Yesterday I was a little less impressed as we passed through, as we do every day on the way home from work.

This is, as the council keep reminding us a multi-million pound scheme, so who decided it would be a good idea to put a bus stop in a single-lane road, only a few metres after a roundabout?  A bus only has to stop for a few minutes and the traffic backs up to block the roundabout.  There is a wide expanse of pavement where the bus stop is – more than enough room to make it a proper lay-by bus stop.  The stop in the other direction has room for cars to park, but not the westbound side.

Very poor planning in my opinion.

It is going to look lovely tomorrow after the huge cat population have an overnight shredding spree.

I went down to Northgate straight from work today to join Geraint and a sizeable crowd of fellow members to knock on doors and deliver election addresses and had a very positive time.  Found a lot of Labour supporters we didn’t know about before and might have even picked up a new member – always a morale-boosting bonus when canvassing.

You get used to some people seeing a crowd wearing rosettes and stickers and crossing the road to avoid you or pretending to be out, but tonight we had somebody actually go out of his way to approach us in the street and ask for a leaflet.  Apparently his gran was thinking of voting Tory and he wanted some material to stage an intervention.

Altogether a fun evening. I do feel a bit bad about one thing though.  I know the Lib Dem candidate, Darren Wise.  In fact I would go so far as to call him a friend – I sat with him at the recording of Question Time earlier in the year and it was his wheelchair that got us to the front of the queue and into the front row, so I feel a little guilty campaigning against him – although, to be fair, I was campaigning for Geraint rather than against him.  I would be more than happy to see Darren come a close second, but not too close eh?  I think we have had more than enough nail-biting results in Crawley in recent years.

I really can’t see what the problem is.  Ironically the register of interests is one of the least interesting documents around, certainly my own entry in it was extremely uninteresting.  Anybody who looks through it will soon decide it is dull and tedious, but make it ’secret’ and it looks like there is something to hide.  OK it is not secret – you can make an appointment to view it.  For those of us with jobs and a life it might as well be secret because it is hugely inconvenient to go and view it. It reminds me of the bit in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the council say the demolition plans had been on public display.

The reason given for not making the register of interests more easily available is that “it could be used by criminal and malicious elements”.  Well guess what?   It still can.  A criminal would just have to lie.

The irony is that the person giving all the quotes to the Crawley News to defend the decision is Duncan Crow.  As he is a county councillor as well, all his information is presumably available online at the WSCC website. That seems to have slipped Labour leader Brenda Smith’s mind when she says “I believe in openness and transparency and would have no problem having my declarations of interests on the web”.  They already are as she is also a county councillor.

Crow says that “It’s not about trying to hide anything”.  While that may be true the council is acting like it has something to hide and if you do that then some people will decide that is the case, especially with all the recent publications of information about MPs.  I would have thought it was the councillors’ own interest to make such information as public as possible. Apart from anything else, there must be at least a third of the borough council who are also county councillors so their details are already out there.

The killer quote is “I would question why people have an interest in seeing this information online. What would be the motivation for viewing it?”  After all the focus on greater transparency in public life that the MP expenses scandal stirred up they still don’t get it do they?

I really cannot see any sensible objection to having the council’s register of interests online at all.  In fact, if anybody wants to send me a copy of the contents I will happily publish them online myself!   Really. But only the complete set – not just cherry-picking whatever juicy bits there may be.   And the same goes for Horsham council too.  Either they do not publish their register of interests or they have it tucked away in such an obscure corner of their website that I can’t find it.

I do wonder about one thing though.  If Councillor Crow is so firmly of the opinion that publishing members’ interests online is a bad thing and potentially dangerous, has he made any attempt to stop the county publishing its register?  I don’t know when the county decided to start putting it online, but if he was already a member at that time, did he vote against it?

For an example of how boring the register of interest is look at Duncan Crow’s own entry in the county council register.   It is even more boring than my entry was when I was a councillor – at least I had a job to list on it.  Or is that the sort of malicious comment they are talking about?

I mentioned a surprise in the first paragraph.  The surprise was that two members of the council have declared on the register that they are freemasons.   I really thought that nobody under 60 would bother joining that bunch of weirdos.  The well-known local agitator referred to above has often voiced his opinions about masons in the council and I thought it was too far-fetched.  Call me cynical, but why would anybody do that?

Do they think to themselves: I would like to do something charitable, shall I make out a standing order to Oxfam?  Volunteer at a local charity?  Or shall I join a quasi-religious, semi-secret society, bound by arcane rituals, and with a reputation for casting a malign corrupting influence over the legal system, the police, and other public bodies?  Surely it is not the first choice for anybody who’s only motivation is good works, and yet that is the only aspect that masons ever mention.

