Tag Archives: Tony Dyer

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.

POOR SHOW

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Families Firstt - 1
Putting Familes First by cutting the budget by £65m and putting out a cheery self-promoting press release

As plans to hack £65m off the Children’s Social Care budget, called ‘Families First’, were hatched at the Counts Louse with the help of private sector consultants chasing a £7.5m payday, council boss “Tory” Tony Dyer featured in some University of Bristol PR on youth knife crime.

He gushed:“Bristol City Council and One City Partners are committed to working with young people and their families to make sure Bristol is a safe place where everyone can have opportunities to prosper.”

A ‘commitment’ committed to cutting cash to deal with the issue, then?

GREEN PLEDGE WATCH

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Green Party
Bristol Greens celebrate the opportunity to break the promises they made to people

More burning wreckage from a crash landing Green election pledge.

Before last year’s election, the line was that the Greens would cancel, within six months, the lease to the evangelical nutters promoting gay conversion therapy at Eagle House in Knowle West and restore it as a youth centre.

A letter from Green leader “Tory” Tony Dyer now announces that there are no legal grounds for cancelling this lease because, presumably, using a council building for unlawful gay conversion therapy activities is fine? Instead, we get the building back when the lease expires in May 2026.

It then will be demolished and the land sold for housing because the evangelical nutters have broken the lease by not doing repairs on the building and letting it fall into disrepair.

Some sort of consultation on some sort of vague community building idea will happen after the demolition but getting anything in place before 2030 seems unlikely.

Great news for young people in Knowle.

How many pledges have Bristol Green Party broken in a year?

Rehouse Barton House residents – LIE
Yew Tree Farm to be protected – LIE
Reopen Public Loos – LIE
SEND spying investigation – LIE

Have the Greens lied to you? Let us know.

SECRET AFFAIRS

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Beware

Low information officer morons surrounding ‘Tory’ Tony Dyer refused to publish his diary under FoI claiming the minimal effort involved would, er, “affect the efficient conduct of public affairs”!

Who makes this shit up? According to the Information Commissioner (ICO), it’s Bristol City Council Monitoring Officer, “Dumpty” Tim O’Gara. He declared himself a ‘reasonable person’ and signed off this lazy-arsed refusal as a ‘reasonable opinion’.

Alas, the ICO begs to differ and has instructed the council to publish Tory Tony’s diary within 30 working days.

The hapless Green clownshow of pointless secrecy takes another hit.

TORY TONY’S CORPORATE MADNESS

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Tory Tony corporate madness


“Tory” Tony Dyer continues his deranged odyssey to the outer reaches of corporate madness.

A breathless press release from pension fund Legal & General (L&G) recently announced, “[L&G] has submitted a planning application for Bristol Temple Island, a £350m masterplan regeneration project that will transform a derelict, former diesel depot site into a vibrant urban quarter.”

The council, in a dubious deal, actually handed over Arena Island to L&G in exchange for a free lease of an office block for 40 years while agreeing to spend £32m decontaminating the land all over again.

Tory Tony enthusiastically appeared in L&G’s PR dross describing this totally shit deal on land originally earmarked for our arena as “great to see”!

It isn’t. It’s monumentally depressing to see our money being pissed up the wall to benefit a wealthy corporate.

DUMPTY WATCH

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O'Gara

Desperate times at the top of Bristol City Council.

A recent question to Full Council from a member of the public – ‘The Chair’s confidence in the work of the Monitoring Officer’ – was unceremoniously banned by, er, “Dumpty” Tim O’Gara, the Monitoring Officer!

Dumpty Tim claimed the question was ‘offensive’. Although from where we’re sitting it looks more like the chair, “Tory” Tony Dyer, didn’t fancy having to tell the truth to the public.

Which is that his legal brains Dumpty Tim is obviously a useless lying bent incompetent that it’s impossible to publicly state you have any confidence in.

Oh dear.

AMATEUR HOUR

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tony_dyer_qa-ezgif.com-avif-to-jpg-converter
Expertly climbing up the arse of wealth and privilege.

