Court ruling takes some of the pressure off social care

Published on Tuesday, 14th August 2018

The Court of Appeal has overturned a ruling that had inflated the cost of providing care services. The original decision, issued last year, required staff to be paid the national living wage for sleeping nights. These are night shifts where the worker sleeps through the night, but is available to help if an incident occurs, which of course generally it does not. 

Historically, these had typically been paid at a flat rate of say £30, but a court decided this breached minimum wage regulations. The total effect on Portsmouth City Council’s budget was about £500,000 per year.

Care workers are generally poorly paid and it is hard to begrudge them the extra money. The problem is that the council just doesn’t have the extra cash and needs to reduce spending and not increase it. The Court of Appeal’s decision, which is that the National Living Wage does not have to be paid, has the potential to help reduce the pressure on the social care budget. 

At this stage, I don’t know whether the council is going to reduce payments to the previous level. For financial reasons, I suspect it will have to at some point and that will hit lowly paid workers. It’s hard to see what the alternative is.

Tags: Social Care

Residents’ parking debacle: how we’re going to get the short end of the stick

Published on Friday, 27th July 2018

This sorry tale can only be understood if you recognise it for what it is: an attempt by the LibDems to hold on to a vulnerable council seat. So apologies in advance for bringing party politics into this, but in this case it really is central.

Five years’ ago, when the LibDems were last in charge of the council, Craneswater residents faced getting all the student cars and third cars from across Southsea dumped in their streets. That would have been the inevitable outcome of a plan to create residents’ parking in much of the rest of Southsea, but not in this ward. An election defeat put a stop to that then, but now the LibDems are back and they are pursuing very much the same plan.

The MB zone, covering streets just to the south of Fratton station was a disaster. Many of the houses there are occupied by students, who either don’t own a car or register that car to their parents’ address in order to benefit from cheaper insurance. The result was that only 800 permits were issued for 1300 spaces. It was like a scene out of 1975, only this time the roads weren’t empty because most people could not afford cars, they were empty because so many of the cars were parked elsewhere. The roads outside the zone, however, were rammed with cars.

The new council administration is proposing to bring this scheme back and they are proposing to do it soon. They intend to bypass the usual survey process and to go straight to a traffic regulation order. This will allow them to do something by the end of this year. They also want to rush in another scheme covering the remainder of Central Southsea ward. This is not a coincidence – Labour beat the LibDem incumbent this May by a clear margin and start as favourites to win another seat next year. This whole parking plan is an attempt to save that seat – and nothing else.

The LibDems are then proposing to survey other areas, but at a much slower rate – these areas face at least a year of mayhem before even being surveyed. At present, their plan talks about covering the area west of Festing Road at some point before 2021. The area to the east of that isn’t even under discussion, but with restrictions potentially to the north and west, it is obvious where all the spare cars are going to end up. Ironically even the councillor in charge of transport, Lynne Stagg, knows this. Justifying the lack of a strategic approach, she said on Facebook:

“There are 2 problems with that [looking at the whole city at once]. 

1. Many people don't want an RPZ although they will do eventually when they experience displacement parking as RPZ s go in around them

2. We don't have the capacity in financial terms as well as enough officers to 'do' the whole city at once.”

Yet even knowing this, she still proposes to go ahead. This would already have gone through on 12th July had the Conservatives not called them out for breaking the rules. As it is, they now plan on using a meeting on July 31st.

There are good arguments in favour of residents’ parking, but it needs to be as part of a plan. Just blindly imposing zones – and emptying out streets along the way – is plain stupid. I am going to oppose it.

Two final points: a council scrutiny committee has spent a couple of years’ putting together a report on residents’ parking. The administration hasn’t even seen it, but who cares? It’s decision first, thinking later. Secondly, the area of Eastney to be surveyed has already been halved, following criticism at the East Southsea Neighbourhood Forum. In fact the whole document they put forward on the 12th has already been rewritten, which is yet further evidence of a lack of any parking strategy. This is all about pushing student cars out of Central Southsea ward to try and protect an incumbent LibDem from defeat by Labour. What happens down your road is not even a consideration.

I will be putting together a website on this topic and will write again with an update at that point.

Tags: Parking

Planning update: new use for old cinema and shared living proposed in Old Portsmouth

Published on Friday, 1st June 2018

There’s been an interesting planning decision and an interesting new application. The former is the conversion of the old Crown Bingo Hall in Kingston Road to eleven flats. This building has been empty for a little while (although not the four years reported in the News).

Old buildings of that sort are difficult to convert, but in this case a way has been found. Before being a bingo hall, it was a cinema and is laid out around a very large auditorium. The solution is to demolish part of the middle to create a courtyard, with flats facing into it. Space has been found for eight cars, which isn’t bad considering the restrictions on the site.

The new planning application is for the site of the Invincible pub near the Historic Dockyard entrance in Queen Street. The proposal is for an eleven storey building for shared living. This is a housing format that has emerged from London and is driven by the difficulty many people have paying high rents. Basically you get a large bedsit (these ones are 18m2 and include a kitchen and bathroom area) and there are shared meeting and leisure areas. If this sounds a lot like student accommodation, that’s because really it is, although it is aimed at a wider age range.

