Articles by David Hewson

With the release of Saved, the book of the glorious Wye campaign, our job here is finally done. There will be no more articles — and this time we mean it. Our thanks go out to all of you who’ve helped, particularly the many who had to do so anonymously. It was a fine victory, and one we trust will give hope to others in similar situations, in both urban and rural locations.

For those of you who want a flavour of the book, you will find some comments on it from a few well-known figures below, and at the foot of this article the entire foreword by Roy Greenslade, the leading media commentator and Professor of Journalism at City University, London, whose concise, frank summary of this story is an admirable starting point for anyone new to the Wye saga.

Copies of the book can also be ordered online here. Thank you all… and now goodnight.

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We have been asked to point out a serious error in the election literature for Wye which has, say college insiders, caused great anxiety to students in the village. In his latest election leaflet Councillor Ian Cooling states, ‘The students studying the Applied Business degree who graduate this year, will be the last to be awarded a London University/Imperial College degree. Future degrees will be awarded by the UoK (University of Kent).’

This is entirely wrong. According to an insider within Wye College, ‘the statement will cause great anxiety to our own students; they do speak to the locals and hear all the rumours. We have had to spend a lot of time and energy assuring them that they (and their education) are protected from all the disruption caused by Imperial’s actions’.

The true situation is that all students currently studying at Wye will receive London University/Imperial College degrees whenever they graduate. Some are working on four-year degree courses which will not finish until 2010. They will not receive UoK degrees. Only students who start to study in Wye from next September will be given UoK degrees when they complete their studies.

Wye College staff are particularly puzzled by the mistake given that Councillor Cooling boasts in the same election leaflet that he is a member of the Court of the University of Kent and ‘I shall be keeping a close eye on all this’.

Note to readers: while we will welcome comments on save-wye for the next few days we still do not allow anonymous ones or those using false names. Please — real names only.

The lives and careers of some of those involved in the Wye Park saga have changed somewhat recently, in ways that happened too late to be included in the first edition of the book. Here is where things stand now with some of the key characters…

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I’m delighted to say that we’ve reached the stage where you can now order a copy of SAVED, the book of the Wye campaign, for immediate despatch on release date on April 7. But please only do this if you can’t be in the village around this time. We are planning a launch event for that day, Easter Saturday, which will be a farmers’ market too. And there will be books on sale in the village after too. So if you’d prefer a signed copy and a chat please come along and see us on the day.

I hope to be able to bring you firm news of publication dates and launch details for SAVED, the book on the Wye campaign shortly. If you want to make sure you get it all first you can now sign up for a free occasional newsletter which will deliver it by e-mail.

To get this just drop by the page on my own web-site and fill in the form — you can easily unsubscribe there too. Details of the book will be published on this page from now on. Here is a preview of the latest cover, with a beautiful photograph by Steve Bloom.

For more information head off here…

I thought I’d seen everything when it came to crappy journalism and the Kentish Express. But today’s issue really takes the biscuit for the paper that never saw fit to cover the Wye Park story with any degree of dedication, or even print the horrifying development plan which we revealed here back in August.

Before any of you begin to believe there’s a grain of truth in the above drivel may I please point out the following…

• The book on this sorry saga which appears in April is entirely fact, not fiction. I wouldn’t dream of novelising a story which I regard as deeply serious and a continuing scandal, not least because of its suspiciously dismal coverage in the local media.
• save-wye was never ‘the villagers’ main mouthpiece’ during this turbulent period, nor did we seek to be. That was the job of Wye Future Group and they did it with great dedication and a lot of hard work.
• No-one from the KE contacted me about this story before putting this rubbish into print. Had they done so, I would have made clear all of these above points and anything else that puzzled them.
• As most of you will know already, neither of us actually lives in Wye. We’re up the hill, not that that means we care any the less.

‘Turning fact into fiction’ seems a very appropriate headline for this story indeed. In fact it could be applied to a great deal of what passes for journalism in the Kentish Express. They did spell our names correctly, though, which is something I guess.

The story of the fight to defend Wye against avaricious development and local authority neglect is a remarkable one. I’ve been thinking for some time that there ought to be some way in which it was recorded beyond this web-site, in a succinct and linear fashion for people who would like to sit down and read it at length away from the evil electronic glare of the computer. Something called a ‘book’ seemed the most appropriate medium.

I’m pleased to say that the first draft is now complete and arrangements are under way to have it published, hopefully by April, in time to give people something to ruminate over in the run-up to local elections. The cover you see on the right is for illustrative purposes only and shouldn’t be taken as anything other than an indication of the kind of book it will be.

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Long-term readers may remember that not long after the Wye Park pipedream collapsed in September save-wye decided to turn to the two elected bodies who’d been party to it and say, effectively: come on, folks. Now there is no plan to be secretive about why not let us have everything in your files concerning the project and your relationship with Imperial College?

We weren’t expecting full disclosure, naturally. Long experience of these two authorities and their scant regard for the Freedom of Information Act had convinced us that wouldn’t be realistic. But you’d think we’d get something, wouldn’t you? After all this was a scheme that caused the community of Wye and its surrounding areas to spend most of 2006 in a state of perpetual anxiety about the loss of the village and the precious Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty around us.

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As bodies financed by our money, Kent County Council, Ashford Borough Council and Imperial College fall within the cover of the Freedom of Information Act, which is just as well since, if they didn’t, we’d probably have surveyors measuring up the green fields around Withersdane at this very moment.

But don’t think for a second that these people have much respect for the responsibilities of disclosure the FoI places upon them. Time and time again they have wriggled out of their duties under the act, shifting documents to the offices of private consultants, for example, or, in the case of KCC, announcing key files were about to be released, then withdrawing them on the instructions of Imperial.

If you want to understand the staggering contempt Professor Sir Richard Sykes, now awaiting ennoblement to the House of Lords, and his fellow pseudo-academic brigands have for the law of the land simply click on the image to the right and read it for yourself, in their own words. This astonishing missive, signed by Nigel Buck, now David Brooks Wilson’s replacement as the college’s estates director, was despatched to KCC on February 6 this year, at the time the council was realising it had to respond to a detailed FoI request from this very website, one that was about to reveal the first deception in many: the fact that there were actually two concordats, and one had been signed almost nine months before the people of Wye had been informed.

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You read here yesterday how Kent County Council knew, back in 2004, that Imperial College craved to reap £100 million from its land holdings in Wye, more than ten times the sum that the estate cost it in the first place. Anyone in the development business knows that this kind of money doesn’t come from tiny little closes of middle-class housing. You only get them from substantial developments spanning hundreds of acres.

Did KCC realise too?

Oh, yes. From the very beginning, and they refused to squeal not even when Imperial College was from the outset pushing a scheme which was even more grandiose than the one which led to Wye Park’s downfall. In 2004, when not a soul among the general public in the village knew something was amiss, KCC officers sat down and listened to Imperial detailing how it wanted to turn the historic village of Wye into a new town, and all because it wanted the money. Read this astonishing verbatim note to see what was going under your noses two years ago with the very idea of destroying Wye as we know it.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re temporarily back in business and feeling punchy. After many weeks of dithering, Kent County Council has finally responded to our plea to release all the documents on Wye Park, since there can, surely, be no excuse for hanging on to files that relate to a dead project.

They haven’t done that, naturally, and many of the key documents remain secret or, we suspect, are no longer ‘retained’ (aka ’shredded’). But what they have provided is still concrete proof that the people of Kent have been cynically deceived, cheated and grossly ill-served by their public representatives for more than a year. The saga of Wye Park is a local government scandal of immense proportions and we aim to place the evidence for that claim firmly in the public domain over the next few days. Please bear with us as we go through the vast array of documents that have landed in our lap and which will result in a series of fresh articles over the next few days. After that save-wye will leave it you, the public, to decide what happens next.

But first let us bring you a taster. The astonishing story of how Kent County Council buckled in to Imperial’s demands and agreed two years ago to start work on what would turn into a road building project into Wye to furnish the college’s ambitions, all at public expense, and all secretly pursued up to the very point at which the project collapsed in disarray.

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Update: No, these aren’t all the e-mails. See foot of article.

We’ve a lot to be grateful for to the Freedom of Information Act around here, though I must say our public bodies have certainly started to tighten the screws on their responses since they realised how much how hot water it can get them into. Yesterday’s release of e-mails between Wye borough councillor Ian Cooling and Imperial College is a case in point.

We asked for all e-mails between these parties, and all documents, information and e-mails about this site. What we got was the Word file we published yesterday and nothing about ourselves on the grounds that the cost of searching all the many e-mails that mention us would be beyond the limits set by the act.

So are these all the e-mails between Councillor Cooling and Imperial? Funnily enough, no. Here’s one the college and Councillor Cooling, who was asked to approve yesterday’s release, appear to have forgotten. Or perhaps lost along the way…

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People have speculated long and hard about the allegiance of Ian Cooling during the battle for Wye. Whose side was the village’s borough councillor really on? The residents’ or Imperial’s? Councillor Cooling has done little to stem this chatter himself, by spending long months saying little in public on the subject and, finally, conceding in the most obscure of language on this site that his actions ‘probably’ made the college believe the latter (please scroll down to the discussion here to read this for yourself).

Now we can shed a little more light on this subject, one which might, we hope, stay lit until the borough council elections next May. The truth is that his relationship with Imperial — Councillor Cooling’s former employer, which paid him £38,700.13 for ‘marketing consultancy’ between August 2000 and August 2004 — was very cosy indeed.

So much so that when your local councillor brushed off attempts to get him to talk about the local bigwigs’ lunch to discuss Wye he actually sent a copy of his round-robin reply to David Brooks Wilson and got the congratulatory response, ‘If I might say so a very measured and well crafted response, sorry not to have got you last week was moving office, best wishes DCBW.’

So much so that last January, when he was all but silent on the subject in the village, he was able to pen a lengthy memo to the PR man for Project Alchemy telling him how to go about winning over the community to a plan that would ultimately destroy it, by, for example, setting up a web-site and organising a letter-writing campaign to the local press to correct ‘the hugely erroneous record that grows weekly’.

Is this the smoking gun? Well, we’d have to ask how much smoke people need. But let us emphasise, before the man himself turns up to do so himself, all of this was done, ultimately, in your own interest. Read on and work out how grateful you feel.

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While save-wye is finished, our inquiries have turned out to have something of an afterlife of their own. This is scarcely surprising since Freedom of Information requests and other official exchanges often takes weeks or months to complete.

These efforts are producing material which we feel should be of use to people who are, we hope, continuing the demand for explanations from the authorities and some form of independent inquiry. When similar documents arrive in the future, we will post them here. Please note those of you who use the e-mail notification service will not be alerted to changes because they will simply be additions to this story, not a new post. To get notification you will need to use our RSS service or simply return to the site. Feel free to comment and dissect the material we post here at will since we will analyse it only briefly.

To begin with here are two recent arrivals in the mailbox, an interesting exchange between Professor Sir Richard Sykes and James Brathwaite, chairman of the South East England Development Agency, from last June in which Mr Brathwaite seems very keen to breathe some life into Project Alchemy with the help of your councils. After this you will also find a very full apology to save-wye from the Government of the South East following our complaint about them discussing our FoI requests with Imperial’s PR men.

But first to the SEEDA exchange which, had Wye Park still been living and breathing, would have made a scandal all of its own.

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Shrubs Wood in spring, bluebells and coppice… all now under threat

Wye Park was a story of greed or, to use the exact term preferred by those in the business, ‘land banking’. Imperial College had acquired the Wye estate at a knockdown price. It planned to make a £100 million or more by selling the agricultural land as building plots, thereby coining huge profits simply through a change in use.

This is not an uncommon activity in today’s endangered countryside, and we would like to introduce you to an example on your very doorstep, at Shrubs Wood, forty two acres of beautiful ancient woodland which straddle the height of the Downs between Bodsham and Hassell Street, and are now in danger of being parceled up and sold for vast profits in a way which will destroy their unique character forever.

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This is the last substantive article you will read on save-wye. There will be a few loose ends to be cleared up over the next few days, and we will be bringing you news of another, smaller environmental scandal in our area for which we hope to elicit your support. You will also be able to comment on anything here for a week or two, and the site itself will stay live as a reference source for another year or more if people need it. But our job in Wye is done and we do not intend to outstay our welcome.
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The flood of letters of complaint to Ashford Borough Council was one reason the authority changed its position on Wye… and now every one of you who wrote in is about to receive the same reply from planning chief Richard Alderton explaining this most welcome of u-turns. You can find a copy at the foot of this article.

