komadori’s green corner

It must be hard being a large retailer. You put lots of effort into cultivating an ‘environmentally friendly’ image, replacing plastic carrier bags with paper ones that proclaim their virtues, only to find that these marketing efforts are ineffective with your customers.

Now, you might think that if — as the person stood in front of me yesterday in a cashiers’ queue was — you’re buying clothes made entirely of synthetic fibres, clothes that have been transported at least half way round the globe, then the least of your environmental concerns should be the material of the carrier bag into which your purchase is being placed. Not to the aforementioned customer ahead of me in the queue. She looked at the cashier packing her polyester paradise into a brown paper bag and said “Paper? Oh well. Why not waste another tree?” For a style-conscious cheap-fashion junkie, only plastic bags for plastic clothing will do, I suppose.

Central Swindon’s clown councillor, Mr Montaut, has been quick to political point scoring after a tree fell during the Armed Forces Family Fun Day in Faringdon Road Park.

Coun Montaut questioned whether Swindon Council was carrying out sufficient checks on the trees after recent cuts to its ground maintenance budget. He said: “What we cannot have is this type of thing happening in a public arena especially at a time when hundreds of people attend events like this. We need to make sure people can enjoy themselves in a safe environment.”

In fact the tree surgeons from Swindon Commercial Services spent much of last week in the park, but working on the trees on the opposite side of the park from the one that fell this weekend. As the tree surgeon who was called to the scene said, trees are unpredictable.

It can still happen — the tree is in full leaf so you wouldn’t expect anything to happen. If there’s decaying trees in the area we take them down straight away, we don’t take any chances, but trees are unpredictable.

From what’s left of it, the tree was clearly rotten at the core of its trunk. But so are many trees for many years. If Mr Montaut had his way, many substantially healthy trees would be felled, just in case an accident happened. Unnecessary felling of trees is a longstanding habit of councillors throughout the country. There’s already been enough instances in Swindon without Mr Montaut encouraging more.

This week seems to have been a week for Swindon to feature in surveys, some local, some national. As always with statistics, the publicity has been misleading.

First there were the May results of Swindon Strategic Economic Partnership’s business survey. This showed that 45% of those surveyed expect an increase in turnover during the next 3 months whilst 24% expect it to fall and 31% expect no change. The Adver translated that into a headline of ‘Business leaders optimistic about recovery’ whilst Swindon Business News managed a rather more restrained ‘Local firms seeing some signs of easing’. With the survey also showing that 47% expect no change in ‘General Business’ — whatever that is — and 68% expecting no change in employment, it’s the headlines that are optimistic, not the business leaders.

The week also saw the publication of a report by the Centre for Cities on youth unemployment. The press seemed keen to portray the report as showing that youth unemployment in Swindon is high. For example, the Telegraph:

Students in Swindon are facing an uncertain future as the one-time boom town takes a beating at the school of hard knocks.

and the Adver:

According to research institute Centre For Cities, the number of unemployed youngsters in Swindon has rocketed from 2.39 per cent in February last year to 7.67 per cent last month – the highest increase in the country.

Now, it’s true that the number of people claiming unemployment benefits in Swindon is now above the national average and that youth unemployment and unemployment in general have risen more quickly in Swindon than elsewhere.

Since the beginning of the recession, Swindon’s claimant count has risen to 5.4 percent – passing the GB average for the first time in 30 years.

But as the report’s own figure 6 shows, youth unemployment is still below the UK average: it may have, in the Adver’s words, rocketed, but it is still below average.

Finally there was a story that people liked living in Swindon but dislike the council.

MOST people like living in Swindon but dislike the local council and feel they have little influence over official decisions. Those are the findings of a major new survey that questioned hundreds of people across the town about their local neighbourhoods and the extent to which they felt able to make their voices heard.

The Place Survey conducted by local councils for the Department of Communities and Local Government does indeed show that 80% of the Swindon population are ‘satisfied with their local area as a place to live’ whilst only 27% believe ‘they can influence decisions in their local area’ and 41% are ‘satisfied with how council runs things’. But the national averages for those are 80%, 29% and 45% respectively. For an example of an unpopular council, try Northampton (only 27% satisfied with the council), for a stubborn one try Gosport (only 20% think they can influence it). So, rather than Swindon Borough Council being singled out by its residents for disdain as the headline would have us believe, their attitude to it is actually rather average.

I read that East Wichel now has its second resident. A month after the first residents moved in, they now have some neighbours… so they won’t be the only people on their new bus service. And if their housing association landlord is to be believed, their new homes are unique.

Each of the Sovereign homes at East Wichel has been designed so that every house has its own individual character and style.

Hmm… it’s only ‘its own individual character and style’ if you don’t look far… to the very next block of housing association properties, for example.

Less than two weeks before a change to their recycling service, Swindon Borough Council has only just started to publicise the change. A story in the Adver tells us of the change.

The move is in response to residents’ irritation that only plastic bottles can be collected as part of the council’s recycling process. But from July 1 yoghurt pots, margarine tubs, take-away containers and much more can all be bagged up for the council to collect…. The only plastic that cannot be collected under the new scheme is black plastic because it cannot be separated from other colours by the waste processors the rubbish is sent to.

Residents are asked to put their mixed plastics into clear or white plastic sacks which can be bought at supermarkets. They can also use the council’s clear bags for plastic bottles, although no more will be delivered.

The new collection will be on the same day as residents’ wheelie bin collections. For those on weekly blue bag collections it will be the same day as the green waste and plastic bottle collections.

I wouldn’t usually quote at such length, but at the moment this is the only information we have on the change. In its very limited wisdom, the council has not yet put any information about the change on its website. If the council really wants people to recycle more, they need to make rather more effort to publicise these changes. It seems they’ve learnt nothing from the farcical publicity that accompanied the introduction of wheelie bins and weekly recycling collections.

