Planners approve Sea Lanes 50m outdoor heated swimming pool on Brighton beach

Steve above says:
“It sounds like a con trick … “.
It certainly does!

Adding to far too long a list of City Council debacles, which have cost honest taxpayers tens of millions since Hove and Brighton merged in 1997 (of which, horrifyingly, the more than £40m lost on the i360 vanity project + surroundings is not even the worst – ‘Golden Goodbyes’ in 1996-97 for Labour to be rid of loyal & professional senior staff at Hove Borough Council is an ongoing financial burden until all of them, and their spouses,have passed away.
And the full extent of the financial disaster of the deal/con with Banco Santander to lease-out 499 council houses still has to see the light of day!).

Anyway the Report to the Council’s Planning Committee for last Wednesday gives some clues.

Regrettably it says nothing about the rent to be charged to Sea Lanes for them to try to make money out of land which we, as taxpayers, and which we currently have free and unrestricted access to.

So, in one part, the Report for last Wednesday speaks of the project being marginally viable (financially, that is).

But elsewhere in the Report we read that there’s no expectation of significantly more swimmers that the 25m pool was expected to attract.

So how is a profit to be made, given the significant extra build, operation, & maintenance costs of a 50m pool compared to the original 25m pool?

The Report does not seem to recognise that major question?

And as to restricting the number of swimmers in the pool?

Well, for those willing to believe it, the Report says that the 6 or so lanes (probably defineded by a floating rope) will always be in place, so once a swimmer’s using a lane that’s what they’re restricted to (so presumably no other swimmers can use the same lane, since the first swimmer might be planning to swim back to do several lengths of the pool)!

Naturally lane-ropes are needed for swimming competitions – but will such swimmers pay a much higher price for quasi-exclusive use of the pool? Unlikely, surely?

But, being on our beach, most people will probably expect it to mainly be a recreational pool – with lots of room for many swimmers on busy days, with the lane-ropes having been taken away, feels to be a much more likely scenario? Also out of commercial necessity?

So where does the truth lie?

In fact, as reported in the article above, this Planning Report provides almost no information upon which any Committee could reach a rational decision!

The Report proposes Conditions 1 to 21, many of which are actually multi-part, and most of which require the developer to submit more information,

This means that neither us, the public, nor our Councillors, actually have much of an idea as to how the built development will actually look and operate!

Over the last 15 years or so this issue, of incomplete Planning Applications where Councillors will never get to vote over all the details of a project, has steadily been getting worse!

Such a lax approach actually undermines the supposedly democratic process of granting, or refusing, Planning Permission must be halted!

A key principle of the need to have sufficient information with which to fully evaluate development proposals is the consideration that City residents have, in our crowded City, almost certainly have invested a large amount of money in buying their home, in a neighbourhood of which they were aware when they purchased.

So, to maintain fairness in an established community, every development propsal needs very close professional examination – to avoid detriment to all those who’ve already invested in that neighbourhood.

However there’s a very simple initial solution:
our elected Councillors need to tell the Council’s Planning Officers to refuse to accept Planning Applications lacking sufficient accurate information.

And for any that slip through the net, and get to the Planning Committee with lots of details still to be secretly agreed by Council officers at a future date the Committee Members just need to be brave enough to send premature Reports back to the Planning Dept to be worked-on.

And at a national level we need a brave Parliament to give ‘Third-party Rights of Appeal’ to anyone aggrieved by the outcome of a Planning Application.

An aggrieved developer had a right of appeal to a Gov’t Planning Inspector, so aggrieved citizens just need to be granted a similar right of appeal, surely?

Theoretically an aggrieved objector, if rich enough to immediately engage a powerful legal team can seek a Judicial Review.

But where an unwelcome grant of Planning Permission has been made by the Council’s Planning Committee the long-standing approach of the High Court has been felt to be:
‘Well, it’s your elected Councillors who took that decision – so you don’t really expect the Court to interfere with your local democracy, do you?’.

And lastly, after going through the Report, just how is this pool to be heated?

Our City Council has already passed resolutions to achieve ‘Carbon Neutral’ by 2030.

Fundamentally no more Greenhouse Gas emissions means no more combustion anywhere, not even at a power-station miles away!

Which means green electricity is becoming too valuable to be wasted on heating a thermally-inefficient outdoor pool – every Watt of power is needed for de-carbonisation, not for people’s sybaritic pleasures, which have already brought us to the brink of catastrophe – with the undeniable evidence of glaciers melting instead of being stable or growing!

And also for this pool there’s a simple solution, not even directly involving the Planning system.

As the freehold land-owner our City Council just needs to say that Sea Lanes can only lease the land for a development which begins by being carbon-neutral, and is retained as such.

Not difficult technically – the proposed pool faces almost due south, so there’s an obvious potential for a mix of solar PV + solar thermal.

And if that’s not enough power & heat then there’s geothermal heat readily available just a few metres down
– because of year-round infiltration of sea-water at about 9deg C (with which to be brought-up to 25deg C by a heat-pump).

Not economically viable? Tough – then bin the project, it’s the duty of all of us to protect the planet, don’t you know?

So there’s a major decision for the new-ish Green Administration – will you really do decarbonisation seriously, or will you be as hypocritical as your colleagues were during their Administration of 2011-15?

It’s already past the time for devloped societies to row-back from wasteful frivolous luxuries – so will our Greens now show some common-sense, please?