As an example for all those in Argyll and the rest of Scotland who are increasingly concerned at the competence and integrity with which local authorities have been conducting ‘school estate reviews’ – aka school closure programmes – it is worth looking at the thinking that has not been done over Angus Council’s current proposal for Arbroath.
This sits in a chain of articles on this subject which have exposed failures in the integrity of evidence claimed by the council to support their plan, failures in the council’s own integrity of process and failures in the legal advice which has brought it to the point where the process must be abandoned.
The Angus taxpayer will be picking up the bill.
The proposal in question is to close Muirfield and Timmergreens primary schools and transfer their pupils to a new school to be built slap-bang on Arbroath’s busy and ever-busier – and undualled – town bypass.
Cost
The proposed new school is to cost around £8 milion. To build it, the council plans to borrow, with annual debt repayments set at £740,000.
This debt is to be incurred by a council whose own finance director has for long issued increasingly bald warnings about the unsustainability of the councIl administration’s incessant spending – and the fiscal inability of maintaining it.
To protect this plan against reality, the council issued misleading statements about the cost of the alternative option of refurbishing both existing schools.
Requests made under freedom of information eventually disclosed that the official surveyor had declared Muirfield easily refurbishable at a total cost of £550,000, to include a new hearing system. Timmergreens is not in as good a condition as Muirfield but would be refurbished for £850,000.
This would give a total spend of £1.4 million, as opposed to the proposed £8 million and could be done at the cost of only two of the annual debt repayments of £740,000 contemplated to enable the council proposal.
This option has many other cost advantages. The site on which Muirfield stands would be sold for housing development. But the Timmergreens site is unlikely to find a developer willing to take it on for a considerable time, so the offset against the cost of the proposed new school would be inadequate.
Council documents kept secret until their disclosure was forced by FOI requests, show that the Muirfield site is planned to be sold for £750,000 for housing and Timmergreens for £300,000 for the same purpose. With Timmergreens a slow sell, this leaves the hypothetical Muirfield disposal raising only enough to cover a single year of the $740,000 annual debt repayments on the£8 million loan for the new build.
There are other advantages of the refurbishment option which include the issues detailed below:
- road safety – for tiny children and road users alike
- capacity
- amenities at the proposed new school
Road safety and drop off / pick up provision
Westway is the single carriageway bypass for Arbroath, running to and from the major east coast city of Dundee.
The industrial estates in Dundee are on the north east of the city, generating much of the heavy duty traffic running in to and bypassing Arbroath, whose Westway has an industrial estate at either end of its short length and with a new supermarket also to be built on it.
The economic growth of Dundee is leading to an increasing demand for housing in Arbroath, which will also ratchet up the traffic using the Westway bypass.
If the proposed new school were to be built and the Muirfield school site, as planned, were to see housing development, that would unavoidably increase demand for places at the proposed new school and significantly worsen the traffic situation on the road outside it.
Muirfield school – as seen below, is on the Westway but set back from it in substantial grounds, taking drop off and pick up traffic right off the bypass.
As it stands, the new school is to have a sort of looped slip road, built parallel to the Westway, to allow drop offs and pick ups – with 20 parking bays.
The school is to take around 500 pupils and, given that it is sited on Arbroath’s most dangerous road, the only children likely to be allowed by their parents to walk to school are those living behind it, who can approach from the rear.
This means that almost all of the pupils will have to be brought to school by car – seeing something like 200 cars arriving – trying to arrive – at 8.50 each weekday morning, at the height of rush hour business traffic – and again in the afternoon.
How will 20 short term parking bays deal with this? As soon as they are full – and you can’t just shoot tinies out of the car and drive off – there will inevitably be a queuing logjam on the bypass, slowing business traffic, frustrating and endangering all road users.
We understand that the council’s roads department is fully aware of this aspect of the plan and is seriously concerned about its impact. Their views – as those of the finance director, are regarded as little as those of the parents involved.
The drop off slip road will already be taking ground out of the modest site at Hospitalfield, There is no room there for any solution other than this foolishly unable one, to deal with the inevitable volume of drop offs and pick ups.
