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RIP OFF BRISTOL: PUBLIC ASSETS LEAP TO AMERESCO

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Netting Zeroes

Over £1m of public assets have been quietly transferred to US multinational, Ameresco.

Tucked away in the Statement of Accounts for 2023 – 24 for the City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd joint venture company between Bristol City Council and Ameresco is the following statement:

“During the year, the directors took the decision to transfer the majority of the company’s employees and all of its property, plant and equipment, including its rights-of-use asset and related lease liability, to Ameresco Limited, as it was deemed in the best interests of the company. Ameresco Limited holds a 50% ownership  in the company. This has resulted in significant movement in the company’s financials during the year compared to the period ended 31 March 2023.”

“The company’s employees and all of its property, plant and equipment, including its rights-of-use asset and related lease liability’” are valued at over one million pounds in the same accounts.

City Leap Assets
Section of City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd’s balance sheet revealing a drop in the company assets of £1,145,556

Decisions at the council with a financial value over £500k are major decisions and should be decided by the appropriate committee of elected councillors. In this case, Green leader, “Tory” Tony Dyer’s shambolic Strategy and Resources Committee. Why didn’t this happen?

We’re told, “it was deemed in the best interests of the company” by “directors” to transfer our assets to a US multinational. Who are these directors? According to the council’s draft Statement of Accounts for 2024 – 25 “the Council has two directors on the Board.”

Not accurate. There are no councillors on the board and therefore no democratic oversight whatsoever of the joint venture company. Instead, there is ONE council officer on City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd’s board of directors. 

Until September 2024, this was Bristol City Council’s dubious former Chief Exec, Stephen “Preening” Peacock. He’s currently in all sorts of trouble in his new post at WECA after his former close Bristol colleague, the Labour Party’s ‘Slow Kev’ Slocombe, picked up a £150k contract with WECA outside of all known procurement regulations. 

In Bristol, Peacock is, perhaps, best known for bunging Bristol Energy £1m from City Leap funds in 2020. The handout happened during a cash flow crisis at the failing council energy company in the lead up to the eventually cancelled 2020 election. The City Leap money was paid to Bristol Energy, allegedly, for “services”. 

City Leap employees
Number of City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd’s employees halved since transferring to Ameresco. Many of these were former council employees transferred to the joint venture company in 2023 as part of Peacock’s ‘City Leap Deal’.

However, despite repeated requests, Peacock failed to identify what services he had purchased from Bristol Energy for City Leap. While the contract he had drawn up had a blank page where Bristol Energy’s “services” should have been listed.

Since Peacock scarpered to WECA, his role as director of City Leap Energy Partnership Ltd has been taken by John “Fails Upwards” Smith. He’s currently ineffectually poncing around the Counts Louse calling himself Executive Director of the Growth and Regeneration.

Coincidentally, Ameresco, the latest recipient of Peacock’s quiet generosity with public funds and assets, are the company currently paying Bristol’s new Labour Party Lord-a-Leapin’, former mayor, the Reverend Rees, a retainer for his services.

Murky stuff.

NETTING ZEROES: WE SPY PFI

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Netting Zeroes (2)

As we wait with bated breath for signs of the “billion pound” private sector investment from City Leap, an idea that’s already failed re-emerges from the gloom.

Please step forward the ‘Energy as a Service model’ – dredged up from the dying days of Bristol Energy.

It’s, basically, small scale PFI where US multinational Ameresco, will fund heating and energy kit to Bristol City Council and then we fork out a service fee every year in perpetuity to the corporate monopoly for the ‘service’ they’re providing. This ‘service’ being heat, power and light, which could be easily purchased on a competitive open market.

Canford Crematorium is proposed by the council to trial the plan because there is an “opportunity in this to decarbonise the crematorium”.

So that’s all right then.

A LOAD OF MALLSHIT

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Parkstreet-ezgif.com-webp-to-jpg-converter
Park Street: pedestrianisation boom or bust?

Council plans to close Park Street are backed by a private sector report by the council’s ‘private sector capital partner’, Arcadis – Queens Road, Triangle and Park Street – Economic Benefits Review.

The report claims that the proposal will generate a large 28.5 per cent increase in economic activity for the retail and food sector and a 19.64 per cent increase for the office sector.

Fantastic news until you learn from campaigners that the research Arcadis used to ‘prove’ these economic benefits is derived from US research from the 1960s about pedestrianising shopping malls.

The data is therefore 60 years old and, in three cases, malls were reopened to traffic to stop the economic decline caused by, er, pedestrianisation!

More dodgy bullshit from the Greens.

EXPENSEMINSTER

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Stafford Yard
The elegant charm of the new Bedminster

Anyone for over-priced accommodation?

Units at Stafford Yard on Malago Road (part of Bemmy Green development) are going for £1,450 – £1,600/month for 1 – 2 bedroom apartments.

That’s 3 – 4 rooms respectively with a balcony barely large enough to squeeze in a deck chair. Council flats in Withywood and Hartcliffe are better appointed.

Maybe it’ll be worth it when the shopping mall goes up next door with biometric screening and armed security to exclude the riff-raff?

Maybe the unaffordable rents reflect the panoramic views across the city complete with violet sunsets stolen from the locals living in the long shadow of the steel framed fake brick clad block of flats?

One construction worker told The BRISTOLIAN that he can’t afford to live there.

Is that the landlord we can hear laughing all the way to Dubai to sup cocktails with petro chemical giants posing as climate saviours?

GAGGED!

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Gagged

No change in the alarming regularity of blatant cover-ups at Bristol City Council.

In the five years up to December 2024, the council forced 59 former workers to sign gagging orders when they departed the council. An average of twelve a year.