I believe you have to be invited to join.  Is the initial approach one where a mason takes you to one side and asks if you want to be involved in a charitable organisation with no personal benefit whatsoever like some sort of  up-market chugger?  Doesn’t seem likely does it?  I will remain deeply suspicious of the organisation. Apart from anything else you apparently have to profess a belief in a supreme being which is odd enough in itself.

What are these suggested measures?

Pursue economic development objectives… blah blah…  university… blah blah

Fine. But that is just carrying on with what is already being done isn’t it?  Nothing of interest here. Move on.

Ensure council building projects are completed on time.

Suppose so.  Some workers involved might prefer it if the work lasted longer if there was nothing else on the horizon for them, but you can’t really argue with this, except its another thing you should do anyway if you can.

Mortgage rescue scheme

Sounds good. They saw a government scheme, decided it could benefit residents so they signed up to it. Nothing wrong there. Shame they don’t do that with all government schemes that would benefit residents, like the free swimming scheme.

Free car parking to encourage shoppers

Fascinating. No -really.  It leads to an extremely topical analogy.  We are supposed to be encouraging greener behaviours and less car-dependency.  As we saw when petrol prices were recently 35% higher than they are now price is about the only thing that affects our behaviour.

The council are weighing up green policies on one side and economic effects on the other and deciding that the economy wins.  Sounds very much like the decision on Heathrow’s third runway but on a much smaller scale doesn’t it?  The Tories are happy to talk about green issues in opposition, but where they are in power they find a responsibility to the economy.  bear that in mind.  Should they win a general election they may have to stop plans for Heathrow because they have said they would so uncategorically, but they will decide that that they have to expand somewhere else instead. Stanstead? Gatwick?

Free parking means something else though.  Less revenue. How much would it cost?  Back to the free swimming, the council said they didn’t want to take part because there was a risk of it costing £40k or something like that.  So how much are they willing to incur in a guaranteed cost rather than a mere risk?   Remember that even if free parking schemes attract some more shoppers to the benefit of the town’s economy, there are many more who would have been parking here anyway whose parking charges have been taken out of the council’s coffers.

Reduce the time taken to decide planning decisions

Suppose so.  A difficult one though.  As I found out, one sure way to do that is to delegate as much as possible to officers but that is anathema to many councillors and so difficult to achieve. You can also speed it all up by being less diligent.

Help for local shopping parades (e.g. web sites)

Yes. A good website for Somerfield in Bewbush is really going to persuade me to go there instead of to the Broadfield one (which is going to become a Morrisons in April!)   Local shops could get a bit more business by being better promoted, although probably more through getting listed on the various directories than through their own web sites.  Sometimes the biggest benefit from a web site is through the effect that there is something to appear on Google search results.

Not sure that any benefits will be in relation to the costs.

The one thing most obviously missing from this list is the thing that local parade shopkeepers have been asking for since long before the economy started playing up: cheaper rents.  In fact they were not even asking for cheaper rents – just smaller increases.  Given a choice, I am sure most independent shops would prefer to not have their rent increased by 50% or 100% than to have some Internet consultancy.  I haven’t carried out any sort of research; that is just a guess.

Claire Denman says “it’s important we, as a council, do everything within our powers to minimise the effects of the recession”.  Everything?   So how about rents in shopping parades?

So far 85% of councils have signed up for the scheme, but 100% of West Sussex’s councils have backed out.  Whatever reasons they give are not reasons – they are excuses.  The decision about whether to join in with this scheme is a political one, with the decision coming first and justifications sought afterwards.

The two main excuses reasons given are that there will be a small cost to the council and that over 60s from neighbouring districts that have opted out will pile in across the border to take advantage.  The second point disappears if the neighbouring districts are also taking part – so not a problem for most of the East Sussex districts except where they are adjacent to West Sussex or Kent, but that has not put them off.

As for the cost justification, in Crawley it has been worked out to be something like £40,000 I think.  This week the council has been crowing about saving £400,000 by changing the management at the leisure centre.  They could have settled for a saving of £360,000 instead.

In Horsham there is an additional aspect that does not really apply to Crawley, where there is a brand new swimming pool, and that is that joining the free swimming scheme gives access to a one-off capital grant for modernising swimming facilities.  The grant is based on the size of the over-60 population and depends on the council having modernisation plans. The total pot of grant money is something like £60 million over three years.  Even if Horsham has a lower than average over-60 population (which I doubt) it could easily more than make up for any notional loss in revenue in the form of a share of the capital funds.

It all depends on attitude.  If you really want to do it you will look for, and find, a way to do it.  If you don’t want to do it you will use that energy searching for excuses not to do it and that, unfortunately, is the attitude taken by the West Sussex councils.

