Minister Tumblr

Posted on August 17, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

The internet’s alive – 160 articles of varying quality based on the same news release and counting – to the Twitter of Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy being appointed ‘Twitter Tsar’ for the Labour Party’s doomed general election campaign next year.

The real job title is apparently New Media Campaigns Spokesperson although here at the Blogger we’re quite keen on Minister Tumblr after “the bona fide cult hero” from Cbeebies.

Ms McCarthy has spent the day taking to the airwaves and the blogosphere making various extraordinary claims about the Labour Party and new media. My favourite, however, appears on local news site Bristol 24-7 where she seems to think politicians talking bollocks on Twitter presages nothing less than the end of spin.

Off the top of my head, I think that’s at least the third time that New Labour have announced the end of spin. Once when Alistair Campbell left Downing Street in 2003; again when Gordon Brown ascended to the leadership in 2007 and now today …

Interestingly, one of the things Ms McCarthy did today at the dawn of this latest post-spin era was visit the Counts Louse to discuss finance with the Chief Exec. I wonder if she will be blogging about what was said there?

Will we get an explanation for this mysterious new £30m deficit and the 1,000 odd jobs at stake? Or is that a secret between important people only?

Posted in Blogging, Bristol, Bristol East, Budget, Labour Party, Local government, Media, MPs, Politics | Tagged , , | There are 17 comments

Development Control (South and East) Committee (part 1)

Posted on August 16, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

Sharp eyed observers may have noticed that a special meeting of the Development Control (South and East) Committee of Bristol City Council is scheduled for 6.00pm November 4.

And the Bristol Blogger can confirm that this will be the planning hearing for the proposed new Bristol City stadium on greenbelt land at Ashton Vale (Blogger passim).

The Blogger can also confirm that the Tesco application on Ashton Gate will not be dealt with at the same meeting despite planning officers strongly resisting attempts to allow the applications to be dealt with by separate meetings.

Quite why our politicians allow lowly unelected planning officers such a strong say in their order of business – a key political power – is anyone guess but we’ll save that discussion for another day.

However, I suppose we must celebrate these small victories over the bureaucrats that really rule us as the Tesco application has now been rescheduled instead for 6.oopm on November 5. That’s a whole 24 hours between these two controversial and delicately entwined decisions.

Anyone out there who’s catching the strong whiff of stitch-up here may well be right, because – by sheer coincidence obviously – the closing date for Bristol’s World Cup bid to the FA is November 6 … Fancy that!

Given that to all intents and purposes the City stadium and Tesco are now done deals – and it’s a waste of time and effort to believe or act otherwise – it’s time for the various groups against these plans to have a long hard think about the tactics they might need to adopt.

Together, these two planning applications in November are the most significant for the city since the planning shenanigans over the Lloyds TSB HQ on Harbourside in the late eighties (a few of Venue’s older staffers might be able to tell you a bit about that).

And, like Llloyds TSB, the outcome is likely to affect the shape and style of this city for, at least, the next 20 years.

At present the authorities’ plan is to allow huge corporations on the scale of Tesco and gangsters like Sepp Blatter to shape our city. Is that what we want?

Posted in Ashton Vale, Bedminster, Bristol, Bristol South, Developments, Economy, Environment, Local government, Planning, Southville, World Cup 2018 | Tagged , , , , | There are 18 comments

World Cup footBALLS: jolly news

Posted on August 14, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

By our Chief Football Correspondent, Sell Outter

See the Evening Cancer on Tuesday?

Unfortunately its World Cup “fluff” piece of the day wasn’t considered worth putting on their internet site ...

But essentially it was about a World Cup jolly to Hannover and Frankfurt by the council’s new Partnership and Innumeracy Manager (are you sure that’s his title? Ed.), Stephen Wray and Guy Price, Development advisor for Bristol City FC – let’s hope the Bristol public didn’t pay for his ticket! – telling us how wonderful the World Cup would be for Bristol’s economy on the basis of some remarkably vague figures that related to the whole of the German economy in 2006, not any individual city.

Some quotes:

The Bristol 2018 World Cup bid team have returned from Germany with the invigorating message from two 2006 World Cup cities – “we would do it again tomorrow”.

Hannover refurbished an existing stadium, sticking to a strict budget of 65 million euros, while Frankfurt spent 188 million euros on a new stadium and a further 42 million euros on associated infrastructure.

Er, actually Frankfurt spent 126 million euros on its stadium: 64 million from the City of Frankfurt itself, 20.5 million from the Hesse state government plus a capital loan of 41.5 million euros.

