The children’s book section in the bookshop gets bigger, I complain to the council and a bit of a ramble.

My work on the children’s section continues, so we now have four bookcases of children’s fiction instead of two, which I think is a lot better.

The next part of the job is to expand the children’s non-fiction which means moving the humour books to another part of the shop.

The idea eventually is to have a much bigger children’s section, but that may take some time.

On to my complaint to the council, here it is:

“Hi I wish to complain about the council’s online petition facility.

I am concerned that no effort is made by the council to separate or identify petitioners and those starting a petition, into Thanet Residents and non-Thanet residents or restrict the number of times someone can sign an online petition.

Please see the Manston airport cpo issue as being unrelated to this complaint and as only being used by me because it the most recent TDC online petition and helps me to illustrate areas of possible improvement.   

Although I am not against saving Manston airport, I did note that the petition was started by a non UK resident and that it had been signed both by other non UK residents and by people living within the UK who were protesting against airport expansion elsewhere in the UK, usually where they live. 

All of this meant that when councillors had to decide this important local issue it wasn’t possible for them to gauge the support for the cpo among Thanet residents, who are now funding the various legal stages in investigating the issue.

The norm (that used by KCC and the UK government) appears to be only members of the electoral roll (councils) or UK residents (UK gov) can start petitions or sign them, either online or on paper.

My suggestion would be that when members of the public join the council’s website they have to supply their names and addresses so that the council could verify them. Obviously once the names had been verified they wouldn’t subsequently need to be verified for every petition, which would save the council money. 

People who have already joined the council’s website would need to be emailed asking them to update their details. My understanding is that it is possible to join the council’s website, to sign petitions as many times as one has email addresses at the moment, so this would be an opportune moment to resolve the multiple signing issue too.

I would also refer you to your own document pack from when the council decided on how online petitions should function, which states that the rules for online petition should be the same as those for paper petitions and that the names and addresses for signatories of paper petitions should be verified. 

I believe the situation is generally different for online consultation, where people from outside the area are allowed to take part but their responses are weighted to reflect their geographical location.    

Best regards Michael”

The world of council complaints is a strange one, I think the council officers are as unhappy about the petition system as I am, but they can’t of course justify the officer time they would need to sort it out unless a member of the public complains to them.     

So first I phoned them up and discussed what would be the most useful content of the complaint, to them, to them. 

Thanet Council, Turner Contemporary, Edmund De Waal and The Impossible Object; a day orf ramble.

May day today and I went to Margate; in search of something pagan? Don’t know really. At Turner Contemporary I went through the motions of not photographing or drawing “Atmosphere” by Edmund De Waal, the only major exhibit you are allowed to photograph, I hope was is a sufficiently minimalist approach. There are parallels between the vitrines containing his pots and the gallery’s café where I went for a coffee. There is a sense there of being inside an extension of the exhibits that one has just been, what’s the word? We will go for “observing” from different angles.

For me the acid test of any work of art is does it inspire me to engage in art myself. And after my minimalist observation I was just gagging to draw, my brain was still between two glass cases, so the impossible (above) occurred.

After this I ventured further into the gallery in search of maidens with maypoles.

On the bookbuying front I struck lucky with a pagan Margate item.

The literate among you will know “Impossible Object” is a novel by Nichols Mosley, what with one thing and another I baulked at trying to photograph an impossible object

So here is a picture of one of his other books.

On, sadly to the council, some of you will have read Ian Driver’s blog post http://thanetgreencouncillor.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/thanet-council-bullies-whistleblowers.html where there is an email from the council’s lawyer asking Ian to do the impossible i.e. remove something from the internet.

Here is the relevant quote:

“You should also be aware that qualified privilege attaches when issues of concern are raised internally but your conduct in publishing these can attract no such protection and as a result, you have placed yourself at significant personal risk of having multiple actions in defamation taken against you by all those named in your web-blog, If nothing else will persuade you to do the right thing, perhaps the realisation that you have placed your home and personal assets at risk, will.

I therefore require you to immediately remove from your web blog all the matters referred to in this letter. I would also suggest that you seek urgent legal advice on how to mitigate your liability for your ill judged actions.”

