Inconsistency and avoidance: a week in the life of a Cornwall Councillor

Out of nowhere Probus councillor Bob Egerton this week donned the mantle of Stadium super-sceptic. On Monday he sent a coruscating email to all his councillor colleagues raising a load of questions about the developers Inox and their director Robin Saltmarsh. Indeed, positively dripping with insinuations of dodgy dealing it would have been worthy of a place in the pantheon of CZ blogs.

Mr Saltmarsh was so offended that within two days he’d offered a long and robust rebuttal. (Although this was apparently written from the future in 2072 with the aid of a time machine.) While this deals with most of the questions Egerton had raised about Inox and its organisation it can’t escape the basic facts which are

1. Inox is an up-country firm financed by private equity companies that expect to make a healthy profit from this suburbanisation project
2. Truro and the Roseland only need around 800-900 new dwellings to house its current population to 2030. So 1,500 in just one suburb might seem a mite over the top.
3. This is a greenfield site with high landscape value.
4. There has been close collusion between Inox and Cornwall Council planners since 2009.

So congratulations are due to Councillor Egerton for poking his stick into this particular wasps’ nest. As he says the whole episode of connection between stadium and suburb and who’s exactly funding what gets

curiouser and curiouser

Also curious however is that the same Cllr Egerton appears to lose all his critical faculties when it comes to developments on the other side of town. Consistent criticism of the profiteers sucking the blood out of Truro would be nice. But instead, Bob Egerton thinks that the Duchy/Waitrose/Cornwall Council scheme for the eastern urban extension will

provide benefits to the residents of Probus [and] other parishes

In particular the park and ride will benefit ‘traffic flows within Truro’. What Egerton prefers not to understand is that it will increase traffic flows overall. An odd position for someone with a logo ‘One Cornwall One Planet’ on his website.

And what does Bob Egerton think about the biggest issue facing us in Cornwall – the Council’s Core Strategy plans for another minimum 48,000 houses and around 95,000 people in Cornwall by 2030? Strangely, he doesn’t say. Not a single word on his website about that. This sad failure to represent and lead opinion is sadder still when we note that Egerton is typical of the majority of his councillor colleagues. They can get awfully het up about who is going to represent the Council at the Olympic torch shenanigans but prefer to say f**k all about the Council’s growth agenda.

When Cllr Egerton was appointed the Council’s transparency champion a year ago he committed himself to making it as open and transparent as possible. But not it seems to the point of telling us what he feels about the Core Strategy or the looming prospect of over a million people in Cornwall by 2099.

Eco-Communities? In your dreams!

The good people of Newlyn East and Mitchell are horrified to learn that Cornwall Council is contemplating a so-called ‘eco-community’ at Degembris Farm, near Mitchell. ‘Eco-communities’. Sounds so warm and cuddly, doesn’t it? The only tiny hitch is that this eco-community dumps 2-3,000 houses or up to 6,000 people in open countryside, dwarfing the boringly traditional villages nearby.

You can call a new commuter village an eco-community as much as you like but the sad truth is that it remains a new commuter village built on perfectly good agricultural land.

Eco-towns were the brainchild of the Labour Government (specifically Gordon Brown) and have more than a whiff of the idea on the back of a fag packet about them. They were convenient. The perfect cover for Labour’s plans to build a lot more houses in rural areas to accommodate a rapidly growing population. And they fitted Labour’s bias towards big construction firms who could deliver ‘big’ schemes.

The only trouble was that as eco-towns were to spring up in open countryside they would also destroy large chunks of landscape and biodiversity. And every time an eco-town was proposed it triggered howls of protest from local people.

The number of proposed eco-towns was whittled down to a handful. Typically, one of them was foisted on Cornwall – the St Austell eco-town of 5,000 houses (or 10,000+ people). Although it wasn’t actually a town but a series of villages. And it included a marina for the eco-rich to moor their eco-yachts.

