Councillors Should Be Ashamed
After this months Planning Committee, where councillor Benedict Swann said Carianne Wells (PDPLA member and director at Applecore, which provides architectural professional services) should hang her head in shame, The News went with a front page headline of 'HMO Anger' and twice published a piece summarising Cllr. Swann's rant.
Read our response
Our Response Sent To The News
As we all prepare to vote in the local elections, we would do well to remember the unenviable role played by local councillors. We elect them to represent us hoping they will transform the city whilst also managing all the various services we depend upon and ensuring that it is all done at a cost affordable within our local and national taxes. An impossible task?
The reality is that for negligible remuneration these champions of the local public are faced with a raft of national and local regulations and rules within which they must operate, commitments on everything from housing to social care and education that must be met and very limited scope to do more than make small tweaks around the edges and act as a figurehead for the huge numbers of council staff who oft appear more interested in ensuring their own long term future than the good of the city in which so few of them actually live.
Maybe this explains the low calibre of some of our current councillors, but as the local landlord association (the PDPLA), we must take issue with the bizarre behaviour of some councillors at recent planning meetings, in social media and this newspaper. For local business woman and PDPLA member, Carianne Wells, to be told she should hold her head in shame because her architectural company is ensuring local developers follow all of the rules laid down by Portsmouth City Council (PCC) AND national government is madness, especially when this tirade comes from someone who did not submit a deputation as required in the PCC rules, by a councillor who refuses to name that deputy (also in contravention of the same rules) in a deputation that was allowed to overrun the allotted time (as are all anti-HMO deputations) by a Planning Committee chair who did nothing to stop this abuse and who completely ignored a request at the end of the meeting from Cllr. Sanders that personal attacks should not be allowed at future meetings.
If this was a one-off, we would probably bang our heads against our keyboards and make a cup of coffee – but this was the same meeting where a councillor asked that all plans have pictures of beds on them so she could see if they fit. Apart from being completely at odds with all architectural, planning and building regs in the UK it would set a precedent that would mean every Portsmouth resident would need planning permission if they were going to move their bed or get a bigger one. Sadly, this happens all the time – from where the washing machine goes to whether a macerator toilet should be allowed. And don't even mention the constant 'the house will be licensed to hold 7 people, but we must wring our hands in horror as we fear that it will have 14 occupants' even though overcrowding has not been an issue in this city since the 1930's and there are plenty of rules where any more than 7 would result in the prosecution of the property manager.
As the local landlord association, we are not going to suggest we tell people how to vote – but we do ask that when you vote, you make sure that whoever you choose is able to understand that there are many rules which they just have to accept and work within as they have no ability to change them and bending the rules and making up restrictions which will never be supported is bad for the city – it costs taxpayers money, it increases rents and delays developments which are legitimate and much needed. And to those councillors alluded to here – you should hang your heads in shame.