Author: Matthew Montagu-Pollock

Five months after his election as mayor, Marvin Rees revealed an ambition which had never been mentioned in his manifesto – to encourage tall buildings in Bristol.   

Since then it has been a continuous story of building. Rees, who has little aesthetic sense, has decided that he knows the answers. The answer is to take a beautiful town, with a distinctively low-rise topography (like so many beautiful continental cities – Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Munich, Toulouse and many others) – and to transform it by filling it with skyscrapers, like hundreds of third world cities. Never mind that its present topography serves it perfectly well. It is rich, it attracts talent, and attracts tourists, which it will no longer do when it has been transformed into a high rise city. Never mind that you can build just as densely in mid-rise cities as you can by building high (the two densest city centres in Europe are Paris and Barcelona). Never mind that people are less happy living in tall buildings, less sociable with their neighbours, and that mothers and children find them particularly difficult to live in for lack of places for their children to play. Never mind that tall buildings are much more expensive to build so will probably mostly be bought be foreign buy-to-let investors (as in London), that they are much more damaging to the planet and less sustainable both in construction phase and in ongoing phases. Low rise buildings have lower embodied carbon, are simpler, more robust, more adaptable, and are lower maintenance and consume less energy. High rise buildings have more structure, more cladding (e.g. ventilation), greater long term maintenance issues, are less adaptable and are much more costly.

Bristol is the second richest large town in England after London and the university cities. It is already a densely-inhabited town, and on an average weekend it is sparkling with life. It is recognised as an attractive city, and from its centre you can see the green hills and its many views. But no, insists the Mayor, we have to disconnect our citizens from the sky and overwhelm the traditional elements of the city which we value so much. After the Mayor is done with it – without consulting his citizens – Castle Park will be completely in shade and surrounded by high rises on all sides That is a good thing? Bedminster will also be overwhelmed by high rises. And now they are starting on Spike Island and Ashton Gate!

All these disadvages of high rises are known, they are part of the common understanding of what is taught on urbanistic courses (understood by most people except Marvin). But high rises must be built, because the glory of Marvin requires it!

Here are the tall buildings that Bristol now faces: 

The City Centre

Rupert Street Car Park. (Developer: Student Roost. Architect: Alec French)(Pre-App)

• Two towers of 20 and 18 storeys, 400 car parking spaces, 151 sq m commercial space, up to 249 co-living units (of which 20% would be affordable) and 328 student rooms.
• Would replace the NCP car park, which a writer in the Architects’ Journal considers “a giant of post-war architecture”, and the C20th century society has applied to be listed.
• Bristol Civic Society say: “Applying Bristol Byzantine to a building so much bigger than the buildings the Victorians built, with a completely different scale and rhythm, seems inappropriate.” 

Premier Inn (Developer: Olympian Homes)(Pre-App)

• Two towers – a 28-storey tower with 445 student beds, and an 18-storey co-living tower with 136 rooms (the taller tower would be two storeys higher than the 26-storey Castle Park View tower).
• Previous owners Whitbread have sold to Olympian Homes. They will rename the area ‘St James Square’.
• The developers claim that rebuilding would use much less carbon than refurbishing the current 20-storey Premier Inn, but have not given details of the assessment.
• Bristol Civic Society: “In our view the proposed replacement buildings are far too tall for this site and, indeed, for any site in Bristol. We do not accept that any development should be any higher than the existing Premier Inn.”

Goram Castle Park (Developer: Council via Goram Homes; Architect: Groupwork and McGregor Coxall) Pre-App

33 storeys, 375 flats. of which 12% (75) will be affordable.

It is worth quoting the Civic Society response at length: “The Society objects very strongly to this development proposal...

1. “Assault on Bristol. At 33 storeys the Society considers that the proposal is a fundamental assault on the appearance of the city and on its visual traditions.
2. “Impact on the Floating Harbour. The Society emphasises the inappropriateness of this waterfront location for a tall building. The Floating Harbour is a defining feature of Bristol, and other new developments have reflected the scale and massing of the former warehouses and industrial complexes.
3. “Impact on Castle Park. The proposed development will have a very significant, and highly negative, impact on Castle Park. There will inevitably be issues of overlooking and of overshadowing

“The Society wishes to stress that tall buildings like this are inherently unsustainable and carbon-consumptive.”

The Galleries Owners: La Salle; Developers: Deeley Freed + La Salle Investment Management. Architects: Alford Hall Monaghan Morris (Pre-App)

• 28 storey tower, with 240 housing units; 180 other housing units facing the park (11 storeys); 30 housing units facing north (5 storeys) (20% of the total housing will be affordable); 300 hotel rooms (12 storeys), 800 student units (15 storeys); 5,200 sq. m. of retail, and 22,000 sq. m. workspace units (10 storeys), 200 parking spaces.
• Significant public realm, open 24/7 (35% of site), outdoor seating, open to cyclists and pedestrians. But will the public realm have sufficient sunlight?
• Active frontages throughout. Lots of small retail units (which are more viable than bigger stores nowadays). Green on the roofs.
• The Galleries had a 35% drop in footfall from pre-pandemic levels – unviable.
• The development has the Frome River under it – challenging! (see video)
• The 28 storey height of the tower will cast significant shadow on Broadmead.
• Planning Application expected end-2023, but the new site is not expected to open until 2027 at the earliest.

St Mary le Port Owners: Federated Hermes, and Aviva Investors. Freeholds: Bristol City Council. Developers: MEPC; Architects: FeildenCleggBradleyStudios (21/03020/F)

• Three wide buildings of 8-9 storeys, very ugly, with 28,000 sq. m. of office space, and retail space at ground level.
• Huge controversy: strong opposition from Historic England, the Georgian Group, 20^th Century Society, The Conservation Advisory Panel, Ancient Monuments Society, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
• The Bristol Civic Society asked planning ministers to ‘call in’ the plan.
• Refused on grounds that the decision was a local issue.Questions have arised about the relationship between the Friends of Castle Park, a local group whose support for the development swayed the Councillors, and the developers.
• Approved: 9 September 2022

Old Market

Castle Park View (Developer: Linkcity/Bouygues; Architect: Chapman Taylor) 17/04267/F Built

• 26 storeys, 375 flats, 20% affordable, run by Housing Association Abri
• Site was within the Old Market Quarter Neighbourhood Development Plan (OMQNDP) area, but the requirement to consult OMQNDP was ignored by developers and council.
• Old Market Community Association retelling here
• Completed: 2022

Gardiner Haskins (Soapworks) (Developer: First Base) 20/01150/F

• 20 storeys: 250 apartments, 20% affordable, and 154,000 square foot offices.
• The Council’s own City Design Group objected to the (very similar) original plan: “Development scale is grossly excessive, the massing clumsy and overbearing, and the impact on the listed buildings is significant and negative.”
• Objections came also from Bristol Civic Society, Historic England, and Old Market Community Association.
• Approved: April 28 2021

Redcliffe

Temple Back Former Fire Station Developer: Cubex (19/01255/)

• 16 storeys at highest point. 300 buy-to-rent homes, 20% affordable + office space for 1,500 people.
• Objections from the City Design Group, Historic England, and Urban Design Forum, but officer recommended approval.
• Coopers Court (10 storeys), next door, built by the same developers, will be run by the social housing provider Abri.
• Approved in December 2019, to be completed in summer of 2023.

Redcliffe Quarter (Owner: Grainger) 21/02574/F

Silverthorne Lane conservation area

Student + residential buildings + school on Silverthorne Lane (Developer: Square Bay) 19/03867/P and (revised tall building of 16 storeys, Plot 6, Studio Hive) 22/05155/F

• 17 storeys at the Eastern end of a long strip consisting of student rooms, homes, a school and research spaces
  • East: 706 student bedspaces, revised design of this very tall building is better than the first very ugly design, but still too tall
  • Middle: Oasis Academy, 1,600 place secondary school
  • Middle: 371 homes by Studio Hive, max 13 storeys, of which 71 affordable
  • West: research spaces
• Heights ignore the advice given in the Temple Quarter Spatial Framework (5-8 floors)
• The Environment Agency objected on flooding fears, a public inquiry was held (May 2021), the Minister of State for Housing gave go-ahead (2022-04-14)
• Initially permitted on August 6 2020, Plot 6 revision still pending.

10 and 12-16 Feeder Road, (Developers: Summix; (19/01881/F)

• Four buildings -14 storeys, and then 5, 7 and 8 storeys with 595 bedspaces.
• Very tall in the context; blocky and ugly.
• A Planning appeal was allowed on 8 March 2022, overuling the flooding-related planning refusal of 25 February 2021, on the view that flood risk is minimal and that any harm to heritage assets is less than substantial and does not outweigh the scheme’s benefits.

Chanson Foods site, Avon Street. Owners: Victoria Hall Management Limited (VHML); Architects: Chapman Taylor (19/02664/F)

• 13 to 8 floors, with 471 student bedspaces, arranged around central courtyard, stepped down to two storey ‘hub’ building providing student facilities.
• Chapman Taylor were architects of the very undistinguished Castle Park View.
• The Council’s City Design Team considered that the proposed scale of the
  development to be unacceptable and recommend a height parameter in the range of 6 to 10 residential storeys. The officer’s report claimed that the Bristol Civic Society was happy with the heights, which was untrue.

40-46 Albert Road Developer: Avon Capital Estates; Architect: AHHM (22/06014/PREAPP)

• 17-8 floors, with 472 bed purpose built student rooms
• Ground and lower ground floor uses: reception area, flexible commercial spaces 499 sq.m., plant and cycle storage.,
• Would enlose the river in a canyon of tall buildings.

Mead Street. Developer: DTZ Investors; Architect: Sheppard Robson.

• 1,500 new homes.
• Eight to nine storeys, damaging views of Totterdown.
• 40 per cent of the site will be green space. A central green will be the public heart of the proposal, with lawns, play areas, outdoor gym, community gardens and market spaces
• There will be a 2.5 m segregated cycle lane within the development

Temple Island

Temple Island student accommodation (Architects: AHMM)

19/02952/M

• 22 storeys, 16 storeys and 9 storeys (a little lower than original proposals) housing 953 students
• Historic England find the scale and height OK, but judge the buildings to be boring “unrelieved monoliths, with little sense of refinement in their detail.”
• Permitted in December 2019.