Of course no one would read this as a veiled threat and as I have already said, removing something from the internet is impossible anyway, only the most technologically illiterate would have the slightest difficulty finding the cached page.

Anyway this morning I sent the following open letter in the form of an email to the council’s chief executive, lawyer, leader and leader of the opposition.

“Hi Sue [forwarded to the others asking them to comment on it] 

Please see this one as an open letter that will be published today, with any reply you send me.

I am becoming increasingly concerned about the situation at TDC with senior officers and councillors.

This culminated yesterday in a councillor publishing documents [which he was then asked to remove] Ed. I have removed part of this paragraph pending legal advice.

I am leaving part of the post deleted at the moment but have added this link to the Gazette article about the issue http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Council-takes-legal-advice-chief-executive/story-21035116-detail/story.html   

The follow up to this was the council’s legal department threatening the councillor with legal action that could result in the loss of his house.

Looking at this from outside the council my impression is, that if an elected member discovers wrongdoing or suspects that there may be wrongdoing among the most senior officers, then that councillor is likely to be threatened with having his or her house repossessed and being made bankrupt.      

Any thoughts you have on this matter would be helpful.

Best regards Michael”

I have so far had the following reply from the leader of the opposition:

Hi Michael

As I am presently a member of TDC's General Purposes Committee, which is presently engaged in a process related to the issues you raise, I feel that it would be inappropriate to comment on your open letter. The work of this committee has been seriously compromised by Cllr Driver's actions and I have no desire to make things worse.

Regards

Bob

And this reply from the council’s PR team:

Dear Michael,

Your recent e-mail has been passed on to the PR and Publicity team.

Our response to your enquiry is as follows:

The council is following due process and in order to allow this to be properly and thoroughly considered – and in fairness to the parties concerned – it would be inappropriate to provide any comment on this investigation at the present time.

Kind regards

*****

I don’t really know if I will get any more replies though I expect I will as I am sure they are not all in it together, if I do I will publish them.

In view of the warning and although I really don’t have any idea what the council would do with my bookshop, comments with names of officers and councillors that look dubious will be deleted from this post as will anything else that could possibly construed as detrimental to the council’s investigation.

I will also ramble on here about my visit to Margate.

Now the bulb has gone out in Tracey Emin’s Margate sign, I wondered if anyone could remember what it said as I found myself struggling. Wasn't it supposed to be worth loads of dosh, I do hope I am not the only person to notice that there is no canvas in the frame.  

Back in Ramsgate with the lifeguard hut on our rapidly diminishing beach.

As you see they have the right idea about how to stop it floating away.

Ah yes, a stamp on the toe for being so slow, I went to the webstats for this blog that I usually use for the referring sites on my pinch and a punch posts and it says I only had one visit during the last month. So either there has been a technical glitch or this blog has become a lot less popular recently.

This is a picture of the rather limited information about referring sites on bloggers own stats page, this is what drives the counter app at the top of the sidebar.

Ferry Interesting but Stupid, a midweek ramble

Having read The Lawyers Tale in The Gazette, see http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Council-missed-Half-hour-window-impound/story-20494019-detail/story.html#axzz2rkF3MudT and noticing that our very own ECR seemed to be going along with it http://eastcliffrichard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/spectacular-end-for-ostend-spirit.html I have to admit to having some reservations.

No one seems to have asked the obvious question. Which senior officers did the harbour master phone after Harvey failed to pick up. Which raises the question. Which senior officer or officers gave the OK for the ferry to sail. Which raises the further question. Why would thy do that? What would be the incentives for handing out our money in this way?

With the chief executive and the editor of The Gazette I am reminded of something from Alice in Wonderland here about the red queen and the black queen, did they have tea together before or after the Queen of Hearts started saying “off with his head”?

I wonder if when choosing a fall guy a lawyer is the best choice? Could this be expensive? 

Anyway this morning I phoned the council’s press department and put my thoughts to them. And yes they did say they had other enquiries along these lines. And yes I put my take on the situation to them and although they didn’t say much in reply, there wasn’t any of the usual “Michael you have got it completely wrongs” associated with my having got something completely wrong. 

So the answer from the council’s press office was that they would send me a written statement about this by email by 1pm. I will add it to this post when/if it arrives.

