Leaving aside the point of a private road becoming a through road and the whole adoption process, the idea that an individual or company can take a road (or anything similar) shove it into a new company owned by the same people, then declare that company insolvent and wash their hands of it fundamentally shows that something is wrong with corporate responsibility structures in the UK and (given this was the plot of a West Wing episode as well S02E19) the rest of the world.
That was my initial feeling although it also doesn’t seem right that the owners of a small business estate should be responsible for anything other than deterioration caused by visitors to those businesses. Of course they’ve managed to evade responsibility for that too but it seems likely the bulk of the damage was caused by through traffic, especially given the comment in the article on HGVs.
I think the point is that while owned by Daniels brothers and family the road was not properly maintained. It was probably a massive cash cow for a number of years until so badly deteriorated that ownership became a liability. It was then time to place the ownership where the original owners could not be held to account.
Interesting question - if you own a road and hadn't 'accidentally' sold it to a company that instantly went bankrupt, are you in the clear if you set up a set of bollards (or similar impassable items) making it impassable? It'd be a tragedy if that happened and the council had to adopt the road in a hurry to allow traffic through.
Or alternatively a toll booth. It's your road, after all.
I'm surprised prospective councillors, MPs and others aren't regularly campaigning about this, getting the classic picture of politicians glumly pointing at potholes!
The circumstances surrounding the sale of the road look highly suspect to me. Those who consider it the job of a Local Authority to lamely take on the liabilities of those wishing to evade them, may want to have a quiet word with themselves.
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand a private cul-de-sac road that was part of a small industrial estate should never have become part of a major through road without being adopted by the council. Presumably it wouldn’t be in its current state if it had remained a cul-de-sac.
I ended up sympathising more with the Daniels than I expected here. If the council want to use the road as if it were adopted but then refuse to actually adopt it and leave it to the Daniels and their tenants to pay for its upkeep then I can understand their approach!
Me too! I assume the council is stuck because it probably had a lot of funds cut so decided to not adopt it then but is only going to have to adopt it later in a shabbier state with much more work and cost required in the long run! Residents must spend a lot on tyres and shock absorbers!
I suspect the council didn’t adopt as the construction condition is far below adoptable standard and probably always was. Given the amount of HGV traffic the costs of bringing it up are likely astronomical, and those frontages would go berserk if they got landed with the bill via S228. Having been on the other side refusing requests to adopt private streets I can sympathise with CBC in not wanting the rate payers to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Though they probably should have secured a S38/S278 when they started approving all the adjoining developments.
This is a result of local politics moving from "Get the bins collected and make sure the roads are ok" to people who want to signal their wokeness and bleat constantly about Climate Change, Ukraine, LGBT+ and Gaza.
And it is the local people's fault, they keep voting for the same moronic parties that couldn't give a flying one about them or their area.
The Council will eventually adopt the road, it will be fixed and no more will be said about it. But don't expect it to happen until a local election is due, then things will happen
Most local councilors are, and have always been, older busy-body "pillar of the community" types. There's very little difference between a Lab, Con or LD councillor, they're all a similar personality type.
Case in point, the semi-retired head of compliance at an insurance company I once worked at was an LD councillor, while the legal counsel was a Con councillor. They were basically the same person/with the same opinions. They would always bang on about house building proposals, river defences and bin collections. Not once did I ever hear them talking about anything "woke".
The bigger problem we have, in terms of the general stagnation and inertia in the country is complex, and includes our insane buearacracy, too many vested interests, an aging population and the culture of nimbyism this creates, lack of political risk taking, and the broader fact that all modern economies are constrained by how the bond markets will react to their plans (see, Liz, Truss budget), which stops anything from ever changing. This cuts across all political groups/interest groups. Tory/Reform are generally against new housing developments, Labour/Green place too much emphasis on environmental protection over development, etc
There is no problem with the population other than it is expanding due to immigration. If things were left alone housing would become cheaper and more babies would naturally be born as the major cost for young couples - housing - fell in price.
