French exchange opportunity

Published on Monday, 20th March 2017

An interesting opportunity for any French-speaking young people out there: the city of Caen is looking for someone aged between 18 and 25 to work on an internship for the month of August. Accommodation will be provided, as will payment of €1100. Click here for details.

A letter and CV (in French) is required to apply. Former councillor Terry Hall is coordinating applications. I won't put her email address online, as webbots trawl sites for that sort of thing. However if you are interested, email me at my councillor email address (available via the council website) and I will forward your message.

Tags: Twin town

Pro tennis tournament coming to Southsea

Published on Friday, 10th March 2017

A major ladies' tennis tournament will be hosted by the Canoe Lake tennis club this summer. The Aegon Trophy Series consists of five short tournaments spread across the country and all played in the month of June. Together they form a warm up for Wimbledon and are a way for up and coming players to compete on a grass surface, improve their rankings and earn some serious prize money.

Some of the world's top 100 players will be here, not least because $100,000 in prize money is available.

This tournament is another feather in the cap for Canoe Lake Leisure, the community organisation that runs the tennis courts. Admission will be free. It will run between the 27th and 30th of June, weather permitting.

Tags: Leisure, Seafront

New hotel planned for Old Portsmouth

Published on Friday, 10th March 2017

A 120-bedroom hotel may be built opposite the dockyard entrance. A planning application submitted to the council seeks permission for a seven storey building on the site of a collection of obsolete commercial buildings. The ground floor would feature a restaurant, the operator would be Premier Inn and there would be no parking created.

While parking is a problem in that area, the benefits of a stronger tourist sector and 79 new jobs mean this development will be good news if it all goes ahead. There is substantial unmet demand for hotel rooms in the Old Portsmouth area, with the Holiday Inn Express in nearby Gunwharf having an extraordinarily high occupancy rate.

Tags: Planning

Good news for local government in the budget

Published on Friday, 10th March 2017

Whatever the wisdom and justification of increasing national insurance on the self-employed, from the standpoint of local government, the budget contained unexpected good news. As ever it will be some weeks before all the small print comes out and we won't know the whole picture until then. However, the headlines were:

-       £2bn for social care over the next three years, with half that total in 2017/8

-       A £690m fund to reduce congestion

-       £300m for business rate relief

Portsmouth's social care system is bearing up better than most, with reasonable waiting times and a manageable hospital discharge system, but many other parts of the country are not faring so well. The council will have to carefully consider how to use this windfall wisely.

Tags: Budget

The Housing White Paper and its local implications

Published on Friday, 10th March 2017

While to those of us who are adequately housed, it may not appear there is a housing crisis, when viewed from government, there clearly is. Household formation in England is running at perhaps 210,000 per year, while completions have varied between 110,000 and 170,000 over the last fifteen years, but have always lagged some way behind. The unmet demand drives house price inflation and is behind the sub-division of existing homes into Houses in Multiple Occupation.

This then is the background for the Housing White Paper and the thinking behind it. Billed as a really important document that will solve the housing shortage, it is actually quite modest. In particular, there is nothing in there about allowing house building on greenbelt land around the edges of London - and without that there can be no solution to £1500 plus a month rents for modest flats in unfashionable parts of the capital.

Instead, the emphasis is on forcing local authorities to deliver the numbers in their local plans, on some longer-term measures on skills and on encouraging smaller developers and on a few legal changes to make things clearer for renters.

Many of the measures are uncontroversial and sensible, although often limited in impact: so providing extra help to smaller construction companies when bidding for government funds will help, as will encouraging factory built housing, greater training opportunities in construction trades, rules to ban hidden charges in leasehold agreements and some positive moves about infrastructure funding. There are however two aspects in particular that are not so good and that may affect Portsmouth.

At the moment, local authorities have to have local plans and have to grant planning consent for a certain level of development, but if insufficient applications come forward or sites are not developed then that is not their problem; in the future, it will be. The government is proposing a housing delivery test, which will see areas that are not meeting 65% of their target by 2020 lose some powers to protect sites from development; in the context of Portsmouth, that could mean the possible loss of significant amounts of industrial land. Portsmouth has a profound shortage of space and is behind on its target, with completions running at around 400 a year against a target of 550 and demand of something like 900. That will improve in the medium term as all the new student rooms count towards the target on a 5:1 basis, but in the longer term, though, the shortage of plausible sites is not going to go away.

Another concern is the proposed extension of the Right-to-Buy to some properties built by councils through arm's length companies. With no legislation on the table, it’s impossible to say exactly what this will mean, but it may affect some properties being built now by the City Council for discounted rent in Leigh Park. While the Right to Buy has transformed estates, it also undermines the economics of building new homes.

Overall then it’s a mixed bag.