Harbour

Baltic Wharf (Developer/Architects: Goram Homes; Builder: Hill) (21/01331/F)

• 150 homes of which 66 (40%) affordable. There will be 1,2 and 3 bed flats in buildings of 4-6 storeys.
• 79% of all homes will be dual aspect. 89% of apartments will have direct or partial views towards water.
• All will meet national space standards. There will be future connection to BCC’s heat network.
• While 6 storeys may not seem tall, in the context it is. Historic England say: “We reiterate our belief… the scheme should be reduced by a single storey.” Bristol Civic Society made the same request. Goram replied that this would sacrifice much of the affordable component.
• The buildings are slightly raised to incorporate flood measures, but there have been six objections on flooding grounds by the Environment Agency because the plan poses “a significant risk to life”.” However Bristol’s Principal Flood Risk Officer Matthew Sugden has withdrawn his objection.
• No decision yet. Application made on 16 March 2021.

Wapping Wharf North (Developer: Umberslade) (pre-App)

• 12 storeys at the west (Harbour) end, with 4 blocks sloping down to 8 storeys on Wapping Road . The 12 storey block would accommodate restaurants on the terraces.
• Above the ground floor, there would be 240 apartments of varying size, but predominantly one and two bedrooms.
• The site is between Museum Street and Rope Walk behind M-Shed
• If anyone finds the result beautiful, I am amazed. The damage to one of Bristol’s prime assets – the harbour – which pulls the whole town together, and is such a source of pleasure for strollers at weekends, would be incalculable.
• An unfortunate precedent for future proposals in the harbourside area.

Former Peugot site, Clarence road. (Developer: Dandara Living; Architect: Stride Treglown) (Pre-App)

• 10 buildings: 19 storeys, 10 storeys, then 9, 8, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, and 3 storeys. 412 flats.
• A hideous “welcome to Bristol”, the development will sit on the roundabout at the beginning of Bath Road, almost opposite the station. It is a trafficky, noisy, and polluted location.
• The immediate environment is now mostly low-rise, but Dandara seek to justify the heights by reference to the Temple Island Development Site with up to 24 storeys and Soapworks up to 20 storeys.

Plot 3, Temple Quay. (Owner: Homes England; Developer: IKB Developments: Architect: Sheppard Robson) (22/05998/F;

• 3 buildings of 10 – 6 storeys: a 234-room hotel; a 168 apart-hotel; and a 108 room build-to-rent residential block (with 21 Affordable Private Rented units (20% of total residential units)
• This is a key site, immediately visible on exit from the northern (future main) entrance of Temple Meads Station.
• Revised to good effect after comments from the Council to improve visibility of the Eye, the Floating Harbour, and Temple Meads Station from Valentine Bridge. Undecided

Assembly (Developers: Bell Hammer, AXA; Architect: Allford Hall Monaghan Morris; Builders: Galliford Try) (No code number)

Completed in July 2021, Building C has 14 storeys and is let entirely to BT, accommodating up to 2,500 employees. Building A (13 storeys) and Building B (7 storeys) will both be finished in Spring 2023.

1 Passage Street (Owner: LPPI Real Estate Fund; Developer: Knight Frank Investment Management; Architect: AWW) (21/06933/F)

• 13-storey office building, next to the Cheese Lane Shot Tower, which replaces a rather uninteresing building.
• Its height obstructs the view of the 19th century Generator Building and St. Philip & St. Jacob’s Church (13th century)

Temple Island – eight blocks (Architects: Zaha Hadid) (Pre-App))

• The former Arena site: 8 blocks of up to 24 storeys. On the southern side, there will be 5 residential towers (31.40m to 82.60m) containing 550 new homes (including 220 affordable). The back row will contain a conference centre and a hotel (with 345 rooms) (56.80m tall), and 2 office blocks (35m, 47m).
• Featureless, ugly towers. Very poor access to the area.
• Legal & General will invest £350m, and will be guaranteed rent on the office space for 40 years. In return, Bristol City Council will spend £32m getting the plot ready, including sorting contamination issues.
• In 2021, Rees said that over 25 years the city would get about £850m of gross added value, compared to about £300m from an arena, and that the L&G plans would generate about three times the number of jobs.
• Bristol Civic Society: “Bristol Civic Society was disappointed with the proposals for this important site. We cannot support the preapplication plans as they stand.”

Land on the North side of Gas Lane (Owners/Developers: Watkin Jones and Merrion Group; Architects: AWW (21/06761/F)

• 8 to 9 storeys; 299 student rooms arranged in a triangle, one side taller.
• Given height of the buildings, little light is likely to penetrate the triangular site, creating an unattractive, shady courtyard.
• The building is rough, ugly, and would present cliff faces to Freestone Road, Gas Lane, and to the north/south route adjacent to the east end of the development.
• Approved: 6 March 2023

Freestone Road. Developer: Tiger Developments; Architect: Chapman Taylor (preApp)

• Four buildings of eight and nine storeys
• 204 bedrooms (?) in four blocks linked by a series of footbridges.
• The buildings’ heights have been revised upwards, meaning (Civic Society) “It would protrude much further above the railway embankment resulting in a grim, grey wall when viewed from the north and from trains approaching or departing from Temple Meads.” It would also “spoil the ambience of Dings Park, overbearing it and possibly overshadowing it particularly at darker times of the year.”

Land South of Freestone Road and west of Kingsland Road Owner: Unite Students; Architect: Alex French) (22/06050/F)

• 16 storeys on the northern side, stepping down to 10 storeys.
• 600+ bedspace student accommodation plus public spaces around existing locally listed Kingsland House and between the new buildings. Active frontages with commercial space along Kingsland Road.
• The height would be extremely harmful to the character of the area and to the light and ambience of Dings Park. The justification for these heights in the Design and Access Statement is frankly ridiculous, contradicting all advice.
• Bristol Civic Society: “The Society considers that the maximum height of buildings should be similar to the 8 storeys proposed by the university for the south side of Gas Lane and respect the height of the student housing proposed for the north side of Freestone Road.
• Application made 22 December 2022 but not yet considered.

Bedminster / Windmill Hill

Bedminster (below) is the city’s most contested area. The council made informally clear to developers that the area should have tower blocks. Developers piled in chaotically and without co-ordination, bidding up land prices, no master-plan having been developed by the city. Eventually consultants Nash Partnership were called in to master-plan, aggressive heights having been put into the Urban Living SPD and into the Local Plan.

A residents’ group, Windmill Hill and Malago Community Planning Group (WHaM), has continuously challenged the proposals. Some heights have been reduced, some designs have been improved, but it is a wearysome process with developers appealing rejections and, when the appeal is refused, coming back with new proposals only marginally different from the original.

• 

Pring Hill Site / Malago Road (Plot 1) (Developer: a2 Dominion ? Watkin Jones) 19/00267/F

• The original 12 storey application was recommended for refusal by officers and was in fact refused in September 2019 – so an appeal was launched
• In April 2021 the appeal was dismissed.7% affordable (40 out of 590)
• Refused 6 September 2019 No new application has yet been made.

St Catherine’s Place (Plot 2) (Developer: The PG Group and Firmstone)

• A 14 storey application was approved in March 2021.
• Committee members followed BCC officers’ recommendation to refuse the original application, despite a height reduction from 22 to 16 storeys. An appeal against this refusal was dismissed in February 2021.
• 0% affordable out of 180 flats
• Granted 1 October 2021

Dalby Avenue (Plot 3) (Developer: Watkin Jones) 20/05811/F

• Multiple buildings up to 9 storeys
• 0% affordable (out of 837 student units)
• One of the most worrying developments, given its multiple impacts – but with City Design Group input, cladding changes and a little height reduction has improved it
• Plans submitted in December 2020, decided 23 December 2021. Construction on Plot 3 started in spring 2022 and is due for completion in September 2024.

Little Paradise Street (Plot 4a) (Developer: Dandara) 18/06722/F

• Permitted October 2020, despite strong City Design Group reservations over height
• High proportion of single-aspect flats (64% in private, 72% in affordable units), and worries about daylight 6% afforable (21 out of 316)16 and 14 storeys
• Construction on Plot 4a started in spring 2022 and is due for completion in September 2024.

Triangle between Malago Road, Whitehouse Lane, and Hereford St (Plot 5) (Owner: Council; Developer: Dandara) (21/05219/F)

• Still in consultation – three buildings, with the largest up to 10 storeys, yielding 105 affordable homes our of 350
• The buildings wrap around Bedminster Green.

Totterdown

Totterdown Reach Bath Road (“The Boat Yard”) (Owner: Clarion; Architects: Feilden Clegg Bradley) 18/04620/F

• 17 storey tower, plus 3 other blocks (7,6 and 3 storeys) giving a total of 152 flats, 30% of which will be affordable.
• At 65 metres, the Tower will have an unmissable impact on the views to the north for many Totterdown residents, dominating the local character of the Bath Road and Totterdown Bridge.
• This ugly set of buildings – shown off by Marvin Rees to a visiting Keir Starmer as evidence of his magnificant achievements – have had an accident-prone history. In July 2022 developer/builders Mid Group went backrupt, and their workers were fired. In January 2023 part of the embankment beneath the development was reported sliding into the river. The developers claim that this does not affect the buildings’ stability. But in 2019 warnings were already given in a geotechnical assessment made of the site by Arup.
• Bristol Civic Society has raised safety fears about the high rise tower, which has just one escape route.
• The development is sited above a busy junction on an arterial road with the added nuisance of industrial noise from the north side of the Avon River.

Approved March 2019

122 Bath Road (Developer: P. Yates) Architect: Robert O’Reilly. (21/04096/F)

• 5 storeys high and 32 apartments, some single aspect, of which 30% affordable, or 9 apartments. The original application was for 9 storeys, far exceeding Bristol City Council’s own guidance on the density of homes per hectare. The local plan recommends 20 units only.
• Objectors included ward member TRESA (Totterdown Residents and Social Action) The Windmill Hill and Malago Community Planning Group (WHAM), the Conservation Advisory Panel and the Civic Society.
• Although the new design is less ugly and less tall, the Civic Society has maintained its objection, on grounds of no ground level outdoor space and the noise and pollution from the heavy traffic on Bath Road.
• The planning officers supported the application.

Applications: Original: 27 July 2021; Revised: 22 Feb 2022. No decision yet

Ashton Gate (Owner: Ashton Gate Ltd; Architects: KKA).(pre-App)

• 14 storey residential tower and nearby office, reduced from 18 storeys
• Permission will be sought for a sports and convention centre (4000 seats), a 230 bed hotel, 92,000 sq. m. of offices (9 storeys), 140 one and two bed flats in 6, 7 and 14 storey blocks and 540 space multi-storey car park (7 storeys) on land adjoining the stadium;
• These tall buildings will obviously impact very sensitive city views.