The rest is all stuff you've been told rather than the facts. Truss was booted out by the Parliamentary Conservative Party who wanted to put Sunak in office but the members wanted Truss. The markets would have corrected if they'd stuck to their guns but they didn't because Sunak's father in law, his wife and Sunak are absolutely loaded and they wanted a piece of the action. The bond yields are higher today than they were under Truss but the press isn't screaming about it, why?
"Tory/Reform are against new housing developments" is absolutely untrue, I live in an area that was Tory for 20 years and thousands of new houses and flats have been built here, including in areas designated Green belt / farming only. The Tory party wanted to build 20,000 MORE, merging tow large areas into one, it was only the people creating a huge stink that stopped them.
And if you haven't heard of councillors say anything woke you need to talk those currently in office.
We would still need to build a lot more housing,. immigration or no immigration. I accept imigration means we have to build more than we otherwise would, but in both scenarios, we're not building enough.
But moreover, were not building enough of everything, and when we do it's a shambles. HS2, for example, completely ballsed up by the Tories. Businesses aren't able to grow as they could, due to ridiculous planning rules.
To claim the Tories at a local level don't block new housing developments is a bit daft. During his time in Gov, Dominic Cummings wanted to roll out an algorithm to depoliticise house building targets, but they had to drop the idea in the end as so many Tory controlled councils kicked up such a stink. Michael Give also quietly dropped house building targets altogether. Obviously you can point to a few examples showing development, but that doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Also, the vast majority of their vote is now the over 60s, you know, that famously nimby group of people.
You're just speculating with Truss, maybe the markets could have corrected, but who knows. Yes, gilt yields have been on the steady increase, as inflation has been persistent and therefore interest rates have remained high, once rates go down, yields should start to ease a bit. So another scenario could have been we'd be in an even worse position now Gilts wise if we stuck with Truss' plan, in that the post Gilt crash would have established itself as the new baseline, then things would have deteriorated further from that baseline. Yep, I'm speculating just as you are, both scenarios would have been possible.
Then there's the thorny issue of GBP post Truss budget, USD hit a near all time high of 0.94 against GBP, absolutely wild and would have sent prices skyrocketing even further if it persisted,now it's 0.74. wonder why you didn't bring that up as a data point, as it was another fundamental and systemic unforced error that that budget created?
Im sure plenty of councillors post crap on socials about whoever the topic of the day is, and hoist a pride flag or Ukraine flag above the civic centre. But who really gives a fuck? How much of their day does that take up? 10 minutes? To say this is the reason things like bin collections or highway maintenance has gone to shit is laughable. Are you deliberately ignoring the massive fiscal deficits that most councils have, or are you not aware of this, as it seems odd this wasn't acknowledged at all in your previous posts, within the context of councils being a bit shit these days?
I was referring more broadly to dramatic changes in average household sizes and household formation. We have vastly more single person households than we've ever had in the past.
Young people are coupling up much later in life, and it's becoming the norm that many single young men and single young women buy a home by themselves when starting out. This just didn't happen in previous generations, especially among young women.
Then we've got the massively aging population, where, until they go into care are often living by themselves for years. Another factor is we've almost completely turned our back on multi generational households, unlike in the past where nan might have lived a granny annex.
All of this means that say is the population dropped back down to the year 2000 amount of 68million, we'd still need a lot more housing units than we did back then.
Yes you’re 100% correct. What we need is another 5 million people net brought into the country, people who will also bring their family members and have kids themselves. And then we’ll have nirvana.
Oh wait, didn’t we try that between 2010 and 2024? How’s it working out?
Oh look, a substantive article about something that could actually be fixed and a right-wing troll/bot has shown up to make it into a culture war issue about LGTB.
"The Council will eventually adopt the road, it will be fixed and no more will be said about it. But don't expect it to happen until a local election is due, then things will happen"
I think there's some kind of power for a council to do an unopposed compulsory purchase order on land like this.. and it would also look like a relevant use of Community Infrastructure Levy (the funding that councils get from developers - but which can only be used for limited purposes) to fix up.
I believe so, and it’s not clear why they won’t use it. My best guess from reading around is that in order to adopt a road it has to be up to a certain level of condition maybe? But it doesn’t help that they won’t say anything about their actual reasoning.
