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Sir

I read with interest the letters of Mr Slade and Alderman Bridger and the comments of our Council Leader (Surrey Ad 4^th May) and, having spoken at the Committee meeting to which he referred, I can clarify a few points for your readers.

Peter Slade is absolutely right about the crucial role the Philharmonic (GPO) plays in the image and cultural outreach and vitality of Guildford – so much so that all of the Councillors barring perhaps Cllr Meredith were vocal in support of retaining the GPO in some form and gave unequivocal backing to a requirement for the Chief Executive and lead Councillor Jen Powell to revert back without delay with a clear fact-based recommendation as to the future of the GPO.

Councillor Rooth – as is so often his way – has decided to make his views plain, to the complete disenfranchisement of the remaining councillors and, by extension, all those of us who voted for them.

David Hill, our Chief Executive (stand-in Strategic Director, Returning Officer and general factotum), was very clear – even to the point of erroneously interrupting Cllr Reeves mid-flow – to make the point that the future of two council staff’s positions should not be discussed frivolously nor be the subject of premature rumour and gossip.  This intervention by an officer attending the meeting by virtue of delivering a report, was tacitly approved of by Cllr Rooth despite audible gasps from the public gallery and around the committee table.

It is surely inappropriate for elected councillors in a Council Committee to be silenced by either the Leader or the Chief Executive, especially if the Leader is then going to repeat the apparent transgression on your pages a few days later.

Turning to the substance of Cllr Rooth’s comments, he chose to rely on figures and references in the (Chief Executive) Officer’s report which had been derided by the Committee as unsatisfactory and inadequate, and he has decided to adopt a somewhat dangerous tack of equating subsidies to Band D Council tax in a way that would certainly call into question the overall funding of G-Live.

Cllr Rooth perpetuates the myth that all it is costing Guildford is £328,000 per year to subsidise 250 concerts.  My own presentation to the Committee (a copy of which can be made available on request and is a public document) made it clear that the total capital cost in terms of actual development and the receipts of sale foregone (had we allowed the University to accommodate and construct the hall on its site) was in the region of £45m or £346 per head of population across the Borough IN ADDITION to the annual subsidy (or, overall, an annualised subsidy of the entire Borough rates income from almost 67,000 ratepayers!, using the Band D contribution to Guildford of £140 per year and an assumed capital return of only 2%,).

The capital itself would, in all probability, have been enough to make a major contribution towards solving the traffic congestion issues in Guildford’s town centre (Surrey County Council’s problem, so apparently not of interest).  Ironically, by resolving the gyratory system, this would have made Guildford more attractive for investment and would have enhanced the value of GBC’s (our) remaining holdings in Guildford (probably even to the extent of replenishing the capital account by value).

The abject failure of the leadership (Chief Executive or Leader) to develop a clear vision for any aspects of life and work in Guildford is already harming Guildford’s reputation, lowering our asset values and systematically destroying the attractiveness (social, physical, cultural, etc.) of the town and Borough.

It is time for a rethink, and it is time to empower all of the Councillors to truly represent their constituents.  Cllr Rooth should remember that he was elected a Councillor with 854 out of the 1085 votes cast in his ward – the Borough has an electorate in the region of 95,000 voters.

Do not neuter or stifle the Full Council.  It needs (and we need it) to agree a clear vision for Guildford and to ensure everything the Council does is working towards achieving the shared objectives – and this needs to be done with the widest possible engagement with Guildford.

As for the Philharmonic, I believe it still has a vital role to play in attracting business and visitors to our great town.  I accept others may not agree.  I simply want an open, unskewed discussion that is not interfered with by our not-necessarily-representative leadership.

Let All the Councillors Have Their Say

In response to your opinion piece, ‘Where is GBC’s ‘Openness and Transparency’?’, as I recall it, Mr Hill’s other interventions during the debate on the Guildford Philharmonic were to tell the Scrutiny Committee what it can and cannot discuss and what sub-committees it can and cannot establish.