The cost of the stadium in Hannover was 64 million euros: 24 million from the City of Hannover and its region, 20 million provided by a banking consortium and a 20 million reconstruction loan underwritten by the City of Hannover.

However, the associated infrastructure costs for the World Cup were 53 million euros for Frankfurt and a massive 304 million euros for Hannover, which is possibly why the Cancer forgets to mention them.

So instead of the 295 million euros (approx. £250 million) spend implied in the Cancer, the two cities spent nearer 547 million euros.

Despite the significant investment required by both German cities, they confessed to their visitors from Bristol that they would do it again tomorrow if they could, with the rewards of the tournament far outweighing the initial outline of hosting it.

So what exactly are these rewards for World Cup host cities? Where are they recorded? In a report by the German Ministry of the Interior the only mention of direct income to the cities themselves is a fee from FIFA of 300,000 euros or about £250,000, although the stadium owners received a payment 1.8 million euros (£1.5m) plus 15% of net revenue from ticket sales.

By contrast, Bristol ’s proposed new stadium at Ashton Vale, which is currently subject to a planning application, will be predominantly funded by Bristol City FC

Really? In the very same issue of the Cancer, in a story about the Bedminster WI joining the campaign against the proposed Tesco at Ashton Gate, the figure of £65m is given as the cost of the stadium. Yet on 9 July, the stadium developer Ian Cawley, in the presence of Bristol City Chief Exec, Colin Sexstone, told Bristol’s planning department that the stadium would cost £90m and they would be seeking funding from the SWRDA.

And at present the only hard investment figures available for this new football stadium are this £20 million figure constantly touted as available from the sale of Ashton Gate to Tesco and the £5m value of the land at the new stadium’s proposed Ashton Vale site owned between Steve Lansdown and his son and Jon Pontin and his partners.

There have also been reports that Lansdown has sold shares in his financial services business, Hargeaves Lansdown, worth £47 million but he has also said that he does not intend to invest all of this in the stadium.

Germany’s Interior Minister in 2006, Wolfgang Schäuble, reported in December that year that the four-week tournament earned Germany’s tourism industry an extra 300 million euros in revenue, added two billion euros to retail sales and yielded 50,000 new jobs.

The report referred to is the WM2006 Abschlussbericht der Bundesregierung and is available in English here.

The revenue figures mentioned by the Cancer are of course national figures, not those for the individual cities.

The breakdown for the tourism industry is as follows; hotels – 220 million euros, up 8.5%; catering including airlines – 35 million euros, up 6.7%; beverages (bars, pubs and clubs) – 34 million euros, up 4.7%; restaurants – 2 million euros, up 0.3%.

The report also adds the caveat that not all of the increase in the catering and beverages sectors should be associated with the World Cup.

The overall increase in retail sales was just 1.2% and the only sector that showed an increase that might possibly be attributed to the World Cup was the electronics sector, including flat-screen TVs, which showed an increase of 5.2%.

But the report quoted by the Cancer also says this increase might in part be due to the fact that the German government had announced that they were going to increase VAT on electronic products immediately after the World Cup.

Of the 50,000 jobs “created” many are temporary lasting only for the length of the tournament. Another report anticipates that there may be just 9,000 permanent jobs created, many of them related to infrastructure work that was due to be completed regardless of the World Cup.

the German World Cup Organizing Committee earned a net profit of 56.5 million euros which was passed on to the German Soccer Federation (DFB) and German Soccer League (DFL), according to the report

Er, no mention that FIFA gave a grant of 129 million euros to the German World Cup Organising Committee then? Without this, the 56.5 million euros profit would actually have been a 72.5 million euros loss.

The Frankfurt tourist board reported an increase of 13.5 per cent in overnight visitors in 2006 (with an increase of almost 25 per cent in visitors from the UK) and between 2005 and 2008 has seen a rise of 8.2% per cent, attributed mostly to the exposure from the World Cup.

Frankfurt along with Kaiserlautern was the most successful city in terms of attracting overseas visitors while still increasing it’s level of domestic visitors. Other cities reported an increase in overseas football tourists but a reduction in high-spending domestic business visitors. Hanover saw a 14% decline in domestic visitors.

[Mr Price] told the Evening Post: “They described the benefits as nothing short of ‘immense’. They cited pride and self-image, a huge increase in reputation and an increase in overnight stays as the main benefactors and were amazed at the amount of exposure the city received on TV.”

