Burbage

BrandNewGuy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Yes the club has had a chequered history with > regards to finances and ownership. But why is the > one plan that maximises the property developers > profit at the expense of Metropolitan Open Land > the plan which should be supported? It's the only plan on the table - though all the financials, including the club's (un)viability, are still very much under it. DHST and the council may know better, though the council's probably not been given much information on the club, and neither are at liberty to release any detail. And DHST, whatever they do know, are relying on a members' poll, informed only by fancy drawings and expensively warm piles of words, to determine whether they'll support the plans or not. And that's an all-or-nothing thing, according to the memorandum of understanding (MoU). If the members' poll's in favour, DHST is pledged to wholeheartedly and publicly support the entire development plan as it stands. In other words, they seem to have cut themselves out of both asking awkward questions and making helpful suggestions during any consultation. In return for this, the MoU grants DHST promises of 'best efforts' to put DHFC on a sound financial footing and gift it to the community. The MoU, however, isn't with HPG or GPC but with HDML (Hadley Development Management Ltd - assets: ?1, turnover: ?0). Sure, it's a wholly-owned subsidiary of HPG, but parent companies can't be held liabile for the promises of insolvent subsidiaries, and HDML, at least on paper, is less than a bus-fare from financial doom. What their promises are worth, therefore, is open to question. All that aside, the big question is what guarantee there that the stadium will be built. This isn't just anti-capitalist needling, but a real issue. We're all familiar with housing developers who run out of money before the 'affordable' quota has happened - despite rigorous planning controls - so it's worth asking what's to stop the flats being built and the new stadium not being built. The council has some power. They could order that the flats not be built or sold till the new stadium is in place. But if the plans rely on the sale of the flats to build the stadium (remembering that nobody in this whole exercise seems to have any money), that would probably have the same effect as refusing the whole project. An alternative would be to rely on their ability to pursue the freeholder should things go awry. But that's tedious, expensive and often not worth the candle. When the Carlton Tavern in Kilburn was demolished without permission a year ago, Westminster ordered the offshore-owned developers to rebuild it within 18 months. A year later, and the developer's planning appeal has yet to be heard. If they win the appeal, they'll build some aspirational flats. If they lose, I expect they'll simply fold (they have no seizable money to lose, after all), leaving Westminster to compulsorily purchase the land (at healthily market rates) and reconstruct a loss-making boozer out of expensively heritage materials, all at taxpayers' expense. Obviously, there's no suggestion anything like that would happen here but, equally, I don't see any guarantees that it wouldn't.

And Here's the appendix.

The stitched-together remainder of the application brochure (prospectus?) is now here. I've lowered the picture resolution a bit to get the filesize down, but it seems fine on screen. The Appendix will follow shortly.

One thing your will-writing service won't have told you is that the Probate Service will store it for you for a flat, one-off fee of ?20. A helpful leaflet is here. As, once you've passed over, any executor will have to deal with the Probate Service in any case, there'll be no need for them to have remember where it was you told them that you might have put it, chase down long-retired solicitors, fossick through the Panamanian wreckage of fly-by-night will-writing companies, hunt for the keys to safe-deposit boxes, search through biscuit tins, deconstruct mattresses or prise up any floorboards.

ratty Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Maybe the labour council have no choice. Maybe > they have to choose between housing the homeless > and closing libraries because of the cuts. Or > between funding adult social care and closing a > library. It's a point. Though Lambeth isn't planning to close the library. They're planning to spew a bunch of money hollowing it out and turning it into a mechanized refuge for spandexed yoganauts and similar irritants. There's a debate to be had, possibly, about whether there's a need for shelves for dead-tree books, but there's no debate about whether a community needs a safe, accessible, public space where people of all ages can safely read and learn without having some nork scheduling a treadmill class in the middle of it.

I have no idea whether they're FTE, and figures for locum use don't appear to be listed. Another source of information is the CQC website, but they're more literary in their approach, and haven't covered most surgeries yet. Moreover, their traffic-light system isn't quite as clear as it's supposed to be, and it takes a lot of reading to work out how relevant the failings are, because as much seems to depend on the regularity of fire drills and staff appraisals as on outcomes.

