in our society, from one generation to the next.

It gave us another unique experience too. At lunchtime today, in a cafe in Wells, one of the staff came over and said "I hope you don't mind my mentioning it, but didn't I see you both on television this morning ? I love that 'Heir Hunters'... ".

Recognition at last!

Last night's council meeting.

2011-03-23T23:21:00.002Z

To write about the LibDem's behaviour over the Green Spaces Petition would be too negative (or do I mean not negative enough?). In short, it was appalling and it was stupid. IMHO.

Instead, lets look at the good news about that other hobby horse of mine - Plot 6 and the city transport hub. I'd tabled some questions to chase up some up of the half-promises we've heard so far..

Q: Are there conditions in place yet that will protect the site's potential to be used as a multimodal transport hub serving all parts of Bristol?

A: Bristol City Council is negotiating to take on several SWRDA sites but they were initially told to sell Plot 6 to the highest bidder by the Treasury. We intervened and are now confident that the need for an integrated transport hub will be paramount. The ownership model is yet to be finalised.

Q: When might we see the council, or the Cabinet, or the West of England Partnership, adopt these aspirations as written policy?

A: You will find that the West of England is having a rapid refresh of the JLTP and having made such progress you will find new objectives appearing very rapidly.

OK, there are potential weaknesses in these answers, but on the face of it they look good. And we desperately need to find something positive in the debris of last night's meeting.

Here we go again..... Zero minus 44

2011-03-22T08:20:00.005Z

Over on Bristol 24-7 my friend Tony Dyer speculates about the outcomes of the local elections on May 5th, when 1 in 3 of the city's seventy council seats are up for grabs.

His only firm conclusion is that when it's all over, "most Bristol voters look forward to a year without any elections while south Bristolians look forward to two years without some wanna-be politician knocking on their door telling them how it was all the fault of the others."

Just in the last few days Stockwood has seen circulars from Tories, LibDems, and a newbie Labour candidate. And that's over six weeks before the poll! Labour's offering is a modest 2-colour A4, the Tories went for full colour A3, and now the LibDems have capped that with glossy full colour A3, containing claims even more extravagant than the paper they're printed on. (From me, there'll eventually be an A4 circular, which should tell you what you need to know, with an opportunity to learn more if you want.)

There seems to be a well trodden path to success at the polls, by way of particular ritual activities in the run up to an election. They're an electoral 'must-do' - a bit like supporting the local football club.
_____________________________
Football Diversion 1: Peter Mandelson famously told his local paper that the thing he treasured most was his Hartlepool United football scarf. He also became the club's president. Since ownership of the club can be traced to a Virgin Islands company called Independent Oilfield Rentals, he might actually have felt at home in the role.

Football Diversion 2: Demonstrably, the professional clubs enjoy massive local political influence through exploiting their fans' loyalties, and possibly through councillors being easily influenced by association with wealth. But those clubs no longer have much claim to be local. Perhaps, instead of responding to City fans' pleas for a Sainsburys superstore, a Stockwood councillor should be looking closer to home, so that Stockwood Wanderers need no longer wander quite so far from the pitch the council evicted them from.
_____________________________

Anyway, back to the campaign trail. Here in Stockwood, we candidates have an essential campaigning asset, believed to have the power to capture the hearts and minds of the electorate. It lies tucked away in the car park.

Here's the LibDem candidate (always opportunists, those LibDems) laying first claim to it...

And here are our sitting Tory councillors following suit...

Me, I think I'll risk having my photo taken at one of the potholes the other candidates don't know about, because they drive over them so fast they don't notice. Well, it's a unique green angle.

The Big Save Our Green Spaces Debate

2011-03-16T22:37:00.003Z

Having got twice as many signatures as were needed, the Big Save Our Parks petition will be discussed at the full council meeting next Tuesday evening. The petitioners say that
"Neighbourhood Partnerships should decide on any green space disposals in their area – making sure local people are involved in the decision making, unlike the decisions taken so far by Cabinet."

No doubt the lead petitioners will ask their council colleagues to vote for a supporting resolution (which can't actually make any decision, only recommend that the ruling Cabinet go along with it).

And, judging by what happened at our Neighbourhood Partnership last night, the LibDems will want that resolution emasculated or simply defeated by weight of numbers.

Last night, (just the same as in December - before the Cabinet ignored public opinion and steamrollered through its decision to sell off the green spaces, including eight here in Stockwood) I asked our NP to agree to submit a Public Forum Statement to the full council meeting. In December, our Statement had asked the Cabinet to defer its decision. This one simply urges councillors to support the petitioners' contention that Neighbourhood Partnerships must consent to selling green spaces.

And, just as at the last NP meeting, just three people fought tooth and nail to stop the NP agreeing the Statement. They were, of course, Hengrove's two LibDem councillors plus their Stockwood candidate for the May election.

You'd think that Neighbourhood Partnerships might be pleased to have the say-so on what green spaces on their patch should be sold, but not these LibDems. We had a whole series of attempts to avoid a vote on it, including a desperate claim that we couldn't ask the council to do what it cannot do. (Answer A. We weren't doing that. Answer B. What's to stop us expressing a view, anyway?)

Anyway, we agreed to put the Statement in, the three LibDems dissenting. Just like we did in December. It's getting to be a habit.

It's still a mystery why our local LibDems should be fighting so hard against us getting these rights. Maybe they could provide an explanation here?

Petition Power

2011-03-13T00:13:00.005Z

Locally, the 'Big Save our Parks Petition' raised some 7,000 signatures, twice the target, so the full council is obliged to debate it.

It calls for the decisions about selling Open Spaces to be devolved to the Neighbourhood Partnerships instead of the Cabinet, and it'll be debated on March 22nd.

The meeting starts at 6 with the 'Public Forum', i.e. statements and questions from the public (I've got a couple of questions tabled myself, but they're about transport). Statements can be submitted up to noon the day before (to democratic.services@bristol.gov.uk ), and I hope there'll be plenty.
.......................................................
Another highly successful petition was the '38 degrees' bid to stop government proposals to sell off the nations forests. It attracted over half-a-million online signatures - and the government backed down. For now, at least!

Now, 38 degrees are back with another one. This one's about the NHS 'reforms' that even the LibDems are rebelling against. The wording is:

Our NHS is precious - we won't forgive you if you ruin it.
Don’t break up our health service and hand it to private healthcare companies

Listen to the the real experts - doctors, nurses and patients - when they give warnings about these plans
Don't rush through massive changes without testing them properly first
Protect patient care - don't cut beds, wards, doctors or nurses

It's reached 80,000 signatures in its first week. You can sign it at
www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/Protect_our_NHS_Petition#petition

Another linked petition "Blood Money" aims to stop the sale of the National Blood Service (yes, honest!) to a private, profit-driven contractor. It's running at around 34,000 signatures as I write. You can add more here

Come to think of it, it could be sold off to one of the big US 'Defense' contractors like the firm that's doing the UK Census. Yes, Lockheed Martin, manufacturers of cluster bombs and Trident missiles.

Blood Money indeed.

The national stage will have to wait...

2011-03-07T11:51:00.005Z

We'd been led to believe we'd be quoted in the Sunday Times this week. They've been doing a series on selling off public land assets, and this time planned to do a local angle - including Bristol. The phone interviews were done, and a tentative photo-op at the threatened Sturminster Close open space was lined up.

So I bought the paper - all 1.26kg of it, to see what they said. True, Bristol got a brief mention, with a quote about Brislington, but that was about it.

Maybe they had to cut it so that most of the first three news pages could be devoted to the Royal Wedding Dress - after all, Murdoch's flagship of quality journalism must get its priorities right.

Ah well... At least, instead of hanging around for a photographer, we spent Saturday morning down at the orchard, pretty well finishing off the main clearance before the birds start nesting. Amazing what's been done, nearly all by hand, through the winter.

And I'm told that we've hit the 3,500 target for petition signatures, so that there should be a full council debate on the local land sell-off. So we're doing all right!

And the sun's shining, and the blackheaded gulls are getting their black heads back for the summer...

A Temple Meads Hub - a passing bandwagon that's going nowhere?

2011-03-03T23:27:00.009Z

I make no apology for coming back (for the nth time on this blog) to the topic of a multimodal city transport interchange at Temple Meads.

This is where the happy conjunction of the Digby Wyatt shed (the massive unused, covered listed extension of the Brunel's Old Station, adjoining the current booking hall) and Plot 6 (the development site alongside, currently used for car parking) could provide a shared passenger concourse and the bus and coach bays respectively, offering one-hop access to every part of the city - and most parts of the country. All with the luxuries of shelter, safety, seating, real time information, shops, smartcard cross-ticketing, and refreshments - and the added bonus of direct pedestrian access, cycleways, and the harbour ferries. Even taxis.

