In the next few weeks the council will be voting on the latest revision of Explore Living's planning application. If it receives approval, a further 1,301 flats will be built in the Marina in towers up to 28 storeys in height, these in addition to the Brunswick development that the council has already approved (including a 40-storey tower-block). Please go to OBJECT NOW!!! to discover easy ways of submitting your objection. And if you haven't already done so, please JOIN US to be kept in touch with our fast-moving campaign and to discover how you can help it succeed.
You have arrived at the website of savebrighton, campaigning against plans to build a tower-block housing estate in Brighton Marina.
In the UK, local councils normally work in partnership with residents to decide the future of their local area. Brighton and Hove City Council does not operate like this. Here, the council prefers to work in partnership with property development companies. The council has a statutory duty to consult residents, but the way it has chosen to do so has been patently cosmetic - holding Alice in Wonderland 'consultation workshops' in which it tells people what they are allowed to discuss and makes every effort to silence dissent.
The letter below was written after one such workshop
On Monday I attended a council ‘consultation workshop’ on its plans for the Marina. As leader of the savebrighton campaign, representing hundreds of people who complain they are being ignored by our council, I was intending to raise their concerns about the height and density of proposed tower-blocks and their catastrophic effect on Brighton’s traffic and infrastructure. But it soon became clear that participants would not be allowed to focus on the issues that concerned them. When I queried this I was told that if I didn’t like it I should leave. Participants were placed in groups, each placed under the control of a planning officer who made sure we discussed the ‘right’ things. It was like a Moonies indoctrination session; you couldn’t talk to anyone out of the sight or control of a planning officer. Geoffrey Theobald, former head of the Environment Committee, was in my group. I tried to open a discussion of the height and density issue, a topic I knew he was interested in, but the facilitator stopped me and Councillor Theobald said that if I persisted he would leave. I persisted. He left. Meanwhile other groups were trying to make sense of the council’s set tasks, which included saying what was good and bad about the roundabout outside Asda (I kid you not). Meanwhile, a venerable and highly respected citizen and savebrighton member ... for many years a Magistrate and Chairman of East Sussex Magistrates Association, had been barred entry by a council planning officer assisted by a burly bouncer, on the grounds that her presence would ‘unbalance’ the workshop. This council pretends to consult because it knows it has a statutory duty to do so (to consult, that is, not to pretend) but instead of conducting a real consultation it devises an event consisting of childish and irrelevant exercises and stops participants from discussing the issues that really matter. In its essential philosophy it is hard to distinguish this from a Robert Mugabe ‘election’. The only difference is that they don’t hack off dissenters’ limbs or murder them.
website first produced 23 October 2007 last modified 11 October 2008