What is the community?

The previous government was very fond of consultation. It spoke warmly of consulting “the community”. The Conservative green paper, “Open Source Planning” tells us it will give “local people the power to engage in genuine local planning through collaborative democracy – designing a local plan from the “bottom up”, starting with the aspirations of neighbourhoods…”

It all sounds so simple – but it is more complicated than it seems. Just who constitutes the community to be consulted and what weight should be given to whose views?

What happens when you get a divided community literally as with the Cutteslowe Wall built in Oxford in 1934 by private developers to keep out residents from the adjoining council estate? What about those divided figuratively by irreconcilable views like the voters of Barking and Dagenham?

Leaving aside such extreme cases, imagine proposals for a bypass round a village which suffers from heavy traffic. The farmer, who is most directly affected and whose land will be taken and severed, is firmly against it. People in the village, desperate to see the back of the traffic noise fumes and dirt, are all for it. Those in the surrounding area, who will lose a place to walk and unload the dog, are against. Motorists from nearby and further afield, who will avoid a congestion blackspot, think the bypass is well overdue.

At a national level, Natural England (who follow and set government policy on the natural environment) opposes the scheme because the road may go through the migration route for the local toad population. And CPRE is anti, because it opposes any new development in the countryside.

So this is all very difficult. Whose voices carry the day? Those that bring the most votes for me of course.

Third Party Appeals

The Conservative Green Paper, “Open Source Planning” proposed to introduce a right of appeal against planning decisions for third parties. Developers are worried. “It will be a nimby’s charter”. “CPRE will have a field day.”

Eric Pickles certainly wants to give more weight to the views of local residents. When developers won consent for development in the grounds of the former Warley Hospital on appeal, he argued on his website that the views of councilors and residents should not have been overturned by the Inspector – even though the planning officer conceded there were no valid grounds for refusal.

But third party appeals will only arise where the council has given consent for a development which local residents do not like.

The Green Paper says:

“…… we will limit the grounds for appeal against a local planning permission to just two:

1. that correct procedure was not followed in assessing the application, or

2. that the decision reached is in contravention of the local plan.”

We have few problems with the first point – aggrieved parties can already seek judicial review (JR) if they believe due process has not been followed. The appeal will be before a Local Government Ombudsman – which should be more straightforward, cheaper and accessible than the High Court for a JR. However, past experience with JRs suggests that people will dig up the most obscure procedural points that have little bearing on the decision under appeal. We hope the ombudsman will be able to take a pragmatic view and disregard minor technicalities if they did not materially prejudice the decision.

Again, we have no issue with the second point on matters where the local plan is unequivocal – for example no building in the green belt and limits on building heights and densities. But we have concerns where the criteria are not so cut and dried – for example where plans seek development “in keeping with the character of the area”. With the best will in the world architects and public cannot agree what constitutes good design. So anyone with a gripe about any development will be able to appeal on the grounds of poor design.

Likewise many local plans seek a certain percentage of affordable housing. Many of the target figures are now simply not financially viable. So any developer who quite reasonably negotiates a lower percentage of affordable housing will be open to third party appeal for not complying with the plan.

So we share some of the concerns of the development industry. We know there are single issue groups who will oppose almost any development. (I was indirectly involved with the King’s Cross scheme and I know the problems objectors can cause – and how much the ensuing delays and legal fees can cost the developer.) No-one living near a new scheme will countenance any loss of a view or amenity – without very good reason and/or substantial benefits (e.g. free land for a garden extension or a new village social club).

Quite apart from people who object on principle or those that wish to protect the value of their property, we have come across people who have sought judicial review just to make a nuisance of themselves to get the developers to buy them off.

We have no instant solution to these problems, but we believe government should look at limiting appeals to criteria in the local plan where it can be shown unequivocally that the proposed development does not conform. And perhaps such appeals should be limited to those with a beneficial interest in the outcome – rather than give a free rein to single issue lobby groups and those with little or no connection with the area.

More than my job’s worth?

Some years back, I saw a wonderful cartoon in “Planning”. The planner was telling his secretary that he liked to think planning combined the best of all property professions, to which she quipped “Yes: the modesty of an architect; the dress sense of a quantity surveyor; the ethics of an estate agent; and the imagination of a highway engineer.” All the attributes seem apposite – but perhaps none more so than that attributed to the highway engineer.

