Tag Archives: Goram Homes

LIES, DAMN LIES & FOI RESPONSES …

This month from the What Do They Know website:

Dear Bristol City Council, I’ve seen evidence that the mayor’s office are using Whatsapp for council business, despite the guidance on doing so.

This information falls under the parameters of the Freedom of Information Act and must be disclosed.

Please provide all Whatsapp messages sent between chief of staff to the Mayor of Bristol as an employee of Bristol City Council and all paid staff of Goram Homes, and directors of Goram Homes. I would like to see all Whatsapp messages for the last two months.

I remind the council that ALL whatsapp messages are subject to the Act whether from Council-owned phones and phone numbers, or personal phones and phone numbers if the business relates to Council.

As I have seen evidence that Whatsapp is being used I don’t expect a reply saying this information isn’t held.

Yours faithfully –

And the response …

Dear –

Freedom of Information Act 2000

This request is being handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Bristol City Council does not hold information falling within the scope of your request.

Your case has been closed as of today’s date.

THE REAL STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS

Last night the Reverend Rees delivered his final State of the City speech from the University of Bristol’s shithouse Wills Building. Here’s a response:

Marvin, your State of the City speech seems to be a list of things that haven’t been delivered or resolved in your time in office. 

Most of the key infrastructure projects that previous Labour council’s failed to invest in remain uninvested in but with a tab left to be picked up by the next administration. 

There’s no funded mass transit proposal. It’s stalemated due to a lack of agreement between two bickering Labour Mayors who have prioritised their own personal animosity and egos above the needs of the city and region. 

The city continues to have deep divisions along race and class lines despite all the talk about diversity, equity and inclusion and tackling the “issues”. Where are the measurable outcomes showing improvement? 

But then you did watch the Colston statue come down and spot a self promotional media opportunity rather than a chance to trigger a real attempt to tackle the city’s long standing divisions. 

Congratulations Marvin, you built some homes (the vast majority at market rates with many being bought by private landlords) and yet still managed to miss every housing target you set yourself. 

The housing waiting list has increased to 20,000 families. The highest it has ever been, despite officers actively discouraging residents from going on the list “because it’s a waste of time”. 

Homelessness remains noticeably present everywhere, except, maybe, in the Bearpit, despite your promise to solve it. 

The vast majority of the 14,000 homes with planning permission are not being built and you try to blame a minority opposition party for this failure to deliver.

Still no arena, public or privately funded, anywhere. And tens of millions in public funds sunk into an elitist city centre cultural venue because of a binding legal contract signed on your watch. All while deprived suburbs lose community/cultural facilities.

City Leap has potential but so far isn’t unlocking any private investment and is falling behind its real investment plan, never mind this unsubstantiated £1bn you constantly quote at the press.

Goram Homes also has some potential but your planning delays means it’s falling massively behind schedule.

Bristol Waste is a basketcase with a revolving door board of directors. A direct result of poor corporate oversight. Your political interference in its business planning, meanwhile, has undermined any efforts to reduce costs. 

Elsewhere, your council is still complicit in developing SNCIs despite declaring an ‘Ecological Emergency’ and creating plenty of photo-ops of Labour politicians standing in fields saying how important green spaces are. 

There’s still no real plan for achieving net zero despite declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’. 

Then there’s the poorly implemented CAZ, almost as if it was designed to fail and disrupt. 

You are creating only one Liveable Neighbourhood and this is being poorly implemented and poorly consulted on with middle class neighbourhoods getting disproportionate input while poorer neighbourhoods are ignored.

Local CiL projects, especially transport and parks, are not being delivered partly because staff are being taken away to work on “headline grabbing” strategic projects.

The budget gap is currently larger than the Bundred one under Ferguson and there’s still no realistic plan to address it beyond service reduction and selling off council property. 

SEND?!?!! Say no more. Your “Deputy” Mayor hasn’t a clue what she is doing just like the chain of useless Labour education leads before her. Our kids and, increasingly, their parents are paying the price of this serial incompetence. 

The Dedicated Schools Grant is effectively in special measures and your administration is just crossing it’s fingers and hoping the government doesn’t pull the plug on this ever growing debt.

Basically Marvin, you have left behind a stinking pile of crap and then have the nerve to lecture the councillors who will have to clear up your shit about how the city should be run!!! 

Get da fuck!

COMPANY NEWS

City Leap  BE

More bad news for the council’s City Leap energy project. Accounts lodged at Companies House for 2021-22 show that Bristol Heat Networks Ltd registered a loss of £937,471. A loss that will have to be paid by council tax payers.

The council wanted to sell the business to Swedish state energy company, Vattenfall, by December 2022 as part of City Leap. A deadline that’s been missed. So who pays the losses since March? Will the sale price even cover these losses?

Meanwhile, Goram Homes,the council’s housebuilding firm reported a loss of £850,730. Creating aloss of £2.4m since the council started the company

Crisis-hit BristolWaste are yet to file accounts.

More up-to-date City Leap news coming soon!

ECO-CON FIRM’S SLOPE STUDY SHAM

ETHOS ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING

Bristol City Council’s house building company, Goram Homes, have binned plans for housing on the council-owned section of Western Slopes. However, corporate developer Lovells still have a planning application outstanding on the privately-owned section of the land. This application includes an ecological report prepared by Bath’s Ethos Environmental Planning.