No statement from the council but this instead:

-----Original Message-----
From:**** ***** <*****@THANET.GOV.UK>
To: MichaelChild
Sent: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 17:07
Subject: Transeuropa statement

Hi Michael,

Apologies for not coming back to you until now. I’ll send you a copy of the minutes taken at the meeting once they are available which will probably be the most helpful way to address this.

Thanks

**** ****

Thanet District Council press releases, are they censoring the ones they send to bloggers?

 I have just sent the email below to the people at Thanet District Council, in this case the; Corporate Information & Communications Manager, Chief Executive and Leader of the Council: 
 

 “Hi Justine, Sue, Clive

This once again relates to council press releases in general with one serving as an example of the problem.

So this time it’s the “night-time flying: Independent assessment”

It would appear from the various local papers websites that they have been sent this document and I haven’t.

My understanding was that I would be sent images and attachments relating to council press releases and this doesn’t seem to be happening.

Of course this may be some misunderstanding on my part, I which case please just drop the issue as I have no wish to waste officers time.

If the document was sent to the conventional press and not to me, then please take this as an official complaint that it wasn’t sent to me and please also take this as a foi request asking which information, press releases and associated attachments, have been sent to the conventional press and not to me, since you agreed to reinstate me on the press release mailing list.”

If I get a chance I will elaborate on this post, as it is I am very busy this morning so may not get time. 

Council goes camp, schools close but Turner Contemporary remains open

Joseph Mallord William Turner, 236 when asked about blacklegging said, “If I could find anything blacker than black, I'd use it.”

Thanet District Council have issued a press release saying; “Council’s services are expected to be affected on Wednesday 30 November as unions are planning a national day of industrial action over pension reforms.” See http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/11/councils-services-expected-to-be.html

I emailed them about this, see below.

Subject: Re: PRESS RELEASE - Council's services may be affected by industrial strike a...

Date: 28/11/2011 17:07:40 GMT Standard Time

From: MichaelChild@aol.com

Reply To: 

To: *********@thanet.gov.uk

Hi *****, Did you Rally mean affected and not effected?

Am I to expect a camp roadsweeper on Wed or no roadsweeper?  

Best regards Michael

But so far haven’t received a reply.

I may add to this if anything else of the same type occurs to me later.  

Council website misplaces royal visit.

I don’t know if this some sort of equivalent of a queen sacrifice in chess but the boffins at TDCIT seem to have lost the queen from the council’s homepage.

The royal visit announcement was there, and the council issued a press release today see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/11/margate-old-town-to-greet-queen.html the press release didn’t have an embargo on it, so why it hasn’t appeared is a bit of a mystery.

Why the notification of the royal visit has vanished from the council’s homepage is a bit of a mystery, this leaves the councils homepage top event the coffee morning and plant sale. This event is on tomorrow so it should vanish at midnight, part of the Alice in Wonderland feature in TDCIT is that events featured on their homepage vanish at the beginning of the day they are actually on.

The councils Facebook wall is leading with the night flights application, see http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thanet-District-Council/83700846372?sk=wall they last tweeted the Margate football club proposals.

Perhaps the council are engaged in low treason, their other website, Visit Thanet doesn’t mention the royal visit but does say.

“Fri 11 Nov 2011            Margate Old Town      History Walkers Margate

Margate Visitor Information Centre, The Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate, Kent            12:00   01843 223300

Fri 11 Nov 2011            Margate's Historic Shops   History Walkers Margate

Margate Visitor Information Centre, The Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate, Kent            11:00   01843 223300”

Perhaps the history walkers will walk into her majesty. 

Thanet District Council Launches New What’s on Website

I have to admit that this came as a surprise to me, here is the link http://www.warmingwords.org.uk/

What with their other “what’s on” websites not functioning as perhaps one would hope, I don’t really know what to make of this one or why the council would be funding another website on the subject.

The computer coding of the website says; "Immediacy .NET CMS - Licensed To : Thanet District Council" the contact details on the site are those of our tourist information centre and the email address has a TDC extension.

Strangely it doesn’t seem to have any key words apart from “Reading, Warming Words” so I don’t think it would be easy for a search engine to locate.

