Monthly Archives: December 2017

How to stop cuts the Steve Norman way

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By The Bristol Blogger

I first came across Steve Norman in late 2004. Ian Bone, then editor of The Bristolian, called one evening: “You’ve got to meet Steve Norman and Andy Richardson. Top geezers! They’re running a campaign directly with the elderly and learning disabled to save their daycare centres, which are being shut down by the council.

“The protests are crazy. You’ve never seen anything like it. Steve was quoting Martin McGuiness’s ‘Armalite and ballot box strategy’ to me. They’re doing a protest next month outside the Council House. Make sure you get there.”

So that’s how I found myself outside Bristol’s Council House on a crisp January morning in 2005 at some protest to save something I didn’t know much about. Although that was about to change because Bone was right, I’d never seen anything quite like this before.

A protest over council cuts in those days would usually consist of eight – maybe ten – well-meaning socialists brandishing a few crappy placards and a fake petition for the public to sign. Maybe they’d be accompanied by someone flogging a badly written newspaper listing the crimes of the Labour government alongside an urgent plea to join their marginal socialist sect.

This protest consisted of about 20 elderly and learning disabled people accompanied by Andy and – as the public ringmaster-in-chief with a megaphone in hand – Steve. However, the genius of this protest didn’t lie with Steve’s quickfire Bristolian epithets aimed at various social service bosses and out-of-touch Labour councillors but with the 20-odd extremely vulnerable elderly and disabled people who were very, very slowly trooping across the pelican crossing on Park Street directly outside the Council House.

When a protestor finally made it to the other side, they would press the button to cross again and wait for the ‘green man’ pedestrian light. Meanwhile, the other nineteen would continue their ramshackle progress across Park Street. By the time they all finally reached one side, the green man appeared, allowing them to troop across the road all over again!

Few cars were going anywhere that morning. Traffic chaos engulfed the heart of the city directly outside its notional seat of power and there was fuck all anybody could do about it! Motorists might be fuming but they were hardly going to get out of their cars and start threatening a load of vulnerable adults, some with zimmer frames, others in wheelchairs.

The police arrived, mildly (and not very realistically) threatening arrests. Only to be told by Steve they would require full risk assessments and specialist lifting equipment before they attempted to remove anyone in a wheelchair into a police vehicle. The police seemed to accept this logic and drifted away to do something more useful or, maybe, they were trying to find their equalities policy and a disabled access police van with a wheelchair lift? (Steve knew perfectly well that the Avon & Somerset Police had no such vehicle in service. Police were therefore unable to arrest or legally remove wheelchair using protestors).

Meanwhile, the target of the protests, Bristol’s councillors and senior council officers remained hiding behind closed doors. Not one of them daring to venture the few metres outside to meet with their own vulnerable service users on a chilly January morning. Stephen McNamara, the council’s legal boss and town clerk, then at the height of his high camp wig-wearing “Look-at-me-I’m-a-very-important-man-I-am” phase, was even stationed in the lobby of the Council House to personally prevent any of his vulnerable adult service users accessing the toilets!

The protest broke up after a couple of hours when council transport arrived to return the service users to Lockleaze Day Centre for their lunch. Steve and Andy invited me to come to a ‘Campaign to Save Daycare in Bristol’ meeting.

These meetings happened most Thursday evenings in a back room at the – now – sadly demolished Wedlocks pub at Ashton Gate. From this disorganised ragbag of vulnerable service users, carers, political activists and anyone else who showed up – sort of led by Steve and Andy often with their heads in their hands – a ‘spring offensive’ of actions was devised and launched.

This offensive kicked off on the 1 March at the annual budget meeting of Bristol City Council. A meeting flooded with the elderly, disabled and their carers. So many attended that wheelchairs lined the length of chamber and a victory came early when it was announced that Labour’s piss weak and wimpy council leader, Peter Hammond, had thrown a sickie and his long-suffering deputy, Helen Holland, would be standing in for him. Lib Dem Councillor Simon Cook, that year’s Lord Mayor, provided further amusement prior to the meeting when he agreed to depart from tradition and let the public speak at a budget meeting “as long as you don’t mention Hitler”.