About three years ago, where I live in Suffolk, we suffered a plague of road signs, particularly those advising of speed limit. We have a road sign that tells me as I leave our village I may increase my speed to 40 m.p.h. Well I can if I’m daft. The road is single track with blind bends. Thirty is pushing it, even for someone who doesn’t hang around like me. Four hundred yards and I reach another road sign telling me to slow down to thirty. Why bother at all with the forty limit?

As I drive on, I have various signs telling me that: the road is bendy; to beware of toads (or are they frogs?); and to watch out for old folk should one get under the wire from the nearby home. I don’t think I’d be able to see a small toad at night when they are supposed to come out. I have never seen one of the elderly residents near the road, let alone on it. What use these signs are, I know not.

On some roads, changes in speed limit are so frequent and arbitrary that you scarcely know what speed you should be doing. The A1 around Sandy and St Neots takes some beating - as does the A12 between Wickham Market and the outskirts of Lowestoft.

We simply have too many road signs. They are ugly; most of them have their own poles rather than share; they clutter up both urban and rural environments; and they are distracting – you can easily miss the important ones in a whole tree of irrelevant and useless information. (And they also cost a fair bit.)

But once they are up, they are there to stay, no power on earth will make the people who put it there in the first place admit they were wrong. However, no-one seems to inspect the signs to make sure they are still relevant and fulfilling their function – and many of the more important ones get hidden behind trees.

And they won’t move them, even if they are obviously in the wrong place. Where my parents live in Hertfordshire they have a flashing thirty miles an hour sign sited well into the village and beyond a notoriously dangerous junction – despite vocal complaints from residents. They even replaced the sign exactly where it was originally when a speeding car skidded off the road and demolished it.

And who is to blame for all the unnecessary, confusing and badly sited signs. Yes, you have it, the highway engineer or technician. Everywhere I go they seem to get in the way, cause endless delays and generate vast amounts of unnecessary work and bureaucracy.

Even DfT seems to despair. In their report “Increasing the Understanding of Traffic Signs” they say “….it is not surprising that traffic signing is regarded by many practitioners as needing to be improved and at worst to be a disaster area." They cite:

· lack of expertise on the part of the practitioners;

· a fear of litigation if too few signs are used in a scheme – no-one gets criticised for erecting too many signs;

· the fact that in many local authorities, a number of people in difference departments or sections can erect signs, e.g. parking signs by the parking manager or cycle signs by the cycling officer; and

· the inexperience of scheme designers.

Where I used to stay in Letchworth, they allowed parking where people had to come out of their drives unsighted into fast moving traffic, but had double yellow lines on the other side of the road which abutted open space and had no emerging traffic.

Highway engineers do everything by the book – their book. They move glacial pace. My wife was recently involved with putting a dropped kerb access to a village post office. The works cost less than £500 – but the legal agreement cost over £3,000 – and it took nearly a year to put in place before the works could start.

They refused to allow enforcement in the town centre where new public realm works have been installed, because they technically needed DfT permission to move a road sign. As a result, people were parking on the pavements and driving the wrong way up one-way streets endangering life and limb. Did the local highways people care: did common sense prevail? No, neither, provided it is done by the book, Mr Jobsworth can rest safe.

So what can we do about this? Quite frankly I don’t know – highway engineers are a law unto themselves. They always say they aren’t trying to be difficult. Perhaps it’s congenital?

Time Gentlemen Please

As a result of various MMC inquiries, larger breweries were forced to sell off their tied houses. Many went to specialist pub-owning companies (pubcos). Over the years, these companies and smaller breweries with tied house estates have raised the rents of pubs to open market levels, but maintained the tie - often charging 50-100% more than a free house would pay for their wet goods.

In the village where I live in Suffolk, we have an excellent local pub (and an excellent school, but no shops). Out of a village of about 300 souls: around half a dozen are regular churchgoers; about twenty attend the WI; and around 75 frequent the pub. So it is very much the social heart of the village.

Yet it struggles to pay its way. Over the seven years to 2009, we have been through five landlords (brewery tenants) and one temporary one to provide cover when the previous incumbents did a runner leaving a trail of debt behind them. All previous tenants have lost money – it has been a financial disaster for them. The latest landlord is making more of a go of things.