One wonders where the money came from for this project or what it hopes to achieve.

The other totally crazy local events site is http://communityportal.thanet.gov.uk/events/ this one appears to be part funded by TDC and part by the EU.

Words fail me a bit on this one, so I will add to this post later.  

Thanet District Council’s Facebook Mystery

When it comes to Facebook to be honest the whole thing is a bit of a mystery to me, with my own facebook site and after some difficulty, all I do is connect it to this blog so that what I post here shows there automatically.

I just don’t have time for more internet sites and have stuck with blogger as it is easy to use, particularly for people who want to comment without having to fill in some online form.

What the council do on the internet is a bit different though for a number of reasons, the most pertinent being that all of us council taxpayers contribute to the cost and so there is a sense that the councils efforts to publish information on the internet represents all of us.

As far as I can see when it comes to facebook the council have tried to do something similar to what I do with my blog posts with their press releases, the underlying problem for the council is that when it comes to IT they seem to take the approach that they know better than anyone else, and can solve problems by throwing our money at them.

At the moment the council publish their press releases like a bog with comments disallowed, see http://www.thanet.gov.uk/news/latest_press_releases.aspx and this part of the council’s website is supposed to feed to other websites, like a blog does. If the council’s feeds worked properly, every time they added a press release their facebook page would update, people who subscribe to the council’s press releases would receive a new press release and just like blogger other local internet sites would receive the feed and an updated link would go to the top of the list.

To explain this in a bit more detail, when the other local bloggers, Tony, Simon, Don, Peter and so on write a new blog post it pops up on the top of my sidebar and people like you who read the local blogs, notice this and go there to read what they have written.

The problem is though that the council’s feeds don’t work properly, now a simple solution to this would be for the council to use a blog with the comments disallowed, blogger is very versatile and you can use a a blog with all of the complicated and expensive add-ons like feeds and free image publication without it showing to the blog readers, Thanet Waves does this see http://www.thanetwaves.co.uk/

For a number of years now I have been trying to get the council to solve these problems by just embedding a blog in their website and putting their press releases with the associated images, all something that we pay for.

Over this period of time I have had various answers from the council about why their feeds don’t feed properly, the latest being that this is because of a fault with Google, obviously as the don’t feed properly to facebook either this just doesn’t make sense.

As a sort of temporary solution to this problem I have put the new council information that I can fairly easily manually extrapolate from their website and their press releases onto the internet for them. See http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ I don’t think the council like this very much and there have been some efforts by them to make doing this difficult for me. Apart from a short period of time when they took me off of their press release email list I have done this consistently for the last two years.

So here is their facebook wall http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thanet-District-Council/83700846372?sk=wall showing a press release they published on 12.10.2011 with a link to The Thanet Anthem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am4T7QbQm3w

This would be funny it we weren’t paying for it. 

Thanet District Council’s new local news history project

Keeping an eye on the council’s much talked about but little understood RSS news feed I was interested this morning to note that it has just updated and sent me the latest news form the council saying that:

Birchington residents can learn more about fire safety and crime prevention advice, when the latest Operation Cleansweep visits the village.

The Kent Fire and Rescue Service drop-in vehicle will be parked outside the Co-op at 56 Station Road on Wednesday 26 January from 12.30 pm until 4.00 pm.

Kent Fire and Rescue Service officers will be joined by a Crime Reduction Officer from Kent Police, who will be giving out crime prevention advice.

Operation Cleansweep will be visiting Birchington and Westgate over their next two-day operation to do enforcement checks, clear communal areas and offer advice and support to local people.

If you would like any issues that you feel need tackling in the upcoming Birchington Cleansweep or have ideas for future operations, please call 01843 577737.

I would of course normally have alerted the press office to this latest error but of course I am not allowed to communicate with them, perhaps I am supposed to raise a foi request any ideas anyone?

I think the problem here is the council just don’t appreciate the importance of this I have sent them the following official complaint:

This is an official complaint that TDCs news feed is feeding the news that there will be a village event in Birchington on January 17^th 2011, today is 15^th June 2011 the main news event that the council should be feeding to the rest of the country in Margate’s Big Event due to start 18^th June 2011.

