Portsmouth one of a handful of areas to get electric car cash

Published on Tuesday, 16th January 2018

Just five council areas in England bid into a government pot to pay for charging points for electric vehicles – and Portsmouth was one of them. The £100,000 grant will be matched by £30,000 of the council’s own money.

With most parking on-street, Portsmouth is a difficult area to provide charging infrastructure - but it is not impossible. Last year, the council agreed to provide three chargers for public use, all of which are located in car parks. Consideration is being given to whether electric vehicle charging points will be able to be incorporated into street lights.

Electric car numbers will surge over the coming decade. In Norway, where they are heavily subsidised, one new car in three is battery powered. In the UK the figure is much lower, although once hybrids are included it rises to about 1.5%. It is surprising that so few councils are interested in putting in the infrastructure, but happily, Portsmouth is an exception.

Tags: Environment

Church initiative on homelessness

Published on Monday, 15th January 2018

I attended an interesting meeting last week at North End Baptist Church.

Hope into Action is a church-led homeless programme in which parishioners finance housing and church social groups provide support. It started in East Anglia and now has over 200 houses nationwide. There is going to be an attempt to bring it to Portsmouth.

Their business model is to buy houses using money that would otherwise be tied up in low-interest rate accounts. Members of the congregation agree to pay for a slice of a property, so, for example, five people could put in £50,000 each. At the end of a five year period, they can sell their share in proportion to whatever the house is now worth and during the five years they are guaranteed a two percent annual return on their investment – so, in this case, £1000 a year.

This was an initial meeting and I have no idea what will come from it, but it is an example of thinking outside the box. From the perspective of the City Council, any projects like this are welcome and we’d be very happy to have a full discussion about move-on housing: these homeless placements only last for two years.

As an aside, one of the big barriers to housing single people is the social housing stock, most of which is over 40 years old and was built with families in mind. The City Council owns very few small units and while housing associations have more, many are careful who they allow as tenants in order to minimise the risk of rent arrears.

Tags: Homelessness

New French electricity link may come ashore at Eastney

Published on Monday, 18th December 2017

A new connection between the National Grid and the French electricity network is being proposed. Branded as Aquind, the £1.1bn project seeks to link up the two networks at a new substation at Lovedean. If it all proceeds, the cable will come ashore at Eastney and run underground from there. The local impact should be minimal, at least once the construction phase is completed. If the wiring is buried under the road network then this could mean significant road works for a while, although the representative of the company that I spoke to was unsure whether that would be the case. He was also unable to say exactly where the cable would start from, although as the project plan is for works to start in 2020 that is perhaps not surprising. Generally below ground infrastructure does not require planning consent.

A consultation event will take place at Milton Village Hall on January 26th between 2 and 8pm. The project webpage is here.

Tags: Planning

Ice rink proving a hit

Published on Monday, 11th December 2017

The temporary ice rink in Guildhall Square is open twelve hours a day until January 2nd (excluding Christmas Day). Usage has exceeded expectations, with numbers at capacity at times, particularly at night.

The rink is being run by a private company at no cost to council tax payers – in fact the City Council is making a small profit. It will run every year until 2024.

The administration is working hard to make better use of Guildhall Square; an Oktoberfest beer festival now takes place in the autumn.

Tags: Leisure

A Christmas dinner for a hundred older people

Published on Saturday, 2nd December 2017

I sit on the Portsmouth Lottery small grants panel, which makes awards of up to £2500 to good causes in the city. The money comes from a share of the ticket receipts generated by the local lottery. Ticket sales are running at about 2200 a week, which means it raises about £70,000 a year, of which about a third is allocated by the panel.

Last week we approved four awards (and potentially a fifth), several linked to Christmas. One I would like to draw attention to is for a festive meal for up to a hundred older men, who play in the walking football league. 

It’s often lost amongst all the talk of expensive transfers, but actually, many football clubs do excellent community work and that includes our own Portsmouth FC. This year the club and its charitable arm, Pompey in the Community, are putting on the Christmas meal in Fratton Park and are waiving the room hire and are supplying the food at cost. This has driven the bill down to the point where the local lottery can cover it and as a result a hundred older men will get a meal and a present. 

This is an example of what can be achieved when groups work together; plaudits to the football club for their community spirit.

Tags: Charities

The 12 Days of Giving

Published on Saturday, 2nd December 2017

An excellent collaboration between Free Art Friday, Food Cycle Portsmouth and Portsmouth Food Bank will give people who donate food items a chance to win a piece of art. Running between now and the 12^th of December, the project is based out of the John Pounds Centre. See here for more details.