In it Mr Alderton says, ‘I realise how strongly local people feel about the character and environment of Wye and its surroundings. This is also very clear from the large post-bag I have relating to the current position with Imperial College. I hope you will forgive me writing one reply in an attempt to answer all those letters, including your own.’

We’d like to think our own suggestion of a letter on this subject helped. But it was your voices and your time that mattered most, and the realisation that this was battle for everyone who loved Wye, not just those engaged directly in any campaign.

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The London headquarters of the School of Oriental and African Studies

The acclaimed University of London college the School of Oriental and African Studies is negotiating to come to the Imperial College campus in Wye. Any SOAS base in the village is likely to be small — possibly fewer than ten people — but, if the deal goes ahead, this would be Imperial’s second quiet handover of parts of the college to other institutions this year. All existing undergraduate teaching is being passed to the University of Kent which is predicting a student population of almost five hundred next year, almost as big as Wye’s historical peak.

Does this really look like the dead village some would have you believe, one in desperate need of resuscitation by a grandiose plan for housing and industrial estates? And who else is Imperial talking to as it quietly negotiates its withdrawal from the college it took over only six years ago?

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Tomorrow is a momentous day in the history of east Kent. A select few members of Ashford Borough Council will finally get the chance to pass an opinion on Imperial College’s plans to bury Wye in a swathe of new development that would destroy the area’s rural outlook forever and set worrying precedents for the protected status of countryside throughout the UK.

They can vote to allow the Imperial plan into the council’s local development framework. Or they can listen to the pleas of residents, conservation organisations and a growing number of environmental groups and make Imperial’s plans effectively unworkable, either by leaving it out altogether or imposing conditions that make the massive redevelopment of the area impractical.

Rather than give ABC more reasons to turn its back on Ashford, we thought we’d show you some reasons why the Wye Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty deserves to be saved from the bulldozer, for everyone, not just those who live there. You’ll need just five minutes, a broadband connection and the latest free Quicktime multimedia plugin to view the small movie above.

Downloadable high quality Quicktime version (Right click and save to your own computer — 32 mb).

I have no idea whether the minutes of the Wye Business Association are must-read stuff in the village these days, but if you find your head in the latest edition you will see something there which requires clarification. It is, I hasten to add, nothing to do with the minutes themselves, but a statement contained therein, one emanating from our borough councillor and WBA leading light Ian Cooling.

It comes after someone suggested we be approached to run a free ad for the Wye Business Association Exhibition on September 16 (i.e. a week tomorrow) as we did for the farmers market when it needed a new manager. To quote from the minutes, ‘Chris Pound thought this was a good idea as save-wye are getting 600-800 hits per day. Ian Cooling pointed out that some of those are search engines but he would take up the suggestion and email the WBA press release to save-wye.’

I was unaware that web site statistics were among our local councillor’s skills, nor do I recall having discussed this subject with him. This statement is now on the record for an important village body. It is also utterly erroneous. So please indulge me for a moment while I try to put things absolutely straight. This may appear a small point but I’m afraid journalists (even former ones) are sticklers for accuracy so it’s important anyone who wants to understand our statistics has the opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

While most everyone in east Kent now realises that Imperial’s grand vision is unravelling by the day, Paul Clokie, leader of Ashford Borough Council, plods on in its service regardless. Yesterday he met members of the Stour Fisheries Association, which represents angling interests on the lovely river that runs through Wye, and sought to assure them that the so-called science park won’t ruin the neighbouring water with polluting effluent.

Not that he quite managed this. Cllr Clokie revealed to the group’s representatives that any science park would involve a plant to refine bio mass into fuel oil, as this site has predicted several times, though Imperial have repeatedly promised no manufacturing would take place in the village. Relax, though. Paul Clokie said Imperial had the technology to ensure that the resulting effluent, which presumably would find its way into the river by one means or another, would be purified to ensure it didn’t harm the environment.

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Kent County Council’s planning boss Pete Raine got an offer he didn’t expect when he dined in a Ramsgate Thai restaurant, right, last week. Campaigners who have been trying to stop the expansion of Manston airport — a financial black hole backed by public money through KCC — got him choking on his curry with a plea to send Imperial’s science park scheme to Thanet, where the jobs are needed, saving Wye’s countryside while adding to Kent’s prosperity.

The approach came from Tim Garbutt who runs the Surin restaurant with his wife. Tim had invited Pete Raine and his fellow KCC colleagues Graham Gibbens and Stephen Dukes last Tuesday to discuss the future of Manston. Tim tells us, ‘Pete said OK – what would you do with Manston and I laid out an outline plan of developing Imperial there: Thanet jobs, safeguard Wye greenbelt, equidistant to Canterbury, near Pfizer etc. And Manston is a brownfield site where KCC have invested recently.’

In case you didn’t know, in June KCC paid £5.3 million for a 35-acre business park used by the former Planestation company, the firm that had financial backing from KCC but went spectacularly bust through Eujet and owning Manston. Graham Gibbens, KCCC Cabinet member for regeneration, said the council stepped in ‘because the park had potential to support regeneration in east Kent.’

So what did the KCC team make of Tim Garbutt’s offer?

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We welcome all around here, and like most websites have software that lists where people come from and what they do. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve noticed a lot of interest from some companies we wouldn’t normally expect to be interested in a very local story out here in rural Kent. Here, for your interest, are some of those who have made repeated visits to this site over the last fortnight. If any of these firms want to know something, by the way, do please ask. We don’t believe in unnecessary secrecy around here. Read the rest of this entry »

Wye’s borough councillor Ian Cooling has called for an inquiry by the Local Government Ombudsman into the role of Ashford Council over Wye Park. In a statement to save-wye which may mark the first public indication of a split on the ruling Tory group over Imperial’s plans, Cllr Cooling says, ‘I was originally sceptical about the value of an enquiry by the Local Government Ombudsman. I now believe that there is so much rumour, counter-rumour, accusations, conflicting information, disinformation and lack of information, along with a degree of unfamiliarity with what is and is not permitted under planning law, that such a process is now needed as a catharsis.

‘I gather WFG are preparing a submission for such an enquiry. I now hope that this happens sooner rather than later.’

He also bucks what is thought to be mainstream ABC policy — in other words, what Paul Clokie wants — on other points too…

• He is against the construction of a new road into the village from Junction 10a, which is thought to be about to come under active discussion within ABC and would be needed to support a housing development of the scale envisaged by Imperial.
• He says he has ’serious concerns’ about the draft Wye policy document in the LDF, and is working for its removal, which is one of the four main demands of the village over the Imperial project.
• There should be no ‘manufacturing or other industrial processes’ in the village.

You can read the full statement here.

One of the reasons this site came into existence was that we came to the conclusion coverage of Wye Park was going to be pretty spotty in the local press, namely the Kentish Express. Things bucked up a few months ago when it seems someone on the paper realised there was a story to be written here.

Then it all bounced back into near silence again… even when some of the revelations coming out of the process include actual plans and maps. This week’s paper contains not a word on what could be the biggest building project in the area since the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. But if you go to the letters page you will find one cunning reader has snuck in a mention of Wye, even though the real subject may well have escaped the KE’s editors.

Take a look at the letter headed, ‘My ambition would create lots of jobs’ below…

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We’ve lodged a formal complaint with the Government Office of the South East (GOSE) for breach of privacy over its proven habit of leaking our Freedom of Information requests to Imperial College. This is just one instance of many in which we have discovered that everyday requests to local authorities and, on this occasion, a government department are being routinely copied to Imperial, which is effectively a potential private developer with no right to receive them.

To our certain knowledge, Imperial’s senior managers have received copies of both FoI requests and private e-mails from save-wye, passed on instantly by some of the key players in this saga. The most egregious instance until now was Kent County Council’s craven offering of our FoI request to it last February, which resulted in Imperial demanding the witholding of key documents on Wye which KCC had been ready to release.

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It’s only eight days since we suggested those of you who oppose Wye Park write to Richard Alderton, Ashford’s planning chief, and ask him to leave it out of the core strategy currently being put together by the council.

But what a bunch of letters have come out as a result — more, we know, than you see on the site here since not everyone wants to make their protest public, and some have come from well outside the Ashford area (and why not — you don’t need to live here to care about Wye).

As an example of the literate and informed quality of these responses we would like to highlight just one, from a resident who would like to remain anonymous, which you will find in full below. It’s a cracker: calm, sensible and talking the kind of language planners everywhere will surely understand. If you’re still hesitating about whether to write yourself, please take a look at it… and then find pen and paper yourself.

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As you read here yesterday, Imperial and its council supporters may have been boasting, prematurely, that they had some of the highest levels of government on their side. But now we can reveal that the Department for Communities & Local Government — formerly the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister — has decided to keep the Wye Park saga at a distanced arms length, citing this website as one reason to stay away.

In a fascinating exchange of e-mails provided to save-wye after a Freedom of Information request, DCLG officials talk frankly to one another about how glad they are to stay out of the entire project… and even pass on gossip about overhearing Kent County Council planning chief Pete Raine saying that Imperial was in a ‘kill or cure’ situation and had ‘a very good offer to set up the same facility’ in Shanghai.

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Sadly there is no law against lying in press releases, unless you are a company telling porkies to your shareholders. Imperial College, Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council are all publicly-funded bodies though, and you could argue we are their shareholders. And if that were the case we would surely be reaching for our lawyers right now, because the most visible part of the statement all three bodies issued when they announced their Concordat last December has turned out to be a blatant piece of fiction.

They told us in their press release at the time that the Concordat paved ‘the way for Wye to become home to a new £1 billion, world class science research and manufacturing facility.’ You will be amazed to learn — or possibly, not — that this is somewhat at variance with the actual facts.
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There is a time bomb ticking underneath the desks of local politicians and council officials in Kent. It’s marked ‘Wye Park’ and with the publication of Imperial’s own private presentation today it just got an awful lot louder.

The damning words are there on page eighteen of the presentation given to Imperial’s management board, under the section entitled Context/Objectives. After two smug self-congratulatory sentences declaring that a ’specific Wye reference’ has now been added to the draft east Kent and Ashford sub region of the South East Plan and the Draft Regional Economic Strategy, the report adds…

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As save-wye has reported over the past few month, doubts about Wye Park have been growing inside Imperial. In June the project was placed on ‘economy’ mode, with most contractors taken off the job to save money. But the college’s grandiose scheme is not yet dead, though it faces some serious obstacles and deadlines. These were already becoming clear on June 12 as the presentation to the management board makes plain.

So what are the pitfalls that Imperial itself belief could bring down its plan to turn Wye into a small town and make vast sums of money for the institution’s coffers?

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Rural wind turbines in Canada: Imperial have been told they will be needed for Wye

Environmental consultants have told Imperial College that it will have to erect wind turbines in Wye and create a brand new high-tech wood or crop burning power station in order to meet the energy demands of its proposed science park and housing development. The international consultancy Watermans, which has been employed by IC to work on the master plan for Wye, produced a report last month which forecast that the only way the college could meet its own stated intentions for ‘world leading sustainable’ development would be the introduction of controversial turbines and a new Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant. This is a system that burns ‘friendly’ fuels and is more efficient than older technologies; an example ’small’ size CHP plant, of the size expected to be needed for Wye, is already working in Sweden and can be seen in the picture here (click for a closer view).

The secret report from Watermans has, save-wye understands, been buried within Imperial for fear of the public outcry it could cause. Even Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council, supposedly close partners in the Wye Park project with IC, are unaware of the huge energy demands which IC’s own consultants say will stem from the project if it goes ahead.

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If you’d like to tell your friends and neighbours about the latest revelations on save-wye.org you will find them encapsulated below in a two page printer friendly format. We will also be offering free copies tomorrow through the New Flying Horse, Wye News and in the Farmers’ Market. Thanks as always to everyone who is helping distribute the latest news from this site.

Save-wye7 August 4, 2006

Farming is far from dead in east Kent, as any visit to the Wye Farmers’ Market which takes place on the village green every two weeks will quickly show you. The market has become a huge success since its establishment a few years back, and now attracts hundreds of shoppers whenever it appears on the green.

If you’re interested in a part-time job that helps keep agriculture firmly to the forefront in Wye at a time when Imperial College would have you believe it is dead, then this could be the job for you. The market is looking for a manager to work 24 hours per month on its development, involving promotion, market research and the recruitment of new stallholders. You can find the details in the job vacancy notice below.

