Even the sages who predicted it would never happen must have been taken by surprise by the speed with which ESG’s Link Road dream seems to have disappeared into thin air. Thanks in no small measure to the axe-wielding George Osborne, one suspects.

As half-baked, ill-conceived masterplans go, this one was a 24ct clinker from the word go. Less than 1km long, yet warranting five sets of traffic lights along its dual-single carriageway route and non-conforming cycleways, it would have taken three years to build, displaced dozens of established businesses and made hundreds jobless.

No other planning proposal in the history of Herefordshire Council has ever attracted so many letters of objection (plus It’s Our City’s 10,000-name petition). Yet Hereford Civic Society’s 33-page technical report, which had taken over 200 hours to research and compile, was reduced to an 86-word summary in the Planning Committee’s papers for their meeting last March. ESG’s costs in mounting this planning application are unknown, but are likely to have been in the region of £250,000.

So who will be the winners and losers in the likely demise of this unwanted strip of tarmac?

Seamless interchange

The principal beneficiaries should have been users of public transport, since it was originally mooted (by the local pressure group Rail for Herefordshire (RfH)) among others that the opportunity to build a true transport interchange should be taken.

Rail travellers coming into the city’s Grade II-listed station, it argued, should be able to transfer seamlessly to a network of integrated bus routes, both urban and rural; or pick up taxis; or be collected by car; or even rent a car, perhaps for a touring holiday in the Wye Valley; or ride off on their own bikes – or even on a rented one. All these activities, plus through-ticketing offices and electronic information arrays, would be enclosed within a new structure, designed in sympathy with the Victorian station building. But RfH’s suggestion fell on deaf ears.

RfH chairman Cllr Gerald Dawe describes the ESG scheme, unveiled at a special ‘consultation workshop’ in February 2009 (styled by the developer as a Transport Hub, as showing “a planning ability straight out of the 1960s.” HCS chairman Garry Thomas was so incensed that he walked out of the meeting, branding it “a sham”.

Europe has some fine transport interchange buildings – Holland and Germany boasting several architectural masterpieces; the Campaign for Better Transport cites Bangor, Corby, (London) Stratford East and Walsall as exemplars closer to home. The plan for Hereford was simply an asphalted forecourt with a weather-protected bus stand and some plants in IKEA pots.

Limboland

Of the possible loss of the Link Road, It’s Our City founder Mark Hubbard is less sanguine. “The Advantage West Midlands funding is already in place for Phase I (the westernmost section, due to run from Edgar Street to Widemarsh Street) and I don’t think even George Osborne could take it back.”

“Having once made a start on the project, ESG’s planning permission (for the whole road) is then, in effect, in perpetuity, meaning Phases II and III could be years away. So this would leave all the presently-blighted businesses along Station Approach in limboland for years. Remember, it was only at the beginning of this summer that the Prime Minister warned that the cuts will affect the whole country for many years, possibly even a decade”.

By-pass doubts

Doubts over the present administration’s plans to press ahead with a city by-pass (or Outer Distributor Road) have also been highlighted recently, following the Secretary of State for Transport’s written statement to Parliament that he was taking steps to avoid any expenditure while the government considered its transport priorities. All road building schemes granted conditional approval by the last administration are to be reviewed as part of the current spending review.

Join the debate: Does high density development make travel more sustainable?

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The ESG 'enterprise' is now seven years old. Millions of our money have been spent or pledged on this adventure. There is NOTHING to show for our money apart from waist high weeds on a derelict site. Now we hear that the ESG management has leased a parcel of our city to a private company for 250 years - and that without asking us who live in this city!

This is just too much! Let all who are concerned go to Coningsby Street and see for themselves. We need it all stopped and an immediate public enquiry into the whole farcical process.

Might I refer the twelve councillors who voted in favour of the consent that they might well be contravening planning law. It is now accepted practice that all supporting reports are required to be in place before consideration of a planning application. (Henry Boot v Bassetlaw D C) There were no results submitted on Drainage flows, no Abstraction Licence drafted, no full landscape scheme nor full ecology or archaeology reports. Indeed the Officer's report referring to the quasi industrial nature of the application could only go as far as writing “in broad terms the proposal complies with this policy”.

Those of us who regularly submit planning applications will be angry that one rule applies to Herefordshire Council and one to the rest of us. Watch out Herefordshire Councillors, might I refer you to Powergen UK v Leicester City Council? The Law Lords observed ”compliance with a planning permission is not a matter for private agreement between developers and local planning authorities."

Cyclists in the London borough of Ealing will become part of a traffic-flow experiment this autumn as several junctions ‘go naked’. Ealing Council plans to remove traffic lights at key junctions to see if congestion can be reduced. If successful, the experiement might continue in other parts of the borough.

Could this happen in Hereford? Read the full story here.

Following our recent visits to other housing developments, afterwards in the bar an architectural idea emerged - HCS should embark on a mission to track down some housing architecture exemplars pointing Hereford in the right direction for housing projects to be built here.

We know that the aim is to build 8000 houses by 2026 and if the Bellway homes project near Burnham on Sea is what we can expect, then I think we should all move somewhere else.

So with this in mind – moving somewhere else - here are some UK examples of good housing. Not the ‘toy town’ designs we saw yesterday.

http://www.designforhomes.org/hda/2008/complete/oxley_woods.html

http://www.designforhomes.org/hda/2008/complete/adelaide_wharf.html

http://www.designforhomes.org/hda/2009/shortlist/complete.html

Another idea is to visit Holland and witness, in my view, the best housing being developed. The UK used to lead the world in housing - now it is the Dutch.