In the good old days when I started frequenting licensed premises, most were tied houses – owned by the brewery. The brewery charged a pretty nominal “tied rent” and made their money by putting an inflated mark up on the beer. Everybody (except the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and real ale buffs who deplored fizzy keg beer and the lack of choice) was happy.

So it is small wonder pubs are going out of business at the rate of eight a day. At least we are fortunate in that our local authority has a planning policy that virtually prohibits change of use for the last pub in a village.

In July last year, CAMRA made a super complaint to the OFT (albeit focusing on larger pubcos). They wanted the OFT to investigate, amongst other things:

· the foreclosure of tied outlets to suppliers unable to access sales outlets directly;

· the wholesale prices paid by tied pubs for beer and other tied drinks and the level of rent paid by tied lessees; and

· the basis upon which rents for pub lessees are calculated.

Late last year OFT published its response. It said its work was "to ensure that effective competition delivers value and choice to consumers.” Its spokesman said. “Any strategy by a pub-owning company which compromises the competitive position of its tied pubs would not be sustainable, as this would result in a loss of sales. Pub-owning companies are not therefore protected from competition by virtue of the supply ties agreed with their lessees.”

The OFT concluded that it: had “not found evidence that supply ties are resulting in competition problems that are having an adverse impact on consumers.”

So what is causing the problem? The smoking ban is often cited as an issue – but most now think that is a good thing. Supermarket sales and drinking at home have affected trade. Tax increases have not helped. Attitudes to drink driving have hit rural pubs hard. But ask virtually any tied landlord what the principal problem is and he will tell you it is the level of rent and the inflated price he is paying for drinks. He can manage one, but not both at the same time.

At the risk of taking issue with such an august body as the OFT, I would point that the competitive position of tied houses is being compromised. They are closing at a rate of knots. As they do, consumer choice is being reduced. In many villages there is only one pub. Drink driving rules preclude visits to the “competition”. So, in practice, many people do not benefit from any competition at all. The pub often only has a small catchment so will struggle come what may. While rural pubs last, customers are charged inflated prices. But that is better than the alternative of the pub closing.

The last government proposed measures for to enable planners to intervene and call a pause for the community to have their say before any demolition or material change of use. John Healey, the outgoing planning minister, reminded councils that PPS4 provides tools for the authority to take account of the pub’s importance to the community before deciding on any planning application. Nick Clegg, in his statement on the “big society” said that it would give ”communities a greater say over their local planning system and saving local services such as post offices and pubs”. Let’s hope these words are followed through with actions.

Back to my village. We are all hoping the new landlord will be able to make a living and the pub will survive. (Prosper is too unrealistic a wish.) Our new landlord is more experienced than his predecessors. Trade is better true – but more importantly he has been able to take on the pub owner (a local company which values its standing in the community) and by virtue of his knowledge and experience has persuaded them to get real. To its credit, the company has reduced the rent. For our part, we are crossing our fingers, and doing our best for trade.

What will happen if the pub fails? Us locals may form a co-operative and buy it. As a pub, it is worth much less than a house – and, with a pretty tough and unequivocal local policy, our planners won’t allow it to be changed to a house if there are people willing and able to buy it and run it. What happens if you are outbid by someone who has a dream of owning a country pub? I say good luck to them, provided the pub is saved. Without a tie and an onerous rent they may well make a go of it and guarantee its future.

The Round Robin to end all Round Robins

Last week I turned up a piece that my father wrote about ten years ago when he was 75. It still makes me chuckle, so I thought I’d share it with you.

First by way of background, it’s a spoof round robin – the sort of thing you get at Christmas from distant relatives and friends telling you about their wonderful year. Don’t you hate them? You know the sort of thing, “Little Sophie is excelling at ballet, she goes for her audition at Sadlers Wells next month; she’s two years younger than most of the candidates, but her teacher has great hopes. Crispin celebrated his eighth birthday by completing the times cryptic crossword in nine minutes. The school say he is the most their gifted pupil since Darwin…..” And so it continues.

About ten years ago, my family used to get regular circular letters from a host of friends in Australia – only their children would be appearing at the Sydney Opera House or Melbourne Cricket Ground. They were enough to make anyone “speak into the big white telephone” as they say over there.