Lawrence Hill

Barrow Road (Developer: Galliard Homes) (pre-App)

• 18 Storeys and 10 storeys (next to the Kingsmarsh House high-rise block) plus town houses. Will overshadow nearby houses.
• Former Mecca Bingo Hall and Pure Gym warehouse building located between St Philip’s Causeway and Lawrence Hill High Street.
• Says campaigner Eve Bergsoul: “This area already has a large number of tower blocks and tower blocks are conducive to social problems. High-rise living is not the best kind of living and we’re being put upon to just accept this.”

Broadwalk Shopping Centre Owners: BDS Development; Developers: Pelican; Architect: Keep. (22/03924/P)

• What a drama! An application for a 12 storey shopping and living development to house 850 people in an extremely crampted space was initially refused, after prolonged and skilled campaigning by local, Laura Chapman.
• A week later the application came back to committee, notionally to firm up the reasons for refusal. But something odd happened.
• All the applicants’ supporters were there. No campaigners were. Why? They had been told refusal was a certainty. But the Labour councillors changed their vote – and the planning application was accepted.
• The perception that there had been a stitch-up was inescapable. Richard Eddy, the Conservative chair of the committee, defended the Committee’s decision to approve planning permission, slaiming that every public comment was taken into account, and promises of extra affordable housing from developers had tipped the balance in favour, and that all processes were followed properly. He persuaded few people.
• Laura Chapman is raising money, so far remarkably successfully, to launch a judicial review.
• Application originally submitted on 11 August 2022, approved 5 July 2023

Commentary:

Marvin Rees’ desire to bring more tall buildings to Bristol meant rewriting the city’s planning law (see account of how it was rewritten).  To do this, Rees appointed councillor Nicola Beech, previously a developers’ PR, as head of planning.  She pushed through a new Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) “Urban Living” in 2018 to replace the 2005 SPD (which had protected Bristol from tall buildings (see comparison of new SPD and previous SPD). This new document then had to be consulted on, by law. Residents, ordinary citizens, architects and amenity societies, in the largest response to any consultation in the history of Bristol, overwhelmingly rejected tall buildings. This response was ignored by Rees and Beech.

While densification of city centres is often good, helping make cities walkable and helping support public transport, the densest cities in the developed world are not US cities with towering high rise centres, nor UK cities following suit like Leeds or Manchester, but historic mid-rise continental cities like Barcelona and Paris.

These dense European cities are more beautiful, more sociable, pleasanter to be in than the US cities. They have gentle mid-rise centres, connected by good public transport (typically trams).  So why are we rushing to go high when it is not necessary?  The argument ‘for’ – which pleases developers – is based on false logic, as has been eloquently argued in Bristol before the Bristol Civic Society by UCL’s Professor Philip Steadman, Create Streets’ David Milner, and Bennetts Associates Rab Bennetts. 

Mid-rise densification can house as many or more residents (see Steadman), is more sustainable because it uses less carbon (see Bennetts), makes residents happier (see Milner), and will produce many more affordable housing units, because it is less expensive to build per square metre. It is also more beautiful which, research suggests, in the longer-term is likely to increase Bristol’s prosperity by attracting talent to the city.  

Sources of information on planning applications:

Centre / Castle Park / Redcliffe: No organisation tracks applications in this area. The best source is the Bristol Civic Society (BCS) Planning Issues Status page, and Planning Issues, and Planning Archive. There is also a BCS twitter, which frankly needs more effort: @BristolCivicSoc

Bedminster. The best source is the WHaM site and, for keeping up to date, the WHaM Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1511895115798962

Totterdown / Bath Road. A source is Totterdown Residents Environmental and Social Action (TRESA) , though it is primarily social. More useful for keeping up to date is TRESA’s twitter: @TRESAci

City-wide: The best source is the Bristol Civic Society. The Neighbourhood Planning Network has an excellent Current Topics page. Specifically on high rises: https://www.facebook.com/groups/169400953696154.

The Local Plan is important because it “will set out how Bristol will develop over the next 20 years” (quote from the Council’s “Review”). The sting in the tail for the city is that it has to implement (as in must implement) new national policies with a very strong requirement for local democratic involvement(as in really local). These new national policies have obvious implications for tall buildings because few areas in Bristol would voluntarily draw up codes which include tall buildings.

I was alerted to this by the Bristol Draft Local Plan itself, which says:

“10.3 The approach to design set out in national planning policy and guidance has changed. All local planning authorities are expected to prepare local design guides or codes that contain their detailed design guidance. Design guidance is to be developed in partnership with local communities. Local planning authorities are no longer expected to set out detailed development management policies for design in their local plans.”

This refers to the new National Design Guide and particularly the National Model Design Code (NMDC). The second new national document is amazing, in fact revolutionary. It includes a very strong requirement for local democratic involvement, which it calls “co-design”.

However the Bristol Draft Local Plan paragraphs 10.5 and 10.6 alarmingly imply that planning guidance is to be achieved largely by referring to previous top-down policies “Policies consulted on previously in the 2019 local plan review consultation”. (These included, notably, policies on tall buildings) and “Existing relevant planning guidance such as the Urban Living SPD..” You’ll recall that the popular responses to the SPD consultation on tall buildings were largely ignored by the city administration.

This top-down disregard of popular opinion is emphatically not what the new national policies have in mind.

Each community is to co-design its own environment

On the contrary, under the new national rules each local community is expected to be a co-designer of its own environment. This is a big change. It is not acceptable if in practice the community’s desires are over-ruled. So we need to know how this “co-design” is to happen.

This is made clear in the National Model Design Code (eg Part 1) see Paras 14, says that “Design codes should be prepared in light of information about what is popular locally, on the basis of evidence. This will address the ambition in the new planning system to bring democracy forward so that communities decide what good design means locally and that this is enshrined in design codes and guides.” Paras 16: 9. The National Planning Policy Framework is clear that design policies should be developed with local communities, so they reflect local aspirations.”

The subsequent pages of the National Model Design Code sets out advice on this, and it seems that Bristol’s draft local plan has not really taken the advice on local democratic input to heart, and not worked sufficiently on it.

Also consider: National Model Design Code Part 2 – Guidance Notes See Paras

220: When preparing design codes, communities need to be involved at each stage of the process… The form and approach for community engagement needs to be decided locally and co-designed with community groups.

That is clear enough. Is it being done?

221. The community involves all people living and working in and around the area for which the code is being produced together with local interest groups, stakeholders and elected representatives.

223. The process should be transparent and collaborative and precede each stage of the design code production… At each stage, it should be easy for participants to engage with the process and see how their inputs have been used to develop the next iteration.

“The process should be transparent.” The obvious locus of transparency, which councillors, politicians and local campaign groups refer is the Local Plan. So why are the procedures to be adopted, or at least how they are to be developed, not in the Local Plan?

Also see NMDC p 87 on community engagement tools, 88 on community engagement, paras 232 and 233 on measuring community support, and Planning Practice Guidance, Design: Process and Tools. These local engagement and local engagement tools are, as is evidenced by the amount of space given to them, not minor aspects of the new nationally-mandated requirements, but central.

The need for the Bristol Local Plan to specify processes

However it very much feels as if Bristol Council finds this awkward and is embarrassed by it, and is not prepared to adapt its practice to meet the new requirements for local “co-design”, but has decided to produce a lot of text apparently adapting to the new situation (lists of ambitions which correspond to those in the national documents, e.g.), but in practice changing little and continuing to behave in the same way as before.

The Draft Bristol Local Plan paragraphs 10.5 and 10.6 refer to Appendix 3, which sets out a rather reasonable view of the areas of design guidance which should be “developed in partnership”. But the pious hopes enunciated are not enough, we need some specification of the processes to be followed at local level. Since the national documents cannot specify the processes (it would have been impossible – a village must clearly have different planning processes to parts of Manchester or Bristol) the processes have to be locally developed. If these processes are not developed and specified, it will be impossible to criticise our politicians for not giving sufficient weight to local opinion. Equally, we know it is too much to expect of our councillors to criticise the city’s procedures by reference to the national documents – if they don’t do so now, why should they in future?

So we should NOT accept the Draft Local plan’s Appendix 3 as a sufficient fulfillment of the new national policies in this area. We need to ask for something more. We want actual processes by which local co-design can be implemented, and standards to which we can hold our politicians. Remember, this Local Plan will rule us, it is claimed, for 20 years, so getting it right is important.

How to make comments: https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/planning-and-building-regulations/planning-policy-and-guidance/local-plan/local-plan-review

Email to: blp@bristol.gov.uk.

1. https://files.smartsurvey.io/…/BLPR__Nov_22_Further…
2. https://www.bristol.gov.uk/…/local-plan/local-plan-review
3. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/…/National…
4. https://www.gov.uk/…/publica…/national-model-design-code
5. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/…/NMDC_Part_1…
6. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/…/NMDC_Part_2…

Marvin Rees’ administration is highly PR-driven, as everyone in Bristol’s political establishment knows. Large numbers of Facebook posts are posted in his name every day, justifying his policies. These Facebook posts are often completely misleading. Since potential critics are banned from seeing his posts, and he refuses to interact with the public in open fora, and refuses to talk to members of the press he considers “biased”, or answer questions he considers “biased”, challenging the large volume of fake news emanating from the Mayor is hard. Bristol is ruled in accordance with the Mayor’s alternative reality, with more or less misleading justifications produced for the schemes he favours.

One example is this recent post (thanks to Andrew Lynch):

The tweet that the Mayor has copied from is the purest item of “fake news” – it is completely misleading. 

The chart comes from a deep dive by the tweeter into the @UCBerkeley http://coolclimate.org database which estimates the likely effectivenes of different methods of reducing carbon footprints in different Californian cities by 2030, and encourages you to run your own result. It would be good to know what the tweeter put in as the query, because if you put in “700 cities” nothing comes up. If you put in “California”, Urban Infill – i.e. building more and more densely – does come up, but well down the list in efficiency at reducing carbon footprints, and clearly labelled “California”.

An accompanying paper (Carbon Footprint Planning: Quantifying Local and State Mitigation: Opportunities for 700 California Cities, Urban Planning, Volume 3, Issue 2) states on Pages 35-51 its estimate of the mitigatory effect of Urban Infill in California if appropriate measures were taken by 2030, giving the table below. Infill only contributes 7.3 million metric tons CO2E abatement potential by 2030, out of a possible 102.7 abatement potential from all sources. So Infill contributes much less than all other leading forms of mitigation – exactly the opposite of what the Mayor claims.

As you can see, the result for Urban Infill is surprisingly small.

What appears to have happened, accidentally or more likely deliberately, is that the tweeter has deleted the query she originally put in, and super-imposed results from a query using data from another city where Infill is actually effective, claiming that the chart references California’s 700 cities. It does not.

