Greenwich Council, Britney and £1750 an hour: nice work if you can get it

DURING THE election period, the usual weekly picture of Chris Roberts, Greenwich Council’s wise and beneficient leader, has temporarily disappeared from Greenwich Time. But at least he has something else to keep him happy.

Today, I can reveal that Mr Roberts has become possibly the highest-paid council leader in Britain, collecting the attractive sum of £1,750 an hour from the public purse for his services.

Mr Roberts is an executive member of London Councils, the umbrella body for the 32 London boroughs. He doesn’t like London Councils much – he’s pulling Greenwich out of it to save a few quid in affiliation fees. But he is happy to take the £10,499 a year paid to executive members for turning up to its meetings – except, alas, that he doesn’t turn up much of the time.

In the four years since the last elections, Mr Roberts has attended only 18 out of 32 meetings. In the most recent financial year, he has attended three out of five, making a total payment for each meeting he’s been to of £3,500. The meetings last about two hours, so the hourly rate is something equivalent to a City lawyer’s.

Nor is Mr Roberts the only person at the council to enjoy unusual rewards for his services. Tucked away on the council website, I found a fascinating report about council officers’ use during 2009 of the authority’s sponsored hospitality suite at the O2. Greenwich taxpayers pay £100,000 a year for this private box, with its ringside seat at many of the arena’s top events.

“Officers,” says the report, “host the suite for most events to ensure that all guests understand how the suite operates… officers have been recruited from across the council to form a pool of volunteer hosts.”

According to the report, the shows seen for free by Greenwich Council officers in their private hospitality suite included Metallica, Simply Red, Lionel Ritchie, AC/DC, Russell Brand, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Beyonce, Britney Spears, Kings of Leon, Boyzone, Madonna, James Taylor, and Pearl Jam.

They particularly liked Britney – council officers went to see her ten times. Beyonce, another favourite, scored four and Kings of Leon three. There were also numerous performances of Walking with Dinosaurs and Ben Hur Live.

Tickets for these events, if the taxpayer was not providing, would cost up to £110 each. “Feedback from guests continues to be overwhelmingly positive,” the report adds. You don’t say!

In theory, the money for the officers is recouped by selling tickets to Greenwich Card holders – but the report shows that for the latest quarter given, June-September 2009, there’s a substantial shortfall.

I mention all this because in the upcoming election, the case against Greenwich Council is simple. It’s that they are obsessed with flashy irrelevancies at the expense of anything important.

The borough’s schools have long been second-rate. Only this week, the council’s social services department took an absolute hammering from a High Court judge. Lord Justice Wall, the new head of the Family Division, described Greenwich social workers as “shocking,” “arrogant” and “very poor.”

But instead of tackling these problems, or anything else that really matters, the council is transfixed by a series of sideshows: the Olympics, Royal Borough status, and endless attempts to fuss and meddle with things, such as the foot tunnels, that are pretty much all right as they are.

The Olympic horseriding will not educate a single child, fund a single social worker or create a single permanent job. It will almost certainly cost jobs, crippling the area’s tourist economy for a whole summer, and damaging the park for much longer, if not permanently.

I have genuinely tried to understand what the councillors see in these things, what they imagine is in it for Greenwich. With some reluctance, I’ve been forced to conclude that it’s the junkets. The Royal Borough thing has already been “celebrated” with a slap-up banquet in the Painted Hall. The Olympics have generated lovely air-miles in trips to Beijing. Endless quantities of private luncheons, celebrity hob-nobbing and reserved grandstand seats await the lucky champions of Royal Olympic Greenwich.

When you see the extraordinary way in which the councillors, and some of their staff, treat themselves, it’s not so hard to understand why the dull slog of sorting out the schools seems a bit boring by comparison.

Andrew Gilligan: Even the Royal Parks Has “Reservations” About The Olympics

AS GREENWICH Council today prepares to rubber-stamp the planning application to close parts of Greenwich Park for up to five years – for an Olympic equestrian event lasting two weeks – we can reveal that even the park’s owner, the Royal Parks Agency, has started to have reservations about this fantastically ill-defined plan.

In its submission to the council, the agency calls on Locog to “reconsider the extent of the stripping of soil and grass that needs to take place,” saying that “the method of reinstatement of acid grass as set out [by Locog] is not recognised by us as a tried and tested method.”

“We question the need to strip top-soil and grass as a general approach towards producing a cross-country course,” it says. “We request that further consideration is given to minimise this measure and the resultant impact on the Park fabric and ecology.”