Suddenly, a Temple Meads hub has arrived in the political mainstream. Beyond the Green Party, beyond the transport activists, beyond the planning lobbyists. It's now embraced by our last three Transport supremos (Gary Hopkins (hold that thought...), Jon Rogers, and Mark Bradshaw. It's endorsed by the cross-party Transport Scrutiny Commission. What's more, Gary Hopkins has had a word with Norman Baker, and has high hopes of getting the site, or at least the required planning designations, for the city. We're nearly there.

Or are we?

On Bristol 24/7 Labour and LibDem frontbenchers seem keen to claim a part in moving the Plot 6 hub forward. But faced with a request to endorse the whole plan, really making the best of the opportunity, everything goes quiet.

Meanwhile, an email exchange with SWRDA this week reveals that
" The draft development masterplan for plot 6 provides for c.300,000 sq ft of employment-led mixed use development and a new multi-storey car park to reprovide the existing surface car parking. The scheme will include public realm areas and a much improved pedestrian and cycle link between the station and Temple Quay. We have worked with Network Rail, Bristol City Council and English Heritage to produce the draft masterplan, which will effectively form part of the overall Temple Meads station transport interchange, by providing interchange between pedestrians, cycles, ferry, private car and heavy rail modes." (Looks like they've missed the bus there, then....)

and "Any contract for the disposal of the land will require the purchaser to deliver a scheme within these parameters. "

I would have linked here to the master plan at www.plot6.co.uk - but the site's been taken down. The copy I made shows next to no public transport provision on Plot 6, and only rail uses for the Digby Wyatt shed. In the Master Plan, "interchange" means pretty much what we have now, but with more up to date bus stops.

So if there's really been a big push from the city council for a city hub at Plot 6, it looks like SWRDA haven't been told.

And now the Evening Post tells us (SWRDA didn't!) that there are ongoing negotiations with a private buyer, who'd develop the site as per the 'master plan'. No hub.

The site could be sold under our noses, and this wonderful opportunity lost forever.

Leader Column

2011-02-25T11:29:00.004Z

It was something usually experienced only by celebrities and those facing trial for heinous crimes. I was trying to walk along looking nonchalant, as if the photographers and cameramen in front of me, shooting away while walking backwards, didn't exist.

Behind me was a column of local Green Party activists. I was explaining to the person alongside about our long-running campaign to get Plot 6, alongside Temple Meads, to become home for Bristol's all-purpose transport hub. And it was she who had brought the cameras out - Caroline Lucas, our first Green MP and our first 'leader' (though given our suspicion of leadership, and seeing the way some recent Prime Ministers have chosen to exercise it, our Caroline is more constrained than most by the party constitution.)

Caroline was here in Bristol on Thursday, taking the scenic route from her Brighton consituency to the Greens' biannual conference at Cardiff by way of the north of England,, London, Devon, and Bristol - and concentrating, as you might expect, on places where the Greens look set to do well in the local elections.

For once, the media took interest in us. Both regional TV stations were there, with the BBC doing lengthy interviews for The Politics Show. Even the Post, not usually one to take an interest in Green Party events, sent a photographer (it's political editor was too busy writing yet another piece about stadia and superstores). So we got coverage on ITV news, Radio Bristol, Jack FM, and the Evening Post; with (I hope) more to come, from Venue (soon, I very much hope, to be reborn) and the Politics Show.

But the biggest impact of the day was certainly Caroline herself. The fluent way she handled questions and made all the key points, whether on national or local issues, (she did far better on those than I would have done!) left most of us in awe.

City's latest signing

2011-02-20T22:27:00.009Z

Lots of people will have seen the new signing on roads, paths, and posts, giving a bit more confidence for those attempting to find their way around Bristol by bike.

It's a Cycling City project, helpfully mapped on this pdf from their website.

It shows the major cycleways, like Sustrans National Cycle Network 3 that uses the St Philips Greenway and the recently Whitchurch Railway Path.

This has been rebranded as 'Whitchurch Way' along its route through south Bristol.

The signage map also shows route links - like these at Stockwood.

Fortunately, not all of them have acquired signs 'on the ground' like this one (the lower link on the map) at Longreach Grove at Stockwood, directing you and your bike up two flights of steps:

The next one north, if anyone were to use it would bring the rider up a steep cul-de-sac, to be rewarded for the effort by a confrontation with the steel fence of a well-defended golfcourse. (The reward is freewheeling back down!)

And a bit further north, the route heading westward up to Knowle includes these three flights of steps (which haven't had the blessing of real, on the ground signs - just as well!)

Another link into Knowle from the city side is shown leaving the Malago Greenway at Lynton Road, heading for the Health Centre. Perhaps if the signers ever got there to do their work, they'd have decided not to bother.

Could this symbolise the new, reformed, NHS ?
...............................................
You have to wonder why, if this signage map was commissioned, so little trouble was taken to get it right. The information about these links must have come from somewhere, it is demonstrably wrong, and now it's in the public domain for anyone to take as gospel.

The Longreach Grove stepped access has for a long time been on the official city cycle map. How long before the others join it on the official map, on route finders, or even on GPS gear?

Me and Eric - Localists

2011-02-13T22:47:00.003Z

The last couple of days I've spent an hour or three outside the local shops with clipboard and a petition. The idea is to get enough signatures to force a council debate about their plans to sell off public open spaces, including several local ones (I could see two from the shops, with children making good use of them in the sunshine). What's more, I could tell the shoppers that it's a joint project by the Labour, Conservative, and Green Parties. That's a first! People are very keen to sign. People power in action.

Meanwhile, in Whitehall, Community Secretary Eric Pickles was doing his own bit to promote the small government, pro-localism agenda. Except he didn't. Instead he gave his blessing to plans to burn food (palm oil) grown in Asia as fuel in an Avonmouth power station to provide electricity in Britain - overriding a decision by our own city council a year ago.

Hidden in that bad news for localism and for global food supplies, though, there's a crumb of comfort. The inspector who heard the appeal from would be plant-builders W4B had already rejected the city council's contention that wider issues of sustainability are a material planning consideration. In short, if it does no damage to Bristol's rainforests, only to those in S.E. Asia, we shouldn't let it worry us.

Maybe the inspectorate - or even Eric - had a change of heart. There are conditions in the final permission that 'any bioliquids burnt in the main boiler shall satisfy the sustainability criteria' . That means compliance with the EU's 'Renewable Directive' on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources, particularly those sections relating to the sustainability of bioliquids. There's a requirement that the company report to the council annually on how it complies.

All of which suggests that the council was right to raise global sustainability as a legitimate reason for turning the original application down.

There's lots more, plus plenty of well-informed comment, in a Guardian piece by George Monbiot . Neil Harrison's been blogging about it too - on much the same lines as this piece.

Stocktaking Time for Sainsburys

2011-02-11T10:20:00.004Z

The latest plans for a Megastore at Ashton Gate, even with the advantage of being treated as an enabling development for a new green belt stadium, have taken another blow.

This time it's the council appointed independent retail consultants, GVA Grimley, who are advising their clients (us) that Sainsburys claims' for retail impact are specious. They conclude:

"It the Council reaches the view that there are one or more significant adverse impacts, then the application should be refused under Policy EC17.1 of PPS4, with no need to take into account any of the other material planning considerations surrounding the scheme."

"...it is our view that the negative impacts of the proposal outweigh any positive benefits which may accrue. In reaching this view we have given particular weight to the financial impact of the proposal and its adverse effect upon the vitality and viability of both defined centres in Bedminster. We recommend that this conclusion is taken in account by the Council as it considers and balances the positive and negative impacts of the proposal as a whole."

Add to that the very persuasive evidence that their claims of job creation are fictitious, that their transport predictions are nonsense and a few other exploded myths, and it's hard to see how the planning application (to be considered on March 2nd, 6pm) can possibly succeed.

Far more likely that Sainsburys will drop this latest application and go back to appealing against the same committee turning down their previous application. Although, of course, they claim that the current scheme is better than the previous one - and that must mean that the previous one was worse than the current one.

Either way, the whole stadium project is a mess. I know Sainsburys don't give up easily - for years they've been pouring money into Southend United to keep it solvent, given the security of its big assets - the Roots Hall ground where they want an Ashton Gate megastore equivalent, and land with planning permission for an out of town retail park to boot.

Still, I can't see myself getting the opportunity to pedal off down a new South Bristol Ring Road Cyclepath to Ashton Vale to watch the match or to pick up Nectar points and orange bags. Which is probably a Good Thing.

Running Rings Round Bristol

2011-02-10T22:40:00.003Z

The South Bristol Link is, exactly as predicted, morphing back into a Ring Road. The temporary green veneer that was provided by the promise of Rapid Transit is fading even before any contracts are placed.

Oh, and it's going to cost us an extra ten million quid, too.

Remember how Jon Rogers was so keen to deny that the South Bristol Link had anything to do with any ring road project? The Rapid Transit was what it was all about - even though everyone knew there was no convincing case for it.

