Heritage

These pages, recording the laws in the West Indies in 1763, were in volumes on display in the library a few years back.     

Welcome to Bristol!

Hallo, and welcome to Bristol!

Here's your indispensible free guidebook for 2014, brought to you courtesy of Destination Bristol and the generosity of local residents and businesses.

With the authority of Visit England and our own 'travelwest' brand behind it, it will tell you just what you need to know.....

Like how to catch a 75 bus to North Street and the Tobacco Factory …...(p49)

or our wonderful railway stations at Easton, Gloucester Road and Stokes Croft..... (p77)

 

or if you want a break from the city in one of North Somerset's seaside resorts, you can visit them all by direct train from Bristol (p58)

Austerity? Let's buy an Arena !

Stockwood Pete isn't too fussed about an Arena. Having clicked through the programmes and the prices now on offer at other Arenas – Cardiff, Newcastle, Sheffield, Leeds, Coventry, (not much on here), and Birmingham, it's clear that Stockwood Pete's bum is unlikely to occupy any of the Bristol Arena's 10,000 seats.

But on Thursday, the Mayor, with the support of his chosen Cabinet, will certainly commit Bristol residents to borrowing – and repaying - many millions of pounds, just to make sure that I and my fellow Bristolians have the opportunity.

It won't be a business decision (no business would touch it); it will be populist and political.

Most Bristolians will probably never go to our Arena (in the absence of naming rights, lets call it the Red Trousers Arena) just as they don't feel the need to go to professional football matches. Even so, it's been elevated to a matter of civic pride, and political pragmatism, that we should have one, just like every other self-respecting city. If we don't, the others will laugh at us. It's also a useful distraction from more serious matters.

Original nicked from Dru Marland.  Trousers by Stockwood Pete

In pursuit of the dream, many public servants and quite a few consultants have for years been fully occupied trying to find a business rationale for building an Arena. Back in 2003, the now defunct South West Regional Development Agency had a head start with it, and poured £9 million into acquiring the site, the heavily contaminated 'Diesel Depot' alongside Temple Meads. Then they spent a few million more on remediation. They even got as far as committing another £14 million to build a bridge from Cattle Market Road, giving not just access but essential services too. They found a global corporate arena operator, SMG Europe, plus other developers ready to make maximum use of the site. Then, in 2007, it went pear shaped. The operator argued (as private sector partners tend to do) that their own investment couldn't be justified without further effective public subsidy. SWRDA quickly backed off. As they explained at the time: 

“the Bristol Arena will not be able to go ahead. Following a thorough look at the scheme, rising costs for the project mean it would simply not be a good use of public money. The amount of public cash needed for the scheme would have been £86m, including the £15m we've already spent.”

Of course, SWRDA never had to depend on votes. They were more dependent on government imposed financial targets and on shrinking budgets. Your average elector, not to mention the Bristol Evening Post, didn't matter too much to them. Their days were numbered anyway, so they could afford to take this unpopular, but commercially sound, decision.

Enter the mayoral system. The Arena Promise was thought to be an essential part of any winning electoral strategy, and the Red Trousers Arena won. Back came the consultants and the development teams. Plus the new boys on the block, the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership – a powerful mix of elected members and businessmen self-appointed in backroom deals. By this time SWRDA had been dissolved, and its assets, including the now 'clean' diesel depot, transferred to the government's Homes and Communities Agency (HCA).

On Thursday, the Mayor and Cabinet will – after an earlier item about cutting £90 million from the city's public services – agree to borrow £90 million for an Arena. (That's before they've actually found the cash to buy the land it will stand on from the HCA.)

It's called, in the language of council finance, 'prudential borrowing'. The security – and the repayments - on the loan will rely on three funding streams : 

• Rent paid by the Arena operator over 25 years
• Car parking fees
• Anticipated income from new business rates in the Enterprise Zone.

The first two are 'new' money – they won't happen unless, and until, the Arena's built. Reliance on car parking revenue suggests that (in spite of the rhetoric) this will be a very heavily car-dependent venture, because it's based on a projection of 1,000 new nearby parking spaces (ie one car to every ten Arena seats) at £6 a throw and each occupied a hundred times a year. That would bring in £600K and a whole load of traffic on Cattle Market Road, while giving the customers every opportunity to drive back home without getting round to spending anything off-site. (The notion of a proper city public transport hub at Temple Meads gets its customary mention in the blurb around the Arena, but in truth it remains as woolly and opaque as ever)

The last income stream to cover the Arena debt and repayments – the hoped-for business rate income from the Enterprise Zone – covers the bulk of it, at £53 million. But that's not guaranteed, and more important, if it wasn't used for the Arena it would be available (the LEP permitting) for other things. So in effect it's far from being a new income, it's a massive new cost to the public purse.