Even though London soon lost interest in Gordon Brown’s cunning wheeze, Cornwall Council, never slow to welcome any daft idea as long as it encourages more in-migration, invited landlords across Cornwall to suggest more sites for eco-communities. “Let a thousand eco-communities bloom” was the cry ringing through the corridors of County Hall.

Eleven possible sites make their way into the current Core Strategy document. The majority of these are actually existing urban extensions dressed up in new eco-community clothes but four are new proposals in rural areas outside the towns.

However, a brief glance at the location of these rural ‘eco-communities’ gives the game away. They’re all within easy commuting distance of Truro, at Shortlanesend, Mitchell, St Allen and St Columb. The only exception is Coldstyle Road, Liskeard. But that’s a rebranded existing development project and anyway is within the Plymouth commuter range.

The shape of eco-communities to come?

The other seven are right next to Truro, Camborne and Falmouth. Take Maiden Green at Truro. This is being proposed by Walker Developments. Odd that their website doesn’t actually call it an ‘eco-community. All I can find there is an ‘eco-pilot’ involving 27 houses, which will be built to Code for Sustainable Homes Levels 5/6 (only Level 6 is carbon neutral though). In fact their website is unchanged from pre-eco community days. Surely this can’t just be a cynical act of re-branding in order to make planning permission even more likely, can it?

No, more like this actually

The first detailed plans from Eco-Bos (involving Imerys, Orascom and the Eden project) for the St Austell eco-scam town reveal the less than ecological truth about ‘eco-communities’. The 92 houses come with 60 bike spaces (ooh, goody) but also 162 spaces for cars. Eco-Bos are clearly expecting to cater for mainly two-car households then.

So not only do eco-communities destroy biodiversity and act as a flimsy excuse for attracting more in-migration, they increase car-dependence! More people, more houses, more cars. Presumably this is the attraction for Cornwall Council’s policy-makers. Add plenty of greenwash and they can fool most of the people most of the time.

Or can they?

Lys Ker-Now: Turmoil at top

Rumours of a behind the scenes power struggle in the secretive, closed regime of far-western Lys Ker-Now reached fever pitch this week. Deputy Leader of the ruling Con Serv-Tiv Party Sco Man-Nn, hitherto little seen in public, has inexplicably disappeared even further from public view.

Unconfirmed reports circulate that Sco Man-Nn was unhappy at the spiritual pollution tainting the regime, notably Supreme Leader Rob Er-Son’s growing infatuation with the People’s Stadium planned for backward rural community Three Mile-Stone. This stadium is at the centre of the regime’s ambitious plans to host the next Olympics. Spectators will be housed in the giant suburbs earmarked for neighbouring wildlife habitats.

Public intimations of dissent are extremely rare in this closely controlled society. The harassed populace aimlessly wander around the many out of town consumer temples while being exhorted that Lys Ker-Now is a ‘Great Council’ anchored in the heart of that mysterious but highly revered dear Buddha-like deity Er Rik-Pik (Els).

Crowds rally at Three Mile-Stone in spontaneous outpouring of support for Dear Comrade Rob Er-Son

Though deeply cynical, most people here concentrate on day to day survival. They have little faith or interest in politics, retreating into their private space as rallying points for alternatives are few and far between. For instance, the recent ‘Great Grow Smarter’ budget received near unanimous acclamation by 94 votes to 12 in the People’s Constituent Assembly. This was despite mild denunciations from the puppet opposition Lib Dem-Cons who eventually rallied with the Supreme Leader’s Con Serv-Tivs and the majority of the bedraggled directionless group known as the Ind Pen-Dents to nod the proposal through.

Supreme Leader Rob Er-Son, whose origins are shrouded in mystery but who is thought to have traded traditional Cornish herbal medicine in a remote southern town on the edge of a great airfield, inscrutably explained

reductions are not the same as cuts

Meanwhile, Sco Man-Nn is reported to be attempting to cross the border to the neighbouring free state of Cameronian Cleggland. If found the regime is likely to stage his show trail for hostile acts.

