St Jude’s Day

We all knew the wind was coming: we all knew the power would fail.  What we did not know, was how long it would take to fix the power.  Sure enough, the wind arrived on time at 8.00 a.m. and the power went off at about 8.05.  The storm was comparatively short lived – only about half an hour.  The scale of the damage was modest compared with the hurricane of 1987.  Most of the roads were cleared of fallen trees within a couple of hours.  But where we were, the power stayed off for 56 hours.

We were lucky: we had a big log burner, an old fashioned corded phone and a propane gas hob.  We kept our freezers shut and were surprised that our frozen food survived unscathed.  With a large tank we managed to last 36 hours before we ran out of hot water.

However, there are some things that you don’t think about when the power goes down.  Power was cut to telecoms masts, so our mobiles did not work.  But perhaps the most irritating thing was the various alarms that warn that back up batteries are not charging.  We got the alarm company to fix the burglar alarm at 5.30 a.m.  But we could not find any answer to the irritating beeps from the smoke alarms or from the cordless phones (other than consigning them to the garage).  The beeps are designed to be so irritating that you have to get the kit fixed.  As such, they are virtually impossible to sleep through.

Our demeanour was not helped by a series of calls at 3.00 in the morning (which stopped just before we got to the phone) to advise us that our friends’ alarm had gone off. 

It was impossible to get any idea of when the power would go back on, as UK Power Networks’ switchboard was permanently jammed.

So by the time the power eventually came back on we were very grateful, but totally frazzled.

I have just read that UK Power Networks will pay us the princely sum of £54 – twice the statutory compensation - as a gesture of goodwill.  Great: it will not even cover the alarm call-out charge.

We probably get between ten and twenty power cuts a year.  Most are very brief and merely irritating, as we have to reset all our clocks.

The problem is we are in a rural area at the end of a long run of overhead cables, which are vulnerable to damage from falling trees.  The supply could be made more resilient by undergrounding the cables.  But this is expensive and the (private) monopoly grid supplier finds it cheaper to fork out to remedy the chaos that occurs when we get a storm, than providing a proper permanent solution.  Resilience of power supply is not even on the regulator’s radar.  It should be. 

It is ironic that we are within five miles of a nuclear power station and face the prospect of major disruption and blight while EDF builds another, but we do not have a reliable electricity supply.  Perhaps the cost of fixing the problem should be part of the price that the operator pays for Sizewell C?

But I don’t see anyone doing anything about our problem fast.  So I am going to buy a generator.  It won’t power everything: but it will keep our oil-fired heating and hot water going; stop our freezers defrosting; keep our phones and computers on line; and above all get rid of all those damn beeps!

How not to consult

Yesterday an anonymous white envelope arrived in the post along with an one from for Zenith double glazing.  It said “important information” but so does everything else from stair lifts to life insurance advertising.  For some unknown reason, I opened the thing to find a booklet entitled “Have your say on new Sizewell emergency arrangements.”

The document puts forward five proposals including an extension of the Detailed Emergency Planning Zone (DEPZ) to 4 km and the establishment of a new Precautionary Emergency Planning Zone of 15 km.  

The booklet comes from Suffolk Resilience Forum - a multi-agency partnership “which provides guidance and support in the case of a major incident affecting the county”. The forum includes emergency services, health, county, district and borough councils.

We are invited to say whether we agree/ disagree or are neutral on each proposal.  (What does neutral mean - don't care, don't know?)  But we are not asked whether we disagree because we think the proposals go too far - or do not go far enough.  So the answers are going to be fairly meaningless.  There is a small "sweep up" box for additional comments, but this is hardly going to prompt informative answers from the majority of consultees. 

Amongst other things we are asked whether more use should be made of self-evacuation.  More use than what?  The extant plan is almost secret.  Last year, I stumbled upon it on the website under “Draft Residents Calendar - 24 May 2012"

The last question is a nonsense.  It asks if there should be a plan for the evacuation of schools etc within the precautionary zone "if down wind of any release." Surely the plans should be in place come what may?

The booklet has only been sent to people within the Precautionary Zone - so anyone outside it will not have the opportunity to say that they should be included in an extended zone.

The document itself is not easy to read - white print on pale lilac paper - a triumph of style over substance for the marketing people.

If the forum is sincere about securing people’s opinions it should have addressed the booklet in person to residents - and not just delivered lumped in with a load of junk mail.

All of my complaints are about elementary mistakes.  Although the presentation of the booklet is pretty professional, the contents, the format and the manner of distribution are amateurish in the extreme.

