Guernsey Press

Tales of the unexpected

SOMETIMES you really should expect the unexpected.

Published

Take the development of the Foulon crematorium.

When States members, somewhat reluctantly, backed spending £3.9m. on the new facility there, they expected the access issues to be thought through and resolved – indeed, that they could be resolved. They voted an imperfect solution through based on the information they had in front of them.

All indications are now that they won’t be resolved to any great satisfaction.

So no blue badge parking nearby, for instance.

It is a decision that rather flies in the face of all the nice words that the States puts in items such as the disability strategy, or the living and ageing well work, because when it comes to the crunch the financial considerations and some vague pledges win out.

Then look at the inert waste debate.

When members amended the report on what to do with all the builders’ rubble so that more than one solution was worked up beyond Lounge Hougue south (or Belle Greve north if you want to be more provocative), the indications in the debate were that it would be about comparing a relatively like with like medium to long term solution, so reclamation at Mont Cuet, for example.

What those behind the project have instead come up with is putting two tiny quarries in the lanes of the Vale on the line that would, at best, provide for three years of fill.

They had not even warranted a mention during the debate, they were so far from members’ thoughts.

This is indicative of the classic behaviour committees indulge in when told to go and do something – they go all contrary because they didn’t get their way in the first place.

And inert waste is really a topic that deserves long-term joined-up thinking. What we have instead is a rush to a conclusion because so much attention, time and energy has been expanded on what to do with domestic waste in the last decade or so that this hasn’t had the profile it deserves.

The States almost indulges in land reclamation for land reclamation’s sake and then works out what to do with what it has created.

At Longue Hougue it became a useful site to put the waste infrastructure, but not altogether a very attractive one, being so prominent on the coastline.

This time around it would be great to see some of the long-term development projects being worked on to line up in tandem with the inert waste solution.

The easy fit, at least to a layman, would be developing the harbour and sea defences.

But as ever, the progress on these potential development projects is years away and Longue Hougue is already almost full.

Perhaps the slowdown in the construction industry, itself in a large part because of the States not driving through its capital projects at anything like the pace it should do, creates a window of opportunity.

Perhaps something could be done with a temporary storage solution to buy the few years that it will take to bring forward plans on the harbour, fuel berths and coastal defence, and then Les Vardes becomes a viable answer.

Or perhaps Environment & Infrastructure and the States’ Trading Supervisory Board have a grand plan in mind if they do reclaim another bit of the northern coastline – given previous protest placards, maybe a winkle retirement village would be appropriate.

More seriously, land is clearly a valuable and precious resource, so reclamation in the right places with a long-term vision makes sense – what we lack is that vision.

While we are on long-term visions, E&I is involved in another expect-the-unexpected project.

When the integrated transport strategy was voted through, it included an island-wide speed limit review, or really we should say another island-wide speed limit review, as two had already been done under previous strategies.

Entirely independently, of course, members also backed the Island Development Plan.

During the course of that IDP debate, indeed during its development, it is hard to track down any thoughts that the lines drawn on it would suddenly become the basis for an ad-hoc and blunt imposition of 25mph limits.

But in the absence of any result of the speed limit review, that is exactly what has been proposed.

Perhaps that was the intention all along, perhaps we all missed it. There is some logic, and it is a travesty that parents do not feel safe walking their children to school and jump in a car instead, for instance, or that elderly people and the less mobile get increasingly trapped in their home because they don’t feel safe crossing a road.

But these speed limit proposals have been announced in isolation of the full review, which more than a year ago we were told was well under way.

E&I now says the 25mph proposals and the consultation is part of that review, no doubt the perceptions of road safety survey it has just done fits in somewhere too, but it all comes across as really bitty policy making – or someone at E&I does not think the public can be trusted with all the information and intentions.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of any policy changes it announces, that will get it into trouble with the public.

Many will argue that more attention should be turned to the road infrastructure and traffic calming – and perhaps that will also inevitably flow from 25mph limits. But at the moment we are none the wiser.