I should further add that the council has sopped sending me press releases which I used to publish for them with proper working news feeds at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ there reason for doing this appears to be that I should use their feeds which evidently do not work.

The net result of this will be probably be a few thousand less people attending The Big Event with the associated loss of income for local businesses and even the council because of lost program sales.          

Thanet District Council’s new war on the prominent Thanet Blogs

I have just received an email from the council saying that they won’t be sending me, or any other prominent bloggers, any more of their press releases and presumably no more of their accompanying photographs either.

Apparently they are only going to send press releases to the mainstream media, they also say that I can no longer ask the press department questions on behalf of my readership and any questions I have should be addressed to their freedom of information department.

From past experience this would mean that the average time they take to answer a question would be a month, with the maximum time about a year.  

Particularly interesting as I notice from the counter thingy on the sidebar that the last 30 days viewings for this blog have exceeded the 20,000 mark.

The more cynical may think that the council offering considerable income to the mainstream, through advertising has something to do, with this.

I will add to this when I have asked the council’s press department about it.   

Thanet District Council Cabinet Reshuffle

There is what I would call a strong rumour that the cabinet is to be reshuffled with some Labour representation.

Sorry about the rather short post there, a busy morning in the bookshop, I will do my best to expand what I have heard.

It’s gossip really, so I wouldn’t take much heed of it.

The cabinet is to have a reshuffle and as you would expect in Thanet this is a totally behind closed doors affair, I think the idea is to give the less senior of the senior men more responsibility, while the more senior of the senior men get less.

Apparently the Isle of Thanet Gazette wanted to get the press release before everyone else, so that they could meet the copy deadline for Friday’s paper and so they tried the old journo trick of pretending that they knew more than they did, this backfired.

With the Gazettes website blown to pieces, all the links to their stories sending you to error pages or advertising, they are reliant on old fashioned paper and of course their FaceBook site http://www.facebook.com/thanetgroup where they say:

Isle of Thanet Gazette

Thanet District Council will announce the new cabinet positions today. The Isle of Thanet Gazette team believes that the following councillors will be made cabinet members for the said positions: Councillor Chris Wells for Housing and Community Safety; Councillor Bob Bayford for Finance; Councillor Alisdair Bruce for Regeneration, Port and Tourism; Councillor Martin Wise for Internal Performance (Thanet council staff performance and council overall); Councillor Simon Moores for Waste and Parks. The announcement will be confirmed later today and we will bring you the news as we have it.

The cabinet don’t seem to want to release any press release until they have shown it to the Labour group, and certainly wouldn’t tell a lowly blogger like me until last.

I am not really sure if there will be a Conservative group press release or if this will only be a council press release. 


The real problems though relate to the no overall majority business and the fact that there are no councillors from the two main Thanet towns in the cabinet.

I will add to this one as more information becomes available.

Westwood Cross Thanet Town Centre Consolidation

Putting up the last weeks planning applications on my press release blog I noticed that one of them didn’t have a title, perhaps it’s too big.

Anyway there are pages and pages of this thing, because it’s on the council’s planning website I can’t link to it, but recommend that you have a look at the application.

Please follow these instructions to get there.

1 copy the following planning reference F/TH/11/0200

2 click on the link http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet to get to the council’s planning site

3 paste the planning reference in the application search number box and click on the search button

The council’s planning site is a very cantankerous bit if IT, documents often open reluctantly in difficult file formats only to have been scanned so badly as to be illegible. There are no linier scales on the plans most of which are scanned scale drawings, this means that you can’t actually tell how big anything is by looking at the drawing.    

I suppose that some of the councillors see my concerns about the way the council manages its internet presence as some sort of mischievous attack on them. I had a fairly long discussion with Simon Moores about the council’s failure to promote the opening of The Turner Contemporary, on the councils homepage, last week, see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/03/wedding-bells.html

I think, although it is difficult to say, that Simon is saying, that this wasn’t some sort of dreadful error, or even an April fools joke, but something the council achieved deliberately. 

Well now we have plans for this huge development without even a title, so that it looks less significant than an application for a garden shed, this does the beg the question, was this also done deliberately?


