Perverted planning- An attack on local democracy and urban green space

Swearword box at the ready. This Conservative Government is increasingly becoming worse in its policy decisions.

The recent outlined changes to the planning system, which have been progressively watered down over the years to the benefit of Tory party political donor land owners and property developers are the final nail in the coffin for those who live in crowded, overpopulated areas like Sandwell.

It is the death knell for the limited pockets of green space that we have left, and the demise of distinct town boundaries of Oldbury, Tipton and West Bromwich. On the side lines like an excitable puppy we have the cheering unwanted Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street aka “Tonka the Great” or The Wealdstone Raider, who appears set on “saving” land in private ownership for the benefit of those who live in the hypothetical and typically agricultural concept of “greenbelt”. This is assisted land banking at its worst.

All of this swift policy has been achieved under the guise of what I consider to be the biggest health hoax  and utter scandal in human history, and an excuse and a cover for resetting Government and “the big society”- for a “society of friends” who live off the cream at the top of the pile.

The ghastly cult that was the Society of Friends of the likes of The Cadbury’s et al, were eugenicists who wanted “Garden cities” where the vermin were kept well away from the centre of affairs at the centre, occupied only by the great and the good. This cabal of Quakers and Unitarians drove the creation of The Town and Country Planning Act, which was an abomination in vision of its division of land classes and by virtue, people of different wealth and socio economic status, and increasingly divisions of race. The green belters still want to keep their areas white, and gate off everything else, there is no doubt about that , so let’s just drop the pretence about “saving wildlife” and the pretty views.

Greenbelt champion Street never misses an opportunity to crow about another “brownfield” site in the black country secured for development, but is less clear on how these lucky new private renters, (because none of these homes are ever built to buy affordably), will fit in to the picture of where their kids are going to go to school, where they will go to shop when the high streets are closing down because retail is dead, and in current times, how “social distancing” fits into this tapestry when there is no fucking room left to swing a cat.

Private “greenbelt” land protected on the posh outskirts of areas which are not in “the black country” in Sedgley and Wolverhampton, but tax payers cash offered for “brownfield” development taking away any hope of public open space in real Black Country areas like Tipton and Oldbury

The Conservatives, via Street, even paid for adds and posted adds on local facebook groups asking people who owned vacant “brownfield” land in Oldbury and Smethwick to consider putting it forward for the call for sites submission. 😕

Hey Smethwick and Oldbury, you live in a shit area. How about we build some more houses on your bits of green space that I call “brownfield”.                    Please show me where the greenbelt sites in Oldbury and Smethwick are?

“We… have the money”- by this he means giving landbankers OUR money!

Perhaps the mayor would have achieved his desired audience if he had targeted the tax avoidance/tax evasion bolt hole of Jersey instead, as I am pretty sure that none of them live in either of these two West Midland towns by choice.  😆

As for the technology, I remember well a development site in West Bromwich where some of this fraudulent “ultra heat treatment” technology was deployed to allegedly clear contaminated oily sludges on the land. This shite travelled down a brook and into a pool where it caused catastrophic damage to the wildfowl as a result of this bituminous material getting there as a result of this development and nothing else. The Environment agency were their typical incompetent self in being unable to identify this, yet were able to send me information detailing the exact same thing happening into the exact same site, via the exact same pathway sixteen years earlier in an FOI request. At some point I will get around to detailing this absolute environmental crime caused by housing developers in a post, but suffice to say, the boasts of industry about “clean up” are a fraud.

Also in recent times, another West Bromwich example of the failure of brownfield land remediation is shown by the Hall Green Road site, which again has been delayed due to unspecified issues relating to the chemicals that were dumped there many years ago by T&S Element. The developers treat local residents with contempt in not being able to give any date on when this exercise will be finished. It has now been going on years, and yet they seek further time from a council that unfortunately says “yes” every time. If it is more difficult to remediate this site than they anticipated, this means that their initial assessments carried out by environmental consultants were obviously flawed, so why should we believe that they are achievable now with safeguards?

This is part of one of the Doomwatch sites, SL57, issued on 3rd March 1978, licenced by the absolutely incompetent West Midlands County council, and I have no faith in any of these being able to be developed safely for residential end use with it’s “awful lot of problems”. And why, should it be asked, should this be done potentially with public money?

Let me be clear, I don’t hold any personal issues against Mayor Street, I met him at an Ask Andy session, and he was very accommodating, polite and personable, but just plain wrong in his vision for my area. I asked him specific questions about The former Duport’s Tip site fronting rattlechain lagoon, and that it was “owned” by a dubious “off shore” company registered in Jersey, whose affairs appear to be managed by a firm of solicitors in Manchester.