It’s (almost) official: stadium depends on housing

So now we have it. You first read about this in this very blog months ago. But now even Cornwall Council is gradually admitting the close links between the proposed stadium at Threemilestone and the planned 1,500 houses right next door.

Last week, Chris Ridgers, Cabinet member for economy and ‘regeneration’ stated that

whether the stadium goes ahead has no bearing on the housing

What he was very careful not to say was

whether the housing goes ahead has no bearing on the stadium

Because that that would presumably not be the case. The £15 million for the stadium will be coming from Truro College, the Cornish Pirates and the Exeter-based Inox property development group. What a coincidence – Inox just happen to be the same people who want to build the 1,500 houses.

The College has said it’s thinking of stumping up £2 million for the stadium. The Pirates and Inox are refusing to tell us how much they’re willing to put in. However, between them it will be £13 million. It’s unlikely that the Pirates would find more than £3-4 million which means that £9-10 million, the majority of the money, will have to come from Inox.

Now, will Inox still be so keen to invest in a stadium, the business plan of which is to say the least decidedly dodgy, if its plans for the 1,500 houses don’t go through? Of course, this outcome is highly unlikely as it suits Cornwall Council’s unstated policy of long-term ethnic transformation perfectly. And the lure of a popularly backed stadium will surely concentrate minds a little.

Meanwhile, the Stadium for Cornwall campaign group is becoming increasingly hysterical in attacking those who, whatever their views of the stadium, see 1,500 unnecessary houses on a greenfield site with high landscape value as too high a price to pay. The campaign’s chairman, Peter Marks, now merely resorts to insult:

the limited number of naysayers who don’t wish to see Cornwall progress are resorting to increasingly bizarre tactics to gain support for their negativity.

p.s. Mr Marks is supported by several prominent Cornish nationalists.

UPDATE
Seems all is not as it seems after all. At the meeting where the above plan for the private sector to finance the Stadium was unveiled another report was presented in secret containing a plan for Cornwall Council to match this £15 million. Given the collusion between council and developers from the beginning of this project isn't it about time all the details were made public and not hidden behind a spurious mask of commercial confidentiality. Especially as apparently there's £16 million of public money involved after all.

See here

Cornwall Council covers up second homes scandal

As some readers may perhaps have guessed Cornwall Council is supposedly seeking comments on its Core Strategy. It’s bad enough wading through page after page of greenwash, gobbledygook and bizarre assertions more suited to the mad hatter’s tea party. But the whole exercise becomes even more difficult as the planners refuse to give us the basic data required to reach any sort of sensible evaluation.

For example, how many of the extra 48,000 to 53,000 houses they want the developers to build are intended for an increased population of in-migrants; how many are the result of household changes in the currently resident population; and how many will be bought by second home owners?

You have to look quite hard to find mention of the latter. However, tucked away in the lists of laughable reasons provided to legitimate the Council’s plans for excessive growth in each community network area, we can find references to second homes. Well, not actually second home owners as such, but ‘temporary residents’. How convenient. This newly coined term gives them a status more equal to us ‘permanent residents’.

But I can reveal that in more than half the community network areas (10 out of 19) competition from ‘temporary residents’ is pushing up the numbers of houses being built.

In Wadebridge and Padstow the problem of second homes can hardly be ignored. Padstow is described as ‘a popular second home location’ and the planners admit the horrifying fact that in this district

four out of ten homes are already occupied by temporary residents

Does this therefore explain the curious fact that, despite being the one area in Cornwall which has no predicted population growth, there is still a ‘need’ for 800 more houses over the next 20 years? It would be nice to know how many of these 800 are earmarked for second homes. But sadly we’re not told.

