Chapter VI Pinkerton Plaza

 

 

  As I mentioned earlier, the planning process is my favourite council activity. This may make me sound like an anorak but for me urban planning is the bread and butter of urban life. Most Council responsibilities, such as education, social services, council housing, libraries, parks, street cleaning, waste collection, consumer protection, are hampered by financial restraints. Yet councils are saddled with the statutory obligation to carry out these activities to an advanced standard or you can be fined or impeached. It was responsibility without power.

   With planning the reverse is true. It is power with only minimal responsibility. Planning decisions are far more wide ranging because it is other people or organizations who spend the money, and you merely tell them if they can do it or not. You can sit there like God Almighty, while humble individuals, small businesses, corporations and state institutions proceed in a cavalcade in front of you with their proposals ranging from a mere pavement crossover or a humble garage extension to a multi-million pound shopping and office complex. If you say you are not sure, you could be wined and dined by the most powerful as you deliberate your decision. Even the smallest and humblest Councillor can be treated like royalty and participate in these life or death issues. Does the Sheikh of Qatar want to build a squash court in the back garden of his London residence and needs to remove a few trees? You ask for a site visit, and traipse around the grounds with his London site manager as you gawp at his chandeliers and golden staircase and wolf down the proffered wine and canapés. Eventually you condescend to approve the planning application.

   Of course, you have to be careful with these giant corporations. There are statutory limitations, even when there are no financial ones. You may not like an ambitious residential project with poor architectural designs, a loss of unused green space and a sharp increase in local traffic and parking problems. Also, local residents may be up in arms against it and start preparing petitions and demonstrations outside your office. You are inclined to refuse the application. Yet you cannot just throw the scheme out because you don’t like it or because it is unpopular with your electorate. If you do, the developers will almost certainly appeal to the Planning Inspectorate in the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office and if your grounds for rejection are not considered sound or fair, the whole scheme is foisted on to you, warts and all. (Why the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, you may ask? Because that is the way Whitehall has been rearranged to fit in the Deputy Leader of the party in government.)

   So you have to introduce a bit of horse-play. If you think that there are some merits in the scheme then you ask for changes in the details you detest and impose conditions restricting, say, the amount of parking space, hours of use, etc. and then you seek so-called “community gain”, where you ask the developer to introduce a proportion of cheaper homes for key workers like nurses or teachers, or contribute to a bus route or pay for a pelican road crossing at a nearby site with a large accident problem. True planning nerds refer to the provision of community gain as a “section 106 agreement”. Even then, that may not be the end of your problem because on the one hand, a corporation could appeal against conditions they consider too harsh, and on the other you have to explain to an enraged group of residents why you are eventually giving consent to a vastly unpopular development which will impinge on their immediate neighbourhood. You have to have the wisdom of Solomon and the cunning of Ulysses to contend with planning issues on a Council. These are the sort of issues that could cost you an election, if you make the wrong choice.

     To prevent the Councillors in the majority party wandering off in all directions on these complex issues we always held a group pre-meeting on the day before the Planning Committee to decide on our party policy. Our party had always done this though we had had hints from our legal department that this may be illegal. Emil Kapacek, who had discussed the more serious issues with the Council Leader and with the senior planning officers beforehand, would lead the discussion. Once we decided our policy we were supposed to stick to it at the open session of the Committee meeting the following day. My role as Committee Vice-Chair was to act as the majority party spokesman. So I became the Oracle, the voice of the Council on some of the most controversial issues facing our Borough. As soon as I have made my position known at a public Committee meeting every observer was aware which way the vote would go. “Councillor Axtell has spoken. Framden Council has decided. The multi-million pound scheme is off/on.” Heady stuff!

   Do not judge me too harshly. I am merely being honest with myself. Behind my publicity-seeking ego, and disguised under my modest manufactured self-effacing exterior, I’m still an honest regular guy with dreams of doing good for my fellow men and women. I still fight for maximizing the use of public transport against the encroachment of the car, for protecting the small family stores against the supermarket giants, for saving meadows and trees and familiar old landmarks against the incursion of breezeblock developers. I preferred the quiet, decent human-sized streets with parents walking their children to school and the traditional old shopping centres to the concrete monstrosities of today with their wind-blown empty plazas, multi-layered car parks and monotonous shopping chains. So, yes, dream on. I am ambitious enough to want to leave some kind of a footprint on my world. But I am still idealistic enough to prefer that footprint to be a hanging garden rather than a tower block.  

 

   At our June Planning Committee meeting, a full year after our election, Chris Finneston, our Chief Planning Officer, presented us with a huge agenda of strategic planning applications.

