The spirited Rally held in Dunoon on Saturday 17th January by supporters of South Cowal Community Development Company’s [SCCDC] campaign to buy the neglected Castle Toward estate from Argyll and Bute Council threw up some very interesting facts.
There were genuinely shocking revelations about Argyll and Bute Council’s general dereliction of its duty of care of public property assets; and of the partisan inconsistency of its decision taking.
There was a determination to carry on the campaign – but without giving the clear description of the strategic steps to be pursued in this continuation that would have fully fired and directed the engine of the Rally.
For instance – there is a formal deadline for completing a community buy out under the Land Reform legislation that enables these acquisitions. There was no mention at the Rally of any timeline or any strategy for managing it. This is a crucial framework for any action.
There were cheers of support for a newly renegade councillor from Helensburgh whose own performance record should give pause before putting hands together.
There was misplaced support for council officers in order to focus anger on the inexplicably obtuse performance of Council Leader Dick Walsh – who represents Dunoon and South Cowal. Yes, it is councilors who take the decisions. Yes, officers only make recommendations. But with too many supine, disengaged and less that reassuringly competent councillors looking for a quiet life of easy influence, it is the officers that largely rule this council – by default and through deliberate manipulation of the sleeping policemen.
Yes, the one person the senior officers cannot manipulate is Council Leader Dick Walsh – but there is something of a devil’s pact between them as each knows just where the other’s bodies are buried. Neither can afford to fall out with the other.
It may well be that Councillor Walsh forced his senior officers, Douglas Hendry and Cleland Sneddon, to renege on the agreement Alan Stewart, SCCDC’s Chair, unhesitatingly confirmed they had made for the council to drop the price of the property if SCCDC withdrew their formal appeal against the official valuation of Castle Toward and addressed two specific issues.
But the lesson to be belatedly learned from this incident is a hard nosed political reality: when dealing with those – here officers and councillors, whose integrity has been evidentially demonstrated to be unreliable, where you have an advantage, press it home regardless and negotiate afterwards from a position of strength.
The council was clearly exercised by the appeal against the valuation. It was an honest and collegial gesture of trust for SCCDC to drop the appeal – but it was a fundamental and disabling error that Alan Stewart made clear to the Rally – cannot now be reversed.
Perhaps the biggest outstanding question is that of the council’s apparent preparedness itself to commit a £750k fraud on the Scottish Government and to invite a community company to be complicit in such a scheme.
The situation
Alan Stewart, who, with his core team has worked incessantly to drive this project to success, explained the impossibility in law and in honour, of SCCDC accepting the macchiavellian loan of £1 million at commercial rates offered by the council to make themselves look constructive.
He reminded the Rally that the figures in SCCDC’s business case demonstrated that they could not afford such a loan; that SCCDC had told the council they would never be in a position to repay it; and that the council had persisted in offering the loan in the full knowledge that SCCDC would have to default in three years, with the council then largely or wholly reclaiming the property.
Prompted also by a later question for the floor, Mr Stewart admitted to being as foxed as anyone by a situation where the council was effectively inciting the directors of Castle Toward to act unlawfully in accepting a loan they knew they could not repay.
This position would inevitably have seen the council go on to reclaim the property in three years time, already £750,000 of hard cash to the good – which had come from the Scottish Government’s Land Fund through SCCDC as its cash contribution to the purchase.
It would be interesting to know what view government lawyers take of this proposition. Here we have a local authority effectively trying to bring about a situation in which it deliberately defrauds the Land Fund of £750,000 – and invites a community company to be complicit in this criminal act.
Mr Stewart made it known that SCCDC had now commissioned property specialists, Savills [who had previously given them an informed opinion of the market value of Castle Toward in its present state] to prepare a full formal ‘Red Book’ valuation of the property.
When they get this – and the SCCDC Chair assured the Rally that this valuation would be below £1 million – the company’s next step would be to present the valuation to the council – knowing that they could do no more than hope that this conflicting professional valuation might persuade the District Valuer to revisit his earlier and contested valuation of £1.75 million.