In West Penwith there is also

a significant level of competition between permanent and temporary residents … and the growth figure chosen will need to accommodate this level of competition

Which means that more houses have to be built to cater for the second home market.

A similar unquantified ‘need’ to accommodate second home owners appears at St Agnes, St Blazey, Fowey and Lostwithiel, Liskeard and Looe and at Camelford. In the last of these there is

a great deal of competition

At Helston and the Lizard

households … face higher levels of competition than on average … from prospective second home owners

While at Bude

residents in this area face a great deal of competition for housing from the second and holiday home market and the growth level chosen will have to take this into account

Meanwhile, at Hayle and St Ives

there is great deal of competition from second home owners … and the number of new houses developed will need to accommodate this aspect of need

‘Aspect of need’???? This implies that the phrase ‘housing need’ tossed around with such abandon by the Core Strategy and its apologists includes the ‘need’ to build second homes for ‘temporary residents’, not to mention all those unaffordable homes for new permanent residents. Obviously, this is not something Cornwall Council wants to make a big fuss about. But the next time you hear Kaczmarek and co wittering on about meeting ‘local need’ remember that their definition of this includes second homes and in-migration.

More evidence of Lib Dem double dealing

News this past week that families where the main wage-earner is in part-time work (between 16 and 24 hours a week) will have to increase their hours to 24 if they want to remain eligible for working family tax credits. If they can’t then they stand to lose up to £4,000 a year.

This potentially affects 1,610 families in Cornwall, with 3,310 children at the sharp end paying the price for the greed of casino capitalism. Unless of course their parent/s can find the extra hours. And we’re assured by this government that there’s plenty of work out there if only we look harder. More than half the Cabinet are millionaires, so they should know.

But even those households in full time work will be £580 worse off. 

Strange, but there seems little Lib Dem comment in Cornwall on what their government is doing. Back in January Andrew George was welcoming all those steps that the Lib Dems were taking in government

to give hard working families a fairer deal

Such as raising the tax threshold – maximum benefit £200 a year, but not if your income was already very low. Or council tax freezes, estimated to put the princely sum of £48 a year into the pockets of the very poorest, but only £26 a year into those of the working poor. All of which adds up to about a half of the amount lost through the working family tax credit changes.

So why no proud Lib Dem blogging about the part the Lib Dems play in government

squeezing hard working families and giving them an unfair deal

Fred Goodwin and cronies: not being squeezed

They can waffle until they’re blue in the face but the embarrassing truth that they prefer to avoid is that

low income households of working age lose the most [from the Government’s tax and spending changes] … those who lose the least are households of working age without children in the upper half of the income distribution

And that’s not me saying that; it’s the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Midnight train to nowhere

Back in 1976 Cornwall County Council (those were the days!) warned that Cornwall’s ideal population capacity was 430,000. In 1989, when it reached 465,000 CoSERG, in their book Cornwall at the Crossroads, called for a breathing space. I now read that in 1994 a report concluded that the environmental (not to mention cultural) damage of population growth – then at 477,000 - had ‘reached a disturbing level’. It’s now almost 540,000.

Recently, I’ve been suffering this recurrent nightmare. The Cornish nation is stuck on a runaway train. The train hurtles along, sparks flying, a symphony of impending doom from its horn echoing back from the enveloping darkness outside. Stations flash past. Though they have numbers, not names. 400,000, 500,000, the next one 634,000. But we never stop. Just career through. Litter blows around forlornly in our wake as the only evidence of our passing.

Some of the passengers, most of them packed like sardines in standard class (the first class carriages are almost empty) wonder vaguely why we don’t stop. The tannoy infuriatingly announces the next station stop will always be the one after the next one. A few are getting alarmed at the way the train’s beginning to sway with little jumps as we race across the points and ominous clangs from the rails.

But the strange thing is most people don’t seem to notice. Or care. They’re lost in their in-train entertainment screens or locked away inside laptops and smartphones, oblivious to the outside world or the destination. Others carry on partying. Or eating.