Helen managed to mumble through almost five minutes of her boss Hammond’s odious justification for cuts to the city’s most vulnerable at the height of an economic boom for the rich when the council chamber descended into chaos and the budget meeting – as planned by the council – ground to a halt. Kicked off by a single carer interrupting her speech and loudly accusing Helen “of trying to fucking kill me” in 2003, the Hitler speech was soon rolled out by another protestor as councillors, the Lord Mayor and town clerk, McNamara, resplendent on his throne in his absurd judges wig, were aggressively heckled into silence.

A full blown retreat by councillors from the chamber soon followed when Steve and Andy handcuffed themselves to a rail in the public gallery and McNamara was confronted with the reality that he had lost all control of his own council meeting and had no means of restoring order. He had no clue how to remove the handcuffs from Steve and Andy and couldn’t use his security to throw out any other protestors. Even he understood manhandling any vulnerable adults he was legally responsible for protecting out of his building might end badly.

The people had seized the council chamber and the Lord Mayor, councillors and highly-paid administrators from the UK’s eighth largest city were cowering from vulnerable adults in a back room unable to set a legal budget for the city. Mission accomplished.

Many of the “spring offensive” actions have now taken on a near mythical status. Not least, the Friday afternoon of March 18 2005 when twelve service users occupied their own day centre in Lockleaze after some of them handcuffed themselves to rails and refused to leave at the end of the day. Steve, Andy and friends remained outside all night, supporting the occupiers – and thwarting the plans of council staff, who had to remain on site to “protect” service users, to starve out the occupiers – by pushing fish and chip takeaways through an open second floor window on long sticks.

The occupation created a huge amount of high profile coverage from the press, TV and radio. While the council’s daft PR man, Simon Caplan, invited open ridicule and more publicity when he helpfully explained, from the front page of the local newspaper, that the protest “served no useful purpose”. Except introducing the daycare campaign to new audiences across the city through headline coverage on every available local news platform!With the wind in their sails, the campaign moved on to even more logistically complex protests. Within hours of the announcement by Tony Blair of the 2005 General Election on April 5, Steve and a number of protestors with major mobility problems had occupied the Labour Party’s first floor South West HQ on Portland Square with an ITV News camera crew in tow!

On May 3 2005, just days before the election, Steve and protestors targeted hundreds of bank holiday customers at @Bristol. Many of these punters were less-than-impressed that the learning disabled and the frail elderly were having to take the streets to campaign to keep their own services. Bristol’s Labour boss for social services, Robin Moss, however, insisted to reporters that the daycare protests were “political stunts”. Although the real political stunt arrived just a few days later when Moss was unceremoniously dumped out of his Easton council ward by the Lib Dems while his party was similarly dumped out of power in Bristol, again, by the Lib Dems.

Steve, Andy and the protestors weren’t done yet and continued putting pressure on the new Lib Dem administration that had promised a review of daycare services during the election. On June 6 2015, the group appeared on College Green directly outside the Council House for the day with a series of 10ft-high placards directly naming seven council officers under a large headline: “Bristol social services’ list of uncaring professionals”.

This produced an aggressive response from town clerk and part time Council House toilet attendant, Stephen McNamara. “If necessary,” the wannabe tough guy thundered from the pages of the Evening Post, “the council will take legal action through the courts to prevent any such activity. The council will not tolerate its employees being harassed in this way.”

Steve loved these kind of threats from puffed up bureaucrats. “This campaign will not be bullied by city council legal mumbo jumbo and empty threats,” he replied in the same article. While he told the BBC, “I would love a legal action for the publicity”. That same day, Steve publicly forwarded his name and address to McNamara, inviting him to take immediate legal action. Steve was only too happy to see this – or any other – pompous old fool, who habitually made the law up to suit the interests of the powerful, in a proper court where the real law would apply.

When Steve, predictably, received no response from McNamara, he borrowed a flat-bed truck and on June 11 2005 spent the day humiliating the council by driving around the city centre, followed by a convoy of the press, parading his ten foot placards publicly shaming the same seven council employees all over again.

And the council’s response? Immediate legal action? Police? Arrests? Injunction? ASBO? Er, no, unconditional surrender and an invitation to Steve and the protestors to immediately attend talks with the Lib Dems to try and settle the dispute. Within weeks of these talks, the Lockleaze Day Centre was officially saved and the campaign drew to a close.

