Second Annual Report – The continuing campaign

In June Rovers announced that the student accommodation company Opal had withdrawn from the Commercial, Residential and Stadium Redevelopment project and that the stadium build would be delayed by a year.

It would be unwise to assume this is the end of the plans and if Rovers do find another student (or other) Accommodation Company to back the scheme then it is possible the redevelopment will be started next year. That is why, even though things appear to be safe and quiet at the moment, the members of the HorfieldROSE committee continue to work to restrain these plans.

In May HorfieldROSE met with the Ombudsman’s investigator and our thanks go to him for giving us the opportunity to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of our complaint against Bristol City Council’s original planning permission of January 2007. Our thanks also go to the many residents who contributed to the HorfieldROSE complaint, and to those who wrote directly to the Ombudsman’s office. Except to say that the Investigation is ongoing, we have no further information at the present time.

Much work has been done during the year: we have met with Councillors and Officers from the Transport and Planning departments, and have continued to voice our concerns about the suitability of such a large development for this area. We have highlighted the increased density of population and traffic that will come from the development of Southmead Hospital, the Cricket Ground and the various housing projects proposed for the area.

The current situation is that, as no stadium building work is taking place, the mitigation measures (i.e. Residents Parking Zone, Stadium Monitoring Group, Park and Ride, etc.) which were obligations on Bristol Rovers Football Club from the first planning application, do not have to be implemented.

Two of our committee members recently attended a meeting with Bristol City Council, police, traffic safety officers, local Councillors and representatives from the Football Club to discuss parking and traffic control issues. The emphasis is on keeping the area immediately surrounding the Stadium clear for emergency vehicles and spectators. Match day restrictions will be put in place during the season, any permanent measures being subject to public consultation. Please do respond to the Council during the consultation period as measures set up now may well become a precedent.

We have asked for clarification on who pays for these measures, how they will be enforced, and how consultation will be effected. Any concerns you have should be addressed to your local Councillor.

The clamping measures for those who park illegally on Horfield Common are a success and thanks, again, go to everyone who sent in their views on the issue – things can be changed with persistence.

We will fight on and continue to abide by the principles on which we were founded:

1. The protection of the local environment and the amenity of residents in Horfield and Bishopston against unacceptable impacts of stadium development and activity,

2. Support for sport in general and the Bristol teams in particular. Our opposition is to the development plans, not the teams themselves.

3. Campaign in an inclusive manner, working with all involved and remaining politically unaligned.

Back to Basics

In a long running campaign like this it is easy to get caught up in the day to day aspects and then to forget the primary reasons for things.

HorfieldROSE and other people who oppose this stadium plan are not anti-sport. Many of the members of HorfieldROSE are football or rugby supporters, but when one looks at all of the factors in these plans the detrimental aspects far outweigh the benefits. There are many good reasons for wanting a new and better stadium, but not just any stadium because the one that is being planned, is not good for Bristol, it is not good for the clubs, the fans or the resident's who will have to live with it.

The Wrong Location

When the Memorial Ground was established in 1921 in memory of all those who had died in WWI, it was a set of rugby pitches with a covered wooden terrace stand in an established Victorian residential area near the edge of the city. Both players and spectators would be drawn from the surrounding area and most would arrive on foot.

Times have changed and so has the city. Nearly a century of development and the Memorial Ground is now land locked in a huge sprawl of housing suburbs. Attendees to matches now come from much greater distances, cars are the primary mode of transport, and sport has become much more commercial.

All of these factors make the site less appropriate for today's needs. All seater stadiums are always bigger than terraced stadiums with the same capacity. Changing the stadium from mainly terraced to all seater and at the same time increasing the capacity by 50% makes the necessary structure significantly larger completely filling the site. This is not good for the neighbours of the stadium, but it also means that the stadium will not be able to expand, gives no area outside the stadium for activities and also presents crowd management and safety issues.