Up in the cab the driver is hunched over the controls. His hand rests on the power lever, but this one has a big sign on it saying ‘growth’. This is the opposite of a deadman’s handle. If he lets go of the growth lever he’s been told the whole train will grind to a halt in the middle of nowhere. The passengers will have to disembark into ua searing hot desert – no water, no shade. To prevent that disaster the driver has to keep the train going. Faster, ever faster.

End of the line?

By his side is his assistant. This guy used to operate the brakes and saw his role as protecting the passengers and preventing the train running out of control. No longer. Now, he urges the driver on. Give it some welly my son, more speed. Keep pressing that lever.

Was that a red signal we just passed? No matter. Both driver and assistant have been rendered colour-blind and all signals are at green. Even if they’re red.

There’s going to be a helluva scat up if we go on like this. Panicking, I look for the communication cord.

But there isn’t one.

Cornish communities aspire to grow. And grow. And grow.

Give enough monkeys an infinite amount of time and some typewriters and we’re told they’ll eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But how much time should we give Cornwall Council’s planning department before they come up with something that makes sense? For sheer unadulterated nuttiness alone the Core Strategy documents are well worth a read.

For example, each of the 19 ‘community network areas’ discussion papers contains a table setting out ‘growth factors’. At the bottom there’s a traffic light key – green (!?) for ‘supports the case for future growth’, orange for ‘no conclusion’ and red for ‘suggests concerns over future growth’. Each policy objective is evaluated against these.

One of these objectives is ‘community aspiration’, presumably meaning what communities want. Starting in West Penwith we find that

growth can help deliver many of the aspirations of local communities

It appears that the people of Hayle and St Ives are also keen on growth for

the area has aspirations to grow both in terms of housing and employment

Meanwhile, at Helston

growth will help deliver many of the aspirations communities have

Moving on to Camborne-Redruth we discover that of course the area

has aspirations to grow in terms of both housing and employment, and growth can help maintain the existing retail centres and community facilities and enable new community facilities to come forward

It’s the same story at Falmouth and Penryn, where, amazingly

growth can enable many of the local community’s [sic] aspirations to be delivered

In Truro we also find that

growth can help deliver many of the aspirations of local communities

To cut a lengthening story short precisely the same wording is used at St Agnes, Newqay, St Austell, St Blazey, Newquay and Lanson

Cornwall planners hard at work

In the china clay area ‘can’ becomes ‘will’ as the planners remember their muscular ‘can-do’ mission

growth will help support the regeneration of villages and the local economy and enable the delivery of affordable homes

At Bodmin, there’s no doubt about it. The town

has aspirations to grow in terms of both housing and employment

Even up at Camelford it seems

the area has aspirations to grow to some degree so long as it is planned and is sensible (?)

They may not be so keen in Bude but the planners reminds them sternly that

growth will help maintain Bude’s role as the local service centre for the area

While at Liskeard/Looe they’re much more enthusiastic as

growth will help to deliver many of the aspirations of local communities

Over at Saltash/Torpoint too the Council’s in-depth research into local views is replaced with

growth can help support the regeneration of Saltash and Torpoint town centres and new housing development will mean more people will fall within their respective catchment areas

Only at Caradon (Callington and Calstock) is there some hesitation with no explicit mention of growth or uncovering of the expected massive local aspirations.

And what about those traffic lights? Well, what a surprise! It appears that not one of the 11 objectives in any of the 19 CNAs gives rise to ‘suggested concerns over future growth’. It apparently matters not a whit whether the place in question has already more than doubled in size over the past generation or is destined to grow by up to 70% in just 20 years. There are never ‘concerns’ over growth anywhere. 

Indeed, according to the picture from Lys Kernow the Council is just innocently meeting the wishes of communities, all aglow with aspirations to grow.

