In 2006, in the face of furious local opposition, the council gave planning permission for the Brunswick tower-block scheme. It was now clear that council planners had started to regard Brighton Marina as a 'brown field site', ripe for the implantation of a 1960s-style housing estate. Since spring 2007 the council has been collaborating with developers on the production of a Planning Advisory Note (PAN04), otherwise known as the Brighton Marina Masterplan, which appears to be intended to fast-track the granting of planning permission for the next phase of tower-block building.
But council planners realised that they could not be seen to be ignoring residents altogether. So, on 26 November 2007, they revealed their draft Masterplan to a small group of residents' representatives, giving them a deadline of 7 January to report back to their associations and obtain comments on it. Can it have been a coincidence that they chose the Christmas / New Year holiday period for what turned out to be a purely cosmetic 'consultation'?
On 20 March, at Hove Town Hall, the Environment Committee, led by Councillor Geoffrey Theobald hammered the latest nail into the coffin of our local democracy by approving PAN04 in the face of ferocious opposition from residents.
In a shrill voice, like an anguished nurse trying to persuade a recalcitrant child to swallow some bitter medicine, Councillor Theobald sought to explain to a packed gallery of protestors why the PAN would be good for them. They were not convinced. But he was adamant and with a few honourable exceptions the councillors followed him like sheep. Georgia Wrighton was the only councillor to argue with him, but her impassioned, eloquent speech fell on deaf ears.
The five public questions, from Robert Powell (Marine Gate Action Group), Peter Martin (Brighton Marina Residents Association), Jill Sewell (Kemptown Society), Rosemary Shepherd (Roedean Residents Association) and Brian Simpson (savebrighton), berated the PAN for failing to protect the Marina from excessively high, dense building, for failing to protect priceless views and the setting of Kemptown’s listed Georgian terraces, for its lack of intelligent transport proposals and for the council’s consultation – which was so cosmetic that Max Factor would have been proud of it. These also fell on deaf ears.
Cries of ‘shame’ echoed around the chamber as Mr Theobald led his committee to an 8-3 victory in what amounted to a full-frontal assault on our local democracy. This PAN institutionalises the fact that in future it will be council planning officers who decide what happens to Brighton Marina and, at their whim, the cliff height restriction in the 1968 Brighton Marina Act can be disregarded whenever they like.
Mr Theobald was clearly rattled by the response from the gallery and at times he was almost pleading with protestors. He seemed to be saying that only by giving the council planning department powers to do whatever they liked would they have the power to argue effectively with developers. It was a bizarre and fundamentally unintelligible argument.
