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David Hewson writes… It’s more than a year now since Saved, my real-life account of the successful battle to prevent a huge housing complex swallowing the little Kent village of Wye, appeared. You can still buy the book in the village at Wye News and campaign headquarters, the New Flying Horse. But there’s a fresh outlet too.

I have donated most of the remaining copies of the book to the doughty campaigners facing a similarly greedy and unnecessary development nightmare in nearby Sellindge. So please visit their site and support their campaign, with a book if you like (all proceeds now go to their campaign and another local charity).

For those of you too far away to get a book – or if you’d simply like to know what all the fuss is about – I’m happy to put the entire book of Saved online below. You can email it to others as a pdf and, if you join up to Scribd for free using the icon below, download your own copy too. To see a larger version which you can adjust to your own preferred size just click on the Scribd icon.

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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.

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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Early January and an iron-cold easterly has given way to the wet warmth of a south-westerly. The post-Christmas week’s heavy dump of snow is all gone save for the odd grey patch piled up in farm gateways, thawing rapidly and leaving a smudged reminder of the beauty of a real Kentish winter.

It has been nearly a month since the concordat. Cash-strapped and struggling to keep warm in a ramshackle cottage in Hastingleigh, the enormity of Imperial’s vision has passed me by. Beth — my wife — and I left Wye for the hills the previous August. Since then, we have been plagued by terrible family illness. It feels like our lives are only just back on the fairway.

Neither of us intends to look back. Read the rest of this entry »

The smoke has finally cleared after the battle of Wye Park but the fallout from Imperial’s shattered vision litters the field. It’s almost six months since Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz announced that the college was scrapping its plan to destroy a large part of Kent’s most beautiful environment and that it would not look for an alternative.

If anybody hasn’t yet noticed, Wye College is gone. Its departments are closed or moved to South Kensington, its professors redundant or relocated, its happy and noisy population of red-faced agriculture undergrads a distant memory. For the people of Wye, this is the real legacy of Project Alchemy: the wanton destruction of an ancient institution by a small group of academics and businessmen located in a steel and glass building 60 miles away.

But the Wye Park scandal has also hurt those most closely associated with it, too, and some of them very badly indeed. The time for recrimination is, we hope, past and we don’t take any pleasure in the effect this disaster has had on the careers of its promoters. Yet, just one year ago none of us — least of all David and me, back then still trying to find out how to be journalists again — could have forseen how things would turn out. Read the rest of this entry »

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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The battle for Wye represented a famous victory in the war for a proper, functioning democracy in our county. But although that battle was won, the wider war against the corruption of our democractic rights is being lost on virtually every front thanks to the corrosive influence of a quasi-official network of unelected people who are seeking to influence the planning process in Kent before those who pay for it – us, the huddled masses – have an inkling of what is going on. Imperial’s Project Alchemy is the perfect example of this — a monstrous scheme, worked up for 18 months in conditions of total secrecy with the active connivance of public officials and elected councillors.

Imperial got away with it for so long because of the connections that existed between one man – the ubiquitous David Brooks Wilson – and the people who run our county. They are connections that run deep and raise serious questions about who controls Kent, whose interests are being served by those we pay to provide the services on which the county depends and what can be done to restore the democratic checks and balances that are vital to prevent a total takeover by the corpocracy.

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When he and his officers suddenly did their incredible volte face in September and announced that Wye Park would not be included in the Local Development Framework, Ashford council leader Paul Clokie issued a statement saying that in signing the concordats, it had never been his intention to ‘work up’ proposals of such a scale. But KCC’s release of documents dating back to 2004 raises serious questions about what Cllr Clokie knew and when and we are forced to ask, again, ‘how on earth could he not know what was going on?’

First there is the original smoking gun — document number 65 in KCC’s list — a handwritten note by Mr Perfidy Pete Raine laying out what Imperial was demanding. At the top he clearly refers to Imperial’s desire to build in the AONB and to raise a £100 million endowment. At the bottom of the note — which is undated but is clearly from 2004 (you can read why here) — are the people that Raine wants to draw into his ’small team’ to work up Imperial’s plan. They are two underlings from his own department and David Hill, chief executive at Ashford, and Paul Clokie.

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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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We think Project Alchemy represents a failure of democracy and a scandal of governance of monumental proportions. Imperial may have been defeated, its grasping would-be property developers sent packing and its main proponent — the ominipresent David Brooks Wilson — now picking up his redundancy cheque from the college and casting around Whitehall for a job. But the conniving local officials who worked up Imperial’s monstrous plans in conditions of total secrecy for more than a year are still in place, their six-figure wages and final salary pensions — all paid for by you, the people whose lives their scheming would have ruined — secure.

If there is ever an inquiry into the behaviour of people like Pete Raine, Kent County Council’s director of environment and regeneration (pictured right in suitable attire), then it could do a lot worse than start with Item 65 in KCC’s latest release of documents. There may not be a single smoking gun when it comes to Wye Park but Item 65 is as near enough for jazz. It is a handwritten note by Mr Raine of a meeting involving himself, Sir Richard Sykes, Brooks Wilson, John McCready from Ernst & Young and Sandy Bruce-Lockhart and Alex King — then leader and deputy leader of KCC – plus Mike Pitt, then the chief executive at the county council. The document is undated but it is possible to deduce that it was scribbled long before the first concordat was signed in April 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

He has been excited, angry, offended and finally, when it was obvious Wye Park was a dead duck, outraged. But in private Cllr Ian Cooling was regarded as ‘on board’ with Project Alchemy and described as ‘enthusiastic’ by one of the Imperial plan’s leading proponents.

Cllr Cooling, who recently said that he is ‘moving on’ from questions about his allegiance during the brief life of Wye Park, features in the latest and largest release of documents from Kent County Council so far, made available to save-wye.org under the Freedom of Information Act. We will be publishing all 73 documents — consisting of emails, hand-written notes and letters — over the next few days. Amongst other revelations, the documents reveal:

• That all those involved in Project Alchemy — including Ashford leader Paul Clokie who two months ago protested that he did not know about the scale of Imperial’s housing plans — knew that the college was hoping to get permission to build homes on up to 400 acres and that it was seeking a £100 million endowment.
• That threatened with the total withdrawal of Imperial from Kent, officers at KCC were the original brains behind the Wye Park idea … not the college.
• That officers and leading councillors at KCC fell over themselves to express their boundless enthusiasm for Imperial’s plans.
• That plans for a road into Wye from the M20 and a new link to the A28 costing more than £30 million were worked up by Pete Raine’s strategic planning department at KCC in 2004, long before such a thing was demanded by Imperial. Read the rest of this entry »

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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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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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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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.’

Read the rest of this entry »

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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Ashford Borough Council’s leader, Paul Clokie, has said that the credibility of the Wye concordats has been undermined because Imperial College’s plans — as revealed on save-wye.org — are far more extensive than has ever been discussed with councillors or officers. He is now demanding urgent discussions with the college because, he says, the concordats’ ‘worth and credibility’ have been seriously undermined.

In a sensational development, Cllr Clokie — who signed both concordats last year and was, until now, one of Imperial College’s leading cheerleaders — says that he wants to place on record ‘that it was never my intention in signing the concordats with Kent County Council and Imperial to support the working up of proposals on this scale, or of proposals which incorporate large scale residential enabling development on greenfield AONB land’. In an amazing attack on Imperial, he adds that he is ‘most concerned that the intention of the concordats has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted’.

