Tag: Swindon

A document uncovered by kecl over on TalkSwindon shows that Swindon Borough Council’s £450,000 loan to the company installing wifi across the borough is far from secure.

The new company will need to generate sufficient income to repay the loan provided by the Council. Should this not be the case, security is provided through the loan agreement which requires transfer of the ownership of the company’s assets to the Council in the event of default. The physical assets will be purchased at a cost of around £250k

What the cabinet briefing to Mr Bluh and Mr Edwards doesn’t mention is what those physical assets might be worth once installed: no doubt considerably less than £250k. Still, never mind, the council would have a share in an unsuccessful network and a defaulting company.

In addition there will be value in the virtual network that will cover all of the Borough and in the Council’s shareholding in the company.

The document also indicates how woefully unprepared the company was just a couple of months before launching the service.

While providing the loan is not without risk, based on the Business Case it appears that the risk that the loan repayment period may need to be extended is more likely than the risk of complete default…. The success of the company, particularly in the early stages, and consequently the potential for Swindon Borough Council to achieve a return from its shareholding will depend to a large extent on the success of the marketing campaign. A formal marketing plan has not yet been developed, but a Brand Consultant and Marketing Specialist have been informally assisting the project.

So that’s a loan made of the basis of a business plan that lacks a plan for what financially is its most important part.

Over 50% of households in Swindon already had broadband access in 2006. That’s half the potential market for the new company’s paid-for services gone before they even start. Many of the remainder are likely to have neither the interest nor the money to pay for wifi services either. The business case must be very optimistic.

According to the document, the report and its recommendations were approved by the two cabinet members without reference to the rest of the council’s cabinet. The issue has now been referred to the Audit Commission.

It seems that Mr Bluh does not understand what the role of a local council is. Primarily councils exist to provide services, such as social services and education. At their core are services taken over by councils as the Poor Laws were reformed, then abolished and replaced by the welfare state, plus a few other tasks inherited from the courts.

One thing that has never been at the heart of council business is commercial speculation. Mr Bluh seems to be unaware of this.

This is a commercial decision, in the new world in which we all live more and more commercial decisions will be made. An opportunity was put to us, and we were asked if we wanted to invest…. Had we not done it the way we did, the deal would not have gone through.

Had Swindon Borough Council made the decision to invest £450,000 of our money in a wi-fi venture in a more open way, it may well have been found that it was perfectly right and proper for the deal not to go through. Unfortunately, very few seem to have been asked for an opinion.

We don’t do anything without considering the implications. But we would not have done this had it not been in accordance with council policy.

I don’t recall gambling on start-up companies being a council policy.

This is a commercial venture that will bring commercial return. The only affects on capital budgets will be if this loan does not get repaid in full.

Has Mr Bluh not noticed that the economy is in rather a mess? That defaults on loans are much more commonplace than they were a couple of years ago? This is a commercial venture that may bring commercial return, but could equally bring losses. To remind him of something he said very recently.

To get a reasonable level of council tax and to go forward we have been required to find savings and efficiencies. We are doing everything that is humanly possible to keep this ship afloat.

Speculating almost £½M on a commercial venture in an already very crowded and competitive market does not look like ‘doing everything that is humanly possible’ to me.

If I wanted to speculate on commercial ventures, I’d buy some shares. With those shares comes the right to vote to remove the executive. And if others didn’t agree with me I could sell the shares and take my money elsewhere. None of those options are available when it comes to a council. The council takes my money in council tax regardless of whether I agree with what it does: there is no option to sell out.

I expect the council to provide services, not to indulge in commercial speculation. Whatever Mr Bluh may think, the council is not a business, it’s a council, and it is not subject to the commercial rigours that business is. If I want to invest my money, I’ll chose where to invest it myself thank you. I don’t expect some has-been lawyer and a bunch of bureaucrats to speculate with my money without asking first.

Mr Wilkes of the Brunel Centre seems to be jumping to conclusions about the effectiveness of dropping the cost of parking around Swindon town centre.

My prediction is that if they were to end this deal shopper footfall at the Brunel would return to 17 per cent down in January…. If the council were to remove these improved tariffs it would cause a wipe-out in January.

Welcome to Mt Molehill, Mr Wilkes. Both Mr Young of Swindon Borough Council and Mr Jackson of inSwindon manage to be rather more circumspect.

I think these statistics underline our strategy, meaning that if you give someone a four-hour ticket for about the same price as an hour long stay, they will spend more time and money in the town centre.

Visually the town centre looks busier this year and certainly people are still coming into town and still purchasing in all of the stores.

And seemingly purchasing more or more expensive items, as on average store revenue is the same as last year.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the drop in parking charges has not been beneficial to business in the town centre, but to claim that putting the charges back up would cause ‘wipe out’ is clearly over-dramatic.

