Bristol Greenwash Companion

Thanks to a comment by Tim in the Greenwash Corner post I tracked down a copy of the Green Companion, delivered as an insert in the current issue of Venue magazine. It was marked 'free' (i.e. already paid for by we tax payers) so it was with a clear conscience that I liberated a copy from Borders for later perusal.



The Green Companion is published by the Bristol Green Capital Initiative whose website is bristolgreencapital.org, which is sponsored by The Bristol Partnership, who are, er, we don't know because their web site refers to an executive board but neglects to tell us who they are. Minor details I know and only a carping critic like me would try to make anything of such trivial omissions. It seems the website is due to be revamped because we find this tucked away on the site -

We apologise for the inconvenience caused and look forward to introducing you to the new Bristol Partnership website in the near future.

Jon House
Deputy Chief Executive
Bristol City Council

Last Updated: 20th November

The "near future" since last November doesn't seem to include the subsequent 9 months so it looks like we're dealing with local government here, as the name of the Sheffield policeman who now trousers £140k of our taxes each year confirms. Interestingly we also find this -

Last March, we commissioned a review of the Bristol Partnership, which gave us some hard messages. Since then we have been working hard to make the changes required but at the same time keep the work going.

Hard messages? Like you're totally dysfunctional and a pointless waste of tax payers' money? Of course we, who merely paid for this review, have no business knowing what it said, but we can all guess (but see later edit). I wonder if concealing details of who the Bristol Partnership are is one of the "changes required".

What about the Green Capital Initiative then. Do we know who they are? The website seems to confirm that it is merely part of the Bristol Partnership and the only clue we have as to who runs it comes from the contact list, a bunch of bureaucrats ensconced safely out of the way at the Create-a-job Centre on the city's western fringe.

Anyway back to the Green Companion. What's that about? Firstly it's not about asking questions and provoking debate. The 'Resources' section refers to a variety of nice, fluffy 'green' websites that won't trouble your cerebral cortex with anything more taxing than reading familiarly soothing words and half-baked notions of greenness like ecojam, bristol streets and the create centre. You certainly won't find a reference to this blog, the Bristol Blogger, Bristol Traffic or anyone else asking awkward questions and encouraging people to think for themselves.

But look who we do find with pride of place in the 'Money' section of the Green Companion, none other than Hargreaves Lansdown, whose co-founders Steve Lansdown and Peter Hargreaves have prominent local profiles. Steve Lansdown of course has green plans to build a new stadium for Bristol City Football Club on greenbelt land and to turn the existing stadium site into a giant Tesco Extra supermarket with 600 car parking spaces which many locals fear will undermine the viability of that ungreen anachronism from the pre-car shopping era - North Street.



Later edit. Thanks to a link provided in the comment below by the Bristol Blogger we now have access to a copy of the 'peer' review of the Bristol Partnership - here. There was no link provided on the Bristol Partnership website as per normal practice so I wrongly concluded that it wasn't available to public scrutiny.

St George and the Dinosaur

It's been interesting to observe George Ferguson's manoeuvring on the Ashton Gate Tesco supermarket proposal. Back at the beginning of June George was giving the idea very conditional support, saying

"If we're just going to end up with a big shed and whopping car park, then the answer is 'No'. "But if Tesco are prepared to do something really special, an exemplar scheme which is carbon-zero rated, which has mixed use and which puts Tesco at the heart of a community, then I think you could end up with a much better, more profitable scheme."

If only they'd had the sense to hire George, he would surely have sorted them out with something suitably community friendly. But they didn't and in due course the entirely predictable plans for a big shed and whopping car park appeared. By June 24th George is evidently losing patience with the developers. It's reported that he supports the football club in getting high value for the site in order to make its new stadium work, but any supermarket should be part of a mixed-use community if it was to find favour with him.

"They have to grow up and recognise that that form of supermarket is a dinosaur."

Still BCFC and Tesco didn't take the hint and pressed on with their dinosaur plans. Meanwhile opposition to the Tesco plan was growing in George's manor and the inaugural meeting of BERATE (Bedminster Residents Against Tesco's Expansion into Ashton Gate) was coming up, so time for another subtle position shift. At the meeting on 3rd July George said

“There is nothing like a major threat to its future to galvanise a community. This is an appalling proposal – another giant shopping shed set in a massive sea of car parking. The potential economic and environmental damage to this area is immense."

"I fully recognise the importance of Bristol City’s success but it is quite wrong to imply that a new supermarket is something to do with the new stadium or the World Cup – the two issues have to be de-coupled. It is inappropriate and legally dubious to consider the applications for the new stadium and the new supermarket simultaneously”.

Now that last point, the importance of "de-coupling" the two planning issues (Tesco and the new stadium), is a very sound one and I'm entirely in agreement. As George says, it would be "inappropriate and legally dubious" to consider the two issues as if one was conditional on the other. But of course we know that that sort of thing happens all the time with Bristol City Council.

Indeed George may well be mindful of a very recent example concerning the redevelopment of the old Chocolate Factory in Greenbank, where the city council have decided to sell a plot of Railway Path land (the long hedgerow shown below) to the developer, Squarepeg, in contravention of its own Parks and Open Spaces policies and the results of extensive public consultation. The reason given by the council is that the planned redevelopment of the Chocolate Factory depends on the land sale (because that's what Squarepeg claimed, in exactly the same way as BCFC claim that their plans for a new stadium depend on the Tesco development proceeding).



Inexplicably there appears to be no record of George Ferguson speaking out against this earlier travesty of natural justice. Yet he must surely have known all about it, seeing as he is the architect of the Chocolate Factory project and the agent who originally arranged the land sale in a private meeting with the council's Strategic Director of City Development, David Bishop. Perhaps if George had spoken out about the Railway Path land sale being wrongly coupled with the Chocolate Factory development, his current concerns about the Tesco - New Stadium linkage might have a little more credibility.