Wye Farmers’ Market seeks a manager

On Thursday Ashford Borough Council leader Paul Clokie was rubbishing the suggestion of architect Sir Terry Farrell that the government abandon huge development in places like Ashford and focus instead on developing unused land closer to London in the Thames Gateway. ‘Silly’, said Cllr Clokie. Today it doesn’t look so silly at all to his far more senior counterpart at Kent County Council, the leader Paul Carter, who has told the Kent on Sunday he agrees with Sir Terry.

Where exactly that leaves ABC and KCC as joint partners in the stumbling Concordat with Imperial over Wye Park is anyone’s guess. KCC and Paul Carter have been remarkably silent of late on the whole thing. But Cllr Carter’s remarks sound utterly incompatible with the original Concordat idea.

He told KoS, ‘There’s an enormous number of brownfield sites in the City of London airport, across to Dartford and I’d very much support the use of brownfield land before we encroach on greenfield.’ Which makes Wye Park look a non-starter if he means what he says.

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Imperial’s local authority foot soldiers have been busy trying to blind locals to the truth behind the plans for Wye Park, often with such blandishments as ‘affordable housing’ so that local young people can enter the housing market. As we have shown already, this is a piece of fiction designed to provoke calumny for anyone opposed to Wye Park… since they would now appear to be against housing for young locals. None of this is true, of course, and as we can now reveal Paul Clokie himself positively loathes the whole affordable housing concept.

While Imperial’s cheerleaders on Ashford Council have been blithely predicting 35 per cent of the thousands of new homes Imperial want to build would be ‘affordable’, Clokie actually fought tooth and nail to reduce a 25 per cent recommended minimum in guidelines for new housing discussed by the South East England Regional Assembly (SEERA) at a meeting in November 2004.

Clokie, the builder’s friend, pleaded, ‘If you try to insist that the developer puts 25% housing on his sites at a reduced price to himself then he will not be able to afford to do that and pay for other chunks of infrastructure. You then produce a situation either where the land doesn’t come forward, or where the builders don’t make a profit.’ And then he added, cryptically, ‘Of course I am sympathetic to those people who can’t afford a house, but frankly, if you try to drive in the poorer areas of the country, of our region, and I am sure my friends in Thanet won’t mind me saying this, house prices in Thanet are depressed. House land in Thanet is not high.’

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Imperial College’s rector Professor Sir Richard Sykes warned us all that if we cut up rough about letting him rule the roost over Wye his new energy research ideas could ‘all go to Abu Dhabi‘. And he was right. Imperial announced today that it has joined a ‘global initiative to develop alternative, advanced technologies to address problems relating to energy and the environment’, based there.

The Masdar Research Network entails the creation of an ‘Energy Futures Lab’ that involves the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, WTH Aachen University, the University of Waterloo, Columbia University. the German Aerospace Centre, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology as well as Imperial. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Kentish Express contains another pearl of wisdom from Ashford council leader Paul Clokie, this time on the suggestion by leading architect Sir Terry Farrell that John Prescott’s plans to concrete over the south east ought to be abandoned for development in the Thames Gateway closer to London. Given the widespread opposition to massive development in the Ashford area, anyone unfamiliar with the unusual Cllr Clokie might have expected the man, as a public representative, at least to have given the idea a hearing.

But no. Sir Terry, a world famous architect, is just ’silly’ says the chap who has lorded over the Discovery Centre (failed), the Stour Centre redevelopment (late and grossly over budget), and the stumbling Wye Park Concordat.

His reasoning, if you can call it that?

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After some struggle we have found the article in the Evening Standard in which Countess Sondes discusses, albeit briefly, the Wye Park project and her involvement in it. This is not, to be honest, earth-shattering stuff, nor will you feel much the better informed afterwards. But for the sake of record here are a few extracts.

Under the headline ‘Countess bids to build a new Cambridge’, it was announced in May that she is in cahoots with Imperial College, helping them draw up plans for a Pounds 1 billion university town deep in the dreaming pastures of Kent. It would reportedly spawn 4,000 new homes and dozens of conference centres and libraries, all swamping the pretty village of Wye, with its Grade II-listed cottages and 13th-century parish church. And hence the Countess find herself at loggerheads with the locals. As one villager put it: ‘We are appalled.’ It is to discuss this rumpus that I have come to meet the Countess at her London residence, a socking great four-storey townhouse in Belgravia.

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If you want to send us a simple e-mail you can always use the contact form above. However it doesn’t handle attachments and it demands a real e-mail address. We know a few people would like to send us documents anonymously, so here is a simple way to do it. Just click on the link below and it will give you a private e-mail address to which you can send, with attachments, and from any e-mail address that is properly formed (i.e. it looks real), even if it is a false one. We are happy to receive anonymous documents this way. Our system will record nothing of your presence, such as an IP address, only the sender’s e-mail address you choose to put on your message. Feel free to use whistleATsave-wye.org (replacing AT with the @ sign). You will also find this link prominently in the sidebar from now on.
Send save-wye a private email.

Call me old-fashioned but I do expect a degree of numeracy and literacy among the people taking big decisions in our lives. Sadly, in the rotten borough of Ashford, one rarely finds either. Let us investigate, for example, the ability of Paul Clokie, ABC’s leader, with numbers, and in particular his trumpeting of his authority’s latest whizz bang boom town project, the Ashford Learning Campus. This is one more gem from the same people who brought you the Discovery Centre (failed due to cost over-runs) and Wye Park (stalled due to so many cock-ups it will require an encyclopaedia to recount them all).

Only last night Cllr Clokie was telling the public how this new educational campus near the station will cost £50m. And if you look at the ABC website you will see the place should welcome its first pupil in September 2009, even though no detailed plan has been agreed, or any final decision on total funding made. What will it do? According to Paul Clokie’s council provide facilities for ‘up to 14,000 full time and part time students’ in the town.

You have those two figures in your head now? A cost of £50m. Some 14,000 students, which is an awful lot, in fact almost double the entire undergraduate population of Imperial College itself, and three thousand more students than Oxford has undergrads. Wouldn’t most of us scratch our heads at this point and say, ‘Hang on…’? Not if you are a council leader for whom everything seems to come written on the back of a fag packet from officers whose heads seem just as much in the sky too.
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Imperial College’s presence in Wye will very soon be in name only. The steady rundown of the college, and the transfer of existing undergraduate staff to the University of Kent, will result in Imperial having no academic staff there whatsoever, probably within the next fourteen months when the 2007-8 academic year begins a year in September.

While the college has been telling all and sundry that the purpose of Wye Park is to maintain its presence in the village — and without massive redevelopment its role there is doomed — the internal minutes of its own staff joint committee tell an entirely different story. We now present to you the verbatim minutes of the committee held on February 2 last.

These state very clearly…

LL confirmed that the Wye regeneration project had been announced which was positive news for Wye. LL confirmed that staff going to work for the University of Kent would go over on TUPE terms. SH confirmed that all Imperial academic staff would either transfer to the South Kensington Campus or become University of Kent staff. There was nothing further to report.

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We revealed here yesterday how Imperial College turned from being an institution with a zero borrowing requirement under Sir Ron Oxburgh to one needing an overdraft facility of £175m under Sir Richard Sykes. Now apply your thinking powers to another riddle in Imperial’s handling of figures. Everyone who has followed Wye Park must, by now, be aware that hard numbers are extremely difficult to find. The forecast cost has varied in the mouths of some of Imperial’s most senior officers by as much as half a billion pounds in a single week.

But consider another strange anomaly. When Sir Ron Oxburgh negotiated the ‘merger’ of Imperial with Wye in 1998 the then Imperial management was so unconcerned about the financial aspects of the deal that it scarcely merited much of a mention. A report to the governing body on June 26 1998 at which the merger was effectively agreed declared, ‘Financially, Wye had an underlying recurrent deficit in 1997-97 of £500k (on a turnover of £12.5m). At 31 July 1997 they held £2.7m in their general reserve and carried a £1.8m debt. They showed £16m tangible assets on their balance sheet. Their intention is to produce a recurrent surplus by the time of the merger and they have a credible rationalisation plan to achieve this.’

Now take a look at the council minutes from April 1 last year to see what three years under the iron hand of the super-efficient, private enterprise friendly Sykes regime have done to the college — or so they claim.

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One of the reasons Wye Park has taken a nosedive of late has been the cost of progressing the masterplan, and unseen extras such as tagging all those pesky greater crested newts that seem to have cropped up everywhere. But Imperial is a rich and powerful college, recipient of £300m a year in grants, much of it from the public purse. It can afford stuff like that, can’t it?

You’d think. But a look at the finances of this national institution makes for interesting reading. And when you do that you start to get an insight into why Sir Richard Sykes may well be looking at the Wye estate and wishing fervently he could turn it into cash. Imperial wants to get its hands on money at the moment, any way it can. Even by borrowing, in pretty hefty numbers too.

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The Wye skyline in twenty years time? Not now…

Whether we ever get to know the true story of Wye Park remains in the lap of the Gods or with Richard Sykes’ conscience, both places that have yet to be proven to exist. But one thing is surely clear. The great project is in stasis, awaiting the executioner’s axe, right now because, in great part, one of its most important potential backers, the oil giant BP, is having very cold feet.

What’s amazing, if you spend a little time with people who watch the energy industry, is that Imperial College ever believed that a company of this nature would be party to a controversial plan to breach existing environmental and planning laws in the first place. Consider…

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The news just gets worse by the day for Imperial College and its tiny band of local authority lackeys. After the quiet meltdown of the Wye Park project now the very government policy behind Ashford Council and Kent County Council’s support for Imperial’s pipedream is in doubt. One of the government’s own advisers has said the Prescott plan to concrete the south east should be ditched for development along London and the Thames.

Sir Terry Farrell, the international architect who advises the Thames Gateway Development Corporation, says there is room for millions of homes in the area between the East End and Dartford, and has criticised specifically the Prescott plan for four growth area — Ashford, the Thames Gatway, the M11 corridor and Milton Keynes — as ‘woolly’. ‘I am very, very critical of those who say London is full up and we should build into Kent and up the M11. What are we doing moving up there when London needs regenerating? We have to make London work.’

What’s more he says he has told John Prescott’s replacement Yvette Cooper, now housing minister, and says she seemed ‘very interested’. Which is the very last thing Imperial College want to hear.

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Kent County Council and a local borough council have been truly swiped around the head by a constituency MP over plans to build green field homes and a new science park. Both local authorities ’should be ashamed of themselves’ says the Westminster man in question… but no, don’t get too excited. This isn’t Wye, the twilight zone as far as local public representatives are concerned.

It’s Swale where Labour’s Derek Wyatt, he of the wafer thin majority, is continuing his three-year battle against the development of Kent Science Park with a huge new road, five thousand homes and a stack of commercial development.

Mr Wyatt, who churlishly suggested earlier this year that Swale should abandon the plan and watch it shipped to Wye instead, is furious with LaSalle, who own KSP near Sittingbourne, for pursuing the expansion plans. In an interview with Kent on Sunday tomorrow (see foot of article) he questions how much science there is in the park when its largest employers include a housing association call centre and a magazine distribution centre.

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You tend to judge people by the company they keep… so let me introduce you to the latest chum Richard Sykes has pulled in for Imperial College, even persuading him to sign a piece of paper that looks precariously like a concordat. Believe it or not it is none other than Jeb Bush, George W’s little brother and Governor of Florida.

Whether the man slapped the rector on the shoulder and said, ‘Yo Sykes’ before accepting a new sweater we shall never know. But the Imperial PR machine clearly thinks it’s something to make a meal of.

There are those who think Jeb makes his big brother look positively mild when it comes to political matters. Richard Sykes certainly didn’t sound like a shrinking liberal violet when he greeted the chap on a visit to the college earlier this month. Sounding much like a southern evangelist touting Imperial-led capitalism as the solution for all the world’s problems he declared…

Entrepreneurship is a major distinguishing feature of Imperial – it is at the heart of Imperials mission and it is implicit in our original charter written almost a century ago in 1907. The creation of wealth in today’s global and knowledge-based economies is critically dependant (that should be dependent by the way, ed) on science and innovation. That innovation is increasingly being driven by partnerships which cut across international and organisational boundaries and which involve Governments, the private sector and academia.

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Shush… Prof Borys (left) and David BW have nothing to say, honest

Few things have been coming out of Imperial College of late, for reasons which regular readers will understand very well: it’s not nice having to break bad news (well bad for Imperial). But a growing tide of rumour has been gripping the organisation in London and Wye centred around gossip that one key player in the Concordat fiasco has thrown in the towel and quit. Who? Well, not David Brooks Wilson, say Tamesis the project’s PR people.