Now, desperate to offer a road-loving, cost-cutting transport secretary what he wants (and to clip a minute or two off Steve Comer's drive to the airport), the Joint Lords of the West of England Partnership, egged on by the new Local Enterprise Partnership, have been wielding the knife with one hand and reaching for the council chequebooks with the other.

The new deal which keeps the Ring Road on the DfT table retains just the same road link between the A378 Long Ashton and Hengrove Park. The Rapid Transit is the same too - for the few hundred metres from Long Ashton P&R as far as Brookgate, where road and BRT converge just north of the railway crossing.

After that, what was a segregated guided Rapid Transit track becomes a mere nearside bus lane up the hill to the A38 at Castle Farm. To most eyes, that means it's going to be a four-lane road for most or all the time.

From there, dipping across Highridge Common through Withywood and on to the Hartcliffe roundabout, there was to have been a central carriageway for the buses. That's been ditched in the newest plan, substituted by 'nearside bus lanes on the approaches to significant junctions'. In other words, the bendybus becomes an ordinary bus on ordinary busy roads, but with less stops.

To complete the deal, the council is offering an extra £10 million from its (our) own resources toward the overall cost. £10 million that could have been set against the horrendous £70 million cuts to services that must be implemented in the next four years.

So we get the road that the businessmen and the airport operators want. The local price goes up to £17 million (plus the risk of cost overruns), but it's about more than hard cash and missed opportunity. We can also forget that talk about reducing road traffic, facing up to climate change and the threat of Peak Oil (not to mention the LibDem's claims to oppose new road building).

Welcome once more to the LibDem World of Hypocrisy.

Sources:
Scheme Description (March 2010)
Revised bid for 5 Major Transport Schemes (30/12/2010)

The Big Save Our Parks Petition - printable version

2011-02-06T22:28:00.003Z

A printable version of the e-Petition raised by the three opposition parties on the City Council is now available for download from the FoSOS website or from the Green Party website. (I know, I put them there!). Please print copies off and gather signatures from friends and neighbours.

The three councillors behind this petition (Tess Green for the Greens, Mark Weston for the Tories, and Mark Bradshaw for Labour) need at least 3,500 valid signatures to get the issue back on the council table - which could help influence policy in a crucial pre-election period.

Completed forms can be returned to any of the three councillors at the Council House; here in Stockwood they can be returned to
Pete Goodwin, 11 Lanesborough Rise
Margaret Short, 10 Townsend Close
David Reeve, 11 Maple Close

But remember, they need to be returned by the end of February

Clean-up Politics

2011-02-06T22:23:00.002Z

Last weekend saw a 'clean-up' operation on the green and wooded valley side rising from the brook alongside Sturminster Road.

It benefitted from outside help provided by a team from Community Payback, lots council officers and contractors, and it was very successful. It was gratifying to see a plenty of local people joining in, after two of us from Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces had distributed a flier around the houses a week or two earlier. It also included three of the likely four candidates in next May's elections (one of them being me). Thanks to everyone who took part.

You'd think that this kind of shared local initiative wouldn't be sullied by anyone trying to make electoral capital out of it. You'd be wrong.

"Unless they were working in a different area to me & my co-worker, I didn't see anything of our two Tory Councillors at the clean-up. Maybe if Cllrs Jethwa & Morris are reading this they could advise me otherwise, if they were there!" writes LibDem Michael Goulden in his blog about the clean-up. I suppose that Michael would have dished out some of the same stuff about me, if he hadn't seen me there at the start. If he'd been there at the end, he'd also have seen Jay Jethwa. His crude attempt to muster electoral advantage was (let's be generous) grossly misleading.

More to the point, it is unreasonable to condemn anyone for not taking part. After all, there were thousands who didn't.... I wonder what Michael thinks of them. There are all sorts of reasons (not least age and ability, but also other commitments, or simply being unaware of the event) that could make it impracticable to join in. It is not, and it should not be, anything to do with electoral or party politics.

When we do party politics, lets do it on policy, not on litter-picks.

Royal Mail, Rubber bands, and Recycling

2011-02-03T23:42:00.005Z

If you laid all the red rubber bands on Bristol's streets end to end, they'd stretch.......

And if any council enforcement officers, anywhere in Britain, brought just one action against a postie for dropping those red rubber bands, it would be national news and the problem would go away. Of course, they should do the decent thing and give warning first.

Meantime, on the Royal Mail website you can 'Ask Sarah' if Royal Mail recycles rubber bands.

Sarah, who evidently works 24 hours a day without sleep (and it shows), will reply "Do you mean: Can you tell me more about your new Simply Drop service?".

Then she confidently goes on to answer her own question by describing the Royal Mail's brand new 'Simply Drop' service, and providing a link to it.

Turns out that it's not a new public service to simply drop free rubber bands for community use on every corner.

It's about mobiles, digital cameras, ink cartridges and other 'value' goods. For that, the Royal Mail has a dedicated commercial service, and will even pay you to be a good recycler and send them your old device every time you upgrade. How conscientious is that? What's more, they assure you that you needn't even pay for a stamp. (I rushed to check what they'd pay for my camera and mobile. Nothing, comes the answer. If I sent them these valueless items, heaven knows what they'd do with them.)

They even anticipate you cynics asking "But what about the envelopes - what's the environmental cost of that?". Royal Mail have thought of that, too - and they don't go for the simple solution of using paper. They'll send you their special free Simply Drop™ envelopes (thoughtfully 'designed to fit simply into a pillar box'!). These are 'made from naturally oxy-degradable polythene. Oxy-degradable means they degrade and disappear in a short period of time, leaving no fragments, no methane, no harmful residues, and therefore no lasting impact upon the environment'

Hmmm... that's not what research commissioned by DEFRA says. Apparently oxy-degradable is very different from biodegradeable (itself a fairly meaningless term) and is certainly not compostable. It's simply oil-based polyethylene plastic with metallic additives to make sure it falls to pieces rather faster than it would otherwise do.

This means it can't be reused, and it can't be recycled along with mainstream plastics, for fear of making the end product vulnerable to early breakdown. It can't be composted. They reckon the only real options are incineration, landfill, or just letting it degrade over time, and under the influence of light or heat, into a very fine powder - though the impacts of that are uncertain.

I'll hang on to my phone and my camera. Ink cartridges aren't so easy, since they have a built in 'killer chip' to stop me just putting more ink in.

I've picked up the rubber bands from Burgis Road. There were 40 at this corner.

How Eric Pickles puts a squeeze on buses

2011-01-26T21:58:00.006Z

[picture thanks to politics.co.uk via Mabinogogiblog ]

A copy of 'In Touch' drops through the letterbox. This one turns out to be seriously out of touch. Apart from the routine photos of glum councillors, it leads me optimistically to their website, wondering if our Stockwood councillors have at last launched some kind of an online dialogue with their constituents.

Sadly, No. The link takes me to the Bristol and South Glos Conservative website. Click on 'News' for the very latest - and there's a South Glos Tories' press release complaining at the "absolutely outrageous" Govt cut in bus subsidy.

But the Govt is a Labour government, and the date is February of last year. There's been no news since then. Still, it remains topical.

The bus subsidy is again being cut. One pledge this 'greenest government ever' is keeping is to protect the concessionary bus pass scheme introduced by Labour. Meaning it's making the same demands of councils and bus companies, but cutting the funding.

The impact is inevitable, and it will affect passengers of all ages. Councils, faced with less money and more costs across all their services, are having to cut the payment they make to the bus companies for every concessionary journey. Bus company income drops, and some journeys no longer generate the revenue to cover costs. Result - service withdrawn. It's already happening in South Glos, where the payment is to drop from 97p to 82p - about 15%.

Expect a wave of bus service withdrawals. But don't expect the Tories to make much of a fuss.

The Big Save Our Parks Petition

2011-01-22T23:54:00.003Z

.....does what it says on the web page - http://epetitions.bristol.gov.uk/epetition_core/community/petition/1403

If it reaches 3,500 valid signatures, anyway.

Council House to Temple Meads - via Damascus

2011-01-20T11:53:00.003Z

Earlier this month I blogged about the need to safeguard Plot 6, the development site at Temple Meads, before it goes into the fire sale of SWRDA's assets. It encouraged me to put a question about it to Gary Hopkins at Tuesday's council meeting - but his reply was seriously ambiguous, it could have meant anything from a fully integrated multimodal city transport hub to a bus stop outside the SWRDA office. Probably the latter, seeing that BCC officers have been actively opposing any designation of the site for an interchange.

All the more surprising, then, that within 18 hours of that exchange, Gary and I were again dealing with Plot 6, this time in a BBC radio interview. And suddenly Gary sounded really positive about a transport hub.

The details and links to the interview are on a Green Party press release here; possibly the LibDems will be giving their own interpretation. Gary's critics will find it easy to point to weaknesses and ambiguities in what he says (short radio interviews aren't the best place to spell out your plans, or to put them in a readable way), but let's for once give him the benefit of the doubt.

All we need now is a bit more flesh on the plans, and something firm in the council's own policy statements. Not much to ask....