Hitting the ground running
In what was weightiest and most objective contribution from a hard hitting platform, Councillor Bruce Marshall, who opened and chaired the session, first made it clear that the administration of Argyll and Bute Council is ‘being led by the nose’ by the Council Leader and Deputy Leader – a situation he rightly described as undemocratic.
Mr Marshall resigned from the administration in the Autumn of 2014, in support of fellow Cowal Councillor, Michael Breslin [a doughty buttress for the Castle Toward campaign] who was victimised by the Leader for his habit of asking awkward questions and insisting on answers. Present at the Rally was Councillor Vivien Dance from Helensburgh, who also left the Administration – earlier this month and as a result of her vote in support of SCCDC’s bid for Castle Toward.
Bruce Marshall first reminded his audience that Castle Toward was by no means the only public asset mismanaged by Argyll and Bute Council. He pointed to the local Market Garden closed ten years ago in order to build a new Children’s home, having demolished the old one. ‘Ten years on’, he said, that land is still lying derelict because a good local offer was refused – in the hope of a big cheque from somewhere else that has never materalised.
He underlined the fact that Council has a ‘Single Outcome Agreement’ with the Scottish Government – which means that all local authorities sign up to progress the targets of the government. Councillor Marshall confessed that in the light of this, he struggled to understand why the Council Leader has obstructed the community buy out of Castle Toward while the Scottish Government is progressing the Community Empowerment Bill. What SCCDC had wanted to do, he said, was exactly in line with the purpose of that bill.
Moving on to the performance of what has become the pantomime of the much vaunted CHORD programme for the regeneration of Argyll’s five largest towns, Mr Marshall revealed a genuine financial scandal.
Speaking of Dunoon’s state of decline, he noted that in 2006 it had been decided that Dunoon would focus its regeneration on improvements to the Queen’s Hall, host to the Rally – and its surrounding area.
In 2008 councillors had signed up to the competitive CHORD project from which they all emerged winners [this being Argyll and Bute Council's version of a competition].
Since then, Councillor Marshall noted that:
- £4.4 million had been spent on Campbeltown;
- £5.9 million on Helensburgh;
- £0.8 million on Oban;
- £1.3 million on Rothesay;
- £1.3 million on Dunoon,
- and told a shocked hall that Dunoon’s £1.3 million had been spent – in its entirety – on consultants fees.
Councillor Marshall ended with another revelation. He had learned only last week that Argyll and Bute Council has gifted free the former Campbeltown Town Hall – a signature burst of exuberance in the centre of Campbeltown’s main street – to Kintyre Community Development Trust. This decision had not been made through the council itself and he had learned of it only from seeing a council press release.
Naturally he wondered aloud at why therefore there could be no similar asset transfer of castle Toward to the South Cowal Community Development Company?
Local MSP’s examples of parallel dereliction of duty of care of public property assets
In another powerful address, local MSP Michael Russel gracefully acknowledged the presence in the hall of Argyll and Bute’s MP, Alan Reid, underlining the cross-party support this represented for the campaign for community ownership of Castle Toward.
Emphasising that the examples he was giving underlined ‘extraordinarily poor decisions’ on property disposals by Argyll and Bute Council and that some showed other communities bent on self-determination also stalled by council obstructionism, Mr Russell cited:
- the Gate Lodge to Castle Hill Museum in Dunoon, its roof now fallen in, seeing a charming little building which could have served a range of useful functions left to run to ‘rack and ruin’ as has been Castle Toward;
- Sandbank School, on the approaches to Dunoon, now pulled down because it had been let go to the extent that it could not even be left standing;
- Rockfield School in Oban town centre, left to dereliction and with a current community buy out campaign also stalled by council fudge;
- Kilbowie House in Oban, lying empty and in a very poor state of repair to the point where it has a £0 value on the council’s asset register – yet a good offer, which would have included restitution by the buyer, was refused;
- Kilmory Home Farm in Lochhilphead, part of the council’s original acquisition of the Kilmory estate as its HQ, lying untended for forty years, despite a prolonged local campaign to make it serve a rich community benefit – again persistently obstructed by the council for no good reason. Indeed the community campaigners were told six months ago that ‘there is now a possible alternative use’ for the property. As is the norm, the nature of that other use remains unspecified.