We are told, “Your thoughts and views are critically important and we hope that you will take this opportunity to get involved and shape the way we manage the risk of radiation emergencies at Sizewell.”

I cannot help thinking that the exact opposite is true.  “We want to be allowed to get on with our jobs with as few responses as possible from interfering members of the public.  We know best.  No emergency will ever happen.  Thank you and goodnight.”

Are Examinations in Public getting the right answers?

I recall a cartoon in Planning Magazine many years ago where the chief planner is preening himself in front of his secretary

“I like to think of us planners combining the best of all the landed professions.” 

“Yes, the modesty of an architect, the imagination of a highway engineer, the dress sense of a quantity surveyor and the ethics of an estate agent.”

All very amusing, but by no means typical.  I have always thought of planners as being bright, well-meaning and hard-working - if somewhat bureaucratic.  However, I have just been forced to reconsider.

I recently made representations to an Examination in Public of our local core strategy.  My point was quite simple.  The core strategy said our local town needed 900m² of new retail space by 2025.  This was predicated on a 2009 retail study, which erroneously showed the existing supermarket as being 600m² net rather than the 1,250m² claimed by the operators and evidenced by a floorplan and my inspection.  So there was a prima facie case for reducing the amount of new floorspace needed to 250m² – quite a reduction on the 900m² shown in the strategy.

I tried to persuade the planner responsible to amend the strategy before the hearing – but she refused point blank – their consultants must be right.  So off I went to the EIP.  There in front of me was the chief planning officer.  I expected him to put his hand up and say “Sorry, mistake, our fault, we’ll put it right.”  But no. 

At no stage did he challenge my evidence on floor area.  He claimed that we were not far apart.  “In fact, in the Retail Study of 2003 the existing supermarket area was shown as 1,300m².” 

“Fine” I said, “but the core strategy figures are taken from the 2009 study.  You now say you agree with my existing floor area, but the relevant study is based on a much lower figure.  Can we not just put the right number into the calculations and re-run the arithmetic?”

“Oh no!  My figure was gross, not net.”

By this time, I was becoming exasperated; my legendary patience was being tested.  He had no answer to the floorspace evidence and refused to do anything about it – even say he would investigate.

At this stage the inspector pointed out that we were going round in circles and wisely called a halt to proceedings.

Now you might think that these differences in floor areas are trivial.  But any new operator wishing to come to the town will use them as a starting figure.  And if you are the local, butcher, greengrocer, deli or florist, in such a small town, a 1,000m² Tesco is a frightening prospect.

My experience has raised three issues.

First, the plan appears to be based on a manifest error and, if adopted as it stands, could be vulnerable to judicial review, as would any determination relying on it - whatever the government does to try and limit the use of JR. 

Secondly, I have always been in favour of the less adversarial approach of an EIP.  But on leaving the building, I was mulling, if my experience were typical, was I right?  It remains to be seen what the inspector makes of things, but I wonder if we went back to the good old-fashioned inquiry, with the prospect of cross-examination by a ruthless QC, the planning officer might have had to provide some answers?

And thirdly, I am left thinking that if I can pick up such an obvious error (although only a very few sad people examine capacity studies in any detail) how many more undetected errors are lurking there?  As Donald Rumsfeld said “…… as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.  But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.” 

It is the unknown unknowns that worry me.

Planning – time for us to have our say

As I said in my last blog, I recently took issue with the planning officer over the lack of consultation on a 15 metre wind turbine which is going up on a ridge 800 metres from the back of our house. He claimed he had consulted various bodies including Westleton Parish Council which had no objections. I pointed out that: it might be in the Westleton area, but it couldn’t be seen from the village; it was much nearer to our village and would dominate the skyline like some monstrous alien. (However, for the time being, until the turbine is attached, it looks more like the Skylon.)

“Why wasn’t our parish consulted?”

“Perhaps they should have been, but we did consult English Nature.”

But the turbine is on farmland way outside the AONB.”

“Well, a notice was put up on the highway.”

“Have you ever been along Fen Street – it’s a mile long single-track lane leading from nowhere to nowhere. The only people who ever go along it are those visiting one of the five houses there – and they probably drive. They’re not going to see a tiny notice on a post set back from the road.”

The conversation reminded me forcibly of the wonderful passage in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when the planning officer is arguing with Arthur Dent, who is lying in front of a bulldozer trying to prevent his home being flattened.

"But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display...."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'…… Ever thought of going into advertising?”