Sniggers all round at “Tory” Tony Dyer’s first assignment in June as leader of the council – an arse-licking session with Business West at the grand temple of council overspend, the Bristol Beacon.

Spies tell us that Tory Tony accidentally referred to himself as ‘mayor’ twice!  He also told the local business crew he had “expertise in local government finances, housing, and urban planning.”

Areas he’s never worked in and has no qualifications in according to his thin public CV. 

Deluded amateur might be a better description.

TORY TONY’S U-TURN WATCH

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Tory Tony U Yurn

Green council boss, “Tory” Tony Dyer, is proving to be highly flexible in power. Before the election, Tory Tony was an enthusiastic supporter of south Bristol’s Yew Tree Farm. The nature reserve and city’s only working farm was under threat from a council plan to expand South Bristol Cemetery into it.

Cometh the moment, cometh the man and now Tory Tony has concluded that expanding the cemetery onto the farm is a great idea. He’s even brokered his own ‘compromise’ between himselves to only use the land for a dirty great drainage pond.

Tory Tony was also an enthusiastic supporter of the victims of the SEND spying scandal. Supporting public demand for a proper investigation into senior council bosses’ surveillance of parents of children with SEND. To score a few political points over Labour, he even helpfully leaked an unredacted version of the council’s internal whitewash report to SEND victims so they could stir the pot for him.

Now, there’s no sign of any investigation from Tory Tony and he’s blocking legal action by the victims against the council by refusing to respond to a pre-action letter issued to his council months ago.

What will the courts make of his clueless dickheadery?

GREEN HORROR SHOW TO DESTROY SOUTH BRISTOL NATURE RESERVE

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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?

ELECTORAL HOUSING BALLS

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housing-development-design-and-regenerationNext up launching their mayoral election campaign … Step forward the Green Party. They even got their crackpot national leader, NUTTILY BENNETT, down for the occasion and their big promise is that they’re going to get private developers to build 8,000 HOMES by 2020 and 2,800 of these will be “affordable”, whatever the fuck that means this week.

So 35 PER CENT of homes built up to 2020 through some kind of unexplained city council/private sector partnership will be “affordable”. An ambitious target that the private sector has persistently FAILED to meet in Bristol and that they have little interest in meeting while they’re driven by a SHORT TERM PROFIT motive.

Quite why developers would suddenly start delivering these targets because the Green Party tell them to is anybodies’ guess. Especially when you consider that the local Greens’ favourite developer, URBIS, who have planning permission to build a tower block at St Catherine’s Place in Bedminster, are committed to delivering ZERO affordable or social housing there while waffling a lot about “sustainable housing”.

The other big question regarding this Green housing promise is where will they put all these homes? They are currently claiming they will build all of them on 91 HECTARES of city council land already identified in a council ‘Housing Land Prospectus‘ and that they will then “insist that MINIMUM DENSITY LEVELS are part of the deal for the future development of this land” according to Green mayoral candidate, Tony Dyer “Straits”.

However the council’s current plans for this land – mainly low quality OPEN SPACE on the outskirts of the city in the poorest areas – already proposes densities of over 70 people per hectare. While average density in Bristol is only 39 PEOPLE PER HECTARE.

The Greens’ proposals to pile 8,000 homes on to this land would therefore push densities up to around 250 – 300 PEOPLE PER HECTARE. An absurd level, way in excess of population densities in Horfield (54 people per hectare), Easton (92 pph) and Southville (49 pph) that the Greens have identified as desirable levels of population density.

The reality is that to deliver 8,000 homes in Bristol is going to take around 360 HECTARES of land, not the 90 currently on offer. This raises the question of where the Greens intend to build the rest of their homes?

However, not one to be outdone in the bullshit stakes, Labour’s Marvin “Luther” Rees is also promising to build 2,000 HOMES A YEAR by 2020. A similar amount to the Greens. Although he, also, has not identified the land he intends to build on.

The Bristolian’s advice is: watch out for your local green space. After May politicians might just want to give it away to their private developer friends …