This could be the dawn of a decent transportation system in Bristol. Yes, really.

Signs of Cycling City

2011-01-20T11:47:00.004Z

Cyclists are being helped on their way to St Bernadette School and the Oasis Academy with these helpful new signs, at the Longreach Grove/Davids Road railway path access point.

There's yet another set of steps before Davids Road is reached.

Perhaps wheel channels might have been a more useful investment - though they only help cyclists, and there are plenty of buggy and wheelchair users who might find a smoother surface would give better access to the delights of Sturminster Road - including its frequent bus services.

Showcase decisions

2011-01-15T23:48:00.004Z

Tuesday's full council meeting promises little, judging by the agenda - unless somehow public or councillors add a bit of spice.

One of the public forum questions might have special resonance for us in Stockwood and other places where schools have been closed down in the name of 'efficiency'. It suggests that the council's purchase of the failed St Ursula's private school, and the deal that brought Oasis in to run it as an Academy, has now ensured that the school survives with a roll of just 64 students. Tell that to the parents of the children of Stockwood Green and other schools with rolls allegedly so low that they had to be closed last summer.

I've got some transport questions tabled myself, about Plot 6, real-time information, and smart travelcards. By chance, they're all relevant to a decision to be taken by full council later in the meeting, endorsing the latest West Of England Joint Local Transport Plan.

That plan (JLTP3) offers next to nothing new, next to nothing to offer a decent smart card system, a proper public transport hub, or comprehensive real time information for travellers. It doesn't seem to have been touched by an exhaustive, expensive programme of public consultation. It doesn't even refer to the potential for a Passenger Transport Authority with powers to provide transport as a public service. None of the things, in fact, that could actually bring the all-round qualitative change to Bristol's public transport that could persuade motorists city-wide that it's a better option than the car. JLTP3 tolerates the prospect of ever-rising traffic in this congested city.

No doubt the council will approve it, rather than rock the West of England boat. In doing so it will be backing a programme of prestige projects that are unlikely to get funding, while putting the real opportunities to improve Bristol's transport on the back burner.

At Last! an FoI response on Green Spaces....

2011-01-11T23:38:00.003Z

Here they are, folks, the council's 2009 assessments of the sites selected for sale. Seven weeks late, but intact.

www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/area_green_space_plans_potential

If there's a particular threatened open space near you, this link might tell you more about their reasons for choosing it as a sacrifice.

Green Space "Call-in" and an FoI Failure (updated)

2011-01-05T22:59:00.005Z

Tomorrow (Thursday, 5.30pm) sees the Cabinet's decision to sell off significant green spaces in Bristol - including eight here in Stockwood - "called in" by the Members' 'Overview and Scrutiny Panel' (details here)

Everyone who witnessed the decision will be well aware that the Cabinet rode roughshod over massive opposition and demonstrable flaws in the consultation process - and still reached a decision that doesn't actually provide the funding that the city's parks are said to need.

For the record, the council's own failure to respond to my 'Freedom of Information' request (for the assessments of the allegedly 'low value' sites in question) remains exactly as it was at the end of the consultation, and through the whole of the decision making process. It's now gone seven weeks beyond the date set by law for a reply.

The idea behind the request was to get vital background information, on which the council was basing its decisions, into the public domain. How else could the accuracy of its evidence be challenged? But that vital data remains under wraps, even now

That's just one example of the many failings in the whole process.

Postscript (6/1/11):

The call-in panel wasn't persuaded. It was only too clear from the start that this decision would be taken on party lines - and the call-in panel has 3 LibDems, 1 Tory, and 1 Labour member.

The 'complainants' were Labour's Mark Bradshaw and the Tories' Mark Weston, as the chairs of the two scrutiny commissions whose 5 hour investigation led to an all-party plea for the sell-off decision to be deferred. They argued that the Cabinet had been unreasonable and over-hasty in their decision to sell-off green spaces - the consultation was demonstrably flawed, the sales wouldn't fulfil the Strategy objectives, so why rush the decision?

Officers - who'd clearly been given an impossible task of assessing the many thousands of consultation responses - did their best to justify themselves, while Gary Hopkins decided (as always) that attack is the best form of defence, and turned the whole thing into tedious party political bickering. Sad.

So we finished up with a 3:2 decision to take 'no further action'. The Cabinet decision stands. Every site earmarked for sale will eventually get put on the market at a time to be decided by the officers. Unless of course it's unsaleable.

I'll (reluctantly) request an internal review of why my own FoI request remains unanswered 7 weeks after the statutory date for a response. It's way too late for the documents in question to be challenged, though. The decision's been made.

A Stockwood Miscellany

2011-01-04T22:33:00.005Z

A new 'transport sub-group' for the Hengrove and Stockwood Neighbourhood Partnership has its first meeting next Monday, 6pm at the S. Bristol Sports Club on West Town Lane. If local transport's important to you, so is this group! All welcome.

Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces has published its New Year news-sheet, linked from their home page. Feel free to print and share it. Details of orchard reclamation work parties (including this coming Saturday and Monday mornings) are on the same site.

On Sunday 30th January, there's a 'community clean-up' along the Sturminster valley and railway path, centred on the Sturminster Club. A team from Community Payback will be helping, and doing more the following day. Details to follow - but email me (stockwoodpete [at] gmail.com) if you'd like them sent to you.

HandS is a new on-line residents forum now being set up to serve the Neighbourhood Partnership area of Hengrove and Stockwood (hence its name, H and S). It's independent of the formal Partnership, which is a council body, but supportive of it. Again, email me if you'd like to know when it's launched.

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Plot 6 revisited

2011-01-03T23:35:00.008Z

A very timely question has been raised about Plot 6 - the wasted space alongside Temple Meads station. "Is this a suitable moment to renew the pressure on using Plot 6 for a more convenient Coach Station and Transport Hub? "

Good point. Plot 6 is in the joint ownership of Network Rail and development agency SWRDA - but their plans to cover this key site with another uninspiring development of offices, flats, and retail have stagnated - and now SWRDA is to close its doors, and its wallet, by March 2012.

Meanwhile Network Rail's future is little more secure, facing (as Christian Wolmar puts it) "something between dismemberment and death"

So what happens to their (ie our) Plot 6 asset? SWRDA says " the rules by which we are governed require that any disposals must be at open market value", though they also hint that councils or the new Local Enterprise Partnership could inherit land assets like Plot 6. An Evening Post report
is less optimistic: "The RDA has also been told it will not be allowed to hand on any properties or assets and they will have to be sold on the open market". In short, the whole deal's being rushed through on ideological grounds without much thought about how it's done or what will be lost, and no-one has much idea what's going to happen. Brilliant.

So is the Plot 6 opportunity be lost to Bristol for ever, thanks to gross political ineptitude?

There's certainly been plenty of public pressure put on both the city council and the West of England Partnership to make sure that this chance isn't lost - but there's been precious little response from them so far.

Bristol is now considering its long term plans for the Central Area, including Temple Meads, as part of the evolving Bristol Development Strategy. On the way, it's seen repeated demands to list Plot 6 for the road/tram component of a multimodal city transport interchange (using the adjacent, and equally underused, Digby Wyatt Shed as the passenger concourse); you'd be hard put to find an event or consultation where the topic hasn't been raised.

Questions to the Cabinet, though, suggest that there is no great ambition to do more than 'improve' the interchange facilities that already exist at Temple Meads - effectively providing a marginally better quality of bus stop. The council's own scrutiny commission was due to get a progress report on Plot 6 on September 23rd; but that seems to have got lost somewhere along the line. [*updated - see footnote]

As for the West of England Partnership, they too make a great thing of seeking out the public's views on their plans, and they too have been told very clearly that Plot 6 could provide the smooth, comfortable interchange that could make public transport in the city an attractive option that could really be preferred to travelling by car. So you might think Plot 6 would merit a mention in the latest Joint Local Transport Plan (JLTP3) covering the next fifteen years of transport development in Bristol and the surrounding authorities.

As luck would have it, the 'final draft' (isn't that a contradiction?) has just been published

And Plot 6 really does get a mention in it! JLTP3 puts on record that Plot 6 was among the big issues raised by consultees, and adds encouragingly that "we have been able to take most of these on board". But - that's the only mention - in 150 pages of detailed proposals to take us through to 2026.

In a further 275 pages of strategic environmental assessment, and in the supplementary papers on cycling, network management(!), public transport(!), parking, road safety, rural transport, smarter choices, and walking - likewise, Plot 6 is totally absent. It's not part of the plans.

So it's pretty clear that the local authories are sitting on their hands while the coalition government prepares a fire sale that will to kill off the sole opportunity to use this unique piece of land to help solve the city's biggest problem.

"Is this a suitable moment to renew the pressure on using Plot 6 for a more convenient Coach Station and Transport Hub?"

I think the answer's pretty obvious....