Steve went on to fight many more battles after this one. But the basic template of the ‘Armalite and ballot box strategy’ altered little: use persistent and high profile PR-friendly direct action ignoring all police and legal threats from weak and desperate politicians until the useless fuckers surrender. And they always will.

RIP Steve.

ST-MARVIN’S-UP-THE-CREEK PARISH NEWS #11

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Greetings at this very special time of year. “A good time to bury bad news” as our Parish communications professional Mr Slocombe always reminds me over a glass of dry sherry in the rectory as we blue sky our Christmas ‘grid’ for the co-production of seasonal excellence in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Although, please note, any mention of my own father and his colourful past remains banned and will not be tolerated as Mr Slocombe detailed in the comprehensive legal threat delivered to the entire congregation last week along with my Christmas card.

This year’s Christmas action points are as packed as ever and have been branded by Mr Slocombe as ‘Tough Christmas times, High New Year hopes’. Especially relevant due to the soft launch of our almost partially transformed Church Hall. I’m assured by our independent development consultants from London, the Jerry Bilt Associates, that the hall will enter completion phase “sometime next year” and that a temporary tarpaulin roof in the meantime is first class solutioning even if there is a small upper-percentile risk of freezing draught at times.

Please do not be put off attending St Marvin’s Christmas events including our transgender light operatic passion musical “Oh Christ!” and, again, this year St Snoots Academy Renaissance Orchestra and Choir’s OFSTED ‘outstanding’ quality Christmas carol production. Although please note tickets are limited, as this year we are being joined by various finance partners, the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club and the local United Grand Lodge of Freemasons. If you’re lucky enough to get in – don’t forget your woollies!

I’m led toward an understanding that the Dave Spart Academy Community Choir are performing at the Cathedral in a seasonal Songs of Praise this year. It’s partially noteworthy that our local OFSTED ‘Needs Improvement’ comprehensive has been identified as a seasonal token gesture by the BBC. Although it’s unfortunate I shan’t be able to attend as core parish leaders and I have a prior engagement in London at the Jerry Bilt Associate’s annual Christmas black tie dinner and dance at the Soho Club. As my mentor, the Texan psychotic preacher and notorious anti-communist homophobe, the Pastor Righteous Loon says, “And lo, it will come to pass that a toot of blow at Christmas does no one any harm.”

This year’s Christmas Charity Appeal is for the Cheney family. You may know Mr Cheney as he’s one of the morons who make up the numbers on the Parish Committee that I haven’t fired yet. Unfortunately without your help, due to the unpreventable evil of Tory austerity, his eleven children will be sleeping under a small bush in the churchyard this Christmas. With only an old soaking wet Peppa Pig blanket for warmth and a bowl of porridge to share for Christmas dinner, their plight is truly desperate. We must especially pray that poor Tiny Tim Cheney even makes it to Christmas. Please give generously.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Vicar

TAX EFFICIENT EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

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Francombe earning more than the PM for managing four employees!

Please step forward Fiona “Luvvie” Francombe, winner for ‘Outstanding Management and Leadership’ at this year’s Bristol Post & Bath Chronicle WOMEN OF THE YEAR Awards.

Fiona works MOST DAYS for the city council as Site Director at the Bottle Yard film studios from a city council office in a city council building using city council equipment. She even has a city council email address and spends lots and lots of city council and taxpayers’ money managing the state subsidised filmmaking facilities.

None of this seems to stop her setting herself up to get paid TAX EFFICIENTLY and avoid the little people’s PAYE obligations right under our noses, however. Fiona is also the Company Secretary for the Purcell Partnership Ltd and, it seems, her wages – at a DAY RATE OF £625 – from Bristol City Council are conveniently routed through the council’s employment agency, Guidant, to avoid prying eyes, difficult questions and, even, the attention of council auditors who tend to have an interest in high-earning council officers.

Why would Bristol City Council choose to pay a full time, permanent, middle-ranking member of staff who manages four staff a SIX FIGURE SALARY as a temp through an employment agency enabling them to AVOID substantial amounts of tax?