Tags: Charities

Views of experts on the costs of social housing

Published on Saturday, 2nd December 2017

Earlier in the week, I attended an expert roundtable organised by Vivid Homes that was ostensibly about social housing and wellbeing but which actually drifted on to questions about the future of the social housing sector.

A number of points were made about possible changes in government policy. With the recent budget containing multiple announcements about house building and including allowing councils in some areas to borrow money for social housing, a change in emphasis on housing policy away from purely owner occupation is under way. However I could not agree with the panel’s view that discounted housing should be available to anyone who wants it: the state will never be able to subsidise most people and it should not try.

Perhaps the most significant point came near the end when someone (via Twitter) asked whether social (or affordable) housing will ever be able to be provided without subsidy. The clearest answer was provided by Gavin Smart, the deputy CEO of the Chartered Institute of Housing, who simply said ‘no’. Other panel members said that you could use the profits from market housing to pay for affordable housing. Radian Homes are an example of a housing association that does this, with most of its homes being available for sale or rent at the market price. 

From a council perspective, this just confirms what we already knew, which is that it is not possible to build huge numbers of council houses without first coming up with huge amount of money – and realistically the only source for that would be via the council tax. The good news is that using its Right to Buy receipts, Portsmouth City Council is building over 200 homes, which is its largest programme in three decades. Extending that further though would require a government subsidy.

Tags: Housing

Bus usage in Portsmouth  

 Published on Tuesday, 28th November 2017

The government collects a raft of statistics on all sorts of things, some of which make interesting reading. An example of this is the latest figures on bus ridership by local authority area.

About half of all bus journeys in England are in London. With chronic congestion and little parking in the central area, the capital is quite different from the rest of the country and far more people of working age routinely use the bus to get to work. The regulatory environment is also different, with a longstanding system of bus franchising, which allows the Greater London Authority (and formerly central government) to set bus routes and fares. Elsewhere in the country services are determined by bus companies, with local government’s role being only to pay for senior bus passes and to subsidise routes that would not otherwise run. This will soon change in areas with regional mayors. The government has granted them powers to regulate bus services. The hope is this will lead to a more coherent network and over time more passengers. These powers are not available in other parts of the country, here included.

Generally speaking bus usage outside of London has been declining for decades. The introduction of free travel for pensioners did slow the decline for a while, but within the last year passenger numbers are down another 2.4%, which is not out of line with the long run trend.

Numbers in the southeast have been more positive and in Portsmouth the numbers in 2015/6 (the latest year for which statistics are available), passenger numbers are about 5% higher than in 2009/10. About 40% of journeys are concessionary journeys, the large majority of which are on pensioner bus passes.

Bus usage is lower in rural and small-town areas and higher in cities, particularly big cities. Compared to comparable areas, bus usage per head in Portsmouth iis somewhat lower than average. The figures in Brighton and Reading are more than double ours and Southampton is 50% higher, but other areas such as the Medway Towns and Slough have usage levels a third lower. On the other hand, in most other cities the figures are falling, sometimes sharply. An extreme case is Warrington, where ridership in 2015/6 is about 40% lower than it was six years before.

You can see all this stats online here.

It is also worth noting that local government has no real power over bus companies, although it can influence bus usage through the bus lanes, bus stations and bus stops it is responsible for. Route subsidies are disappearing across the country, with Hampshire, Northamptonshire and Kent County Councils all looking at withdrawing all their support from April. In common with most urban areas, where services are more frequent, Portsmouth has only a very limited subsidised service.

Tags: Transport

Eastleigh – a cautionary tale

Published on Monday, 20th November 2017

For whatever reason, the borough of Eastleigh has failed to produce a local development plan in more than a decade of trying. Now it, and 14 other districts across England, face having plans drawn up and imposed on them by government. This will mean no local input into what is one of the most important of local government functions – planning.

Happily Portsmouth is not in that position. Its local plan was adopted in 2012 and work to refresh it has already begun. If all goes well, an updated document will be in place by 2019. What Eastleigh does show is the futility of rejecting housing need figures. Most of the places on the intervention list are ones where the local authority has refused to try and meet the target, resulting in an appeal-led planning system and over time in a centrally imposed plan.

Portsmouth is a crowded city with little land available. If it submits a plan on time and if that plan is realistic, it is highly likely that the city will not have to meet its need in full. To get to that point though, the council has to try. That is the purpose of the plan to building housing in the city centre where a large number of flats could be built; the student accommodation already in the pipeline will count as equivalent to 1000 flats. The alternative is a government imposed plan, which could well see significant amounts of employment land turned over to housing. So while tempting, just saying that Portsmouth is full up is not a good strategy and would likely result in more housing, not less.

Tags : Education