Despite being near a showcase bus route, there are simply not enough buses passing to bring even a fifth of the fans to a sold out match, so most fans are forced to drive. The stadium is two miles from any dual carriage roads and the A and B roads that do come near the stadium become clogged and congested very quickly especially around junctions.

Large numbers of people coming by car means there is a huge demand for parking. Currently the non-residenttial roads around the common soak up a large number of the cars coming into the area. But as the numbers increase, fans will be forced to park further and further from the stadium.

The increased congestion and time it will take for people to find parking spaces will not only detract from the experience of the stadium users but also presents a real hazard to safety in the area and restricts the ability of emergency vehicles to move within and through the area. This will be even more important after the E&A moves from Frenchay hospital to Southmead hospital.

Time to consider other sites

In 2002 a search for an alternative site within the Bristol City Council boundary was done and this concluded that there were no available alternative sites. Six years have passed and many things have changed. Bristol City FC managed to find a new site last year.

Avonmouth had been ruled out because it is on the flood plane, but this week a bread factory has been granted permission there and other developments have also been allowed by the Environment Agency.

The eastern fringe of the city is also being developed on greenfield land around Emersons Green.

A stadium in any of these areas would have room to expand, and better road links. Any search that considered sites in parts of Bristol covered by South Gloucester Council would increase the number of possible sites dramatically.

Current Plans not good for Bristol, Fans or Residents

Bristiol

The current plans are described as a £40 million stadium but less than half of that is going on the stadium and the rest goes into the student accommodation, hotel, offices and so on. This is not going to be a great stadium by anyone's standards.

Bristol needs good sporting venues and it would be good if these could also be used for other large events like concerts. However, because of the inappropriate location of the Memorial Stadium, other uses are being restricted by conditions in the planning permission. Even if they were not, the same transport problems would plague visitors to other events as well. At least as regular visitors sports fans would know the area better than visitors to occasional events.

Since the site is not city centre getting to it by public transport is difficult. Since most bus routes go to the centre, anyone not already on the showcase bus route will have to travel into the centre, change buses and then head up the Gloucester Road. This is why people drive instead. Since driving is inevitable, it would be much better to find a site that is either central or has better transport links.

As mentioned before, there are only two A&E departments within Bristol and to have one of them snarled up in match day traffic jams will not be of benefit to the city.

The Fans

No one would deny the poor state of the current facilities, but the fans and the clubs will not be well served by better facilities in the wrong location.

At 18,500 capacity, the stadium is much bigger than the current one, but not big by Championship league standards. The stadium could be a serious impediment to advancement because it already fills the site and cannot be expanded, and the student accommodation will make it impossible to sell the site and move in the future. If the plans are built it will be the last stadium Rovers will ever own and it will never be bigger than 18,500.

And that assumes it gets built. Even now this project has cost the club in terms of money spent getting it this far, disruption to the sale of tickets due to uncertainty about where the teams will be playing. And by taking on an overambitious project and failing to deliver the Rovers board leaves yet more fans disenchanted with the whole experience. Considering how well the team has done over the last year it is a shame that this project sours that success.

Residents

One of the key things that many people forget is that this is not just a larger stadium, it is a stadium with a student block, hotel, offices and other uses bundled with it. This is no longer just about a better sporting venue, this is a large commercial development.

This changes a lot of things. One of the consolations for living near a stadium is that it is essentially dormant 300 days of the year.

The student blocks (which will essentially be the outer walls of the stadium) will be seven storeys high and have literally hundreds of windows on each side looking down into the back gardens of the surrounding houses on all four sides. The roof trusses of the stadium will be a couple of meters short of the height of Cabot Tower. This is an extremely tall building bang in the middle of Victorian terraced homes.

An additional 546 students in the area will change the character of the area and will generate more journeys. Local pubs and restaurants will be overrun by students because there is no break out space or recreational area for students on the stadium site. Also as a living facility the number of lorries servicing the building for deliveries, refuse collection and so on will increase dramatically and every day of the year.