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After a year of arm-twisting and at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds, Imperial College’s attempt to distort the planning process by having its ‘vision’ incorporated into the core strategy of Ashford’s local development framework (LDF) has come to nothing.

Last night’s meeting of the LDF task group accepted a recommendation from the borough’s head of planning, Richard Alderton, that the publication of a map by save-wye.org showing Imperial’s true ambition in Wye — 4,000 houses across 250 acres of farmland — made it unwise to include a reference to the scheme in the core strategy. Accordingly, the Wye policy, which ran to a page and, as revealed on save-wye.org, had been substantially written by Imperial’s planning consultants GeraldEve, was removed.

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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).

They’ve been bleating about consultation, community involvement and keeping us informed for months. But, as some of us have suspected all along, it’s claptrap designed to make us feel all warm and cosy towards Imperial College.

The truth, in case you hadn’t already picked it up from Borys’s ‘let me put this in words you can understand’ comment on January 9, or David Brooks Wilson’s harrumphing impatience with members of Wye Parish Council, is rather different. So what do those ‘nice’ people at Imperial really think of Wye? This:

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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 »

Ashford Borough and Kent County Councils were apparently happy to be parties to a document which threatened the closure of Wye College unless Imperial was granted planning permission for its science park project.

A secret document, written by Ernst & Young and originally intended for public release alongside the second concordat on December 8, never made it into the public domain. Entitled ‘Wye Concordat: Frequently Asked Questions’, the unfinished document was one of several kept on the secure website set up by the parties last year to circumvent freedom of information legislation. Written by Hugo Peel, the man appointed by E&Y to handle publicity in advance of the public announcement, it contains a series of rash promises by Imperial about Alchemy — renamed Wye Park — that we now know to be utterly bogus. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ashford Borough Council is poised to kill Imperial College’s Wye Park ‘vision’ by either dramatically watering down reference to it in the core strategy of the local development framework or dumping it altogether. We understand that the series of revelations about the true extent of Imperial’s plans to raise money by developing 250 acres of housing has caused serious concern within the council where officers believe that continued courting of Imperial may get the authority into legal difficulties.

The council had planned to put the final draft of the core strategy to its LDF task group in October. But borough planning chief Richard Alderton has now brought this forward to September 11 after save-wye.org revealed that Imperial’s planning consultants, GeraldEve, had played a major role in drafting the policy for Wye, a story you can read here. We understand that the revelations surrounding GeraldEve and continued secret meetings between Kent County Council, Ashford and Imperial have raised concerns that the current draft policy on Wye could render the entire LDF legally unsound. Furthermore, Mr Alderton has received a large number of objections to the core strategy from Wye residents demanding that the village policy is removed.

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

David Brooks Wilson was given the Colliers report in April. It won’t have made pleasant reading

Wye is one of the last places in South East England that you’d be likely to achieve success with a science or research park, something that the man in charge of Imperial’s project has known only too well since April, a leaked report has revealed. The study, which the college has tried to keep out of the public domain, warns that the commercial side of Imperial’s vision would be jeopardised by Ashford’s poorly skilled workforce and because the park would be sited 60 miles from Imperial’s main campus.

The paper — titled ‘UK science parks and the ingredients for success’ — was commissioned from Colliers CRE by David Brooks Wilson in February at a time when many connected with the project believed it would be a ‘cakewalk’ having secured the enthusiastic backing of Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council. Since then, a string of confidential reports have cast doubt on the viability of the project while Imperial has made Wye its ‘Plan B’ as it attempts to woo BP to open its biofuels research institute at the South Kensington campus. Nevertheless, the Colliers report makes grim reading for anybody still under any illusion that Wye could be made to work as a commercial centre of cutting-edge research. The report itself has been buried by Imperial’s estates department so we have no reason to think that anybody on the college’s governing council or management board knows about the warnings it contains. It also makes very unpleasant reading for those responsible for the economic well-being of Ashford as a whole with its warning that the lack of a professional and technically skilled worforce in the borough will have a negative effect on any commercial research park at Wye.

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.

Last week the Campaign to Protect Rural England did its very best to bring the public’s attention to the scale of threats facing (what we thought were) nationally protected landscapes. Amongst the nine proposals highlighted, there were two in the south-east – the Brighton & Hove Albion football stadium in the South Downs AONB and Imperial College’s nightmarish vision for us here in the Kent Downs AONB. On Wednesday, both BBC and Meridian TV came to film in Wye for their south-east regional news programmes. But the most fascinating coverage had already taken place earlier in the day, when the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4 had gone to the trouble of interviewing, not only Tom Oliver of CPRE and Martin Perry of Brighton & Hove Albion FC, but the very interesting Kelvin McDonald …

The ‘Today’ programme’s Sarah Montague asked: Is the CPRE right that the government has lost the plot on this?

Read the rest of this entry »

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

It is poised to give Imperial £250million for a global centre to research biofuels but, as far as we are know, BP is completely unaware that the college is aiming to fund its share of the venture and make space for it at South Kensington by destroying the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty around Wye. That’s why we are now encouraging our readers to print out and send the enclosed letter to the head of BP — Lord Browne — so that he is in no doubt about what his company will be indirectly associated with, if it awards its global biofuels centre to Imperial College.

As save-wye.org has reported extensively over the last six weeks, representatives from BP were given a presentation by Imperial on August 21 as part of its bid to host the centre. Originally, Imperial had made research into biofuels the centrepiece of its Wye Park vision. But when BP announced plans for a global institute to be hosted by a UK or US-based university, Wye was downgraded to become a bog-standard science park to make room for the new centre — to be called the Porter Institute — at South Kensington. As we revealed, the June 12 presentation to Imperial College’s management board was told that AONB land would be sold for housing development to provide Imperial with a £100million ‘endowment’ to be put towards the scheme in South Kensington. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Alderton, Ashford’s head of planning, returns to his desk today after a three-week summer holiday in which the quagmire of Imperial College’s involvement in the drafting of the Local Development Framework must have seemed a million miles away. We hope Mr Alderton, pictured right, had a pleasant holiday and, in case he missed them, we’re happy to point him in the direction of the revelations about how Imperial College’s planning consultants wrote the core strategy here and his bizarre series of email exchanges with Imperial and masterplanners Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) here.

For those who haven’t read these messages, they offer an amazing insight into the lengths that Ashford council went to to let Imperial College influence a document which will set the planning framework for Wye for the next decade.
But it seems that this is not the end of the story as far as Imperial College’s involvement in the drafting of the core strategy is concerned. save-wye.org has obtained an eye-opening email from Nigel Buck, acting head of estates, to David Brooks Wilson, the man in charge of Wye Park. Mr Alderton had asked SOM for an update on the masterplan ‘in view of the long period of silence on this’ but an impatient Mr Buck, pictured right, jumps in and suggests that the architects do not respond. Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be some confusion about the authenticity of the maps and extracts we have carried from the June 12 report to the Imperial Council management board (a story you can read here). On Wednesday night, at the monthly Wye Consultation Panel meeting with Imperial, the man in charge of the science park project, David Brooks Wilson, complained that the extracts we ran never made it into the presentation given to the board and that they were from ‘a draft which was one of 27′.