Ethos describe themselves – in purest word salad -,as a “multi-disciplinary environmental planning consultancy providing specialist advice to inform decision making for planning and development”. So does it come as any surprise that Ethos ecologist, Jim Phillips, who’s produced a helpful ecological assessment for Lovell’s at Western Slopes, was found to have breached CIEEM’s (Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management) Code of Professional Conduct?

This was in relation to an ecological assessment he did for a planning application in Crewkerne, Somerset. Phillips, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a useless partially sighted illiterate, only managed to survey a portion of the Crewkerne site. The bit, coincidentally,  that’s not registered as a local wildlife site by Somerset Wildlife Trust. He also forgot to take into account the badger population in the area and didn’t notice a number of ponds and hedgerows on the site.

Now, not dissimilar concerns regarding the quality of Phillips’ efforts for Lovells at Western Slopes are emerging from local campaigners, Bristol Tree Forum and Manor Woods Valley Group.

Of course, any claim that there’s a network of bent ecological consultancies prepared to work for the benefit of corporate property developers with deep pockets would be conspiratorial nonsense wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it?

WESTERN SLOPES: A  LETTER TO THE CABINET

Plans for the council to build housing on the Western Slopes on the fringes of Knowle West are causing a bit of a stir at this election.

Western Slopes

Here’s a south Bristol resident’s letter to the Mayor and Cabinet on the issue after the Cabinet agreed in March to transfer this land to their housing company, Goram Homes, in preparation for building on this valued open space. There was very little debate or discussion about the transfer, which you can watch on YouTube, and green space/ecological issues weren’t mentioned. There was also an ambiguous comment about the planning process:

Dear Mayor and Cabinet Members

I understand the need for housing in Bristol and appreciate the difficulties involved in how to build enough council or affordable housing. I also recognise the difficulty in addressing this need whilst balancing it against the ecological and climate emergencies.

I’m writing to you about the Cabinet meeting held on 9 March 2021.I was disappointed by the lack of any meaningful debate on item 11, Goram Homes Land Disposal. I note that these meetings are public and agendas published, but most residents of Bristol do not follow these meetings at all and there seems very little effort to engage disadvantaged communities in understanding the implications of the items being discussed and the decisions being made.

The Mayor spoke about sustainability in building. That’s welcome but is really just the standard of building now.Councillor Shah, Cabinet Member with responsibility for climate, ecology and sustainable growth, made no comment about any environmental effects of transferring so much land to your housing company. I don’t know all of the 12 sites in detail and many do seem to be genuinely brownfield. However some of the sites are environmentally rich, semi wild spaces, or sites that are rewilding themselves (Western Slopes/Novers Hill), or perhaps were brownfield but could now commonly be thought of as a green space (New Fosseway), or unambiguously a green space that is in high use (Knowle West Health Park).

There was also no mention of the well being effects of green spaces, especially in poorer neighbourhoods and seemingly no recognition of the value of such spaces in reducing the need for costly use of NHS services.

As all but one of you in the register of interests lists your ‘land in the property of the authority’ as ‘sensitive interest’, it is impossible to see if your decisions are affected by self interest to any property you own that may increase in value if these sites are developed. Your land is classed as ‘sensitive interest’ or ‘confidential for reasons of security’, presumably because these are your home addresses.

I invite you to add more transparency to the decision. What is the mechanism to allow this to be looked at? Can council officers who are allowed to see your registered interests check the locations and review whether conflicts of interest should have been declared for this decision?

Councillor Beech, the Cabinet Member for housing said, at 1 hour 8 minutes on the recording, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWn4orU-W2Q):

“Where we own the land we have greater influence in the planning system. The planning system has some teeth, but where you’re the landowner it can really kind of add value and get the outcomes that we’re looking for, so a combination of that sort of regen thinking and where we also have Goram Homes involved it makes me very positive about the future of some of those locations and so I really look forward to…. I’m so glad Gorham are going to have that certainty and now we can look forward to cracking on with those sites.”

I invite you to clarify what was meant, as there are possible different interpretations. On the one hand it could be a positive statement about the benefit to the council of achieving what it wants to on those sites, on the other it carries a threat of extra power in the planning process to push through whatever you want to build. Given the comment is ambiguous and unclear, I think some clarity is needed.

You seem to have created a tension between your housing aims and your ecological aims. The choice of housing or ecological richness. For some of these sites the ecological loss is just too great. All but one of you have wards in the north of the city, I’m very happy to meet you at the Western Slopes and show you around, so that you can actually experience the site for yourself.

Kind regards,

BUILDING OUR WAY OUT OF THE HOUSING CRISIS?

Jessop Way

Plans and sales literature have been published of the new 3 bedroom homes at William Jessop Way, Hartcliffe near Bridge Learning Campus that we are now invited to call ‘Jessop Park’. According to the blurb these homes are “ideal for first time buyers and growing families”. And the cost to first time buyers and growing families” in south Bristol? A snip at just £307,950!

The development by Keepmoat Homes is on former council land and the Reverend Rees gushed to the press when his plans for the land were announced: “We are delighted to be involved with a project that addresses one of our city’s most urgent priorities – building more housing, particularly affordable homes in areas that need it the most. We want to make Bristol a city where everyone has a safe roof over their heads, and we cannot do that without developments like this.”

Look out for much more ridiculously expensive “developments like this” on council land when the council’s housing company Goram Homes in partnership with private developers gets building near you.

You’ll be delighted!