So in case you happen to be one of those mischievous folk putting this rumour around let save-wye — always ones to set the record straight — give it you straight from the horse’s mouth. We asked the company’s Sebastian Hanley whether the rumour was true. He e-mailed back and said, ‘I don’t know who the source is, but Mr Brooks Wilson hasn’t resigned.’

OK? Oh, but I ought just to add…

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Fancy the opportunity to tell Paul Clokie and KCC’s Paul Carter exactly what you think about the state of things in your neighbourhood? Who knows, you might even get the chance to squeeze in a couple of questions and comments about Wye before someone rules you out of order?

Next Monday our two great council leaders are hosting a public meeting in the Ashford Council Chamber where you can make your views heard on Towards 2010, a document setting out KCC’s goals ‘for the future of Kent to make the county an even better place to live, work and enjoy’. Plans, you may care to remind these gentlemen, that, if they got their way, would involve the destruction of an entire community and hundreds of acres of beautiful protected countryside.
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And since we seem to be focusing on Ashford Borough Council this week let me introduce a small scrap of information about this wonderful local authority to remind you exactly what the Wye electorate aren’t being told about its discussions with Imperial College over Wye Park. You can find the original here in the letter from ABC’s head of legal and democratic services (boy do they rub it in) attempting to justify the failure to release these documents under a Freedom of Information request.
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Confused, ill-informed and hopelessly compromised by his signing of the original Concordat, Ashford Borough Council’s leader Paul Clokie is increasingly beginning to look like a man stranded on a desert island shouting for attention from anyone unlucky enough to come within earshot. Today he is quoted in the Kentish Express rubbishing this website — without the slightest ammunition — and fervently hoping that his beloved Wye Park will still be rescued by some unknown white knight willing to throw good money after bad.

But this is the man who has given us such other dead white elephants as the Discovery Centre, and put the entire Ashford planning process in jeopardy by secretly signing up to back Imperial College’s plans to railroad through existing planning conventions, thereby destroying any hope of impartiality the authority might have over Wye Park. Do you expect anything else?

For the record let us look at what the great man says and try (this isn’t easy but we will have a go) to offer some kind of textual analysis. Today’s KE carries an entirely thorough and accurate report of the doubts surrounding the future of Wye Park following Justin Williams’ story last week revealing the project is on the morgue table awaiting an official death certificate which will probably not be issued until September. The college’s PR bunnies are saying little themselves, except to issue bland statements that a decision has not been made, and studiously refraining from denying the details of the original report.

Clokie, Imperial’s man in Ashford, feels no such qualms however.

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While Wye’s science park project lingers in the doldrums awaiting official confirmation of the axe, the county’s other controversial development in the field, at Sittingbourne, is being actively promoted by its backers. To the fury of local residents anxious to prevent development of farmland around the village of Bapchild, the Kent Science Park plan seems to be on track.

As save-wye reported earlier this year, local MP Derek Wyatt, son-in-law of Kent’s Lord Lieutenant, Alan Willett, went so far as to stand up in the House of Commons and ask for the project to be dumped in favour of building at Wye (Mr Wyatt is, you see, in one of the most marginal seats in the country). But with Wye Park doomed, the company behind KSP are pushing ahead with ambitious plans that involve a new road between the M2 and A2, five thousand new homes and the promise of five thousand new jobs too, all in a hi-tech business community covering ‘cutting edge bioscience and chemistry’ according to KentOnline.

Even the language is starting to resemble that used to back up the Wye Park project. According to Andrew Bull, European director of LaSalle Investment Management, the owner of KSP, ‘This is about creating employment in Swale, high-quality jobs.’ He said the scheme would put Sittingbourne on the international map as ‘a centre of scientific excellence’, exactly as Imperial promised for Wye. How many centres of scientific excellence can east Kent hold?

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Imperial College has received its sharpest criticism to date from an elected public representative, with a warning from the South East Euro MP Caroline Lucas (right) that she is already being asked to fight any proposed EU funding for the plan.

MEP Lucas, a member of the Green Party, has written to all members of the Imperial Board asking them to take up concerns about the college’s plans for Wye directly with the rector Professor Sir Richard Sykes. She tells them, ‘The potential consequences for the surrounding area include increases in traffic, a reduction in tourism, and the devastation of an AONB that is home to a number of protected species. These are just a few of the ways that life in Wye would be altered by this major construction project.’

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While I don’t wish to discourage anyone from voting in any of our polls, least of all the current one, could I please make one thing clear. We make no attempt to discover the identity of people who use this site. But our system is a standard Wordpress installation and it will log the IP address people use when accessing interactive areas such as polls. For individuals, this means little; all we record is the IP address of your ISP and then, in the case of the poll, try to make sure you can’t vote twice with the same machine. In corporate networks, we record the identity of the network and the IP address in the same way.

I say all this to discourage anyone from thinking they can fool the poll system into recording a bounced result. You can try, but we will notice. For example right now our current poll has six people voting against the majority view at the moment. It is very easy for us to see that five of them come from within Imperial College and one from inside Kent County Council. If any of you are residents of the Wye area I suggest you vote from a home PC in future. It might be more convincing.

PS. Just to be fair and accurate, I should say there are now substantially more votes from computers within Imperial College in favour of keeping the AONB sacrosanct than in favour of sacrificing it to keep IC in the village.

Imperial College and its handful of supporters insist that the majority view in Wye is in favour of its development proposals… and only a small minority of Nimbies oppose the ground-breaking handover of the protected countryside of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to commercial development.

We don’t happen to think this is true, you may be surprised to learn. But we’re open to persuasion. So you will now find a three-part poll in the sidebar of this site which will let you express your opinion. This is unscientific, in that anyone can vote (once only, from a single computer). But we’re interested to see what happens… so please cast your vote now. And do please ask your neighbours to do the same, whatever their view. This is one debate about Wye Park that isn’t happening behind closed doors… one of the few at the moment.

I hope I can keep this short and sweet. As well as pointing this site in a new and single-minded direction, I’ve taken the opportunity to do some housekeeping. The aim has been to make save-wye easier to use, navigate and read. First off you will notice the new Wye photo gallery which is summed up by our little photo graphic to the right. If you’d like to add your pictures to the pot — and see them here — please e-mail us through the contact form (we can’t do this automatically at the moment unfortunately). All nice Wye photos, no bigger than 800 by 600 in size, are welcome.

I have also taken the opportunity to change radically the site’s ‘mission statement’ to reflect its new role. In the past neither I nor Justin made much of our journalistic credentials, but given recent events, and the accusations of amateurism from certain quarters, I thought that now was, perhaps, the time to be a little less self-effacing.

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I started save-wye.org in January with the naive hope that it would be a focus for different opinions and a forum for reasoned comment about the very real threat to Wye from Imperial College’s Wye Park proposals. Sadly, that idea has proved a failure. While the readership of this site has grown from strength to strength and recently passed the 25,000 mark, we have failed to find contributors who bring different opinions to the debate, and the coverage we have carried has fallen very much on the shoulders of Justin and myself, and the busy army of supporters and researchers who have burrowed out material for us.
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While Wye’s borough councillor Ian Cooling and Imperial College continue to rubbish our report on the secret lunch to discuss Wye Park at Maidstone on May 23, one independent individual attending the event has spoken up… and said we got it right. In this week’s Kent on Sunday, Dr Hilary Newport, director of the Kent branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said ’she agreed with the save-wye version of what was said’.

Dr Newport criticised Imperial’s plans once again, in the kind of terms one might expect of a local council official representing a threatened community. ‘They seem absolutely adamant that they have to take this all or nothing approach and we’re unhappy about that. They said that if they are going to invest in this research centre in Wye it simply has to be accompanied by this development.

‘I am sure there’s a middle way where Wye can benefit without losing part of the countryside around it.’

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Imperial College’s rector says its science park project could go to the Middle East if locals cut up rough over his attempt at droit di seigneur, but has added a bizarre pledge that the college will only try to build on the ugly ‘green bits’ of Wye, not the nice ones.

In an interview with Felix, the Imperial College student newspaper which recently came out against developing the AONB, Sir Richard says, ‘If they say no, we will build it somewhere else. We could put it in Abu Dhabi, I guess. The Abu Dhabi government would be very pleased to support it.’

So… there seems to be no question of arguing that it’s Wye’s academic legacy or its geographical location that are behind the present idea of siting the thing controversially in protected countryside that has hitherto been judged to be beyond the developer’s remit.

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Countess Sondes, the American-born landowner whose plans for a UN-backed non-foods centre appear to have kick-started Imperial’s property ambitions for Wye, has told Kent on Sunday the science park idea has nothing to do with her.

In an interview today, she declared, ‘I support Imperial College but they have not even decided whether ot not they are going to build the science park. Regardless of this, I have no relationship whatsoever with them or what they are doing in Wye.’

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I have done my best to try to make it possible for people to comment anonymously on ths site but unfortunately the habits of a minority make this impossible to continue. From now on all comments must be accompanied by a real name — which will be used — and a real e-mail address — which won’t.

I appreciate there are people who, for professional reasons, feel they can’t reveal their identity when commenting. If they wish to contact us through the form here we will happily talk about running their views as anonymous articles. But the anonymous commenting feature has been abused by a tiny minority who seem to think it acceptable to use save-wye as a nasty graffiti wall where they can try to say things they would never utter under their own name. This is unacceptable, bad for this site, and, most importantly of all, a distraction from the more important matters for which save-wye was created. It also generates an enormous amount of work since someone has to read through all this stuff and try to work out whether it is acceptable or not — something that can easily lead to wrong and unfortunate decisions. We have better things to do frankly.

This feature has been used responsibly by most of those taking advantage of it. But I really feel there is no longer any choice in this matter. So names in future please… and any anonymous comments still in the queue have now been deleted.

It’s supposed to be the boom town of the south east, but some more feisty reporting from Paul Francis of the Kentish Express today exposes the reality behind the hype. The flagship multi-million pound Discovery Centre that was to embody the spirit of Ashford reborn is in deep trouble and could be scrapped altogether.

Problem? The futuristic ‘landmark’ library and community services centre originally budgeted at £13m would probably set the public coffers back an awful lot more, and has run into what look like terminal difficulties with potential developers. Instead… we might just get a new library.

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Whatever Imperial have in mind for ‘affordable housing’ in Wye it isn’t this…

Would a carte blanche to Imperial to do what it wants to Wye be nothing but bad news? Of course not. The level crossing problem would probably be fixed. True, it could be alleviated a lot more cheaply and simply just by having the gates close rather more efficiently than they do at the moment.

But the fact remains. Imperial will promise to bring great benefits alongside the battalions of bulldozers. Let’s take a good look at them before we leap at the prospect, though, because gifts like these may well be a little illusory. Consider, for example, the notion of ‘affordable housing’ which will supposedly account for around thirty five per cent of all the homes the college want to build on the protected land of the AONB.

How could anyone object to ‘affordable housing’? Wouldn’t it be great if Imperial actually made it easier for local people to get on the home owning ladder in the village where they were born? Possibly. But before you get too excited, take a deep breath and prepare yourself for a few surprises. Because this, like so many high-flown Imperial promises, is not the generous offer it seems.

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Remember where you read it first. As we revealed over a week ago, Imperial is shuffling the deckchairs on the Wye Park project. No longer will deputy rector Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz be the main man dealing with the project, but David Brooks Wilson, who is relinquishing his job as estates director to become ‘College Property Advisor with immediate effect, reporting directly to the Rector’.

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There is a growing tide of excellent journalism in the mainstream media about Imperial College’s controversial property development ambitions, and today we’re delighted to point you to one of the most thoroughly detailed articles to appear so far. You can find it in London Student, the newspaper of the University of London, the umbrella organisation Imperial is determined to quit, and it is essential reading for anyone looking to get up to speed on the Wye situation.

LS’s news editor Chaminda Jayanetti has spent weeks interviewing many of the key players in the saga, including Deputy Rector Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, and you can see his journalistic conclusion from the opening paragraph, ‘Imperial College’s attempts to win support for its £1billion research park in rural Kent have descended into farce after a senior manager admitted it was inevitable that the college would make inconsistent statements about the project.’

This stems from an astonishing sequence of events during the research for the article in which Prof Borys managed to contradict himself several times over figures and whether the project included manufacturing, finally resorting to a philosophical argument in which he states, ‘it will always be possible to compare and contrast statements made over periods of time and find inconsistencies.’ Yes, we’d gathered that…

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Forget about — in the words of Wye’s own borough councillor — all that doom and gloom you keep reading about here. Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss — a man who saw benefit in everything — clearly works in local government these days. What other explanation can there be for the extraordinary upbeat presentation given to a meeting of Kent County council’s environment and regeneration policy overview committee on April 21 last.