The reason they won't adopt it is because they will have to spend money to bring it up to the required standard and then maintain it thereafter. In an era of austerity they'd be mad to do it.
It's pretty mystifying. It's a pretty common scenario for councils not to want to take on extra maintenance and safety liabilities for pretty marginal roads on industrial estates, housing developments etc. But it makes zero sense when it's part of their own transport strategy, and by the sounds of it they could have bought it without CPO for buttons. It can only be either 1) once they have responsibility the condition is so bad that it would cost £££ that they don't have to sort it out or 2) simple rank incompetence / computer-says-no brain.
Seems like their budget is likely the reason? Central Bedfordshire Council spent 15.1mn of reserves last year - that’s a ~5% deficit, and they’ve apparently cut running costs by £185mn over the last 15 years (which is a lot when the current budget is £265mn).
In that context the council is probably not in a position to take on any other costs, irrespective of how important they are.
It's the reason I referenced CIL (although not all councils collect it - I don't know if Central Bedfordshire is one of these). That can't be used for general expenditure and has to be used to deliver capital projects.
Yes agree, though they will presumably have various calls on CIL from all sorts of other capital projects already, so the basic issue of not having enough to go around still stands. Plus there may well be distinctions between the upfront capital cost, which they might use CIL for, and ongoing liability, which CIL maybe can't be used for - I'm not sure. (Not to say I agree FWIW, but there at least a certain rationality in not taking on new liabilities when you can't pay for the ones you already have.)
Cracking tale, and beautifully told. If only British businesses and local government showed 10% of the ingenuity they use in shedding unwanted obligations on, say, better products and services.
Leaving aside the point of a private road becoming a through road and the whole adoption process, the idea that an individual or company can take a road (or anything similar) shove it into a new company owned by the same people, then declare that company insolvent and wash their hands of it fundamentally shows that something is wrong with corporate responsibility structures in the UK and (given this was the plot of a West Wing episode as well S02E19) the rest of the world.
That was my initial feeling although it also doesn’t seem right that the owners of a small business estate should be responsible for anything other than deterioration caused by visitors to those businesses. Of course they’ve managed to evade responsibility for that too but it seems likely the bulk of the damage was caused by through traffic, especially given the comment in the article on HGVs.
I think the point is that while owned by Daniels brothers and family the road was not properly maintained. It was probably a massive cash cow for a number of years until so badly deteriorated that ownership became a liability. It was then time to place the ownership where the original owners could not be held to account.
Nice work if you can get it.🤨
Interesting question - if you own a road and hadn't 'accidentally' sold it to a company that instantly went bankrupt, are you in the clear if you set up a set of bollards (or similar impassable items) making it impassable? It'd be a tragedy if that happened and the council had to adopt the road in a hurry to allow traffic through.
Or alternatively a toll booth. It's your road, after all.
I'm surprised prospective councillors, MPs and others aren't regularly campaigning about this, getting the classic picture of politicians glumly pointing at potholes!
The circumstances surrounding the sale of the road look highly suspect to me. Those who consider it the job of a Local Authority to lamely take on the liabilities of those wishing to evade them, may want to have a quiet word with themselves.
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand a private cul-de-sac road that was part of a small industrial estate should never have become part of a major through road without being adopted by the council. Presumably it wouldn’t be in its current state if it had remained a cul-de-sac.
I ended up sympathising more with the Daniels than I expected here. If the council want to use the road as if it were adopted but then refuse to actually adopt it and leave it to the Daniels and their tenants to pay for its upkeep then I can understand their approach!
This isn't the first time the crooks have shafted people in Shefford.
I have no sympathy for them whatsoever.
Me too! I assume the council is stuck because it probably had a lot of funds cut so decided to not adopt it then but is only going to have to adopt it later in a shabbier state with much more work and cost required in the long run! Residents must spend a lot on tyres and shock absorbers!