Like almost everyone else – except, no doubt, the council – the Royal Parks also seems concerned with the conspicuous lack of detail in Locog’s planning application. It speaks of its “reservations” about tree works and calls on the council to require an “arboricultural impact assessment” and “full details of methods of protection of trees.” The lack of such an assessment – a really basic flaw in the application – must give the lie to Locog’s bland assurances that no permanent damage will be caused to any tree. How can it say that if no assessment has been done?

The agency also says that the restoration of the park “will be contingent on Locog providing the necessary funds. We are assured by Locog that this will be forthcoming.” Previous Locog assurances have, of course, included the assurance that the Games will only cost £2.4 billion (actual cost £9.3 billion). As the Royal Parks points out, Locog’s submission “does not fully explain how the remedial work will achieve the results set out as objectives.”

The agency also charges Locog with “not fully explaining the intermediate period between the test event in 2011 and the main events in 2012″ and “not fully mitigating the impact on birds.”

These criticisms are all the more significant because the Royal Parks has been, and remains, a supine supporter of the Olympic juggernaut – regularly proclaiming its complete backing for the event. As I mentioned in my column last week for the Daily Telegraph, the Royal Parks have in this way and other ways demonstrated their unfitness to be in charge of Greenwich Park, or any other park. This appears to have been recognised with proposals by the Tories to abolish the agency and bring it under the control of the Mayor of London.

Another serious objection has been raised by Thames Water,  which says that the development “may lead to sewage flooding” and adds that “with the information provided, Thames Water has been unable to determine the waste water infrastructure needs of this application.” Thames Water further says: “The existing water supply infrastructure is currently unable to meet the additional demands for the proposed facilities.”

Each of these criticisms is further evidence of the fundamental lack of specific information given by Locog, something which surely undermines the planning application in its entirety. How can councillors decide on an application from which so many crucial details are omitted?

Surely the time for a tree impact assessment is before the plans are passed, not after? Surely the method of the the stripping of the very soil of the park should be settled before the plans are passed, not after? Surely the finance to restore the park to its current condition should be totally nailed down before the plans are passed, not after? Surely the not unimportant question of the project’s impact on SE10′s sewer system should be settled before the plans are passed, not after?

Much smaller imprecisions and vaguenesses in the planning application to redevelop Greenwich Market were a key reason why that was rejected by the council. Any planning authority which was doing its job properly would postpone consideration of the Olympic application until it had the actual details of what it was being asked to pass.

But of course with the Olympics, no boring planning considerations will intervene. Because for Greenwich Council, this is not a planning application. It is a crusade. The council made up its mind that it wanted the Olympics in the Park years ago. Its official slogan is “Carrying the Torch for 2012.” Its leaders have spoken at length about the immense benefits that the Olympics will bring the borough (even if they haven’t quite yet managed to articulate what any of those benefits are.)

The fury of the local community will make no difference. The rational arguments of the community will make no difference. The only people the council is listening to are Locog and its Hare Krishna-like cries that the Olympics will be “great” and “put Greenwich on the map.”

The plans will be passed tonight, in all their terrifying lack of precision – giving Locog effectively carte blanche to do whatever it chooses in certain areas, and giving the community no way of stopping it. Nobody, by the way, is saying that Locog intends to harm the park – but as deadlines approach, and money becomes tight, the temptation will be to do damage and cut corners, and in many areas there will be no effective way of preventing the park from being harmed, if that’s what London 2012 deems necessary to get its show ready on time.

Tonight’s meeting will be no more than a formality to endorse a decision taken in about 2006 and clung to ever since, despite the increasingly overwhelming evidence – even now from its own supporters – of its destructiveness, pointlessness and stupidity. It will not, however, be the final word: I think you can be sure of that.

Greenwich Market: More News

WE THINK of Greenwich Council as secretive and unhelpful, but compared to the Planning Inspectorate it’s a beacon of openness.

The deadline is already approaching for comments on Greenwich Hospital’s brazen planning appeal to be allowed to knock down the Market after all. According to an advert in this week’s Greenwich Time, it is March 22nd, less than three weeks away.

But go to the website of the inspectorate, which is handling the appeal, and you find the message: “We regret we are not currently publishing documents for this appeal.” So I can’t tell you if anything has changed about the plans or if any new dodgy claims have been put forward by the developers. A perfect example of what happens when democracy gives way to the quango state.

What I have found, however, is an encouraging decision on another Greenwich Town Centre and Greenwich Hospital planning appeal – and another minor PR own goal by the Hospital.