You can find a copy of the presentation, apparently from planning chief Pete Raine, below, and stirring stuff it is too. It promises the Wye Campus project is NOT (their capitals not mine)…

• A proposal which dispenses with the existing village heritage
• An industrial park with manufacturing units and warehouses
• A new high density ‘city’ supporting 12,000 jobs on-site (that April 1 thing of ours was a joke, folks.. OK?)
• A generator of through-traffic traversing the village
• A landscape ‘covered in concrete’
• A blight in the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
• A ’sea’ of parking

Really? So what is it then? Ah, there’s the catch…

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Ashford’s MP hits out at Imperial’s lack of facts and consultation on Wye

Any doubts about the position of Ashford MP Damian Green over Wye Park can be cast aside. After months of mutterings of discontent behind the scene, Mr Green has weighed in with a highly public blast of criticism aimed at Imperial’s poor communication skills and fumbling with the numbers.

What’s more, he has openly suggested the college ought to be looking at alternative ways of funding the entire project, ones that don’t involve building on the AONB, an idea the college appears to have dismissed out of hand.

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A former governor of Wye College involved in its merger with Imperial says that the new regime of Professor Sir Richard Sykes departed ‘in significant ways from the assurances we had been given’ over its future by the team that brokered the original deal.

Professor Berkeley Hill, staff representative governor at Wye during what he describes as ‘the difficult 1990s’, says in a comment to save-wye that the merger looked ‘very attractive’ when Imperial approached the college with the idea under then rector Sir Ron (now Lord) Oxburgh, who foresaw the establishment of a burgeoning agricultural research centre.

‘The decision by the governors to support the merger was entirely reasonable given the assurances from the then management of Imperial, the vision for the combined college it expounded, and the prospects of what was likely to happen to the finances of an independent Wye College.

‘We were not to know that a change of Rector and other senior staff would lead to a radically different vision and management style, departing in significant ways from the assurances we had been given. With hindsight, Wye’s governors may have acted differently. However, at the time the decision had to be taken, merger with Imperial was the best option available. Governors cannot be blamed for events that were difficult to predict and impossible to influence.’

You can read more about this astonishing turnaround in attitudes towards Wye here.

Countess Sondes, whose interest in a non-food crops centre sparked the project that appears to have become Wye Park, has written to save-wye to clarify some of the comments made in the Sunday Times and repeated here. Since her involvement in the project appears to be so key, we feel you should see this as a separate article, not simply a response to other comments.

While we appreciate Countess Sondes taking the time to write to save-wye, several aspects of this project still seem to be somewhat unclear, not least her statement that the siting of the non-food crops institute is still in the planning stages… and could be in the UK or abroad. We feel sure the residents of Wye would also like to know how she feels about the principle of allowing commercial development in the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which Imperial seem to feel is a prerequisite of the plan. We will happily run any further comments from her on these issues here.

Countess Sondes writes…

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Pick the appropriate SBL for the appropriate occasion.

Not content with signing a secret Concordat that could end up destroying Wye as we know it, former KCC leader, and soon to be ennobled lord, Sandy Bruce Lockhart has now embraced a new political faith: ‘localism’.

He waxes on and on about it in the Guardian today and, if you are keen on articles that invent new words — we don’t just get ‘localism’ but we get ‘localist’ too — you’d best sit back with something strong and tuck in here. Because it includes such beauties as…

We see an erosion of democracy, a crisis of trust, and a cynicism towards politicians and their ability to deliver solutions. We must give people back power and influence over their lives, and over their local services, and the future of the places where they live.

Er… quite. So perhaps Sir Sandy could start the giving back by telling us what went on at the secret meeting he attended last week in Maidstone, attended by Imperial and selected local representatives, one that looks very much as if it was all about getting the crumbling Concordat of which he was an architect back on the tracks.

That would help us all understand what ‘localism’ means, wouldn’t it? Otherwise the cynics among us might have to invent another new word for it. Such as ‘bollocksism’.

Alternatively, if you would like to ask him yourself, and support our good friends at the Council for the Protection of Rural England, you could fork out £15 for a jolly event at Mershem le Hatch on June 7 next Wednesday. Sir Sandy is among the speakers and is expected to cover non-food crops during a CPRE/National Farmers Union debate entitled: Can our countryside survive farming’s future?

More information: CPRE Kent, 3 Evegate Park Barn, Station Road, Smeeth, Ashford TN25 6SX. Tel: 01303 815180. info@cprekent.org.uk

The latest weekly digest is now available here. Please print out and distribute as you see fit… and you will also see it on the bar of the New Flying Horse and in Wye News. Rumours that Shepherd Neame are bringing out a special save-wye seasonal ale, to be called Old Cynic, are, sadly, to be discounted…

save-wye7 June 2 2006

The other David Hewson with a man who’s given Imperial loads over the years.
I do wish he’d stop stealing my autograph opportunities (the singing one that is)

There’s a refrain that runs round Imperial College’s Wye Park propaganda so constantly it’s tempting to take it for granted. But that’s what propaganda is for: repeat a dubious proposition often enough, and sooner or later people will think it’s fact.

The idea is this: Imperial is a world class academic institution (true) looking to become engaged in worthwhile research that may one day help save the planet (possibly). But this takes money. And in order to get that, Imperial needs to raise it. The only way? Flogging off protected countryside for houses, which puts £300 to £400 million into the college’s coffers, and something like 340 acres of Wye’s green land to the bulldozer.

But here’s the truth. Imperial is in a rotten position to start pleading poverty. Just ask Bill Gates. Can you begin to guess how much of his money Professor Richard Sykes et al have pocketed over the past couple of years?
Read the rest of this entry »

You’d be very mistaken if you thought that everyone at Imperial is behind the plan to turn Wye into a building site. After a meek letter backing the idea the previous week, the college’s newspaper contained a rapid response from a fellow student making some very valid points that we don’t expect to see Sykes and co answering very easily.

Read on to see what one Imperial student thinks of the whole Wye Park debacle.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a week’s time Ashford Borough Council look set to wave through outline planning permission for the ideal location for a mixed development of science park, industrial units and domestic housing. It covers 25 acres, but stands right next to another 114 acres going spare on the same site, with planning permission already.

Plus the whole shebang will come with the blessing of the planners involved who have been forced to face up to the fact that the original idea for it under the ownership of Eurotunnel’s property division (then boss one David Brooks Wilson) is dead in the water.

This opportunity to grab 140 acres virtually instantly is just a couple of miles from Wye, right next to the M20, and needs no controversial new road to service it. Plus it is near more land earmarked for further commercial development, existing recent housing estates, and parcels of land predicted to bear another 2,500 homes in the future under current projections. So will Imperial be looking to jump at this opportunity kick start their science park project? Don’t count on it…

Read the rest of this entry »

The Paddington super hospital fell apart after disagreements among the partners

The National Audit Office, the government body which decides whether tax-payers get good value for their money, has just come out with a report on a huge failed project in which Imperial was an important partner… and slammed those involved for catastrophic mismanagement which cost the public purse £15 million.

Imperial’s governors, looking at the stumbling Wye Park plan, might care to read the executive summary of the NAO report (available at the foot of this article), and in particular some of its conclusions on why the attempt to build a huge new super hospital campus in Paddington, in which the rector, Professor Sir Richard Sykes, was personally involved, fell apart so spectacularly.

These include…

• The Campus partners were unable to secure adequate land for the scheme
• The Campus partners, and others, differed over whether the scheme was affordable
• These same people got their sums horribly wrong. When they started work, they were predicting a need for more hospital beds in the area. By the time the project was cancelled, the strategic health authority had actually worked out they needed to reduce capacity by 500 to 600 beds.

Will Wye Park go the same way… and for much the same reasons?

Read the rest of this entry »

It took a while, but Wye Park is now beginning to creep onto the national agenda, in ways which surely won’t make for easier sleeping within the ramparts of Imperial College. The Sunday Times has today produced a long and detailed article on the plan, focusing on the opposition to it, the threat to the countryside, and raising the possibility that there may be animal testing on any new site.

The paper’s deputy political editor interviewed Imperial’s rector Professor Sir Richard Sykes for the article who boasted, ‘It would be research at the cutting edge. The government is very interested.’ He also told her that Imperial would up sticks and abandon the area if it ran into serious planning problems (though most locals would argue they are in that position already).

Read the rest of this entry »

What university rectors do for fun: Richard Sykes demolishing a Grade II listed building

If you would like to see a couple of the major players in this saga in the virtual flesh as it were, head off to this page on the Imperial site or click on the picture above to watch a rather scary video in which the rector of Imperial College, Professor Sir Richard Sykes, leaps into a drilling machine to begin the demolition of the Grade II listed Southside halls of residence regarded by specialists as ‘one of the flagship buildings of the post-war university development’.

Tearing down Southside was a controversial proposal, fought bitterly by the Twentieth Century Society until it accepted that the state of the building was so bad it had to come down (apparently neither Imperial’s science or David Brooks Wilson’s estates skills were sufficient to save it). All the same, it is a little odd to watch a squeaky-voiced Yorkshire academic don a hard hat to take a whacking great demolition machine to the thing. What will he do if he gets the chance to build on Wye? Sacrifice a lamb before the bulldozers are let off the leash?

Read the rest of this entry »

We gave you some real life facts from the marketplace earlier this week to show that, contrary to the claims of Wye’s would be developers, there is no shortage of commercial land in the area. Now it turns out that planners have known this all along… because they were told so in a detailed consultants’ report in 2002 which concluded the area had 70 years’ supply of commercial land, mostly on existing developments, if the pace of change continued at the rate of the 1990s.

And here’s another interesting fact to be gleaned from this detailed independent investigation of the area’s economic capacity for the future: the authors believed the development of the area was held back in the 1990s because the owner of two of its major industrial estates wanted to charge far more than the market could bear because their ‘background and circumstances may not have disposed them to pursue development opportunities as vigorously as they might have done’.

The biggest owner coming in for criticism? None other than Eurotunnel Developments, the Chunnel’s property arm. Its boss for much, if not all, of the period in question? None other than David Brooks Wilson, now, it seems, the man to transform the economy of Wye.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone missing the ancient art of Kremlin-watching — where distant observers had to read internal reshuffles in Russia to find out what was really going on — may care to transfer their skills to Imperial College. Changes are afoot there, and they concern two people well known to Wye, and very prominent indeed at the infamous January meeting.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, deputy rector and key proponent of the Wye Park project, is changing responsibilities. And so is Mr David Brooks Wilson, who is relinquishing the job of estates director to concentrate on ’special projects’.

So how do we read these particular runes?

Read the rest of this entry »

The latest edition of our print digest save-wye7 is now available. Please feel free to print it out and distribute as you see fit. Copies are also available in the New Flying Horse and Wye News. Thanks to everyone for helping distribute the two-page newsletter in this way.

save-wye7 May 27 06

One website alone lists four hundred homes in the Ashford area for sale

We showed you yesterday hard evidence of how ridiculous it is to claim that the Ashford area is short of space for commercial development. But offices and labs are only part of Wye Park, of course. An important element in Imperial College’s get-rich-quick plan is the creation of thousands of new homes on virgin, protected farmland… and what’s the betting they turn up before anything else does, because that is where the easy money is supposed to be?

But is it? Ashford has been earmarked for 31,000 new homes over the next thirty years — largely because John Prescott, when he still had a real job, decided we needed them. What no-one has yet explained adequately is where the people, the jobs, the schools and the infrastructure to fill all these little boxes will come from. Instead we get the chicken and the egg argument… Imperial must be allowed to build homes, because the people coming to staff their new science park need somewhere to live.

This presupposes that the existing housing stock — which is already being supplemented by the huge existing expansion programme each year — is already groaning under the strain of being a boom town. So is there the slightest grain of truth in this idea? Read on…

Read the rest of this entry »

Ninety six acres up for grabs at Eureka alone…

It’s all about that precious, scarce commodity land really, isn’t it? After all, if we were surrounded by suitable, available space ready made and zoned for development, a nice, caring educational establishment like Imperial College wouldn’t want to concrete over an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, would they?

Well, not unless they simply wanted the filthy lucre alone. The problem with the land scarcity argument though is this: it’s rubbish, and you can prove so yourself very easily, right now. Here’s how…

Read the rest of this entry »

In the absence of hard facts, rumours flourish, and they have been positively abuzz since Gordon Brown announced in the last Budget plans for a £1 billion public/private partnership to build a ‘National Institute for Energy Technologies’.