So the “immense” benefits are:

1) pride and self-image

2) reputation

3) overnight stays

4) TV exposure

Only one of those involves a direct increase in expenditure and only then if the foreign visitors spend more than any domestic visitors they displace.

A mark of the enthusiasm for the tournament, likely to be repeated in the West Country should Bristol be successful, was reflected in the sheer number of big screens erected for people to congregate around.

The Hesse region, population around six million people (of which Frankfurt is the capital), is similar in size to the West Country and staged 1,150 public viewing areas, excluding pub gardens.

Amazing eh? The wonderful thing about TV is that it allows you to watch a game without actually being there – the tournament doesn’t even have to be in the same country can you believe? During the 2006 World Cup in Germany many pubs and bars in Bristol showed an increase in revenues from showing big screen coverage of the games live. Big deal.

Perhaps the main point here though is why did a team of people from Bristol fly all the way to Hannover (and Frankfurt) to find out information that’s available in a report you can download from the internet?

In addition, if we paid for the trip when do we get to see their report?

Posted in Ashton Vale, Bristol, Bristol Evening Post, Bristol South, Developments, Economy, Environment, Local government, Planning, Politics, Southville, SWRDA, World Cup 2018 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | There is 1 comment

LEAKED DOCUMENT!!! GOSW instructs councils to to give the RSS "considerable weight" when considering planning applications

Posted on August 12, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

Despite not being finalised and being the subject of a legal challenge, the Government Office of the South West (GOSW) has written to Council Chief Execs and Chief Planning Officers instructing them to give the controversial South West Regional Spacial Strategy (RSS) “considerable weight” when considering planning applications.

Here in Bristol this opens up the possibility of the development of Ashton Vale for not only the new Bristol City FC stadium but for up to 10,500 housing units stretching out to Long Ashton that developers Land Trust are about to apply for outline planning permission for.

The letter in full:

Letter From GOSW on #4D499F by bristol_citizen on Scribd

Posted in Ashton Vale, Bristol, Bristol South, Developments, Environment, GOSW, Housing, Local government, Planning, West Country | Tagged , , , | There are 8 comments

BLACK (cloud) WATCH: council cash news

Posted on August 11, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

A speedy reply to Woodsy’s Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council regarding their expenditure on Victoria Park’s temporary roofless shed, ‘The Black Cloud‘, arrives on the ever-dependable ‘What Do They Know?‘ site and finds the council crunching urgently in to reverse gear.

A lot of it confirms what we already know. Namely that the council stumped up £15k in total of our money for this ‘artwork’ and it came in £5k tranches from Parks, Sustainable Development and the Urban Design sections of the council respectively.

But we also learn that “the Parks team contributed £5,000 from the Central Government grant as part of the Play Pathfinder programme.”

So are they telling us that they’ve handed money from a fund, that – in their own words (pdf) – was meant for, “children, particularly those aged 8-13 who live in the Bristol area,” to a couple of middle aged, middle class millenarian hippies from Wales and some contemporary art wannabes from UWE?

They seem to be. But let’s not obsess too much over fine detail here, because in a piece of blatant revisionist arse covering the council are now saying ‘The Black Cloud’ is all about supplying kids’ play equipment anyway:

An event will be programmed within the structure about BCC’s parks development programme and the improvement of Victoria Park’s play area in particular.

Presumably then they’re expecting us to overlook the simple fact that they could have rented an accessible rain-proof local church hall with seating, a power supply and tea making facilities for a few hundred quid for this purpose?

We’re not exactly getting value for money out of this are we? Spending £5,000 on a roofless temporary shed for a CONsultation on play equipment that should have cost a few hundred quid?

Maybe the Parks section should take a look at their own corporate risk register some time? Specifically risk number 8. Cunningly called ‘Value for Money’, it identifies this risk:

failure to demonstrate improvement in value for money as a result of the lack of a consistently strong focus on value for money across the Council

Oh well. It’s only £5,000 of someone else’s money isn’t it?

Moving on, we also learn the the Sustainable City team contributed £5,000 to this shed. Again, no worries here because:

Sustainable City are working with Situations to develop the event on the 10th October where issues about climate change / sustainability and other key areas of their work can be examined.

Ah yes, “the event on the 10th October”. Is this the ‘How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years’ workshop scheduled at the shed to explore “the future of humanity” and talk about JG Ballard with artists Heather and Ivan, science fiction writers, future thinkers and environmental campaigners by any chance?

And wasn’t this originally scheduled for the 5 September? Indeed it was – until people started asking difficult questions about our money and how it was being spent – when the date appears hurriedly changed while the waffle about JG Ballard and the future of humanity has been conveniently transformed into local authority jargon about “climate change / sustainability and other key areas of Sustainable City’s work”.

