Articles by David Hewson and Justin Willia

Wye Park has claimed its latest casualty in the stunning defeat of sitting Conservative councillor Ian Cooling by the Independent Jack Woodford in the latest borough elections. Mr Woodford overturned a massive Tory majority to become the village’s first Independent councillor in recent memory. His campaign was fought on many fronts, but last year’s failed development by Imperial College, which he had vocally and consistently opposed as a parish councillor, was never far from its heart.

The final result of the 2007 election is…

Jack Woodford (Ind) 589
Ian Cooling (Con) 276
David Berrie (Lib Dem) 40

To put it in votes Paul Clokie might understand…in 2003 Councillor Cooling was elected with a majority of more than two hundred, polling 470 votes against 252 for the Green Party’s Steve Dawe and 57 for the Lib Dem candidate. This year he suffered a rout.

And with that save-wye’s job really is over. We wish the village’s new borough councillor and his predecessor well, and hope the ruling Conservative clique will finally ask themselves why they have been deserted in droves by the people of Wye, many of whom were once their natural supporters.

Happily, Peter Davison, the leader of the Independents on Ashford Council, retained his seat too, though narrowly. Nor is Wye the only area in Kent to have made inroads by fighting on a local campaign outside the realm of conventional big party politics. There was also a very interesting, and in some ways more astonishing, result in Sheppey.

Click on the name to go there: Paul Clokie, David Hill, Ian Cooling, Paul Carter, Pete Raine and a rare photograph of the elusive Charles Findlay.

Wye Park is dead, our job is done. But before we go we’d like to leave something to occupy your time now save-wye is slumbering peacefully. There are still some awkward questions remaining in this story, and we thought we’d pass on the names of some of the people who can supply the answers. Remember: Wye was lucky. Imperial were terrible property developers and shockingly weak when it came to organisation, planning and delivery. The one thing they did seem extremely adept at was working the private, hidden network of councillors, officials and quango members through which this scandal was put together in the first place.

When Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz stood up to address the village on January 9 he thought the college had secured secret prior agreements with some of your key public representatives, a deal so strong that the death of the community and countryside of Wye was just a matter of time, money and a little sham negotiation… then bring on the builders. What exactly made Imperial feel that way?
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Under threat no more: the green acres of Wye. Photo: Steve Bloom

Imperial College this morning announced that it is abandoning its controversial plans for a research park, science hub and housing development in Wye. After months of revelations and growing disquiet over the way the project had been prosecuted in tandem with Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council, the college blamed its collapse principally on economics.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Deputy Rector and the man in charge of trying to bring Wye Park into being, said the project team had ‘concluded that none of the scenarios for the vision would represent a wise, viable or desirable investment of public funds for Imperial College and Wye.’

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What Ernst & Young told your council representatives to ‘acquaint themselves with’ when the second Wye Concordat was signed. Did they stick to the script?

The public are still being denied sight of the original documents for Wye Park codenamed Project Alchemy, papers that Kent County Council first said we might see, then withdrew on the orders of Imperial College.

But fragments of these highly secret reports do keep cropping up in places. Here mainly. So let’s take a look at some more, this time ones which reveal the full membership of the ‘Alchemy’ stakeholders’ working group and, amazingly, the script that Imperial College handed to our own public representatives to make sure that they stayed on message whenever they spoke to the outside world.

In case your head is spinning right now let us just spell out in plain language exactly what is going on here: these are the words that Imperial’s professional advisers are putting in the mouths of your public representatives, people who one day, as part of the supposedly democratic process, would have to pass or reject the college’s planning application as ‘impartial’ judges.

Read on to discover what great thespians our council folk make when someone writes the script for them.

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GeraldEve: Wye Park won’t work even with a £220m subsidy partly from the public

Imperial College may be hoping it can extract £100 million in instant profits from the sale of Wye’s countryside to housing developers, but its scheme as a whole would be a financial disaster, and its proponents know this only too well. They were told by their own surveyors and property consultants, GeraldEve, only last May that Wye Park is essentially unviable, even if Kent County Council throws in up to £50 million of your money as a sweetener, and another third party gifts the project a further £200 million.

These gloomy verdicts are contained in a secret report on the scheme’s finance from GeraldEve partner Graham Bates, one that throws a damning light on the entire Wye Park planning process. Not only is Imperial trying to breathe life into the failing scheme against the advice of its own professional consultants, but the missive reveals that the college was talking specifically about a plan for 386 acres of housing in Wye more than a year ago — in May 2005 — at a time when supposedly this was all just blue sky thinking.

This document proves once and for all that hard numbers about the size of Wye countryside to be devoured by Imperial have been around for more than a year, and hidden in ways that some council officials may find deeply embarrassing.

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We’ve been told for months it was nothing more than an idea for civilised discussion, and certainly not a plan. Now save-wye can prove this charade to be the gross and indefensible lie we’ve suspected all along. Today we publish extracts from the secret report that went to Imperial College’s management board on June 12, almost two months ago, which discussed the detailed blueprint the college had already assembled by that stage, one which would mean the death of the Kent village of Wye forever.

Click on the thumbnail to the right and you will see the enormity that Imperial wishes to visit on the village, and all so that it can fill its coffers to pay for more facilities in London… not Kent at all. This is the detailed plan Imperial College, Ashford Borough Council and Kent County Council hoped you would all never see until it was too late and the destruction of Wye so insidiously ingrained into the local development process that only a miracle could stop it. The reality would be as bad as anyone could have feared… a sprawling mass of offices, scientific buildings and houses that would quadruple the size of the present village, wreath the area in construction work for years and end Wye’s heritage as a historic rural jewel of east Kent once and for all.

And just to rub it in Imperial hopes, as it has promised, to skip construction in the Area of Special Scientific Interest — for now anyway — but plans to send the bulldozers beyond it, to build new housing on land it owns in the village of Brook too. It is a vast and cynical exercise in property development that would cause a furore anywhere in the country. But the idea that such a plan could be visited on an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is simply breathtaking… and explains the extraordinary lengths to which the college and its placemen in Kent’s local authorities have gone to hide the truth from the very people this gigantic scheme would affect, economically, socially and culturally for years to come.

Today we can throw off a little of that shroud of secrecy. Click on our summary on the right to get a brief overview of the spin machine that has been foisted on the Ashford area for the past nine months. In separate longer articles below you can find out how…

• The detailed plans for the village and outlying area would involve construction across huge swathes of beautiful countryside and stretch halfway to the village of Brook
• The prospect of BP going to London instead of Wye has thrown a huge question mark against the project, and turned it instead into a potential moneyspinner to pay for college development in London
• The publicly quoted costs for the project of £1 billion to £1.5 billion bear no relation to the real and much smaller estimates used in private by Imperial, quotes that appear to include the college taking £100 million in ‘profits’ for work in London the moment it goes ahead
• Imperial’s own private documents boast about how local politicians have helped them formulate their plans… with potentially dire consequences for those involved
• Imperial assesses the risks it believes could bring its overweening ambition crashing to earth

These are the most detailed revelations about Imperial’s ambitions and the way it has played fast and loose with the public to date, and they tell the story, for the most part, from the college’s own secret internal records. We hope to bring you more of the same in the future. If you wish to send us more documents anonymously, please use the special e-mail address in the sidebar.

A two-page printable overview of these revelations is available below. Please distribute as you see fit. We are working on a more detailed four-page printout. If anyone can help with printing this, say with an A3 laser colour printer, please get in touch urgently since we have limited facilities and budget for colour printing.

save-wye special August 10, 2006 (two A4 pages)