komadori’s green corner

What’s the best way to ensure that troublesome drunks, loitering around a bus station, don’t cause any more trouble? Apparently, it’s by giving them a conditional discharge and ordering them to pay £46 costs. Not even a hint of ordering them to attend a rehabilitation course. I hope the District Judge concerned felt he was making good use of his time.

Shock, horror… very little has happened whilst I’ve been concentrating on the pain in my shoulder rather than the local news. The aforementioned Councillor Glaholm has flown his nest, influenced, in part, by a below-the-belt election letter distributed in several wards, and the response from his former nest.

I was appalled when I saw it and I could not believe that someone in the group would stoop so low, and then for them to make light of it and make out it was nothing was just outrageous. Hopefully, sometime in the near future the person responsible for the leaflet will be disciplined by the party.

The only other thing that caught my attention was the local railway company’s decision to reduce some off-peak fares. Given that off-peak trains between Swindon and Gloucester have been almost empty for years, one wonders why it has taken so long for them to reduce the fare by 48%.

This doesn’t really come as a surprise. Today my local MP was amongst the hypocrites that voted to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act.

The Adver reports that students from Swindon College set an impressive standard when given the run of the kitchens at the Chiseldon House Hotel. However, there’s no need to go that far. They provide a similar service at a restaurant in their North Star campus. Some colleagues of mine went there last week and were very impressed with both the quality and the price. Well worth making a booking for those working in the offices clustered north of Swindon town centre.

Owing to an arm injury, blogging is likely to be very limited over the coming week.

I don’t like venturing into national politics but, having seen that he who has been anointed leader has suggested the building* of five new ‘eco-towns’ there is one thing I feel I must say.

No!

The aspirations may be laudable.

A home-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy is what would be in the interests of our country because everybody would have a stake in the country. The problem is that even with the great ambitions of the 1950s or the 1980s, they did not succeed in widening the scope for home ownership to large numbers of people who want it.

But the history of ‘New Towns’ built in the last half of the last century should have taught us that New Towns (even new eco-towns) are not the way to achieve high quality communities. It seems the lesson is unlearnt.

The 5 new eco-towns, each housing between 10,000 and 20,000 new homeowners, will be built primarily on brownfield land. Each new home [will] be built to zero-carbon standards, allowing them to qualify for a zero rate of stamp duty, all the energy and electricity they use will be generated locally from sustainable sources, and they will all be built with strong public transport infrastructure. They will include new state-of-the-art zero carbon schools and health centres.

The first such proposed town will be located on a brownfield site, the abandoned Oakington Barracks in Cambridgeshire, and will include 10,000 new homes, with electricity delivered by solar and wind power.

I’ve lived in a New Town, Harlow. Many of my relatives live in another. I have also lived in the St Ann’s area of Nottingham, an area which is about the size of the proposed eco-towns, was redeveloped in the early 1970s, then redeveloped again in the late 1990s when the planners’ and architects’ bright ideas turned out to be not quite so bright after all. Parts of Harlow and the late-twentieth-century parts of Swindon are meeting similar fates.

Towns evolve over a long period and, with the best will in the world, no town planner can match that evolutionary process when designing a new town from scratch. Concentrating houses with the latest innovative ideas from the architects and developers in one place (or five) is a demonstrable mistake too. Some, possibly many, of the innovative ideas will prove not to be durable, as parts of Harlow and Swindon demonstrate. Today’s innovative house designs may well be the slums of the future. To propose these new eco-towns is to plan in the sort of structural problems that towns like Harlow and Swindon are having to cope with today.

* Note the window title on the page that links to: since when has an archive of press releases been a ‘blog archive’?

I’d not noticed until someone pointed it out to me that, in addition to the Central Area Action Plan, there is also a Core Strategy for future development of Swindon currently out for consultation (deadline for comments is Wednesday 23rd May). Apparently, Swindon has green fingers.

A significant feature of past development in Swindon has been the creation and retention of ‘green fingers’ between areas of development. This provides the opportunity for green infrastructure to be enhanced and increased as the town grows.

Slowly but surely, the planning framework is turning into a green skeleton. Next we need some green arms, to join the green fingers to the Central Action Plan’s green spine.

One bit of advice. If you’re thinking of using the online form to send the council your answers to the almost ninety questions that the Core Strategy contains,… don’t. It doesn’t work. The numbering of the questions doesn’t match the numbering in the consultation document and most of your answers will be lost. ’Tis far safer (and easier) to email your comments to the council.

It seems that one of our local politicians has not quite grasped the approach his own government takes to railway privatisation. He has put down an early day motion in the house of commons

That this House notes with growing concern that despite First Great Western train services making substantial profits and introducing significant fare increases, passengers on these services have had to endure poor levels of punctuality, cuts in services and severe overcrowding; is further concerned at reports that 12 extra trains introduced by the company to alleviate the collapse of rail services in Bristol and the West of England last winter will be withdrawn by the end of this year and that this again will result in train cancellations and amount to an astonishing 20 per cent. reduction in the number of trains since First Group took over the Greater Western franchise in April 2006; believes that the interests of passengers should come before the interests of shareholders; and therefore supports the call by passenger groups and rail unions for First Great Western services to be run in the public sector.

The problems with this diagnosis are that most of those ‘substantial profits’ will have to be paid to the Treasury in hefty franchise premium payments, and the cuts in services were as directed by the Department for Transport. It’s not the interests of shareholders that are being put before those of the passengers, it is the interests of the Exchequer. Perhaps said local politician just does not like First Group. If they are making such big profits, why does he feel the need to back throwing even more public money at them? The rail company’s reaction is rightly dismissive.

Since last weekend, Swindon has the dubious privilege of being one of the first towns in Britain to have some of its buildings rendered in three dimensions on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. If you haven’t got a high resolution monitor, it looks rather basic, like a town built of children’ building blocks. Quite why anyone would be interested in looking at the ‘3D’ map when the same website offers detailed ‘2D’ photographic perspective views, with all buildings in perspective, not just the main town centre ones and a select few elsewhere. The only good point is that komadori’s home is one of the few private houses to be shown in kiddy building block 3D.

(Skip through to about half way, to miss the boring Brighton bit.)

A lot has already been said about the case of a child starved to death in Swindon. I’m not going to comment on what could or should have been done… I haven’t followed the case in enough detail to do so. However, the response of the agencies involved to their own report is odd, but sadly familiar.

HEALTH workers followed procedure when dealing with the heart-rending case of 11-month-old Kimberley Baker.

This is the message from the woman in charge of protecting the welfare of Swindon’s youngsters.

Hilary Pitts said midwives and health visitors kept to protocol, despite failing to pick up on the baby’s maltreatment….

The 16-page review outlines 20 recommendations to the agencies that dealt with the family, including Social Services and Swindon and Marlborough NHS Trust….

“It is difficult to think any system is perfect, but I think the procedures and practices were in place.’

That there are twenty recommendations in the report suggests there were at least twenty instances where procedures and practices were not in place. How someone could conclude otherwise is difficult to understand.