Noting the long established performance of the council in letting the public property assets it is entrusted to manage ‘go to rack and ruin’, Mr Russell gave the Rally his ‘Three Cs’:
- Continue the campaign;
- Challenge the council’s decision;
- Change the council.
Karma Chameleon Councillor
At the end of the series of questions from the floor – which were lively and engaged, with most of the 250-strong audience staying to the very end and taking part in the march through the town – the video footage of the event shows an amusing incident.
Councillor Vivien Dance had been trying to catch the eye of Derek, the man with the roving microphone. When she did and he offered her the mic – with a warm endorsement of the positive impact on the SCCDC team of her support for their efforts during dispiritingly obstructive meetings – she ignored the proferred mic and barged past him, set firmly for the main lectern at the front of the hall, of which she promptly took command.
She began meanly – targeting Argyll and Bute’s Liberal Democrat MP, Alan Reid, suggesting he was only there because there was an General Election coming up; and damning him for the questionable actions on the Castle Toward matter of the Deputy Council Leader, Ellen Morton, who is a Liberal Democrat.
This rabble rousing was distasteful and dishonest stuff. Everyone across Argyll and Bute knows that Alan Reid’s track record is of coming to important community and project meetings at all times. He is unarguably a dedicated constituency MP.
And many know that the Liberal Democrat councillors take telling from no one.
When the SNP group walked out of their junior partnership of the council administration on 25th November 2010, in protest against school closures, the Lib Dems and Conservatives replaced them in minutes. These councillors entered with gusto into the proposal to close 26 rural primaries. Both of their political parties told them to leave the administration and not get associated with this scheme – and were seen off in short order.
While one disagreed with their actions, this spirited attitude was always attractive and, actually, close to Councillor Dance’s own stated view that party politics should be kept out of local government – and presumably left purely to personal vested interest.
What the Helensburgh Councillor told the audience was incisive and constructive. Do not be distracted by larger aims. Keep your eyes on the prize. The objective is to see Castle Toward into community ownership. Focus on that. Write, email, phone councillors, members of the two parliaments, public bodies, government, Audit Scotland and make them understand your wishes and concerns.
She also advocated something intriguingly close to direct action, without being specific about what form it might take: underlining the peoples’ position as the master and challenging the audience to make that power real.
Her contribution was well received by an audience who had clearly adopted her as local champion for the time being.
Councillor Dance has a decent mind and this was an impressive and stirring performance.
One had to remind oneself that this newly rebellious councillor is the same woman who, in very different curry-favour-with-Walsh mode, stood up in the Council chamber at the meeting in early November 2010 on school closures and told the Council Leader that parents of children with very special needs served by Park school in Lomond, had told her that they they were content for the school to close. Park was one of 26 schools on the intended closure list.
Fellow Helensburgh councillor, James Robb, quickly showed Councillor Dance’s claim to be a fiction. When the parents of the severely needy pupils at the specialist Park school understood the reality of what was going on – that Park would close and its seriously disadvantaged pupils distributed around local schools with some special needs capacity but far below the level of specialist provision required – they were outraged.
Councillor Dance had been willing then to sacrifice the needs of the unarguably most vulnerable young people in Helensburgh and Lomond – and their families – for the sake of her own advancement within the council; or, most charitably, for the sake of a possible personal conviction that the council should not provide as best it can for the most enfeebled and peripheral in our society.
We were as impressed as any by the logic and forcefulness of Councillor Dance’s address from the lectern she seized.
But we marked her card over the Park school performance and have had good reason to mark it on several subsequent occasions where under the aegis of a company, Viton [VIvien TONy] she and her husband own, wooded grounds in Helensburgh were literally laid waste in the interests of developers for whom Viton are consultants. This was done against strong local protest; regardless of the fact that the sites were under Tree Protection and Special Protection orders;and on one famous occasion, flatly against the explicit instructions of council planners.
So much for the unstoppable power of the people about which Councilor Dance spoke with such revolutionary zeal – and on camera – on Saturday.
Caveat emptor.
NOTE: The film taken of the Rally in the Queen’s Hall in Dunoon on Saturday 17th January 2015 is here on You Tube.