Here's a rough list of patients per quack for local surgeries - the numbers were taken from NHS Choices (which isn't always reliable) and haven't been adjusted for maternity leave, but seem to tally with the various reputations and recommendations that have turned up here. One word of caution - both DMC surgeries are shown as having 9995 registered patients, though Chadwick Rd has 4 doctors listed and CPR has 10 - this looks a bit suspicious to me, and may reflect something fishy with the numbers, so I've put in an average for them both. Patients per Quack (rounded to the nearest whole patient) Gardens1179 DMC (CPR)1249 Forest Hill1266 Lordship Lane1377 Melbourne1765 DMC (average)1999 3062222 DMC (Chadwick)2499

jacks09 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > struggling to open the docs - whats the proposed > capacity and seating arrangements? Covers on all > sides? The documents we're currently allowed to see don't have any details about the stadium. In compensation, however, there's some lyrical prose about Farrell's wonderful Vision, and some lovely artistic impressions of how elegantly the 155 residential units will ornament the space they'll be replacing.

James Barber Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I don't believe budget allocations for Southwark > COuncil highways renewals would be lost if it > rolled over into a new financial year. I don't think was the question. The question was whether Conway is working to a budget, and whether underspends to that would result in cuts to their budget. It's a subtle difference, but while we're not allowed to know exactly how our money is spent, it's an important one. Not least because it allows for the possiblity of contractors being able to uplift their profits without a suitably scrutinized civic justification. Obviously, commercial confidentiality is important (though nobody has yet been able to explain why) and thus it's entirely reasonable to expect not to be able to know what the exact terms of Conways contract are. However, it is reasonable to know what the basis of the contract is, including whether it's cost, cost-plus, fixed budget or related to one or more variables, at least in the most general form. And whether that would mean they'd have an incentive to scuttle about inventing speed humps (or persuading their contacts to invent them) toward the end of the financial year. I mention this simply because we live in a world where council tax can be frozen, yet council tax bills still go up. The use of a precept to pay for what we were already paying for, as not-quite made clear in the touching Urbi et Orbi from Peter Johns that slithered onto our mats, bundled up with the bill, is a well-worn wheeze, but still a wheeze. Its only purpose, for all the flannel about protecting bits of budgets, is to make something look like it's something that it isn't. And, with all due respect, if that's what our councillors are spending their time on, then it's easy for them to find themselves serving the council's needs, rather than those of residents, and so might easily be persuaded to overlook the very subtle difference between, say, a council's budget and that of a contractor.

BrandNewGuy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > According to today's Southwark News, Hadley > Property Group has submitted its "final planning > application" for a new DHFC stadium on Green Dale. Except they haven't. The applications's been made by Bilfinger BVA (or, rather, GVA Grimley Ltd which, for reasons undisclosed, prefers to use an alias) on behalf of Greendale Property Company Limited, which is, I believe, the very same offshore outfit as the freeholder. Why they've chosen this moment to peel back a layer of distransparency isn't clear. Perhaps it's because the likes of Farrells, Savills and all the other hangers-on might not have played ball with an outfit that has (at least on paper) less than no money. Or perhaps it's because it keeps HPG (and thus DHFC) well away from the parts of the redevelopment that might threaten to be profitable. For those that don't find it fun to pick their way through the fragmentized chaos of the council's site, I've stitched the main application document back together. I think this is OK because it's a public document and, besides, there's no copyright notice on it. That may be because any notice might have appeared at the end and the financial viability stuff, which would have appeared at the end, is so unutterably confidential that we're not allowed to see what they're trying to get the council to believe. But I'm happy to take full responsibility for that and, should they choose to let me know that they'd prefer me to have noticed what they've hidden, I can make it disappear just as well as they can.

mynamehere Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It's curious how little concern people reading > this have that exorcisms are carried out down the > street from where we live. As long as they pay the rent, why would we have any concerns? It's repossessions we're worried about.

richard tudor Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > How is this 10 m calculated. Is it 5 m each side > of the corner No. It's 10m from the junction. The Highway Code has advised for decades that motorists do not park their vehicles within 30ft of a junction, and that was more-or-less abided by for a long while. But it isn't any more, and so the council is planning, by applying yellow paint, to redress the situation. To my mind, it's both necessary and not a moment too soon.