We didn’t publish the entire presentation because we felt it was unnecessary and the size of the file is enormous. The extracts, we thought, spoke for themselves. However we have now discovered that the entire document is freely available on the internet through a website in the US, www.talkingstatues.net, where it has been converted into an ordinary site which can be viewed much like this one. We have looked at this site and can verify that the document is indeed the final version shown to the board at the June meeting which also proved the basis of our reports. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial is preparing to sell parts of its Wye Campus to cover the cost of its hugely expensive and disastrous attempt to build a science park and 4,000 houses in the village.

Documents seen by save-wye.org show that valuers called in by Imperial’s estates department have put a figure of close to £17 million on the main assets at the college, more than enough to cover the £6 million Imperial is believed to have spent buying Wye in the first place and and the £1 million it has spent so far on its Wye Park ‘vision’. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest save-wye.org Monthly is now available as a special edition. It contains all the revelations about Imperial College’s true intentions towards Wye that have appeared here over the last couple of weeks.

If you are able, please download it by clicking on the thumbnail to the right, print it out and give copies to people you know who do not have access to the online edition. It will also be available in the New Flying Horse and Wye News. We’re making efforts to distribute save-wye.org Monthly to a wider audience again, so it will be sent to the members of Imperial College’s governing council, its management board and property advisory committee, Ashford borough councillors and Kent county councillors.

Thank you to everybody for continuing to support this effort.

If you have an A3 printer, then another version is available here.

It could so easily be the plaintiff cry of a Nimby, concerned about the destruction of an area he holds dear: ‘The removal of this tree will have a severe impact on the appearance of the area … causing a major deterioration from a country landscape … into one of an urban nature.’

But in a twist that will raise eyebrows in the village which Imperial College plans to treble in size, these words were written by David Brooks Wilson — the man in charge of the Wye Park project, a scheme which would result in the felling of hundreds of trees to make way for 4,000 homes. Until now, Mr Brooks Wilson, pictured right, has kept his environmental concerns very much to himself. But Imperial’s property advisor came out of the closet to protest against an application to fell a cherry tree near his home just outside Milton Keynes. Janet Croston, of Woodley Headland, Peartree Bridge, wanted to remove the tree at the house which overlooks the Grand Union Canal and Woughton marina. Ms Croston’s cherry tree was one of many planted on the ’sought-after’ development — a 1980s estate on the edge of the once quiet 14th century village of Woughton on the Green, a half-timbered community which has been subsumed into the suburban sprawl of Milton Keynes. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

He has warned councillors not to be seen to take sides in the increasingly bitter battle over Wye Park or face being excluded from future debate on the subject. But Ashford Borough Council’s head of planning, Richard Alderton, appears to be only too pleased to meet representatives from Imperial College and discuss the progress not only of the Local Development Framework but also to chivvy their architects along in producing their masterplan.

Mr Alderton — who is already at the centre of a storm of controversy after save-wye revealed his secret negotiations with Imperial’s planning consultants, Gerald Eve, (a story you can read here) — is likely to face further questions about the impartiality of his department following a further set of leaks to save-wye.org. The revelations will also add to the pressure on Ashford chief executive David Hill who continues to insist that Ashford retains control of the LDF and is acting in an impartial manner despite clear evidence that Gerald Eve supplied the wording for parts of the Wye section of the LDF’s core strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

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)

Imperial calls it an ‘endowment’. KCC’s planning chief Pete Raine calls it ‘enabling development’. Whatever the semantics, there is no getting away from the fact that what Imperial is planning for Wye is the largest house building programme outside of Park Farm in Ashford and would quadruple the population of the village.

About 250 acres of housing — stretching from the existing boundary of the village across the fields as far as Silks Farm in the south to Amage Farm in the east — is envisaged. Somewhere in the middle of all this mass of homes, roads and green spaces, Imperial’s masterplanners, SOM, have managed to site the two or three research institute buildings — either side of the road near Withersdane Hall — which will take up 24,000 square metres of land and stand three storeys tall. Also indicated on the map are the red areas where private companies wanting to associate themselves with the ‘vision’ are expected to set up shop. The research institute would house 700 staff made up of 80 principal scientists, 400 researchers, 40 scientific technical staff and 180 admin staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody familiar with this saga has suspected it from the moment that Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz told us that we had to accept Imperial’s ‘vision’ or be responsible for the closure of the Wye campus. But reading hard proof that the Wye Park ‘vision’ is nothing more than a smash and grab on the AONB to release funds for Imperial’s coffers still leaves you open-mouthed at the audacity of these academics with bulldozers in their eyes.

There it is, on page 14 of the management board report, the motivation behind the use of public funds to run a coach and horses through national planning policy:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Ashford council has defended itself following save-wye’s exclusive revelation that Imperial College’s planning consultants wrote sections of the core strategy on Wye in the Local Development Framework (a story you can read here).

On Friday we revealed how Hugh Bullock from Gerald Eve had given Ashford’s head of planning, Richard Alderton, a marked up copy of the Wye core strategy at a meeting in April. The copy contained amendments, some of which have been incorporated into the latest draft. But in a statement to save-wye, chief executive David Hill says that the council has maintained control of the core strategy at all times and is committed to consultation with all ’stakeholders’. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oh ye of little faith, Paul Clokie. You didn’t believe us when we exclusively revealed that the Imperial College Wye Park ‘vision’ was as good as dead (a story which you can read here). You didn’t believe us when we told you that Sir Richard Sykes was now keen on pursuing another romance: namely with BP at his South Kensington campus (even though this story confirmed it). You told the Kentish Express that you thought we had put ‘two and two together and come up with 15′.

And Damian Green. What can we say? In an amazing comment that sounded like some kind of weird echo, you told Kent on Sunday that you thought we had ‘put five and five together and come up with 20′. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Representatives from Wye and Boughton Aluph and Eastwell Parish Councils and Wye Future Group will this morning have their first opportunity to influence the core strategy of the Local Development Framework and its specific mention of Imperial College’s now defunct ‘vision’ for its campus in the village when they meet Ashford council’s head of planning, Richard Alderton.

It seems a shame, therefore, to have to reveal that Imperial was secretly involved in drawing up the document, rewrote it on more than one occasion and that some of the amendments incorporated in the current draft are direct from the pen of the college’s planning consultants. Shockingly, save-wye.org can reveal that the final draft was settled between Imperial College and Ashford’s planners at least a month before any councillor was allowed to look at it. A series of highly-damaging leaks reveal the level of co-operation between Ashford’s civil servants and a developer looking to concrete over hundreds of acres of the South East’s most protected countryside. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we read in the local paper that Ashford Borough Council’s Executive Committee has decided to press ahead with a project to brand the town as ‘Ashford: Best placed in Britain’. Our Wye Borough Councillor, Ian Cooling, in his role as ‘Portfolio Holder for Communications, Partnerships, Forums and Consultation’ had chaired the Branding Committee and explained the proposed expenditure. Ashford would be contributing £35,000 to launch the brand but, fear not, other stakeholders will be helping to pay the £350,000 required over the next three years. Cllr Cooling told his fellow councillors that there was a need for the brand to be understood.

It is a great pity that Ashford’s splendid Borough crest has not been better understood. It is said to symbolize the main industries of Ashford with the famous White Horse of Kent resting a hoof on a locomotive driving wheel and holding a hop-cone in its mouth.

Therefore it should not be so surprising to read on Ashford MP Damian Green’s website that a few months ago he was busy celebrating Wye’s hop industry. The occasion? The Hop Research Unit’s Centenary celebration on 21st April in the House of Commons.