After one such missive too many, Mum and Dad decided to put together their own and send it to everyone who had sent them one. Mum has a wicked sense of humour and Dad has a way with words. It didn’t raise a titter from the Australians. But it stopped the round robins in their tracks. So here it is. You may find it useful.

December 2000

Hello again and a very Merry Christmas!

The Millennium year comes to an end and how exciting it has been – full of ups and downs.

The New Year’s honours list brought few surprises. Nigel was disappointed to receive no more than a knighthood for his services to the lingerie industry and the Temperance Society.

February and March brought two downs. First, Nigel on his knees before Her Majesty, and second, a prolonged and severe cold snap. The press blamed the government for its misguided attempts to reverse global warming. Thanks to Pat’s foresight, a substantial stock of candles and access to a peat bog saw us through the crisis.

Recovering from the cold snap and despite April’s floods, some metaphorical warmth entered our lives. As Britain’s first Olympic synchronised swimmer, Pat was invited to carry the Union Jack in Athens 2004. She will have some difficulty in handling her zimmer at the same time. But Steve Redgrave has offered to lend support and advice.

May was a quiet month, but early in June we were delighted when cousin Jean called in. She had just come from the Television Centre where she had been interviewed by Michael Parkinson. She told the story of her three months on the space station Mir. She had stunned the studio audience by saying how boring it all was. With only an O-level in Serbo-Croat, she had great difficulty in communicating with her Russian fellow travellers. She much prefers bungee jumping.

Being in her seventies and the oldest woman to go into space, the only scary episode was when, as a non-swimmer, she splashed down in the shark-infested Timor Sea. She had to wait two hours while the crew of the USS Nimitz watched the Super Bowl, before coming to her rescue.

We understand that as an after-dinner speaker Jean now commands a bigger fee than Baroness Thatcher, who is said to be fuming and has called her agent to “restore the right priorities”.

July and August were quite dead. So, whilst Ernie polished off the last chapters of his best seller, Pat led an expedition to the Himalayas. Apart from reaching the summit, she was credited with discovering the corpse of a baby yeti. Imagine her disappointment when further research revealed that it was a pekinese left behind when a group of Korean climbers had to abandon their breakfast in the midst of an avalanche.

We should not forget that August of the Queen Mother’s hundredth birthday. (Isn’t she wonderful?) We could not match her, because Uncle Harry had to wait another two days before celebrating. For him, there was, as you may know, an added bonus in that the week before, Fiona, his wife of 22, presented him with twins.

As we told you last year, grandson Ben took a commission in the army. He left his base in Hereford hurriedly at the end of the month to go on some hush-hush mission. We were all very concerned for his well-being.

September and another success, Marilyn wins the Eurovision Song Contest by an unprecedented margin with an updated version of “Yes we have no bananas!” Redolent of wartime shortages and rationing, it reduced the German Jury to a state of apoplexy. (NUL POINTS!) Modesty itself, the musical icon attributed her success to the encouragement of Sir Cliff Richard and the backing of Oasis. (Aren’t Liam and Noel little charmers?)

There were three pleasant surprises in October. First our granddaughter won an Oscar for her role in “Freddie Starr ate my hamster” – a touching account of the true story behind the tabloid headline. Her acceptance speech moved Sylvester Stallone to tears.

Then, following last year’s Nobel Prize for literature, Ernie won the Booker prize for his poignant tale of an alcoholic in Saudi Arabia – “Legless in Mecca”. Sadly, he could not accept the award in person. He was indulging his penchant for travel and exploration by leading the first spring expedition to the South Pole by camel.

Lastly, much to our relief, Ben returned to England looking sun-tanned and fit. He remains tight-lipped, but as far as we can gather he has been working for the CIA as an SAS secondee behind enemy lines in Sierra Leone. (Pat thought she caught a glimpse of him on the news after the rescue of the hostages.)

November, and more joy for Marilyn, her son Joss was awarded his doctorate. We were hardly surprised, but he was delighted to be headhunted by the Sorbonne and take the Jean-Paul Sartre chair in existential philosophy.

