Dear Councillor Sahota
Thank you for your letter concerning the Station Road site in Newport within which you have made various points that I welcome the opportunity to clarify for you.
I will answer the various points that you have made in the order that you have written them: -
- The potential development of the Station Road site was indeed identified by my Administration; something that we have never made a secret of, and something that we exchanged views over at the one and only public meeting in Newport that you have so far managed to attend.
As you well know we were looking to identify a further £10m capital receipt to add to the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme to allow the total rebuild of Newport’s Burton Borough School, an aspiration you have fallen well short. We were also looking to deliver a new recycling centre and business park in Newport to provide jobs, increase recycling and reduce the pressure on local highways. Something you have also fallen well short of, even to the point of cancelling the recycling centre.
Critically, the ultimate choice, as to whether this project ever saw the light of day, would have been left to the residents in Newport as, rather than the so called ‘consultation’ undertaken by your Administration, we had resolved to ballot the town for a decision to develop on the Station Road site in return for the desperately needed new school and the infrastructure projects I have just mentioned.
The proceeds of any sale would have been wholly spent in Newport whereas your Administration have made it blatantly clear that none of the £21m (over double what we were looking to raise), for which you have been reported as selling the site for, will be spent in the town.
You will have now no doubt realised that the notices that you have attached were issued only a few weeks prior to the May 2011 elections – you have had every opportunity since that time, as the Council’s Administration, to scrap the project if you wished.
As you will also perhaps have noticed; your development proposals are for a huge Super store of 87,000sq metres, over TWICE THE SIZE of what we were going to suggest and a third again larger than the 3 other supermarkets put together!
- As for comments “protecting the public purse” and the courts “setting a national precedent”– your last in a long line of High Court failures is of your own making: -
If you cannot understand this fact I will try and help you; Your Council’s Section 106 agreement sought to spread the estimated £2m cost of highway improvement to the A518 across 5 separate development proposals should all 5 developments actually go ahead (3 housing and 2 Superstores including your own development on Station Road).
To suggest that the council will now be left with a bill of £2m, as you claim, is not only untrue but laughable! The Independent Planning Inspector and successive High Court Judges also agree that if only one supermarket goes ahead there will be no need for the full range of highways improvements to be made and costs would be borne proportionately by whatever developments may happen. So I am left wondering why the council has spent so much money fighting rival supermarket schemes while at the same time supporting their own?
The fact that the Secretary of State cost you £544K when he took the very unusual step of ‘calling in’ your own application for a super store on the Station Road site says much about general concerns regarding your proposals that stretch beyond the local community. It is quite right and proper, that if those concerns exist, your proposals should be submitted before an Independent Inspector for a decision – why should you worry about that as it is part of the checks and balance of the democratic process?
Your reference to the £96k incurred by the Council in fighting its own residents to prevent the proposed Sainsbury’s site being designated as a Village Green just smacks of sheer arrogance! After all it was the Council who chose to use a top flight QC to crush local residents whose only ‘crime’ was to challenge you and your Council, as is their absolute right. Even the Court of Appeal suggested your reaction was somewhat unnecessary and excessive!
As for your claim that the “Council has a duty to secure best value for its assets” – well yes it has, and it also has a duty to look after its environment, its community and the viability of it’s Borough Towns and not to sell off its silver just to self perpetuate the council. It is a balance that seems to completely escape you.
Finally, in dealing with your issue over a Local Plan; by May 2011 my Administration was preparing to consult with our residents on planning policy which we had called “Your Future.” For us it was ‘the key issue’, as planning affects many aspects of all our lives.
We were to include two matters of principle from which we did not wish to deviate; firstly, we would only allow development of Greenfield sites in exceptional circumstances, secondly we wished to shrink the development boundary to the A442 at Shawbirch to further protect open countryside.
Your response to revising Planning Policy has been woeful and I have to ask what on earth have you been doing for the past 3 years? Your failure to progress “Shaping Places” (which will not be ready until 2016 at the earliest) has left the Borough at the mercy of the NPPF and uncontrolled development across the Borough.
Your lack of drive and action has resulted in a free for all planning zone which is fully out of control and is damaging the Borough and communities right now.
Having achieved the unenviable position of presiding over the largest waste of cash in the Council’s history (even surpassing the wasted £1.1m spent by the last Labour Administration on trying to get the aborted redevelopment of Telford Town Centre underway) I have to ask you for an undertaking that you will not waste more of our communities money by appealing to the Supreme Court.
I would suggest that you use one of my guiding principles and ask yourself if you would use your own money in this way?
Thank you for your letter and, as I understand you are not in the country at the moment, I am happy to offer to debate this debacle with you on the radio should Radio Shropshire, or you be interested in taking part when you return.
Best Wishes
Andrew