I think we need to be told …

MENTAL MARVIN

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The Reverend Rees took to his pulpit for World Mental Health Day on October 10. “Time taken off work due to mental health illnesses was an “economic consideration” for the Bristol region,” he blustered on Youtube in another EMPTY PR GESTURE designed to make him look like he gives a shit.

Although he is right. Mental health illness is an “economic consideration”. Especially in his own organisation, where 25 per cent of the 4,000 working days lost to sickness absence at Bristol City Council in the last six months were due to “ANXIETY, STRESS, DEPRESSION“.

This is almost entirely the fault of the Reverend’s incompetent, naval-gazing SENIOR BOSS CLASS. A relentless focus on their own terms, conditions and wages and the obsessive feathering of executive and managerial nests at the DIRECT EXPENSE of the public they serve and the people they employ is clear for us all to see.

It’s no coincidence that the lowest rates of sickness – with less than ONE DAY per person lost to sickness in six months – are in the pampered executive offices of the City Director. Here, the soft-handed Reverend and his well-heeled bosses and advisors drift from relaxed meetings with each other discussing how to fuck up our lives to laidback briefings among themselves to set-up their next salary uplift. They are UNSTRUCTURED, UNSUPERVISED and UNACCOUNTABLE.

Meanwhile, the highest rates of sickness are in frontline services – social services, adult care and housing – where the absence rates are TEN TIMES more for those doing the REAL WORK – dealing with the consequences of crappy, distant management decisions from a decaying and corrupt organisation.

The Reverend’s response to the MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS unfolding in front of his eyes in his own organisation was another PR announcement for organisations he’s not really responsible for. Launching an unfunded schools’ mental health initiative he explained he wanted “to help young people build emotional and psychological resilience”.

Presumably, then, the Reverend’s staff can just fuck off?

DAY GROUP INQUIRY: THE COMMUNITY SUMS UP

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IN THE MATTER OF:

THE ENVIRONMENTAL PERMITTING REGULATIONS(ENGLAND AND WALES) 2016

AND

AN APPEAL BY DAY GROUP LIMITED AGAINST THE REFUSAL OF AN ENVIRONMENTAL PERMIT FOR AN INSTALLATION TO TREAT INCINERATOR BOTTOM ASH AT AVONMOUTH, BRISTOL

___________________________________________________________________________

CLOSING STATEMENT OF IAN ROBINSON

___________________________________________________________________________

 

Sir,

I would like to open the closure of my arguments at this inquiry by reaffirming my desire or if preferred, my wish or wishes for you, acting in the capacity of Inspector, to deny permission to the Day Group to start operations at the illegal and unlawful structure that is currently dominating the skyline at the northern end of Avonmouth Village and ruining our amenity. I can no longer see ships docked with the sun setting behind them or, as I understand it, ever sit in my garden again without smelling ‘fresh’ plaster should you permit this further abrogation of my rights.

Further, I call on you as Inspector to require its demolition and the site cleared and returned to a good order and surface at the expense of the Day Group. I charge you sir, upon your office and the oath I’d expect you to have sworn when accepting this case as a public servant or commencement of your employment, licensed and empowered, to respond formally and upon your liability in these matters to the points below, encompassed and explained fully within your written judgement.

The point has been highlighted – and stressed by the appellant’s representative and their experts – that I have not expressed myself clearly or failed to grasp the meaning of a word in my submission of documents to this inquiry. I apologise for my misuse of the English language and my inability to transcribe my thoughts into suitably acceptable Legalise, as I understand the term, bastardising and twisting the English language into the language of contracts where words actually mean different things to what common folk understand.

I’m pleased to say my life, in the main, has taken me in a different direction than the law. That is until I was forced to gain a rudimentary understanding of the lies, half-truths and machinations of public servants by moving next to the Port and discovering, to my cost, the flexible nature of ‘law’ when applied to the rich and poor. Rich people get to attend inquiries, apologise and get forgiven for oversights; poor people get bankrupted and or prison and their lives ruined.

As these proceedings seek to legalise illegal and unlawful acts to which I am not party and derive no benefit from and in the interests of avoidance of doubt: I do not accept the Day Group’s assertion that they have the right, or permission to build this plant. I do not accept the Environment Agency claim for jurisdiction in granting a permit or Bristol City Council’s claim to have issued any form of permission which has been subsequently admitted as unlawful.