[*Updated 5th Jan]
I've just acquired a copy of the officers' scrutiny report, which should be added to the web records of the Sept 23 meeting soon. It shows a clear effort to defuse any attempt by rank and file members to get Plot 6 designated as a transport interchange...

Although initially the site looks ideal for a multi-modal interchange, and there have been representations suggesting this, the case for a multimodal interchange is not clear. It may be that improving links to existing public transport and proposed future Bus Rapid Transit is better than diverting a large number of services on to this site.
For this reason the prudent approach will be to seek that any development at the site is as permeable as possible, improves interchange and provides car parking for the station, without prescribing that it must solely be a multi-modal interchange."

Signs of Enlightenment?

2011-01-01T23:10:00.007Z

At last we've turned the corner! Consumer power forces manufacturers and retailers to take more responsibility for the stuff they sell us.

Take these sky lanterns. Attractive though they are, they've come in for a lot of criticism for the dangerous debris they leave around our countryside. But like the label says, we need worry no longer.

That progress was rightly being celebrated in Stockwood last night.

2011 ushers in a new era of environmental sensitivity and respect for the places we love.

If you go down to the woods today, enjoy it while you still can....

2010-12-23T23:53:00.003Z

Dear Kerry,

EDM 1199: FORESTRY COMMISSION REDUCTIONS IN EXPENDITURE

As the Member for Bristol East, could you consider adding your signature to this Early Day Motion?

I imagine that like me, you're alarmed at the prospect of deep cuts in the budget, and the sale of a substantial part, of the Forestry Commission estate. It is hard to see what possible benefits there could be from a sell-off, apart from the immediate one-off lump sum, to set against multiple threats to long term public enjoyment of the forests, biodiversity, forests as carbon sinks, and jobs.

Jonathon Porritt has blogged about the broad implications in (Forests on the Front Line) as lucidly as ever, with an update that takes a closer look at the Forest of Dean and its MP

At a time when you and I both are urging a rethink on the plans to sell Bristol's own open space assets, perhaps we shouldn't lose sight of the much bigger national picture where the same thing is happening. (There's a seasonal crack here about not seeing the wood for the Christmas trees - but I wouldn't dare use it!)

Yours

Pete Goodwin

Babs, Gary, and the Age of Stupid

2010-12-17T10:59:00.004Z

Barbara Janke was an onlooker at Wednesday's scrutiny commissions meeting where her councillor underlings spent over five hours going over the plans to sell off green spaces, all across the city.

Who knows whether she'd managed to read the 400-page plus documentation, let alone the public statements, but she did hear very clear reports of a flawed consultation, mislaid papers and petitions, expert advice disregarded, Freedom of Information requests unfulfilled, all of it showing that the 'consultation report' is founded on unreliable envidence. Probably the inevitable result of asking a heavily cut-back department to deliver and assess a huge consultation and review of the city's open spaces, way beyond its own resources.

The five hour session was enough to persuade the councillors that a hasty decision to sell the land on such dodgy grounds would be unwise; far better to give it just a bit more time to make sure we get it right. After all, these are final decisions, there's no going back, and there's no rush. So that's what they recommended to the LibDem Cabinet.

The Scrutiny Commissions' appeal was echoed by many others, including even the independent Parks Forum which had until now been 100% behind the sell-off plan (and is being vilified by the Evening Post for it). Add to that the pleas of more councillors, groups like our own Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces and the Neighbourhood Partnership, residents groups and individuals.

To defer a decision on the sales seemed obvious..... Everything to gain, to make sure the eventual decisions are well founded, sustainable, and in keeping with sensible city planning. Anything else would be stupid.

A pity the Cabinet was unanimous in rejecting their advice, and chose the stupid option instead.

Something to do with false pride, the pleasure of exercising power........ or even, possibly, just being stupid?

Aren't Neighbourhood Partnerships brilliant?

2010-12-15T21:42:00.001Z

We actually achieved a bit of people power at the Neighbourhood Partnership meeting last night.

It was a pretty earnest but uninspiring agenda that delivered all that was required of it - but the interest lay elsewhere.

We threw out the 'Code of Conduct' required of Partnership members, and substituted something called 'ground rules' for the meetings, yet to come, and to be written in plain English. For me (as one of the delegate members), it means I can feel free to blog about the NP without first signing an Official Secrets Act.

We had a Public Forum item, too - which is probably unique in the curent round of NP meetings, because it's been disappeared from their agendas. It drew three statements, and they in turn contributed to our final decision - added as an emergency item in spite of vigorous protests from the LibDem corner (including our own Goulden Boy, self-styled saviour of the Craydon Road Open Space). They didn't want it discussed at any price and raised every possible objection (none of them valid!)

The subject was, of course, the Green Space sell-off - or rather the failures in the consultation, such as the loss of Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces response, the failure to fulfil FoI requests, and the under-recording of petition numbers. I'd distilled this into an appeal from the NP to Thursday's Cabinet to delay any decision to sell land until it could be sorted out. Eventually, it was overwhelmingly approved - with the sole exception of the three dissidents, who presumably want an immediate decision to sell.

I'm glad to say that today's Scrutiny Commission reached the same conclusion as our Neighbourhood Partnership, so the Cabinet will be faced with a multiple appeal to hold back on the controversial sales when it meets tomorrow.

Festive Airport

2010-12-15T00:13:00.002Z

At the Broadwalk shopping centre, this year's Christmas display is of a festive airport.

Maybe it's a sign of the times that airports have joined the iconic symbols of Christmas. It prompted me to confirm that you can still buy the ultimate in destructive holiday flights, taking the kids on a day trip to Lapland for a visit to Santa and a snowmobile trip. It won't be long before the trip becomes impossible, as the snow and ice disappear under relentless climate change caused by - people who do trips like this.

Meanwhile, you can still go. For parents and two under 12s, the day will set you back around £1700. So why not do it properly with a couple of nights in a room in a log cabin - for just £4,600? Or even in an 8-seater private jet from upwards of £19,000 - plus your accommodation and keep.

I think I'll settle for Broadwalk. And feel good about it.

Green Space sell-off: the back-of-an-envelope analysis

2010-12-10T23:45:00.003Z

Key figures (revised 13/12 to compare like with like):

Feb 2008 Cabinet:

Element of Parks & Green Spaces funding required from land sales:
£41m :For capital investment
£22m :For maintenance
£63m :Total to fund parks programme
add
£27m : agreed share (@ 30% of gross sales) for the council pot
£90m : total sales receipts required.

Dec 2010 Cabinet:
£16m : total value of sites identified and recommended for sale
£ 4.7m : lost to parks as the agreed cut for other purposes
£11.3m : funds available toward PGSS target.

Shortfall : £51.7m (i.e. only 18% of the total can be raised)

Extract from Parks and Green Spaces Strategy, driving the sales:

"should there be insufficient 'low value' marginal land available.... the council will review the ambitions of the strategy and consider alternative funding sources." (p42)

News Management, Council House style

2010-12-08T00:03:00.004Z

Extraordinary - but not that unexpected.

Tuesday was the day that BCC had to reveal which of the city's green sites it intends to sell off, so that the others might be properly looked after. With a bit of a bonus; 30% goes into the general council pot, and not into the parks at all.

The details eventually emerged in the papers for the Scrutiny meeting next Wednesday.

But well before that, the press and broadcasting media had been called in for a briefing, even before fellow-councillors had been told what was planned for their wards. Then there was a press release, in which Gary Hopkins reveals that the whole Cabinet has already agreed (what? when?) which green spaces should be sold off - subject, of course, to a token hearing of whatever the scrutineering councillors might say, and public statements made at their cabinet meeting.

In other words, verdict first, then square the press, then seal the deal with a 'democratic' dance of confirmation.

The long and comprehensive consultation process looks like a complete waste of time and effort, at least as far as those of us in Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces are concerned; our comprehensive response to the consultation has been lost, stolen or strayed, because it isn't even listed in the verbatim reports among the papers.

Add to that, of course, that a Freedom of Information request for officer assessments of each disposal site continues to be ignored, way beyond statutory time limits.

It all stinks.

Update, Wed 8th:

The council has promised to get the overdue FoI information to me next Monday - which gives about 24 hours to go through 60-odd site details and get representations to the Scrutiny Commission meeting.

Whipping Yarns

2010-12-04T00:01:00.003Z

"We're not being whipped" Cabot's LibDem councillor Alex Woodman told the council debate on abandoning the sell-off of the city's green spaces.

Technically, he was probably right, because a Labour amendment had just been introduced, and any formal whipping on it was impracticable. But only the previous day the LibDems had announced that "Bristol City Council’s ruling Lib Dem group (38 members out of 70) will amend the Tories’ motion on the Green Spaces Strategy (PGSS) at tomorrow’s full council meeting (Nov 16th).". It's hard to know how Alex could have any choice but to do what his party had agreed.