Summary

Everyone deserves a better stadium than this. The city needs something it can be proud of, that people can get to easily and that can be used for sports and other activities. The club needs a venue that will be able to grow with its successes and will not be an impediment to fans because parking is too miserable, or indeed because ticket prices at an all seater venue prove to be prohibitive.

Hopefully, the recent withdrawal of Opal will provide time for reflection and opportunities for a different and better plan in a more suitable location.

Opal Student Accommodation Abandons Stadium Project

Update

This story has been covered in most of the media this evening. 

Also the "quote" from HorfieldROSE member Toby Lewis in the Evening Post article is a very crude paraphrase and not a direct quote (what is printed in the paper does not even make logical sense). The point being made was that HorfieldROSE has always contended that this is the wrong site for the stadium because of the lack of transport infrastructure such as parking and transport, and that it would have been better for this to be stopped through a logical decision rather than financial difficulties.


The following statement has appeared on the Bristol Rovers web site today:

The directors of Bristol Rovers Football Club have recently been made aware that the preferred student accommodation provider negotiating the stadium regeneration is no longer able to progress the project.

As a result the club has entered into negations with an alternative provider.

A further statement will be made next week.

The preferred student accomodation provider was Opal and it was Opal that was to provide £32 million of the funds for the stadium redevelopment (£8 was to be found).

Opal has been in the frame for a very long time and were involved in the S106 negotiations on the previous planning application that was signed this January. Bringing in a new company at this late stage is unlikely to be easy.

One of the key things about Opal is that they do not currently have any student properties in Bristol and this was their foot in the door. Other companies such as Unite which do operate in Bristol will be less willing to pay such a large sum for the student block at the Memorial Stadium.

The other thing to consider is why Opal, who have been very committed to the project, have pulled out. This surely has to do with their ability to raise this sort of finance in the current economic environment. If Opal are finding it difficult then other companies will too.

On Friday 16 May Bristol Community Radio 93.2FM Rovers director Edward Ware said that tenders from the building contractors were due to be received on "Monday week" (which oddly meant the bank holiday Monday, 26 May 2008). Either Mr Ware got his dates wrong or the Rovers board have decided not to share the value of the tenders yet.

The £40 million cost for the stadium is only the Rovers own estimate. The actual bids that the building contractors may return could be higher than this. Perhaps this is what has brought things to a head with Opal, if they were being pressed for even more to finance the build.

Once again fans are left in the dark by the Rovers board. It will be very interesting to hear the "further announcement" by the Rovers board next week.

Rovers in the News

Rovers have been in the papers quite a bit over the last two weeks, and not just on the sports pages. The article on Friday 2 May 2008 "How Rovers Paid Up In Stadium Bid" is quite odd. The article blames the 12 months of delays to the stadium development, in part, on a financial settlement with ex-directors of the club.

"A club spokesman claimed one reason for the delay - which, he said, could not be revealed to the public while it was going on last year - was an issue over the purchase from former directors Colin Williams and Mike Turl of the two houses and of shares held in the club."

It is not clear why it could not be revealed, and the strange thing is that this issue was covered in much greater detail in a Western Daily Press article on 14 October 2006, three months before the planning application even went to the planning committee. So the issues were already very much in the public domain and basically amount to the repayment of loans made by the ex-directors to the club. No big controversy.

On Tuesday 29 April 2008 the article "Gas Opt For Cheltenham" contained several surprises. First was the cost of building the stadium had increased a further £5 million bringing the total to £40 million. This is still only an estimate and the actual cost will not be known until the club receives bids from the three contractors that have been asked to tender. The firm Balfour Beatty (which bought Cowlins last year) has declined to bid "for purely commercial reasons".

The second surprise was Nick Higgs saying "We will be looking to get back here as soon as possible. Maybe with just three sides of the ground finished". This would mean the south stand within the stadium would not be built, probably ever. The new stadium building almost completely fills the stadium site with only a single lane road going around the perimeter of the site. All traffic entering the site including cars, deliveries, refuse collection and emergency vehicles will have to follow this road around the building as there is no turning room anywhere.