I suspect the council didn’t adopt as the construction condition is far below adoptable standard and probably always was. Given the amount of HGV traffic the costs of bringing it up are likely astronomical, and those frontages would go berserk if they got landed with the bill via S228. Having been on the other side refusing requests to adopt private streets I can sympathise with CBC in not wanting the rate payers to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Though they probably should have secured a S38/S278 when they started approving all the adjoining developments.
This is a result of local politics moving from "Get the bins collected and make sure the roads are ok" to people who want to signal their wokeness and bleat constantly about Climate Change, Ukraine, LGBT+ and Gaza.
And it is the local people's fault, they keep voting for the same moronic parties that couldn't give a flying one about them or their area.
The Council will eventually adopt the road, it will be fixed and no more will be said about it. But don't expect it to happen until a local election is due, then things will happen
Most local councilors are, and have always been, older busy-body "pillar of the community" types. There's very little difference between a Lab, Con or LD councillor, they're all a similar personality type.
Case in point, the semi-retired head of compliance at an insurance company I once worked at was an LD councillor, while the legal counsel was a Con councillor. They were basically the same person/with the same opinions. They would always bang on about house building proposals, river defences and bin collections. Not once did I ever hear them talking about anything "woke".
The bigger problem we have, in terms of the general stagnation and inertia in the country is complex, and includes our insane buearacracy, too many vested interests, an aging population and the culture of nimbyism this creates, lack of political risk taking, and the broader fact that all modern economies are constrained by how the bond markets will react to their plans (see, Liz, Truss budget), which stops anything from ever changing. This cuts across all political groups/interest groups. Tory/Reform are generally against new housing developments, Labour/Green place too much emphasis on environmental protection over development, etc
There is no problem with the population other than it is expanding due to immigration. If things were left alone housing would become cheaper and more babies would naturally be born as the major cost for young couples - housing - fell in price.
The rest is all stuff you've been told rather than the facts. Truss was booted out by the Parliamentary Conservative Party who wanted to put Sunak in office but the members wanted Truss. The markets would have corrected if they'd stuck to their guns but they didn't because Sunak's father in law, his wife and Sunak are absolutely loaded and they wanted a piece of the action. The bond yields are higher today than they were under Truss but the press isn't screaming about it, why?
"Tory/Reform are against new housing developments" is absolutely untrue, I live in an area that was Tory for 20 years and thousands of new houses and flats have been built here, including in areas designated Green belt / farming only. The Tory party wanted to build 20,000 MORE, merging tow large areas into one, it was only the people creating a huge stink that stopped them.
And if you haven't heard of councillors say anything woke you need to talk those currently in office.
We would still need to build a lot more housing,. immigration or no immigration. I accept imigration means we have to build more than we otherwise would, but in both scenarios, we're not building enough.
But moreover, were not building enough of everything, and when we do it's a shambles. HS2, for example, completely ballsed up by the Tories. Businesses aren't able to grow as they could, due to ridiculous planning rules.
To claim the Tories at a local level don't block new housing developments is a bit daft. During his time in Gov, Dominic Cummings wanted to roll out an algorithm to depoliticise house building targets, but they had to drop the idea in the end as so many Tory controlled councils kicked up such a stink. Michael Give also quietly dropped house building targets altogether. Obviously you can point to a few examples showing development, but that doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Also, the vast majority of their vote is now the over 60s, you know, that famously nimby group of people.
You're just speculating with Truss, maybe the markets could have corrected, but who knows. Yes, gilt yields have been on the steady increase, as inflation has been persistent and therefore interest rates have remained high, once rates go down, yields should start to ease a bit. So another scenario could have been we'd be in an even worse position now Gilts wise if we stuck with Truss' plan, in that the post Gilt crash would have established itself as the new baseline, then things would have deteriorated further from that baseline. Yep, I'm speculating just as you are, both scenarios would have been possible.
Then there's the thorny issue of GBP post Truss budget, USD hit a near all time high of 0.94 against GBP, absolutely wild and would have sent prices skyrocketing even further if it persisted,now it's 0.74. wonder why you didn't bring that up as a data point, as it was another fundamental and systemic unforced error that that budget created?