Personally I think I’m gonna miss our artists and friends sat in their roofless shed waffling inanely about Ballard to mystified locals. Although getting trapped in a roofless shed in the middle of your local park by a bunch of climate change obssessed bureaucrats justifying themselves sounds a bit like something out of  early period Ballard anyway …

Our final contributors to the shed were the Urban Design team. We’re told:

The project has been supported for its contribution to the public art activity in the city and work with artists in the public realm

On a positive note, at least public art is actually a part of their remit. But if they’ve got cash to spend why aren’t they spending it  – as the people we elected told them to – on a statue of Bill Slim?

Or is it that public art officers and their elitist friends in the contemporary art set think they don’t have to bother answering to us plebs?

Posted in Bristol, Bristol South, Culture, Environment, FOI, Global warming, Local government, Politics, Windmill Hill | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | There are 4 comments

Toffwatch south west

Posted on August 10, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

I say chaps. Have you heard yet? Spiffing news what?

Those jolly good fellows of the South West Regional Development Agency have only gone and got themselves a terrific new Chairman chappie don’t you know?

Naturally such a character, responsible for deciding how a couple of hundred million pounds of public money is spent in the region each year, shouldn’t have to be put through anything as hugely boring and tiresome as a democratic election like the plebs have to.

So welcome aboard Sir Henry William Studholme, 3rd Baronet of Perridge. Henry – or Harry to his friends – attended Eton School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge and is described as the owner/manager of the Perridge Estate, Devon, a business which includes a 350 acre farm, 650 acres of woodland, and both residential and light industrial property letting.

Completists might be interested to hear Grandaddy Studholme was the illustrious Sir Henry Studholme,1st baronet and MP for Tavistock until 1966 when he was replaced by Michael Heseltine.

The current Baronet’s club is Brooks’s if you’re up in town and fancy a quiet chinwag over a glass of port to learn how Harry might be able to help you out with the public’s money.

Tally Ho! And hurrah for meritocracy!

Posted in Economy, Local government, Oxbridge, Politics, SWRDA, Toffs | Tagged , , , | There are 16 comments

The risky business of democracy …

Posted on August 7, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

Leafing through the city council’s Corporate Risk Register (pdf) today musing about maybe getting out a bit more proved to be more interesting than planned.

Basically this register is a list of things the council’s doing that could go badly wrong. Although in many cases, in the hands of the time-servers, deadbeats and wannabes that make up the city council’s senior management team, they’re not so much ‘risks’ as dead certs.

Does anyone believe these idiots can protect children? Minimise the impact of the recession? Maintain our privacy through decent data security? Bring capital projects in on budget? Thought not.

Other ‘risks’ listed here are obvious disasters waiting to happen too. For instance, Chief Exec Jan Ormondroyd’s hare-brained ‘Business Transformation‘ mass privatisation plan based on a handout she and her sidekick – that copper from Sheffield who doesn’t know where Easton is – got given at business school has no chance of success.

While concerns over achieving ‘value for money’ are sine qua non in an organisation that pays talentless drone Ormondroyd £180k a year, her copper sidekick £140k a year to do the marketing and which also sees fit to continue paying jobless Stephen Wray, quite possibly the biggest fuckwit in the world, a six figure salary to mismanage more huge sums of public money.

But the most fascinating risk on the register is coyly listed as “Political uncertainty: – risk of failure to take ‘difficult’ and long term decisions to improve services/V[alue]F[or]M[oney] outcomes.”

What on earth do they mean? Luckily all is explained:

Forthcoming ‘difficult’ decisions include waste management, primary review, R[egional]S[pacial]S[trategy]/BDF [eh?], T[ransport]I[nnovation]F[und] if it proceeds, restructuring, budget, adult social care issues.

Does this mean that unelected council officers have already decided what will happen then? And that there’s a ‘risk’ the people we elect might not do what they’re told?

Welcome to Bristol where democracy is now a risk that needs mitigating …

Posted in Bristol, Local government, Politics | Tagged , , , , | There are 2 comments

BLACK (cloud) WATCH: Slim pickings

Posted on August 6, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

News drifts in that the city council’s direct cash contribution to this temporary roofless shed cum public artwork in Victoria Park – ‘The Black Cloud‘ – comes in at around £15k.

Not much money then? Especially if you take the £15,000 cost and then divide it by the city’s population of 400,000. You actually end up with a cost of just under 4p per person.

