
In our second video interviewing subjects of the book Our City: Community Activism in Bristol, we talk to journalist Joe Banks, who was able to find a real anomaly in the council’s approach to developing the oldest part of the city.
He did this both by looking at information other people had requested, and putting in his own Freedom of Information requests, on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow website.
Details of the book can be found on the Tangent Books website.
You can read lots more about Joe’s investigation into St Mary Le Port, and other local topics, on his website.
If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.
Transcript
0:05 Myf: I’m Myfanwy Nixon, communications manager at mySociety. We’ve been talking to some of the people featured in this book: Our City, community activism in Bristol, edited by Suzanne Audrey.
0:18 In this second interview, I spoke to Joe Banks, a journalist who’s been following really carefully the development of an old part of the city in Bristol, Mary Le Port. It’s said that it’s almost as old as Bristol itself, and in 2018
0:35 the Council announced some plans for redevelopment. Now what Joe found through FOI was fascinating,
0:40 actually. What really intrigued him was a complete 360 degree turnaround in the council’s attitude towards this development plan. So their initial stance was that it was way too big, and then all of a sudden they gave it a green flag to push it through. All of this is what Joe discovered with Freedom of Information using mySociety’s website WhatDoTheyKnow.com.
1:03 But we started off by discussing Joe’s discovery of a Facebook group that wasn’t all that it seemed.
1:10 Joe: I’m Joe Banks, freelance journalist: I’ve written for people like Vice and I’ve written locally, written for the Bristol Cable.
1:16 I became interested in a development in the in the Old City, in the historic centre of Bristol, which was for three large office blocks, which was very controversial. It was very large, way out of scale with what remains of the Old City.
1:33 Most, a lot of the old city in Bristol was destroyed in the in the bombing of the Second World War. Half of it is now a park because that whole area of the Old City was just obliterated.
1:44 It was in one of these committees, and it’s in the minutes that they have a discussion, and they say it will be good for members and officers to set up a “Friends Of” group, right?
1:56 That was the phrasing, you know. So this is a top down thing they’re talking about. And then the Facebook group appeared a week later, after that. An astroturfing community group.
2:07 There’d been a history in this location of local opposition to previous schemes trying to take a chunk of the park. And yes, it turned out that the developer had put the community group right at the centre of their community engagement, which all developers have to go through as part of the planning process.
2:24 And you’d had this guy giving a statement to the actual planning meeting, where the planning application was determined by the council, and telling them that the members of this community group were were in favour of the proposal, at ten to one. But it turned out he got that figure from counting emojis on the Facebook page. So not the most scientific of bases.
2:47 And I wasn’t actually very switched on in terms of local governance issues in Bristol and planning and development, but it sparked my interest.
2:57 And then I was looking into this, into this Facebook group and so forth, but by the time that I was interested in it and started looking at it, the planning application had, actually, it had been given permission.
3:10 Then I got into into the Freedom of Information requests and looking at trying to work out how the whole process had unfolded.
3:18 And so actually my first experience of putting in Freedom of Information requests, was what correspondence had occurred between the council and this sort of pseudo community group.
3;29 But then, yes, I saw all these other requests related to this. Specifically to this development. I didn’t know who they were by, but they had a lot of interesting material in them.
3:40 The next stage was trying to see what had been going on. Between the planning department and the developers, there’s a pre application process: before a planning application goes before council, particularly for big developments like this and very sensitive locations, there’s a back and forth with the Planning Officers looking at the designs and saying where they think it’s good and where it doesn’t meet the demands of the local plan, which is what planning applications are assessed against.
4:14 That was my Freedom of Information request, right? Trying to get further insight into it. I mean, that’s a formal process. It’s letters that are sent: pre-app one, pre-app two, yeah. So I was able to get hold of those.
4:28 I knew from emails that were in these other Freedom of Information requests from other people that there had been basically four pre-app stages.
4:35 But what came back from my request only went to the third, so I then had to go back, you know? And say, “I know you’ve got a fourth. Can I have that please?”
4:44 Yeah, if I hadn’t had the other information from the other requests, I wouldn’t have known that existed. And that fourth one was the letter from the the Head of Development Management. Basically what he was saying in that reiterated what the officers had been saying
5:00 all along: this development is not acceptable. It’s too big. It’s too bulky. This was the same planning man, you know, Head of Development Management, who had sat in the planning meeting encouraging the councillors to vote for an unchanged proposal.
5:15 Stage four was his letter, and the final letter from the planning department to the developer before they were going to put in their application.
5:25 He’s reaffirming, you know, what the council have been saying all the way through this process: this design is not acceptable.
5:31 You then fast forward, I think, a month on from that, they put the planning application in, which is unchanged, the committee meeting comes around. It was about six months later, and he’s in that meeting, yeah, recommending approval for this design he previously said was unacceptable and that, and again, this was through the other Freedom of Information requests that other people have put in.
5:51 You could see the email correspondence between the cabinet member for city planning, one of the main contacts for the developers in the council, and she was agreeing to have meetings with the Commercial Director of the developer. There were also meetings with the Executive Director for growth and regeneration. So that’s one of the three most senior officers in the council
6:13 and the head of the Mayor’s office. People have been putting these Freedom of Information requests in talking about ‘interference’.
6:19 What they were talking about predominantly was interference from the Mayor’s office who was supposed to be completely detached, you know, legally supposed to be completely detached from the planning function of the council.
6:31 So you could see these meetings happening, and they were happening just after Historic England had put in their official opposition to the development.
6:40 I also verified through Freedom of Information request that there’s no record of any of these meetings.
6:46 [Myf:] And I think this must be your wording, because it doesn’t sound like mine in my notes, but “The development industry has penetrated local government with a disdain for democratic process and accountability.”
6:58 [Joe:] I imagine that they were not not wanting to put those on record, you know, the shadow system in planning, you know, which is going on
7:10 outside the public facing process.
7:14 And, yeah, I think people should be held accountable for that, because we it’s so important that we, that the public can see how this is happening.
About WhatDoTheyKnow
7:24 What a great idea that this is publicly available to everyone to access and see the request, see the response. I’m using it quite often. Now, you know, it’s just very well put together.
7:37 I think it works really, really brilliantly. Yeah, the way you can see all those Freedom of Information requests for a particular institution is great. Yeah, I think it’s a fantastic resource.
7:46 Yeah, I couldn’t have actually drawn a picture of that whole process without having access, as well as getting that fourth pre-application document.
7:57 I had to know that it existed, otherwise I never could have made them give it to me.
On dealing with challenges in the FOI process
8:02 I think there’s a big question around how Freedom of Information operates and and you’ll get false, often false exemptions that they’re putting up that you then have to get to an internal review, point out, you know, go through the ICO, the legislation, and show them that you can see, you know, that they’re not following the rules.
8:21 [Myf:] Thanks very much to Joe for sharing his really interesting story with us.
8:25 And if you’re interested to read more of that sort of thing, you can buy the book Our City, edited by Suzanne Audrey. And if you’re intrigued by what Freedom of Information can do, why not check out my Society’s website. WhatDoTheyKnow.com. It takes you through the whole process and makes it really easy to ask for information from public authorities.