The bare facts.

• In September, the number of shoppers visiting the centre was down 17% from the previous September.
• So far in December the number is down by ‘just’ 10% from the previous December.
• Parking figures for 2008 are not available.
• Since September this year, when the parking charges were cut, the number of people parking in town centre car parks has increased by over 20%.

But there were also things happening between September and December last year, which Mr Wilkes seems to have forgotten. Little things, like two of the UK’s biggest banks almost collapsing. Little things, like Honda announcing that it was going to close its South Marston production lines for several months. So even without the boost from reduced parking charges, it would be reasonable to expect the drop between December 2008 and December 2009 to be less than that between September 2008 — when the economy still had another nosedive to come — and September 2009.

With the council’s finances in a mess, it needs to rely on something better than a retail manager’s dodgy statistics before deciding whether to continue spending our money to keep parking charges down.

I’m relieved that Mr Young does not share the manic optimism of Mr Bluh when talking about plans for Swindon town centre. Even so, it’s difficult to feel anything but weary when the subject of redeveloping the site occupied — still — by the old college building gets a mention.

We have been there before on the college site. It’s cautious optimism at the moment. For the first time in a long time there is cause for optimism. It’s a case of the last points for negotiation.

Um, really? That seems painfully familiar.

We want quality for our town centre. We’re not just just going to sign away that quality just to get things moving in the recession. The breakthrough came about a month or two ago and they have gone away to do more detailed work.

So that’s why the town centre has so many vacant and derelict sites is it? They’re just ‘waiting for quality’. Recent experience suggests they’re proabably waiting for yet another hotel proposal.

Let’s not forget that when Swindon town centre was redeveloped in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that was regarded as a ‘quality’ development. We can only hope that the current generation of councillors are better at seeing through the developers’ fantasies than their predecessors were.

With all the fuss and angst over Swindon Borough Council’s budget plans for next financial year, another item on this Wednesday’s council cabinet meeting agenda has been overlooked.

The council executive’s proposals for replacing the New Swindon Company is damning with its mild praise. First, the mild praise.

Since the company’s formation TNSC has helped to stimulate regeneration and investment in Swindon’s central area. TNSC has put together exciting development packages that have stimulated considerable interest in Swindon’s regeneration plans. The company’s most notable success has been in attracting Muse as the developer for the Union Square scheme.

Claiming success before anything has conrete has happened is premature, to say the least. Even if this could be claimed as a success, ‘only’ is a more accurate term than ‘most notable’. One odd thing is that the proposals say funding — if only for the coming year — is unchanged.

Recognising the current economic challenges and the importance of an effective response, SBC aims to continue with its existing level of funding of £250k per annum plus the financing of the transferred economic development team and related project budgets.

Yet the budget proposals show a reduction of £147k. With contradictions like that, it’s no wonder that the council’s finances are in a bad way.

The reasons given for replacing the company read as a thinly-veiled catalogue of failure.

An opportunity to engage with private investors in a way not seen before

So the New Swindon Company failed in attracting private investors….

Deployment of limited resources for maximum impact and for best value

And wasted our money….

The requirement for town centre regeneration to link in a more integrated way with plans for the rest of the Borough to ensure Swindon’s existing communities benefit from regeneration and growth

And ignored the communities it was meant to benefit. And the replacement, borough-wide company, how will that engage with the community? Apparently, not all. The council’s vision for the new company is for it to be the poodle of the council, seemingly with no direct involvement with the community at all.

The recommendation in Swindon Borough Council’s budget proposals for next financial year to turn some street lights off at night has grabbed a few headlines. As I’ve mentioned before, turning off street lights is nothing new; it’s how things used to be. What is new is the amount it costs to turn the lights off. From the council’s figures, simply switching off — permanently — 481 street lights in rural areas is relatively cheap: a one-off cost of £5000 to save £11,000 per year. But putting a timer on street lights in residential areas to turn them off in the middle of the night will cost almost £½M — £450k to be more precise — and will take six years for the savings to recover that cost.

With the council spending almost £½M on turning out the lights and almost another £½M on borough-wide wireless internet, one has to wonder just how much bigger than £12M the hole in the council’s budget would have to be before its cabinet members practice the fiscal rigour that some of them are so fond of preaching to others.

Now I appreciate that both the planning and bridge building processes can be slow and lengthy, especially judging by how long it has taken for Blackhorse Bridge to be reconstructed. Housing development at the moment is even slower. House building on Swindon’s front garden has slowed so much recently — with little likelihood of it picking-up in the immediate future — that the developers are accepting a financial prop from the state. In those circumstances, the recent outline planning application by Arup to build a bridge over the railway line at Southleaze seems a little premature.

Outline application for the construction of a footbridge over the railway line to facilitate pedestrian access between Wichelstowe and housing/ employment areas to the west of Swindon.

