"Our Cornwall" and planning at Cornwall Council

It has been a long day at Cornwall Council and one dominated by planning matters.

Along with over twenty members of Mebyon Kernow, I was pleased to be present at the launch of the “Our Cornwall” pressure group at New County Hall.

The group is opposing the construction of 48,000 housing units over the next 20 years, which it states will lead to “massive estates on green field sites, soulless car-dependent suburbs, more traffic congestion, more pollution, declining town centres, irreversible environmental damage and significant loss of increasingly valuable agricultural land.”

A spokesman for the group delivered a letter from 43 Cornish organizations, including Mebyon Kernow, to the Chairman of Cornwall Council.

Meanwhile, in the meeting of the Strategic Planning Committee, councillors threw out plans for 300 new houses in St Austell. The development had been opposed by over 1,600 people and St Austell Town Council was represented by MK councillor Derek Collins while Cllr Neil Plummer strongly spoke out against the development.

As for myself, I have been preparing for tomorrow’s meeting of the Planning Policy Panel, which I will be chairing. We will be debating the Cornwall Council’s housing target for 2010-2030 and I will be arguing for a lower figure. The recommendation of the Panel will then go the Cabinet and then the whole of the Council.

Conservative division on "Shared Services"

Jim Currie, the Deputy Leader of Cornwall Council, has today circulated a letter to all Cornwall Councillors about the authority’s plans for “shared services.”

It is a telling condemnation of the “part-privatisation” of a host of the Council’s core activities.

Quotes from the letter include:

“The incorporation of procurement into the Joint Venture has increased its financial scope from £22m a year for Shared Services to include the huge procurement Budget recognised by the Service officially as influence over £436m annually. The latter is a step change of potentially 20 times the original scope and exceeding the projected limits. Giving £4.3 billion of spending power away to a proxy over 10 years is a dangerous business.”

“These constitutional aspects of Finance lead me to the topic of Policy which is the preserve of Full Council and for which I have some responsibility using my Democratic Services hat. The main Policy document is the Council Business Plan. The current plan first emerged in 2010 with the Budget and is still valid. However a Policy statement declared we would be “open-minded about alternative service delivery but this now translates in 2012 into “this is about extending the commissioning philosophy to the rest of the Council”. There have been a few inconsistent updates over the last 2 years including denials that Policy has changed. The 2011 Plan had 2 versions attached to the Budget paperwork for Full Council and the 2012 Plan only turned up at the last minute since it was labelled as attached but was not. The paperwork falls short of standards expected of government therefore, as admitted, the 2010 philosophy must remain. Therefore the current dash for extra scope in the JV must be slowed down and handled more carefully to demonstrate open mindedness, especially with billions of pounds worth of procurement which has only recently been identified.”

“The JV process has been described as a year and a half of smoke and mirrors (and secrecy) sorting out £22m a year contract followed by a smash and grab raid of a few weeks imposing a £436 million a year contract for procurement. I would agree with this description since I was on leave when it happened.”

Wow!

By comparison, Council Leader Alec Robertson continues to reinvent democracy. In his latest message to members, he writs:

“Although 46 Members supported the motion on the day expressing a negative view in relation to the Strategic Partnership, the remaining clear majority of Members either supported the Cabinet’s position, abstained or removed themselves from the debate before voting.”

So there you have it – people who abstain, or fail to turn up, all support whatever Alec Robertson and the Cabinet is doing.

“Use your frustration to push for positive change”

My article in last week’s Cornish Guardian was published under the above title. It was as follows:

This weekend, while “tidying” my home, I came across an article that I wrote some three-and-a-bit years ago. It was titled: “We can all make a difference.”

It started: “Why bother … what is the point … it is already a ‘done deal’ … we cannot change anything. How many times have we heard statements such as these … and to be fair, how many times have we felt downhearted at a lack of progress …”

But the article went on to extol the wonders of “people power” and how people like you and I could actually foster positive change.

It will surprise no-one that the article was written at an optimistic time for me, namely the immediate aftermath of the County Council’s decision to refuse planning permission for an incinerator at St Dennis.

I still passionately believe that everyone can make a difference. And yet, I increasingly find myself dismayed at the lack of democracy at Cornwall Council. I would like to give three very topical examples.

Take the incinerator as example one. Even though planning permission was refused, the leadership of Cornwall Council has steadfastly refused to push forward an alternative to incineration. As a result, plans for the waste plant have stormed ahead almost by default. The Leader of Cornwall Council has even lobbied central government to impose the incinerator on the China Clay Area, and the ten-strong ruling Cabinet has ignored a unanimous recommendation from its Waste Panel to explore an alternative proposal.

There is also the proposed “Strategic Partnership for Support Services,” which would allow the private sector to deliver a range of core council services. It was opposed by the majority of councillors at a recent Full Council meeting, but the ruling Cabinet has disgracefully announced that it is still going to proceed with the privatisation anyway, irrespective of the views of elected members.

And then there are the plans for a new archive centre. A working group of councillors recommended that the centre be built at St Austell, but the subsequent report to a scrutiny committee proposed a site at Redruth.

The scrutiny committee voted 11 votes to one to recommend the St Austell site. At the time of writing, the decision has yet to be debated at Cabinet, but the report for the meeting ignores the findings of the scrutiny committee and still recommends the Redruth site.

Though many of us may feel dismayed at what has been happening at County Hall, we must not let this lead us to be disengaged with local politics. We must use these frustrations to redouble our efforts to make sure that things do change.

Postscript

Cornwall Council’s Cabinet voted by six votes to four not to build the archive centre in St Austell. 

MK back "no confidence" vote in leader of Cornwall Council

As people have probably already heard, 42 councillors have triggered a vote of “no confidence” in Alec Robertson, the Conservative Leader of Cornwall Council.

This follows the decision of the leadership of the authority to proceed with the privatisation of a wide range of core council services through a “joint venture” – even though the move was opposed by the wider membership of the authority in a recent vote.

The requisition for the vote was spearheaded by independent councillor Bob Egerton and I can report that all six MK councillors signed the requisition.

On behalf of the signatories, Bob has rightly stated that it would be “inappropriate for the Council to proceed with issuing the invitations to tender for the Joint Venture until the result of the motion is known” calling for “the final date for issuing the said invitations be delayed until after the date of the Extraordinary Meeting of the Council.” 

The meeting to debate the motion of no confidence will take place on the 16th October.

A new mobile library and information service for Clay Country

With my first blog today, I am pleased to be able to report that a new mobile library and information service for the China Clay Area is to be launched on Monday 1st October.

Unlike other parts of Cornwall, the China Clay Area does not have a one stop shop and Cornwall Council has spent less money on what is terms ‘face to face’ services. As local councillors, we have campaigned long and hard to get parity with elsewhere in the Duchy and obviously it is great news that Cornwall Council has agreed to pilot this service for Clay Country.

The “claybus” will be visiting a range of local communities within Clay Country including Bugle, Fraddon, Foxhole, Indian Queens, Nanpean, Penwithick, Roche, St Stephen, Summercourt and others.

As well as offering advice on council services, the bus will be packed with an exciting collection of books for browsing and borrowing.  Local people will also be able to choose from even more titles via the full Cornwall library catalogue as well as to order books, DVDs and CDs.

The timetable for the stops is being finalised and I will publicise it as soon as it is finalised.