It would therefore be impossible to have any construction work going on while the building is in use because no traffic would be able to use the perimeter road. Access for cranes and movement of large structural elements would be problematic. Conceivably the whole facility (including the student flats and hotel) could be shut down in the summer but it will be far more costly to construct the south stand after the building was put into use and so becomes that much less likely to happen.

The third surprise was Higgs saying "that 80 per cent of the project would be financed by the building of student accommodation for 546 people, with the rest of the balance to come from commercial letting." The deal with Opal (the company that will buy and run the student flats) is not signed and even they will be affected by the current economic climate. But the remaining 20 percent of £40 million (which is £8 million) will be from "commercial letting". Big money for a company with a turnover last year of £4.9 million, a profit of £740k and debts of £2.7 million.

Since no buyers have come forward for the hotel, serious questions should be asked about how this further £8 million will be raised and what assets will be sold or mortgaged to get the money. Will Rovers actually own anything after all the contracts are signed?

Seeing the reader comments on all of these articles, fans are obviously not impressed and feel they are being lied to and kept in the dark about what is really going on at the club. Delay after delay for the start of stadium work is being supported by feeble excuses such as "negotiations over public art" and now "two pre-season friendlies" and "buying back properties from ex-directors". As one fan said in the Evening Post comments section "Come on Evening Post, get on with some proper journalism and find out what's really going on? They must think we are stupid."

Ombudsman to Conduct Interviews

The Ombudsman's Investigator has recently contacted HorfieldROSE and has confirmed that, after discussing our complaint against Bristol City Council with the Local Government Ombudsman, he has been asked to visit Bristol in June to investigate our complaints in more detail.

This is obviously a major step forward in the Ombudsman's consideration of the 44 complaints sent to Bristol City Council last year, and the additional documentation sent to the Ombudsman over the last 12 months in support of the original complaints.

We understand the Investigator will be meeting with Council Officers and Councillors, and possibly those residents of Bishopston and Horfield who sent letters to the Ombudsman in support of the main HorfieldROSE complaint, during his visit.

It is probable the Investigator will also be interviewing members of the HorfieldROSE committee.

Whilst the Ombudsman's investigation concerns the previous planning permission for the residential, commercial and stadium development at the Memorial Ground the importance of the decision to investigate further cannot be underestimated.

The HorfieldROSE committee intends to co-operate fully with the requirements of the Investigator during his visit to the City, and we will be informing HorfieldROSE members of the arrangements closer to the date(s) of his visit.

An Unwelcome Decision

On the 2nd April the Council's Development Control (North) Committee meeting again decided to approve the residential, commercial and stadium development at the Memorial Ground.

We believe the reason for the re-submission of the development application was due to changes to the design of the building being deemed significant enough to warrant a new planning application.

Residents attended the meeting and a number of statements read to the committee opposing the development plans. Many of the arguments against the proposals were on noise, loss of daylight, overlooking, sustainability, privacy and environmental, issues but the arguments were in the main, ignored by the committee.

It fact, there were a number of non-planning issues raised by Council Officers which influenced much of the discussion by the Councillors present, and after reviewing the minutes and video of the meeting, the HorfieldROSE committee has decided to make a formal complaint to the Council over these issues.

The main points of the complaint are as follows :

