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.