It is, surely, bad enough to have a relatively unaccountable Executive Committee (7 rural councillors and a token urban one) running affairs in our town – often to the complete disenfranchisement of the remaining forty or so councillors – but to also have a non-local Chief Executive deciding how this Council should conduct the democratic part of its business and behaving petulantly at that meeting whenever anyone said something with which he disagreed is palpably ultra vires. He was at the meeting as an officer (standing in for the one whose demise he oversaw) and should have behaved as such.

It is questionable how well the administrative part of his job is done – I know several members of the voting public to whom he has not even afforded the courtesy of a reply in respect of letters, emails and calls, relating to important issues affecting the town and Borough*. I also have received comments from many employees across the Council (all too afraid to speak out despite the Transparency Code implemented last year) that tell a different story when compared to that protective cloak of concern for his staff he discovered somewhere for the occasion of that meeting.

It is not the professional part of the job that is at question here, though. If David Hill wishes to get involved in local democracy, he should (1) move here so that he is eligible to stand and to vote; he should (2) put himself forward and see what the good burghers of Guildford actually think of him; he should (3) earn sufficient respect to be voted as party leader of the majority party so that he can (4) become the leader of the council.

Let all of the councillors have their say. Let them all provide strong and free representation of those who entrusted them with their votes. No-one should be disenfranchising whole sections of the Borough. Not the party political system, not the Executive Committee and, most definitely, not the Chief Executive.

* I have been asked to remove this reference as some instances have been agreed as misunderstandings – my own experience is very mixed (for example, as of 14th May and as far as I can tell, I have not yet received a reply to or acknowledgement of my email to him of 27th April).

Sir

I attended the Waitrose exhibition and I have considered long and hard what I saw and heard and, however much I would love to have Waitrose in Guildford, I simply cannot see why it should be on the Bellerby Theatre site.

As a property professional with almost thirty years of experience, I know that it would be a much better idea to have both John Lewis and Waitrose anchoring the Friary extension and regenerating the area that has been all but set aside for tens of years pending development.  The combination of these two sister stores in a large format could well be the difference between a viable development or not.  Furthermore, the development of a new residential quarter should be capable of generating attractive returns for the Council’s site.

Access to the Bellerby theatre site has not been resolved by the Waitrose scheme (which does not comply with the original tender document) which envisages trucks using the very narrow road past the telephone exchange (which itself should, perhaps be a candidate for relocation but at what cost?) – an unwarranted intrusion in an ostensibly residential area.

The configuration of the main customer access from and onto York Road, though, is intuitively barmy.  Bad for the already fragile one-way system (and I gather there has not been an overall traffic study of the gyratory system and its feeder roads to determine whether they can cope even at peak times) but horrendous for rush-hour traffic to and from schools and work – especially if there are cars queuing to get into the car park whilst shoppers manoeuvre into and out of the parking spaces near to the entrance.

And this is even before considering the impact of yet another traffic light junction and a pedestrian crossing. The underpass which children use safely at the beginning and end of the school day, will be lost in favour of this crossing so that they can wait for the green man in the rain or, heaven forbid, rush across the road, hoping the stationery traffic does not suddenly spring back to life after many minutes of inactivity.

Having taken almost an hour on Saturday lunch time getting from the station to Onslow Village along Walnut Tree Close and Woodbridge Meadows, I know only too well how Guildford’s traffic needs re-planning. Putting Waitrose in an already heavily congested area could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back – but surely it cannot be good for Waitrose to have long periods when potential customers can neither enter nor exit from the store, and when the challenge of shopping there overwhelms the initial enthusiasm to have this excellent store in our town.

I can assure your readers, the Council and Waitrose that I will watch closely to ensure that the level of evidence for satisfaction of highways concerns is sufficient to confirm that the gyratory system and all its feeder roads can cope, and I would like to remind Surrey County Council of the seriousness of its statutory consultee role in advising Councillors and officers when it comes to determine a planning application from which Guildford Borough Council stands to gain considerable capital receipts.

My name is Julian Lyon, I have lived in Guildford for all of my 51 years and, of the things that make Guildford so special, its excellence in the provision of Arts ranks very highly. 

