Tag Archives: Filton Airfield

BOARD NEWS

A home. How many will we get for £160million?

Bristol City Council has very, very quietly released limited membership details of its BRISTOL HOMES BOARD, tasked with spending a headline figure of £160m of our money to resolve the city’s housing crisis.

Naturally the equaliser, the Reverend Rees, has opted for a 75 per cent male, all-white board (except himself) stuffed with incompetent TIME-SERVERS and serial QUANGOCRATS to spend this large wedge of public money.

Alongside the Reverend and his sidekick, Labour housing boss, Paul “Wolfie” Smith, you’ll find Alison “THREE JOBS” Comley, a senior city council boss and direct subordinate of Rees and Smith, hardly best placed to speak truth to power. Especially as she’s up to her neck in the council’s £30m unlawful budget scandal and is yet to be cleared.

Alison is joined by luminaries such as Stephen “What Crisis?”Teagle from Galliford Try Partnerships, a front for the corporate that runs house builders, LINDEN HOMES. Last year, Linden saw profits rise 21 per cent to £74.3m while its average house cost a mere £338,000. The company also boasts to shareholders that it has a LANDBANK of 14,250 plots. Doesn’t sound much like a crisis for them does it?

Also on the board is Knightstone Housing Association boss Nick Horne “Blower”. He was last seen sat on his useless lazy arse as a board member for West of England LOCAL ENTERPRISE PARTNERSHIP (LEP) while, directly under his nose, BAE sold their Filton Airfield land to YTL Homes UK. YTL is run by Colin “Tory Boy” Skellett who also happened to be the Chair of er, the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership! This blatant CONFLICT OF INTEREST clearly passed Nick by, even though the LEP was given a key role in marketing and developing the airfield for sale with the public money he was overseeing!

Nick also waved through TWO PAYMENTS from the LEP to board member George Ferguson’s Beer Factory and Bristol Brewing Company totalling £62k. A further £92k was paid to a company owned by one of Ferguson’s political donors, Alasdair “Sorearse” Sawday. What were these handouts for? Who knows? Because NO MINUTES exist of these board decisions and no documents indicating Ferguson’s interests were ever published by Horne’s LEP!

Also getting rewarded for serial incompetence and moving across from the useless board of the LEP to oversee millions of pounds of our money for housing in Bristol is Business West bigwig James “Licker” Durie.  Not only is he unlikely to raise any difficult questions about any handouts to wealthy locals, he’s also a notorious salaried lackey for the MERCHANT VENTURERS.

Making up the numbers on the Rev’s quietly appointed board are a couple of posh public schoolboys turned voluntary sector luvvies – David “HAPPY CAMPER” Ingerslev from multi-million homeless charity St Mungos and the CEO of Elim Housing Association, Alistair “HEAD BOY” Allender. No doubt Head Boy can bring his street-level experience from Birkenhead School, “a top performing independent day school for boys and girls aged 3 months to 18” and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge where he studied Natural Sciences to bear?

Further INEFFECTUAL luvvie input on our Homes Board will be supplied by Bevis Watts “The Fuck”, Managing Director of Triodos Bank. He’s a serial quangocrat who boasts the pie, booze and cash giveaway to the wealthy that was the board of the Green Capital, Bristol 2015 Ltd, on his CV!

Adding a healthy dose of surrealism to the whole affair, the board also has a ‘Head of Multi-Channel Fulfilment’ at the table – Debbie “Fulfil Me” Franklin from the Andrews Property Group, a local LETTINGS AGENCY, no less. Career bureaucrat David “The Loaf” Warburton from the Homes and Community Agency quango is also along for the £160m public money ride

The small amount of hope we can invest in this board lies with the final two members. Geraldine Winkler, a housing solicitor with the Avon & Bristol Law Centre and Tom Renhard, a member of tenants union ACORN. He also sits on the board of the Avon Pension Fund for some random reason and we note with concern that Renhard was funded by local authority bosses’ union UNISON to help him get on to this pension board. It’s unclear, too, whether Renhard was a personal appointment by the Vicar or whether he was chosen directly by Acorn members.

As always, it’s just as interesting to note who ISN’T on the committee – seasoned troublemakers or gobshites known to be prepared to stand up to a committee of pie-munching land dealing wankers who forget to keep minutes. And It’s further worth noting that there was no sign of a competitive application process to join this board disbursing £160m of our cash. Instead membership is entirely courtesy of the political PATRONAGE of the Reverend Mayor Rees well away from any scrutiny by councillors and public.

The last “PUBLIC MEETING” of this board took place on 29 June. Despite being “public”, no reports were issued and the board was, instead, treated to a series of Max Wide “Boy” style verbal briefings and crappy Powerpoint presentations that will never be seen again. Already, we have to ask, are these board members doing their jobs properly?

There may be trouble ahead …

TIM AND TEX TWO FRACKING LOONS WANT THE ‘MINERALS’ BENEATH HOMES

 

http://www.scifinow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/mad-max-2-1981-02-g-616x413.jpg

Mr Shorland patrols Filton Airfield in 1990

Word reaches The BRISTOLIAN that north Bristol ‘local characters’ Tim Shorland and Tex Woodward are threatening to FRACK FILTON AIRFIELD.

The pair bought LORD OF THE MANOR titles for areas covering Henbury, Patchway, Filton and other parts of South Gloucestershire. Shorland has said that he bought his laminated back-of-a-van title in 1990 to stop the runway being turned in to a fully functioning airport, to save the area’s rural character.

In 2006 he kicked off again when BAE Systems were trying to sell off the land to be developed and turned into houses, saying the area needed to keep the runway in order to save the area’s aerospace industry. What a do-gooder! Well now that’s gone tits-up he’s threatening to frack us all…

In the last few days thousands of Bristol and South Gloucestershire residents have received mysterious letters from the Land Registry – the official body which records land ownership in the UK – informing them of ‘Lord’ Shorland’s CLAIM TO A STAKE IN THE MINERALS BENEATH THEIR HOMES!

One shocked Patchway resident told The BRISTOLIAN that “householders have received letters from the Land Registry saying Tim Shorland claims that he owns the mineral rights under our land. He told a neighbour of mine that his family has owned the land since 1066! But I understand he bought the title nearly twenty-five years ago. He’s all over the place, some elderly residents thought the letter from the Land Registry meant that the freehold they bought was illegal and this man owns their house!”

Says ‘Lord’ Shorland: “These titles do not affect ownership. People still own their house and the land. It’s only the mines and minerals under their properties we are talking about.”

Why is the Land Registry dishing out threats on behalf of ‘Lords’ Shorland and Woodward without anybody fully knowing what these two with their FELT-TIP MAP actual own? Don’t worry, though – the Chairman of Pilning & Severn Beach Parish Council Cllr Ian Roberts has been on hand to clear everything up:

“I had no idea about these letters,” he says. “This could mean fracking.”