08 Jan 2024
SADC leader Cllr Chris White is realistic about the highs and lows of 2023, and despite the challenges the council has faced, there remain plenty of things that he is proud of achieving over the last 12 months.
“Actually getting a Regulation 18 consultation out, in other words, the consultation on a draft Local Plan, because that has been a real problem for this district. We are now the district with the oldest plan in the country, and that means loads of places are vulnerable to development, so actually getting that process through its first major hurdle was great.”
The results of the consultation were published recently in a huge 300-page document, which was presented to councillors at the last meeting of the planning policy and climate committee.
“It is of course the usual mixture of some stuff which is valuable where you are going to have to think about it. Then there’s some self-contradictory stuff; someone wrote and said there’s no acknowledgement of climate change and then Friends of the Earth said ‘Brilliant to see climate change is there’! Other people said there was no consultation on the draft Local Plan, to which I say no, no, this is the consultation on the draft Local Plan!
“We’re moving at pace though, because under the old regime – and I don’t mean the Conservatives – they would have gone through that 300-page agenda page by page, and not constructively.
“You should basically be looking at it and saying, ‘yeah I’m happy with the officer’s response to that’ and then highlighting any areas where you might be worried rather than having a massive debate about it all over again.”
The whittled-down list of sites is still some way away from being published, however: “That will be the middle of 2024. It normally takes a year, it’s going to take slightly longer than a year because whilst the county council is broadly content with what we’re up to, as the major statutory consultee it’s been more demanding in terms of some technical detail than it has been in previous negotiations with other councils.
“I think the message we’ve got from them really is they’ve probably got their fingers burned a bit in the past by being a bit vague on certain things so that might add another couple of months. But we’re up against a deadline of the latter part of 2025 because otherwise a new set of rules are going to come in.”
The budget crisis experienced by the district council at the start of the year had a far-reaching impact, and resulted in the closure of Abbey View Golf Club, increased charges for discretionary services such as parking and garden waste management, and the scrapping or postponement of major capital projects.
Chris is quietly confident about how they weathered this particular storm.
“I’m proud of us for not falling flat on our face financially even though we had to do some tough things then and we’ll have to do tough things again.
“We’ve got a budget gap of about two and a half million for next year. We have the means by which we can close that but we can’t go on like this year after year. Nor can any other council. It is mission critical. And now it’s not just the districts who are screaming. Counties are really, really worried about adult care services in particular, but also special educational needs, so everything is problematic.
“I think our finance team is really good, it’s one of the strongest I’ve worked with and they have gone through the figures and closed the gap, so we’re down to about £50,000 as we speak, if we do the things that we know we’re going to have to do. But it will be fees and charges again and service reductions again.”
Were there any changes following the Government’s recent announcement of the Local Government Finance Settlement?
“The £2.54 million budget gap has stayed the same following our analysis of the settlement details.
“There are still some uncertainties but these cannot be calculated until late January. We are having to plan on bridging a £2.54 million gap in our proposals to the various committees.
“The Government’s repeated underfunding for all councils means that fees and charges will go up and services will be cut. To be absolutely clear: the Government is raising fees and charges in the district of St Albans.”
Earlier this year SADC received an £8.45m grant from the social housing decarbonisation fund allocated by the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero, with an additional £9.7m taken from the council’s housing budget, financed by rental payments.
Enhancements promised under the Warmer Homes Scheme vary from loft, cavity wall and external wall insulation, low-energy lighting and solar panels, as well as upgrades to windows, external doors and ventilation.
The project will take around two and a half years to complete and involve more than 900 homes.
“I’m proud of getting so much money for insulating council houses, it’s a staggering amount of money and more than any London borough, especially given we’re a small district. We made a decent case I think. I’d love to say that I sat there late at night filling in forms but I rather suspect it was officers of the council who did it well, so full marks to them.”
The coming year will also see a renewed focus on developing a cultural strategy for the district, shaping a coherent policy to make the best use of the council’s cultural assets, but also recognising that what the district offers goes beyond just buildings.
“We have performance places, so how do we market them better? Watching a pub band is not so much buildings-based as a bunch of guys performing music. One of the things I think that struck us during our conversations is how little we know about what goes on culturally, and that’s probably the number one thing I want to get to grips with.
“I’ll give you a small example, I didn’t know there were frequently lunchtime classical concerts in St Peter’s Church. They’re not run by the council, but why didn’t I know about it? Why don’t loads of people know about it? Whose fault is it? Nobody’s. But we could do better.
“I think people in St Albans have very little idea of what’s going on in Harpenden and vice versa. You know, what’s going on at the Eric Morecambe Centre. All that needs to be marketed better. So a lot of it is a comms thing, a marketing thing.
“It is ridiculous because we have more going on than most places do. So we need to find a way of doing that, or getting other people to do it.”
He is also keen to see more outside investment in the district’s cultural legacy: “One thing I’d love to have is a Stanley Kubrick museum but the district council’s never going to find the funds of its own to do that but maybe someone out there will and that would be brilliant.