I well recall many Sunday afternoons sitting in the back row of the balcony of the old Civic Hall with my parents and siblings from the age of five, listening to and watching the Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra – including, when I was around 7, hearing the Philharmonic Choir (now Vivace) performing the seemingly unapproachable piece: Elgar’s The Kingdom. 

I have to declare an interest this evening, therefore, because, according to the report in front of you, I have benefited disproportionately from the existence of the Philharmonic for 46 of its 67 years.  I am also a trustee – following in my father’s footsteps – of the South East Music Trust and I have, in the past, sung in the Philharmonic Choir. 

That interest is precisely what gives me the passion and, yes, responsibility to address you today.  I should note that I have been advised by the Chief Executive to avoid making references to any part SEMT could play going forward, in case that affects the future direction or impacts on the process hereafter.  I have taken the view (having originally been invited by the Chairman to participate in this discussion on the record, and then asked by officers instead to arrange to meet with the Chief Executive) that I need to set some records straight and to tell you how I see the process and current situation.  I should also say that I had a brief conversation with David Hill, who called me this afternoon, and reminded me that he is only just picking this up following the departure of Jim Miles. 

Over the past few years, I believe the Philharmonic has been treated quite shabbily – I am sure this has not been deliberate for the most part – and its budget has been progressively cut (and consequently the number of performances reduced) to the extent that the overheads make up an increasingly large amount of the per-ticket subsidy. 

In the Council Budget for 2010-2011 the Philharmonic was allocated a budget of £245,000 approved by the Full Council.  A couple of months later the budget was reduced to £190,000 – it is very difficult to plan a season properly under such circumstances.  

The figures in the report do not include audiences reached by virtue of the SEMT’s support, which provide added profile for Guildford and typically, SEMT has provided opportunities for amateur groups to perform with a professional orchestra – an important aspirational role in working with the many non-professional choirs and music groups in the area. 

The information in the report relating to Worthing borough Council tells a mere fraction of the story. Worthing also funds Worthing Symphony Society to the tune of at least £25,000 per year plus other classical music groups for an additional £50,000 – and there are other elements of funding which do not quite add up from their respective websites. Clearly this, and other Local Authorities’ provisions, requires more analysis. 

All of this notwithstanding, we are in a position where the Philharmonic will have no programme of concerts for 2012/13 (except the postponed and rearranged Messiah concert from last year).  This is tantamount to closing the Philharmonic as a staffed operation by default (or committing to maintaining the overhead for the next year whilst having no concerts to show for it). 

Because there are staff involved, it is unreasonable to conjecture further about their futures here, but it is equally unreasonable to keep them dangling on a thread, and I would urge the Council at large to clarify their positions as a matter of urgency. 

I am also VERY concerned that we seem to be discussing a tactical paper as if there is an agreed direction or destination of travel. 

I have become aware recently that a growing number of residents and stakeholders are challenging the Council’s apparent lack of vision.  This discussion is not the same as the Town Centre Masterplan saga but the symptoms are remarkably similar. 

Before considering the paper as a blue print, or even an options analysis, there needs to be much more information (and greater accuracy too), there needs to be an engagement with the community at large to understand what provision the Council should be making for the arts in general, and there needs to be an informed debate amongst the Full Council as to what they believe the future of arts funding should be – and I fully accept that I may not like the outcome! 

The Councillors should decide whether they really want to dismantle part of Guildford’s recent (67-year-old) heritage; the Councillors and Officers should engage with potential partners, alternatives, or other interested parties to enable the Councillors to determine its vision for the future (and in fairness, this was part of David Hill’s telephone discussion); the Chief Executive and his management team should then identify the best way to implement the Council’s wishes.  This is not a process for closed-book analysis and imposition. 

This paper when I read it, and this process as played out to date, have the feel of an ambush and a fait accompli.  I don’t like it but I recognise some of the underlying reasons. 

The premise is that £190,000 annual funding for the Philharmonic is not sustainable in this period of austerity. 

I do think, however, that I need to highlight again the apparent absence of vision when dealing with the replacement Civic Hall, which we had thought was to be a coming home for the Philharmonic who had lived ‘on the road’ for several years. 

