Bleeding heads, bureaucracy and brick walls

Jock — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:48:04 +0000

Way back when, when I was once a city councillor, I did take quite an interest in the development of the Town Hall. It's a great building, built by public subscription in the late nineteenth century to be the civic centerpiece of the city to match the grandeur of the university's buildings all around it. I imagine it was a vibrant place, all lit up most evenings with balls and dinners. It has housed the main courthouse in its time and the main city library. It was the drill hall presumably for the locally raised militia. All sorts of things have gone on there.

There are all sorts of unused spaces, and it has become a little frayed at the edges and no longer truly responsive to the city's needs for modern twenty-first century entertainments. It's a dark blot on the city's main central crossroads. A site probably worth much more than it is on the books for. A fantastic opportunity. And I've kept in touch with the progress of various schemes to redevelop it over the years with interest.

I took a proposal to them from a shopping centre developer who was interested in developing the unused lower floors to sympathetically produce retail space that might help draw people in. And I took part in a consultation exercise back at about Christmas time 2005. And the one additional comment I made on my response was that in Open Capital Partnerships I believed I had a mechanism that would allow the City Council to carry out their redevelopment proposals without handouts and that I was very willing to help explain the idea to people.

So to say that I was pissed off when I saw this last week in the Oxford Mail/Times...

Council abandons plans for £9m Town Hall revamp

...was something of an understatement. Now I am sure people think that many of my financial ideas are completely barking mad. But when a citizen offers a positive possibility, surely the state and its representatives ought to at least hear them out. As it is, what was going to be an all singing redevelopment costing £9m is now going to be a lick of paint and a few new doors costing £1-2m. And that is still somewhat dependent on getting a handout from a lottery or heritage fund.

I was talking about a scheme that would not rely on subsidy and rent seeking, but bring money into the Town Hall as a viable investment for people, for the partners in the development. So I still reckon I could find a way of financing significantly more than what's been proposed this morning. But do they ask? Do they heck. A triumph of bureaucracy. There are so many ways according to the book of doing something and nothing else.

And of course councillors, being amateurs, in the best sense of the word - lay people - do not necessarily know to look elsewhere. When you see a report you assume, most of the time, that all avenues have been explored, and by people paid more than you to do just that. Six years ago one of the favourite meeting bingo phrases was "out of the box thinking". When the box is drawn by official experts who are not rewarded for taking the risk of innovation, and robustly built, it's very difficult to think outside of it.

Yet councillors are probably the only people who could get through. Unless they are actually invited, other experts and the general public seem viewed with suspicion - after all, most of the time when you consult, you only get responses from people with objections. I suppose I should just accept that however I put my suggestion over it didn't reach the right people. But I hope the possibility of resurrecting it is not now closed.

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Bleeding heads, bureaucracy and brick walls