You'd think that the selective sale of green space wouldn't really be a big 'party' issue, except maybe for the Greens - but right through this debate, every vote was conducted entirely on party lines. LibDems in wards threatened by proposed sales still voted for it; Tories and Labour in wards that could only gain voted against. The usual disciplined tribal voting patterns, in fact.

Why this 'default' of routine voting as a block? Don't parties trust their own councillors to make their own judgements?

I put in a Public Forum statement to the same full council meeting to suggest that where a whip is in force, speakers should say so, and say why. I explained that "If an election or manifesto promise is involved, or some intrinsic party values, then a whip is understandable; but for the majority of council decisions (for instance the motion to be heard later about the funding for the Area Green Space Plans) it is very hard to find any rational difference between the parties."

The statement's been referred to the respective party whips. So far, only Labour has responded; I'll come back to this when I hear more.

As a footnote, it's worth noting that Alex Woodman and his fellow Cabot councillor Mark Wright (defender of Green Belt except when it involves a stadium) have put out a 'Cabot E-News', acknowledging that "that there is opposition to the sale of some of the sites (around 15 of the 60 proposed)". It turns out that the 15 are not actually sites, they're protest groups, while the 60 are proposed sale sites - so it's grossly misleading. It's still not been corrected though.

Meanwhile my own Freedom of Information request for the officers' assessments of the various suggested disposal sites remains unacknowledged, a couple of weeks after the statutory date for a full answer. With decisions imminent, you have to wonder why such a delay.

Green Spaces - the sham debate

2010-11-18T18:39:00.002Z

Bristol's LibDem councillors have gone one step further than their Westminster counterparts. Not only do they do hypocrisy, but they can do NIMBYism simultaneously.

The Great Green Spaces Debate on Tuesday was their demonstration platform. We were told that there was no whip in force, this was a free vote for the LibDem councillors. Several of them represent wards with a lot to lose through the policy of green space sell-off - so they dutifully tell their constituents that they'll oppose sales in their own wards, and then vote for the rest of Bristol to bear the cost. It would be hard to find a more NIMBY position than that.

It was the 100% support of these councillors in 'un-whipped' votes that won the day for the LibDem administration. No doubt it will, in turn, be used to justify the sale of green open spaces (although, for some reason, no-one mentioned that for every £1 raised in land sales, only 70p will go back into the parks anyway).

True, the original Tory motion wasn't up to much, as it threw out the baby with the bathwater; all the good work that had gone into the Area Green Space Plans would be scrapped under their proposals, not just the land sales. Both Greens and Labour had suggested improvements, that would allow the best of the plans to be retained; and the Tories took that on board.

The debate itself quickly degenerated into a routine shambles of tribal point-scoring. Jay Jethwa, seconding the Tory motion, set the tone with an attack on Executive member Gary Hopkins. She must know after nearly four years that no-one wins Gary's heart or mind with that approach, he just digs in deeper and responds in kind. Clearly, Jay's priority was to impress her constituents, not the decision-makers.

What a waste! There was an option that just might have worked - we'd included it in the Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces response to the Green Space Plans, and the Greens invited the Tories to take it up. It was a key passage in the Parks & Green Spaces Strategy that said "should there be insufficient 'low value' marginal land available.... the council will review the ambitions of the strategy and consider alternative funding sources." Reference to that might (and still could) provide the face-saving formula that would allow the LibDem Executive to quietly drop the unpopular and unsustainable drive to sacrifice the city's open spaces.

Llandudno Junction, 0620hrs, November

2010-11-18T18:28:00.004Z

I'll try to forget the carbon footprint of this one - it was just too good an opportunity to miss. Arriva Trains Wales 'Premier Service' offers its first-class passengers the full monty... a complimentary three course dinner on the northbound Cardiff to Holyhead journey, and a full breakfast on the way back.

And thanks to an unintendedly generous special offer, the whole trip, from Bristol, was there for the taking at £32. The bike went free, and made it possible to reach a good accessible Youth Hostel - Conwy - for a couple of nights, with a bike ride round waterfalls, woods and castles in autumnal sunshine in between.

Young when it suits, old when it suits. Can't be bad. And if I wasn't there, I'd have felt obliged to go to the council meeting - so it was a double benefit!

(Penance done - I've watched the webcast debate)

Kerry and the Bill-killers

2010-11-13T23:34:00.003Z

Kerry McCarthy MP is rightly aggrieved. Arcane parliamentary procedures allowed neighbouring MP Jacob Rees-Mogg to recite poetry as part of a government strategy to 'talk out' the second reading of the Sustainable Livestock Bill yesterday.

Yet again, a Friday afternoon "Private Members Bill" that made a great deal of sense and had very strong support, was lost not though argument, not through a vote, but through the abuse of Parliamentary procedure. And it's become a habit. No wonder Kerry tweets that
"We've got to sort out these Friday procedures".

Pity she wasn't so keen when her party was in power, and, as a junior whip, she was only too ready to use those same procedures to block Bills that, for its own reasons, the government didn't want discussed.

Bills like Lord Morris's Haemophiliacs Bill, to compensate victims of "the worst medical treatment disaster in the history of the NHS" the contamination of haemophiliacs with HIV/HCV through plasma imported from US prisons. That one was killed stone dead by Kerry's call of 'Object!' one Friday back in February.

There have been innumerable popular Bills killed off the same way. I know, I've often been part of the lobbying to persuade MPs to try to get them taken up in the first place.

Caroline Lucas MP was, like Kerry, appalled at the way yesterday's Bill was stopped. Unlike Kerry, Caroline hasn't got a history of killing Bills herself, or of using arcane procedures to avoid debate - the legislative equivalent of using legal loopholes to avoid paying tax. As she told this autumn's Green Party conference:

" I remain conscious of how strange, even alien, Parliament is.

It isn't just the odd language, the arcane procedures and strange costumes.

It's an institution designed for, and run by, an elite, who simply don't want to let the people have a real say in decisions. "

Kerry and the rest really need to get their act together if they really mean to challenge this shameful side of 'the mother of parliaments'.

But will it happen?

New Kids on the Blog

2010-11-10T21:32:00.002Z

Two new additions to my blogroll (right)

Save Stockwood's Green Sites is one I run for Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces. It's on the roll to alert locals to new posts - but I want to spread the word further - and asap - about the most recent post, backing an all-Bristol call to prevent the sale of the city's green spaces to fund the Parks Strategy. Key date is the council meeting next Tuesday, so please take a look and spread the word.

Those on Facebook (me, I avoid it!) can help it go viral with this link

The other link is to Stockwood's Other Blogger - the LibDem candidate, Michael Goulding. Michael's blog is, he assures me, entirely his own work, though he has been advised not to link back here to Stockwood Pete, which he regards as a front for the Green Party! (it isn't of course. Well, not always.) Anyway, the blogroll link will alert me to whatever he has to say without me having to visit to check.

What a pity our two Tory councillors still don't have a presence on the web, or even take the trouble to comment on these pages.

The Big Shift

2010-11-10T10:16:00.003Z

Meanwhile, back on the ground....

Here's a nice contrast with the Zaragoza junket (previous post), with its focus on the abstractions of brands and image as the key to a golden future.

It's about the real world, and it's much cheaper and easier to get to, too. (Council House, Sunday 28th, 9.30 till 5, £14/£8)

I wonder if Barbara Janke or our Director of Place-Making will find the time to go....

www.shiftbristol.org.uk/?page_id=306

Bristol goes to Zaragoza

2010-11-08T17:32:00.005Z

This search on the city council's website really was for 'eurocities' and not, as they feared, 'atrocities'. I'll save that one for another day....

It did find a few references, too - but none of them were about the trip that Leader Barbara Janke has just taken to the four-day Eurocities Conference at Zaragoza. That doesn't seem to be on record anywhere.

Barbara's big Zaragoza opportunity was to join a panel discussion where she could share with fellow leaders "the process of developing Bristol's identity, and the consequences of building an internationally recognized city brand". That may be why she took our newly appointed Director of Place Making along with her.

I see that one Steve Woods has been wondering about the value of trips like this (perhaps remembering how they jetted off to Copenhagen for the Climate Change conference, and came back to twitter about an innovative bicycle wheel that we knew about anyway). Steve wants to know if anyone else went to Spain and what it all cost us, so he's put in an FoI request.

He misses the big questions, though. After the Conference closed on Friday, there was still 24 hours entertainment available for anyone not rushing back home. So did Bristol's finest hang back for the guided Zaragoza bus tour? Or the dramatised tour? Or the tapas tour? Or the Saturday morning Chocotour ("Let yourself be sweetened and discover Zaragoza’s chocolate tradition in some of the city’s most well known chocolate cafés").

I think we should be told...

An Apple for the Banker

2010-11-05T22:12:00.002Z

Thanks to a team from Barclays Bank, we made a terrific start on opening up the abandoned orchard on Stockwood Open Space earlier this week.