I say that the maneouvre is likely deliberate, because the type above the charts is not the font that http://coolclimate.org uses to indicate what area a result represents, but a completely different font, obviously typed in instead. The Mayor or the assistant who showed him this chart has clearly not checked the accompanying paper. Our Mayor, alas, very generally goes with whatever theory he instinctively believes in, and doesn’t bother to check – even when his hunch will have enormous negative consequences.

The Mayor is obsessed with high-rising this beautiful and historic city, for no good reason that proper empirical analysis supports. Incidentally high rise is not specifically dealt with in the paper. But it is well-established that high rise is by far the most expensive, least sustainable and adaptable, and most carbon-intensive form of infill.

If Marvin Rees wants to densify Bristol in an efficient and sustainable way, mid-rise is the way to go (as has often been explained to him) but it requires much more planning work than the present strategy of giving permission for almost anything that developers ask for, and behind the scenes encouraging developers to add substantial numbers of extra storeys to their initial applications (as in the case of the Goram Homes proposal next to Castle Park, where City Hall apparently asked for an extra 11 storeys).

Bristol is a lively city, rich but bohemian, with a large creative sector, possibly the most physically attractive large city in the UK.  Over the past five years it has set out on a little-heralded experiment – an experiment in authoritarian democracy, which is unique in the UK.  Its pioneer is Bristol’s mayor Marvin Rees, who has installed a system which discourages debate, rewards conformity, and concentrates almost all power in the hands of one man. The claim is that the new system will be highly efficient, particularly insofar as it redresses inequalities affecting deprived citizens such as BAME and working class communities, and more generally will “get stuff done”. 

Bristol’s experiment began after it was made possible by the Localism Act 2011, which triggered referendums on transitioning to directly elected mayors in 10 cities in May 2012.  Only one city, Bristol, voted for change.  In Bristol the vote in favour of an elected mayor was won by the campaign of architect George Ferguson, an independent (who became the city’s first elected mayor). Other people in favour included the local Conservative Party, the local paper the Bristol Post, and a Bristol academic advocate of directly elected mayors, Professor Robin Hambleton.

In the second election for mayor in 2016 the personal nature of the contest helped attract attention, and turnout greatly increased from 27.92% to 44.87% of total eligible voters.  Labour’s candidate Marvin Rees more than doubled his previous total from 31,259 votes to 68,750 votes, while George Ferguson barely moved his, from 37,353 votes to 39,577 votes.[i] 

One result of Bristol’s mayor following the (no-doubt well-meaning) advice of Professor Hambleton, is that the authoritarian potential of the elected mayoral system has been greatly developed. The key architecture of the new system is the ‘One City Plan’ – Hambleton’s core idea – administered by a newly-established mayor-appointed City Office. ‘One City’ has six boards which represent different facets of the city’s life – all appointed by the City Office, i.e. by mayor Rees. The One City logo features in most Bristol publicity and is constantly promoted as a “bold, imaginative idea” with (at latest count) 546 goals stretching till 2050.[ii] 

The boards are entirely appointed by the mayor through the City Office.  Bristol’s 70 elected councillors have been relegated to deciding planning applications, local CIL and s106 decisions, voting on the annual budget, and asking awkward questions (“scrutiny”). They have only minor other roles.

One City boards consist of academics, business leaders, and people linked to the mayor’s political networks from around the city. 

This sounds fine until you realise they have no actual power – they can only recommend – and that people who are not sympathetic to the mayor are not appointed. Those who become critical or awkward can at any time be removed.  Ideas that the mayor does not approve of are not welcome.

Bristol also has a cabinet appointed by the mayor. 

However cabinet members, who are all Labour councillors, tend not to show up, as all decisions are in fact taken elsewhere – by the mayor’s inner circle in the City Office.

There was once a local participatory system in Bristol known as the Neighbourhood Partnerships (NPs) which emerged from the Localism Act 2011. These popular community groups were established when the Lib-Dems had a majority and had formal power to influence planning in local areas.  They met 4 times a year to allow communities to set out their vision and establish general policies to guide neighbourhood development.  But Rees abolished them. 

The problem with this structure is obvious.  Quite aside from being undemocratic, citizens cannot get ideas through to the mayor.  Power is extraordinarily centralised.  To communicate with the mayor you need to belong to one of his political networks, or be invited by him to sit on a board. 

How in this system is the mayor to be told that he is in the wrong?  The mayor never appears in public without questions being pre-scripted or (alternatively) being in control of the microphone.  Under him there are no US-style “town hall” meetings at which anyone can speak.  His message is at all times rigidlly controlled. 

In contrast, the previous mayor, a naturally gregarious man, allowed anyone to ask him questions, openly, in front of any audience. He could be seen night after night at events, listening, talking, interacting. Sometimes he would be annoyed by questions, but he put himself on the spot as – one might think – an honest if perhaps incautious leader should. 

One department which has expanded in Bristol (in an era of cuts) under the current administration is the city’s public relations department. The PR department sends out a continuous stream of “city-happy” messages, many of them referencing One City. These are purportedly for the common good but of course all implicitly reference Rees, who continuously reminds the public that he created One City.  One result of this extensive PR work has been an unprecedented number of awards won either by Rees or by the city.

Mayor Rees’ isolation behind a wall of PR may be why increasingly odd ideas have emerged unfiltered from the mayor’s office.  The most important was the announcement that Bristol should become a high-rise city, made in Rees’ first annual speech of October 2016. Tower blocks, a fondness for which he appears to have developed in the US, suddenly became planning policy in this previously mid- and low-rise city, and a new Head of Planning – previously a developers’ PR – rewrote the city’s Supplementary Planning Document to encourage them, incidentally causing a massive escalation of land values as developers eagerly bought up land, which in turn made the provision of human-scale housing difficult. Although towers are not part of what makes Bristol an attractive city, and were not mentioned in Rees’ lengthy pre-election manifesto (so taking Bristolians entirely by surprise)[iii] the mayor has complete control over cabinet and policy, and despite enormous disquiet from architects and amenity societies expressed in the largest-ever response to a statutory consultation (87% of respondents were opposed to high rise),[iv] passage of the Supplementary Planning Document (“Urban Living”) encouraging tower blocks was assured. The impact on a beautiful, historic, city gently nestling around a harbour will be profoundly damaging (see the Bristol Civic Society on tall buildings [v] and this link). 

Another unilateral mayoral decision was to move the city’s long-planned new arena, which was on the verge of being built, from the city centre to a disused airfield on the city’s outskirts.  The justification for moving from a pedestrian-friendly to a car-only  location (incidentally discouraging concert-goers from shopping and dining in the city centre) was to sell city-centre land at high prices.  The implications for traffic and the centre caused every councillor including all Labour councillors to vote against the idea. Yet the plan was pushed through.

Land sales in the centre are the motivation of another plan, to run a dual carriageway up the river Avon towards Bristol’s iconic suspension bridge – again, to clear city-centre land and sell it off to high-rise investors. This is likely to destroy Bristol’s major tourist attraction, the view of the gorge and the historic suspension bridge.  Unfortunately Rees has developed a doctrine that elected local councillors should not be included in such decisions because they are ‘political’, so instead of the area’s residents and councillors being represented in consultations, a group of business interests and mayoral supporters from around the city with almost no local representation were assembled to take forward the new road scheme, and declared to be a “consultative” body.[vi]  Which then met in secret. 

The mayor has frequently promised to build an underground in Bristol, another strange top-down plan. Any feasibility study would show that an underground is impractical in Bristol because the cost of boring down wouldn’t be offset by a high frequency of service such as you would get in London.  Trams are feasible, but an underground isn’t.  But the idea is regularly surfaced.

Why do so many unrealistic ideas surface?  Why are they pushed so hard?  The simple answer is that the institutional checks which existed under the previous system have been abandoned.  The mayor now has enormous power.  But combined with power, there is also a question of character. Mayor Rees appears to believe that people who criticise his policies always do so for self-seeking political reasons, or for other reasons which can be discounted. He will not engage intellectually, he will not consider alternative evidence, he will not accord those who criticise his ideas the benefit of the doubt, he believes that their motives are always questionable.  He knows what is right and what is wrong, and that is that.

As a manager, Rees has an unfortunate record.  In his first two years, half his senior staff left, including a CEO he had insisted on recruiting against advice who took a large payoff.[vii] 

The mayor’s egocentric management style has caused unhappiness among his own Labour Party councillors. Five Labour councillors have so far resigned amid allegations of leadership bullying. The resignation statement of the latest, Jo Sergeant, noted that Rees sees local councillors as an “annoying inconvenience” and has “no respect” for any members other than those Labour individuals in his “inner circle”.[viii]  She said he set up the City Office and One City Boards as an “alternative council” to make policy in a way that “circumvents democratic process”.[ix] She describes the Bristol Labour party as being “focused on power for power’s sake and beset with a culture of fear and bullying”.

Other Labour councillor resignations include leftists Harriet Bradley and Nicola Bowden-Jones (who also complained of bullying), Eastville representative Sultan Khan (who said he was tired of “infighting”), and former head of housing Paul Smith, believed to have found it impossible to do his job given pressure from above. Not all bullying is from the mayor, but none is ever dealt with, even when complaints are made. That is partly why only 17 out of the 37 Labour councillors elected last time are running for re-election.

Labour councillor Mike Davies, standing down but not resigning, noted that: “There has been such a disparity between my hopes before I got elected and the reality of being a councillor under the mayoral system…It has been a demoralising experience.  Under the mayoral system so much experience, talent and expertise has gone wasted.”[x]

The mayor’s relations with opposition councillors have been even worse than those with members of his own party. Councillors emerge from the council chamber shaking with rage and humiliation after the mayor, who controls microphone time while others’ responses are strictly time-limited, insults and condescends to them.  Members of the public are often treated with disdain in chamber by the mayor. Rees is self-confident (he gives easy and relaxed interviews, which always impress visiting journalists), but intolerant of criticism.  His view, often expressed, is that he is right, while those who disagree with him are playing politics and wasting his time.  This doesn’t make for easy relationships. 

The mayor also bullies journalists.  Democracy reporter Adam Postans was target of a day of mayoral ridicule and snide jokes (“it would be nice if we had a journalist in the chamber” – titters from mayoral sidekicks) to which he had to listen but could not respond, and was then publicly berated in City Hall corridors – all because he had described a new city waste disposal plant as a ‘dump’ (it was later pointed out that the city’s official web site calls it a ‘tip’).[xi] 

One aspect of Bristol’s total centralisation of power is that the administration keeps decisions secret until the last possible moment.  Why isn’t clear – no rationale is given – but it makes local participatory democracy impossible. 

