On 5 Feb 2018 at 4:25pm Waterloo wrote:
... Are the people of Lewes being stitched up again?
Check it out here »
On 5 Feb 2018 at 4:34pm Bagpuss wrote:
Yawn!
On 5 Feb 2018 at 5:21pm SHS wrote:
Tx Waterloo very informative. Fact is, given the high business rates, rents and parking charges likely to be levied on any new commercial premises I doubt much interest will be shown by prospective tenants. Perhaps left 'cheap and cheerful'?
Also, I suspect many current residents have higher priorities than worrying about the North St development. Such as traffic pollution. Scraping a living....
On 5 Feb 2018 at 6:14pm Mavis wrote:
Personally, I don't think our local councillors are at all adequately equipped for a project as large as this. Therefore they are at risk of biased advice and recommendations from outside sources which will have a vested interest. There certainly shouldn't be any public funds "invested"
On 5 Feb 2018 at 8:43pm The people wrote:
I have posted many comments about NSQ over last 18 months. Now we see that my predictions are coming true. It’s a flawed project with all planning authorities failing in their duties when approving developments, as the financial commitments were never realised. What due diligence did the authorities do, zero. The site could now be blighted for years to come, any eyesore for Lewes.
On 5 Feb 2018 at 8:47pm The fat controller wrote:
The site must be saved for a station on the uckfield line
On 5 Feb 2018 at 9:00pm GummyBear wrote:
But this is good news, isn't it?
The point is, we don't want this development to be built do we?! So as far as I'm concerned, this article has cheered me up no end.
On 5 Feb 2018 at 9:52pm Waterloo wrote:
Over the original 'Phoenix Quarter' development I always suspected outright corruption was involved. Over the 'North Street Quarter' it seems to be sheer incompetence on the part of our toytown councillors.
On 6 Feb 2018 at 7:27am Edith wrote:
Why describe hard working councillors as toy town councillors? Why don't you stand for election yourself and get really involved? Personally I prefer housing and work opportunity to be based in the town and not taking up our precious pastures in the surrounding countryside.
On 6 Feb 2018 at 7:39am Annette Curtin-Twitcher wrote:
None of this surprises me at all. House prices in London appear to be falling, or at least have stopped rising, and if this continues the trend will spread to the rest of the south east. No-one would risk committing development money in such a climate if they could avoid it.
Asking the council to borrow money for some of it is just cheeky imo. I thought the basic premise was that the town would gain affordable housing at no cost to the council taxpayer, not subsidise it meeting the cost of servicing an (admittedly small) loan.
Like Waterloo, I suspect incompetence rather than conspiracy. From what I hear, the council is in a complete shambles because of the "merger" with Eastbourne, have lost a lot of their best and most experienced staff and the ones that are left seem to be spending all their time and energy on trying to sort out the mess rather than deliver the services we're paying through the nose for.
On 6 Feb 2018 at 8:16am Mavis wrote:
My opinion of the local councillors are pretty low, anyone worth their salt hasn't got the time and is already earning a fortune working hard, It just attracts free loaders and do gooders with too much time on their hands.
On 6 Feb 2018 at 10:35am Sashimi wrote:
Sadly, no actual update on the NSQ situation in this thread so far. The £10m is a grant to part pay for infrastructure (flood defences, decontamination of the ground, roads, etc). It is part of a government scheme to help unlock brownfield sites which are much more expensive to develop. NSQ has taken longer than expected to get to a spade in the ground on the site. The developer (a joint venture of NSQ Ltd and LDC) has already spent a shed load of money acquiring additional sites like Springman House and building a replacement factory for Gosnalls. They expect to move Gosnalls, demolish their old building and build an access road to the site so they can demolish all the Phase 1 buildings and get on with the development. That's the bit of the site Phoenix Rising was interested in. I remember Chelsea Renton saying after the planning application was approved that PR accepted the decision and would look for an alternative location for the arts community. I am sorry if PR now think there is a prospect of reviving the old project because there isn't. If the economy tanks again, the site will be mothballed until better times or sold on as a single entity. At least the £10m grant makes this a bit less likely. Let's hope it isn't because it's going to provide jobs and very decent homes in the Town and the sooner the better IMO. The last thing my most of my neighbours in Malling want to see is the continuation of the eyesore of rusty shed on the other river bank and the return of clapped out camper vans full of squatters. I know there is a housing crisis, but creating a favella is not the way to solve it. Lastly, I am sorry to be posting this under a pseudonym. I registered 'John Stockdale' as a user name. The website lost my password, gave me a complicated replacement and I can't find a way to substitute a memorable one. It's probably me and not the system.
On 6 Feb 2018 at 12:38pm Dictionary Corner wrote:
Only one L in favela. Seriously though - Genuine thanks, Mr. Stockdale for your update. I had to look up favela, so I'll add that to my vocabulary. 
On 6 Feb 2018 at 5:24pm The people wrote:
Let’s hear the council l dates.....
On 6 Feb 2018 at 7:27pm I dates ? wrote:
??
On 6 Feb 2018 at 7:40pm Sashimi wrote:
Thanks, Dictionary Corner. It's always a pleasure to find someone taking language seriously - even if it's someone else's language.
On 7 Feb 2018 at 10:04am Jobsworth wrote:
Whilst many of our councillors are pretty useless, the problem is more the unelected, incompetent idiots on the council payroll doing the work. Local government is a notoriously closed shop and there is a culture of getting rid of incompetent workers by promoting them out of your department which means the biggest idiots often end up running things. If a chief executive in the private sector was as hopeless as some of the senior management you see in the public sector, they'd get sacked and never work again, if they're running the council they get a huge payoff and walk into another job straight away. You only have to look at Jenny Rowlands, CEO of LDC, waltzed into the job after getting the boot from Brighton for completely mucking up the King Alfreds development then agrees a load of contracts with the same dodgy builders who messed that up to develop a load of LDC property. The woman is clearly totally clueless and in the pocket of some dubious developers but councils keep giving her six figure salaries!
On 7 Feb 2018 at 11:56am Clifford wrote:
Jobsworth wrote: 'If a chief executive in the private sector was as hopeless as some of the senior management you see in the public sector, they'd get sacked and never work again, if they're running the council they get a huge payoff...'
What, like the heads of the banks who brought us to the brink in 2008? And those people who drove Carillion into the ground. This 'private sector efficient' myth is a bit of a joke, you know. And the job of councillors is to oversee what the officers do on our behalf. If they can't do that what exactly do they think they're there for?
On 9 Feb 2018 at 1:24am candycow wrote:
Artisan.
They'll run rings around any hobbyist councillors (as an ex councillor I know from bitter experience).