‘The event was to celebrate 100 years of hop breeding, and we learned the extraordinary fact that in that time only four men have been responsible at Wye for the scientific breeding of Britain’s hops’, explains Damian.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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The full extent of the game that Imperial is playing with the people of Kent as it quietly downgrades its Wye Park ‘vision’ in favour of a scheme involving BP at the college’s London headquarters is revealed today. Despite continued attempts to rubbish save-wye’s original revelation that the college is secretly negotiating to host BP’s £257 million Energy Biosciences Institute in London — which you can read here — by claiming that there is not a formal bid, save-wye.org has learned that negotiations with the energy giant are at an advanced stage.

Indeed, at the same time as pulling most of its contractors off the Wye Park project, Imperial is so keen to host the world’s first dedicated biofuels institute that is believed that it wants to site the institute at the heart of its South Kensington headquarters.

The latest developments will come as extremely bad news for the signatories to the original Wye Concordats, not least Cllr Paul Clokie, leader of Ashford Borough Council, who last week attempted to rubbish our original story by claiming that we had ‘put five and five together and come up with 30′. He also claimed to have spoken to Imperial about the story and reported that the college was ‘not bothered by it’. But given what we hear about a flurry of anxious phonecalls and meetings between representatives of the college and KCC and ABC officers concerned that vapid promises of 12,500 jobs were disappearing in a cloud of vegetable oil smoke, somebody is clearly very worried indeed.

Unfortunately for the blustering Cllr Clokie, Wye does not merit a single word in the negotiations between BP and the college, which has employed Foster and Partners — the firm of architects led by Lord Foster which designed such iconic constructions as 30 St Mary Axe (the London ‘gherkin’) and the Millau Viaduct in France — to design the Energy Biosciences Institute. Imperial has used Foster before — to design the Tanaka business school and the ‘impregnable’ administrative headquarters, the Faculty building, which is home to Sir Richard Sykes and Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

At last! After months of being ignored Wye residents finally had an opportunity to question our County and Borough councillors in person. How lucky we are to live in a vibrant democracy, with free speech and open to ideas.

On Monday, a cross section of residents attended the Civic Centre to respond to KCC’s glossy policy document ‘Towards 2010’. Thanks to save-wye’s alert half the audience came from Wye. But as save-wye predicted, after deflecting just two questions about the village, Cllr Clokie expressed his displeasure: ‘I’d like to get away from Wye; we’ve drowned that baby.’ The chairman KCC Cllr Angell duly obliged.

Then Alan Paterson raised his hand. Cllr Angell hesitated before allowing a third Wye person to speak, but only as Chairman of Ashford Choral Society, not a Wye resident. Alan asked if there were any plans for a multi-use hall in the borough as the Society will be celebrating its 150th anniversary in Canterbury and Ashford has no suitable venue. No worries, Cllr Clokie it seems plans to build an Ashford Arena with 5,000 seats close to the station. He beamed that the venue would ‘be as commercial as it can be’. After the dead Discovery Centre and the Stour Centre, still closed and grossly over budget, roll on the next white elephant at tax payer’s expense then…

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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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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They refused to comment on our story about the mire that the Wye Park project is in but Imperial College has at least tacitly confirmed it to Kent on Sunday. In an article in tomorrow’s paper, Imperial is asked to deny save-wye’s original article — Imperial prepares to scrap its Wye Park vision — and notably fails to do so.

But we are not, frankly, surprised. Because the story is 100 per cent true and we stand by it. Read the rest of this entry »

It has cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, blighted Wye and its surrounding area and led to a run down of the college’s operations in Kent, but Imperial’s plan for a research institute, science park and thousands of houses is virtually dead, save-wye.org can reveal. A combination of cost overruns, poor planning and the announcement by BP of a £275million biofuels research programme in conjunction with a major UK or US university has all but killed Imperial’s Wye Park vision. Work on the project — apart from the masterplanning by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill — has stopped.

The news will both delight and worry those in the village who fought the college’s plan to build the research centre, science park and thousands of homes on the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty but wanted to see the campus regenerated. The end of the Wye Park plan raises the possibility that Imperial will now attempt to break up its Wye campus and sell parcels off to developers.

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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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The environment group supposedly set up by Kent County Council’s strategic planning director Pete Raine to consider the impact of Imperial plans for Wye is a sham being orchestrated by the college.

Documents released by KCC under the Freedom of Information Act show the committee — officially known as the Wye Environmental Consultation Group (WECG) — is being run by Imperial after a suggestion by Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the college’s deputy rector, to Mr Raine. The two letters also reveal that some of those who sit on the group were asked to join it by Mr Raine before Imperial College made public its plans with the second ‘concordat’ in December last year. The group is chaired by Mr Raine and boasts representatives from Imperial College, the Environment Agency, CPRE Kent and the Kent Wildlife Trust among its members. Also on the group is Diana Pound — the former member of Wye Future Group who is now representing WFG in planning matters. Mrs Pound worked with Mr Raine in the 1990s. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

by Mike Copland, Wye Flood Group

On Monday I asked you Is Wye safe in Ashford council’s hands? And now we have the answer and it is clearly ‘no’. Ashford Borough Council has approved the Oil Depot plans, without any conditions being imposed.

What went wrong? Practically everything: the failure of Ashford planners to manage the entire process over the past three years; their indifference to local concerns; Cllr Ian Cooling’s failure to act in time or keep his word; and finally, the barrage of misinformation put up on the night to confuse the Planning Committee. Read the rest of this entry »

You would have thought, given the fiasco of the concordats and the threat of complaints to the local government ombudsman, that some of our most senior public servants would learn to shut up when it comes to their enthusiasm for Wye Park and all things Imperial.

You would have thought, perhaps, that senior officers at both Ashford and Kent County Council would refrain from talking enthusiastically about a scheme that would not only breach national planning law but which, we are told repeatedly ‘is only an idea, not a plan’. So it is with considerable surprise and dismay that we learn of a particular conversation between two officials of KCC at a recent visit by Yvette Cooper, housing minister, to Ashford. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College’s first tentative plans of its Wye Park proposal would virtually double the built-up area of the village even before a single acre is lost to speculative housing development.

The plans — put together by masterplanners Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and reproduced here — show the Wye Park scheme bringing buildings up to the foot of the North Downs at Coldharbour Farm and Little Olantigh Road. But although zones for housing are shown on the plans, the development is to service the research and commercial science parks and is not the speculative housing development Imperial insists it needs to finance its vision, raising the spectre of further hundreds of acres disappearing underneath housing estates towards Brook. Read the rest of this entry »

Putting aside all the hype about Imperial’s new and possibly hypothetical science of GM crop derived biofuels, let’s take a reality check on the economic interests behind its core operations.

By far the largest element of Imperial College’s research activity is provided by the Faculty of Medicine. The reality is that nearly 70 per cent of Imperial’s total income is generated from grants and contracts (currently approaching £100 million per annum). This includes almost 200-250 clinical trials within Imperial — and considerably more when taking into account the partner NHS Trusts. For example, research undertaken by Imperial’s Department of Immunology exploits the strong clinical links on its Northwick Park campus, building clinical and therapeutic programmes from a strong basic science platform. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Sometimes Imperial College is uncharacteristically shy about attracting publicity for its world class activities.