An example: in his 2017 annual State of the City Address Rees suggested that the Bristol harbour’s western end, known as Cumberland Basin, should be a priority for new housing. This is a sensitive area.  The view up the Avon Gorge of the suspension bridge is internationally famous as the most recognised image of Bristol.  It draws large numbers of tourists and is a source of great pride and pleasure.  Therefore one might have expected extensive public engagement.

In January 2018 a feasibility study was commissioned from Arup to reconfigure the area’s transport.[xii]  In February 2018 Rees made an Asian sales tour and took with him a sales brochure (which was not made public).[xiii]  When this was leaked, residents of the Cumberland Basin learned that a new name, Western Harbour, had been given to the area where they lived. Rees’ brochure claimed the project would unlock 15-20 hectares of developable land potentially providing 3,500 homes with a gross development value of over £1 billion. Yet none of the people living in the area, nor their councillors, nor the wider city, had been consulted about the homes plans.

Given Rees’ well-known preference for tower blocks, residents were worried.  In early 2018, locals pressed the Mayor’s office for community involvement.  However to date – three years later – no community involvement has been undertaken. In February 2019 the growth and regeneration committee (a scrutiny committee), discovered that senior council employees had given engineering and design consultants Arup “free rein” to assess 10 options for the area.  Yet elected councillors had not been told.

Bizarrely, the boundaries of the affected area kept changing, apparently to get more land to sell off. In the Bristol Local Plan of February 2018 the “highly desirable location for residential development” for 3,500 homes was only north of the river.[xiv] By March 2019, the proposed housing area also covered land south of the Floating Harbour, including some of the loveliest and best-used riverside parkland in Bristol. 

20 months after the Arup report was commissioned, neither the report, nor the brief, had been made public.  When the scrutiny councillors were finally allowed to see it they were shown into a private room, one by one, supervised, and were not allowed to take notes. Liberal Democrat councillor Mark Wright said that in his 12 years as a councillor he had never experienced such secrecy from Bristol City Council. He told BBC Radio Bristol that it is “completely remarkable for the council to act in this way”.[xv] 

Finally a public consultation was launched in late 2019, during the August holiday period.  But only 3 out of 10 routes Arup had studied were included (and none of the others were shown).  Little detail was given: large proposed roads were shown as mere pink lines, making it impossible to assess their impact, and there was no indication of separate pedestrian and cycling routes, and no computer visualisations. No option was given to repair the existing bridge, which most people considered the most viable option. 

The public response was overwhelmingly negative, including a stinging critique from the Bristol Civic Society.[xvi]  But these objections were ignored, as they had been previously with the Urban Living SPD and most other planning consultations. In November a “consultation” group to implement the plans was set up consisting of Rees’ friend business leader John Savage, plus other leading business figures in the Savage circle, plus people from Rees’ political networks. But no elected councillors were included, and only one local group representative. 

Perhaps mercifully Covid-19 then closed down the discussion. With an election looming the risks of ignoring public opinion were mounting, and the pandemic’s impact combined with the climate crisis caused a worldwide change of attitudes to new city road systems. In the following year the council finally promised to “go back to basics” with a “meaningful” public consultation, after 4 years of not listening and not engaging. But the new list of suggested consultees are mostly entirely unrelated to the area (but closely linked to the mayor) such as WECIL (where his election agent is director), Knowle West Media Centre, Ujima Radio, Voscur, and St. Paul’s carnival. Rees has since made clear that he considers opposition to the plans to be NIMBYism, the product of white privilege, remarking for good measure that many opponents live in ex slave-owners’ houses.[xvii]

This secretiveness and the disdain are entirely typical, repeated in every consultation on the built environment held under Rees.  Typically the public competition for the most important site in Bristol – Canon’s Marsh – was held in secret, and decided in secret. The public are not to be allowed to see the losing bids.  Asked by Lib Dem councillor Mark Wright why the bids were being kept secret, Rees replied that the competition submissions were not being kept secret, they were merely confidential. What leader does not allow his citizens to see the submissions for an architectural competition affecting the most prominent site in a beautiful, historic city? 

Importantly, the work of the council’s scrutiny committees has been made almost impossible by secrecy. The administration has limited councillors’ access to information, reduced time available to read it, and limited the meetings held. Scrutiny is an important council function and is needed to keep a strong executive in check.  Scrutiny was problematic under the previous mayor, but the issue has grown exponentially.

A typical tactic is to delay production of vital papers.  During the Arena decision-making, 842 papers were released on a Friday afternoon to be read for a meeting a week later.  As already noted, during the Cumberland Basin saga it took 20 months for the consultants’ report to be made public.  In November 2019 the chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Management Board (OSMB) complained about the process surrounding scrutiny of delays in publishing Bristol’s clean air proposal papers meant members had only three days to examine more than 1,000 pages of reports. [xviii]

The mayor’s response to such complaints has been to criticise councillors for the creation of ‘fake debates’, arguing that ‘one of the death-knells of getting things done in Bristol is to begin to get people on these benches to play ping-pong with it’. [xix]  To “play political ping-pong” is a favourite Rees expression for making points he disagrees with. 

Bristol’s administration under Rees closely supervises its citizens.  £90,000 is paid to social media company Impact Social to track online platforms,[xx] with citizens’ social media mentions of the mayor and City Council being sent to the Head of the Mayor’s Office and to the mayor’s policy advisers. Though the Impact Social contract says “information from the analysis will be available to anybody upon request,” it took an investigative reporter, Joanna Booth, to make these reports public. Conservative Leader Councillor Mark Weston commented:  “This is the first time I have heard of the company ‘Impact Social’ and, given the apparent cost of their contract and supposed non-partisan status, I am surprised that these monthly reports are not more widely circulated or distributed.”  Liberal Democrat leader councillor Gary Hopkins added: “We knew nothing about this and it is quite staggering in its gall. The cost of the Mayor’s Office is quite appalling in any case and this is disgraceful.”

Almost all initiatives – bicycle racks, special needs education, or whatever – must now be channelled through One City, through the City Office, or through other partner network organisations. This has had a chilling effect on Bristol’s lively tradition of popular participation.  No agenda is likely to progress unless framed in terms likely to appeal to the mayor or his appointees, and channelled through organisations already connected to the system.

An example: a structure to make grants to organisations in BAME and deprived communities has been set up – the Bristol Impact Fund – but to apply you must explicitly commit to the ideological goals of the administration, such as being ‘equality led’, and ‘supporting community empowerment’ or ‘be in a strong position to collaborate with Bristol City Council and the One City Partnership to understand and work to address inequality caused by poverty and low income, class, racism, sexism, disablism, heterosexism or ageism and bring about meaningful change for people experiencing these inequalities.’[xxi]  Voscur, Bristol’s long-established voluntary action organisation, has now effectively integrated itself into One City, channelling large amounts of the charitable funds it receives into the same networks. The newly-established social investment organisation “CityFunds” channels another £10 million in a similar direction.  These organisations are very interested in supporting something called “Asset Based Community Development” which speaks a religiose language of self-empowerment. The effect is that money is given to people who speak this language, i.e. speak the same language as the politicians in power.  There is an obvious danger that giving money on ideological grounds rather than objective criteria will engender a classic “Tammany Hall” structure, named after the corrupt New York political machine which gave patronage to low-status groups in exchange for votes for New York Democratic Party candidates.  Such corruption seems an almost inevitable outcome of Bristol’s rapidly developing system.

An interesting feature of many of these organisations is that (like the mayor and John Savage) they have an explicit religious commitment. CityFunds is evangelically-led, and the new city-funded Bristol Housing Festival is also entirely staffed by evangelicals (it even has its own chaplain).[xxii]  The mayor’s engagement with the US California Bethel Church, a spirit-healing cult with its own much-expanded version of the Bible, has been probed by reporter Joanna Booth. [xxiii]

One surprising claim made by Hambleton is that the One City system will reinforce local ‘place based’ democracy against the forces of neo-liberal globalisation. [xxiv] In practice the opposite has happened. One City represents, at least partly, an alliance of the mayor with business interests. The distant genesis of this alliance was the formation in 1989 of The Bristol Initiative (TBI), which stemmed from a Confederation of British Industry (CBI) project to increase business involvement in local politics, partly based on the view that for many businesses, their success depends on the competitive performance of the city in which they are based. The Bristol team was formed in 1989, funded by subscriptions from local firms. John Savage, a charismatic Christian businessman with local connections, was chosen to head a small full-time secretariat.[xxv]

The Bristol Initiative has morphed into an enormously influential network. Today, almost no important aspect of city governance is free from the influence of the (renamed) Bristol Chamber of Commerce and Initiative (BCCI) and of its regional extension Business West, exercised through a vast network of BIDs, Chambers of Commerce, and cultural organisations.  Some see it as the modern-day equivalent of Bristol’s previous ruling elite, the Merchant Venturers, whose copybook was blotted by involvement in the slave trade.

Although Savage backed Rees’ opponent George Ferguson as continuity candidate in the 2016 mayoral election, he then became a kind of mentor to the new mayor, based on a previous relationship and friendship. BCCI personnel, with their philosophy of pro-capitalist social endeavour, now interpenetrate the One City system.  John Savage’s 2011 book “High in Hope” strongly influenced Rees’ infrastructure projects.[xxvi]  The resulting business-mayoral alliance completely bypasses elected Labour representatives and places BCCI’s business interests at the heart of the city’s decision-making. 

Cultural institutions play an interesting role in this new “consensus”.  Bristol considers itself a vibrant, cultured city. But this is a recent phenomenon. Strong traditions of municipal cultural provision – good cultural buildings, prestigious symphony orchestras (CBSO in Birmingham, the Halle in Manchester) – are typical of Britain’s industrial centres. But Bristol’s traditions and history are different. They are less marked by the Labourist and collectivist traditions which in Manchester and Birmingham generated institutions of local cultural pride, so effecting a reconciliation between labour and capital.  In contrast, it has been said that Bristol’s business leadership has been “strongly marked by the severe and joyless aspects of Protestant non-conformism”, and that partly as a result, in the past the city generated relatively weak cultural institutions. [xxvii]

The situation was partly transformed by BCCI, which hit on culture as high-impact way to reinvigorate Bristol, then suffering from the UK’s recession. It adopted a pattern of city boosterism through prestige cultural projects typical of many cities in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s (e.g. Bilbao’s Gehry-designed museum).  A local firm of arts consultants, Boyden Southwood Associates, was appointed and published a report in April 1992.  The academic Ron Griffiths noted that: “To the delight of the arts community, the report articulated a powerful set of arguments in support of increased city council spending on the arts” despite severe central government pressure to cut spending. The report argued that in the ‘competition of cities’, a cultural strategy could help Bristol consolidate its position as a regional capital and “become (again) a city of European significance”.[xxviii] The central message was that the city currently fell below its potential.  It needed a cultural strategy to maximise potential – and compete against other cities. 