Just how – what I shall now refer to going forward as ‘the monstrosity’, or if you prefer – the ‘cube of doom’ came into being, seems to be a subject that the fantastically qualified and, I’d imagine, the eye-wateringly expensive David Elvin QC took great pains to try to keep out of the inquiry by opening his case referencing this very subject. For those that follow comedy and are familiar with the work of Frankie Boyle, I believe this is the legal equivalent of ‘the racist door’. Not being one to waste an opportunity, I thank him for letting me step through it.

Bristol City Council in 2014 granted a lawful use of land certificate to the Day Group which, subsequently, was withdrawn in 2015 after BCC and I had a discussion about ‘permitted development rights’ at the Port. The Day Group were informed by the North Bristol Planning Manager Mr Chick that the erroneous and, as I see it, without any force in law certificate did not provide permission for the construction of the ‘cube of doom’. The Day Group chose to ignore this advice and started construction whilst, as I understand things, ‘operating at their own risk’ in 2016. This was the second such permit issued ‘in error’ by planning officers for the site.

I contacted BCC and my MP Charlotte Leslie in October 2016 to request action. As, I had identified – between dust storms and explosions – that the permitted development rights enjoyed by the Port did not extend to industrial operations. Subsequently BCC issued a Planning Contravention Notice to the Day Group. The fact that BCC chose not to act further against the Day Group after serving the planning contravention notice for erecting the plant highlights the complicity of BCC officers and therefore the council. They assisted not just an entity that they had a statutory duty to prosecute a case against, but also an entity that just – co-incidentally – was a tenant and lessee of a corporation that they own shares in and upon whose board sits a Cllr serving as non-executive director.

Many questions arise that need answers around the timeline of contract negotiations with the Port, BCC and the contractors that gave birth to this bastard child of greed and entitlement, which now squats on my skyline. We need these answers before the Day Group should be able to claim any form of liability against the taxpayer for any costs of construction, or loss arising from their egregious manipulation of preferred partners, public representatives and the frameworks of both common law and modern statutes to achieve their aims. Despite – and in spite – of any impact to myself and the wider community of Avonmouth.

Questions, incidentally, that have not been answered in this inquiry. Essentially the Day Group, I believe, have acted without good faith and are liable for their own costs in all of their dealings regarding their development.

The Day Group and the Environment Agency conspired to end these proceedings before they had even begun. Sending out a communication at 7:30pm on Monday 27th stating that as far as they were both concerned there was no need for the public to be afforded the courtesy of examination of their little business venture and we should all just go home. Especially me, it would seem, as upon arrival into this building – after skillfully dodging the ‘gatekeepers of the poor’ in the car park and witnessing the spreading of ‘poor person itch horror’ amongst the staff and besuited denizens of this beautiful structure – I entered the inquiry room to find I was expected to sit on the floor or in the public gallery.

After finally being afforded the courtesies extended to the other parties, Mr Levin QC opened his case by intimating that the Inspector could, should he so wish, just save us all some time because the big boys have had a nice little backroom discussion and between themselves had carved things up very nicely indeed thank you. To your credit, sir, you recognised that this really wouldn’t be on or indeed cricket and decided that we could continue. Albeit with a reduced focus on the activities between the Day Group and the Evading Agency as they are known in circles aware of, and impacted by, their woeful and inept attempts to regulate the markets they create. Primarily, it would seem, to facilitate nice sensible gals and splendid chaps, sourced from approved institutions, entry into the highly lucrative public sector industry of drain cover painting and water quality testing at some of the most beautiful and expensive parts of their ‘jurisdiction’.

Immediately it was mooted and decided that the members of the public – who had booked leave or wasted a day of their weekend and had undertaken tortuous journeys across the city via our laughable public transport or by other means to, probably, the most inconvenient and remote part of the city (far removed from the community the ‘monstrosity’ impacts) – had to basically shut up and bugger off until Thursday 30th before they could speak. This despite the point being agreed at the pre-inquiry meeting and subsequently published to the residents of Avonmouth and the wider area that that day one would be utilised for public comments. I could argue that these factors diminished the attendance of the public and the engagement of the community of Avonmouth and therefore negates the lawfulness of the inquiry. If the inquiry had been held local to Avonmouth then the public would have been able to pop in between school runs, zero hour contracts and doctors’ appointments for treatment to their boils, rickets, lice and suchlike to keep up with developments and express an opinion on the matters at hand.