Five years ago it had to pay nearly £50,000 in fines and legal fees after potentially releasing a deadly virus, for which there is no known cure. In addition to the failure to take basic safety precautions when working with a hybrid form of the Hepatitis C virus (developed by the university), it took a brave lab rat whistleblower to report that the cabinets in which it was kept were not properly used, or ventilated and no safety equipment was available.
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by Mike Copland for Wye Flood Group

Wye’s biggest housing development on the AONB for 30 years – complete with endangered newts and water voles! – comes up for a final detailed planning approval by Ashford Borough Council Planning Committee on Wednesday. But there are some strongly contested issues which the planning papers have failed to include.

If Imperial get their way this is only the first of a series of developments which will change Wye forever. No – it’s not Imperial College this time but Folkestone Development Company (FDC Homes) who paid a pittance of £605,000 to the MOD for the seven-acre Oil Depot site, already designated for housing. The place is not on a College brown-field site but 400 yards away, sitting on the river flood plain on the west side of the railway station. FDC’s plan shows 57 houses which will alter the view of the North Downs from the Crown and miles around and for everyone who walks or motors down Churchfield Way to Wye station. Read the rest of this entry »

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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The latest of our save-wye.org 7 printed editions is available now. Please download it and, if you are able to, print out a few copies and distribute them to your friends. We are constantly surprised at the number of people who do this. Once again, we’d like to extend an enormous thank you to everybody who helps keep save-wye.org going.

Download the latest edition here

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.’

Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College is planning a building or several buildings equivalent in size to a major supermarket distribution centre or 10 Kempe Centres to house its Wye research institute. The building — which would be one of the largest in Kent — would take up 32,000 square metres of space on a site about five hectares (12 acres) large.

Members of Wye Parish Council were told about the enormous building by David Brooks Wilson, Imperial’s special projects advisor, at its regular monthly meeting with the college last night. Mr Brooks Wilson said that the centre, which would initially house up to 150 scientists, would be followed by its commercial science park, which could be no more than 200 or 300 metres away. He refused to be discuss the potential enabling development of up to 4,000 houses save that any housing had ‘not been defined’ and would ‘be part of the research process’, a cryptic remark many of those present struggled to decipher. Read the rest of this entry »

We promised it some time ago and now we are pleased to tell you that our special monthly Imperial College edition has just been sent to all of the governing council, department heads and pro-rectors at the college.

We want them to be informed about what is going on in Wye as they prepare to make crucial decisions on the Wye Park plans in the months ahead. Some of the most important people don’t appear to have email addresses so we will be posting the edition to them.

It’s a big file, so you will need a broadband connection. You can download this monthly special here

Imperial College will not seek either government or European funding for its Wye Park ‘vision’ because it wants to retain complete control over the project if it goes ahead.

Sir Richard Sykes, Imperial’s rector, made the admission at the May 23 lunch held at County Hall, which was organised by KCC leader Paul Carter. The get-together replaced a lunch organised by the Lord Lieutenant, Alan Willett, which was cancelled after publicity on save-wye.org. Read the rest of this entry »

Who is in charge of the Wye Park project and could Imperial College organise its way out of a paper bag?

Forgive us for asking these questions but the staff of Imperial must be asking the same ones after being told in two separate memos that David Brooks Wilson, former estates director and now special advisor to the rector, Sir Richard Sykes, is suddenly in charge of special projects — including the Wye ‘vision’. Not only that, but in the first memo — dated May 24 and issued by college secretary Tony Mitcheson — staff were told that Mr Brooks Wilson was reporting ‘directly to the rector’. You can find the first story we wrote about this here Read the rest of this entry »

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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It was barely one month before Sir Richard Sykes brought him on board as Imperial College’s Director of Estates and he was just a few months into his job as the vice-chairman of planning committee of the South East Regional Assembly. But David Brooks Wilson — the new Wye Park supremo — was writing letters to ministers objecting to the Government’s plan to strip county councils of their role in the planning process … letters which now make very curious reading for anybody interested in the concordat saga. Read the rest of this entry »

The group set up by Kent County Council’s strategic planning director, Pete Raine, to look at the impact Imperial’s Wye Park would have on the environment is struggling to get off the ground before it has even met. Read the rest of this entry »

They thought they had it all stitched up. But for David Brooks Wilson and Imperial College with its ‘vision’ of thousands of new homes and a commercial science park in Wye, Ashford Borough Council’s submission to the South East Plan will not make pleasant reading. And with the deadline for submissions on the draft plan to the South East Regional Assembly on Friday next week, the council’s view could prove significant in the battle to stop the college’s already faltering effort.

Gone is the overt support for Imperial’s project expressed by the council’s leader Paul Clokie when he signed the concordat. In its place is a far more reserved and sober assessment of the inclusion of the Wye proposal in the plan. Indeed, Ashford’s view that some of the enthusiasm and support for Imperial’s ‘vision’ in the draft plan is ‘inappropriate’ could prove crucial when all the submissions are put together. One wonders what Cllr Clokie — Ashford’s representative on the assembly — will be thinking about all this (we would ask him, but he refuses to talk to save-wye.org). Read the rest of this entry »

Fighting Kent’s corner: Lord Bruce-Lockhart of the Weald

The first signatory to the original, secret concordat and the man behind the international non-food crops centre infamously hijacked by Imperial College is to take title Lord Bruce-Lockhart of the Weald.

Formerly plain old Sir Sandy, Lord Bruce-Lockhart has had the title conferred on him by the Lord Chancellor as one of the Government’s newly-appointed working peers. The Chairman of the Local Government Association and former leader of Kent County Council, Lord Bruce-Lockhart said ‘It is a great honour and nice to be associated with a part of Kent where I live and where the countryside and traditional villages are so wonderfully and uniquely Kentish. I will be fighting Kent’s corner in the Lords. Of course, to all my friends, colleagues and people in Kent, I hope I remain just Sandy.’

Alan Paterson, of the Wye Future Group, has sent us this piece of news about the organisation’s latest fund-raising activities:

Wye Future Group’s Sponsored Walk on Sunday was a huge success with over £2,250 raised so far. On one of this summer’s hottest days, some 50 walkers enjoyed the magnificent views from both the top of Wye Crown and the Devils Kneading Trough. The 5-mile route went along the ridge of the downs from the start and finish point at Wye Village Hall, returning on footpaths across the Imperial College estate. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

You can download it here

It is OK for their leader to sign an agreement with a potential developer looking forward to delivering their ‘collective goal’ and it’s just fine, apparently, for him to attend secret meetings and lunches with them. But it seems it is not all right for any member of Ashford Borough Council’s planning committee to discuss or express a view on Imperial College’s plan to concrete over several hundred acres of the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty at Wye. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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How much has the Wye Park saga cost Imperial College so far? It’s a question that even that whizz with figures, David Brooks Wilson, may struggle to answer. But you can be sure that it has run into several hundred thousand pounds and has perhaps even broken the million mark. Firms like Ernst & Young, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Financial Dynamics, Gerald Eve, Waterman Group and Berwin Leighton Paisner don’t come cheap. Perhaps the spiralling cost of this farce is what prompted Sir Richard Sykes to remove his No. 2, Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, as project manager.

However high the sum, the question that is being asked at the very highest levels of Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council is, apparently: ‘Has Imperial spent so much already that it cannot justify pulling out of Wye to its governing council when its planning application for thousands of homes on the AONB is inevitably kicked out by a planning inspector?’

