In which I have a bit of a rant.
I live in a small town (Oswestry) where last year the district council granted planning permission to a building developer to build an out of town supermarket on what used to be the livestock market. I'm not quite sure why they think we need another supermarket (we already have a Morrison's, an Aldi, a Sainsbury's and an M&S food, and the total population of Oswestry and the surrounding rural area is only around 17,000 according to WikiPedia) but apparently we do.
There were quite a few potential developments, one of which was in town but would have meant there was virtually no parking in the town itself and would have led to utter traffic chaos, as far as I could work out. The bid which won did so because it promised to provide strong links to the town centre along with a cinema (which we haven't had here for many years, apart from films shown in local halls) and various other commitments to the town.
It now appears the developers are attempting to renege on many of these commitments (see Oswestry21). The council are having a meeting about this tomorrow (Thursday 28th April) but have claimed there is "litle public interest" in the matter (this despite the fact that 250 odd people turned up for a previous meeting regarding the development), but then they haven't actually publicised it and it's very difficult to be interested in something when you don't even know it's happening.
Now, I don't personally like large out of town developments; it's been shown in various studies (including ones financed by the supermarkets themselves) that generally they lead to an overall loss of jobs (see this study), and I can't really see the point of us having one at all in Oswestry when it's only 20 minutes to Shrewsbury or Wrexham, both of which have much bigger supermarkets and out of town retail parks than the one planned for Oswestry. The argument of "it will bring more people to the town" looks very weak to me when you consider that, but then that's just my opinion.
However, my gripe in this post isn't about the duplicity of the developers, as annoying as it is; no, what makes me cringe and wonder what on earth the council are up to is the attempt to say there is little public interest in the matter.
Not because it's not true (it may be - many people are too apathetic to take much interest in this sort of thing, but I doubt the veracity of the statement myself).
Not because saying there's little interest when they've done nothing to make it public and deliberately held the thing in a small building (when there are much bigger venues available on the day) is duplicitous at best.
No, because it's just plain stupid to expect that this will not get out in today's world. Here's a statistic for you: "Total broadband penetration in the UK is now 71%, with fixed broadband at 65% and mobile broadband at 15%" (see Google's Internet Stats). Even given that Oswestry is a reasonably rural area a lot of people in the town itself will have access to the Internet.
There are people that care about this and they absolutely will blog about it (Hi mom!), or write articles on local websites, or go to the local paper who will put the story online, and therefore people will find out about it, whether you've publicised it or not.
As a politician or a councillor or whatever, you simply cannot afford to be ignorant of the fact that there is absolutely no way that something like this will not get out into the open one way or another; you can no longer expect to have nothing appear until next week (when it's too late) on page 5 of the local paper. We live in a world of instant communication, where writing an article and getting it on the web is as easy as having access to the Internet; you don't even need a PC any more, a mobile phone will do (as long as it's a posh enough one).
So, the people making this decision are either totally ignorant of the Internet and its uses or they just don't care. Or, possibly, they sincerely believe that there would be little public interest in this even if they did publicise it. The latter option seems the most optimistic, but is certainly the kindest as it at least qualifies them as just misinformed rather than deliberately deceptive.
Ah well, my first serious post. I must be pining for something...