The nearest employment areas in West Swindon are two miles from the westernmost extremity of East Wichel. I’m fully in favour of encouraging a healthy commute, but I suspect it will be many years before this bridge earns its keep. In the intervening period, all it’s likely to do is open up Southleaze to further vandalism.

Swindon Borough Council’s Connecting People Connecting Places programme — CP2 for short — appears to have a blog. I say ‘appears’ because the week old Connecting Swindon blog has received no publicity and is devoid of links from official sources. The only link I can find is that the Swindon Borough Council twitter account follows the Connecting Swindon blog’s twitter feed. With that level of publicity the blog is, for the moment, largely speaking to nobody.

Lack of publicity is not the only weak point of the Connecting Swindon blog. The latest posting is on events in the Town Centre cluster.

We will be continuing this form of local engagement over the next couple of weeks in the Eastcott area with an event at Groundwell Rd on Tuesday 10th November and in the central ward area later in the evening in the Manchester Road area followed by an event on Farringdon Road on Friday 13th November in the afternoon.

The next couple of weeks? They must be fans of time travel, as that was posted on 26th November. And this is the only publicity these events have received: they are not even mentioned on the cluster’s official page.

With poor publicity like this, one could be forgiven for thinking that the council does not really want to know the opinions of the community. If you read the job description for a cluster lead you may well be convinced that is so. The ‘people’ barely get a mention.

Work hand in hand with ward members to establish the framework for neighbourhood area forums including governance, membership and forward agendas.

So that’s zero community involvement in setting the local agenda.

The overall strategic vision and priorities are set by the local authorities and partners through the Community Strategy and the Local Area Agreement and other plans such as the Children and Young People’s Plan. The Neighbourhood Area Agreement will have a range of themes cascaded from those two documents, that the area forum will monitor and explore to achieve local community priorities.

Welcome to top-down planning. Far from being a meaningful conversation, CP2 appears to be a monologue.

It seems that the government’s representative in South Swindon, Ms Snelgrove, is so eager to rubbish the priorities of Swindon Borough Council that she hasn’t even bothered to read what their priorities are. According to Ms Snelgrove the council isn’t concerned about crime and anti-social behaviour.

I am appalled that the Council do not think anti-social behaviour and local crime are priorities in Swindon.

She even provides a link to the council’s priorities.

The Council sets its priorities under the Local Area Agreement (www.swindon.gov.uk/yourcouncil-laa) but crime and anti-social behaviour are not even mentioned.

Follow that link. You’ll find, as the sixth of six priorities in the current Local Area Agreement the following.

A place where the resident population can have real influence to develop a sense of community and belonging, and where reducing crimes makes them feel safe.

If Ms Snelgrove thinks that’s not even mentioning crime, she really should go back to school and take some English language lessons.

Update 23:09. I see that Ms Snelgrove has now issued an updated version claiming criteria that were used to dish out this money, though this wasn’t mentioned in the government press release.

Areas that received funding are those that either chose to include ASB as one of their Local Area Agreement priorities or were one of the areas chosen by the Home Office as having high levels of ASB.

So she’s complaining that the council didn’t make a priority out of something her own government doesn’t think is a big issue in Swindon anyway. Logic, reasoning and representing the best interests of her constituents never were Ms Snelgrove’s strong points. Clearly, they still aren’t.

It has been announced that the New Swindon Company is to be replaced by a new company tasked with doing… well, almost exactly the same as the New Swindon Company was. This smacks of an attempt to hide failure that’s no more likely to succeed than renaming of Windscale nuclear plant as Sellafield did. According to Swindon Borough Council’s Mr Jones,

The new company will be responsible for the integrated plans for economic development, growth and regeneration.

Hmm… that’s so different from the purpose of the New Swindon Company.

The New Swindon Company was formed in 2002 to stimulate investment and co-ordinate plans for revitalisation of the town centre as a key component to achieving sustainable economic growth.

What’s not so clear from the announcement is how this new bureaucracy will be funded. The New Swindon Company was funded by tax payers through three routes: Swindon Borough Council, the South West Regional Development Agency and the Homes and Communities Agency. Funding from the last two does not seem to be guaranteed. Mr Jones hopes the new bureaucracy will obtain more funding from the private sector. Whether local people wish their town’s regeneration to be lead by an organisation dominated by developers is a question he seems not to have pondered.

As usual, at the conference where this piece of deckchair shuffling was announced, Mr Bluh was in full head-in-the-sand mode.

I find it the most exciting place I’ve ever lived in. We must not pick up the negative side but keep positive. I feel certain we will come out of the recession on the right side. We certainly have got the product here and it is our job to sell it.

Blind, unquestioning optimism has never been a virtue. A decade of demolition and degeneration has not changed that.