Dutch Architecture Examples

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/amsterdam/borneo_photos.htm

http://www.e-architect.co.uk/dutch_architecture.htm

If you missed it, Les Sparks could've been describing Hereford's predicament re ESG versus city centre on You and Yours on Wed 17th June 12.30 ( he spoke about 12.45)

In it, he was asked what the smaller historic city centres should be doing to survive the downturn and his response was 'play to their strengths' more trees, benches, traditional stone pavements and improved streetscape detail generally; varied activities like F Markets etc. Protect and enhance the historic and make it attractive and comfortable and interesting for the punter....(a more socially complex and aethetically pleasing experience than visiting a modern retail shed would give us - to paraphase).

Re newbuild shopping centres: Developers need to 'pause and reconsider their brief. Plans for new shopping centres need to be scaled down or stopped - not the time for new retail developments. He cited small sympathetic development in Exeter and Shrewsbur's approach as examples of getting it right and Chester who are getting it wrong apparently but didnt hear why....

He would be definately worth quoting in his capacity as Urban Forum.

The possibility of dimming street lights to save energy, with a trial in Hinton, might sound like green thinking from the Council, but you'd be wrong. This is simply about cutting costs. A sustainable travel plan for the city, greater emphasis on smaller scale localised production of food and goods, reducing and re-using waste, and energy efficiency measures in buildings, would have a far greater impact on energy consumption than fiddling with the lights, with the concerns over crime and community safety that this brings. Such real green measures would also create local jobs and save money in the long run. But the long term thinking is not a strong point of Hereford's planning. Dim thinking on street lights is more like it.

An interesting story is at http://www.lighting.co.uk/news/show/49

Those who attended last night's HCS talk by Adam Wilkinson of the New Economics Foundation may be interested in this article. Please do add comments at the bottom of the article.

How to make Community Spending Review positive for communities, progressive for the public sector, and purposeful for the delivery of policy.

Adam Wilkinson

The objective of this very brief paper is to sketch out how local spending reviews can be turned from chore to opportunity. The data already published shows clearly two things. First that raw data is meaningless, second that we need context to create meaning.

What is that this data actually contains? Potentially it shows how much of total spending is being invested by authorities in the communities that they represent. It can show what contribution is being made to the regeneration and sustainability of communities. In addition it could be used to demonstrate how social and environmental policy is being delivered and how effectively the strategic aims of the organisation are being met.

Sadly all of this potential is wasted if spending data is not first compiled within the context of strategic objectives. Second the data needs to be used within a procurement mechanism that maximises this prioritisation. Finally the impacts on communities of this activity need to be recorded by use of meaningful measures across economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

How could this be achieved?

In effect spending reviews are records of procurement activity. In order to deliver the real value the reviews need three elements added to them.

First we need to relate spending to policy. Why are we spending this money to achieve what aims? All procurement is now meant to be sustainable so how do these spending records demonstrate this? All authorities have corporate, community, and procurement strategies, but in our experience these do not relate to each other. Neither routinely does the actual process of procurement reflect the objectives of these strategies. In fact a spending review should relate closely. For example what % of spend contributed to the delivery of the community strategy? This is perfectly possible but not until we have the integrated approach described below.

Second we need to release not raw data but processed data that is meaningful for communities. The simplest way to do this is by adding key elements to the data. For example if we wanted to use economic impact we can add the postcode of where the supplier is based. This then enables us to capture immediately an indicative economic impact for the community with no further data (other than the constants derived by using the variation of the LM3 model developed in the North East across all 25 councils). Further work has been commissioned by emda and is currently underway to identify other measures that can indicate accurately similar impacts for social and very importantly environmental impacts. These generic measures are currently being tested with the tier one supply chain. A prerequisite of these KPI’s is that they must be meaningful and usable within current procurement regulations, quantifiable, and auditable.

Third we need to embed these KPI’s within the procurement process so that as priorities are decided at a strategic level and then expressed in meaningful KPI’s they are then included as standard within the procurement process. We then need to capture the impact of these within the delivery of the goods or service. By making this a standard and automated part of monitoring we can then complete the circle and demonstrate with authority what the impact of spending is on communities. This information is what then gives real meaning to the spending review.

The above is a sketch of what could be done. In fact much of this is already in place. All that is really needed is a joining together of these elements into a coherent whole. If this was done what might be the benefits?

For communities for the first time it would enable individuals, groups, and businesses to see how spending was directed and what the impacts of that spending was directly on their community. This would also mean that the communities would be able to express a view on the prioritisation of objectives and their delivery.

For the organisation it would enable them to show how the strategic objectives of the community and their organisation were being delivered, not only in terms of headline figures but actual impacts. In addition the adoption of an outcome based approach would also provide direct evidence of performance for CAA and other national requirements. It is in fact likely to demonstrate that far higher returns are already being delivered but they go unreported because of a lack of the mechanism described.

For national policy delivery standard spending data could be directly accumulated in a meaningful way. This would enable a much better methodology for joining policy both across national ministries such as Berr, and Defra , but also and critically bridging the gap between national, region, and local service delivery and policy.

This note is just that but it is not imagination. 25 local authorities in the North East have already used LM3 to assess spending impact. The work of Emda in establishing meaningful sustainable procurement KPI’s and South Tyne in matching procurement types to social clauses are just a few examples of how the necessary methodologies are being put in place. Other work demonstrating how large public and private organisations can deliver and measure environmental and social benefits are also underway.

Community Spending reviews should be seen as the opportunity to bring all of this together, left as it is it will be just another missed opportunity.