   As usual we were seated in a horse-shoe shaped arrangement of tables in Committee Room 3, with Emil at the head, me on one side of him and the Committee Secretary and the Legal Assistant on the other side. Beyond the legal officer sat three Planning Officers, namely, Chris Finneston and his usual minions, Peter Bulmer and Suleiman Kurali. Then there was a representative from the Traffic Engineer’s department and then officers from other department. Beyond them again sat the opposition Councillors headed by a scowling sceptical Melanie Sheldrake.

  To my left sat my own party colleagues, a real mixed bag of busybodies who generally showed little interest in anything unless it directly affected the wards they represented and were liable to cause a real stink with residents’ associations. The only one who had a more general interest was Councillor Potts, our working-class veteran, who was interested in making life as difficult as possible for the Planning Officers as he settled old grudges over planning schemes he had failed to prevent. He was the barrack-room planner who knew every clause in the Borough Plan and the planning manual by heart, but had little inkling of their spirit. He would sit there scanning the planning agenda with great interest and occasionally picking his nose and smearing the bogeys seemingly surreptitiously over his papers, thinking nobody could see him.

   Next to him was Councillor Craven who spent most of the meeting reading her correspondence and scribbling hand-written replies for eventual retyping by the Council typing pool. She and I did not get on too well for reasons I could not quite understand at first, as I generally got on well with the opposite sex. We just did not click from the beginning. I mentioned this to Meena who immediately laughed. “She’s got a girlfriend, you blind twit,” she laughed, “what on earth would she want you for?”

   Then there was Councillor Perera, another embittered soul, whose wrinkled features failed to disguise his equal contempt both for the opposition, and for Emil and myself. Remember he had stood for chairmanship of the committee last year, and again this year. Each failure increased his sense of frustration.

   Councillor Kausar was friendly, but totally clueless. Unless the planning application applied to a mosque or to a madrassa, or to one of his acquaintances or their businesses, then he was just not there. Not mentally anyway. He would sit there dreaming with his gaze fixed on some point outside the window, as Finneston explained some important planning detail. When it came to a vote, he would be watching me to get the right lead as to when he should put his hand up.

    As for Councillor Graham, he was the least experienced. His Jamaican parents were obviously proud to see their son Noel become the first black Councillor on Framden Council, but Planning was not quite the field that he or they thought he should be in. He had wanted to play a bigger role in the education side. Yet I sensed from the pre-meeting the previous day that the planning bug had bit him too. He did not say much. He was on a learning curve after all. But it was a sharp learning curve. He too watched for my hidden signals but with a readier understanding of the issues involved.

    The rest of the scene was completed by the 3 rows of chairs put out for the public. Behind and around the chairs were self-standing panels with planning application drawings. The public normally consisted of a local journalist (probably the one who had drawn the short straw when they drew lots on apportioning their jobs for the day), a few professional planning nerds, occasional developers anxious to see their planning applications approved and delegations of residents or tenants association anxious to see how their petitions or objections would be handled. The public had no say at this stage of the process. Only councillors who were Planning Committee members and Council officers could speak at this stage. The only concession to the public was that a local Councillor who was not a member of the committee would be allowed to speak on the issue on their behalf. Here all the general public could do was to observe that each issue was being considered on its merits. However, it was not always easy for concerned members of the public to sit still while the future of their road or their favourite scheme was being discussed. They might sometimes shout something out or grumble publicly, but that could lead to them being asked to leave the meeting. This was now the Councillors’ show.

   The biggest planning application by far on the agenda was a large canal-side development scheme worth £2 billion, involving flats, shops, restaurants, a leisure centre and a canal-side park and recreation area. It was called the Pinkerton Plaza Development. As this application had already drawn a restless crowd of protesters, while representatives of the developers were also present it was automatically put first on the agenda.

   There was Korean and Hong Kong investment in the project and it was rumoured that one of the Russian oil oligarchs had now put up half of the money. Of course, we had no love of Russian oligarchs. We were also aware that this scheme would meet enormous opposition as it would give us high rise development in an area that could block out London views for courting couples and kite flyers from Daffodil Hill, and that it would add considerably to traffic congestion in the southern part of the borough. We knew though that the scheme appeared to have enormous benefits too, including an increase in local jobs, the introduction of a new park and new bus stops and the filling in of an unpleasant neglected inner city site once called the Claybury Industrial Estate. Chris Finneston and his staff had seen to that. This area was still anachronistically zoned as industrial on our Borough Plan but we were nothing if not flexible on these issues. With the development, we were told, there was also likely to be an influx of young children to this part of the Borough, in an area where there are two existing primary schools with excess capacity and which would otherwise have to be merged or closed. (I had consulted Meena on just that point the night before).