Later we were stunned to see Sister Mary on the news being led away in handcuffs by the police. She had been the driver of the JCB in the raid on the Dome. She was unrepentant shouting “Another blow for pensioners” as she was bustled inside the police van. Given her unblemished record and age, she should get no more than five years and could be out in three. She remains in our thoughts and prayers.

December brought some disappointment for Ernie, Nigel and Ben. After the England players called off their strike, the RFU no longer required their services against the Pumas. It would have been quite a first to have three generations running on to the pitch at Twickenham.

And now for the big news. A year has passed and we have not moved house. But we are a footloose and restless family – always looking for new horizons. At the moment, it’s a commercial secret, but the news will soon break. Needing a pied-a-terre in the great metropolis, we have just been notified that our bid for the Dome has been accepted. We shall of course have to make good the damage that Mary caused last month.

Meanwhile, watch out! Pat and Marilyn have been asked to join Naomi Campbell, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Liz Hurley and others to bare all for a 2001 David Bailey calendar for Children in Need.

With much love

Pat and Ernie

The slums of the future

With the recession, the crash of the buy-to-let market, and a serious oversupply problem, many developers have stopped building flats. Those who have not stopped altogether have cut right back on numbers and redesigned schemes, substituting houses for apartments. Good.

Over the last few years, it has been my misfortune to see numerous proposals for new developments of apartment blocks. The name of the game has been to squeeze as many as flats as possible on to the site – with little thought, if any, as to the people who will live there.

High numbers are achieved by: over-massing of blocks – too high and too deep; producing tiny flats (Parker Morris would have had a fit); and appalling design generally, particularly as regards daylighting and outlook.

Many new flats are single aspect without any external space such as a balcony or terrace. For those of you who have not experienced living in such properties - I have - they are ghastly. In the summer, those facing south and west can become stiflingly hot with limited opening windows and no possibility of through ventilation. Those facing north are depressingly gloomy – OK for troglodytes, but enough to put normal humans on Prozac. In mixed tenure schemes, such dwellings are normally reserved for social housing – especially if they overlook a car park, busy main road or railway line.

In the sixties, single aspect houses were termed back-to-backs; they were deemed unfit under slum clearance legislation, irrespective of their condition. At least you could walk out of the door into the street and open air. Now we allow developers to get away with building single aspect homes many floors above the ground with no immediate outside access. Those who build or design them should be made to live in them to see just how awful they are.

Where the development of apartment blocks is still viable, planners should look carefully at layouts and reject proposals for single aspect properties – especially those facing north and/or without balconies or terraces. Even better perhaps government could issue guidance or regulations that precluded the development of such properties entirely.

Beware the freeholder

Until recently we owned a flat in a well known prize winning development. Beautiful building – highly sustainable – but a great pity about the way the management of the blocks was run.

Conventional wisdom has it that the best way to manage an owner occupied block of flats is by granting long leases to the owners and enforcing mutual obligations (including paying for service charge) by way of leasehold covenants. Fine. With a caring sharing freeholder, everything works well.

But to squeeze more cash out of the scheme developers usually create ground rent leases (usually involving an initial rent of a few hundred pounds with provisions for increases) and flog off the resulting investment to the highest bidder.

Such firms are only interested in the money they can make – collecting the rent (fair enough) and charging exorbitant sums for various minor consents that leaseholders need to secure from time to time. (In our case they demand money for consents to let on assured shorthold terms, which are not required under the terms of the lease – and leave it for the leaseholder put them right. Fine for two property professionals like us – but not the little old lady.)

Even worse, the freeholder contracts out the management to the cheapest outfit they can find. In our case the maintenance was poor and the accounting was chaotic. So much so, that we and our fellow owners opted to run the building ourselves under right to manage legislation. We now have a firm that seems to know what it is doing, can add, communicate in English and seemingly set sensible budgets.

All the time, effort and mess could have been avoided if the developers had not been so greedy, given some thought sustainable management (possibly got the owners to manage from day one) and chosen the freeholder more carefully. If I had known what I know now – I would have thought twice about buying anything where the freehold was owned by the particular bunch of shysters we have experienced.

So, if you are buying a leasehold property, find out about how the management works in practice – and do some research on your freeholder. And if you are developing a block of flats – give some thought for the owners who will have to live with the freeholders you land them with and the management arrangements that you or they put in place.

