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Posted on January 22 2012 at 11:46:05 0 comments

It might seem that this space has become the “knock Bromsgrove District Council” column. We don’t mean to, of course, but there seems to be such a disconnect between what we, the people who pay for the council’s services, want and what we get.

Take Marlbrook Tip: what many people want is for the people at Bromsgrove who ignored their complaints for years to show some backbone and put right what they allowed to happen (the over-tipping of more than a million cubic metres waste on the Lickey foothills).

Instead, they get an hour or two of people in suits at a public meeting saying, yes, it shouldn’t have happened, but we weren’t equipped to do what we were supposed to be doing.

Still, they add brightly, there’s no point in dwelling on the past, let’s learn lessons “moving forward” and invite the company behind the tipping to apply for retrospective planning permission for the million cubic metres excess.

The expedient course of inaction.

Travel eastwards around the Lickeys and you will find more fields that have fallen prey to expediency.

Little more than ten years ago, Bromsgrove District Council at least had the bottle to mount a High Court fight for the fields behind the Barnt Green Inn (only to see it designated “white land” and vulnerable to developers’ attentions).

This time around, squeezed by pressure to provide more land for housing (which, of course, the developers tell the Government they should be pushing councils to provide) and the fact that most of the district is Green Belt, the council has rolled over and gone against just about everyone’s wishes – except Banner Homes’, which will be very happy to have outline permission to build 88 homes on the fields.

So we now see the people of Barnt Green planning to raise funds to mount a legal challenge to the decision made by Bromsgrove District Council – supposedly on their behalf and paid for by their council taxes.

As the Government talks of “localism” and giving power back to the people, the people have never felt more powerless.

Just to set the record straight: at the Marlbrook Tip public meeting Coun Kit Taylor, the responsible portfolio holder, was asked if the Tip Monitoring Group would be reformed if a planning application was received – as we had reported him saying in our October 2011 issue.

From the stage, Coun Taylor said: “I am amazed by what I read in The Village magazine.”

We don’t know why he’s amazed: we were only reporting what he had told Lickey & Blackwell Parish Council in September.

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