• Committee Members were advised before their consideration of the redevelopment proposal that, if the decision was refused, the Council could face substantial Legal Costs. This statement focused member’s attention on possible legal action against the Council rather than on the merits of the planning application.
• The Local government Ombudsman’s continuing investigation into the previous planning application (06/03850/F) was also raised a number of times during the course of the meeting. This matter is not a planning issue and should not have been raised by the legal officer or any committee member, as a view on the possible outcome of the Ombudsman’s investigations could, and possibly did, influence the decision making process.
• The Council failed to publish a number of updated design detail drawings on the public website, and this denied the community access to, and the opportunity to comment on, new revisions to the development design.
• Outstanding issues surrounding the submitted air quality report had not been addressed, the Council still awaiting a full response from the developer's air quality consultant. The proposed Conditions could not therefore be tested against a credible air quality report.
• No Environmental Impact Assessment had been carried out. The presented traffic and air quality assessments were considered sufficient information by the Council to substitute for an Environmental Impact Assessment for the previous planning application, but both these assessments now appear to be flawed and therefore fail to address environmental impacts of the development as qualified by national and EU policy.
• Noise conditions proposed for the previous application (06/03850/F) and carried over for this application, are not fit for purpose. A noise assessment had been completed for the stadium itself but not for noise associated with on site traffic and from the enabling developments. These additional assessments should have been carried out and considered in the course of processing the application, to provide greater certainty on the noise issues. There is the possibility the existing conditions may not be capable of being complied with and therefore compromise the permission.
• No information on the sustainability of the current proposal was provided to the committee. Sustainability of a development of the scale proposed is a major planning matter, but the changes to the build process (except in the reduction in the number of loads of spoil to be removed from the site) and the re-arrangement of the enclosed space was not considered in terms of long term sustainability of the development.

Many issues associated with the new development such as increased height of parts of the development, loss of daylight to properties on Alton Road, reduced sustainability due to increased use of precast concrete and re-arrangement of internal accommodation, overlooking, etc. have been raised through correspondence prior to the committee meeting, but were not addressed in ay detailed way.

According to the Council's code of conduct on Development Control matters, "When dealing with planning matters only material planning considerations should be taken into account. Section 54(A) of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 requires all planning applications to be determined by reference to the Development Plan, if material to the application, and any other material consideration."

The events of the committee meeting has raised deep misgivings amongst those residents who attended the meeting, perhaps even more than after the planning meeting of January 2007. The HorfieldROSE committee has therefore decided to seek advice on the soundness of the planning decision from elsewhere.
We will report on this matter when we have more information.

HorfieldROSE committee.

Disappointed but not Surprised

Yesterday (2 April 2008) the Bristol City Council Development Control Committee met to make decisions on a couple of planning applications including the revised plans for the Memorial Stadium.

We were disappointed, although not surprised, that the decision was once again to approve the plans for the commercial, residential and stadium development at the Memorial Ground site.

It was basically a fait accompli when Bryan Cadman of the Planning department explained to the councillors that since this was only a revision of the previous plans which were approved, Rovers could challenge the decision legally if the new plans were refused permission. In this light five of the councillors expressed grave concerns about height, shadowing, noise, pollution and the lack of disabled parking but then voted in favour.

All of these issues were raised with the previous planning application and sadly most of them were glossed over, or simply ignored. Many issues had never been satisfactorily quantified such as air quality and noise assessments. In short the scale of the impacts was never given sufficient consideration and all sacrificed for the vague notion of "the general good".

It is actually a sad day for the fans too. During both this application and the previous two the inappropriateness of the current site of the stadium has been acknowledge by all concerned.

Transport in the area is good for a residential area but inadequate for large volumes of visitors at larger matches, even with the laughable transport mitigation measures. Parking at current attendee levels is possible because of the non-residential roads around the common, but this will not scale up as attendee numbers increase. Like filling a bottle under a tap, it starts slowly but once the capacity in the main vessel is used the water races up the neck of the bottle.

Fans will find that unless they arrive four or five hours before a match they will have to park in areas much much further from the stadium than they are used to. This not only makes the experience for the fans less pleasant but may also deter the less dedicated fans from attending which ultimately hurts the club's income the the whole rationale for the increased stadium capacity.