But maybe there’s some other issues to consider here?

Firstly, there’s the small matter of where the money seems to have come from within the council. UWE’s Situations, who commissioned the shed, tell us it came from the Parks section, the Urban Design Unit and the Sustainable Development Unit.

None of whom usually provide grants to outside bodies, which begs the question of how on earth did UWE manage to access council cash from specialist city council service delivery sections when you or I apparently can’t?

It also begs the question – if the city council has various sections quietly sat on big lumps of cash for public art and any old officer-led specialist project they feel like – of why this money isn’t used first for democratically agreed popular public art projects?

Because on two occasions now, once on 11 October 2005 and again 1 April 2008, the Full Council – where our elected representatives are supposed to hold sway – has agreed motions to create a permanent monument to the Bristolian Second World War vet Field Marshall Bill Slim and his “Forgotten Army“.

In 2005 they all agreed:

a statue or other permanent memorial to Field Marshal William Joseph Slim, is long overdue in Bristol, the city of his birth.

Then back they came again in 2008 after nothing much had happened:

Council reaffirms its commitment to commemorate Field Marshall Lord Slim by the installation of a prominent and permanent memorial in the city.

And while they waited interminably for this fitting monument they also agreed:

that Council endorses the on-going process of installing a memorial plaque at the Cenotaph, in the centre of Bristol in recognition of those Bristolians who fought in the Fourteenth Army, and to which the Council is contributing £12,000

So that means more money has been quietly allocated by officers behind the scenes to a couple of “internationally acclaimed artists” no one’s ever heard of to build a temporary roofless shed in Victoria Park for no reason than has actually been spent on a fitting memorial to a Bristolian war hero and his men.

This is despite the constant demands that something significant be done by our democratically elected representatives, the increasingly pissed off Burma Star Association and the wider Bristolian public.

Now admittedly, at the last Full Council Meeting in 2008 councillors also agreed that they would make a further £58k available for this monument with these conditions:

that Council … offers its support for and contribution to any public subscription campaign organised by the local press to provide such a monument.

Unfortunately over 18 months on and there’s still no sign of this monument is there?

But why the hell are we sitting about endlessly waiting for public subscriptions to build this thing when it appears that various council managers are sat on substantial sums of money for just such purposes?

Isn’t it time our councillors found out how many of their managers have access to little £5k pots of cash for ‘art’ purposes they’re not telling anyone about? Then perhaps they should take our money back and use it for the one art project they and the rest of us in Bristol actually want.

And before the contemporary art crowd wafts on here sneering at soldiers and statues and telling us what a bunch of Daily Mail worshiping conservatives we all are compared to them, they might do well to find out a bit about Bill Slim.

Not only is he the kind of character that does the dirty work so that congenital idiots educated way beyond their abilities can ponce about in total freedom claiming any old shit is art, he also came to lead from a relatively modest background a victorious multicultural (before the word was invented) working class army who had nothing but respect for him.

In comparison to Slim and his men, your average publicly funded contemporary artist is a pointless wanker. Something this monument, if it ever arrives, will hopefully demonstrate.

Posted in Bishopston, Bristol, Bristol South, Culture, Local government, Politics, Windmill Hill | Tagged , , , | There are 3 comments

"A new era for the site"?

Posted on August 1, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

Was it only two years ago John from Urban Splash was on this blog talking about “a new era” for Hartcliffe’s Imperial Tobbacco factory site?

“We are making a massive investment into this area ensuring it will be a success,” he assured us cynics about their Lakeshore development (Blogger  passim).

Not any more they’re not. Their massive investment into overpriced flats with trendy “green” lifestyle add-ons is now being made by you and me instead.

For the Blogger learns, that the developers – the once painfully trendy but now just painfully skint, Urban Splash – who are already two years behind schedule, are now seeking a government bail out.

It’s understood the only chance of this development seeing the light of day is through the Homes & Communities Agency’s £1 billion Kickstart programme.

Will this also mean that the tiny overpriced flats originally sold at rip-off prices to investors two years ago will be repriced and repackaged to reflect reality and what people can really afford?

(Cartoon by Evelyn Post. Evelyn Post is The Bristol Blogger’s resident cartoonist. He has a woman’s name)

Posted in Bristol, Bristol South, Developments, Economy, Hartcliffe, Housing, Planning | Tagged , , | There are 4 comments

Certainly not spelling city are we?

Posted on July 27, 2009 by The Bristol Blogger

Posted in Bristol, Cycling City, Environment, Local government, South Gloucestershire, Transport | | There are 10 comments