Nobody pretends the city coffers will end up in the black from all this. It's much more about trying not to be too much in the red when it's all over.

On Thursday, will we really see the Mayor, backed by his Cabinet, within a few minutes of imposing a budget of £90 million in cuts, decide to commit a similar amount to what, in a time of austerity, can only be a vanity project?

Sadly, yes. And will we see any protests from the business elite, the people whose commercial nous has put them in the LEP driving seat to manage these public funds ?  Like hell we will.

Brief Encounter 2

Temple Meads, today, 12.45 - 12.50pm.

On the left, the 1pm Cross-Country train to Manchester Picadilly.  Busy with passengers headed north to Birmingham and beyond.  

Drawn up alongside, the Direct Rail Services freight from Bridgwater.   On board, two flasks of highly irradiated spent nuclear fuel rods from Hinkley Point, on their way to Sellafield where the plutonium will be extracted and stored to try to keep it out of the way.    

Full international cast of Brief Encounter 2 includes:
Direct Rail Services, the only publicly owned rail-freight company in the UK, being run by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.  Hinkley Point is owned by Electricite de France (EDF), who will aim to keep the waste flowing by building Hinkley Point C, with French and Chinese capital and generous operating subsidies from the UK government.   Sellafield is, like the trains, in the ownership of the NDA, but is run by Nuclear Management Partners, a consortium of the URS Corporation (USA), AMEC (UK) and Areva (France).  Emergency Planning services at Sellafield have been contracted out to those exemplars of integrity and good practice, SERCO  (honest!).   Emergency planning in Bristol is provided by the council's Civil Protection Unit.   Cross Country is owned by Deutsche Bahn.

Unlike the 1945 film, in which the head finally rules the heart, this 2013 release gives full rein to to the recklessness of the lead characters. And sod the children! 

 Now showing at railway stations across Britain

Edited 31/12/13

Horrors of SERC

It's three years since the Localism Bill was proudly unveiled by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles. It would, he said

“herald a ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities overturning decades of central government control and starting a new era of people power “ . 

There was a lot more of the same sort of populist guff....

Six months earlier, South Glos councillors had turned down an application from SITA to build an incinerator – sorry, waste-to-energy facility – sorry, Severnside Energy Recovery Centre - at Hallen, three miles north of Avonmouth. It was much more than a NIMBY decision; the area was already overcommitted to waste treatment plant over and above the local need, and the West of England councils were committed to a 'dispersal' strategy to reduce distances that waste must be carried . [Since then, our councils, with that unlikely Local Hero Gary Hopkins at the fore, have abandoned incineration altogether and gone for more advanced technology, along with then innovative food waste colections which are both proving themselves well . Gary survived the Evening Post vilification treatment. Lets hope Daniella Radice is equally resilient ].

But SITA now saw a commercial opportunity to burn as much as half the industrial and commercial waste produced in the West of England area. They appealed to the Secretary of State against the South Glos. decision. In 2011 there was a planning inquiry, at which Mr Pickles' Inspector took the SITA side. Pickles duly overturned the local councillors' decision. So SITA got their permission, but, in the absence of the local customers they'd described in their appeal, they still had nothing to give investors the confidence to put up the cash.

Incinerators need an assured flow of waste to burn – so the operators build in contract terms so that their customers must pay dearly for any shortfall in supply. Who cares that that obstructs any new measures to reduce waste or divert materials for recycling? If local authorities, desperate to avoid landfill taxes, commit to paying out £1.4 billion to burn waste by open combustion in an incinerator for 25 years; well, it's a proven if primitive technology, and financiers are keen to put up the capital with such low risks and high prospective profits. That's the theory.

Having had no more luck selling disposal contracts to local businesses than it had with the West of England local authorities, SITA cast its net wider. In west London it found a consortium of 6 underperforming and unambitious boroughs that were still sending high levels of waste to landfill, and were pretty low down the recycling tables. A deal was done. The incinerator would be built at Hallen as that champion of localisation, Pickles, had ruled; the waste to feed it would now come from the bins of Ealing, Brent, Hounslow, Richmond, Harrow, and Hillingdon.

Of the incinerator outputs, some would be the stack emissions, mostly drifting across North Bristol; some would be 'bottom ash'; some would be highly hazardous fly ash. Some of the heat would generate electricity for the grid, but unless neighbouring customers could be found for the bulk of the waste heat, that would just be dissipated to atmosphere.

Even given the deal, the promise of a cast iron long-term contract, and the profits and low risks that go with it, it seems that investors still didn't exactly queue up waving their cheque books.

Enter the Green Investment Bank. Set up about the same time as Pickles was banging on about the virtues of small government and local decision making, the GIB is supposed dip into its £3.8 billion to back 'green' projects in offshore wind, energy efficiency (especially the 'green deal') , or waste reduction/treatment where its “capital, knowledge and reputation make the difference that enables a project to be successfully financed“.