Waiting list witlessness

It had to come. Cornwall Council, becoming a little frazzled by the growing criticism of its plans to make Cornwall home to over a million people before the end of the century, was this morning desperately muddying the waters. What better than a story on Radio Yokel about the rising tide of people joining the housing waiting lists in Cornwall.

This has apparently risen by 2,000 in just two months and is now 23,000. A scandal indeed and the result of a generation of relying on the market plus the destruction of council housing by Tory and Labour Governments. But cue Mark Kazcmarek, Cornwall Council Cabinet member for Housing, who has a cunning plan.

He wants the Council to borrow £20 million to buy land for more houses. Now if this were to build social housing for subsidised rents (and there’s the rub – they can’t subsidise it anymore) then all well and good. Although £20 million would only build somewhere around 200-300 houses so it’s a bit of a proverbial drop in an ocean over-populated by red herrings.

Moreover, Kazcmarek wasn’t exactly crystal clear about what the land would be used for. At one point he stated it would be used to deliver

local needs housing

But then he went on to say it would be sold on to others with only

the majority [being] affordable

I hope I’m not being too cynical in suspecting this might be just another way to ease planning permission for the council’s developer mates.

Kazcmarek also said that the land could be used

for housing purposes or even business purposes

Business purposes? What might these be?

The real difficulty of meeting local needs is unfortunately being used as a smokescreen to distract attention from of all those unaffordable houses the Council (and their developer friends) want to build to sell to comfortably-off in-migrants.

Strange indeed how the problem of rising waiting lists so easily and conveniently segues into the ‘need’ to build more unaffordable houses. Jenny Allen from the National Housing Federation (the ‘voice of housing associations’) was keen to leap in to say we must increase the number of houses – apparently of any kind – over the 48,000 already proposed by the Council. The more unaffordables (and the more in-migrants) the better as it allows us to build more affordables for locals (and for non-locals of course although they’re rarely mentioned).

This mad hatter’s tea party thinking did not warrant a jot of critical interrogation from the Radio Yokel presenter. Far from it, this idiot was too busy equating the waiting list with people

needing a roof over their heads

That particular myth (much of the increase will presumably be people with a roof over their heads but struggling to pay the exorbitant rent required to keep it there) was then (deliberately?) encouraged by Kazcmarek. The rise in the waiting list was, he said, a result of people

made homeless [and] living on the streets.

Really? Mark Kazcmarek should be congratulated for beginning a grown-up debate about ways to solve the market-induced housing crisis in Cornwall. But perhaps he could start by spelling out for us exactly how many of the 23,000 are actually homeless.

Cornwall Council plans to house comfortably off

Yesterday’s Western Morning News included a snide comment from a ‘senior planner’ in Cornwall. This anonymous source claimed that opposition to more houses came from the

comfortably off

The caricature offered is of selfish, old nimbies preventing poor, young Cornish people getting homes. By implication and in contrast, developers and planners, with a tear in their eyes, are the friends of the poor and homeless rather than ruthless profiteers and environmental vandals.

If only.

What these people never dare to admit openly is that

• at least 80% of the houses proposed in Cornwall’s Core Strategy plan are being built solely to accommodate in-migrants. The majority of these no doubt qualify for the ‘comfortably off’ bracket.

120 more houses for the homeless at St Eval

• another 48,000 houses in just 20 years continues one of the fastest rates of growth in the UK

• they don’t have a plan – not a clue – for how they intend to avoid doubling the Cornish population to over a million by the end of the century

If this economy with the truth weren’t enough the WMN then wheeled out Mark Kazcmarek, Cornwall Council’s housing supremo, who said that the Council’s ‘soon-to-be approved’ minimum 48,000 house target – so what’s the point of the ongoing ‘consultation’ then? – would lead to the expansion of urban areas through [warning! imminent gobbledygook alert]

exception sites

Not exactly that exceptional though, are they Mark, as there’s over 80 of them scattered across Cornwall.