“The other thing is making sure we talk about the St Albans of today, not always looking at the past and heritage, and not always looking at just the city. Harpenden is a significant player in many things, and more St Albans people need to go to the things going on there.”
Looking further ahead, 2024 will also see the demolition of the city’s only high-rise tower block, Telford Court, although this is unlikely to come in the form of a controlled explosion due to the proximity of other properties.
Exactly what will replace it has yet to be confirmed: “I’ve got an idea, but nothing has been done yet. It would be similar density low-rise accommodation, but you can actually make much better use of the land and the obvious inefficiency in terms of car parking, which no one’s would do these days.
“When you have underground car parking, then you can have the same density of housing but half the height like they’ve done at Gabriel Square.”
Although the Liberal Democrat administration has faced criticism for being anti-car, Chris does not agree this is the case: “The way I see it is it’s just trying to make the most of a medieval city that’s got very limited options for multiple vehicle households.
“We have to be realistic, there are too many bits of metal on the roads.
“We are in an urban environment and we need to recognise that. There are huge numbers of people in London who don’t own a car and don’t drive. Why would they? We’d like to get closer to that with regulated buses which I suspect may come from central government and could be a game changer.”
As part of SADC’s future plans, they are looking at selling off assets which have no particular purpose, moving away from the idea of the council being some sort of property manager.
“There are old buildings in Harpenden – and I don’t mean the public halls – which would be better off in private hands, or sold to the town council. The whole thing needs tidying up.
“Some of it is old compulsory purchases to facilitate the driving of a dual carriageway through the centre of St Albans. A resident actually kept the plans from the ‘60s when it was mooted as a great new idea. It didn’t happen basically because the people of St Albans rebelled, but it would have gone from the junction of London Road right across the middle of town, with roundabouts, right up to Hatfield Road. The way of understanding it is to go to Hertford, because that’s what did happen – it’s tragic, a beautiful town scythed through by someone who thought dual carriageways should be in the middle of town, which is utterly discredited as a concept now.”
The recent changes in the political landscape are also being reflected across the county, with Liberal Democrats taking seats which were previously Conservative strongholds.
“I am the chair of Hertfordshire council leaders, and in May some of them just disappeared. So now I have a situation in which the Lib Dems are in eight of the 10 district administrations, either as leaders or deputy leaders in a coalition, and I haven’t seen that since my early days in the ‘90s. So it looks as though history is repeating itself, and there’s definitely a consciousness at County Hall that things are changing.
“Harpenden and Berkhamsted is looking encouraging. Victoria [Collins, Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for the constituency] is doing the business, she’s here a lot, and it’s a difficult brief for her. It’s easier for Daisy [Cooper, St Albans MP], who has one district council to deal with, whereas Victoria’s got two, both St Albans and Decorum to deal with, and places like Tring which are a long way away. But she seems to manage.”
So where are the checks and balances with the Liberal Democrats taking more and more control? Do they in effect have to be the opposition to themselves?
“We do, and that can be quite hard work behind closed doors. We’ve had to invent structures in the district council to make sure that it’s not a one-party state.
It doesn’t help, to be frank, that the opposition are underperforming in terms of committee work and full council. When I was off [recently] apparently the Tories wouldn’t ask any questions because I wasn’t there. They’ve got the deputy leader there – their job is to shred her, but they couldn’t do that. They should come along with a series of difficult questions, the sort of questions you’re asking, it’s not hard but they don’t to that.”
Some of the other measures introduced are mechanisms designed to facilitate better scrutiny of council activity.
“The best thing we did was putting in an independent chair of audit. I think it’s a model that all councils should adopt, because he doesn’t care. I was summoned recently and he gave me quite a hard time, not a rude time, but it was tough questioning.
“I’ve got a funny feeling that if it had been a Lib Dem chair it would have been much more restrained. It was not just him asking questions, it was other councillors, because they felt that they were a bit special. If it had been a Tory chair they would have all clammed up, but I felt challenged.
“Introducing this question time thing, which is actually copied from the county council, where it’s even bigger, is a good thing. Because ordinary councillors giving the leader of the council a hard time in a public forum with no notice has got to be good because whilst you can’t know everything. It soon becomes apparent if you don’t know anything at all that you’re a bit useless really and people start saying it’s time to move on. So I think that was useful.
“We’ve put a bit of scrutiny into the service committees because the scrutiny committee wasn’t working correctly and we’re going to tweak that again. There’s a section which is questions from councillors who are on the committee to the chair and the vice chair. Well anyone who’s on the committee can surely manage to work their question into any part of the debate, so no one used it. It was pointed out, wouldn’t it be better if it was questions from anybody who could come along, particularly someone not on the committee and say why are you doing this? So we’re going to change that.”
Looking ahead now to the coming year, he is grimly blunt about how things currently stand at SADC.
“A lot of it is survival at the moment. What we discuss more than anything is how on Earth are we going to survive when you can see the inflation coming down the track? So for instance on bins, we have a much cheaper deal than the neighbouring council. They get a better service, and by that I don’t mean our service is poor, you pay for what you get. But we know that costs are rising and it’s a constant worry about how we manage that.”