More questions than answers – time to come clean on sustainable energy

The Greens have become the new puritans. With a sanctimony that hasn’t been seen since the seventeenth century - as practised by men in white ruffs and tall black hats - they urge us all to follow their example. They follow a fundamentalist creed that holds assertions as truths. They sit smugly under their photovoltaic roof, with their Toyota Pious on the drive, watching their wind turbine rotate slowly, looking down their nose at their unenlightened neighbours.

Most of us agree that global warming is an issue and is principally caused by burning fossil fuel. Even if we do not, we accept that we shall need to reduce our carbon footprints, if only because shall run out of fossil fuel sooner or later and, in any event, burgeoning demand will push up prices to eye-watering levels.

But are we going about things the right way? The big problem for the layman is trying to get accurate unbiased information. Be it for energy saving or energy generation investment, most of us might like to know:

· How much it will cost (net and gross)?

· How much it will save and on what assumptions about future energy and maintenance costs?

· What will its payback period be?

· How long will it last?

And for the more environmentally concerned:

· How much embedded carbon was involved in making it?

· What is its carbon payback period?

Most of the information available on costs and savings, comes from manufacturers of the kit – and as such is highly suspect. Even the experts cannot agree amongst themselves. The numbers are all over the place. (In reviewing research on the embedded carbon payback period for photovoltaics, Bankier and Gale (Energy Bulletin 2006) cite researchers’ estimates varying between 0.7 and 25 years.)

So we need agreed common bases of measurement. For example, what do we take into account in embedded carbon in manufacture and installation of generating equipment– human labour, transport from China, mounting and supporting structures?

Every time we hear about a new wind farm, we are told it will produce X thousand megawatts, enough to power a town of Y thousand homes. Fine for peak output, but what about the rest of the year, when it will run suboptimally – let alone when there is not enough wind to make it run at all, or when there is so much, it has to be switched off. Tell us average outputs – not peak performance.

And we delude ourselves both individually and as a nation on the economics of green energy generation. Home installations benefit from government subsidies on capital. Commercial projects benefit from being able to sell electricity at inflated prices. Without such large subsidies, hardly anyone would be doing green energy in the UK. How much will it cost the taxpayer either directly or indirectly (through higher power prices) to achieve the EU target of 20% renewables by 2020?

Salesmen of alternative energy projects tell householders how their product will add to the value of their home. Perhaps. But if you have an attractive period or faux period house, solar panels on the roof and a wind turbine in the back garden will do little for the aesthetics of the property – and could well reduce its value.

Come what may – be it in carbon or money terms, the best payback for most homeowners is insulation. Lagging the loft, double-glazing and cavity insulation are easy: solid wall insulation is less straightforward, but effective. As things stand, unless I have missed an announcement to the contrary, government is still committed to achieving zero carbon new build homes by 2016 – even though it will currently add c 40% to construction costs and the lack of ventilation and having to shower in a warm fog will not be too everyone’s liking. (Code for Sustainable Homes; CLG March 2010 shows costs 30-48% over 2006 Building Regs compliant specification.) If government were looking for best value in financial and carbon saving terms for the UK as a whole, it should replace the demand for Code Level 6 homes with a levy to be reinvested in insulating existing stock properly.

As part of its drive for more sustainable homes, government is looking for onsite power generation. Given problems with wind and solar power, a combined heat and power plant is often the only solution. This optimises total energy output – heat plus electricity. In the winter, houses can use most if not all of the heat. The problem is what to do with it in the summer. Some of the schemes I have seen merely dump it in the nearest river until they can find something sensible to do with it. Paradoxically the best use for this excess heat is to provide cooling by way of absorption chillers. But in the UK, the principal users of air-conditioning are offices (and some shopping malls). So here we have a good reason for proper mixed development – like Argent’s scheme at King’s Cross. But no-one at CLG seems to be putting this message across. The only game in town for the department – up to now at least – has been housing numbers and an inexorable drive to achieve Code Level 6.