One interesting aspect was the stress placed on the built environment.  The report recommended that an ‘arts and entertainment zone’ be developed in the city centre to take advantage of institutions such as the Watershed and the Arnolfini. It also advocated prioritising an existing proposal for a new centre for the performing arts on Canon’s Marsh, to act as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the arts and entertainment district. 

Due to a lack of national funding, the centre for the performing arts was never built and the intended location remains empty. But a charitable body was formed, the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership Ltd (BCDP) with board members from Bristol City Council, South West Arts (SWA) and the BCCI. A Head of Cultural Development (Andrew Kelly, formerly the director of the Kirklees Media Centre in Huddersfield) was appointed and took up his post in April 1993.

One of Kelly’s most successful and popular initiatives has been The Festival of Ideas, set up in 2005. The Festival is a series of invited talks given by prominent authors and academics. It invites feminists, egalitarians, anti-colonialists, third world voices, people with off-beat ideas, and a brilliant cross-section of the world’s leading writers, economists, artists, and thinkers. It presents a Bristol which is tolerant, open to ideas, experimental, progressive, indeed radical. It has been a sparkling performance, and Andrew Kelly is rightly celebrated for his achievement.  But what it does not do, is raise radical issues within Bristol.  There are few ‘for and against’ debates about the most challenging issues that Bristol faces, unless there is effectively already a consensus that the current administration endorses, or a local struggle which lies safely in the past, or a debate between politicians within the safe confines of the four yearly election cycle. The Festival of Ideas plays almost no role in debates about Bristol here and now. 

It is reasonable to ask what is the effect of the Festival of Ideas.  What does it mean to give the impression that all ideas are tolerated and open for discussion, when in fact the Festival of Ideas does not in fact hold (many) discussions about Bristol?  Do people even notice?  Is it important that they do not notice?  Does the rich panoply of choices, speaking of liberation, radicalism, free choice, and cultural quality, the active thrust of intellectual cross-fire, seduce the audience into forgetting that here, in this particular city, no such choices are being presented, that there is no intellectual cross-fire about possible futures open to the city?  If so, we may ask whether it functions as a conservative force under the guise of liberation. Herbert Marcuse’s phrase “repressive desublimation” springs to mind.  Is it realistic to expect radical challenges to ‘how things are done’ to find a place in the Festival, when its head is an appointee of council and business interests?   Is it realistic to expect it to be anything more than a pleasant surface, the kind of ‘culture’ that speaks of righting injustices elsewhere or supporting the day’s conventional obsessions, without offering discussion of actual choices that the city faces?  This – and the evisceration of the local press by the internet age – is the cultural background to the strengthening of the Mayor’s power in cooperation with business interests.  

To return to the theme of business-administration co-operation, Bristol’s business interests now have a Labour administration which gives them better access to policy-making than they ever previously enjoyed in Bristol’s post-war history.  Business, and the dominant faction of the Bristol Labour Party, are now working together, supported by the administration’s propaganda machine. 

What of Rees’ actual track record? He argues that “getting stuff done” is the key test of his administration, and of the One City system. So let us draw up a balance sheet of achievements and failures. 

Rees’ five years do not seem to have brought many achievements.  The administration had met surprisingly few of its campaign promises.  The mayor’s core campaign promise was housing: “We will build 2,000 new homes – 800 affordable – a year by 2020.”  On the council’s own figures in 2019/20, 1350 homes were built of which 312 were affordable. Goram Homes, a newly-established council housing company, has not yet built anything. 

Completing a city-centre arena, a major project of the previous administration which was shovel-ready, was promised – but was not done.  Greater transparency and accountability were promised (“We will be democratic. We will listen to communities and devolve greater powers to neighbourhoods”) – clearly not achieved. Strengthened Neighbourhood Partnerships were promised – but they were abolished.  Promises on 20 mph zones and RPZs were made – and not kept. An integrated transport network was promised – but not delivered. 

The administration has been financially accident-prone.  The city’s power distribution company Bristol Energy, started under Rees’ predecessor, was allowed to build up more than £50 million in losses, although opposition councillors had been warning against continuing to invest since 2016. Poor scrutiny arrangements were a key cause of losses building up.  Other losses due to inadequate scrutiny include £60 million of unexpected rebuilding costs at the city’s concert hall, Bristol Beacon, previously Colston Hall.  

On the positive side, the administration has promoted more BAME staff within the Bristol Council bureaucracy, and increased the heft of BAME networks associated with the mayor such as the Black South West Network, an important achievement given past relative neglect of such communities, not least within the Labour Party itself. 

Turning to active harm as opposed to mere failure to do things, the encouragement of tall buildings, their appearance all over the city,[xxix] will cause enormous damage. 

Bristol is a beautiful city which it makes absolutely no sense to spoil by a program of building tower blocks in the city centre. They are unnecessary to produce densification.  They are more expensive to build, so will deliver less affordable housing, a key administration goal. The evidence is also clear that tall buildings cause unhappiness – a survey by Robert Gifford (2007) concludes: “the literature suggests that high-rises are less satisfactory than other housing forms for most people.’[xxx]

Tall buildings are also less sustainable than mid-rise.  The science suggests that they use dramatically more energy than other buildings on an ongoing basis, in fact 100% more energy per square metre. This has been shown in research by UCL’s Professor Philip Steadman, using a large data set of 612 UK office buildings, new and old, large and small, air-conditioned and naturally ventilated.[xxxi] More important, tall buildings also use more “embodied energy”, i.e. energy consumed during construction – maybe as much as 60% more “embodied energy”.   Over the lifetime of a building, embodied energy is typically more important than ongoing energy use.

Finally, it is generally agreed that tall buildings will harm Bristol’s appearance.  Bristol’s beauty is a key factor which draws tourists and skilled incomers.  The more beautiful a city is, the urbanist Richard Florida has pointed out, the more successful it tends to be at attracting new jobs and new residents, including the highly educated and affluent ones.[xxxii]

To summarise, Bristol’s misconceived tall buildings programme has been pursued by the administration without understanding the issues, and without taking proper advice. 

It seems impossible to separate this ongoing mistake from the power structure the mayor has built up which has reduced his ability to hear outside advice and the views of his citizens, causing him to adopt unwise policies. 

As Griffiths noted in his article in 1995, the strategy of cultural boosterism adopted by Bristol (which partly motivated efforts to keep Bristol’s built environment beautiful) always depended on a delicate coalition of forces – a coalition between a socially-oriented business network, and (on the other hand) politicians and citizens who desired a city beautiful, which they suspected would also be a city prosperous.

That coalition has now morphed, as a result of a complete shift in views by one element in the “alliance” – our current mayor. Business improvement districts (BIDs) are enthusiastic about the change, since in any particular location BIDs will always put locally increased receipts from new tall buildings above the city’s beauty. One might have expected BCCI to challenge the change in policy, but BCCI has been a supporter of the high-rise push (as evidenced by Destination Bristol’s positive comments on high rise planning applications). Result: the administration has encountered no opposition, except from local campaigners, to pushing through permissions for high-rise blocks in the centre’s most sensitive locations – against the wishes of most Bristolians and most residents. 

Griffiths’ 1995 words now seem prophetic:

“It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the cultural strategy may come to be used essentially as a vehicle for attracting private sector funds for the redevelopment of underused sites in the city centre, and that wider cultural development issues may become secondary. In other words, there is a possibility that, under certain configurations of balances of forces at work, the support and goodwill that emerged around the cultural strategy could lead to it (and the partnership arrangements cautiously constructed to carry it forward) being used as a smokescreen, or legitimizing device, to conceal a harsher property development agenda, whatever the original intentions of its authors and sponsors.”[xxxiii]

That is exactly what has happened. 

The mayor’s unhappy performance has now put on the agenda a question: should the elected mayoral system be abandoned?

In reality, the system has pros and cons. 

Elected mayors tend to be more ‘visible’ (which may be why national politicians find them easy to deal with).  But though national politicians have long been attracted to the idea the elected mayors deliver better local government, evidence is lacking that directly elected mayors improve economic growth, citizen welfare, governance, or, indeed, succeed in what is often claimed to be a major benefit, securing resources for their cities, despite the claims made for them.[xxxiv] 

Elected mayoral systems do however concentrate immense power in the hands of one person.  Is that a plus or a minus?  It partly depends on the character of the person who is elected. Since the electorate has usually only been briefly been exposed to most candidates before the election, and so cannot make a proper judgment, the character of the mayor is (in a sense) largely a matter of accident.

If the mayor’s visibility is the aim, the system has been successful in Bristol: our mayor is all over the world, attending conferences and receiving awards.  If democracy is the aim, research clearly suggests that the public now feels less able to influence the political system than before the elected mayor was introduced, i.e. participatory democracy has been reduced.[xxxv]

It would seem likely that most Bristolians value their ability to participate in the democratic process more than they value the visibility of their mayor. We should also worry about the closed features of the One City system, and about the ongoing reduction of councillors’ powers of scrutiny, both of which reduce the diversity of views reaching the mayor.  We should worry about the unwillingness of our mayor to interact directly with his electors, and the expansion of his public relations apparatus against a background of reduced media budgets, and the lack of fora where open, democratic discussion takes place. 

Too much power has been put in the hands of one person, and the city is clearly suffering

---

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_Bristol#2016

[ii] https://www.bristolonecity.com/dashboard/?fwp_sdgs=2eb742a9c421bd81fc55e04f260a281a

[iii] https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/labourclp407/pages/233/attachments/original/1460111184/Our_Bristol_Plan.pdf?1460111184

[iv] http://bristolcommentary.uk/bristol-overwhelmingly-against-high-rises

[v] https://www.bristolcivicsociety.org.uk/expert-view-on-high-rise-bristol/

[vi] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/what-people-working-huge-western-3943376

[vii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-50004983

[viii] https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/former-labour-councillor-pens-stinging-resignation-letter/

[ix] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/former-labour-councillor-launches-scathing-5190007

[x] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/labour-councillor-speaks-out-against-5194855

[xi] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-mayor-marvin-rees-jokes-3629185

[xii] https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s30396/Cumberland%20Basin%20sch%201.pdf

[xiii] http://www.bristolnpn.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Dec2017_Bristol-Investment-Brochure_EN.pdf

[xiv] https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s30328/Houses%20of%20Multiple%20Occupancy%20-%20New%20Article%204%20Directions.pdf

[xv] Well reported here: https://www.bristol247.com/opinion/your-say/the-way-the-council-has-handled-the-cumberland-basin-project-is-insulting/

[xvi] https://www.bristolcivicsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Western-Harbour-Response.pdf

[xvii] See: https://twitter.com/stillawake/status/1380644608523243523/photo/1 In Marvin Rees’ online talk, he presented his view of the community response to development in Western Harbour as NIMBYism: see the section on Western Harbour https://youtu.be/ShJn4fXHLiw at about 33 minutes in.