The bill matches the figure most often quoted for the cost of Wye Park. The research is in the same area Imperial have been hyping like crazy. And the Treasury have hinted strongly that Imperial is among the front runners to get the prize of building a new boffin bank to invent some way of fuelling the world without ruining the place at the same time.

So is Wye really on the cards for this idea? An e-mail from within the Treasury has to make you wonder…

Read the rest of this entry »

The new two-page newsletter for you to print out and share around is now available below. Many thanks to the New Flying Horse and Wye News for their continuing assistance in distributing copies of this digest from our week’s news.

Justin is on holiday, so please excuse the different layout. I don’t have the fancy software he does… or the newspaper skills.

Save-wye 7 newsletter May 19 2006

We have reintroduced a discussion forum. You can find it here. Please take a look around and let us know what you think (preferably on the forum).

We hope you will use it for…

• Recording wildlife sightings
• Discussing aspects of the campaign
• Raising questions that others might be able to answer in an easier way than through simple comments

Anyone can post to the areas on how to use the site without pre-registration. But to post to the forum anonymously you will need to register. This is painless, happens once, and simply requires a real e-mail address. It will let you start topics, upload photographs and add events to the online calendar. We don’t need to know your identity from that e-mail address. If it’s a brand new one from Hotmail it doesn’t matter. But you will need it to register the first time.

The forum will be unmoderated to begin with, until we see how things go. It is a very powerful thing (which is one way of saying I don’t fully understand it yet). But it will do some very clever stuff, such as allow you to post photographs and communicate privately with other members.

Let us know if you have suggestions for other topic areas.

Wye Future Group is compiling a survey of sightings of wildlife in Wye, the results of which will be sent on to the national Biological Records Centre. They would like people to fill in the form below with details of species seen in the area. The survey covers farmed land and the built-up area only because the Downs are already documented.

If you want to take part please print out the form and the sheet on species to look for and send your finished surveys to the address provided.

Survey sheet

Species to look for

From today’s KE… some excellent investigative local journalism

The track record of some of the key figures behind the Wye Park scheme is beginning to look more shaky by the day. Thanks to some excellent reporting by Paul Francis in the Kentish Express, we now know that an earlier effort by this bunch of would-be property titans has ended up costing the public £10m, and failed miserably in its effort to bring new companies to the area.

The purchase of International House in the town centre was supposed to be a ’significant step forward for the regeneration of Ashford’ according to SEEDA, the South East England Development Agency which bought the 11-storey block for £8.2 million in 2004. But Paul Francis has been using the Freedom of Information Act to find out what really went on in this deal, and discovered some interesting information that casts new light on the Wye project too.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Campaign to Protect Rural England in Kent have weighed in on the Wye Park controversy, and summed up local feelings in a single sentence: ‘(it) would probably seem like some strange joke to the people of Wye, were they not contemplating the destruction of everything they love about their village.’

In a fierce and well-informed editorial, headlined ‘Behaving imperially’, the normally mildly spoken CPRE fumes, ‘This nightmare blueprint for Wye’s future would bring thousands of new residents and a daily army of commuters pouring along a new road, sliced through fields and woodland from the M20 to plug the village into the motorway network. A permanent, character-destroying alteration of one of Kent’s most lovely villages would take place, and with it wholesale destruction of Wye’s surrounding countryside.’

This lengthy and detailed piece is well worth a read, and distributing to others interested in the future of Wye. It concludes, ‘We shall, through our Ashford Committee and branch office — as well as alongside the people of Wye and their organisations — try to keep this issue in the public eye. We will also, through written submission and oral representation, do everything we can to stop national, regional, county and district government policy evolving in such a way that would assist Imperial and its woefully inappropriate conception.’

We hope Imperial’s governors take note when they have to consider whether to take this madcap grandiose scheme forward later this year. As the CPRE’s closing remarks indicate, the protest queue to drag you through each and every piece of local, national and European legislation designed to protect every last blade of grass and protected species of fauna and flora in Wye is beginning to lengthen… and we have scarcely begun.

Our weekly digest was skipped last week because of lack of time on the part of the two of us. I hope it will appear at the weekend, but in the meantime here is one of a sporadic series of special reports which will be published when appropriate. This one summarises the very interesting information Justin discovered about the truth behind the UN non-foods crops centre planned for the village, which Imperial like to make out is at the heart of their plans. Needless to say the facts are somewhat different.

Please print out and pass around as you see fit — and we will be producing copies for the New Flying Horse too. And excuse the cruddy design and one obvious typo on page 2 — all this print stuff is Justin’s bag, not mine, but he’s on hols right now.

You can download the two-page printout below.

Oh… and a special, and final, message for the correspondent formerly known as J.Lo. Will you either follow the rules and supply a real e-mail address or kindly stop sending us comments under new fake ones? Our system doesn’t know who you are, but it knows the IP address from which you are sending these comments — which actually I would like to use, if they met the rules. So inventing new fake e-mail addresses simply won’t work, and wastes time I would rather use on something else.

save-wye special on the UN non-foods crops centre

We believe in democracy around here. So let’s canvas your opinion. Above you will see an image featuring three creatures with a noticeable presence in this area. The first is the Great Crested Newt. The second is the rector of Imperial College, Sir Richard Sykes. And the third is his estates director David Brooks Wilson.

The question — and this is not entirely academic — is this. If you could have only one of these three living near to you in Wye, which would it be? Kindly choose in our poll in the sidebar. And once you’ve answered — or ignored the question entirely — please read on to find out why we ask.

Read the rest of this entry »

He’s turned down every request for an interview we’ve made, but of late Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the man charged to deliver Wye’s green land on a plate to Imperial, just can’t stop talking to almost everyone else. He’s spoken to student newspapers, and now he’s sat down with Kent on Sunday — smiling too! — to deliver his thoughts on Wye. You can read it in full on their site, or in the extract at the foot of this article.

So what does he say? Er, not a lot… Again.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s amazing how many different ways some people can face in local government. Kent County Council’s leader Paul Carter is on the front page of tomorrow’s Kent on Sunday warning that Ruth Kelly, John Prescott’s replacement as the nation’s overseer of communities and local government, wants to force more housing on the Garden of England.

‘We’ve had an enormous number of houses thrust upon the South East and upon Kent… to suggest we need more or of a higher density would be quite ridiculous.’

As indeed it would. So one wonders why Paul Carter signed the Concordat with Imperial College which now, it transpires, may demand the building of thousands of houses in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, outside current development plans, and in addition to the 31,000 homes already scheduled for the Ashford area.

Read the rest of this entry »

We like to bring you good news from time to time. So here’s some hot off the digital press. The heart of Wye just got a lot greener with the opening of the amazing new cottage garden at the New Flying Horse, an exact copy of the one that won first prize at last year’s Chelsea Flower Show.

Shepherd Neame have named the tiny thatched cottage ‘pub’ in the garden The Chelsea Pensioner and got a bunch of the red-coated chaps out in force to help cut the ribbon. The new outside area features a pond and a children’s play area, plus so much grass and beautifully kept flower beds your own little patch may look a bit scruffy by comparison. Quite where these people find perfect broad bean plants in blossom at the beginning of May is beyond me.

You can experience a little of this with our first video, above. You will need broadband and the latest free Macromedia Flash player installed — available in the Flash section here. It’s worth having — we hope to use more video, and this player will also let you see Google’s new video service. But if all you see is video without sound or vice versa it means you need to update your version.

Below you will find some photos from the event too. The New Flying Horse has done more than most to publicise save-wye, for which we are very grateful. Without Cliff’s steadfast display of information on the bar, we would never reach so many people. And the expense Shepherd Neame have gone to in order to create this little green oasis in the village shows Kent’s brewer has plenty of community spirit too. As one of the Chelsea pensioners remarked, ‘I wouldn’t mind living here myself — I think it may be even nicer than home.’

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always nice to have good neighbours, and that’s just what the people on the other side of the A28 in Boughton Aluph and Eastwell are. They have written to the principal players in Wye Park — Imperial, Ashford and Kent County Council — and made it plain they are not in favour of grandiose redevelopment either.

Read the rest of this entry »

The long list of sceptics who have looked carefully at Imperial’s record over the Wye Park project with raised eyebrows has just grown: now the college’s own newspaper has joined the ranks of those who think the Imperial hierarchy has gone off the rails.

Rupert Neate, the editor of Felix, the official IC newspaper, visited Wye for the story and spent a day talking with a number of residents. You can read his report here, along with an editorial which ought to be mandatory consumption for IC’s senior management and members of the governing council.

Read the rest of this entry »

While most of the comments we receive are thoughtful, genuine and welcome, we are once again receiving a stream of abusive and anonymous e-mails from fake e-mail addresses. It is very time-consuming dealing with these, and unless they cease we will have to insist users register a proper e-mail address with this site before any comment is considered. The addresses will not be made public to anyone; we just want to know you’re real. It is a little rich to get messages from people calling other real people liars when the accusers fake not only their own names but their supposed e-mail addresses. Our limited voluntary time here is not best used checking whether e-mail addresses are genuine or not.

Let me reiterate the comments policy. You may post anonymously but all comments must come from a genuine address, and we will be introducing measures which will attempt to check these automatically from now on. We are happy to carry robust comments, including those on the record, stance and statements of the figures involved. But personal abuse and libellous accusations are totally unacceptable. So please spare us the work of excising them. Most, I think, come from supporters of this site, but you are doing us no favour in sending in occasionally quite nasty comments about individuals in this saga which are unprintable. In between the bile they often make good points, but of course we can’t suggest changes because we have no real e-mail address.

Finally… a thank you to the minority of users who post comments using their real names. Your words certainly carry a lot more weight with most visitors I am sure.

We discovered yesterday that Imperial College’s working group overseeing its £1billion plus planned redevelopment of Wye was in the curious habit of failing to keep minutes of important meetings. This is odd, and generally viewed to be very bad practice.

Should the group require advice on how to improve its poor practice in this area, it surely need look no further than its own Tanaka Business School which promises that, ‘Learning core management disciplines from an internationally respected faculty, you gain both the perspective to ask the right questions and the skills to deliver convincing answers.’

Unfortunately, if you go to the business school’s own website you will find a few convincing answers missing. Not least… where does it unusual name come from? Let us help…

Read the rest of this entry »

Sadly, we will be unable to bring you the details of Imperial College’s 31-page document on building in the AONB just yet. The college’s Freedom of Information act appeals system has just judged our complaint about the fact Imperial won’t release a document that, back in February, Kent County Council said was fit for public consumption (until Prof Sykes’ people complained)… and, surprise, surprise, said no to our request to see this file.

The reasoning appears simple.

1. It’s just an out-of-date briefing note of no current importance.
2. In spite of the above, it contains ‘the type of information that, if released into the public domain, could jeopardise the College’s ability in the future to obtain competitive tenders or ensure value for money in relation to developments at its Wye Campus’.

Have we mentioned recently that Imperial don’t do courses in applied logic either? Well, read on…

Read the rest of this entry »

I still have to pinch myself a little over this but we have now welcomed our ten thousandth individual visitor since counting started on January 8. In the early days we were lucky to get a couple of hundred curious viewers a week. Now we regularly attract more than that each day — as you can see from the graphs at the foot of this article.

Thanks for your interest. And thanks in particular to Justin who came in with his own special brand of enthusiasm just when I was wondering whether it was worth continuing at all. I began this site thinking that the Wye Park project — as we now know it — was worthy of a single issue discussion forum where lots of individuals could chip in with news, opinion and ideas. That never really worked, but thanks to Justin we found another purpose: as a highly focused online local newspaper, one which, with his very hard work and the constant support of Cliff at the New Flying Horse and our friends at Wye News, is now available in a free weekly print digest too. Read the rest of this entry »

KCC’s planning boss Pete Raine has been remarkably visible this week, first in the Kentish Express here, and tomorrow in an interview with Kent on Sunday. And once again, like most people involved in this project, he is having enormous difficulties with numbers, except to say… they’re big and, in this latest media chat, have ‘potentially negative’ environmental implications.

Read the rest of this entry »

The college’s website PR fails to tell potential students what is actually happening

And I guess most of us wouldn’t argue with that. But if you are a student thinking of choosing Imperial at Wye for your future best not trust Imperial’s own website for accurate advice on what to expect.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s all just an idea, you understand, and no-one has made up their minds about anything. All the same, Kent County Council intend to spend your tax money on providing Imperial with a free employee to work on the plan to break conventional planning regulations and build on the AONB in Wye.