NOGAR are right that anyone buying Gatwick will want to add a runway if they can.  BAA really did not want to have an extra runway -I think their overall plan depends on Heathrow having the sort of size and capability to compete with Frankfurt, Schipol and Roissy so they always favoured expansion there and saw expansion of Gatwick as a threat to that.  It was not in BAA’s interest for Gatwick to steal business from Heathrow, but it will be entirely in the interests of a new owner to compete for passengers with Heathrow.

There is a lot of talk about the notorious 2019 agreement.  Both councils (county and borough) have talked about wanting to extend it.  Any new buyer would never do that voluntarily.  BAA could possibly do it to protect them from future competition, but that would make Gatwick far less attractive and drop the price a lot.  With the way things are today BAA will want as much as they can get from the sale.  2019 is now not so far away.  By the time a sale goes through it will only be 10 years before someone could start building one, and only five or six years before they could start the planning.

A so-called close-parallel runway within the current boundaries of the airport might not be too bad, but no operator would want it because it would be hugely expensive with only a relatively small increase in capacity.  It would effectively kill off any chance of further runways so for the local area it would be a case of having up to 50% increase in passengers against a 50% chance of a 100% increase.  Whether you favour it would depend on your approach to gambling.

The timing of the sale is unfortunate.  It makes the ideal solution totally impractical – for Crawley council to buy the airport.  Seriously.  Other local authorities run airports, the most prominent example in the UK is Manchester.  On the plus side, the council would have control of expansion if it owned the airport, and BAA would be really pleased to sell to somebody who didn’t have plans to compete with Heathrow.  As a profitable business it could even subsidise the council’s services.  One tiny little barrier is that slthough Crawley council is very, very well-off by the standards of councils, with something like £100million in the bank that is still about £1.9billion short of the asking price.

That is why the timing is unfortunate.  In happier times the council could conceivably have borrowed enough to buy Gatwick and then used the operating profits to pay off the loan.  In happier times it would even have been possible to raise that sort of money, but this is not the time to expect those sort of sums to get lent, especially when the aviation industry is a bit flaky so the returns are far less certain.  Joining a consortium would be more feasible, but the types of organisation that would be interested in that would also be interested in expansion.

Maybe the timing is not so unfortunate after all…  Imagine if the council did operate the airport…  at some point it would end up relying on the income, like it used to rely on the business rates from the airport but on a bigger scale.  If Heathrow started taking the market share then you could end up with the council needing expansion but not wanting it.  So, probably not such a good idea then, but you have to admit it would be interesting.

The first theory is the one the local Tories were proposing in May. The gist of it was that the travellers used to be all over the place, and then the Tories took over the council and their tough line on travellers made them all disappear instantly with the result that there had been no illegal encampments for a year or so.

The second theory was one I heard in mid-May.  The gist of this theory was that when Labour ran the borough council and travellers camped on land belonging to the county council, the Tory-run county council were in no hurry to move them on and were happy for their stays to be extended as the general public don’t appreciate the exact ownership of land and the encampments were reflecting badly on the Labour-run borough council.  There was also a suggestion that as soon as the Tories took over the borough, their colleagues in the county helped to find a place for the most persistant family of travellers in an official site near Burgess Hill.  The overall implication was that the Tories had tried to prolong the problem in Crawley while it damaged Labour’s reputation and then proved that they could have sorted it all out ages ago if there had been the political will.

And then there was the third theory, which was my own point of view.  When I read the original Tory election claims I thought they were laughable.   Had the travellers stopped visiting a year after they took over the council it might have been plausible that their policies were having an effect, but an immediate effect?  That just smelled of coincidence to me.  I felt at the time that they were tempting fate a bit by trying to calim credit for something that just happened.

Apart from anything, the policy of preventing incursions by fortifying land owned by the council was an old one and, by necessity, a long-running one; it takes a long time to do all that work and it costs a lot so the cost (and therefore the work) was spread over several years.  Most of the work was carried out by the previous Labour council, by the time the Tories took over there were far fewer borough-owned bits of land that were accessible.

The other claim, that the council was more lenient when it was Labour-controlled is debatable too.  I remember a meeting with various people including some travellers and a representative from their pressure group where they claimed that Crawley council were more strict than anywhere else and more aggressive in their processing of eviction orders.

Suffice it to say that I just wrote off the Tory claims as standard opportunism and figured that the absence of illegal encampments was down to a combination of the accumulated impact of the long-running strategy of protecting land and pure chance – that the travellers had decided to go somewhere else for a while.

When I heard the second theory I was a bit seduced by it.  It was a conspiracy theory, but one of the more plausible conspiracy theories I have heard.  In the absence of any hard evidence that a particualr family was accommodated in Burgess Hill, or hard-to-get statistics of how many encampments there were on county-owned land and ho long they lasted I still tend towards the cock-up theory rather than the conspiracy theory.

