The Armada Way tree-felling fiasco has certainly put Plymouth on the map. It was a disaster, not just for Plymouth’s canopy cover, but for our city’s reputation and the relationship between the public and the local authority, which wasn’t great to begin with.
It was described as “environmental vandalism” by many, resulting in the then leader stepping down, and it is still a hot topic of conversation in Plymouth. Even those who weren’t overly worried about losing the trees found the way it was done shocking and unforgivable.
Following the felling and subsequent legal challenges, Plymouth City Council (PCC) ordered the Armada Way Independent Learning Review (AWILR) – a £130,000 investigation to help the council learn some lessons.
It was finished in May and at the time the Chief Exec said,
“Organisations that want to be the best learn, and make sure that they do learn”.
But has this shocking episode really made PCC reflect? Do they genuinely want to learn lessons and be better? Will we finally see genuine community involvement in decision-making as recommended by the Review panel?
Well, recently they showed no evidence of this when they informed the public, with the support of our local MP, Luke Pollard, that they want to fell four mature trees to install traffic-calming measures. No details were given as to why the trees needed felling and there has been no attempt to adhere to new laws on street tree felling, which now require a public consultation to be held. In a committee meeting, one councillor made egregious claims that the trees are being felled in part because of two recent fatal accidents. It turns out that neither occurred as a result of the trees and one resulted in the conviction of a serial offender who got 6 years in prison for driving under the influence of a controlled drug. What an unbelievably cynical approach, to use these tragedies to justify tree loss.
Plymouth has a troubled relationship with street trees: good at getting rid of them, terrible at replacing them. If you have five and a half hours spare, you can view a project we recently completed on a period of this loss – Stump City. A record of the thousands of street trees removed and not replaced since Google Street View has been going. It’s a sobering watch and probably the tip of the iceberg.
Since the AWILR was completed, some local politicians have been doing their best to try and convince the public that they do actually really like trees and nature and consultations. They recently invited people to input in the creation of a well-meaning policy document on nature and people, which looks nice, but is unfortunately lacking in measurable targets.
Unfortunately, it seems the real decision-makers – the senior officers – are less interested in self-reflection.
The AWILR got off to a bad start. The PCC Monitoring Officer ensured the panel would be sympathetic by ensuring they were all serving or former senior local authority officers, rather than people from a range of backgrounds. She also made sure the terms of reference were narrow, narrower than what had been promised to the High Court and even included the proviso that it was not about blame or repercussions – just learning. No fingers would be pointed and no heads would roll. When asked whether she took responsibility for what happened, Tracey Lee, the PCC Chief Executive, said that it was a collective responsibility, and added that no, she would not meet with campaigners to build bridges.
Despite the report vindicating the issues raised by our campaign and legal challenges, STRAW campaigners, deeply affected by what happened, have received no apology. Quite the opposite, in fact, the now Council Leader, Tudor Evans (Labour), appeared to place the full blame for wasting £3.3 million on the fiasco on me, personally.
Meanwhile in Sheffield, the City Council are planning a brass plaque to go up in the Town Hall to recognise the efforts of local people who courageously fought for and saved so many street trees, who now work closely with the council to scrutinise tree works.
Once the AWILR report was complete, PCC waited until just hours before a press briefing and the council meeting before sharing it, to ensure that neither journalists nor the public had time to read the whole thing before their opportunity to ask questions.
While the report they compiled was damning, it certainly could have been a lot worse. This of course, was helped by the fact that the panel elected to speak to almost exclusively PCC officers and politicians, and only one person from what they referred to as “the other side” – myself. I led the campaign to save the trees, and my invitation to speak to the panel felt like a token gesture, perhaps to avoid potential criticism.
PCC ended up with 18 recommendations on a range of issues, many of which PCC felt they had met before the review was complete. One serious area highlighted was the project team’s failure to understand environmental responsibilities and processes. This has apparently been resolved by having the planners attend just one refresher meeting. Another box ticked.
Another area the panel found they fell short was in their approach to consultation. This was no surprise to me since it was the reason I started the campaign. So what has their response been?
PCC has recognised that they don’t have the capacity, or maybe expertise, to run public consultations, so now outsources big ones to a private company. Yet despite this recognition and comments from the AWILR panel that the Armada Way team did not carry out the felling in adherence of the most basic principles of public service, the Nolan Principles, PCC felt it appropriate for the Comms officer who was on the team, and who came to the high court to defend their actions, to write the new consultation and engagement framework.
A recent public consultation on the sale of a much-loved heritage property showed that the respondents were universally against the idea. Shortly after, PCC announced their intention to carry on regardless and claimed that they had in fact taken on board the concerns of locals who were outraged at the plan to sell not only the house, but part of the park. You have to wonder how exactly. Community groups were given no time to raise the funds and the land and house went straight to auction.
Earlier this year, PCC employed a private company to run an extensive consultation on what appears to be a very unpopular £156m road widening scheme. With still no sign of a report from the consultation six months on, the project is carrying on regardless, with millions already having been signed off for it and 12,000 households receiving letters to warn them that it’s going ahead.
So while the outcome of public consultations in Plymouth is much the same, now that it’s been privatised, it presumably just costs the taxpayer a lot more.
And consultations are not the only thing PCC has “learned” to privatise.
The AWILR panel suggested in their report that PCC involve knowledgeable local people, environmentalists and community groups in their plans going forward, to work with stakeholders to help shape the city. This feels particularly important now since PCC has recently teamed up with Homes England (HE), who plan to build 10,000 new flats in the centre, which will require significant demolition and fundamentally change the way the centre looks and feels.
I don’t know what steps PCC is taking to work with the wider range of stakeholders, but the AWILR report enthusiastically mentions their support for a now reconvened Plymouth Regeneration Forum. A regular meet-up of PCC officers and local business leaders.
One councillor said of the forum, “This can only be a good thing for the city. We are all committed to a better Plymouth, and this will help strengthen relationships to provide a better business and investment climate in Plymouth.”
But it has recently come to light that the revived Regeneration Forum has been outsourced to a local legal firm, Womble Bond Dickinson (WBD).
WBD invite businesses to “Join the conversation and help influence the future of local governance in Plymouth” and state that the group is indeed a partnership with PCC.
But since these meetings are, on paper at least, not hosted by PCC, no details of what is said or who attends these meetings can be requested via FOI. PCC has confirmed that no minutes are held by them. PCC have apparently “learned” that as long as their meetings are in someone else’s office, transparency rules don’t apply. That’s good learning. And this follows on from another recent attempt to keep information out of the public domain. Requests to see information from ongoing talks between PCC and HE were refused at the request of HE, despite the obvious public interest in the plans and finances. Luckily, the Information Commissioner’s Office weren’t impressed, and PCC and HE were ordered to be less heavy-handed with their redactions.
After our campaign group, STRAW, submitted our petition of 10,000 signatures to try and save some of the trees, we were given a clue as to the type of learning PCC had in mind. Rather than accepting that petitions are one of the very limited ways in which residents can make their voices heard, PCC had obviously had enough of them and recommended that councillors vote to change the constitution to make submitting petitions harder, insisting that they should only accept petitions raised on their own platform and not from popular platforms like Change.org. Needless to say, they haven’t had many since. So desperate were they to avoid future embarrassment, officers even wanted the opportunity for petitioners who received 5,000 signatures to speak at a council meeting to be removed. Keep in mind that this has only happened twice in more than ten years.
So yes, they are learning; they are a learning council, but apparently not learning to be better in a way that you or I might recognise, not improving transparency or accountability, but rather, they are learning to be better at getting away with things.
