Recent Posts

At their meeting next week Shepway’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee will discuss this report. As we already know from the Working Group minutes the council intends to look at things like the business plan for the new leisure centre, land disposal and capital funding but only once the planning application has been submitted. As we have said before, surely this is the wrong way round? The target is for the leisure centre to open in 2020 but the risk assessment acknowledges a medium risk that the project could be delayed.
http://www.shepway.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s24186/ros20170711%20Princes%20Parade%20Cabinet%20190717.pdf

Having been previously promised that the pre application advice from the council to itself would be published when the planning application was submitted, we emailed the head of planning on 15th June to ask him to confirm this and if it wasn’t the case then to treat the email as an FoI request. No response. So we chased him by email on 19th June. No response. So we emailed princesparade@shepway.gov.uk (from where the original promise came) on 23rd June. Still no response. So we have submitted this request above – now they can’t ignore us.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/pre_application_advice_re_prince

 

Council Meetings

Shepway District Council are looking for consultants to “to prepare a business plan for the new prospective leisure centre”. Surely they should have been thinking about this before spending £500k preparing the planning application. https://procontract.due-north.com/Advert?advertId=9c55bd88-a252-e711-80e3-005056b64545&p=8691483f-2f3d-e711-80e1-005056b64545

There is a meeting of the Princes Parade Working Group (ie a sub set of the Shepway District Council Cabinet) next week. The council say that the public cannot attend the meeting. However, it’s good to see that all our arguments for transparency have had some effect as the meeting is shown on the calendar on Shepway’s website and the minutes of the previous meeting have been published albeit not very useful ones.http://www.shepway.gov.uk/moderngov/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=455&MId=4355

We did challenge the exclusion of the public and this is the answer we received from the council  “Princess Parade Working group is an internal working group and is not a committee of the Council. It is important to note that the working group does not have decision making powers. The rules do not allow members of the public to attend the meeting.The minutes of the meeting will be published on Modgov as soon as possible.” We have challenged this response because the document setting out the rules for working groups does not specifically exclude the public and also we disagree that the working group does not have decision making powers. If it doesn’t, what is the point of it? It cannot be just to brief cabinet members since not all cabinet members belong to the group and the working group must surely be giving some sort of feedback/steer to the officers which will influence the fate of PP.

 

We have recently put in a Freedom of Information request regarding the financial viability of the proposed leisure centre. This was refused for a number of reasons (which you can read in full on the link below) but we are very concerned by the council’s admission that the decision on the leisure centre will probably be made in private. And what do they mean by “thinking the unthinkable” ?

“The decision on the leisure centre will probably be made in a
meeting where the public are excluded. The decision makers need a “safe space” to consider the issues and release of the information would be detrimental to the decision making process. Secondly, the costs are only estimates at this stage and whilst the public will be informed of the likely costs of the entire project, release of detailed estimates of building the leisure centre would not advance the public understanding of
the implications and would be detrimental to the public interest as set out above.”

This article was originally published 21 April 2017. Rory Love is standing as Conservative candidate for  election again in 2021.

Below is a video of the cabinet meeting on 13 April 2016 referred to.

---

 

Rory Love is the Conservative candidate for the Hythe East, Sandgate and Cheriton division for the Kent County Council elections on May 4th. He is also a cabinet member on Shepway District Council. This is from the leaflet he has been distributing in the area. He claims that he refused to support the Princes Parade proposals at a Shepway Cabinet meeting. He is referring to the meeting on 7 February this year where he didn’t vote against the proposals – he just abstained. (Though to be fair he did speak against the diversion of the road). At all other cabinet meetings he has voted FOR the proposals to develop Princes Parade including at the meeting on 13 April 2016 when the number of new homes jumped from 36 to 150 with no real explanation. So why is he now saying that he opposes the plans unless the number of houses is cut? This just isn’t supported by his voting record. If you want proof of this you can view videos of the cabinet meetings and find links to the minutes of the meetings here:

On the front page of today’s  Express is a story about the sports hall having been deleted from the proposed new leisure centre. Something we were aware of of course but good that it is being discussed more publicly. Shepway are quoted as saying that that the design of the leisure centre has tried to balance a number of issues including ensuring long term financial sustainability. But the papers for the cabinet meeting on 7th Feb 2017 were clear that a viability assessment had not yet been done. In any case, the argument for a leisure centre rather than just a swimming pool has always been that a swimming pool on its own wouldn’t make money. But Shepway have not yet proved that the leisure centre will make money with or without the sports hall – especially given that being on the coast it will have a restricted catchment area compared to an equivalent inland facility. At the exhibition in November we were told that the sports hall was taken out of the plans because there are already sufficient sports halls in Folkestone. That’s true but is it not also true that there are already lots of affordable gym stations in Shepway? So is there really a need for a fitness centre in the proposed new leisure centre?

Following an EIR request (similar to a Freedom of Information request) Shepway released some of the papers relating to the private meetings of the Princes Parade Working Group. However it was clear that not all the papers had been released so an internal review was requested resulting in the release of more papers (why weren’t they released in the first place?). Shepway are refusing to releases the papers for the Mar 2017 meeting of the working group on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. However the papers that have been released show that discussions at these meetings included a discussion of the risk of delays due to a possible call in. This is the sort of thing that we believe should have been discussed in detail at the formal cabinet meeting in on 7th Feb.We note also that there was an intention to produce a feasibility report and a financial plan but neither of these were presented to cabinet in February seemingly because they haven’t been prepared. We have been trying to get the chief executive and/or monitoring officer to justify the meetings of the working group and the informal cabinet meetings that we know have taken place in terms of the council’s constitution and/or the law but we have not received a satisfactory response. We tried making a complaint but were informed that we can only complain about the services the council provides. Surely a council should be more transparent and more accountable to local people than this?https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/princes_parade_working_group#incoming-936319

We still aren’t able to see the latest ecology reports for Princes Parade but we have managed to get some emails to and from the ecologist vis a Freedom of Information request https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/…/communications_with_lloyd_… . Their main concern is the bats and the need to keep the canal as a dark corridor. How does that fit with moving the road alongside it?