I believe the Inspector should take these points back to the adminisphere for further processing so that the public are not as effectively silenced and their views completely ignored as they have been under the guise of the expediency of this inquiry and resulting in the detriment of mine and the public’s interests and rights.

Further I’d recommend that inquiries going forward should have provision for hearing loop users, full wheelchair access, monitors to display the complicated maps and tables discussed for members of the public to view and braile support. This inquiry failed to do most of these things. This has led to an avoidable incident whereby a person who attended this inquiry with significant hearing issues requested a witness to speak up and was curtly informed that the testimony was loud enough for one of the parties and the citizen rudely directed that they should stand further away. All documents should be hosted in a portal for electronic access by citizens to browse and interrogate without the need for small forests to be razed.

The case at hand highlights perfectly the issues we have as ‘service users’ when dealing with EA and BCC around developments at the Port. Jurisdictions are blurred and each agency claims or denies responsibility when either accepting a fee or responding to a justified complaint. The public gets handed between agencies and nothing gets resolved. This matter was taken up by Charlotte Leslie when a serving MP dealing with ‘Flymaggeddon II’ which made national news and resulted in questions in Parliament to David Cameron when he served as Prime Minister. Charlotte highlighted both the public and her own frustration at being passed between agencies with no individual entity owning the problem, no accountability of officers for either their actions or inaction and no method or instruments for redress for the affected parties.

The investigation ended after myself and other residents met with the then Sec State For Environment Liz Truss. She assured us that she took on-board our collective concerns and that the government and the Local Government Association would work together to appoint a lead agency to manage problems going forward. She also said that the Environment Agency would take seriously and mitigate any concerns affecting or impacting the public from waste treatment operations at the Port and within the wider community and, lastly, that BCC would be held to account for planning issues.

Liz didn’t quite get to the level of passion and engagement that she exhibited in her speech on cheese, yet she managed to clearly identify herself as incapable of anything but finger painting and story time. None of the promises that she or David Cameron made, agreed with the agencies and public representatives, have been delivered to date and pollution has gotten worse where I live.

The assurances of the EA that they will robustly manage issues with the operation of the monstrosity going forward carry no weight with the community of Avonmouth, or indeed it would seem with any community where their management frameworks exists. No liability is attached to any officer directly if acting Ultra Vires or without due diligence. None of the enforcement action makes any tangible difference to the problems experienced. None of the fines are distributed to the people impacted. None of the officers involved live day in and day out with the impact of their omissions or oversights.

The Day Group made much of the fact that the problems highlighted in my submissions with regard to dust emissions were nothing to do with the Day Group and were on a different site with a different operator. Testimony presented to the Inspector has highlighted that this, in fact, is a half-truth and the answers to my questions regarding Boomeco and the issues arising from their operations on the site concerned have shown that the Day Group were aware of problems. The public had reported them directly to senior management; had identified that the tenant had breached their agreement or – as I’d describe – contract for use of the land and yet no action was taken to correct this breach that the Day Group are prepared to substantiate. This calls into question the Day Group’s fitness, willingness or capacity to operate a facility of this type in the unique locale of Avonmouth Port and their compliance going forward. Agencies’ willingness, capability or capacity to manage any issues experienced must also be questioned.

BCC’s shameful performance in enforcement of the law regarding the unloading and loading of ships providing feedstocks to the Port, which are outside of the EA’s claimed jurisdiction, give effective legal wriggle room. This allows the EA to claim responsibility only for the Day Group site and not the end-to-end journey of the product. This approach, illustrated by submissions from expert opinion, takes no account of the ‘product journey’ from ship to shore. The Day Group’s expert Dr Cockroft seems to think that lorries thundering up and down the road at 3:30 am with the associated noise of loading and unloading has no impact on people sleeping 50 metres away. My full, personal liability and expert opinion – not the testimony of a limited liability organisation – should take precedence in the Inspector’s consideration of these matters. I am a live person, a human being and not a corporation. The Day Group, EA, BCC and Port are not providing any individual prepared to accept personal liability for the plant’s operation and therefore have no rights.