[xviii] https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/b18740/Supplement%20-%20Report%20from%20Scrutiny%20Commission%2005th-Nov-2019%2016.00%20Cabinet.pdf?T=9

[xix] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/mayor-marvin-rees-blasted-truly-3554660

[xx] https://ephemeraldigest.wordpress.com/2020/02/19/how-close-an-eye-is-the-mayor-keeping-on-bristols-residents/

[xxi] https://www.voscur.org/bristol-impact-fund2

[xxii] https://www.bristolhousingfestival.org.uk/team

[xxiii] https://jo-stillawake.medium.com/who-is-marvin-rees-faith-adviser-and-what-effect-does-she-have-on-him-3fd67c3737d2

[xxiv] Robin Hambleton (2019): The New Civic Leadership: Place and the co-creation of public innovation, Public Money & Management, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2019.1592908, and Hambleton, R (2015). Leading the Inclusive City: Place-based Innovation for a Bounded Planet. Bristol: Policy Press.

[xxv] Griffiths, R. 1995: Cultural strategies and new modes of urban intervention, Cities, Vol 12, No 4, 253-65

[xxvi] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P_5xOn-sNCx2Nz8WLsKTdoQT-XkZd4FQ/view

[xxvii] Griffiths, R. 1995, quoting Roger V. Clements(1969), Local Notables and the City Council, Macmillan & Co

[xxviii] Boyden Southwood (1992a, p4) A Cultural Strategy for Bristol: Final Report. Boyden Southwood Associates, Bristol.

[xxix] http://bristolcommentary.uk/bristol-tall-buildings-recently-built-permitted-or-in-planning

[xxx] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233490985_The_Consequences_of_Living_in_High-Rise_Buildings

[xxxi] https://www.bristolcivicsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Philip-Steadman.pdf

[xxxii] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/how-a-city-s-beauty-affects-its-economic-growth

[xxxiii] Griffiths, R. 1995

[xxxiv] This issue is well discussed in Ed, David Sweeting (2018): Directly elected mayors in urban governance – impact and practice. Bristol: Policy Press

[xxxv] http://bristolcommentary.uk/new-data-suggests-a-dramatic-decline-in-public-confidence-in-the-mayor

The award of an honorary fellowship by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to Marvin Rees is shocking and extraordinarily unfortunate. It is as if John Betjeman, during the famous ‘Fight for Bristol’ of an earlier generation, had placed his prestige squarely behind building a hotel in the Avon Gorge and cementing over the harbour. That the UK’s most prestigious architectural institution has indicated its approval of what Rees has been doing is tragic. How can groups now argue, correctly, that good planning principles point in another direction entirely?

Of course Rees is not being awarded for any architecture, but for ex-housing head Paul Smith’s work in housing. RIBA’s explanation for the award was that: “As Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees founded a city owned housing company to develop and build homes. He has overseen a major housebuilding programme, increased the percentage of affordable homes and embarked on the largest council house building scheme for over 35 years.”

In fact, the number of new homes built under Rees has fallen, as compared to the previous period. The mayor’s core campaign promise was housing: “We will build 2,000 new homes – 800 affordable – a year by 2020.”  On the council’s own figures in 2019/20, 1350 homes were built of which 312 were affordable. Goram Homes, a newly-established council housing company, has not yet built anything.  As the Bristol Post’s Amanda Cameron recently wrote. “Fewer than 350 new affordable homes have been built in Bristol each year for the last four years, new figures from the local authority show. Marvin Rees pledged to build 2,000 new homes – 800 affordable – a year by 2020 before becoming the city’s second elected mayor in May 2016.”

Which he has failed to do.

More generally the award will be tragically misinterpreted. It will be treated as an architecture award. Not least because the honour allows recipients during their lifetime to use the suffix Hon FRIBA.

This is very unfortunate.

Because this is a mayor who has pursued an aggressive campaign to fill this beautiful mid-rise city with high rises, without considering the mid-rise alternative, and without once mentioning in his pre-election manifesto that he was in favour of high rise buildings.

He has disbanded neighbourhood forums. He decides planning policy through fake consultation groups, selected by himself. He has entrusted policy to the ‘One City’ structure excluding all dissenters and dissenting opinions, makes policy on the hoof entrusting detail to consultants whose reports are then hidden. He runs the most public-relations dominated administration in Bristol’s history, refuses open discussion, is persistently rude to opposition councillors. His administration routinely refuses to come to council committees with policy statements in due time, so that policy can be properly examined.

Marvin Rees has even appointed a developers’ public relations officer to write the city’s planning policy! An appointee who then abandoned the careful views framework of Bristol’s 2005 Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) (which inspired the policy which saved Edinburgh’s skyline). Instead, the SPD protecting Bristol’s views was replaced by this administration’s 2018 “Urban Living”, whose purpose was to encourage tall buildings.

Meanwhile large swathes of the city are being devastated. Walk across the park to look at Castle Park View. Walk down the Avon Street, the new dismally dense, characterless and lightless canyon street behind Glass Wharf. Contemplate the appalling plans for the Gardiner Haskins development. Look at the dire Silverthorne Lane and the inappropriate plans for the university residential quarter in St Philips.

Whole new areas of Bristol are being thrown up without any concern for design, without green, without light, without sympathy for the human beings who will navigate them, and contrary to the mayor’s election promises, offering only a very small proportion of affordable developments. Look at the plans for the future of Bedminster, at the awful buildings in Bath Road. Look at the alarming plans for the Western Harbour, for new highways along the Avon and a bridge near the suspension bridge.

And we haven’t even got started on the city’s ridiculous transport policies which have been the despair of health experts and of environmentalists, as Rees fought off pedestrianisation, argued for cars, failed repeatedly to meet national pollution targets, and criticized environmentalists as anti-working class, even though the poor bear the harshest health impacts of traffic pollution.

But our mayor is a vote-conscious politician. So shortly after Extinction Rebellion invited Greta Thunberg to Bristol and Covid-19 hit, he suddenly became the man who (his account) had courageously pioneered green policies for the city, and his PR machine even put him in with a paid entry for a Green Leaders prize which he was duly awarded. Which of course has as much authenticity as a child drawing a £5 note on scrap paper! Yet RIBA, oblivious, awarded him…

So what activated RIBA? All this must be understood in context. Ongoing, at present, is a dramatic remaking of England’s built environment, now touching Bristol. This process is steamrollering across the land, joining in an unholy alliance the giant architectural practices with hundreds of staff, the big developers, and city mayors desperate for money, willing to sell off key plots in city centres to fund their austerity-depleted budgets. The big architectural practices put up offices in target cities, lobby politicians, and 10 years later, another city has been entirely transformed, often for the worse. Yet almost no-one writes about this process, and there is little public awareness of the powers at work. These are things largely ‘done to’ a passive populace, which is relentlessley targeted by the misleading mantra – “build up or out”. The coverage of architecture and above all, of planning, by even the best newspapers such as the Guardian and the Times is quite thin, concentrating on individual buildings, while the professional coverage is siloed behind paywalls (Architectural Journal, Architectural Review) in magazines which are largely practicality and achievement oriented.

One part of this process is a ‘softening up’ of public opinion by the institutions which represent architects, such as RIBA, which tends to be headed by the leaders of large practices. Obviously whatever their quality, these practices are deeply implicated, financially and emotionally, in the ongoing process of transforming British cities with the morass of high rises which we see going up in London, Birmingham, Manchester and now Bristol.

We are but tiny fleas being crushed under these vast mechanisms. On the continent, under different planning regimes, the kind of disaster now overtaking Bristol is being avoided. But not here. Here, we seem done for.

The government recently released a white paper calling for a total re-orientation of the UK planning system – Planning for the Future (PFF).  Large chunks came straight out of the report of the excellent Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which I have summarised elsewhere in this blog (see: BBBBC).  

Nicholas Boys Smith – not an architect or planner – largely wrote BBBBC.  Before that he had a career in and out of the civil service and then founded the consultancy Create Streets because of his discontent with what is being done to UK cities by architects and developers and by the planning system.  His complaints:

• The UK has some of the ugliest cities in Europe.  They are also being remorselessly high rised, though there is strong evidence that ordinary people prefer more traditional building forms.
• The UK also has an extraordinarily clunky, opaque, and slow planning system, which frustrates ordinary people, and which commands almost no public support (Grosvenor report). It has been tinkered with endlessly and nothing seems to improve it. 
• And the UK has a housing crisis.
• These elements, to his mind, are connected.

At the core of Boys Smith’s vision is a move towards local democratic plan-making, and towards code-based plans, i.e., plans which set outline conditions for developers to meet. If they are willing to meet these democractically-decided outline conditions, developers should be able to build without the need to write 200 page proposals and go to planning committee. This sort of code-based system, universal on continental Europe, will speed things up and produce more houses, make the process easier for small builders, and enable decision-making to be handed back to the people, who will be able to decide what sort of towns they want. Both of these ideas are stamped all over PFF and repeated many times. 

People want development, he believes, and (despite developers’ accusations) are not generally NIMBYs.  But they want good development.  BBBBC and Create Streets want the planning system to reflect less of what architects and developers want for us, and more of what we want for ourselves. 

We should bear this background in mind when reflecting on the shrieks of outrage at PFF’s message from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Boys Smith’s report was (if anything) anti-architect and anti-developer, but for ordinary people.

Ironically PFF then landed in the lap of a populist Conservative government and a minister with a dodgy reputation.

So is this a neoliberal power-grab?

There is evidence of something of a “car crash” between BBBBC’s urbanistic vision, and the developer interests which had the ear of Secretary of State Robert Jenrick.  The recent government expansion by diktat of the permitted development scheme is an example of this schizophrenia, with government overriding local democratic planning  (TCPA – Is this the end for democratic planning?).  It is hard yet to judge because PFF is more a green paper than a white paper and is still unclear on essentials. 

Yet PFF embodies that same vision as BBBBC, in the same words: it argues that moving to a democratically-influenced code-based system can reduce the time from project conception to build-out, reduce planning risk, reduce costs and so help smaller builders participate and help more houses get built, and place community input much earlier, where it has a chance to make a difference, thus hopefully improving outcomes (i.e. give us more beauty). 