Of course, the company is a total front for who really owns it. The former Black Country Development Corporation 30 years earlier, of which his combined authority is a poor man’s reinvention, had thrown a great deal of public money at this site, culminating in the ludicrous redevelopment of the former sewage works site right adjacent to the still active hazardous waste lagoon . The former Duport’s Tip was a vessel for over tipped foundry sand, for the great profit to the directors of that company, which sits there under a carpet of green to this day.

Sandwell council had refused the former sewage works application, but this was overturned by a Bristol based idiot on appeal. Much information was left out about the dangers of the rattlechain lagoon hazardous waste site, and SMBC presented a very poor case whilst calling no expert witnesses in phosphorus chemistry, or challenging the inaccurate assessments made by those on behalf of the appellant. Worst of all, they failed to challenge the integrity of the Cremer and Warner report, which was compiled in 1990/1 on behalf of BCDC in an attempt to see if the waste tipped at the former Duport’s tip was compatible with infilling a hole of toxic waste at the lagoon. The conclusion was that it was not. This report is so shit and void of detail (having been informed by the corporate liars of Albright and Wilson), it is shocking, but typical of “environmental consultants” at large, and I will at a time of my choosing outline this, as well as all the rest of the Duport’s tip/sewage works development history by the then site operators. 

Oh, and I’m also watching closely, the existence of two companies purported to be operating out of an address in Hampton In Arden.  😉 I just wonder what they actually know as fact about their locations of interest, and the detailed history?  😆 

Mr Street, a previous vocal critic of off shore companies operating freely in Britain, replied “..and so any application would have to be measured against all of those criteria to find suitable value for money, and actually to know that the developer is of reputable quality.”

Unfortunately environmental consultants are a travesty to the protection of the environment and the protection of wildlife habitat. They are paid liars and local authorities do not challenge anything that they say, so long as a report ticks the boxes of the planning regime. Lumping whole areas as the Conservatives propose to do in their white paper into so called “growth” areas are a means of dumping vast unregulated developments onto areas of The Black country by force. No local voice will be listened to, and no opposition will be tolerated. It appears that some grass roots Tories are not happy with these ideas, and perhaps the new MP’s for this area should think very carefully as to what their  electorate want and not follow the way of the Londoncentric ministers. Unfortunately, the only potential opposition in Labour, (a dictatorship of two parts in Sandwell),  also stick their tongues out like antennas pointing towards Westminster at the prospect of Government (tax payer) handouts for more brownfield building.  They are happy to flog off bits of land next to rubbish sites for residential like Hall Green Road, and more recently land at Bescot adjoining that of major land floggers, Severn Trent Water. It is just a monopoly board to them all.

A petition of over 400 local people was submitted to SMBC after the publication of Sandwell council’s  dodgy “Dudley Port Supplementary planning document”, opposing any further development around rattlechain lagoon and Sheepwash nature reserve, and this petition still stands to reject the so called laughable “garden city”. In reality, this prospectus for building on contaminated land has now been even further diluted by the new proposals with the tag line of every Street having to be “tree lined”.

“Brownfield” land CAN be used for something, turning it green for the benefit of people and nature, and not just more housing. 

Why would local people want to surrender an area of greened over space in exchange for more overcrowding, which I have looked at HERE? Worst still, why would they want an area ripped up and turned black again in the process which would take years to complete at risk to their personal health and wellbeing from the chemicals and waste and dusts buried there?

The trees in such areas  would be set in phytotoxic soils. “Urban forests” it seems, the buzz phrase of the BCDC back in the early 1990’s are starting to be deforested for housing at a rapid rate.

Here below are extracts from one of their PR brochures at the time “The Black Country Urban Forest: A strategy for its development.” There doesn’t seem to be much of a strategy now does there?  😥

 

We need to green brownfield land and make this area green and not black.

We need green shoots not metal foundations.

We need plants and insects, not bricks and mortar.

We need carpets of fallen leaves and not tarmac roads. 

We need a planning system designed by local people with consultation and not Westminster diktats. 

One has to wonder, what does this Government have to offer the people of the Black Country, except squalor, overcrowding and loss of public space, pretentiously dressed up as tree lined boulevards of “growth”  to rival those that  tax evading land owners and the political class are used to in their own foreign retreat second homes?

Fuck em! That’s five pounds I owe, but better than loosing a fiver than creating a Street with 50 pieces of  silver lining.

#STOPTHEGARDENCITY

by any means necessary. 

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