The Port itself uses antiquated and unsafe methods to load and unload ships. This gives rise to pollution from both a noise and dust perspective. Regular shipments of thousands of tonnes of dusty cargo is moved via grab or bucket grab to lorry using the ‘best available technique’ (BAT) of dropping from a great height utilising the freely available force of gravity, without any form of mitigation, on a dockside regularly blasted with stormy winds and rainfall. The collective ‘we’ are not aware of the strengths, variability or historical patterns of weather affecting the dockside at Avonmouth. This is utilised by BCC, EA the Port and their lessees and tenants when making applications. Their experts will present data sourced from other elevations, aspects and even counties to generate models that bear no relation to the actual conditions on the ground. These models are then accepted as baselines from which other fantastical creations are calculated, pop into being and are relied upon as truth within the caveat of ‘variabilities’ and excluding liabilities.

As I understand things, BAT should encompass the size, resources and profitability of the organisation making the application in relation to the task or problem at hand before consideration is given to other factors thus deriving BAT from the whole. As the Day Group seem to have a hand in deciding BAT through their relationship with the regulator and their membership of the professional bodies and associations seemingly advising the regulator I’d suggest that a re-evaluation of BAT, in this case by an independent working party that reflects the justified concerns of residents, be undertaken before any permits are granted.

The residents and members of the public who have shared their statements with you have given accounts of the huge impact that the cumulative effect of the individual registrations based at the Port and surrounding areas have on the health and wellbeing of people who live here. Harrowing accounts of constant chest infections and breathing problems in the young and the old, noise problems that impact across the face of the clock and not just site licensed hours and the dramatic effect these problems have on individual mental health. We do allegedly have protections within Article 1 of the first protocol: 1998 Human Rights Act and I dare say under lots of other acts and statutes and the framework of common law, which must be enforced by the various authorities due to the UK’s undertakings. However these ‘rights’ seem negotiable when the Port is involved and the purposefully toothless regulators have to extract a digit and cease polishing the seats of their chairs.

The cube of doom has generated more input from all sections of society and the self-styled political classes than any application I have experience of. The public at large, residents, local Cllrs and even the Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, have written to oppose the construction and permitting of the structure. The weight of public opinion far exceeds the numbers of people able to respond to the whims of the Day Group and various agencies pushing for its acceptance and I have been genuinely moved by some of the messages of support and promises of action should this plant go ahead. Civil disobedience is the duty of citizens who have no other remedy.

Do not permit this activity. It’s in the wrong place, not wanted and has been constructed illegally.

I’m done, soon to be dusted.

Ian Robinson, resident, representing 140 souls, Avonmouth Community Action Group.

COURT’S PFI HELL

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All is not well at the Bristol Civil Justice Centre, Bristol’s state-of-the art PFI funded civil court buildings in Redcliff. Expensively built by the PRIVATE SECTOR for the Labour government for over £20million and opened to great fanfare in 2010 after judges arrived at work on 27 June this year to discover their car park KNEE DEEP in water with an electric current running through it.

Now, four months later, our civil court house remains INEXPLICABLY closed with the city’s civil cases being squeezed in at the Magistrates Court or in Cardiff, Gloucester or Taunton while Judges are housed in spare rooms, libraries, store rooms and doubling up to fit into the space. No one seems to be sure when they will be back either.

The courts were built under a PFI DEAL with the Department of the Environment (not the Ministry of Justice for some obscure reason) and the terms of the lease and build contract deal don’t appear to cover what’s occurred. Indeed, we’re told, “senior judges have read the terms of the lease and can’t make sense of them”!

The problem, it seems, is that the flood caused the fuse box to blow. Not an unusual event and fixable within hours. However, this fuse box was CUSTOM MADE for the site in Germany and no one knows why. The delay is being caused as we have to wait for the Germans to come over and build an expensive, identical custom-built fuse box to fit the space.

No one has any idea why this was done in the first place. No one has any idea how much the custom built fuse box will cost. No one has any idea what the cost of rehousing everyone is. Nor, indeed, does anyone have any idea who is going to be paying.

 It’s another rip-roaring public-private success!

[UPDATE: since this story was published in the paper, the courts have now reopened]