Planning has become more and more process driven. Provided you can tick all the boxes – fine. It matters not what the outcome is or if the decision defies common sense. Provided you follow the right process, that’s all right.

Given the part that consultation should play in planning, it is surprising how little effort some authorities make to engage the community when development proposals emerge.

Whilst the best write to everyone affected, the worst do virtually nothing. Some seem to be keen almost to conceal controversial proposals – all they want is a quiet life. The last thing they need is some meddlesome resident getting hot under the collar about some scheme they could otherwise deal with the minimum of fuss under delegated powers. They don’t need the involvement of an enraged busybody threatening their average decision times.

So what do they do? Put an advert in the paper or put up a notice. An advert in the paper might be all right if it were a real advert rather than a public notice. What kind of sad person reads the public notices? They may fulfil a statutory requirement, but they are hardly in the spirit of the legislation.

Whilst a prominent poster can attract attention, the sort of thing we see is a bland A4 note that usually gives little information about the project but says that the plan can be inspected at some inconvenient time in some inconvenient place.

I cannot help thinking that planning should be more inclusive. I have long advocated that planners should do more to sample opinion in the plan-making consultation. They should also do more when they receive potentially controversial applications – and actively seek the views of those affected, even if it means knocking on doors or sending letters with annotated plans which describe the proposal in some detail.

Green energy – anything goes

I recently phoned up our local planning officer to take issue with the lack of consultation on a 15 metre wind turbine which is going up in a prominent position 800 metres from the back of our house. He admitted that perhaps he ought to have consulted our village as the only settlement affected by the structure. But he added that, even if he had refused consent, the applicant would have probably won on appeal. He was still feeling sore about an appeal he had lost down the road. “When it comes to green energy, all normal planning policies go out the window.”

This started me thinking. He’s right. Take a look at the house in middle of the photo. I used to live there. It was erected about 10 years ago. It is opposite a beautiful church slap bang in the middle of a conservation area. The conservation status was deemed so important that, at considerable expense, the local authority match-funded European money to put the overhead electricity and telephone cables underground.

So when the developers applied for consent to put up the house, the planners were, quite rightly, very fussy. The building is finished in traditional local bricks laid to mimic Flemish Bond (long one, short one, long one – for those of you who aren’t familiar with the technical terms). The roof has a traditional Suffolk asymmetric pitch and is clad in local black pantiles.

After all this effort to get something that fits in, along comes a new owner who takes a shine to new solar panels. Perhaps he’s a committed environmentalist? Perhaps he works for Everest? Perhaps he thinks that, like Stonecrete, they will increase the value of his house? Perhaps he is gullible and fell for the salesman’s hard sell “Half price for demonstration projects in your area Sir?” Who knows? Come what may, I wouldn’t mind so much if this chap and others like him were going to save the planet. But they are not. The science is unproven. The embedded carbon used to make the photovoltaics may well be greater than the carbon saved over the lifetime of the installation.

Just look at the panels. They might be at home on a Mir Space Station or on the set of Startrek, but they look totally out of place in an old Suffolk village. Would they have been allowed if they were necessary for say television reception or receiving broadband? Of course not. Would any old plastic framed thermally efficient replacement windows been accepted? No, the planners would have insisted on something in keeping with the building. Can the planners do anything about these monstrous solar panels? No. About 18 months ago, government changed the rules. You can almost now put up what you like on a roof (as opposed to a wall) in a conservation area. (Who puts up such panels on walls?)

When it comes to green energy generation anything goes.

Changing Banks

2010 was a year of change for us. We moved full time to Suffolk, changed power company, changed IT provider, changed car and changed bank.

Banks admit that customers rarely change banks. Many, if not most people, are dissatisfied with the service they get, but are reluctant to change – which is one of the reasons why banks are so complacent and their service so lousy. We have not been at all happy with the awful performance of NatWest for years, but like others have stuck with them, because the competition is little, if any better and because of the hassle any such change would involve. What finally pressed us into a move was the location of our nearest branches – half an hour away at either Woodbridge or Beccles.

For most things, branch location is not a worry at all. Most transactions can be effected over the phone or Internet. The problem comes with cheques, like my £6-50p dividend from dear old Adnams. It would cost considerably more in fuel alone to drive to Woodbridge and back than the value of the cheque.

The decision to change was not taken lightly – I had been with NatWest (and the Westminster before it) for 45 years.

We decided against First Direct (you can pay in cheques at HSBC) notwithstanding the online plaudits, because we wanted a person we could talk to face-to-face – an old-fashioned bank manager.

