Following last night’s cabinet meeting at Folkestone & Hythe District Council, our councillor and cabinent member for the environment, Lesley Whybrow, writes:
I guess it was no surprise that the Tories would vote to continue the Princes Parade project. Cllr Prater and I voted against, the rest of cabinet voted for.
I asked a lot of questions about the contamination. The consultants did admit that they couldn’t know all the contamination that was there and that testing would continue as the work progressed. The council’s contractors, BAM, have agreed to a fixed term contract under which they take on all the liability for the remediation. That does at least mean that the huge financial risk to the council is much reduced.
It doesn’t take away from the council any of the moral responsibility for the health of local residents – present and future. The consultants gave assurances about how they would monitor dust from the site. As one of the ward councillors, I will hold them to account on that.
The officer’s report was suspiciously silent on the subject of how the residential land was disposed of. It was confirmed at the meeting that it was marketed by BNP Paribas Real Estates who contacted over 40 parties , 13 of whom registered an interest. The decision was based on price but also upon other aspects such as community assets provided, the certainty of the development and the ability to meet planning requirements which would include the provision of affordable housing.
There is now a proposal to put solar panels on the leisure and some other initiatives for climate change adaptation have been included in the design. However I feel that the council could have gone much further – Exeter have built a Passivhaus leisure centre.
Incredibly a comment at the end of the officer’s report claimed an overall positive for conservation and wildlife. In my view the ecology has been destroyed. The badgers have been excluded from their setts and forced to move to a new sett in a location not of their choosing. The reptiles have been forcibly removed to a new habitat, the preparation of which involved the destruction of numerous trees and the use of herbicide. The maritime grassland which was of local ecological interest has been dug up. No thought has been given to the unprotected animals that live on this side. Nor the nesting and migrating birds and the insects.
For me the biggest remaining problem is the huge (but not unexpected) rise in the costs and how the funding gap of £6.625m will be financed. The proposal was to fund this with borrowing to be paid back by the savings from running the existing pool and the income from the new leisure centre. What the officer’s report didn’t say is that this borrowing will be over 50 years! In my opinion the leisure centre will be obsolete long before that – not least because it is not being designed to the highest possible sustainability standards – so this is an unacceptable burden to place on council tax payers.
£1.4m of funding will come from the Imperial Hotel development s106 monies for off-site affordable housing. However no additional affordable homes will be built with this money – the only affordable homes that will be built relate to those due from the Princes Parade and existing pool sites. So the end result is that Hythe loses out on some affordable homes.
The funding of the project also uses £3.150m of Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). As I said at the meeting, there needs to be a lot more transparency about how decisions about CIL are made. In February, full council will be asked to agree to the additional budget. The planning department is currently working on the discharge of the conditions to the hybrid planning application. This includes the contamination condition. I have been assured that the planning dept employ their own firm of contamination specialists for this type of work.