Looking at the plan for this drop off and pick up road and parking bays (on page 28 of the downloadable document here) we can identify a real and additional risk to young children.
The 20 parking bays for this purpose are sited on the Westway side of the slip road loop coming off the bypass.
This means that small children, when they exit their car, will have to cross that slip road – which will be under severe pressure with incoming and exiting vehicles – on their way in to the school.
Parents will have to leave their car and escort the children across this slip road – and the multiple escorting will slow access for incoming drop off and pick up traffic to the wholly inadequate number of parking bays.
This plan is counter-intuitive in every way. The bays should clearly have been envisaged on the school – and left hand – side of the access slip.
This is a completely unworkable mess.
Potential traffic regulation systems could not reduce the problem of the volumes requiring to access the parking bays and would add to the length of the queuing – or even parking – vehicles on the narrow Westway.
This is the sort of situation that can be inherited where existing infrastructure tries to cope with originally unforeseen growth.
It is emphatically not a scenario anyone but a halfwit would contemplate deliberately building.
Capacity
The proposed new school is to have a built capacity of 500 pupils. The existing rolls at Muirfield (around 200) and Timmergreens (around 250) , with nursery places, will all but fill this – and the Arbroath birth rate has been significantly rising, leading to known increased demand in the pipeline.
That picture of a new school almost immediately unable to cope with growth in demand also takes no account of the demand that would be born at once from the conversion of the large Muirfied school site to housing.
Amenities
The proposed new school, on account of the limited size of the site at Hospitalfield, would be less advantageous in amenities for its 500 pupils as those available now on the site of just one of the existing schools – Muirfield, with around 200 pupils.
As the photograph above shows, Muirfield sits in substantial grounds – and on the left side of what is visible here, there is the same amount of green space again – which includes a football pitch.
The rated size of each site is:
- Muirfield – 2.49 ha
- Hospitalfield – 2.76 ha
The additional space at Hospitalfield is allocated to the 20 bay drop off and pick up slip road. dicussed above.
The plan for the proposed new school is for two car parks – with the staff one bigger than that already at Muirfield and with the a planned reduction in teaching staff from the number currently employed at the two existing schools.
All of this means that the planned playspace for the proposed new school is smaller – for over twice as many pupils – than the current playspace at Muirfield alone – taking no account of the needs of around 25o pupils from Timmergreens.
The siting of the football pitch behind the proposed new school (also seen on the plan on page 28 of the downloadable document linked above) is an imposed one. The only available space for it is on top of a graveyard. Historic Scotland will not permit building on this but agree that it can be grassed over and used as a sports pitch.
The overall picture
Apart from the blend of chicanery (the opinion surveys) and incompetence (the unable legal advice on statutory consultees) the calibre of the thinking involved in this compound proposal is cause for the most serious concern.
The cost, the impact of an unnecessary scheme on local finances already stretched by untrammelled spending, the unexplored and advantageous alternatives, the choice of site, the capacity of the school, the planning of its facilities and the consideration of the context in which it would exist in housing and town development – are individually flawed, sometimes unconsidered and collectively conflicted issues.
Angus – as with the equally troubled Argyll and Bute and as with every local authority – has a right to expect local government that at least attains basic competence.
On the evidence of this utterly unable proposal and, as with Argyll and Bute, the corporate will to ram it through in the face of the weight of contrary evidence and of public opposition, Angus has serious thinking to do before the May 2012 local elections.
If ever there was evidence of the imperative for local government reform it is richly to be found in Argyll and Bute and in Angus, with Highland and Shetland in close pursuit . That’s a lot of newly aware territory.
The photographs accompanying this article are by copyright holder, Paul Reid of AngusPictures.
NOTE: The articles in this chain are:
- Angus Council leader compares FOI to phone hacking
- Miles more on Myles: Angus Council, FOI and Arbroath schools review (This article links to a number of subsidiary detailed articles)
- Westway school latest: consultation illegal as Angus Council legal eagle proves turkey
- Arbroath school review’s Westway proposal: cost, safety, capacity, amenity