This all leaves me with the problem, do I take the planning files for this huge project and convert them into ordinary web pages that can be viewed on any computer, found by the search engines and linked to in the normal way, or do I just leave the whole mess for the council and local people to try and get on with as best they can?

Improvement works to Ramsgate Harbour stops Tall Ships visit

Reading the words of Thanet District Council’s leader today, see http://www.thanet.gov.uk/news/latest_press_releases/race_of_the_classics.aspx?lang=en-gb if you don’t believe this is actually on the council’s website, you may find is reminiscent of newspeak.

Leader of the council, Cllr. Bob Bayford, said: “It’s a great shame that we won’t be able to accommodate the Race of the Classics this year, but the improvement work to the harbour is a priority and something that we know people want to see completed. We understand that people may be disappointed to hear this news, but the long term future of the harbour is the most important thing for us. We look forward to welcoming the tall ships and the Race of the Classics back to an improved Ramsgate Royal Harbour in 2012.”

The picture above was taken today, sorry it’s a bit gloomy it was like that today. There was me assuming that the reason that the tall ships wouldn’t be coming because they couldn’t actually enter the harbour because the sandbar blocking the entrance is the largest we have ever had.

I know I am probably considered an unperson, but this looks like duckspeak although I know I should bellyfeel it to be blackwhite.

Update I have just discussed this with a senior member of the Politbüro, who would prefer not to be named, this is what the said.

“We must think or this as considerable progress, you must remember the terrible problem of Sandy’s Beach has been completely resolved by the new Bob’s Breakwater.

A beach inside a harbour is quite unsuitable whereas a breakwater is quite appropriate to a harbour situation.”

Council weed Pleasurama cliff façade and then say they haven’t

Thanet District Council have been removing some of the weeds from the Pleasurama cliff façade, the bizarre question here though is, why would they say they haven’t?
Weeds on Friday.

No weeds on Sunday.

Sorry about the vertigo, at least no one was on the bike when it went over the edge. This is the bit where the stubborn tree was, obviously they managed to get it out.

You have to admit it looked a bit touch and go, with the spade and the cherry picker.

Strange that they have left some of the weeds behind, some sort of selective gardening I thought at first.

What is really bizarre though is that the council say that none of this work has occurred on the bit of the façade behind the Pleasurama site, I quote, from an internal email so I have dotted a few bits out.


“The email from Michael Child refers to a piece of render (approx 1m2)
which delaminated and fell from a brickwork panel just outside the
fenced Pleasurama site at the East end of the site last week. The area
was inspected from a hydraulic platform last Friday …… and it was found that a short section of lead flashing had
failed which in turn lead to the failure of the piece of render. This
section of cliff facade is outside the construction site and not within
the area which received the refurbishment works in 2008 and 2009. This
was a local failure of sand/cement rendering and was not caused by
water
ingress behind the cliff facing structure itself.

Some repair works will be required following the inspection which will
involve pointing to the brickwork, re-rendering and repairs to the
flashing. These works will take up to two days to complete and will be
funded from the coastal maintenance budget.

As mentioned above this issue relates to a section of cliff facade
outside the Pleasurama development site which has a very different
method of construction to the cliff facing structures within the site.
There are therefore no implications as a result of this incident for
The development works on the site”

Sorry it was a bit chomped up due to TDCIT.

This picture shows the cliff façade between the Ramsgate Cliff lift and old tunnel entrance by Augusta Stairs both marked in red.


The Pleasurama site boundary fence is marked in light blue.


The cliff façade can be split into three parts


Yellow portals I would guess this bit was built between 1940 and 1950


Green arches built I think in the 1930s


Mauve brick built in the 1860s

The dark blue lines show where the weeding that I noticed has occurred.

Now follows a long rant about the façade for anyone who is interested.

The arched, green bit, of this façade that appears to be normally constructed and looks like a normal piece of civil engineering, apart from at the base where there is no sign of the load spreading foundations being where the design drawings show they should be. The chalk at the bottom of this part of the façade doesn’t appear to have been disturbed in the way one would expect to dig out for the spreaders, but this is a regular arched structure showing no signs of movement and is probably fine.

My guess is that that it is founded directly on solid chalk without load spreaders, I would think that it has also been keyed into the chalk cliff which would mitigate the vertical load.