The GIB must be struggling, what with investors pulling out of offshore wind and the controversy over the big energy companies 'taxing' consumers with what Cameron reportedly dismisses as 'green crap'. It's been putting money into such bizarrely ungreen projects as converting Drax from coal to biomass – wood pellets imported from the forest clearance in the USA. Apparently that's a net reduction in local CO2 emissions, so it qualifies.

At Hallen, the GIB has put £20 million into SERC. As their press release put it, “GIB will invest £20 million of the senior debt alongside a lending club of Credit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Mizuho Bank. Equity will be provided by SITA UK, Japan's ITOCHU Corporation and Scottish Widows Investment Partnership.”

Thanks to them, and Mr “where there's muck there's brass” Pickles, household waste with plenty of recyclable materials still in it will be rail freighted from London to be burned here, in an area where our more progressive local authories have already found ways to recycle more, to pollute less, and to keep it local.

Happy Christmas.

Bristol opts for the Barnet model?

The announcement that Bristol has recruited Max Wide to become the city's 'Strategic Director for Business Change' raises some alarming questions. Not so much about the new man, but on the agenda of those who chose to recruit him.

It doesn't look good. Mr Wide has history, inside and outside local authorities. His CV shows he has 'worked with over 60 local authorities delivering change programmes' either as employee, on secondment from BT Local Government (the IT services arm of BT), or with consultancies such as iMPOWER. There's one constant theme running through the lot – outsourcing and privatisation.

Local government watchers will be well aware of 'Broken Barnet', the London borough whose political leadership has gone to unprecedented lengths to cut services and farm out what's left to expensive and inefficient 'services' companies. Mr Wide was very deeply involved in making it happen.

Then there was Suffolk CountyCouncil, with much the same agenda (since abandoned) . And the West Midlands borough of Sandwell, where the management of Children's Services was contracted out to Mr Wide's iMPOWER, led (oddly enough) by their newest employee, Suffolk's director of Childrens Services. After that it was Doncaster, where the government insisted that management of the failing Children's Services be privatised – and iMPOWER got the contract, at least until an 'independent' trust can take over.

So that's what Max Wide is about. Privatisation and outsourcing is what he does. And now he's been invited to take up a lucrative post in Bristol.

But the real story, surely, is to ask who chose him, and why... what's the political programme he is to carry out?.

It's inconceivable that his record as an arch-privatiser is not the reason.

Abraham's 'Empty Heads' Law.

It's always going to be difficult when elected councillors are asked to rule on planning applications from their own councils. When it happens, they're expected to exercise the same dispassionate and independent judgement as they apply to any other planning application. That includes, in particular, avoiding any possible charge that they have prejudged the decision.

That was the situation on Wednesday, when Bristol City Council sought the blessing of its own Development Control Comittee to construct the in-city leg of the South Bristol Link Road, attracting heavy traffic through Withywood and across Highridge Common to the A38. There it joins the North Somerset leg, already approved for construction, and primarily a route that opens up green belt for development while clipping as much as a minute off airport journey times. (It will also save busy commuters the embarrassment and inconvenience of running over Barrow Gurney villagers)

On the day, the Bristol councillors voted the Withywood leg through by 8 votes to 2.

One of the dissidents was the Greens' Daniella Radice, who found a host of reasons (reinforced by the transparent failure of officers to offer convincing answers to her questions) to vote against. The other was Labour's Sean Beynon, who could not reconcile the undoubted expense of a very dubious project with a cash-strapped council being forced into harsh austerity measures by a ruthlessly ideological government (my words, not Sean's!). It just doesn't add up.

Helen Holland would surely have joined them – but as a long-standing and very public objector to the project she did the decent thing and stood down from the Committee – only to be replaced by a Labour colleague, Afzhal Shah, who decided to go with the flow and approve the road.

Of course Helen should have invoked Abraham's Empty Heads Law. All she needed was a simple statement saying “But I wish to give an absolute assurance, and that assurance is, that I come to this with a completely open mind. That must be done, and that is what I shall do.” It worked for Peter Abraham on the Ashton Vale Town Green debacle.

At least two previously-declared cheerleaders for the Link Road weren't troubled by any suspicion that they might have formed a view before the meeting. 

Both Claire Campion-Smith and Mark Wright had been part of the LibDem Cabinet that unanimously agreed to bid for government support for the road back in March 2010. Mark Wright had, at that meeting, (and in comments on this blog) rehearsed some of the same pro-road arguments as he repeated on Wednesday before voting in favour of the new road.

Planning applicants..... planning committees...... sometimes they just seem to merge into one.

(more on the nosouthbristollink website)