Since December 2024, under the oversight of the Greens, two further gagging orders have already been forced on former staff.

What do the Greens want to hide?

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

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Matiluko

Bristol 24/7’s new deputy editor from London is shaping up to be quite the entertainer. Seun “Scoop” Matiluko kicked off her career in Bristol with an exciting three hour book promo interview with the Reverend Rees.

Much of Matiluko’s scribblings were a lengthy repetition of the Reverend’s neo-Dickensian back story, which we’ve all heard before. However, she also briefly unexplains the Reverend’s eight-year run-in with “Twitter trolls” and local reporters. “This is what we end up going back-and-forth about for the majority of our chat,” she says.

Neutrally calling local Twitter users “keyboard warriors”, Seun says, “some describe [Rees] as a career politician or self-promoter,” without bothering with any of the detail unearthed on Twitter about Rees’s administration over the last eight years.

On local reporters, Seun helpfully explains, “some of the local reporting on Marvin’s tenure could very much be described as racist.”

Unfortunately she doesn’t bother to very much identify what reporting and we are very much left with an impression that any journalist in the city, including Seun’s subordinates at 24/7, could very much be racist.

That’s cleared that up then.

GREEN HORROR SHOW TO DESTROY SOUTH BRISTOL NATURE RESERVE

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Abdul-Malik-South-Bristol-Cemetery-photo-Green-Party-1600x900
Hammer Horror presents …

With the vote by councillors to trash Bristol’s only remaining working farm and a Site of Nature Conservation Interest, Yew Tree Farm, due on Friday, Green Party councillors are gearing up to break one of the few manifesto commitments they managed to make.

The manifesto the Greens ran on in May promised they would, “Protect Sites of Nature Conservation Interest (SNCI) that Bristol City Council controls by preventing development on them.”

The policy seemed to be confirmed as recently as August 22. Green council leader, “Tory” Tony Dyer, huffed and puffed at Bristol 24/7 that he had been ‘misrepresented’ in an interview with BBC Points West the day before when he had appeared to support plans to expand the South Bristol Crematorium onto Yew Tree Farm SNCI.

Dyer whined at 24/7, “Yesterday in an interview with BBC Points West, I reaffirmed the Green Party’s opposition to development on SNCIs in response to a question on Yew Tree Farm. This was edited out of the broadcast interview.”

Now in October, developing the farm seems to have been edited back in. Four Greens on the Public Health and Communities Policy Committee are being asked to consider a council officer report proposing to expand South Bristol Crematorium on to Yew Tree Farm, a site ‘Bristol City Council controls’.

And these councillors – Abdul “Dull” Malik and Fi “Fie Foe” Hance, a couple of dodgy old Lib Dems mainly loyal to their own ambition, and rookie councillors Cara “Caravan” Lavan and Ed “Fuk” Fraser – appear to be getting cold feet about saving this council controlled SNCI.

All four councillors have point blank refused to visit the farm to meet the farmer Catherine Withers and learn about the importance of the site and three of them – Abd-dull, Fi and Ed – have refused to meet with independent ecology experts. Labour, Lib Dem and Tory councillors have all visited the farm to learn more before voting on this crude act of environmental destruction.

Ab-Dull has even gone one step further, ignoring both his boss, Tory Tony and the manifesto he ran on just a few months ago, publishing a rambling piece in Bristol 24/7 about Muslim burials and claiming that ‘we must balance the need for burial space with protecting the environment’.

The article was accompanied by one of the weirdest publicity shots ever (see above). An uneasy pastoral like something out of the 17th Century, the gloomy folk horror tableau features Ab-Dull stood solemnly in front of a coffin flanked by male counterparts. Any women present are stood ten metres back and off to the side of Ab-Dull and the boys. 

Is this weird shit the progressive new look for Tory Tony’s not very greens?

YOUTH ZONE: ALL THE WRONG MOVES

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Youth Zone
Artists impression of Bristol’s forthcoming Merchant Venturers Zone

The horrifying reality, being built on open space at Inns Court, about Bristol’s Youth Zone, a giant shed for the youth of Bristol that no one in youth works wants, is emerging.

Now chairing Youth Moves, the charity managing this public-private partnership big project that’s swallowing Bristol City Council’s entire youth services budget whole, is Heather Frankham, a Merchant Venturer and, until July, a director of the miserably failing Venturers Trust. The local academy trust so useless it has had to disband and hand their work over to a competent body, the national E-ACT academy trust.

The Venturers Trust’s recent handiwork includes transforming the Merchants Academy in Hartcliffe into a OFSTED-rated ‘inadequate’ school and shutting the school’s sixth form at a week’s notice in September 2023 leaving sixth formers in Hartcliffe without a sixth form to attend. Just the track record required to be trusted with further large sums of public money for youth services in South Bristol then.

Frankham has wasted no time in appointing a snooty twit from Clifton to support her Youth Zone madness. Please step forward newly installed interim chief executive for Youth Moves, Guy Cowper. This former Operations Manager at posh and private Clifton High School will now be responsible for delivering youth services in south Bristol. What on Earth qualifies him in any way for this role is not clear.

Mystery, meanwhile, surrounds the sudden departure of Youth Moves’ former CEO, experienced Knowle West youth boss Ali Dale who suddenly quit in May explaining “it is time for me to move on” after 13 years running the popular charity.

Having wrecked a generation’s education in South Bristol, are the Merchant Venturers and their friends and relatives about to wreak their incompetent havoc on youth services in South Bristol?

Watch this space.

***CORRECTION*** an earlier version of this story said that Guy Cowper and Heather Frankham were partners. This is not the case.