Personally I think some units of this kind are inevitably going to have to be part of the response to the housing shortage that is making life difficult for many younger people. The key is getting the quality right and picking the right area. Whether this site does that, I am not sure.

Tags: Planning

Residents’ groups should be consulted on flood defences

Published on Friday, 1st June 2018

Before the election, I had a few discussions with colleagues about the possibility of having a working group on the flood defences that included not just other parties but also representative residents’ groups. These could include Neighbourhood Forums and potentially organisations like the Friends of Old Portsmouth.

The election results now mean the decision over whether to form such a body no longer rests with me or my party, but I still think that would be the right thing to do. After all with decision making remaining with the Cabinet, any working group can only be advisory and consultative.

My colleague, Donna Jones, has written to the new council leader to ask him to create a more broadly based group. Let’s see what happens.

Tags: Flood defences, Seafront

Portsmouth on leaked list of Mothercare stores set to close

Published on Friday, 1st June 2018

The latest casualty on the High Street is to be Mothercare, with around 50 of its 137 stores facing the axe as part of a Company Voluntary Agreement (CVA) with creditors to keep the children’s retailer afloat. For struggling shop chains, the great advantage of CVAs over other forms of restructuring is that they are a way to legally get out of expensive leases.

While the list of sites to go has not been announced, the Plymouth Herald is reporting a leaked document (click here) that appears to show Portsmouth as one of the sites to go. If it is correct then the out-of-town store in Havant will survive, as will the branch located on a retail park near West Quay, Southampton.

Whether this list of stores turns out to be completely accurate or not, the trend is clear. Of the ten nearest branches to here, all four High Street branches are on the closure list, as do two out-of-town locations; the surviving four are all on retail parks. It’s a similar story in London where of the ten branches closest to the central area, four are on the list and comprise all the High Street branches (although the major shopping centres of Brent Cross, Westfield Stratford and Westfield White City all survive).

Across the country, all sorts of retailers are moving out-of-town. This is a worrying trend and it is obviously a threat to Commercial Road, but it is not hard to understand why it is happening. Larger shops are cheaper to run, rents are lower and free parking is often available just outside the front door.

It is more important than ever that money is secured for the City Centre Road Scheme so that Portsmouth gets a new retail scheme off the back of allowing a large amount of housing on the former Northern Quarter site. It took three years to save up enough money to pay for the council’s share of the bill – something that should have been done a decade ago, when there was a lot more money around. It really needs to go ahead now and soon.

Tags: City Centre, Retail

Phone boxes to go to appeal

Published on Sunday, 13th May 2018

Despite almost everyone having a mobile phone, there are more phone boxes in town centres than ever. The reason is advertising: phone boxes can be installed as essential infrastructure, effectively bypassing most planning rules and once in, they can then be used as advertising boards.

Applications for another five in Commercial Road were rejected on pedestrian safety grounds. All are going to appeal and hopefully all those appeals will fail.

Tags: Planning

Rail replacement works

Published on Sunday, 13th May 2018

Next weekend, Network Rail will be replacing track in the Portsmouth area. They hope to do all the works at night, in which case train service should not be affected.

Tags: Transport

Redundant office block set to become student accommodation

Published on Sunday, 13th May 2018

A revised proposal for the conversion of Wingfield House to student accommodation has been put forward. The former tax office in the northern end of Commercial Road already has permission for 295 student rooms, some of which would be within three new storeys to be added to the top of the building. The new application ups those numbers to 440, partly through an additional floor but mostly through reconfiguring the existing space to create more, smaller rooms.

The development of new student accommodation around Portsmouth and Southsea station has been controversial, but in my view it has been the right thing to do: it has freed up existing housing for other tenants; it has helped the University compete for students and it has been a catalyst for other development that would not be happening were it not for the transformation of the area taking place. The latest of these – a new hotel – is likely to be considered by the Planning Committee in June.

Student accommodation elsewhere in the city centre is less desirable, but national planning rules make a lot of it impossible to resist. As Wingfield House was previously an office block, it can be converted to housing without planning consent – and that extends to the conversion to cluster flats, where every room is rented by a student or to self contained bed sits, of any size, again where each room is rented by a student. In effect the only parts of the Wingfield House scheme that needs permission are the extra storeys and the cladding. It was a similar situation with Venture Tower, Fratton. The Planning Committee also had little choice but to allow student housing on Unity Hall, the old Labour Party HQ, in Lake Road, even though general purpose housing would have been a better use of the site.

Tags: Planning

Election results

Published on Sunday, 13th May 2018

I am delighted to have been re-elected to represent Eastney and Craneswater ward. The results were:

As far as the council as a whole goes, while the Conservative vote held up well, the Labour party made progress and UKIP lost all its remaining seats, resulting in a hung council where the combined LibDem and Labour vote now constitutes a narrow majority (at least once a leftwing independent is counted as part of the block). At this stage it is not clear whether any such coalition will be formed or whether the current Conservative minority administration will continue for another year. 

Tags: Election