The Council was offered, as I understand it, around £20m for the site for residential and supermarket development – indeed the level of offers on the so-called ‘Waitrose site’ would seem to support this; the University offered to build the hall on its land at its expense.  Here, though, we have a hall which we have paid for – and replies to enquiries have determined ‘the Council has no involvement in running it’, where the operating subsidy is a substantial £328,000 per year for nine years after an initial boost of £450,000.

By my calculations, that effective investment of approaching £50m of actual cost and opportunity cost amounts to around £375 per resident of Guildford[1].  Way above the subsidy level of £1.48 per resident that the current funding for the Philharmonic represents – indeed, even at a conservative rate of interest on the total investment, the interest foregone would have funded the Philharmonic four or five times over each year at current levels. 

So, before this paper becomes Council policy by default, we need to understand a few things:

• What are the Council’s priorities? 
• What should the Council be funding and at what overall annual cost?  
• Perhaps more to the point, who decides and who gets a say in that decision – it seems to be all too often that the full body of Councillors we have elected do not!

In order to try to inform the discussion and to help arrive at a vision and a plan, I am ready personally to assist in any way that I can, and I am sure that my fellow trustees of South East Music Trust will join me.  I am aware of other groups who would have plenty to say on the matter, and I think there are many ‘quieter’ voices out there that need to be heard. 

The future should not be defined by this flawed report but the Philharmonic staff need to and deserve to understand how this hiatus and the future process will affect their positions. 

Thank you for listening.

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The travesty of the conflicting interests of the Borough Council when it comes to deciding how much of the gross capital receipts should be commuted for s106 and s278 agreements for highways improvements is that we have no traffic study or long term plan against which to measure the appropriateness of any allocation.

Indeed, Waitrose themselves (in the form of their traffic engineer at the exhibition at the Guildhall on Friday 20th) acknowledged that their modelling, based on a generic traffic modelling system, only analysed the traffic impact of their proposals on the York Road roundabout and York Road itself.

Surely we need a full assessment of the capacity of the gyratory system AND the measures that would need to be taken to allow it to reach capacity. Thereafter, we need a proper thirty year plan as to how we allow Guildford to flourish and prosper (without losing what we love about it) – preferably one which removes through traffic from the centre of town and allows free pedestrian access between the sights, the shops, the river and the transport hubs.

Waitrose cannot deliver all of this but the Borough Council could decide to commission the relevant studies, set aside sufficient money to solve, say, the problem of unsynchronised traffic signal throughout the gyratory and feeder roads, and then make a commitment whereby future development must contribute to a long term traffic plan.

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Guildford desperately needs to address its traffic congestion (clearly confirmed by the meeting of 150 to 200 people on 21^st March launching the Guildford Vision Group) and to create a vision for a better town to meet the needs of all its stakeholders.

The Council’s Draft Town Centre Masterplan, with minimal consultation over the busy Christmas period, has been widely criticised as “woeful”, “badly researched”, “lacking any vision” and “fundamentally flawed” – mainly because it did nothing to address congestion and the impact of traffic routes on pedestrian access between the station, the town, the river and elsewhere.

Perhaps having a plan approved by a Council Executive I have previously criticised for its lack of transparency, is more about selling off Council-owned (actually our) town centre sites, and triggering quick-fix solutions such as the Bedford Road bus station idea and the Waitrose supermarket land sale! (For those unaware, a sale of the Bellerby Theatre and surrounding land to Waitrose has been rushed through before the Council even had the chance to grant itself planning permission – although it did publish a planning brief to convert less lucrative residential use to a ‘preferred’ supermarket use without any reference to traffic generation or solutions).

The Planning Brief for the Bellerby Theatre site does state that that the draft Town Centre Area Action Plan is “being afforded no weight in determination of planning applications”  – so now they have to get some sort of Town Centre Masterplan through quickly to provide a valid planning context for the Waitrose scheme.  So what of the Draft Local Masterplan?