I wish I had told someone all this at the time because then I could say “I told you so”.  As we have seen this summer, the travellers were not absent because this was ‘fortress Crawley’ and they could not find anywhere to stop here: they were absent because they just wanted to be somewhere else.  The problem was not solved either by publicly-quoted policies or by the suspected underhand secret policies, in fact it was not solved at all – it just decided to go away for a bit.

Anyway, I hear through the grapevine that the travellers are camped near Asda at the moment, and I also hear that they are planning to go to Ireland on holiday tomorrow for a couple of months.  When that happens and the Tories claim that they have gone because of some amazing new council tactic just remember – I told you so.

I can’t find any confirmation of this though.  The news websites are pre-occupied with trying to stir up speculation about Gordon Brown’s future because they find that sort of thing much more interesting.  The Labour Party website doesn’t mention it either because it is more interested in what Brown said to the NPF than what the NPF said, but it is really good news, and well overdue.

For a long time now councils have been using the fact that other RSLs can get funding under much better terms as an excuse to stop building council houses to replace those lost under right-to-buy legislation- and then using that as an excuse to sell off or transfer what stock they do have left.

Councils now have the opportunity to be in control.  If there is a shortage of affordable housing – for the sake of argument let’s just say housing that somebody on no more than an average wage can afford to live in – they can decide to build some, and make it all affordable.  They do not have to rely on developers building whatever makes the most profit and then begrudgingly putting the bare minimum of whatever percentage is in the local development framework, and they do not have to rely on housing associations over which they will have no direct control.

How many councils will take advantage of this?   The Horsham Labour Party is meeting with Horsham District Council soon to discuss housing andto ask if they will be involved in building much-needed homes for ordinary working people: well, you have to ask don’t you?  I’m not sure that Crawley Borough Council will be interested now.  For years the Labour council wanted to build houses.  It was gagging to build houses but had to reluctantly face up to economic reality while pressing for the fourth option at conference every year.  The current administration don’t give off those vibes, but we can still hope for some sort of Damascene conversion.

I am talking, of course, about the now-legendary agreement by the developers of Highwod Park, Broadfield to install traffic calming measures on Woodmans Hill. I last wrote about this just over a year ago and nothing has changed at all except we are one year on and therefore a little less likely to ever see the improvements made.

To summarise the events:

• In 2002/3 (can’t remember exactly when) there was a design brief to develop the old council depot behind Vulcan Close. After consulting nearby residents we got a clause inserted that any developer would have to do something about calming traffic on Woodmans Hill.

• In 2003/4 (again I can’t remember the exact date) planning permission was granted with a condition that before the 19th unit was occupied the developers put traffic calming measures on Woodmans Hill.

• By October 2005 half the houses were built and show homes were seeing a regular stream of visitors, despite the houses being tremendously expensive for what they are.

• Early in 2006 the houses and flats were starting to fill up. I asked my local councillor¹ about it and they asked questions on my behalf. The answer was that the developers wanted to do their S106 work around Christmas 2005 but were asked to postpone it until after the holidays.

• By mid-2007 the estate was complete and full and no traffic calming had been done at all. A friendly reporter made some enquiries for me and was told by the council’s planning department that the work had already been done.

• Early this year I heard a rumour from a very trusted source that one of the councils had pursued the developers through the courts to get them to fulfil their obligations and that work would be carried out over Easter. I wasn’t sure whether that meant Easter weekend or the schools’ Easter holidays so I waited until both had been and gone, and still nothing has happened.

And that is where we are today. More than 30 months after building started and at least two years after the places were occupied and traffic still zooms up and down Woodmans Hill – with its school crossing at the bottom – totally uncalmed. And then… I open up Crawley Live to be told about all the good things being done under Section 106. It is frustrating.

And now a little postscript to all of that by way of some things I found on the Internet:

Thing one: according to this document, Belwinch Homes won an award for the development at Highwood Park. The award was for “South East Pride in the Job 2006″ Not too proud to wriggle out of their legal obligations though. How proud will they be if someone is run down at the bottom of the hill?

Thing two: its probably nothing, but on both Google Maps and Multimap the road layout at Highwood Park is wrong. They both show access directly from the A23 via the junction for Broadfield House. Why is that? The original plan was very clear that access should be via Woodmans Hill so that the new houses were not isolated and would be a proper part of Broadfield, and that is how they were built. How did a map showing access via the A23 ever get drawn up?

Thing three: on the mouseprice site Highwood Park is listed as the No. 43 in the list of most expensive streets in the whole RH11 postcode area. Must have been a nice little earner for Bellwinch homes. Not that I entirely believe that site – my own road is up in the 20s on that list and it is almost entirely rented social housing.

So, Section 106. It can be a good thing, but sometimes it is not worth the paper it is written on.

1. three guesses who