Tags: Planning, Housing

Shocking tactics as LibDems falsely accuse council for the moving of the Yomper

Published on Monday, 27th February 2017

In these postings I try to stay above the tit-for-tat nonsense that comprises all too much of local politics. However, sometimes something is said that leaves me no choice: such is the case with the latest LibDem email attempting to blame the moving of the Yomper on Conservative councillors.

As those that have followed the debate will know, the Royal Marines’ Museum is relocating to the Dockyard and is considering taking the Yomper with it. Last year, my ward colleague, Jennie Brent put forward a motion to ask the decision makers - the board of the Museum of the Royal Navy – to leave it where it is. It received unanimous support.

So where does the claim from the LibDem leader that ‘As local Lib Dem councillors, we put forward a proposal to maintain the Yomper where it is but this was unfortunately voted down by Conservative and UKIP councillors’ come from?. 

Well in the budget debate they put forward a highly political amendment that was voted down. In it was a proposal to spend £1000 a year maintaining the Yomper. This then is the basis of their claim. However:

- the decision to move the Yomper does not rest with the council

- the council has objected to it being moved

- trivial sums can easily be found in the budget throughout the year

- this ‘plan’ was never raised in advance

- there is no agreement with the Museum of the Royal Navy

It’s exactly sort of fake news that gives politics a bad name. Whether you agree with me on other issues or not, I hope you will join me in condemning political campaigning based on this sort of falsehood.

Tags: Seafront, LibDems

City centre redevelopment plans

Published on Sunday, 19th February 2017

The News ran a front page article on the possible redevelopment of the city centre a couple of days ago and I want to expand on some of what it said and to provide some context on what is and what is not possible.

The Northern Quarter project has been getting nowhere fast for twenty years. While a huge new shopping centre would be a great addition to the city centre, changing retail patterns mean it is no longer realistic to expect anyone to sink hundreds of millions of pounds into building it. 

So instead we're now looking at a mixed use scheme comprising a lesser amount of retail, more leisure and hospitality uses, such as possibly a cinema and a cluster of restaurants and a significant amount of high-density housing: a figure of 2600 flats was suggested in the report, although may not be accurate.

The most significant barrier to making this a reality is transport and particularly the rerouting of southbound city centre traffic along the Dockyard wall, or perhaps through the Morrison's site. The new road would be expensive and is dependent on the government contributing two-thirds of the cost. There will be lots of funding streams to bid into - over multiple years if necessary - but if that money is not forthcoming then we have a problem.

Any scheme for that land has to make a profit for the developer (who already controls most of the land) or it will not happen, so talk of a huge leisure complex with no housing is unrealistic. It also has to fit with the government's aspirations if the bid for funding for the road is to succeed and they are clear that housing is what they want.

Continued population growth, national policy and the government's White Paper on housing are all conspiring to put pressure on the council over housing numbers anyway. Whether anyone likes it or not - and I don't - more housing is going to have to be provided in Portsmouth. It is better to meet this demand in the city centre than the alternative of the planning inspectorate declaring open season on the city's industrial land and green spaces - and that is what could happen. Moreover, the retail, leisure and office uses would boost the city and increase employment.

Infrastructure is rightly a concern. At this stage, it's just too early to say what would be provided. However, there would certainly have to be additional school places and parking would have to be provided. Local taxes on development should cover the cost of whatever is needed. As ever, the council cannot borrow money to build infrastructure as it would have no means of repaying the loan and that would not be legal. It would also not be the developer and would not own any of whatever is built.

Tags: Planning, City Centre

Council budget

Published on Sunday, 19th February 2017

On Tuesday, the council meet to consider the budget for the coming year and after a lengthy debate adopted the administration's revenue and capital budgets without amendment.

It is always a relief to see the budget go through - with no party having a majority on Portsmouth City Council, every year I worry that a combination of illness and the decisions of the smaller groups could conspire to let a bad amendment pass.

There was a lot of virtue signalling in the LibDem proposal, but not a lot that was realistic. So setting aside £50,000 for a feasibility study on a hospital discharge centre would not have resulted in anything being built, as to do so would be an NHS responsibility and at 0.009% of QA hospital's annual budget, if they wanted to do that, they could easily fund it themselves. Last year, it was all about how £10,000 would stop the flood defences from aging, when in reality you would need one hundred times that amount.

The good news though is how through prudent financial management, the savings targets for future years are coming down. Next year the council will have to find an additional £4m in savings, which compares very favourably to the £17m it needed in 2013 and the similar figure it needed in 2015. This year's target was £9m.

Tags: Budget

Anstey hotel planning appeal passes

Published on Sunday, 19th February 2017

The most disappointing news this week comes from the planning inspectorate, which has granted permission for a 25-room House in Multiple Occupation at the Anstey Hotel, Clarendon Road.

Particularly troubling was the award of costs against the council. While the money involved won't be much - they're usually a few thousand - these awards are becoming more frequent.

Tags: Planning