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That questionnaire: Remember the farce of the questionnaire drawn up by Tamesis PR and posted on the wyecampusvision.org site? You know, the one that pre-supposed the village wanted to see some form of development and gave everybody about four minutes to respond before it was embarrassingly withdrawn? Well, a new one is about to come out, one that has been boiled down to just four questions and which asks such gems as ‘what makes Wye special to you?’ Er…

Timescale appears to be a problem again though, with residents being given until the end of June to reply.

Sebastian Hanley of Tamesis responds: ‘The date on the revised questionnaire was indicative. It was issued to members of the Wye Consultation Panel as a draft for comment as agreed at the previous meeting. The deadline date will be partly dependent on when the questionnaire is sent out to households in Wye, but we will provide a minimum of 21 days for response.’

England 1 Brooks Wilson Globetrotters 0: The workshop with architects SOM due to be held at Withersdane on June 20 has been postponed until June 26 because of the pesky World Cup. Sebastian Hanley of Tamesis PR explains: ‘Due to the World Cup game between England and Sweden, it has been rescheduled to the 26th June to ensure all invited members have the opportunity to attend.’ The date of the next consultation panel meeting with opera nut David Brooks Wilson — June 22 — has not changed.

Newts take root: The ecologists hired by Imperial to survey the great crested newt colonies on and around the college’s landholding continue to get very excited about one pond that borders the estate in Brook. A visit at the weekend found 77 newts in one small area. Given that England is home to 95 per cent of the world’s great crested newt population, that the South East is the nation’s newt central and that Wye has very significant populations, it seems even more likely that the amphibians are going to cost Imperial a great deal of money if a decision is taken to go ahead with the grand projet.

And they haven’t even got on to the water voles …

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’.

Read the rest of this entry »

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Further evidence of how Imperial College has ‘muscled in’ on plans for a non-food crop centre at Wye — backed by the United Nations — has emerged in documents released by Kent County Council. The series of proposals, records of meetings, emails and letters confirm that the proposal for the centre at Wye had little, if anything, to do with Sykes, Borysiewicz, Brooks Wilson et al and pre-dated any of the moves by Imperial to close the agricultural sciences division and turn Wye into the South East’s biggest building site. Read the rest of this entry »

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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?
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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.

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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…

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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?

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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…

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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 »

Before you read this article, allow me to point out the usual Imperial/Ashford/KCC health warning about the Wye Park: there are no plans, no drawings, no models and no studies to help to inform you about the desirability or otherwise of the trop grand des grand projets. So what the hell, you may well ask, is this:

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.

They are words that have been used repeatedly by Imperial since the public announcement about the future of Wye College in December last year. Descriptions about the Wye Park project being of ‘national’, ‘international’ and ‘global’ significance keep cropping up in press releases and interviews with Sir Richard Sykes, the rector of Imperial, and his deputy, Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. Read the rest of this entry »

Holidays and staff (!) absences mean that we won’t be producing save-wye.org 7 this week. It will return next weekend.

Wye’s county councillor will wait to see Imperial’s plans for its science park before he decides whether he will ‘go along with the village’.

At last night’s annual parish meeting, Charles Findlay faced several questions over his position on the proposal for the Wye Park and housing development on the college estate. At one point, parishioner Vinny McLean demanded: ‘When are our councillors going to get up to speed and start representing us?’ Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial is to remove five signs — including its 8ft white sign outside the main Wye College building — after admitting that it never sought permission to put them up.

The college says that the sign was put up to replace an existing one and that its planning consultant — Gerald Eve, which is also its main consultant on the Wye Park proposals — has written to Ashford Borough Council seeking guidance on whether planning permission is required. According to a statement released by Imperial, this is ‘normal practice’ to seek guidance before submitting a ‘potentially unnecessary planning application’ despite the building being Grade I listed and it being within a conservation area. ‘We recognise that, in this case, guidance should have been sought earlier and will be taking down this sign.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Wye Future Group is set to accuse all the main players in the Wye Park concordats fiasco of maladministration and acting ultra vires.

The group has dropped its claim for a judicial review in favour of preparing complaints to the Standards Board of England and the Local Government Ombudsman. The group is also reserving its right to pursue legal action against all the main players, too. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

This week’s issue of save-wye.org 7 — its seventh edition — is available for download now. Please download it and print it out and, if you are able to, distribute a few copies to those who do not have access to the online edition.

As ever, we are extremely grateful to the large number of people who are supporting this project.

Download this week’s edition here

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 »

For those enthusiastic about Imperial College’s plans to turn Wye into the non-food crops equivalent of Silicon Valley, it was to be the social event of the year. The names on the guest list read like the signatories to the mother of all concordats: Sir Richard Sykes, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Paul Carter, Alex King, Paul Clokie, Damian Green, Ian Cooling and Charles Findlay. The token woman and voice of the environment was to be Dr Hilary Newport, the director of the Kent branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. 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 »

It’s 8ft tall and 3ft wide, made of shiny white plastic and helpfully directs visitors to Imperial College’s Wye campus to all points north, east, south and west. The new sign — which appeared early this week — also tells passers-by that they are at Imperial College London and is accompanied by a shiny notice about ‘accessible parking’. Perhaps more importantly, the sign has been put up without planning permission and could be a criminal offence under the Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas Act. 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 »

My colleague, David Hewson, has already said this, but forgive me for re-iterating it: we don’t believe in conspiracies round here but we have noticed some remarkable connections between the people who run our county and the people who have come up with or are openly backing the Wye Park proposal. And here’s another one, make of it what you will:

On May 23, the Lord Lieutenant of Kent — Alan Willett CMG — is hosting a lunch at his house in Chilham. We have no idea what fine vintages will be drunk, nor what Kentish Fayre will be consumed but we do know that the subject of the discussions will be Imperial’s ambitions and we do know who is on the guest list: 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 »

This week’s issue of save-wye.org 7 — its sixth edition — is available for download now. Please download it and print it out and, if you are able to, distribute a few copies to those who do not have access to the online edition.

Once again, we are extremely grateful to the large number of people who are supporting this project.

Download this week’s edition here

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 »

At the end of last week, we highlighted the appalling state of Coldharbour — one of the original farmsteads that make up the Wye College estate and once the home to the principal.

Since then, we have been sent evidence of the neglect of other buildings within the Wye College campus — from the oldest to the newest. Today, we print two pictures. The first is of the Latin School — one of the original buildings that make up the Grade I listed heart of the old Wye College. It is a 15th century building, built shortly after Cardinal Kempe founded the college itself. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s issue of save-wye.org 7 — its fifth edition — is available for download now. Please download it and print it out and, if you are able to, distribute a few copies to those who do not have access to the online edition.

Once again, we are extremely grateful to the large number of people who are supporting this project.

Download this week’s edition here

The thousands of homes planned by Imperial College to finance its Wye science park will not count as greenfield development because they will ’simply replace’ green field housing proposed for land south of Ashford, according to the former leader of Kent County Council.

Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the chairman of the Local Government Association and one of the latest set of working peers to be nominated for the House of Lords, was the first signatory to the original, secret concordat signed with Imperial in April last year. He will take up his seat in the Lords later this month and says that he will use it to ‘fight hard’ for the science park to go ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College wants to cut 20 staff out of its total estates workforce of 360 in an attempt to rein in the department’s £9million deficit.