   If we were to acquiesce in the plan, we would probably have to put forward proposals to the developers to fund the “community gain”. Here, the richer the development, the longer our shopping list. We needed to draw up such a list and we also knew that we could also argue endlessly about other details such as parking and traffic restrictions.  

   Consequently, when we had our first group pre-meeting on the previous evening, we had agreed that we would simply meet the developers and order a site visit. We had been given to understand that the main opposition party would ask for the same thing. So, effectively, we assumed that the Committee meeting the following day would be a done deal.  

  This is why, at the full Planning Committee meeting, I put forward this proposition to hold a site visit as a formal motion without a prolonged speech. This required little effort or preparation on my side, because it seemed obvious that our side would propose it and that the majority of the opposition would concur. Also, there was too much at stake for a hasty decision to be made too early, whether for or against the scheme. So it seemed superfluous to discuss the merits of the scheme in open forum at this stage. Even those members of the public who had turned up to protest at this development accepted this in silence.

    Following my motion for a site visit, Emil was about to move to next business when Sheldrake indicated her wish to speak.

   “Councillor Miss Sheldrake.”

   Incidentally there was a strange convention in the Council, dating back to the radical 1980s that women councillors on our majority side were referred to simply with their surnames in the same way as male councillors. However, the opposition, more traditional, had insisted that their female councillors retain their female title of Mrs or Miss or Ms or whatever.

   Anyway, Melanie Sheldrake now had permission to speak. To our astonishment she demanded outright rejection of the scheme there and then. The meeting sprang into life. She immediately raised the emotive issues of the historic views from Daffodil Hill and then proceeded into a long ramble about traffic congestion throughout the borough and how we had always neglected the car user in all our considerations. I could see the local Framden Journal correspondent avidly copying down her speech. Members of the public were clapping, some even cheering. The other opposition Councillors were keeping their heads low avoiding eye contact with us or with each other.

   Suddenly she glared at me. “And here we have Councillor Axtell, lap dog to every third world developer who chooses to spend his ill-gotten gains in this Borough, trying to arrange another freebie booze up for himself and his colleagues in what he euphemistically calls a site visit…..”

   The Committee members erupted with anger at this. Emil was calling her to order: “Councillor Miss Sheldrake! Councillor Miss Sheldrake! These comments are insulting, racist and out of order and must be withdrawn.”

   She tried to speak further but the uproar prevented her. In the hubbub, Emil’s voice could still be heard. “Councillor Miss Sheldrake. You must withdraw these comments. They are clearly intended to be insulting. And you must withdraw the personal insults concerning Councillor Axtell and apologize to him.”

    There was silence and all eyes were on her. At first my cheeks had been burning with indignation at her outburst. On reflection I realized that I had expected nothing less from her and in a strange sort of way I was flattered by her accusations and her scorn. It was so personal it was doing her no good politically. Apart from that, the Committee, including the Chairman, had already taken my side. In fact, when I had recovered from the surprise, I found that I was feeling no animosity towards her whatsoever over this. Calmly I rested my cheek on my arm and waited for her response.

   After a short silence, Melanie Sheldrake spoke. “Chair, I unreservedly apologize if my remarks about third world developers could be construed as racist as that was not my intention. Please remember however that Russians even now are killing Chechens in a vicious war of occupation.” (“Councillor Miss Sheldrake, that is not relevant”, I could hear Emil vainly trying to intervene.) “As for Councillor Axtell, I apologize for using the phrase “lap-dog” as that is not really fair to dogs of any kind, certainly not the ones I treat in my surgery.” That was it? After a moment’s hesitation, some of the Committee members burst out laughing, though others were still horrified by her earlier remarks and her cynical justification. Emil was already chuckling, somewhat shamefacedly.

  In the confusion she looked brazenly at me. “Touché, you bitch,” I thought.

  I asked the Chair to speak. Emil looked at me quizzically but allowed me to speak.

  “Chair, fellow Councillors, I think that many of Councillor Miss Sheldrake’s concerns over this development can be addressed when we meet the developers at the site visit. She will of course be able to attend the meeting herself. I hope that she does, so as to make her points. Apart from that I am not seeking any personal apologies from Councillor Miss Sheldrake. She is entitled to her views and her idiosyncrasies. Provided that she can promise me one thing. That as a lap-dog, I do NOT end up in her surgery.”

   Now the whole Committee, including the attending officers and members of the public, was laughing. I looked directly at Sheldrake. She looked at me. Was I imagining it, or was there less steel in her eyes? There was a brightness, but not that of hate. Were not her eyes now saying in turn, “Touché!”?