A landslide for local democracy?
Residents’ perspectives on the Old Roar Gill landslip
DR RALITSA HITEVA
Last Wednesday evening (16 October), residents affected by the landslide at the Old Roar Gill (ORG) in February gathered in Muriel Matters House for an Extraordinary General Meeting of Hastings Borough Council (HBC) to discuss three options for the next steps in dealing with the consequences of the landslide.
Option 1 involved HBC paying for further investigations into the cause of the landslide on HBC-owned land only. Option 2 involved widening the scope of the investigation to include other privately owned land and to share the costs of this work with the affected residents. Option 3 was essentially to do nothing.
ORG residents were not consulted with or involved in the design of the three options. In fact, despite repeated questions about how the options were determined, HBC’s only response was to say they were designed based on the findings of an insurance report which was completed in April. The report, based mostly on desk-based research and a brief site visit, did not seek to establish liability, but instead discussed potential contributing factors and recommended a suite of further investigations to understand the full scope and scale of the cause and potential repair.
We raised concerns about the lack of engagement and the design and description of the three options in a letter sent to all councillors. We also pointed out that Option 2 listed pros which would also be true for Option 1. We were told that this was due to human error and that councillors would be briefed about the potential pros. The Council had over five weeks to correct the report it sent to councillors, but did not do so.
The most worrying thing for all of us was that we were not given any details of the proposed work or costs under Option 2, even though HBC has already selected Coffey Geotechnics to carry out this work. For us, Option 2 seemed as unrealistic as Option 3.
Around 20 residents turned up to the first part of the meeting, whilst many more watched online. This part of the meeting was streamed online and allowed the public to be present, without being able to participate in the discussion. The second part of the meeting was behind closed doors and included discussion of financial and legal issues and the vote.
It turns out that democracy in practice is a short, edited affair. The first part of the meeting lasted a little over 22 minutes with a handful of questions from councillors and two senior HBC officials misrepresenting the truth. The Chief Legal Officer denied that the landslip was on HBC-owned land stating that “the lower part of the Old Roar Gill, the ecological area, that’s on the bottom, where the waterfall and everything else is, is owned by the Council. The actual area of the collapse is owned by the respective residents who live on that slope.”
This statement goes against Land Registry information and HBC’s own webpage. The landslide affected land in the HBC-owned Gill, a public path for which East Sussex CC is responsible, and which stood between the Gill and the private residents’ homes and several properties at the top. It is hard to comprehend what the purpose is of making such a statement, apart from yet another attempt to distance the Council from the landslide.
This was followed by a statement from HBC’s Head of Strategic Programmes who stated that discussions about Option 2 have already taken place with residents and “that they would be engaged in any design.” This could not be further from the truth. HBC themselves confirmed this when denying a freedom of information request under the Environmental Information Regulations to provide the cost and scope of work documents for Coffey Geotechnics. They stated, “the requested information has not been shared with the affected residents, therefore, unfair to release into the public domain.”
At this point some of us walked out of the meeting.
It is difficult to find the right words to describe how, we, the residents, felt after the meeting. Two words could be heard muttered the most by the small crowd gathered in the lobby of the council building: “cruel” and “shameful.” If this part of the footage had not been edited out by the Council, people watching the recording of Part 1 could have heard them too.
The way HBC is dealing with the ORG residents and the landslide is much bigger than the shifting earth mass and empty homes around the Gill. It gives a glimpse into a local authority desperate to bend the truth and unwilling to stand with residents and communities in the face of this disaster.
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Thanks for this article.
Illuminating though obviously not encouraging.
We clearly overdue an overhaul…