The college’s director of estates, David Brooks Wilson, has written to all staff in his department — which has an annual budget of £28million and has a further £125million a year to spend on new buildings — asking for 20 voluntary redundancies. Mr Brooks Wilson, who recently took on two assistant directors of estates — Steve Howe from Tate Modern and Nick Roalfe from Marks and Spencer — has also asked staff to keep maintenance to a minimum… a policy which is already apparent to those concerned about the condition of Wye College where many buildings are in a poor state of repair and some have the appearance of being abandoned. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve had some tremendous success with save-wye.org: our online edition has a readership of 6,500 people and our print edition is five weeks old this weekend.

But there is one very important group of people that we worry are not getting to read the whole, unbiased and unspun story about Imperial’s faltering plans to build a science park and up to 4,000 houses in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty: the staff, students and governing council of Imperial itself. Read the rest of this entry »

An academic at London University, who wishes to remain anonymous, argues that the noises made by Imperial indicate that the Wye Park will be bigger than anything in Europe

Imperial College has given no detail on its plans for Wye, merely the broadest of outlines. We have no idea what the new Research Centre might look like or how extensive the Science Park might be, but we can speculate from the little information available.

Professor Borysiewicz told Wye Village on 9 January that, to be viable, the Research Centre would have a minimum staff of 100 to 150 principal scientists and employ about 1,400 people. This is certainly large. Much larger than, for example, the Medical Research Council’s biggest laboratory – the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill – which has 60 tenured staff and a total staff of 750 on site, making Imperial’s vision twice the number of people. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

The latest edition of our print version — save-wye.org 7 — is available now. You can download it here. Please print it out and give it to friends and neighbours who do not have access to the online edition.

We are very grateful to all of our supporters. Thank you, too, to those who are supporting this unique publishing effort with time and money.

They all deny it but evidence continues to mount that Ashford Borough and Kent County Council have entered into some form of private but firm commitment to support Imperial College’s plans to redevelop the Wye campus with a science park and housing.

The latest Freedom of Information disclosures to save-wye.org by Ashford council show that, before the storm of controversy fell on the project earlier this year, both the leader, Cllr Paul Clokie, and chief executive David Hill were enthusiastic supporters of Imperial’s plans. Read the rest of this entry »

The oblique reference to the expansion of Imperial College’s campus in Wye is to be dumped from the Local Development Framework and the concordats signed with Kent and Ashford councils last year are to be scrapped, save-wye.org has learned.

A senior source within county hall has told us that — in response to the threat of legal action by the Wye Future Group — the statement on the future of Imperial’s presence in Wye and the cryptic references to keeping the ‘world-class institution’ and ‘related research and business opportunities’ are to be deleted from the LDF core strategy options drawn up in the summer of last year. The source told us that Ashford council is ‘running scared’ and that Imperial College had ‘gone ballistic’ and had, at one point in recent discussions, threatened the two authorities with legal action. Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Mike Blatt worked at Wye College for many years before moving to a new senior post in Glasgow. He returned to Wye recently and was shocked by the attitude of Imperial Estates Security. Here he explains what happened.

A new development and the future of Wye? Returning to visit as a former member of Wye College, and taking a stroll around the environs of Wye, I was this afternoon accosted by Imperial College security outside Withersdane informing me that I was ‘trespassing on private property’.

After brief discussion — and naturally an apology (somewhat bemusedly) on my part — I was informed that ICL was now forced to raise the level of security around its holdings in the area. Why? I asked. Because of fears of terrorism and growing public awareness of al-Qaida in the university, I am told. 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.
Read the rest of this entry »

The third issue of our print edition — save-wye.org 7 — is available for download now. If you can, please download this, print it out and distribute it to people who do not have access to the web edition.

We are very grateful to the many people who are helping us in this unique publishing venture.

Download save-wye.org 7 here

Our elected representatives and their officers deny its existence and insist that nobody has even sat down to sketch a line on a map. But without a single word of public debate, Kent County Council has given notice to the Government that it will want in excess of £5 million of public money to build a new road from the M20 at junction 10a to Imperial’s proposed science park.

A plan for the road — which both KCC and Ashford council continue to insist does not exist — is now county council policy and is scheduled to be built between 2011 and 2016. It was adopted as policy at a meeting of KCC last week without a word by councillors, including Wye’s representative, Charles Findlay. Read the rest of this entry »

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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The Mayor of Ashford has pulled out of the launch of the Wye Future Group to be held this Saturday because he had not been told what the purpose of the organisation is.

Cllr Malcolm Eke was asked to launch 84 balloons — each representing 10 of the 840 acres that Imperial College owns in Wye — at a recent meeting of the Ashford Independents at the King’s Head. save-wye.org has learned that he was not informed about the purpose of the WFG and was therefore unaware that it was the same organisation that is mounting a legal challenge against Ashford council’s signing of the ‘concordat’ with Imperial. Read the rest of this entry »

EXCLUSIVE

The Treasury has confirmed to save-wye.org that the £1 billion National Insititute for Energy Technologies — announced in last week’s Budget — will be sited on a university campus and that Imperial College is the front-runner.

In an exclusive briefing to save-wye.org, a senior official in the Treasury has confirmed what many people in Wye suspect: that Imperial College, with its proven expertise in fuel research, is likely to play a lead role in the Government’s urgent search for alternatives to fossil fuels and is the favourite to host the insititute when it is up and running in 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Clokie, the leader of Ashford Borough Council, signed both ‘concordats’ with Imperial College without the benefit of any legal advice, save-wye.org has learned.

The revelation that Cllr Clokie did not seek or receive the advice of either the borough solicitor, Terry Mortimer, or other lawyers, before signing the first secret concordat on April last year or the second public document in December will send shockwaves through the council and raises the ante as Wye Future Group seeks a judicial review to get the agreements quashed. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Imperial College suggested that it would only build on the 60 acres of brownfield land it owns in Wye during secret negotiations with Ashford and Kent County Councils but saved its bombshell that it wanted up to 300 acres of housing until after the two so-called ‘Concordats’ had been signed.

Addressing a meeting of Ashford Borough Council, its leader Cllr Paul Clokie (Con), defended entering into secret negotiations with Imperial and said that he believed that the best way for residents of Wye to proceed was to ‘fully engage’ with Imperial as it draws up its plans to build a science park and what is now believed to be up to 300 acres of housing in the North Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
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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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Gordon Brown today announced a £1 billion public/private partnership to build a ‘National Institute for Energy Technologies’ in his Budget.

Echoing the words of Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Imperial’s deputy rector, the Chancellor said that he believed the UK ‘has the capacity to be a world leader in energy technologies’. The announcement of the creation of the institute ties in with Imperial’s ambition to research biofuels and other sustainable energy sources at its proposed Wye Park. In November, Imperial launched its own ‘Energy Futures Lab’ to research technologies ’such as carbon capture, fossil fuel engineering, renewable energy resources and fuel cells’. Read the rest of this entry »

The signing of two concordats with Imperial College has put Ashford Borough Council in a difficult position and may have prejudiced the planning process, the leader of Kent County Council has admitted.

Confirming that the county council is taking legal advice and may be forced to tear up the agreement with Imperial College in the face of a challenge that could end up in the High Court, Cllr Paul Carter said the Ashford council could find itself in difficulty as a result of the signing of the concordat. Read the rest of this entry »

Wye Future Group’s press officer has quit the organisation in protest over the ‘covert’ construction of a new website.