The student flats and hotel have taken up a significant amount of space within the stadium site which precludes future expansion for the stadium. As many fans have noted 18,500 seats is a bit small for a Championship league stadium. This effectively draws a line over the ambitions of the club and suggests that it really has no plans to advance past League One. Had the club considered alternative sites and sold the Memorial Ground for residential development the club could have kept its options open. If the proposals actually get built, the club will find that it is stuck with a stadium it cannot sell and wont even own the the student flats because these are being sold off in advance to raise the finance for the build. If an alternative site did present itself at a later date, the club will not be able to move from the current site. What a shame.

The redevelopment proposals are also very disruptive to the current business of the club. We have heard rumours that even the club's board is not unanimous on whether the plans should be implemented. Once again fans face the prospect of buying season tickets without knowing where home matches will be played. Also nearly two full seasons of playing in exile will be detrimental to club morale and finances and may hinder the current progress the team is making within the leagues.

Last year when the last planning application was being decided the word that kept coming up was "sustainability". The student rooms were to be prefabricated off site and assemble at the ground offering efficient used of materials and reducing wasteage. The insulation of the building was to exceed building regulations by 10%. There was even an article in the Evening Post suggesting that wind turbines could be placed on the roof.

This year, the plans involve the student flats being constructed from cast concrete which is one of the most environmentally damaging building materials (because concrete is made by burning limestone at extreme temperatures, 1560C, which takes lots of fuel). No mention of the 10% better insulation than building regulations was made this time round, and the solar gain of the building will be reduced by changes in the position of rooms. And the wind turbines, well, no one took that article seriously.

The proposals were presented as a scaled down version of the previous plans, which was very misleading. As we have explained in an earlier post the hotel has always had 84 rooms and this has not changed, but the number of stadium hospitality boxes (which could be used by the hotel as extra rooms) has been reduced. There have always been 546 student bedrooms. They were divided into 106 flats before but have now been divided into 99 flats. That just means more students crammed into each flat, the external impact of the students will be the same. The height, despite claims has gone up with the plans as submitted in January and revisions since have increased them further. The hotel block is 3m taller, the turrets on the north side are taller, the north east corner is taller, the arched trusses are taller. The south corners have been drawn in away from the boundary wall, but the central section of the south side remains at the old position and now leans out closer to the boundary wall.

They have removed the conference centre but intend to use the restaurant for conferences instead. Just removing a dedicated room within the building has no external impact when the same function will take place at the stadium, but simply in a different room. The retail shop will be reduced in size by five square meters (only 1% of the total area) which is so insignificant it hardly bares mentioning.

The reductions they did not highlight were the education centre which is reduced to less than half the size of last years plans. The crèche too is to be halved in size.

There are also serious safety concerns that have not been fully addressed. The perimeter road that will be added around the outside of the stadium will be so narrow that it has to be a one way road and there will be no places which will allow turning or passing.

The fire department has stated that it will not be able to get a fire engine with a tall ladder (a large appliance as it is called) around the building. Access to the south, west and north sides of the building could become severely restricted if there was any kind of obstruction or debris in the roadway.

Evacuating the stadium also raises some concerns. Because the building itself now fills so much of the site, there will be little standing room outside the stadium building within the stadium site. This will make it harder for fans to exit the building before other fans have exited the site. During a mass exit, emergency vehicles such as fire engines or ambulances would not be able to enter the grounds and fire fighters and paramedics would have to proceed "on foot" and against the flow of spectators.

The surrounding area to will be placed at risk by cars parked illegally on street corners. This reduces visibility and makes driving and walking in the area more hazardous. But the main concern is that emergency vehicles are large and require clear corners to turn into many roads. Residents with chronic conditions such as heart disease or acute asthma who may frequently need to be collected by ambulance live in fear. And accidents can happen to anyone.

This is not the end of the story. There will be another S106 to be hammered out with the council. Rovers have not yet signed a deal with Opal the student letting firm which will buy the student flats and provide the finance for the project. With an unsettled property market and other economic gloom, this deal becomes less certain. Rovers board may also decide that this is not the right time to cash in the family silver and will save their most precious asset, the Memorial Ground, for when they actually need the capacity and are in a stronger financial position to build a better stadium at a more suitable site. The fact that Bristol City Football Club can find a new site shows that it is possible and we can all take heart in that.