Walking home from work yesterday I saw at least one person making use of the New Swindon Company’s latest offering: mirrored windows with headless transfers. A woman ran up to the former Zavvi shop front, struck a pose for about one second in front of a headless James Bond transfer, had a little giggle and rushed on. Whether the New Swindon Company succeed in getting posers to upload their photographs is another matter. At the moment, the address given in their news item is to a domain without a website. The Strike a Pose Swindon website is at www.strikeaposeswindon.com — itself just a link to some buried pages on the Swindon Big Screen website — rather than the ‘.co.uk’ equivalent. As I seem to be the first person to provide a link to the website, it’s no surprise that at the moment the gallery is empty.

That’s not my verdict: it’s that of Mr Bluh on some of the latest witterings of the New Swindon Company’s Mr James. It’s perhaps indicative of just how monotonous his ramblings have become that his own financial backers are not sounding overly supportive. As Mr James was talking about a part of the town centre for which there is, on his own admission, no investment interest yet, his words were even emptier than usual. The plans are now six years old; Mr James has been talking about them for almost four of those years.

With every repeat of his tales about what might happen to the town centre in the future but in six years hasn’t yet, the reputation of the New Swindon Company as an organisation delivers nothing at great expense grows. Mr James needs to learn that if he hasn’t got anything new and substantive to say, he’d be better off not speaking at all.

With the current economic conditions, I’m expecting a long silence.

I spent yesterday wading through Swindon Borough Council’s consultation document on the proposed Eastern Development Area. With the main document running to over 90 pages, and almost 240 pages of supporting documentation, it wasn’t easy going. The consultants seem to have been enjoying themselves, with the document stuffed full of jargon. I have now been introduced to phrases such as “functional green infrastructure links”, “benchmark for exemplar sustainable development” and “urban acupuncture”.

It’s only once one has got through almost 30 pages of this guff that there’s something of substance about what is actually planned. For those living in South Marston and East Swindon it’s bad news.

It is important that South Marston retains its independent identity as a settlement and does not coalesce with Swindon.

The consultants have an… errm… unique way of doing that. The proposals change South Marston beyond recognition, more than doubling it in size, or in planner-speak “significantly enhance the sustainable credentials of the village”.

For those in East Swindon, there’s just a few fuzzy words about not increasing the likelihood of flooding, with nothing to say about the severity of flooding. There’s much talk of the ‘benefits’ the development might bring to East Swindon, but these are dependent on the most expensive option — The Crunch — being selected: an option that requires government subsidy to bury the A419 at the White Hart Roundabout. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that with the current government having run up a level of debt that would shame a 1980s third-world dictator, that money isn’t going to be forthcoming. Which leaves us with one of the other options, The Stretch or The Weave — just what were the consultants on? — with a new town centre facing South Marston across the railway line as the most likely outcome.

Unusually for anti-development campaigns in Swindon, the campaigners actually seem to have got their act together and learnt from the mistakes of some of the less effective recent campaigns. No petitions, but 200 individual responses submitted to the council. The last time there was a consultation on a similar matter, the Central Area Action Plan, the number of responses from individuals could be counted on one hand.

The consultation closes at 4.30 pm tomorrow.

I really don’t know why Mr James of the New Swindon Company bothers to waste his breath speculating on when the old college building on Regents Circus will be demolished.

There is still a possibility it could come down this year but it’s unlikely…. We are waiting on the developers. They are not going to demolish the site until everything is signed because, essentially, that’s all they have over the council.

More accurately, it’s all they’ve got against the local residents. As the New Swindon Company themselves explained six months ago, once the building is demolished, residents on the hill behind could legitimately object to new development on the basis that it would spoil their view. If you bear that in mind, the excuses given by Mr Fisher of Ashfield Land look like a blatant lie.

I can’t tell you exactly when it is going to come down because we are still in the final stages of getting an agreement with the supermarket. Our ambition is certainly to start this year but I can’t guarantee that. We can’t demolish anything until that deal is done because we have an agreement with the council on keeping the car park open.

Hmm… I could’ve sworn that, in other towns, a frequent use for redundant sites between demolition and redevelopment is as car parks.

The Beeb has happily trumpeted that the South West Regional Development Agency is bringing forward £3M of ‘investment’ in the regeneration of Swindon town centre, whilst making cuts almost everywhere else. But that’s only part of the story. The details of the plans say rather more about how that money is being spent.

Swindon town centre, 2009/2010: Given the current recession and significant uncertainty in the property market, the Agency has agreed to bring forward £2.85m of investment in town centre regeneration projects into 2009/10. This investment, which has now been approved, will help to improve the town centre including helping to tackle empty units, creating construction jobs now and helping to create the conditions for private sector investment when market confidence returns

‘Tackling empty buildings’ sounds like more demolition to me, with only a little bit of building going on. The briefing and project list also make clear that this is the last money Swindon will be receiving from the agency for the foreseeable future.

In five particular areas where we are currently involved in a large number of projects — Plymouth, West of England, Swindon, Gloucester and our support for the aerospace industry — we have decided that we need to place an upper limit on what will still be significant future support for projects in these areas….
Swindon town centre, 2010/2011: Given the shortage of funds available to the Agency in 2010/11 other partners will fund activity in this year. This collaborative approach will allow the RDA and its partners collectively to keep regeneration and development moving forward

That to me sounds like Swindon’s tax payers picking up the tab for the New Swindon Company’s ineffectiveness. Nice. A ‘collaborative approach’ where Swindon gets told what to build by a quango it didn’t ask for, but after this year doesn’t get any extra money to pay for it. That doesn’t look like much of a collaboration to me.