BrandNewGuy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > But that would take a > completely different approach to local government > in this country, which is another matter > altogether. Not entirely. Dartford FC's stadium is owned by the council, as is the land beneath it, so it's possible. Moreover, the Olympic Dividend (for which we're still paying) was expressly intended to deliver a munificent boost to the world of community-driven grassroots sports, and what better legacy could there be than a Jowell Memorial Stadium to recognise in perpetuity the tireless work of that selfless helmsperson? Given a new stadium would cost just one year's worth of Southwark's contribution to the Olympic Precept, it would be small change compared to the ?1.3bn Olymicopolis which, to the trained or untrained eye, has yet to deliver so much as a kickabout. Obviously, the current site would be unsuitable, as it's very unclear who owns the land and, in any case, it's currently leased to a company with no track-record of stadium management, no money to build one and, as far as I can tell, little chance of producing any acceptable plans to do so. Happily, there are plenty of alternatives. For example, there's a fervid discussion elsethread debating why a cemetery should and shouldn't be used as a place to bury people. It seems to me that a new stadium (which is mostly open space if you look at it the right way) with a demountable pitch could be the solution that would suit all parties and give the council a prime opportunity to leverage some synergies in the pursuit of value.

Penguin68 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Post Offices are not like shops, they need > significant security (including safes) and data > communications installations to allow them to > operate; Not any more they don't. They can be run from a box on a counter, as exemplified by the smooth and successful transfer of the Post Office business from the Post Office near The Plough (complete with safe and floor-to-ceiling screens) to the Costcutter opposite the library (a bit of perspex behind the Twixes). As any cash needed is "borrowed" from the "retail partner's" float, and the sub-postmaster's contract makes the sub-postmaster entirely responsible for any losses or shortfalls, there's no need for Post Office to invest in any sort of security at all. As for communications, standard links work well enough. At least, Post Office management believe they do and although an investigation (that Parliament forced the Post Office to commission) suggested that they don't (see answer to Q51 here), Post Office (as they prefer to be called) can choose whichever version of the truth turns out most profitable, just as any company can if it takes enough care to shelter its senior management from the business they're paid to be running.

mikeb Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Does anyone know what the operating profit is of > the club before any rent or interest? Somebody will, but I strongly doubt they'll tell us. > "market level" of rent for the ground depends on > what it can be used for, True, but it's a two way thing. On the one hand, there's a limited number of people wanting to hire a stadium, which pushes rent down. On the other, there's a limited number of places a local football club could train and play at, which pushes rent up. Much depends on the landlord, though, and we don't know yet who will ultimately own the stadium. HPG might end up with it, if there's money left over from the flats, but that's a long time off and, in the meantime, they don't seem to have any money in the bank. Nor do any of their seventeen subsidiaries. So a big question remains as to who will finance the project. That probably won't be Omni Capital (whose charge was satisfied in full on Feb 16th), but it might be Collaton (of the British Virgin Islands), the Guernsey-based landlord, or HPG's owner (HPGL Holdings Limited, of Hong Kong). But whoever it is, I can't see a reason why that finance would come cheap. And if the stadium costs what Dartford's did (?7m), that would be a lot of interest. At the 8% that Omni Capital seem to be getting, that would be around ?40k per month, about a third more than DHFC's current total income. There again, if HPG get a generous lease then, as you say, they would be landords to the club they own and clearly have no interest in racking up the rent. Not until, at least, they make good on their pledge to make the club supporter-owned. In the meantime, though, they clearly hope to make the club sustainable, and we should be grateful for that rather than ask how long it'll be sustainable for.