Residents, the council (even a councillor!), and the Wildlife Trust played a part too, so you could - if you wanted to make political capital - call it 'Big Society' in action. Except that it wasn't a case of a 'partnership' taking over council duties, it was something that wouldn't have been done otherwise, and it wasn't so much an exercise in self-flagellation (until you look at the bramble scratches!) as it was pleasure.

Now we've got a part-cleared orchard, loads of unidentified fruit trees, and a winter window to finish getting it all into shape before the breeding season starts up again. We'll need all the help we can get.

More on the Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces web site. (And all welcome at the AGM on Monday, 8th November, at the Free Church, 7.30pm)

Why Smart Cards aren't so smart for First Bus

2010-11-05T13:21:00.005Z

[Over on 'Turning Bristol Red', Darren Lewis takes a well justified pop at the problems of travelling by bus in Bristol. Here's a bit more, to explore how First Bus's corporate priorities actually prevent progress.]

On the face of it, 'smart' oyster-style tickets have a lot to offer bus operators. They free up drivers from the fare collecting duty, save costly, non-profitable time at bus stops, make the service faster and more attractive to passengers. All good for business, good for profits. But instead of going for it, FirstBus are keeping well away from Bristol's efforts to introduce smart travel cards.

Could it be to protect their monopoly?

In Bristol, it was the First group that held the dominant position after the post-deregulation bus wars, and they've protected that monopoly ever since.

Near-monopoly, of course, brings economies of size and (in theory) greater efficiency. That was one of the great assets of publicly owned transport networks; full access to the more profitable routes allowed cross-subsidy for the less economic routes. First, though, don't have to do that - they can (and do) abandon unprofitable routes at will, leaving local councils with the obligation to provide a subsidy to keep those buses running.

FirstBus has two more vital trade advantages that help maintain their monopoly, and thus their profits, while removing the need to actually improve services.

One (believe it or not) is customer loyalty! There's persuasive anecdotal evidence of customers waiting for First's more familiar and long-established buses, with a history on that route, rather than use one of the upstarts like U-Link or ABus, notwithstanding the time and fare advantages they might offer.

The second, crucially, is their First Day ticket; £4 each and travel anywhere in Bristol for the day - so long as it's on their buses. Take the family (off peak) and it's a mere £7.50. But of course, if you want to do one leg of the trip on someone else' bus, you'll have to pay that fare on top.

No other operator in Bristol can compete with that offer - and First know it.

In London, the Oyster card seems to set the standard for smart cards on local public transport. It does what a First Day ticket doesn't do - it takes you on London buses, tubes, trams, and even on heavy rail. Who runs the service doesn't matter. If, at the end of the day, you've 'spent' more in fares than a daily cap (if you'd used a Travelcard instead), you pay the lesser fare.

In Bristol, such a scheme would threaten First's monopoly, because they could no longer rely on selling cheaper 'First-only' tickets that keep passengers from using rival services.

First Bus get deeply involved in forward planning for such things as bendy bus routes, where they think there's something in it for them. But they're nowhere to be seen when smart cards are mentioned. So what progress has Bristol managed without the active support of its main bus operator? As you might expect, very little.

Any good scheme has to be ITSO compliant, ITSO being the national standard for smart travel cards. Apart from a 'back-office system' that's being set up to manage it, there's little progress in Bristol to turn it into reality. Instead of helping push it forward, First are looking the other way.

Meanwhile a couple of minor (but more progressive) operators - U-Link and Wessex - are trialling a simpler short term substitute, a 'stored value' card that offers quicker boarding and fare reductions, but isn't ITSO compliant. That's all.

In short, First's priorities are self-interest and non-cooperation with anything that might undermine the market distortions that it has cultivated to protect its monopoly. And that stalls progress towards the smart travel card that Bristol desperately needs

[ADDED] There'a an e-petition on the city council web site calling for Oyster-style smart cards for Bristol

New homes - or the school run?

2010-10-28T21:18:00.005+01:00

Behind Stockwood's Hollway Road shops, there's a grim, uncared for area that finds use by shoppers and by parents on the Waycroft School run. It's in private ownership. The owner's just applied to put three detached four-bedroomed homes on it.

You can take a look at the plans, and comment, on line at the council's planning portal. The application number is 10/04539/F and you can go direct to the application documents here. I'd recommend a look at the 'proposed perspective views' for starters.

No-one would pretend that the present frontage (or backage?) has anything to commend it - but these proposals will raise many questions...

How on earth will service vehicles navigate their way to the shops' rear entrances? Will the same service road become a 'dark alley' out of hours, out of sight, a no-go zone for anyone other than the residents who must use it for access?

Will we see a mass protest march (or, more likely, convoy) launched by the schoolrunner mums? Will the developers actually be able to build at a price that attracts buyers to this... er... rather different kind of a site?

Tory U-turn on Green Spaces!

2010-10-27T23:59:00.008+01:00

Well, well.

At the full council on November 16th, the Conservative group will " CALL ON THE LEADER AND CABINET TO SCRAP THE AREA GREEN SPACE PLANS". That's the ones that they, along with Labour and LibDems, supported just a couple of years ago!

Could there be an explanation for these dramatic contortions?

It CAN'T be on principle...

After all, this is the ideologically driven party that plans to sell off Britains' publicly owned (and profitable) forests to private speculators and investors - with the extra bonus of being inheritance tax free! (Petition against it here)

This is the party whose local councillors are backing tax-exile Lansdown's bid to build a stadium on the Ashton Vale green belt, trampling on the lawful rights of local people.

So, if it ain't principle, could it be - dare I say - electoral opportunism?

Next May will see more than one Tory councillor having to explain to angry voters why they backed a strategy to sell off much loved local parks and open spaces in their wards. In Bishopsworth, for instance, where Kings Head Park is under threat. In Frome Vale, with where six sites have been identified for sale. And here in Stockwood, where several open spaces could be lost to the community for ever, and Cllrs Jethwa and Morris have been desperately distancing themselves from any responsibility for it.

But it's not just about hanging on to these seats - there might be new opportunities for electoral gain. Brislington East and West, Hartcliffe, Hengrove, Hillfields, and St George East are all threatened by a loss of open space, and in all of them the Tories might expect to benefit, if they play their cards right.

Call me a cynic........

Anyway, the Tory motion submitted for the next full council meeting is:

COUNCILLOR M WESTON TO MOVE

THIS COUNCIL CALLS ON THE LEADER AND CABINET TO SCRAP THE AREA GREEN SPACE PLANS

Public consultation has shown that the planned sell-off of parkland and valued leisure land, identified in the ideas and options proposals, is a step too far and that community open space is not for sale.

The original Parks and Green Spaces Strategy was meant to dispose of
land of low value, poor quality plots or areas that attract anti-social behaviour. Instead, the developed plans have earmarked well-used and highly valued recreational space.

Alternative funding sources must be sought for investment in our
Parks.”

Which just happens to have been the Green Party position for the last three years. Welcome on board.

[Note: Petition against forest sales]
[This post comes with a self-interest declaration - as a likely Stockwood candidate next May]

Council's "TV, not Parks" plans challenged

2010-10-26T18:43:00.002+01:00

As the Evening Post series explores the city's open spaces and looks at what's gained and lost by the different plans (today revealing that the some of the profit from parkland sales in Stockwood could help pay for a giant TV screen in the Bear Pit) - Friends of Stockwood Open Spaces have sent in their own verdict on the plans.

They conclude that it's time to trigger that part of the Parks Strategy that provides "should there be insufficient 'low value' marginal land available.... the council will review the ambitions of the strategy and consider alternative funding sources."

[Added] FoI Request

Meanwhile, an FoI request has gone in to try to get to the bottom of why all these sites were selected. Has their attractiveness to developers been a factor? The answer will be too late to inform any consultation responses, but it might still help influence the actual decisions. The FoI request is Bristol-wide, and should put all the answers in the public domain via the "What do they Know" web site.

Lansdown's MPs - breaking the line, or breaking the law?

2010-10-26T13:10:00.004+01:00

After the extraordinary 'A City United' statement that Bristol's MPs were cajoled into signing by BCFC, Simon Cook and the Evening Post, at least two have been under pressure to explain the bit at the end: “Councillors have an important and difficult decision to make. We urge them to stand up for the views of the majority of residents and bring the stadium to Bristol”. After all, that's a direct call on councillors to put populism ahead of an honest assessment of the Village Green application. Which would, of course, be unlawful.

Now, both Stephen Willams (in comments on his blog) and Kerry McCarthy (in comments on this blog) have given assurances that they expect councillors to act within the law - i.e. to consider the village green application only on the evidence of public use, not on the potential of the land to provide a stadium. Neither MP has yet gone so far as to retract that final sentence, though - even though it appears to have been drafted for them by the football club!

Of course, that leaves the other signatories - Dawn Primarolo, Charlotte Leslie, Chris Skidmore, and Tessa Munt, still totally unapologetic about urging Bristol's councillors to defy the law when they come to decide the village green designation.