Picture credit: Title: Bristol Council Photo by: FatMandy Licence: CC NonCommercial NoDerivs License

Thanks to all who attended the public meeting

Thank you very much to everyone who came along to the meeting this evening. It is very encouraging to see the continued strength of feeling among the residents and to know that the endless process of applications has not dented the resistance.

We would still like to increase the number of letters of objection so if you have not yet written please do so this weekend and ensure you post or email them by Monday.

Please send letters of objection with your name and address to
Ref: application no. 08/00061/F

north.planning@bristol.gov.uk

or to the case officer

Kit Stokes,
Brunel House,
St. Georges Road,
BS1 5UY

Letters of objection will be counted by the planning department and the number of letters of objection and support will be stated at the development control meeting.

You can increase the impact of your letter by also sending it in as a statement which will be included in the pack of statements given to the councillors the day before the development control meeting. Unlike letters of objection, the councillors will actually be expected to read all of the statements before the meeting.

Submitting a statement would also give you a theoretical right to speak at the meeting, but there will be a large number of statements and so only a limited number of people will actually get an opportunity to speak. There is no obligation to speak if you do submit a statement.


Please send your statements including your name and address to

Ref: application no. 08/00061/F

democratic.services@bristol.gov.uk

Bristol City Council
Democratic Services
Council House,
College Green,
Bristol
BS1 5TR

A question was raised about access to the documents for the previous application. Thse can be found on the council web site at the following address:

http://e2eweb.bristol-city.gov.uk/publicaccess/tdc/DcApplication/application_detailview.aspx?caseno=J5S2VVDNK0000

Follow the tab for "Associated Documents" The previous application number was 06/03850/F

Public Meeting Friday 28 March 7:30PM

Horfield ROSE are hosting a public meeting to discuss the situation with the residential, commercial, and stadium development at Memorial Ground redevelopment.

The meeting will be held at the Horfield Methodist Church Hall, entrance on the side on Churchways Avenue (the same entrance used on Polling days) at 7:30PM Friday 28th March 2008.

The officers report has been published and it gives us serious concerns about the way this application is being treated.

The Development Control Committee meeting to decide this application is currently scheduled to take place at 6PM on Wednesday 2 April 2008.

If you cannot attend please send all your letters of objection,
Ref: application no. 08/00061/F by 28 March to

north.planning@bristol.gov.uk

or to the case officer
Kit Stokes,
Brunel House,
St. Georges Road,
BS1 5UY

or use Council’s website, www.bristol-city.gov.uk/planning

Please add your name and address to validate.

PLEASE COME ALONG & TELL YOUR NEIGHBOURS!!!!

Clamping on the Common Starts Sunday

Well done to everyone who has been lobbying local councillors, MPs, the Police and others about the illegal parking around the area, particularly on match days.

Our persistence has paid off and the damage caused to the Common, which is nothing short of vandalism and shows the deep disrespect that match-day visitors have for the area, is thankfully now being dealt with as a matter of urgency.

A company has been appointed with clamp and tow away powers, with associated fines being imposed. We are assured that there will be a rigorous system put into place. Please continue to be vigilant and let the company know if illegal parking is occurring. Signs will be displayed with a contact number.

The illegal and often dangerous parking on the streets is a matter for Bristol City Council and The Police and we are hoping that with your continued lobbying, photographs and reports of index numbers they will be inspired to follow this excellent initiative. There have already been incidents where emergency vehicles have been badly delayed because of parking and traffic congestion in the area and we are trying to make sure an accident does not become a tragedy. We shall continue to fight for the safety of this community.

We hope this will encourage you continue to object to aspects of the New Stadium Application that could affect you. It is still a totally unsuitable development for this area with regard to size, noise, parking, traffic and will greatly affect the quality of our lives.

Map of Horfield Common: No parking for anyone on the green bits.