Aristide Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > what a disingenuous load of crap, Hadley want to > make a load of cash by building houses, once > they've trousered it you wont see them for dust. "Hadley want to make a load of cash by building houses" Not quite. Hadley Property Group is a private limited company whose secretary is Network Secretarial Services Ltd (who also act as directors for, among others, the dormant Dulwich Hamlet Leisure Ltd, Hadley Resources Ltd and Champion Hill Investments Ltd). Hadley Property Group itself has paid up share capital of ?1000, has managed to turn in a loss over seven yearxs despite the booming market, and yet still manages to borrow money to keep itself afloat. That might seem odd to those of us in Wonga-land, but looking at the filed charges against it we find a number of companies, including Omni Capital - a provider of 'non-regulated products' (ie. loans) to onshore and offshore clients, charging around 8% above base rate and with one of the Candy brothers as a director - and Collaton Global Ltd, happily registered in the British Virgin Islands. The security put up are shares in, for example, Chelsea Island Developments Ltd, which also has Network Secretarial Services Ltd as its Secretary and, until December, was also in hock to Omni Capital (it's now in hock to a Frankfurt-based investment outfit for its stake in PLJ Chelsea Ltd, a firm which shares at least one director with Hadley Property Group). The trail gets quite obscure after that, but it looks to me that Hadley is determined to make as little cash as possible and will continue to do so until hell freezes over or a politician turns bluster into action. Whichever is the sooner.

rahrahrah Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > TImthink the point of the works was to ensure > water gathered in the park. It seems to have been > successful unfortunately That's exactly right. Without the new defences, The Village, and the less unfortunate bits of Herne Hill, would be faced with a potential repeat of the 2004 flood horror, which forced them to tap their insurers for over ?1m. In the wake of this terrible hardship which, though apparently a one-off, had a tragic effect on premiums, the council, the Environment Agency and Thames Water proactively conspired to draft a mitigation plan - of such complete and utter sense that it received almost no objections - suggesting the least the local tax- and bill-payers could do was to stump up ?4m for 'bunds' and 'geocellular tanks', and partially sacrifice use of the park. As promised, the loss of amenity has been only partial. Although some parts are swamped, the Gallery end, containing the car park, cafe, bowling green and tennis courts, has remained delightfully dry, and those who have to use other entrances can still make use of liberal areas of hard standing. Moreover, the degree of swampiness is highly weather-dependent, and it's expected that the pitches, exercise areas and other amenities used by those without au pairs or gym memberships might dry out completely given only a few weeks of drought. In the meantime, the lake is harbouring a good many ducks, including shovelers, who are relishing the moist conditions and may be viewed (but not fed) by suitably-clad visitors just as soon as the boardwalk's been salvaged.

DulwichFox Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > Because it is supposed be part of the Tesco > Reward Scheme.. I think you've misunderstood something. The Tesco Reward Scheme, as the name implies, is only designed to reward Tesco.

Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Erm... he's not standing. There are not potential > DM voters. Yes if he was standing I'd want this > backed up with rather more substance. But for me, > this thinking is at least on the right track. No. Not yet. But those are the ideas he's presenting (in this article) as the 'alternative' to Corbyn. In short, that's what he reckons the near-indistinguishable Burnham/Cooper/Kendall camps have to offer. He's siding with Kendall presumably because the others have more obvious New Labour ties, but there won't be much in it. What I suspect he'll want is for inoffensive placeholder to keep Labour all beige and united and safe from the union vultures until the Tories have got a new leader, when it'll be time for a more experienced character to take charge.