To start with the latter: they have engaged a new consultancy firm, the accurately-named Sensitive Projects, to get the appeal through. Sensitive Projects (“we advise on projects which are often controversial and unpopular”) consists of David McFarlane, who was the Hospital’s previous PR at another firm, and a woman called Harriet Kerr, who was a director of PPS, another outfit which specialises in getting unpopular developments through. PPS is a very interesting company.

In 2007, in an investigation for my then newspaper, the Standard, and Channel 4′s Dispatches, 17 minutes in, PPS was accused of using forgery, impersonation and even bugging to manipulate the planning process.

I found that fake letters of support for a highly-controversial planning application had been dispatched to councillors – the people whose names appeared on the letters had never written them; and that people posing as PhD students had visited councillors, pumping them for inside information about their views. I was leaked an internal PPS document boasting of how they managed to “create” favourable letters for projects, including that one. I was also leaked, from within PPS, a verbatim, 20-page transcript of a private meeting of councillors

I found mysterious new people who had joined a residents’ association which had opposed the development – then turned the association neutral, and then as soon as the development was approved, had vanished from the scene without trace. It’s a funny old game, the property business.

Harriet Kerr was not involved in the projects I investigated at PPS and there is no suggestion that she acted in any way improperly while at the company, or since. But these lobbyists will still be worth keeping an eye on, I feel.

My second piece of news about the market appeal is that if precedent means anything at all, we might be all right. This is not, it turns out, the first time in recent months that the Hospital have been refused planning permission by Greenwich Council, then taken it to appeal. Last year, the council turned down their bid to put new shop fronts on 2, 3 and 4 College Approach (currently laid out as house fronts) and a remodelled shop front on 5 College Approach.

Last summer Greenwich Hospital appealed – but the appeal was largely refused (they did get permission for the remodelled shop front at No 5.) The inspector, Christine Thorby, said the plan would be “to the detriment of the character and appearance of the… wider historic area,” conflicting with the same council planning policies as the market proposal.

Now it’s true that the College Approach properties are listed buildings, described by the inspector as of “very high quality,” and the market buildings proposed for demolition aren’t. But the decision is one more little thing weighing in the balance against the Hospital getting its ghastly Bluewater scheme past the goalie in injury time.

Andrew Gilligan: Council Worried About Park Olympics

Lewisham Council has expressed serious concerns about the controversial plan to stage the Olympic equestrian events in Greenwich Park, we can reveal.

In an email obtained by greenwich.co.uk, Stuart Sharp, Lewisham’s highways development manager, raises a series of pertinent “areas of concern” about the ability of the local road and rail networks to cope with the spectator and competitor influx for the Games, particularly on the day of the cross-country event.

In the email to Greenwich Council, dated 18 February, Mr Sharp writes: “When does the major cross-country attraction occur – hopefully on a weekend? If it doesn’t, then given the predicted 75,000-plus crowd, plus two to three thousand workforce plus competitors all arriving 90 mins or earlier before the events start at 11am means that most will be attempting to travel… during the morning peak. Similarly, the reverse pattern could occur during the evening travel peak.”

The day of the cross-country event, 31 July 2012, is a Tuesday.

Mr Sharp says that even the Park’s “smaller” events – involving between 22,700 and 55,000 people – will place enormous demands on the local transport network. He protests that the Games organisers have done “no analysis of public transport capacity to absorb the predicted [number of] people requiring to travel to and from the site.”

He asks: “Is there sufficient timetable, line and platform capacity to cope with the predicted numbers, particularly on weekdays? How will bus operations be affected if the bus lanes in Romney Road are used for pedestrian movement? I can’t find any detail [in the plans] of park-and-ride strategy and direct coach arrival and departure arrangements.

“Where are the drop-off, pick-up and coach queuing points? Where will the 200-250 coaches park after drop-off and before pick-up? The [transport plan] suggests the site off Creek Road hitherto earmarked for the Greenwich Waterfront Transit depot – surely that won’t be big enough and will it still be available?”

A failure to set out important plans in sufficient detail is becoming a bit of a theme with the Greenwich Olympics. We still don’t know which trees will be affected by the promised “pruning” operations. We don’t know the full closure schedule. We don’t know where all the temporary buildings will go. We don’t even know exactly what the main arena will look like!

But the transport position is serious. Unlike north of the river, Greenwich is to see no transport capacity improvements (apart from a third car on the DLR.) The existing network will, in fact, be reduced in capacity by the likely creation of a competitors-only lane through the Blackwall Tunnel. As well as the visual, amenity and ecological damage to the park, and the damage to the tourist industry of seeing it closed for weeks, there now appears to be a risk of wider economic damage that the area’s roads and railways will seize up.

