In the UK it is not practicable for ordinary people to use the courts to protect their interests. Civil litigation is so uncertain and expensive that the main participants are the destitute (who may qualify for legal aid) and the seriously rich. The Ombudsman service is supposed to protect ordinary people of limited means against administrative abuses. The following section demonstrates just how weak and ineffective the Local Ombudsman is likely to prove when called upon to remedy misbehaviour by the "great and good".
The collapse of the Mountleigh / LCDC development scheme in 1989 was followed by a period of generally better relations between the Leeds Development Corporation (LDC) and the West Leeds communities. The Corporation started to hold part of its meetings in public, and consulted with local residents about its revised planning framework. Local individuals and organisations were involved in planning the new Kirkstall Nature Reserve. These improved relations gradually deteriorated when LDC started to process new planning applications made under its 1990 planning framework.
In June 1991 Mountleigh Northern Developments submitted an outline application 91/24/181/99 for housing development on the former Waddingtons factory site and playing field near Bridge Road, and in August 1991 Leeds City Development Company (LCDC) submitted an outline application 91/24/310/99 in conjunction with Leeds Metropolitan University for student housing and a fast food restaurant on the Nature Garden and Children's Play Area on Kirkstall Road. Both applications raised yet again the issue of development on former inner-city recreational land, and re-awakened in resident's minds the problem that several members of the LDC board were closely associated with the hated Mountleigh / LCDC consortium.
The Mountleigh application re-focussed attention on the unlawful top soil stripping from the former Waddington's football ground which took place without the benefit of planning consent in October 1987. Despite timely complaints from the public and the Kirkstall councillors, the soil stripping was not pursued by Leeds City Council Planning Department. It is claimed that enforcement action was not appropriate because there was a live planning application from Peel Investments on the site. It is also possible that officers were following a hidden agenda promoting the secret Mountleigh / LCDC development scheme. At the time, most elected members of the Council's planning committee were unaware of the Mountleigh / LCDC scheme, and had little reason to suspect what was really going on. The public have little protection if officers decline to remedy a breach in development control.
In the event, the Council had limited opportunity to either protect or destroy the Kirkstall Valley, because from March 1988 the Secretary of State for the Environment "called in" all outstanding planning applications so they might eventually be determined by the embryonic LDC. This included three supermarket planning applications by Peel Investments Ltd, who had an option to purchase the entire Waddingtons site at Bridge Road. Mountleigh acquired this site in September 1988 and the soil stripping episode became submerged in the enormous furore over the Mountleigh / LCDC development scheme. LDC initially met in secret, and the local population imagined that it possessed draconian powers and operated outside the familiar legal framework. It was some time before most people realised that LDC was in fact subject to the normal rule of law! This left the soil stripping in limbo until June 1991.
Paradoxically, the unauthorised development work initially impeded further planning approvals. The Kirkstall Valley floor consists of deep, high-grade river alluvium, and the unlawful removal of about 25,000 tonnes of top soil from the Waddingtons site reduced the ground level and increased the risk of flooding. The National Rivers Authority (NRA) became concerned when it seemed possible that LDC might grant a housing consent on this land, and they petitioned the Secretary of State in July 1991 to "call in" the Mountleigh planning application. By this stage KVC was much better informed about planning law, and the attitude of Leeds City Council had shifted considerably against further development in the Kirkstall Valley. The end result was a united front by the Council and about 500 local residents, objecting to development of the former Waddington's football pitch. LDC received a formal request for enforcement action against Mountleigh to remedy the unlawful soil stripping from the Waddington's site.
[Under UK law, when land is bought or sold, any liability for previous misdeeds attaches to the new owners of the development site.]
LDC officers were provided with detailed contemporaneous written records and a statement from the Council's 1987 enforcement officer, but they procrastinated (claiming "lack of evidence") until the four year time limit for enforcement action had safely expired in October 1991. The flooding problem was a little more difficult to solve (and reduced the market value of this housing site!) but agreement was eventually achieved with the NRA and a planning consent was issued in April 1992.
The episode illustrates a powerful technique used by land owners to secure planning permission on greenfield sites. If the owners damage their land, or get somebody else to damage it for them, they can claim that the site is "derelict" and is a suitable location for new development. A huge profit can be secured by the change of use, and with luck it may even be possible to obtain government grants to restore the land. This was achieved with the Kirkstall Valley golf development.
Two things are necessary for an Ombudsman complaint: there must have been "maladminstration" and somebody must suffer injustice as a result. Maladministration is nowhere defined, but some residents felt that a situation where several members of the local planning authority (LDC) had past or present interests in a development site might conceivably qualify. The problem was that LDC had frequently met in secret, and outsiders didn't really knew who had participated in each decision, and whether the members' personal interests had been properly declared or not. Injustice is even more tricky to prove. The steady, relentless destruction of their local environment is what really concerned most people, but this probably didn't count because it affected everybody to the same extent. The Ombudsman only deals with injustices affecting a limited number of people.
Milford amateur rugby league club made an Ombudsman complaint, because they were a local club who had hoped to buy the Waddington's pitch, and its price was now out of reach. They said that Mountleigh's 1991 housing application was "pre-determined" because four members of the LDC board were former members of the Mountleigh / LCDC consortium, while another LDC board member had served as a Waddington's director when the unlawful soil stripping took place, and also later when Waddingtons sold the site to Mountleigh Northern.
Meanwhile, in February 1992, LDC had granted permission for student housing and a fast food restaurant on land previously designated as a Nature Garden and Children's play area alongside Kirkstall Road. Leeds City Council secretly sold this area of public open space to LCDC in 1988. Yvonne Huckerby (who at the time was the KVC Secretary) made a separate complaint to the Ombudsman as a private individual, because her house was almost opposite the proposed development. The Local Ombudsman investigated both complaints in parallel, because they raised similar issues about conflicts of interest where individuals served both as LCDC directors and as members of the LDC board.
The basic problem was that the Ombudsman's investigation took three and a half years: from May 1992 until December 1995. There seem to have been staffing problems, and this may have been an unusually poor performance, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was a political "hot potato" that the Ombudsman was afraid to touch. By the time she reported that there had been "maladministration but no injustice" both development schemes had been abandoned and LDC had been dissolved. Click here to see the full version of the Ombudsman report into Milford's complaint. The student flats were developed in a much better location just outside the UDA at the former Kirkstall Brewery, while the situation at Bridge Road had been transformed by the arrival of Mr Ray Palmer, and the "Berkshire Plan".
Was there a problem, if no development ever took place? Yes there was, because the Ombudsman discovered a deeply unsatisfactory situation within the LDC. The lack of any swift response, and her failure to expose abuses, may have caused the Corporation to imagine that they were above the law. It may have fostered the more serious problems that marked their closing years.
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