Strategic Diversions in the Parks

2010-10-23T22:11:00.005+01:00

Today's Evening Post publishes some questions emerging from all the protests about the threatened sale of Bristol's green spaces - and how Gary Hopkins, the Cabinet member with the Parks brief, responds. I've added my own comments in italics - plus a bonus Q&A at the end.

Q THERE has been vocal opposition to a quarter of the areas put forward for sale at the very least – is that an acceptable number?

A It's certain there will be changes to the original list that officers came up with.
But just because there are comments doesn't mean there will be changes to individual sites.
How can we address 30 years of neglect without a strategic, sensible action?

* Of course it needs action. The problem is whether the way of funding that action is fair, realistic, or sustainable. I suggest it is none of these.

We will guarantee that every park not sold off will be protected for the next 20 years.

* What's so special about that promise? Isn't it what councils are supposed to do anyway?

Q Is it fair to give money raised from selling land in one part of the city to another area that might not lose any green space?

A The whole point of the strategy, which all parties signed up for, is that there should be minimum standards people should be able to expect for their green spaces.

* As Glenn Vowles has pointed out (and Gary Hopkins himself admitted at Stockwood) the Green Party opposed the funding method from the start. No one listened though.

It would be ludicrous to sell off land where there is a deficit of green spaces.

* Setting up an aunt sally just to knock it down again. No-one's suggested any such thing

Q Should money be going to improve parks in relatively wealthy areas like Clifton and Henleaze, which won't lose out on any green spaces?

A What about areas like Easton and Lawrence Weston, which have a shortage of open space? Would it be fair to say you should deprive people of Easton of the parks they need?

* A politician blatantly avoiding a question. The general cash flow will be from the less wealthy outer wards of Bristol into the centre - and into the general council pot.

The argument that you can't sell off land because you're spending the money elsewhere in the city is not a particularly strong argument. Improvements cost money.

* The fact remains that many poorer communities, where green space is one of the main amenities, will lose out. That makes it a stronger argument than it would otherwise have been!

Some people might come up and say we don't want anything sold off up here but then say we would quite like those improvements.

* It's not unreasonable for people to expect that children will have play space near their homes, and would look to the council to provide it in the course of time. That doesn't have to mean raising cash by selling valued land, then putting (some of) the proceeds into buying new swings.

In some areas there wasn't any local group interested in that land, so we have stirred up interest.

* A bit like saying the blitz was a good thing because it brought people together.....

Q Instead of selling off green spaces to raise money for improvements, why not spend section 106 money, raised from developers who submit major planning applications?

A We know it's not enough. It's a quarter of what's required. There are four funding sources – land sales, section 106, council money and grants. The grants are easier to come by when there is a strategy showing what you want.

*Here in Stockwood, the major improvements aren't being funded by the Parks Strategy sales, but by old Sec 106 money. Can't that happen elsewhere?

Q The council says it wants to sell the green spaces to help fund an £87 million programme of improvements to other green spaces in Bristol. How many of the 62 sites will have to be sold to raise the £63m the council says it needs to fund improvements?

A We can't say how many, it depends on the sizes of the areas and other factors.

This is a 20-year strategy, so we're not talking about selling off 15 to 20 spaces now.

*The Strategy gave ball-park figures of £90 million, raised by the sale of 90 acres, providing £60 million to spend on parks improvements and maintenence over twenty years. What happens after that is anybody's guess. That was always the real target - not some notional mapping of those land assets considered to be of 'low community value'. It follows that market value will determine which sites are put up for sale.

It's not likely any of these will be sold in the next few years.
The situation has always been that land has been sold off on a piecemeal basis but the money has not gone back into parks.

* Of course every council will buy and sell land in order to function (some might even give it away if there's a rich tax exile wants it). In this case, of course, only 70% goes back into the parks, and some of that is merely for maintenance.

Q Why not just sell off brown field sites instead of building on green spaces?

A That's what the site allocation plan is for. The money from those will go back into the council coffers, and some of the money for the green spaces plan will come from the council.

* Not entirely true. The site allocations document is about future land use, whether by the council or anyone else.
Still, this simply suggests that the parks can't expect anything much in future from general council funds, even though they're a council service. We've been conned.
How do other councils find the money to provide and maintain parks? Bet they don't use the Bristol method....

Q The council is consulting on two separate documents at the same time – the area green space plan and the site allocation document – which confused some residents. Should the consultations have run separately?

A No. They are two separate processes but there are connections between them because both involve council use of land. If responses have been sent to the wrong department that's not a problem.

* AGREE!

Q What happens when the consultation comes to an end?

A A list will come out in December of the sites that are going to be sold off.

* Verdict first, evidence afterwards.

[Here's one further question, not put in the Evening Post:]

Q. What if there is insufficient 'low value' marginal land available once the planning process has been concluded?

A. The council will review the ambitions of the strategy and consider alternative funding sources. (At least, that's what it says on p42 of the Parks and Green Space Strategy. Looks like Hopkins and Co have unilaterally ditched that part of the deal, though!)

Illusion

2010-10-21T23:29:00.007+01:00

As a change from the orchestrated illusion of the Spending Review - ideology masquerading as economic reality - here's a lighter version of hiding the economic truths.....

First, what was George & Railway Hotel in Temple Gate, nicely disguised (except when mammon requires a dirty great advert in the same place) as a cared for building. OK, it's not going to fool anyone, but most people would agree that it looks better than what's underneath.

Next, a parade of shops in Stockwood (though it could be anywhere). A potential case of the 'broken window' effect, where a down-at-heel environment tends to prompt further antisocial behaviour.

Next, more empty shops - except these are in a High Street. Redcar's shopping centre has been going downhill for years under pressure from supermarkets, out-of-town retail parks, and economic decline as industry shuts down. In an effort to brighten the scene, the High Street is now peppered with 'virtual shops' instead of steel shutters. The consensus is that it looks very much better than it did.

Finally, scope for a more ambitious project; what could you do with this monstrous concrete skeleton that welcomes everyone arriving at Temple Meads?

Cutting the debt? No, adding to it

2010-10-18T23:59:00.002+01:00

Some deeply disturbing announcements coming out of the government today.

The National Security Strategy - all 39 pages of it - does actually recognise climate change as a key part of our future insecurity. But it doesn't even mention putting prevention at the heart of the strategy - much as neither Clegg nor Cameron (leaders of the 'greenest government ever') mentioned climate change in their big conferences speeches.

Still, we have bankers to appease right now, so let's leave it to the next generation.

Then there's the embarrassing sight of Energy Secretary (sorry, energy and climate change secretary) Chris Huhne embracing the nuclear option. It's not that long since we heard him declare that there'd be no public subsidy for the industry. Now, however, it looks like the nuclear operators unique freedom from having to insure against a 'Maximum credible accident" - the government and people would bear all the horrific costs - will be maintained. Now that's what I call a subsidy!

Meanwhile, as Jonathon Porritt points out, Chris Huhne's departmental budget continues to carry the cost of Britain's previous nuclear programme, the clean-up costing us £1.7 billion a year. Now that's what I call a debt!

Still, we have bankers to appease right now, so let's leave the next debt to the next generation (and their kids.... and their kids...)

Something in the water.... fluoride and us.

2010-10-15T22:46:00.005+01:00

There are plenty of good posts on the theme of water today - it being the subject of blog action day. Richard Lawson's Mabinogogiblog (as always) has a fresh and positive take on some of the global angles.

Me, I'll stick to the wonderful commodity that comes out of our Bristol taps - the nice clean wholesome and incredibly healthy stuff-of-life that we scarcely give a second thought to.

There are plans to change all that. The regional health people want to add fluoride to it, and have been asked (by the Primary Care Trust) to look into the practicality of putting it in our drinking water supply. Last time I checked, they'd not yet commissioned the necessary work, but it is (dare I say) in the pipeline.

Although fluoridation is highly controversial, medical orthodoxy insists that one part fluoride per million in the water supply would do a lot to reduce dental caries in young children, especially those who don't brush their teeth much. As the government and NHS pursue their new primary objectives of cutting everything to keep the markets happy, fluoridation is going to look like a pretty good back-up for the already thin provision of expensive mass dental care. It would probably please the manufacturers of sugary confections too!

Enter Professor Paul Connett. Paul's work on two subjects, incineration and fluoridation, have led him to become an international expert on both. He's coming to Bristol on Tuesday week (26/10) to speak at a public meeting about fluoridation at University of Bristol, Wills Hall, Parry’s Lane, Stoke Bishop BS9 1AE, starting at 2pm. (Not far from the 54 bus route for us bus freeloaders).

[Added Note: There's some doubt as to whether this talk is actually happening - right now I can only find Paul talking about incineration at UWE on November 17. I'll update when I know more.... ]

I heard Paul speak many years ago, and was seriously impressed not just by his encyclopaedic knowledge, but by his ability to share it, entertainingly, with his audience. I'll thoroughly recommend the meeting to anyone who cares about the science or the ethics of mass-medicating us through our drinking water supply.