Unbelievable? You’d think so. But a private in-house job ad has just gone up inside KCC’s Environment and Regeneration unit… for someone to go and work on secondment with Imperial to further the Wye Park project.

Read the rest of this entry »

I never thought I would write these words but… Praise be to the Kentish Express! The old beast finally got its act together this week and delivered a page of news on the Wye Park controversy that is informed, impartial and contains a damned good scoop too.

It also documents KCC’s planning chief Pete Raine putting his foot so far into his mouth you half expect him to be in casualty at the William Harvey at the end of it. The only odd part of the story is it carries no byline. But whoever you were… thank you, please come again. Soon.

Read the rest of this entry »

New documents from the government’s university funding body, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), reveal that Sir Richard Sykes was looking for a way out of Imperial’s deal to buy Wye less than eighteen months after the merger was formally agreed.

In January 2002, a year after Sykes’ arrival as rector, concerned officials from HEFCE — the body that funds English universities — reported that Imperial feared the Wye deal was a mistake, and were looking at a restructure, closure, or transfer to another college — with help from HEFCE, which had paid £2.5m for the original merger.

So alarmed were some HEFCE officers that one commented, ‘I find (this) pretty astonishing, given that we have only just given them £2.5m to support the merger… if Imperial do decide to get out of Wye, there must be real question about claiming our £2.5m back.’

The latest documents, produced as a result of a Freedom of Information request by save-wye, also reveal…

• The figures Imperial released last week, which show the college expected to conclude the merger at little or no cost to themselves, turned out to be highly inaccurate. In fact the merger cost £5m, and HEFCE turned down Imperial’s request to foot the whole bill, only agreeing to half.
• Those same figures failed to mention that Imperial had also stumped up loans to cover Wye’s debts and running costs — eventually writing off almost £3.5m in unrepaid debts and lost interest.
• Redundancy, retirement costs and professional fees added almost £1m to the final bill.
• Undergraduate and postgraduate student entry figures more than halved after Imperial’s takeover, in part because the college began to demand the same entry requirements for Wye as it wanted of students at its main London campus. The obvious result — students capable of gaining entrance to a London degree course expected an education in London, not in rural Kent — never seems to have occurred to anyone.

In short, Imperial’s takeover of Wye seems to have been a running disaster even before it formally began in August 2000. For the latest horror stories, and a glimpse into how yet another large central government institution views Imperial, read on…

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday saw our biggest single daily readership. At 355 unique visitors — including many who came back more than once — it’s not Google, but we think it’s pretty good going for a single issue website concerning a village with a small population, and it is three times the readership we were getting six weeks ago. Over the last seven days more than 1,400 different people came to save-wye from all over the world, including government institutions, local councils, and many departments and individuals within Imperial College. We hope that one of the key messages of save-wye — that this story is about more than a supposed Nimby backlash against development — is starting to get through.

Please bear in mind that we are very keen to carry a range of opinions on this issue. If you would like your say, use the contact form to get in touch. You don’t need to live near Wye; we welcome the views of everyone.

It’s taken longer than they ever promised, and you have just a couple of weeks to take part, but Imperial have finally come up with a way in which you can tell them just what you think about Wye Park. Follow this link and you can have your say online by filling in a form. But get it in by May 5 ’so the results can be discussed at the next Consultation Panel meeting and the Community Workshop’.

Quite how people are supposed to know this ‘Wye Campus Vision Questionnaire’ exists is beyond us. We weren’t told; only eagle-eyed save-wye reader Andy Gubb spotted it. The questions are summarised below if you’d like to think about them before you answer. You will also find a print version here. Since we have no way of knowing whether Imperial are actually distributing them in the village, you can also find a copy below — please print it out and give it to people without internet access. They can be filled in with a pen and sent direct to the college.

Imperial Questionnaire on the future of Wye

It’s nice they should finally get around to ‘consultation’. But we tend to agree with Andy Gubb when he says, ‘I note that many of the questions are worded in a way which presupposes the development going ahead — they’re along of the lines of “What would be the best use for land when it is re-developed?” and “What are the most important attributes of to maintain [when we go ahead and implement our proposals]?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever wondered what the proposed Wye Park might look like if it’s ever built? We assume, naturally, that the housing and office accommodation that make up the bulk of this planned development will be the usual Legoland stuff. But Imperial certainly has some interesting ideas when it comes to its own property. Take a look at the oddity below which, if the college gets its way, will be the new entrance to its South Kensington Campus.

Read the rest of this entry »

The property business is an odd world. One minute something’s worthless. The next it’s priceless. For example, we know that Imperial hopes it can raise £300m by flogging off protected countryside for commercial development and housing, and spawn a project worth £1billion (or £1.5billion depending on the day of the week). But how much did Imperial actually pay to ‘merge’ — i.e. take over — Wye College, all its many properties, and its 840-acre estate back in 2000?

Pick your answer from the choices below, then read on to find out what appears to be the truth.

1) £11.3m. 2) £5.1m 3) £2.5m 4) £830,000 5) A nominal £1 fee

Read the rest of this entry »

We were speculating here earlier about whether Wye Park’s murky antecedents included some private nods and winks with central government, and John Prescott’s gigantic Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in particular, before it entered public view.

Now we can tell you the answer. No… indeed many of the civil servants who have looked at the idea seem as taken aback as the rest of us. For a fascinating glimpse into how those who may end up sitting in final judgement on the plan reacted in the first few days after Imperial’s December bombshell, read on…

Read the rest of this entry »

For a college involved in science, Imperial sometimes has a curiously uncertain way with numbers. The estimate of the number of jobs Wye Park would bring to the area has veered between just over a thousand and 12,500. Now meet yet another astonishing variable. Since the day of the public signing of the Concordat, we’ve all been told this is a plan that would cost £1 billion.

But that was not what the governing body of Imperial College was assured when Wye Park’s mentor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz briefed them on December 9. This was three days after the public version was signed, with a press release that put the £1 billion price tag on the event. So how much did Prof Borys say the thing would cost when he spoke to the college’s bosses? Er, £1.5 billion, a 50 per cent rise in 72 hours, surely a record for fast expenditure over-runs, even for the public sector.

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Just when you thought this story couldn’t get more bizarre… Imperial College have come up with a new reason why they can’t release the detailed 31-page consultants’ report they commissioned at great expense into buildlng in the Wye Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Er, they don’t keep a copy in the office. Read the rest of this entry »

After weeks of undercover investigations, save-wye can reveal the truth behind ‘Project Alchemy’, the £1 billion plan to transform the entire Wye district. Thanks to the leak of part of the secret files which the authorities have been desperately trying to keep from public view, we can finally, for the first time, show you concrete proof of what the area will look like if Imperial gets the go-ahead.

This exclusive report includes…

• The first high-tech 3D simulation of the future ‘Wye City’ envisaged by the plan.
• Photographic evidence that many of the major individuals involved are linked by membership of the same, secretive group.
• The covert picture that captured the signing of the original secret Concordat document almost a year ago.
• Scientifically-documented predictions of some of the drastic changes which could be on the way to the Wye area.

A print version can be found at the foot of the article.
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We speculated the other day about whether Imperial’s deputy rector, Professor Leszek Borysiewicz, resorted to the voodoo of the dreaded Microsoft PowerPoint presentation in order to put across his message when he briefed the college’s management board on the Wye Park project last November.

As it turns out, if he did, he was only following in his master’s footsteps. Below we reproduce Sir Richard Sykes’ personal internal PowerPoint presentation arguing for the merger of Imperial and University College London to create ‘the complete pack’, a ‘major force’ in world universities capable of ‘responding rapidly to new opportunities’ and of ‘a size which justifies major investments by funders (public and corporate)’. Oh and you also get that horrible old piece of tripe he trotted out for the Concordat too, the promise to create ‘global centres of excellence’, which are presumably like local or national centres of excellence except, er… global. But that’s enough of the Microsoft Office 97 jargon wizard for now.

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Update 0539 Friday: save-wye was closed yesterday by a deliberate attack, one we could have survived had it not been for the incompetence of our then hosting service. We are now with a new host and have recovered most of the site.

Friday night update. Please excuse the brief outage tonight. There was nothing suspicious about this. It was just an idiot user — me — forgetting to tell this site to stop using the old temporary database I created to keep it up and running during the move. Many thanks to our new host, Dreamhost, for not only spotting the problem but fixing it.

We got clobbered yesterday. Our US hosting service declared save-wye was too popular for our own good and decided without warning, that it was moving us to another server. After that point, very little of the site worked, as many of you may have noticed, and eventually people started getting an ‘account suspended’ notice, which amazed me since I still have eight paid for months to run on this contract.

To answer the obvious question first: no, we weren’t hacked in the sense that someone got inside. But we appear to have been victim of some kind of attack in which there was an attempt to ‘flood’ the server by repeatedly demanding informaton in such substantial quantities from the site that our hosting service became concerned.

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One of the recurring themes in the argument over whether the Wye area needs to lose 300 acres of protected green land to property developers is the economic one. Imagine the benefits. Think of the jobs it might bring.

Were the residents living in a region of high unemployment and social blight this might be understandable. But they’re not. Says who? None other than Ashford Borough Council itself, in detail, and through the mouth of its very own economic development manager, Mark Bradbury, uttered in the same month that its leader Paul Clokie, apparently without a word to a single other elected member, was signing the secret deal to bring massive redevelopment to Wye.

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Yesterday we showed you how Imperial College’s views were able to shift radically — from no job losses in Wye, to lots, possibly compulsory — in four years. Now we demonstrate another marvellous trick, surely beyond the grasp of mere mortals.

Read on to discover the college’s amazing control over the time-space continuum.

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In the great morass of unanswered questions about the Wye Concordat, one thing does become clear: the absence of hard fact means you have to take an awful lot on trust. So when it comes to the faith factor, how do the high and mighty of Imperial fare?

Consider these two internal reports from the college, both concerned with its attitude towards Wye, and judge for yourself — you will, as usual, find them in full at the foot of the article, in print ready form.

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This is fast becoming a complicated story, and one that newcomers may find a little baffling. So, in accordance with a welcome and highly sensible suggestion from Cliff of the New Flying Horse we now have a two-page background document which you can read online and print out too. It is called, as the picture says, ‘When democracy goes bad’, and you can find it below and on our new background page, which also includes a couple of new window stickers too. Please print out and use as you see fit — it really helps us if you pass copies of this, and save-wye.org7, to people without internet access or anyone who has yet to hear of this site.

Please note that we have now discontinued updating our press coverage page. This is because only one newspaper, Kent on Sunday, sees fit to cover this story in any detailed professional way. If Wye interests you, it’s essential reading… and a very good newspaper in its own right.

When democracy goes bad: background to the Wye Concordat

We’re delighted to tell you that Ian Cooling, Wye’s borough councillor, is to contribute his own opinions on the Imperial College development issue here on save-wye. His first piece will be his open letter to villagers which will be distributed around the Parish shortly. This will lay out where Ian stands at the moment, give an outline of the results from a series of wide-ranging discussions he has had across the community over the past three months and offer his thoughts on how he can best work for the community in the weeks and months to come.

You can comment on it in the usual way, and Ian is keen to answer your questions if you post them through the site too. In case people are still in any doubt about the nature of save-wye let me reiterate: Ian’s appearance here in no way indicates his support or agreement with articles by other people on this site. I’m sure he disagrees with things he reads here, and he’s absolutely free to say so.

Save-wye is a focal point for dialogue, not a campaign group trying to steer any of you towards any particular conclusion or consensus. We simply want to see the facts out in the open for all to see and mull over. We’re really pleased that Ian has become the first elected representative to choose to open up his views to the public through save-wye. If any other councillors would like to have a similar platform they need only ask.

Kent County Council has finally come up with an explanation for why it files its public Freedom of Information submissions in a way that makes it near impossible for the public to find them: it’s the computers’ fault.

As save-wye pointed out a few weeks ago, the trickle of FoI documents from KCC over the Wye Concordat was even more difficult to find because of the method the council used to post them in an obscure corner of their website. Most organisations file their documents in the common pdf format as text, which means the contents are easily tracked by public search engines such as Google. KCC, uniquely for any public body we know, scans each document first, which means that they are simply pictures of words, not words themselves, so Google can’t find them.

Why?