Locog’s coyness on transport detail is understandable: their fear must be that Mr Sharp’s questions are impossible to answer. But planning applications require detail. It was a lack of detail, as much as anything else, which doomed Greenwich Hospital’s application for the market redevelopment – and that application was rather fuller than the Olympic one.

As anyone who has used the area’s transport network during the rush hour will know, it is essentially at capacity, sometimes beyond. Although the Games will take place during the summer holiday season – and some of the travel will be against the peak flow – it is a further example of the way in which the Olympic organisers decided this venue on the basis of pretty pictures rather than serious examination.

Lewisham’s borough boundary comes within a few hundred yards of the park, and Mr Sharp’s email raises the fascinating possibility that the council could formally object to the application.

That possibility still seems remote – but it is a real indictment of Greenwich Council’s uncritical cheerleading for the Olympics that important objections are only raised by a neighbouring borough.

Greenwich Market: Developers to Appeal

THE HATED demolition and redevelopment of Greenwich Market could still go ahead with its owner, Greenwich Hospital, likely to appeal against the council’s decision to refuse planning permission.

Traders in the market have been told by Edward Dolby, the Hospital’s resources director, that an appeal against the refusal is to be lodged. “He has been telling people that if they get the appeal, nothing will be demolished until January 2013,” said one person familiar with the situation. The appeal has to be lodged by February 26, six months after the council’s decision.

Greenwich Hospital’s director, Martin Sands, refused to confirm or deny last night whether the Hospital will appeal. However, official confirmation of the position is expected to be given to a meeting of market traders tomorrow.

The plan would see the existing market and the shops around it demolished and replaced by a modern market, contemporary shopping precinct and 104-bedroom hotel. The hotel would rise to five storeys and would loom over the existing buildings. Its entrance would be directly on the busy one-way system.

In August the plan was unanimously rejected by Greenwich’s planning board, which described it as “unbalanced and detrimental,” “visually intrustive,” an “overdevelopment,” “out of keeping with its historic surroundings,” and a “low quality design” which would deliver a “poor environment” and “impact on the free flow of traffic.”

Any appeal would probably be heard by the Planning Inspectorate in Bristol, though there is a faint possibility the Government or the Mayor could intervene. The inspectorate decides whether to do it entirely in writing, to have a public hearing or to have a full-scale inquiry, with lawyers for each side.
Since this scheme has been so controversial, it is unlikely to be dealt with in writing.

As before, opponents of the scheme will be able to submit written objections and appear in person at the hearing or inquiry if they wish. The criteria on which the appeal is decided are not terribly clear, but they appear to be whether the council has acted in accordance with its own Unitary Development Plan (UDP), the definitive statement of its planning policy.

According to the council, the Greenwich Market application breached no fewer than ten policies of the UDP, not to mention two items of national government planning policy guidance. It is, on the face of it, hard to see how any planning inspector could disagree with this. Take, for instance, UDP policy TC7, which states: “The Council will protect and enhance the site and setting of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site…. Development within it should preserve and enhance its essential and unique character and appearance.” Indisputably, the new scheme, which looks like a bus station, does not do this.

Policy TC8 states that any new development anywhere in the town centre must “demonstrate the highest standards in design, landscaping, detailing, and finishing.” Again, the market scheme seems quite clearly not of the highest standards.

The Hospital may argue that the council’s planning officers recommended acceptance of the scheme, though how those officers managed to reconcile it with their own policy is still unclear.
Even if the Hospital wins its case, however, economics may have turned against the scheme. The redevelopment relies on the new hotel for its viability. But since last year, another major hotel scheme has been approved in the area – a new 150-roomer on Greenwich High Road. Frank Dowling’s Inc Group is also sitting on planning permission to turn the upper floors of the Trafalgar Tavern into a 16-bedroom hotel.

There is also a planning application, which seems likely to be granted, for a 450-room hotel at the 02. All this new hotel development is, of course, in addition to the existing Ibis, Novotel and Holiday Inn behemoths which have been constructed locally over the last fifteen years. The real risk for the Hospital is that even if they do get their planning permission, the hotel market in SE10 will already be too saturated for anyone to invest.

The chances of saving the market seem higher, therefore, than at this time last year. Nonetheless, if an appeal is launched, there will need to be another campaign. And how depressing it will be to see this further evidence of Greenwich Hospital’s arrogance, pigheadedness and refusal to engage with the community it claims to serve.

UPDATE: At the meeting with traders tonight, Greenwich Hospital confirmed that it would launch an appeal. The plan will be the same as the one that was rejected by councillors last year. A press release is expected to be issued on Friday.

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