Jeremy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Actually I quite like David Milliband. This is a > man I could actually vote for: > These ideas focus, for example, on how to tackle > the secular stagnation in median wages; how to > redistribute power to cities to spread economic > wealth; how to modernise the education curriculum > for a creative age; how to build a secure, > low-carbon European energy future; how to make the > welfare state an effective springboard out of > poverty; how to combat humanitarian catastrophe > where it occurs and before it becomes an > immigration crisis on the shores of Europe. All lovely stuff. But these are questions and aspirations rather than proposals, and tediously familiar to anyone old enough to have voted more than once. This isn't vision. It's vacuous wibble. An empty list of aspirational hogswind which gives potential voters no idea what they'd actually do. (And what, incidentally, is 'secular stagnation' supposed to mean?) With Corbyn, at least for the moment, you can more-or-less guess, and that plays well with voters. People like progress, fairness and prosperity, but they also like stability and, when it comes to the crunch, voters tend to choose the predictable. That's why, in recent decades, parties have tended to stay in power until the leadership's become unhinged. Labour's in its current mess not because it screwed up the economy but because it's chosen not to oppose. The impression taken by the public, and many supporters, is that's because it doesn't really know what it is. To tackle that, Labour would have to work out what it stands for, and find a snappy way of saying it. Corbyn, by going with "anti-austerity" and "renationalization", has taken the high ground. They're almost perfect, encapsulating what, in the public mind, are defining aspects of the left, and though you might not like the underlying idea of quantitative easing, even the Tories have used that as a tool to provoke the investment of stagnant cash. Compare that stance with "Focussing on modernising the education curriculum for a creative age". It's indistinct, tedious and promises only more education reforms - just as the last lot of Labour education reforms are landing half our graduates in a market that neither values nor needs their talents. There is, however, a good reason why Labour's grandees are firmly standing by such twaddle. They know their prospects depend almost entirely on who becomes the next Tory leader and so, for the moment, want a bland caretaker who'll not force them to take sides before launching their own leadership campaigns. It is politically canny. But it's also dishonest, and it does their their party, their supporters and a nation that sorely needs a proper opposition, little good.

Not really. Not so much as I used to, at any rate. In it's heyday it was useful for keeping a guarded eye on what the economically inactive were up to, but that's all changed since the government conquered unemployment, so I rarely bother now. It does, admittedly, serve as a useful outlet for green ink and the sort of nostalgia usually associated with wipe-clean armchairs, so I might return in a few decades. But, till then, it's probably a no.

JohnL Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Some people used to be scared of upstairs (really) > I've no idea why Three clues: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-33760418 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-33584494 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-31097083

wulfhound Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Might be one to drop Tessa Jowell a line about, > though - she seems to be making the case for more > walking & running as part of her election campaign > - see > http://essays.centreforlondon.org/issues/technolog > y/london-a-walkable-city/ - and presumably knows > that junction? Jowell has, in the past, been made aware of the problem. However, as TfL are accountable to the Mayor and thus the GLA, rather than Westminster, it really devolves down to GLA reps and however much Jowell can supply in the way of graceful tutting, it makes no discernible difference. The local labour group, which included Helen Hayes, sent out postcards before the last local elections drumming up support for improvements to the junction, but nothing came of it, as you'd expect given the history. Val Shawcross and Caroline Pidgeon have both responded positively in the past but TfL successfully managed to avoid their interest by swifly putting out assurances implying that improvements were already scheduled. This is a favoured TfL tactic as it takes people a long time to notice that scheduled works don't happen, during which time there's usually been a new strategic plan or a revised set of priorities or a new budget or an entirely different administration, any of which lets them throw issues of their choosing into the 'legacy' box and pretend they never existed. This is broadly how, despite being "prioritised" in at least two separate London-wide junction-improvement plans, under both Livingstone and Johnson, the junction (along with many other examples of TfL's murderously complacent contempt for pedestrians) has not been touched in over a decade, even though a pedestrian-friendly design has been commissioned, drawn up, consulted on, safety-checked and funded. When last challenged on this, TfL (after a long delay) changed tack slightly and decided there wasn't enough evidence that it wouldn't disrupt traffic flows (they put it a bit differently, but it comes to the same thing - in effect, they decided they'd need to analyse traffic flows again, but found themselves unable to bring themselves to do so, despite being the only body that can). Which means, as others have suggested, that TfL won't be doing anything until enough people have stepped forward to dent the safety statistics.