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Kent County Council have confirmed they pulled back on their decision to release key documents on the Wye Concordat because of objections from Imperial College — and still plan to keep the files secret. We have now lodged a formal complaint with the Information Commissioner over the council’s extraordinary about-turn over documents it said, itself, were fit for public viewing.
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Until this week’s blast from Ashford Independents, local politicians have been surprisingly cautious about making much noise about the Concordat, until this week’s blast from Ashford Independents. But one would-be local representative thinks it important enough to put it at the top of his agenda.

Jamie Clifford is standing for the parish council election for Wye with Hinxhill, which happens on April 6. On his website he states very clearly…

The biggest single issue facing Wye today is the development plan of Imperial College. It has created a huge amount of uncertainty and concern in the village. All that makes Wye special could be at risk.

We don’t take sides in elections. But we’re very glad to see someone who is standing for public office puts this issue so prominently on his agenda. Mr Clifford is a graduate of Wye and says he couldn’t wait to get back to the village after he married. He is now the development director of Kent County Cricket Club and, he says, ‘very much a man of Kent’.

As cross-party concern over the Wye Concordat grows, Ashford council’s opposition says there should be no more progress on the controversial plan without a vote.

Ashford Borough Council’s main opposition party, the Independents, has called for the Wye Concordat to be put to the vote after what they describe as ‘the breakdown of democracy in Ashford’. In the most outspoken local attack so far on the way the Concordat plan has been prosecuted in secret by the leaders of Ashford council and Kent County Council, the Independents have criticised the Tory leader, Paul Clokie, personally for keeping all members, including those of his own party, in the dark about the £1 billion attempt to build housing and commercial development in the Wye Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
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Imperial College seems so certain it is going ahead with its Wye development plan it is even offering a discount on residential courses in the village to ‘celebrate’. The special deal, detailed on Imperial’s website here, says that visitors can ‘enjoy ten per cent off all new bookings for residential conferences held at our Withersdane Conference Centre’ until July 31, 2006.
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As we revealed a few days ago, the estates director of Imperial College, Mr David Brooks Wilson, is an unsung architect of the Wye Concordat, a man of countless connections and talents who is working tirelessly on its behalf.

Only now, though, is it becoming clear how fortunate the area is to have a figure of his stature slaving away to turn grass to concrete. He has had many, many other irons in the fire, as this small anecdote proves. Read the rest of this entry »

We like facts around here, and among those are statistics about how many people are using this site, what they read, and where they come from. You’ve a right to know what we collect and what we don’t. So here is an example. This is a snapshot of our traffic from this afternoon (Friday March 10, 2006). Each of these individual entries represents a single visitor. The hits tell you how many pages they have looked at so far. The red dots indicate they are on the site at the time this snapshot was taken. ‘Timed out’ simply means that they have been online for more than 30 minutes, the limit at which the system ceases to record the length of the visit.

We do not — and never will — track individual users. All our system records is where you come from, which for individuals means your various ISPs (such as ntl and aol, seen here). Companies and organisations visit through their corporate networks which, if they have named them, appear under those names. So you can see, from this information, that this afternoon someone in the House of Commons has spent 13 minutes and 23 seconds reading 12 pages, while another visitor from Imperial College (ic.ac.uk) has spent 11 minutes and 5 seconds viewing 11 pages. We have also had visits from Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council, as well as Kent on Sunday (kosmedia). If you have any queries about our statistics please ask. But let me reiterate: we do not collect any individual information, simply the IP or network addresses which all professional sites use to monitor their visitors.

This is an independent, non-partisan site which, if that doesn’t make things sufficiently clear, means we will take a pop at anyone. Today let’s make it the Kent Conservatives who rule our County Council — one of Imperial College’s biggest fans — with a Ceausescuesque majority of 57 seats out of 84 if you please.

The leader of KCC, Paul Carter, and his predecessor, Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, have made much of what a great thing the coming Wye Park is, while insisting, of course, that it’s ‘only an idea not a plan’, (a refrain we’re hearing so often these days we may well abbreviate it to simply ‘OAINAP’ — pronounced ‘Oi-nap’ — in future).

So what do Kent Tories make of this billion pound miracle on their very own website?
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UPDATED with new information on March 8th

Kent County Council has slammed down the secrecy shutters on two crucial internal documents about the Wye Science Park project… after telling this website in writing that they were about to be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The reports — one by the consultants, Ernst & Young, and a second 31-page document on how to deal with development in the local Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, written by the property agents GeraldEve — are thought to cover some of the most contentious aspects of the planned development proposal.

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Ashford’s minority Labour group have joined in the criticism of the authority’s role in the Wye Park plan. Labour say that, like the Lib-Dems, they think the public weren’t informed early enough, and go on to add, ‘Understanding the confidentiality required, we are not happy that all the activity documented (in the Concordat) was taking place over such a long period without bringing all 43 ABC councillors into their confidence at a much earlier date than they did.’

Cllr Mick Hubert, leader of the Labour group, says that a Labour majority on the council would lead to ‘a positive approach seeking local and borough wide support through consultation’. But the project belongs in the regional development plan, he believes.

‘Bearing in mind the plan remains in draft form and that there is a lot more detail to be added and perhaps taken away, with discussions to be had followed by public consultation, we are of the opinion that it needs to remain in the blue print for the South East.’

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We don’t want to depress you all hereabouts. So welcome to save-wye’s first reader contest!

Yes, put on your thinking caps and you could win a signed first edition of my new book, published today, the fourth in the Nic Costa series of Italian crime stories, The Lizard’s Bite (plug ends here). The prize goes to the person who can offer the best explanation — possibly factual, possibly more cerebral — for the mysterious hand-written council officer’s note we reproduce below. Read the rest of this entry »

Both Ashford Borough Council and Kent Council have written directly to the housing and planning minister, Yvette Cooper, lauding the idea of the Wye Science Park and offering to ‘arrange briefings’ with Imperial College if members of the government want them.

The enthusiasm of Paul Carter, leader of KCC, and Paul Clokie, leader of Ashford, to do this unpaid PR work on behalf of Imperial seems to know few bounds; they even copied Alan Johnson of the DTI, Margaret Beckett at DEFRA and David Miliband, the local government minister into the missive. You can read their starry-eyed gushings below, thanks to Freedom of Information requests by save-wye to KCC. Sir Richard Sykes, of Imperial, wrote separately on the same subject to Gordon Brown, John Prescott, and Ruth Kelly, though that letter has not been released to us by Imperial, despite requests under the FoI. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve grown considerably in size over the last few weeks. It’s clear, also, that many visitors are quite new to the internet. So here are a few tips you might want to try to get more out of save-wye for less effort. This is not a normal website of the kind that’s been around for years. It can let you find the information you want in a flash and even deliver the news to you in a shot too, by e-mail or directly over the web. Read the rest of this entry »

Ashford’s Liberal Democrat leader and parliamentary candidate have both expressed their concerns about the way in which the Wye Park scheme was developed in secrecy by Imperial College, Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council.

Cllr Rita Hawes, leader of the Lib-Dem group on ABC, said that she was told of the proposal two days before the press announcement but asked to ‘keep quiet’ — a request she was happy to agree to in the circumstances.

‘Yes, I do query whether all the secrecy has been wise. It has come as a shock to Wye residents who have reacted very strongly. Until more information is available I find it hard to comment on the future.
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Yesterday save-wye.org broke two records: we crashed through the 2,000-visitor mark, and registered our highest single readership in one day, some 122 visitors. Just click below to see the details, learn a little about good and bad internet statistics, and admire a pretty graph.
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Ashford Borough Council has confirmed the disclosures made by save-wye.org about the protracted and secret discussions that preceded last December’s shock announcement of the Wye Park project with Imperial College.

In a statement to Kent on Sunday, the only Kent newspaper which has so far had the guts and the gumption to follow up our exclusive revelations, ABC chief executive David Hill says, ‘We believe the report’s chronology is broadly correct. We have been discussing with Imperial College the prospect of significant investment in a research park at Wye and it has always been our ambition to work with them to secure and continue academic work at Wye.

‘But in everything we have done we have stressed to them and have stressed publicly that it needs to be done through appropriate planning processes and the people of Wye need to be involved. The concordat launched a vision, not a plan.’

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This website is now six weeks old, and has a fast growing readership. It’s also become something we didn’t plan or expect when it was first established. In case anyone is in any doubt about who we are — ‘fifth columnists’ or just a couple of loud-mouthed blokes from ‘up the hill’ — please read our re-written ‘mission statement’ which we hope will allay any doubts or fears. You can find it here.

We’ve taken the separate forum offline for the time being because it seemed superfluous. Please use the comment system at the foot of all articles on the site to make your views known.

The Wye Concordat was not the only one to hit Kent last year — simply the one that caught all the headlines. Another of the blasted things was signed back in the summer too… and parts have an oddly resonant ring to them.

You can find the full document — all 59 pages of it — here, though we suggest the proximity of alcoholic beverage should you undertake the task of reading through every last line. The Concordat was signed between the Government Office of the South East (Mr Prescott’s chaps) and KCC, on behalf of the Kent Partnership (of which more later).

There is a list of eighteen ‘high-level outcomes’ which the document seeks to engender in Kent (health, happiness, and economic prosperity being among them, naturally, though there is no mention of English success in the World Cup, possibly on grounds of political correctness). Of particular interest is the desired ‘outcome block’ of ‘Stronger and Safer Communities’. Outcome number thirteen is ‘to increase the capacity of local communities so that people are empowered to participate in local decision making and the delivery of services’. The lead partner in this thoroughly praiseworthy venture is to be your local district council, in conjunction with parish councils. One objective is ‘increased perceptions of community cohesion’.
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New documents released by Kent County Council under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the controversial Wye Concordat was agreed in outline in March last year, and the first version signed only two months later. The residents of Wye had to wait until last December for news of the plan, which arrived seven months after the ink had dried on a draft agreement signed by the leaders of Ashford Borough Council, Paul Clokie, KCC, Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, and the rector of Imperial College, Sir Richard Sykes.

The statement, made in response to a request by save-wye.org, details the timetable leading up to the news that rocked the Wye area in December. It reveals…
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This is the full text of the statement released by Kent County Council in response to a request from save-wye.org.
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It was meant to be Ashford’s future: a science park backed by one of the world’s leading universities which would attract high-quality jobs and research to the area and stop it becoming just a dormitory town.

But the dream that was the Eureka Science Park has finally been laid to rest by Ashford Borough Council which has been forced to admit that there is not the demand to sustain a science base there. In the last few months the name ‘Eureka Science Park’ has been quietly dropped in favour of the rather more mundane ‘Trinity Trading Estate’.

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Imperial College’s Deputy Rector Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz has written to Wye residents to apologise for the fact that some were turned away from the meeting to discuss the Concordat project on January 9.

‘We had an enormous level of interest and, unfortunately, on reaching our capacity of 550, we had to restrict access due to fire regulation and health and safety concerns,’ Sir Leszek wrote.

The college has promised to send a report of the meeting to the homes of every resident in Wye. Sir Leszek says he will try to answer any concerns or questions residents have, by email or writing. You can read the letter and view his presentation to the meeting in our background section here. The initial meeting is just the first of many ‘briefing sessions’ planned for the village and neighbouring villages, Sir Leszek says. More information will be published in due course on the college’s own website.

Comment… Someone needs to have a word with the triumvirate involved in this befuddled mess and explain a few basic elements of public relations. The bad feeling generated by vague deals put together in secret will not be dissipated by a few anodyne PowerPoint presentations and ‘briefing sessions’. Those affected by these plans — which are already threatening to blight both homes and jobs in the area — deserve to be heard. Imperial and its partners should set aside time for listening, not just talking, and institute a proper, formal, open consultative process as soon as possible.

Wye faces years of debate over the far-reaching proposals to introduce new housing, industrial and academic development, Ashford MP Damian Green warned this week.

Writing for this website after a capacity turnout of 550 people, the largest community meeting in village history, to hear about the proposals, Mr Green said there will be time for Wye residents to influence the project. But he will not be supporting any ‘no change at any price’ approach to the plans.

‘There will be a number of those in the village who are just opposed in principle to any large-scale development. Obviously I respect this point of view but I do not share it. I think there will be a mixture of benefits and problems caused by the proposals, and the trick will be to maximise the former and minimise the latter.’

I have made sure in private that Imperial College recognise the strength of feeling on this issue — Damian Green MP

Mr Green was also critical of the way the news had been broken to the village. He said he sensed that there was more widespread disquiet that a deal had been ‘cooked up’ keeping local people in the dark, than over some of the plan’s implications themselves.
You can read Mr Green’s comments after the meeting below. We will also be running articles on the event from local Wye residents. If you would like to add your own view, please use the comment forms on the site or, if you would like to write an article yourself, contact us directly.