It also shifts power away from current power-holders, which in the Bristol mayoral system is the mayor, who is given extraordinary power which has recently been exercised highly destructively, to “best in class consultation” – no local plan to be accepted unless evidence is provided that this has truly taken place.

Yet some elements not in BBBBC have caused special concern:

• The call for local councils to designate all land into 3 zones – growth, renewal, and conservation. PFF’s vagueness about what placing land in each category precisely means makes judging this difficult.   

Professor Mattthew Carmona is clear that free-fire zoning systems do not produce acceptable results (Japan), that zoning models which add layers of rules per district tend to generate paperwork and history-bound immobility (US), so that for acceptable results you need local frameworks everywhere, i.e. masterplans combined with codes (Germany).(Planning for an uglier future). Which requires a lot of local resourcing.  Increased resourcing is promised in PFF – but it doesn’t feel very local.

• Another important new element is the top-down imposition of housing targets.  National government will set the numbers, local government will decide where stuff gets built (details still lacking).

Some elements in BBBBC are regrettably lacking:

• The suggestion for equalising the burden of taxation on newbuilds, and on the refurbishment of existing buildings – has been dropped.  A pity because refurbs are very much more environmentally friendly.

How should we react? 

Elements which seem positive:

• The ambition to move away from a discretionary system in the hands of councillors towards a more consultative system with a strengthened local planning cadre (1.17, 1.18) which directly interacts with ‘the people’ seems positive (though genuine consultation is expensive and difficult).  
• The move to more visual, digital and shorter local plans, which ordinary people can intuitively understand, helping them make genuine choices, is a huge plus. Modern digital software makes it incredibly easy to understand visually what planners have in mind (see https://vu.city/vucity-bristol  You can fly around the city virtually seeing what things will look like. Hopefully the council would show alternatives – We need to build X new units, so shall we do this, or this or this?
• The move to a code-based system with its various benefits, bearing in mind that poorly-implemented code-based systems can be even worse than what we now have (see Carmona).
• The replacement of CIL and s106 by a standard contribution scale based on sale values, removing endless gaming of the system by developers (1.19), seems a plus.

Negative elements

• The whole discussion of the difference between Growth and Renewal areas, and what each implies, is suspiciously obscure. 
• The proposal that “Development management policy” should be lifted out of local hands and placed in hands of the government (Proposal 2, esp 2.13).  “Development management policy” is nowhere defined, so it is impossible to know what this might mean, which counts as a negative. If it means everything that is (e.g.) called ‘DM____’ in the Bristol Local Plan, well this is unrealistic.

Ho hum elements

• A new ‘national standard method’ for establishing housing requirement figures (Proposal 4). No detail is given (see planoracs), so this is difficult to judge.

Conclusion – there is currently no planning democracy in Bristol.  Maybe this offers us real hope.

Inevitably people will feel that local democracy is being undermined by PFF. But local democracy in Bristol planning hardly exists. Our Supplementary Planning Document was written by a mayoral appointee, passed by a mayor-appointed cabinet, and is binding on members of the Development Control Committee.  If they reject buildings permitted by the SPD’s terms they will be over-ruled on appeal, at great cost to the council.  So our present system represents the views of one man, the mayor.  That may be some people’s idea of democracy, but not mine or (I wager) yours. 

There is a long way to go before PFF’s proposals are fleshed out.  But surely the idea that plans should be visual, and decided at an early stage by local people, and that no plan should be approved without the council showing that it has listened to local people and acted on their suggestions, could be a step forward.

Footnote:

An interesting and competent summary of Planning for the Future (no reading required!) was given to a council scrutiny committee by Sarah O’Driskoll, who got it down to 10 short minutes with good visuals in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cwm6ATDeKA&feature=youtu.be (from 1:44). Quite a good summary though she arguably did not greatly explore PFF’s somewhat idealistic aspiration of taking planning power away from the council and putting it in the hands of ordinary people instead!

Followed by a lot of panicky comment from councillors who, while admitting they haven’t read it, are planning to put forward a cross-party protest about it, coordinated by chair, councillor Paula O’Rourke (who hasn’t read it either).

Bristol planning officers Zoe Willcox, Sarah O’Driskoll, and even cabinet member Nicola Beech seemed quietly positive about it.

In March the Bristol Civic Leadership Project announced that Bristol council’s leadership had become more visible since 2012, presumably because of the Mayoral system. Some politicians celebrated the research as demonstrating the popularity of Marvin Rees’ leadership, while others commented that visibility does not necessarily mean quality. 

Unfortunately the Leadership Project published only a 4 page analysis in 2020, as opposed to 57 pages in 2013 and 65 pages in 2015. Hidden in the announcement was the fact that much of the latest data was not being released. The Leadership Project also chose not to remind the public that they had done three large-scale surveys – in 2012, 2014 and 2018. Instead, they compared only the situation in 2012 and 2018.

The effect was to hide a dramatic decline in public confidence in the city’s leadership between 2014 and 2018.  Since Marvin Rees assumed office, confidence, trust, sense of ability to participate, in fact every single indicator available in the latest results (which can then be compared with the 2012 and 2014 results) shows there has been an extraordinary decline in public perception of the mayor and the city’s leadership under Marvin Rees.

I have taken every piece of the 2018 data which was made available in the 2020 publication, and compared it with the earlier results.  This means, simply – no data cherry-picking. The results are striking.

The most positive aspect of the introduction of the mayor’s role has been to raise the visibility of city leadership.  Yet while there was a big improvement under ex-mayor George Ferguson, things have gone backwards under the current mayor Rees.  Here are the results of polling of a representative sample of Bristol Citizens:

Strikingly, the sense of democratic participation increased under Ferguson, but fewer citizens now feel involved and able to make a difference than before the mayoral system was introduced:

Finally, trust in the council’s decision-making capacity, which improved during the Ferguson era, has dramatically declined to levels inferior even to the supposedly muddled and disunited pre-Mayoral days:

These results reflect polling of ordinary citizens – 658 respondents in 2012, 1013 respondents in 2014 and 680 respondents in 2018.

In addition to consulting ordinary citizens, the Leadership Project consulted three groups of leaders: councillors, community and business leaders, and public management and professionals. 

Councillors have been less than happy with the introduction of the mayoral system, not surprisingly as power has moved away from them towards the mayor.  Still, on a couple of issues there has been a step-decline under Rees, and in no case an improvement.

Strikingly, fewer councillors feel that responsibility for making decisions is clear now than ever before:

Democratic accountability and checks and balances are seen to have dramatically declined under Rees:

More councillors are now unhappy with how well their constituents’ views are represented:

The most gung-ho supporters of the mayoral system were the community and business leaders:

But more of them now feel that the clarity about who makes decisions is lower now than under Ferguson and lower than even in pre-mayoral days:

Particularly marked is the change during Rees’ tenure in the views held by the third group of leaders surveyed, the managers and professionals.  They saw an increase in clarity of leadership under Ferguson, but now see a decline to even pre-mayoral days under Rees. Their views are particularly surprising given that Ferguson operated largely un-assisted for much of his tenure, while Rees has brought in several expensive managers.

The Bristol City Leadership Project did not make their full results available in March, or we could have explored these issues in more depth.  Why they chose not to is unclear – possibly, they wanted their audience to concentrate on contrasting “before the [institution of the] Mayor” and “after the Mayor”.   But this is a pity.  For example, the poorest segment of Bristol’s population had the highest expectations of improvement from the introduction of the mayoral system in 2012, and were most disappointed by what it actually delivered in 2014 (which may have contributed to Ferguson’s defeat).  It would be interesting to know where they stand now. 

In any case one thing is clear – mayor Marvin Rees can take little comfort in the results.  Nor can supporters of the mayoral system. The system appears to have performed less well than hoped, particularly under the current mayor, as reflected in a decline in leadership ratings on every single measure between 2014 and 2018. 

Comment by Dr Thom Oliver: Co-investigator Bristol Civic Leadership Project / Dr Thom Oliver (@Thomoli) / Twitter / Bristol Civic Leadership Project | A collaborative project on change in local governance 16 February 2021:

Thanks for taking the time to look at the Bristol Civic Leadership data, I thought I would send across a few brief comments on your analysis, which I hope should explain the logics of decisions to present what we did, and the limitations of our data.

In terms of length of report, we were limited by our own individual capacity (the Bristol Civic Leadership Project takes up a small/almost voluntary amount of our ‘day jobs’ as it were), Robin Hambleton is retired, David has a senior academic role at University of Bristol with a substantial teaching load, and I am personally limited given my role is research support as opposed to a 100% academic role. We were limited by time, capacity, and the desire of Policy Bristol to produce a ‘short report’ in line with their other outputs. We still have a desire to do something more extensive, but in the academic world, our institutional push would be more towards academic peer reviewed papers, as opposed to policy briefings.

In terms of the presentation of data comparing 2012 to 2018 as opposed to all three data phases. This is on two distinct logics, firstly the BCLP aims to consider the mayoral model, not the individuals within the role of mayor. Our questions and data are depersonalised, and the original frame of the research was to compare the pre governance under the leadership model, alongside the governance after the introduction of the mayoral model. The second reason for not comparing 2014 to 2018, is that it would be statistically incorrect to draw conclusions from such comparisons. Most shifts are not statistically significant (i.e. we cannot say with enough certainty that the respective changes in scores either up or down, could be explained or attributable to a singular known reason, the other variance, which we could not account for, or attribute could be the main factor in informing the change). 

Further to this there is a particular challenge that in each cycle we are not comparing like to like between the sample populations (although Bristol City Council do very well to balance the sample), again there is variance there which given the small sample meant we couldn’t draw ‘fair’ conclusions on between data cycles.

There will be further outputs from this data, based on current data and the continuation of questions in the Bristol City Council ‘Quality of Life Survey’ and ‘Citizens Panel’, all the data is available online here: Find Consultations – Bristol – Citizen Space searching ‘Civic Leadership’. So, I would encourage people to look at the data themselves.

Overall, though, and without any statistical power, there was a definite tailing off between both mayors across several variables, and this was anticipated, given the distance from the original point of contrast, non-mayor versus mayor, and a predictable withering on the basis that original expectations of what the mayoral model could do, being met or not.

Links:

https://bristolcivicleadership.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/the-prospects-for-mayoral-governance-in-bristol-13-march-2013-130313.pdf

https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/805865/the-impacts-of-mayoral-governance-in-bristol

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/policybristol/briefings-and-reports-pdfs/D1625_Pike_Policy%20Report_Mayoral%20governance%20in%20Bristol_web.pdf