We settled on Barclays, which has branches at Leiston and Saxmundham (as well as Southwold, Aldeburgh and Halesworth).

Banks tell us that it is easy to change; just give them your account details and, no worries, they’ll do the rest. We stressed how important it was to transfer the standing orders from our sole accounts to our joint account otherwise we would quickly clock up a large overdraft. We got lists of direct debits and standing orders to check, ticked them off, sat back and forgot about it, until two days ago. We tried to pay our horrendous domestic fuel oil bill by our Barclays joint debit card. (Never ever moan to us about the price of gas or electricity – the domestic fuel oil racket will be the subject of another blog.) The payment was rejected, so we paid by another card.

Puzzled as to why the card had been rejected we went to our accounts on line and saw that Barclays had taken money out of our sole accounts, but paid it in to our old NatWest joint account, leaving us embarrassingly overdrawn at Barclays. So we phoned our old-fashioned bank manager who was very apologetic and told us she would fix it, but for this month we had to pay a cheque from our NatWest account to transfer the money back into our Barclays account. If you are not confused by now I’d be surprised.

It took an hour and a half to check our accounts on line. We had a raft of other more minor problems, which I’m sure will be fixed in time. However for some reason, our mobile phone payment to Vodafone fell down a hole between the two banks. Soon after discovering the problem, we received a stroppy text message from the company threatening to cut us off. After two or three calls to Latvian ladies, “Why can’t you take it out of the new account – the direct debit is in place?”

“Can you pay by some other means?”

“Yes but please answer my question.”

“You’ll have to fill in a new direct debit form.”

“No I won’t.”

“Yes you will…..”

And so it went on, with Vodafone eventually acknowledging our direct debit, but insisting we paid our last bill by card.

So what have we learned from all of this. First, I remain convinced that banks would offer a better service if more customers voted with their feet. But secondly, if you do change banks, what can go wrong will go wrong … and make sure you have a friendly face that can put things right.

Time for a rethink on retail impact assessments

Tesco want to build a large new store on the edge of Leiston, our nearest town. Like others in the area we are worried about the impact of a store of well over 30,000 square feet gross on a town with a population of only 5,500.

For those of you who don’t know Leiston, it is about a couple of miles inland from the Suffolk coast. As a former industrial centre, it lacks the charm of a typical market town, but it has a thriving community which supports some excellent independent shops (notably two butchers, a greengrocer, a baker and a deli selling excellent fresh local produce) as well as a modest Co-op supermarket and a couple of hardware stores.

So off we went to Tesco’s road show in the local Unitarian Chapel. We were greeted by the usual collection of corporate charmers - neat PR people along with a slightly scruffier and older planner to answer the technical questions like “How big is it?” (He didn’t know.)

“The store will create 200 jobs.”

“How many full time equivalents?”

“About 100.”

“But that is gross. What about job losses when all the independents and the Co-op shut?”

“Oh no, Tesco will set up a local fund to help the stores through the opening period.”

“That’s as may be, but evidence from elsewhere shows that whatever you say at inquiry, the Tesco Death Star will wipe out the High Street.”

“Not necessarily, there’s a place in Kent where the butcher’s survived.”

“Well, that’s really reassuring.”

I know from experience that if and when the application gets to inquiry, Tesco’s retail planners will pick over the minutiae of policy and produce reams of calculations that will show a minimal impact on the existing shops. How they can keep a straight face, I don’t know. Their calculations defy logic and run contrary to common sense and past experience. But if they get it wrong, who cares? If the application gets turned down, that will be the end of the matter. And if it goes ahead and wipes out the town centre, no one will re-open the file.

Communities and Local Government have been strong on evidence-based policies. Their research projects, checking on the outcomes of programmes and policies have been legion. But no one has sought to review how retail schemes turned out and what effect they had on existing shops compared with the so-called expert predictions given at inquiry. The last bit of research I could find was dated 1998 and covered the impact of large foodstores on market towns, but did not seek to compare predicted impacts with actual outcomes. (Heaven forbid that anyone should think that this lack of action should have anything to do with the fact that Lord Sainsbury was a major Labour Party benefactor.)

No one wants to let the cat out of the bag. The whole thing is a charade. Clearly, the last thing the supermarkets want is the truth to come out – in a small town, a big foodstore will wipe out most, if not all, the independent convenience shops. The experts (are you buying or selling?) don’t want to prejudice a lucrative line in business. And the last thing the Department wants, is the world to know is quite how disastrous its polices have been for small shops and town centres.