Tatiana Cant resigned after claiming that she had not been told about the new site – www.wyefuturegroup.info. The website had been constructed by Chris Pound and Garth McCleod and was supposed to be a draft to be put to other members for approval. Save-wye.org understands that the group was forced to use the obscure .info domain after discovering that the domains wyefuturegroup.com, wyefuturegroup.co.uk and wyefuturegroup.org had been registered by Ms Cant’s partner, Kamal Sayanay, in his business’s name — Kantara — on February 11. Read the rest of this entry »

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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Wye Future Group should engage with Imperial College and not take on the role of a negative protest group, planning consultants have said.

Planning Aid, a state-funded organisation which aims to engage ordinary people in the planning process, has told WFG that it should not appear ‘too negative’ or take on an adversarial attitude when making representations on Imperial’s plan. WFG members have been told by its planning and environment committee – code-named ‘Green’ – that this would not be ’selling out’ and would not prejudice the group’s right to make representations if and when a planning application is submitted. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming soon: save-wye.org 7. Another way to read about the future of Wye

Since its launch in January, thousands of people have visited save-wye.org but we are keenly aware that not everybody wants or is able to read the news about Imperial College’s plans for its Wye Science Park on the internet. We also know that not every councillor on Ashford Borough Council or at Kent County Council is aware of the strength of feeling on this subject or the depth of the secret deals entered into in their name. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Imperial College will attempt to bypass Ashford Borough Council and get the Government to decide whether its Wye Science Park should get the go-ahead, documents released to save-wye.org indicate.

A summary of advice provided to Imperial by consultants Ernst & Young, released to save-wye.org under the Freedom of Information Act, suggests that the college may go straight to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister instead of relying on its two partners to the so-called ‘concordats’ — Kent County Council and Ashford council — to deliver. The document follows revelations by save-wye.org that KCC is on the point of pulling out of the concordats signed with Imperial and Ashford council last year and that several borough councillors are becoming increasingly nervous about the authority’s legal position. Read the rest of this entry »

Imperial College ‘ordered’ Kent County Council to remove two key documents from a series that it was about to release to save-wye.org under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents — 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 consultants GeraldEve — were removed from the list of items to be released under the act to save-wye.org between February 27 and March 5. KCC has refused to offer an explanation for the removal of the documents — which were both drawn up for Imperial and shared with the county council and Ashford council. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.’

Read the rest of this entry »

The Bearman report into the future of Imperial College’s Wye campus has now been made available to the public. It was commissioned by the college in September 2005 and forms the basis of its plans for Wye.

Read it here: The Bearman Report

KENT County Council may pull out of the ‘Wye Concordat’ or scale back its commitment to Imperial College’s science park.

The sensational move would throw Imperial’s entire scheme into doubt and leave Ashford Borough Council as the only enthusiastic supporter of the plan. The county council’s legal department has told the Wye Future Group that the leader, Paul Carter, is shortly to hold a meeting to ‘further consider the concordat’ and may decide that the agreement can be ‘better expressed’. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

A LETTER sent by the chief executive of Kent County Council to Imperial College more than a year ago suggests the existence of plans showing the size of and footprint of buildings being considered for Wye.
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There are two different versions of the ‘concordat’ to redevelop Wye.
JUSTIN WILLIAMS uncovers the one they never wanted you to see.

ITS EXISTENCE was unknown until a month ago. But the publication today of the first secret ‘concordat’ between Imperial College, Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council — nearly 12 months after it was signed — suggests that the version signed in December last year may be little more than a sham designed for public consumption only. Read the rest of this entry »

IMPERIAL College has appointed one of Britain’s most successful firms of planning consultants to advise it on the Wye Science Park.

Gerald Eve, a London-based company of chartered surveyors and property consultants, will advise Imperial on the value of its landholding in Wye and, working with architects SOM, handle any planning applications for the campus. 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 »

IT IS one of the world’s leading firms of architects and is behind some of the biggest projects on the planet — from the replacement for the World Trade Center in New York to the masterplan for the regeneration of Canary Wharf in London. Read the rest of this entry »

A FULL outline of Imperial College’s ‘masterplan’ for Wye — including a possible planning application — will not be made public before July.

Addressing members of Wye Parish Council tonight (February 28) at a meeting to set up a liaison committee with the village, the college’s deputy rector, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said that SOM — the architects working on the project — would be evaluating its feasibility between March and May. Only when they reported back to Imperial, he said, would the decision be made whether to submit a planning application.
Read the rest of this entry »

THE attempt by Wye Future Group to get the so-called Wye Concordat quashed by Ashford Borough Council has been rejected.

The rejection of the WFG’s pre-action protocol — a letter sent to Ashford Borough Council and Kent Council informing them that the group intends to seek a judicial review of the Concordat if it is not dropped — significantly increases the likelihood of costly legal action in the High Court over the agreement signed between Imperial College and the two councils last year.

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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 »

THE leader of Ashford Borough Council is unrepentent in the face of a storm of criticism over the authority’s support for Imperial College’s plans for a science park in Wye.

Despite the threat of legal action by the Wye Future Group in the High Court to quash the so-called Wye Concordat and the fury Ashford’s covert support for Imperial has provoked, Cllr Paul Clokie says that some of the concerns of residents of the village are “misplaced” or “premature”.

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ASHFORD Borough Council is pressing for a specific commitment to Imperial College’s plan for a Wye science park to be included in the economic strategy document for the whole of the South East.

The South East of England Development Agency (SEEDA), a government quango, has been inviting comments on its review of regional economic strategy which is due for adoption in the spring. When adopted, it will form the basis for decision-making on economic policy on a huge area outside London from Milton Keynes in the north to Margate in the east and Southampton in the west. 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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.’

Read the rest of this entry »

Wye’s borough councillor has described how both the leader and chief executive of Ashford council kept him in the dark over Imperial College’s controversial plans for the area.

Speaking at a meeting of Wye Parish Council on Thursday night, Cllr Ian Cooling insisted that he had no inkling of the plans being discussed by ICL, Ashford and Kent County Council until November 18 last year when he had been briefed by Ashford’s chief executive, David Hill, just three weeks before the project was made public. Cllr Cooling said that he had attempted to get the wording of the Wye Concordat changed when he saw a draft copy of it, but his efforts were rebuffed.
Read the rest of this entry »

IMPERIAL College instructed a major consulting firm to draw up a list of options for redeveloping Wye at least two years before it commissioned the Bearman report into the campus’s future, save-wye has learned.

Information released by Imperial College under the Freedom of Information Act shows that ICL instructed Ernst & Young as long ago as the summer of 2003 to advise it on the future of Wye.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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IMPERIAL College’s plans to set up a biofuels research centre and attract funding from the United Nations first received backing from Kent County Council last spring.

In June 2005, the then KCC leader, Sir Sandy Bruce Lockhart, met senior UN and World Bank officials in Washington in an attempt to secure funding for a global biofuels centre in Kent.

Read the rest of this entry »

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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More than 40 people — described as an ‘exceptionally talented bunch’ — have offered Wye Parish Council their professional expertise in the battle to stop Imperial College’s plan to create a science park in the village.

A meeting of the parish council last night heard that many others have come forward to offer their services to the group being set up to battle Imperial – to be provisionally called the Wye Future Group.

The list of experts who want to join the group include barristers, the finance director of a major building materials company, the chief executive of a neighbouring borough council, a judge, advertising executives, several journalists, a planning lawyer and television executives.

A borough councillor expressed disquiet that members had not been told in advance of Ashford council’s plan to sign an agreement on the future of Wye with Imperial College. Read the rest of this entry »

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.