Guildford’s Principal Policy Planner last week indicated that the Council is going to appoint Urban Design Consultants, staggeringly, not to start again but only to finalise the ‘useful’ document and “in particular to work on its presentation including its maps and diagrams.”  The draft plan did not fail in any of these matters specifically; it failed through a dearth of basic and up to date research, a lack of any investigation of traffic engineering solutions; it failed on transparency, community involvement and through an absence of any vision at all.

But wait! These new revisions are only going to delay the plan by two months. From my professional experience I know this is barely long enough to get started, so where is the brief for this external planning appointment that can redesign Guildford in two months?  So, for the sake of indecent haste, we can expect the plan to be ‘garbage in and garbage out’ – but with better plans and diagrams!

Fixing the problems with the original document would normally take at least 9-12 months as these firms like to engage with the public as part of their work – and we can be sure this new document (passed off as amendments to the draft) will not be open properly to public scrutiny before the Executive hastily adopts it in July.

The Government are increasingly encouraging (and enabling) communities take on a greater role in such matters – and for very good reason.  Perhaps our rather secretive Chief Executive (who can sell off the Council’s prize assets and retire back home to South Oxfordshire without ever again having to think about the traffic chaos he will have left behind) is keen to get this plan in place before the community has the chance to fully organise its neighbourhood response!

The Council also now says that actually it was not a masterplan as such and that they now want to call it a ‘town centre framework’ – whatever difference that makes. Furthermore, as they have not done the research, they intend to call it ‘interim’ – to be reviewed next year.  Why could they not just publish the plan after due process in a year’s time? This seems to back up my (perhaps cynical) view that the Council Executive needs to have an adopted plan in place to legitimise the change of zoning of residential sites and sell them off to supermarket operators with the minimum of public scrutiny (if any!).

I am not opposed to Waitrose (or John Lewis for that matter) coming to Guildford, but I cannot stand by and watch; residents, shoppers, businesses and visitors are going to experience the biggest growth in traffic movements in the town centre for a decade if the Council’s Executive banks the Waitrose cheque, allows 350 apartments, another supermarket and a 9-storey hotel on top of the station and pursues another 250,000 square feet of retailing on the Friary extension whilst everyone directly involved continue with their mantra – “Traffic? That is for others to sort out!”

Come on Guildford Borough Council, start again; do it properly and transparently.  Promote a publicly agreed brief, a tender for external master planners and traffic engineers and full consultation and engagement with all the stakeholders in Guildford – including the residents, visitors, shoppers, business community, the University, the Science Park, the Cathedral and the Hospital.  This fudged framework document is not going to keep me quiet and I suspect many others share my passion and concern.

Guildford’s next 50 years are too important for a handful of officers and the Executive of the Council to keep possession of all decisions to themselves in this way.

Congratulations to the Guildford Society, supported by the various Residents’ Associations around Guildford, for the successful launch of Guildford Vision Group on 21st March 2012 in front of between 180 and 200 people.

Guest speakers included the former Director of Planning on Cambridge City Council, Peter Studdert; the former President of the Royal Town Planning Institute, Mike Hayes CBE; and Allies & Morrison.  The focus was on Collaborative Planning, The Planning Process and Shaping Towns and Cities.

This initiative takes a much more significant position when seen in the context of the Localism Act, since Guildford Vision Group (GVG) could decide to apply to become a Neighbourhood Forum if it has public backing but is unable to secure proper engagement from the Local Authority.  Equally, the newly published National Planning Policy Guidance (NNPG) requires Local Authorities to put in place a Local Plan, and the Localism Act allows residents to apply to run local services; perhaps this process could be taken over by GVG.

One way or another, it is vital for the future operation, prosperity and environment of our great town of Guildford that a proper vision is put in place – after all, “The Vision is an expression of what a place could be like in the future. It is the foundation of the masterplanning process” (Commission for Architecture & the Built Environment – CABE).

It is to be hoped (but not to be taken for granted) that the Borough Council will engage and openly work with the community to agree what Guildford can be like in the long term.

More information will soon be available on the GVG website (www.guildfordvisiongroup.com) and I intend to discuss issues on the face of this blog over the coming months.