Nuclear may be, no, could be, the solution to our power generation problems. Most of the opposition is simply on the grounds of “I don’t understand nuclear and it is evil.” More rational opposition is on the basis of: it may be prone to terrorist attack (but so are lots of things); there might be an accident (yes but the recent safety record in the West is pretty good); and lastly, we cannot get rid of the fuel safely. This third point carries the most weight. As things stand, we are simply storing spent fuel – often in dynamic conditions of cooling or drying. Government has simply twiddled its thumbs. The previous government was not prepared to commit the necessary resources to reprocessing – and has not been prepared to decide on a long-term storage solution in the face of opposition from the antinuclear lobby. But it wouldn’t tell you any of this. The new government has decided to disagree with itself.

So, what we need from government on energy, for both personal and national investment purposes is some clear and unbiased information setting out the facts and the assumptions on which those facts are based. If there is disagreement between scientists, let us know. Let us hear both sides of the arguments.

To date there has been more heat than light.

New localism – beware of what you ask for

Let me tell you a story. Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation runs a scheme of management to protect the unique built environment of the first Garden City. This means householders have to get the permission of the Foundation to make material changes their property, even though they have already secured planning consent – or, in many cases, do not need it at all. Such changes include concreting over front gardens and putting in plastic picture windows.

Trouble began in 2003/4 when a local architect, peeved by the Foundation's refusal of his own development proposals – and its own proposals for development near his house - began to campaign and then petition for a parish (town) council. Having obtained the requisite number of signatures he forced the district council to carry out a postal opinion poll. Because the poll was called by a number of residents (as distinct from elected members) it was limited to those on the edited register – which excludes those on the full register who opted not to have their details made available to bothersome commercial interests. With a promise of running on a minimal budget, the town council lobby carried the day with 62% of the votes cast (only 21% of the electoral roll).

When the first election was held in 2005, with no effective opposition, the “independent” town councillors won 23 out of 24 seats - albeit none secured more than 13% of the eligible vote. Things went from bad to worse. The council got through six town clerks in its first three years. The then leader was suspended for bullying staff. The council spent £10,000 on a mayoral coat of arms and chain. In 2008, it trebled its precept to £600,000 - £50 p.a. for a Band D home – two and a half times the all England average. (Unlike all higher tier authorities, parish councils are immune from capping.) The parish employed six staff even though it had no power to do anything other than dole out money to charities of its choosing and make representations on (meddle in) planning applications.

That was enough for a bunch of residents who called themselves HELP (Help Eliminate Letchworth Parish Council). Yes – it includes me. We got up a petition to abolish the council. In the subsequent poll, 76.3% voted in favour of abolition. But because of government policy on governance reviews, we shall have to give the council at least eight years before this can be done.

So HELP put up candidates in the 2009 election which was held on the same day as local council elections and open to all those on the electoral roll. After an amazingly effective campaign run through the press and over the internet, on a turn out of over 40%, HELP candidates won 22 of the 24 seats. (One was tied and lost on the toss of a coin and the other lost by only six votes.) The biggest wins were in the largest and most affluent ward where the voters’ principal concerns were to protect the environment and value of their homes and minimise their council tax. Results were closer in those wards which had benefited for the council’s largesse and where a high proportion were on Council Tax Benefit and immune from any increase in precept.

HELP have since reduced the precept to nil and effectively put the council to sleep – undertaking only the minimum statutory duties. The aggrieved ex-Town Councillors sought judicial review to prevent the winding down, making the staff redundant and disposal of the council offices.

The judge gave them short shrift saying (amongst other things) “The object of the claim is to frustrate the lawful decisions of a democratically elected council by judicial order.”

So there we have it for the time being, except for the hearing on redundancy terms of the staff which will shortly before an employment tribunal. The previous council changed the terms of employment just before the election. The current council have been advised the terms are ultra vires and therefore declined to pay.

We all have to sit things out until the next council elections in three years time before we can have a new election – and if HELP win the day – hold a governance review and get rid of the council.

So what lessons can we learn from our experience in Letchworth?

1. Most people don’t care about local politics and local issues generally – only when they affect them in particular.

2. Small minorities can exert undue influence and manipulate the local agenda.

3. Single issue lobbies can carry all before them.

4. Government needs to change existing rules, so that issues put to a local poll by local residents are put to the entire electorate – not just those on the edited register. (In Letchworth, 45-50% of voters are not on the edited register.)

5. If you do not yet have a parish council, think carefully about trying to get one started!