Not quite. But I don't think you can separate thought from imagination in any meaningful way. You might claim that imagination is just a type of thought, but it's difficult to think of, or about, anything without using imagination. As for imaginary concepts, they're the foundation of whole branches of mathematics and much of what we consider we 'know' about the universe. Over the last ninety years, quantum mechanics has become the foundation of much progress in science and technology. But the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics are based on a 'wavefunction', and not even physicists know exactly what that is, or if it's real. A recent experiment suggests it's real but, as the authors carefully noted, that's only "assuming that a notion of objective reality exists". We have also seen, in recent years, confirmation of the 'spooky action at a distance' that Einstein's theories predicted, but which Einstein himself was unable to accept on account of it being 'so weird'. In other words, even Einstein couldn't avoid being trapped by historical continuity, even when it went against his own thinking. This sort of "paradigm lock", as Thomas Kuhn termed it, isn't confined to physics. In biology, the waggle dance has been accepted as a symbolic language giving precise information about food sources between honey bees by a majority of biologists since it was first described as such in the sixties. But forty years on,it's still the subject of some dispute still rumble on. As I see it, there's not a great difference between the belief of a scientist in a theory they've inadequately challenged and that of a priest, nor reason why there should be. Science is, after all, just as much a social construct as religion. It follows a set of conventions and attempts to explain the world. The difference is only that science tries to do so objectively, rather than subjectively. That 'only' might seem a stretch, but any attempt at objectivity rests on the assumption of the wavefunction-botherers - the assumption that an objective reality exists - and assumption is the mother of all infelicities. As to whether ghosts exist, the absence of convincing evidence gives us an opportunity to hypothesise in any way we choose. And in the absence of any sensible way to acquire convincing evidence, we can choose what to believe. The mistake the rationalists make is in believing that nothing that can't be disproven can possibly exist. They fall into the trap of believing there's nothing beyond science. The cultural sphere isn't just for putting in museums and admiring. Even now, cancer scientists are riffling through the ancient recipes of shamans and old wives, seeking potential candidate drugs for investigation, synthesis and trials that may result in new conventional drugs to bring help to millions. And all the while, the millions who believe the shamans and the old wives' tales may very well be benefitting already. Acupuncture is a good example. It emerges from an ancient set of belief-driven traditions, but still it has a provable anaalgesic effect. The rationalists might scoff, saying it's often no better than placebo, has no long-term effects and that we have no clear idea of exactly how it works. But the rationalists forget that exactly the same can be said of paracetamol and iboprufen. So it really comes down to who you believe, and what historical continuity you find most convincing.

root Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Now why do I get so annoyed with people making > claims of ghost and prophets and gods and water > with memory and all that stuff? Because they > demand to be accepted as valid opinions that > deserve to be > privileged/protected/respected/whatever. I don't think that's the reason at all. But never mind that. As all good rationalists know, the most rigorous and objective of scientific inquiry can only disprove an idea, it can never entirely prove one. And in order for science to function at all, it has to start with an unproven idea. The business of coming up with unproven ideas is, though part of science, not necessarily scientific in itself. And vice versa, naturally. So the Christian Bible, for example, can teach us much good stuff about the behaviour of ostriches, provided you remember that some translations deferred to English-speaking audiences by substituting owls, and thus cannot be dismissed out of hand, even though it's considered religious and thus nonsense well beyond the grasp of strict, Gradgrindian rationalists. But once you accept, as the wise always do, that even science can't prove anything, then the umproven becomes as possible as it is. Which makes it open to inquiry. But how can you possible know that. As a good rationlist, you obviously have no soul or spirit. But you do have a consciousness? How's that any different? And if you're going to acknowledge having consciousness, then you can't easily deny the existence of thought, even though thougt itself is an almost undefinable and often, according to as valuable as source as yourself, delusional. Thought, when it comes down to it, is an instance of an abstract thing that's unavoidably, necessarily and purely imaginary in itself. In which case, either you can't think at all, or you're stuck with the existence of imagination which, though essential for science itself, remains as indefinable, and thus as valid, as any ghost, soul or spirit. I may be wrong, but that seems the inevitable conclusion of your line of thinking. So I'd respectfully suggest you reconsider your premise in the light of, among other things, what you consider to be your motivation, and try again. This time, without feeling.