Why has it taken more than nine months for some paperwork about the proposed to Broomhill Lido to cross Russell Road in Ipswich and then go back again? 

And more to the point why is it that no one in either Ipswich Borough Council or Suffolk County Council seems to care about this - or think that it's out of the ordinary?

Let's look at the history of this. The pool closed after the 2002 season and over the last 22 years there have been attempts to reopen it.

A deal was finally agreed in 2019 with a number of partners including the borough, which owns the property, and Fusion Lifestyle which will restore and operate it thanks to a multi-million pound lottery grant.

Planning permission for that was granted - but work never started because of the pandemic.

After the lockdowns and the financial stress placed on leisure firms like Fusion Lifestyle, the plans were put on ice until last year when a new deal was agreed to take account of the rising restoration costs following the lockdowns. 

The new plans were agreed and announced in January of this year. The only slight glitch was that because of the delay the planning permissions granted in 2019 had lapsed and needed to be re-applied for - but there were no substantial changes.

In January this year the work was agreed and announced and a timetable to get all the planning was unveiled showing it should be agreed by June so work could start in September.

The planning did include documents showing that the developers would include work to make sure that the roads around the lido were improved - these are included in what are known as Section 106 agreements.

Given the fact agreement this had already been reached five years ago it didn't seem unreasonable to think that the agreement could be agreed in four months between January and May to allow the plans to be decided by June.

But by the end of October it still hadn't been agreed. The highways officials, planners, and lawyers from Suffolk County Council and the planners from Ipswich Borough Council hadn't been able to get together to sort it out. 

Why not? They work in offices on opposite sides of Russell Road in Ipswich. Why were they incapable of sorting out a relatively simple issue in less than 10 months?

As I said, what is more worrying is that no one is surprised by this. Politicians and officials I've spoken to seem to accept "this is just the way it is" so far as local government bureaucracy in Suffolk is concerned.

It's something I've heard about Suffolk councils so many times over the years - that their bureaucracy is stifling and seems set on slowing down the process as far as possible.

I've head from external civic and business leaders who tell me time and again that the default response from local councils - particularly Ipswich Borough - to any proposal is to defer it to the next meeting.

On one level this seems quite funny. But on another it is deadly serious - putting off decisions risks putting the price up.

We've seen Ipswich lose a major new health centre  on the Tooks site because NHS bureaucrats dithered so long that the cost went up so much to make it uneconomic.

There are fears from some pool campaigners that naval-gazing by pen-pushers at the borough and county councils could produce the same result at Broomhill.

Suffolk, and Ipswich in particular, doesn't have the greatest reputation for council dynamism - look at the Upper Orwell Crossing, Arras Square, and the snail's-speed redevelopment of the Stoke Bridge end of the Waterfront.

Council pen-pushers really do need to take a long hard look at who they are serving - the people of Ipswich and Suffolk or the system that has sucked them in like a black hole!

 

The opinions expressed in this column are the personal views of Paul Geater and do not necessarily reflect views held by this newspaper, its sister publications or its owner and publisher Newsquest Media Group Ltd.