Im sure plenty of councillors post crap on socials about whoever the topic of the day is, and hoist a pride flag or Ukraine flag above the civic centre. But who really gives a fuck? How much of their day does that take up? 10 minutes? To say this is the reason things like bin collections or highway maintenance has gone to shit is laughable. Are you deliberately ignoring the massive fiscal deficits that most councils have, or are you not aware of this, as it seems odd this wasn't acknowledged at all in your previous posts, within the context of councils being a bit shit these days?
No you’re wrong.
The population would now be falling. Figure 2
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-impact-of-migration-on-uk-population-growth/
Did I claim otherwise?
I was referring more broadly to dramatic changes in average household sizes and household formation. We have vastly more single person households than we've ever had in the past.
Young people are coupling up much later in life, and it's becoming the norm that many single young men and single young women buy a home by themselves when starting out. This just didn't happen in previous generations, especially among young women.
Then we've got the massively aging population, where, until they go into care are often living by themselves for years. Another factor is we've almost completely turned our back on multi generational households, unlike in the past where nan might have lived a granny annex.
All of this means that say is the population dropped back down to the year 2000 amount of 68million, we'd still need a lot more housing units than we did back then.
You don't seem great at system thinking?
Yes you’re 100% correct. What we need is another 5 million people net brought into the country, people who will also bring their family members and have kids themselves. And then we’ll have nirvana.
Oh wait, didn’t we try that between 2010 and 2024? How’s it working out?
Really? The Tory led Central Bedfordshire council is too woke for you
Get a grip you right wing reactionary troll.
Oh look, a substantive article about something that could actually be fixed and a right-wing troll/bot has shown up to make it into a culture war issue about LGTB.
You didn't read what I wrote?
"The Council will eventually adopt the road, it will be fixed and no more will be said about it. But don't expect it to happen until a local election is due, then things will happen"
No surprise there.
I think there's some kind of power for a council to do an unopposed compulsory purchase order on land like this.. and it would also look like a relevant use of Community Infrastructure Levy (the funding that councils get from developers - but which can only be used for limited purposes) to fix up.
I believe so, and it’s not clear why they won’t use it. My best guess from reading around is that in order to adopt a road it has to be up to a certain level of condition maybe? But it doesn’t help that they won’t say anything about their actual reasoning.
The reason they won't adopt it is because they will have to spend money to bring it up to the required standard and then maintain it thereafter. In an era of austerity they'd be mad to do it.
It's pretty mystifying. It's a pretty common scenario for councils not to want to take on extra maintenance and safety liabilities for pretty marginal roads on industrial estates, housing developments etc. But it makes zero sense when it's part of their own transport strategy, and by the sounds of it they could have bought it without CPO for buttons. It can only be either 1) once they have responsibility the condition is so bad that it would cost £££ that they don't have to sort it out or 2) simple rank incompetence / computer-says-no brain.
Seems like their budget is likely the reason? Central Bedfordshire Council spent 15.1mn of reserves last year - that’s a ~5% deficit, and they’ve apparently cut running costs by £185mn over the last 15 years (which is a lot when the current budget is £265mn).
In that context the council is probably not in a position to take on any other costs, irrespective of how important they are.
£450m down to £265m maybe does point to the real reason doesn't it - as with so many 'why doesn't the council do x/y/z?' issues
It's the reason I referenced CIL (although not all councils collect it - I don't know if Central Bedfordshire is one of these). That can't be used for general expenditure and has to be used to deliver capital projects.
Yes agree, though they will presumably have various calls on CIL from all sorts of other capital projects already, so the basic issue of not having enough to go around still stands. Plus there may well be distinctions between the upfront capital cost, which they might use CIL for, and ongoing liability, which CIL maybe can't be used for - I'm not sure. (Not to say I agree FWIW, but there at least a certain rationality in not taking on new liabilities when you can't pay for the ones you already have.)
Cracking tale, and beautifully told. If only British businesses and local government showed 10% of the ingenuity they use in shedding unwanted obligations on, say, better products and services.
Random thought- if the King now owns it, can't he pay for it to be fixed as a "gift to his loyal subjects"? Seems like an easy PR win if nothing else
No idea, I’ll WhatsApp him.
No need. I presume he subscribes.