The council’s Policy and Resources Committee approved the City Downland Estate Plan at its most recent meeting. This ambitious plan governs the future of the 12,500 acres of downland owned by Brighton and Hove City Council, most of which is tenanted farmland situated within the South Downs National Park.
The South Downs National Park Authority has been inviting its landowners to create “whole estate plans” – and the plan for Brighton and Hove is the product of one of the most extensive consultations ever carried out by the council.
For the past two years, council officers have worked with residents, farmers and representatives from groups and organisations across the city and beyond to create the plan.
To produce a draft, they collated over 31,000 comments and ideas. A further round of public consultation followed this summer.
Key objectives of the plan include improving accessibility, reversing the loss of biodiversity and working towards (and beyond) net zero carbon emissions. The plan identifies short, medium and long-term actions to support the achievement of these objectives.
The council has set up a Downland Advisory Panel to advise on the plan’s implementation. This is made up of tenant farmers, stakeholder organisations (such as the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, South Downs National Park Authority and Sussex Wildlife Trust) and community organisations such as the Brighton Downs Alliance, as well as councillors.
I am personally immensely proud of the work on the plan which has been done on a cross-party basis. It was therefore disappointing to see Conservative councillors forget their normally vocal commitment to protecting the downland and urban fringe sites and vote against the plan.
While Labour councillors did support it, they introduced an amendment ringfencing the proceeds of any disposals from the downland estate for reinvestment in it.
On the face of it, that sounds attractive. But it ties the council’s hands ahead of what all councillors know are going to be more challenging budget decisions than we have faced for decades.
The council’s chief finance officer stepped in to advise against this but that advice went unheeded. Unfortunately, such behaviour is precisely what has landed other local authorities in difficulties in recent years.
In this case, our Labour colleagues have not yet made the connection between budget reports and practical decisions.
Not that Conservative councillors were any better in this respect. Not only did they support this ill-considered amendment while voting against the plan itself, they also called for a report on the legal protections affecting urban fringe sites within the City Plan.
Such a report would only ever represent a snapshot of the legal position – which could have changed in any case by the time any individual site becomes the subject of a planning application.
The officer advice was that this report would add £50,000 to this year’s overspend. And yet, once again, Conservative and Labour councillors voted for it, with no thought for the services that might need to be shaved to pay for this.
With inflation at a 41-year high and the cost of gas, electricity and materials soaring, it is no wonder that, over the next two years, it is projected that 60 per cent of councils across the country will become unable to balance their budgets.
Councils are being asked to make cuts just at the time when demand for services is likely to increase, given the “cost of living crisis”.
What councils need is a three-year budget settlement from central government. This would allow councils to plan. We also need an end to the government practice of having local authorities bidding against each other for inadequate pots of funding.
And of course, we need increased investment in services for the most vulnerable, particularly adult and children’s social care, as opposed to empty claims that the government has “fixed” adult social care.
Green councillors are committed to serving our residents, to supporting them in this time of need with policies that encourage people to keep active and healthy, and that allow our city and its residents to flourish.
But to pass a budget that makes the best for the city of the horrible situation we are in, we need Labour and Conservative colleagues to appreciate the seriousness of the situation and accept some financial responsibility. That is the least that should be expected of any political party with aspirations to leading the city next year.
Councillor Siriol Hugh-Jones is the Green deputy leader of Brighton and Hove City Council.
Don’t you dare talk about financial prudence when your party has wasted so much taxpayers money!
A £50k overspend is loose change by comparison with what the totally dysfunctional Green councillors have allowed officers to overspend with apparently no knowledge/nous, questions, oversight or scrutiny. Officers’ overspend runs into many millions (mainly on staff costs during a period when many staff have been WFH and there has still been no explanation of who these staff were, what they did, why there was a massive overspend and why, despite the overspend, already poor services deteriorated beyond the pale,plus we now have an unexplained overspend on council housing repairs, which apparently resulted from the decision to bring all this back in house – with the result that contractors are now having to be hired to sort out the mess.) In the first instance, council officers bear the responsibility for the chaos, BUT, the alleged political controllers are equally culpable here and should be thrown out next May. There may be, somewhere in B&H, a Green councillor who is actually a competent person, but, if so, there has been no evidence of that at all over the last couple of years.
At full council yesterday, every council failing was blamed on Tory austerity. Every. Single. One. Everything is someone else’s fault with this utter shambles of a council. Zero accountability. Joke.
Typical lefties – always blame central Govt cuts and austerity – yet in that same period of time – my council tax has virtually doubled.
And what does this hopeless, woke council give me for my money – virtue signalling, and vanity projects that no-one wants.
Brighton and Hove is an absolute tip, do your job and serve residents by delivering basic services.
So-Called progressive
The Greens financially responsible? Don’t think so!
All those who bang on constantly about Tory austerity as an excuse for total B&H council incompetence should perhaps consider how this came about. The answer is that it came about from a Labour Government and the unelected Gordon Brown, his total mismanagement of almost everything and the need for the succeeding Govt to attempt to rectify matters.
Starmer is now taking advice from Brown on how to reform the House of Lords, which is a total red herring as far as normal people are concerned. Yes, it should be reformed, but it is hardly the priority.
Greens are totally irrelevant in all this, as they are almost everywhere else in the UK -and yet they apparently ‘control’ B&H – BY DEFAULT. Not for much longer, one hopes.
Lol that’s oh so true yet who’s going to pay for this Kingsway to the sea vanity project us the wonderful tax payers to bail them out