It was constructed when the ground below it was used as a funfair and is fairly typical of cliff facades in Thanet.

The portal, yellow bit, of the structure has all of the appearance of having no design at all, I believe part of it was constructed during WW2, the low portal served as an entrance to the tunnels used by HMD Fervent. The building below it abutted the cliff and served as an indoor amusement arcade, it was used by costal command as HMS Fervent.

I believe that the inclined chalk cliff was stepped for the portal pillars and that these were cast onto these steps.

The bases of these pillars appear to sit on made ground, in fact I think it possible that some of the façade was built directly onto the concrete floor of the arcade.

The block infills definitely sit on made ground although there may be some sort of concrete shelf keyed into the chalk behind, which forms a foundation for the blockwork.

Various parts of the main concrete structure of this part of the façade have shifted laterally since its construction the worst part of this was repaired using the anchored concrete badge method, there are brown streaks below the badge that think should be analysed and if they contain iron oxide the badge may need treating as suspect.

Rust there could be caused by spalling of the original structure but could also be caused by the anchors, as the rest of the repair contract has visible faults I have reservations about the way the badge was applied.

Normally the drilling and inserting into the cliff of the anchors is done by a specialist contractor and is unlikely to be suspect.

The block panel adjacent to the lift has no drain holes and the coating applied during the main contract is coming away at the bottom of it, I would think that water is entering from above there.

When the block panel was removed for replacement at the end of last year there was a gap visible between the chalk and the adjacent pillar.

It is important to understand that this concrete façade isn’t designed to support the cliff, in fact it is the cliff that supports the façade, so damaged to the stepped chalk could be very significant indeed.

Finally the mauve part, the one that worries me the most at the moment the part in the vicinity of the blocked drain.

Firstly I should say that I don’t think that this was what caused the render to come off at the weekend, I think this was caused by the roots of the plant growing above it and should be treated as a minor cliff maintenance problem along with the plant growth in the blockwork.

There has been some surface movement in this area over the past couple of years, minor subsidence and lateral shifting.

My main concerns relates to the brick pier (the mauve lump) immediately adjacent to the blocked drain and the panel of brickwork sitting on much more recent blockwork, this area is very uncertain and parts of this brick structure collapsed without warning immediately after being investigated by civil engineers just over forty years ago.

As the cliff is south facing the sun tends to dry out the surface of the brickwork.

I think an underlying problem here may be that the councils advising structural engineers were supervising engineers on the main repair contract.

Sunday ramble about Thanet District Council’s website.

This is a long old ramble and not much recommended as it is rather depressing, as soon as I can I will get some folk week pictures up on the top of the blog, just a case of it needs saying and I hope that the council will take some notice of it.

This is about the shortcomings of the councils, something I would far rather not be spending my time on, I much prefer the local history and frankly would rather be spending time on that.

The problem with the council is that it is only the bits I see as citizen that I can judge what they are doing from, for all I know the bits that I can’t see may be functioning perfectly ok, however from some of the bits that I do see it is obvious that a lot of our money is going into something and what is coming out is just poor.

Something that I see all to often is their website and frankly despite trying very hard to get them to mend the some of the most basic broken bits it still seems to be something that doesn’t get fixed.

I am still trying on the absolute front end of this, getting them to get the homepage reasonably functional, much of the problem is I think that they just don’t seem to understand what is wrong.

There homepage is http://www.thanet.gov.uk/ I am not going to take it all apart here but just a bit starting at the top.

The search box, you have to try this to believe it, the first time I did I thought it was some sort of temporary glitch, I am sorry to say that it isn’t.

Here are some search words to try in this search box: “Ramsgate” “Margate” “Broadstairs” “Thanet” All these words return the following result: Sorry, no pages found containing your search terms.

Quite simply this most basic website function just doesn’t work and hasn’t worked properly for over a year see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/05/search-thanet-district-council-website.html

Back in May of last year I pointed this out to the council, found and sent them the script for a search facility that does work, engaged in a long and time consuming dialogue with them and at the same time added the facility to search their website to the sidebar of this blog. This facility returns 370 results for the search term “Ramsgate” from the council’s website.

I do wonder though just how much of our money has been pumped into the councils attempts to write a better web search script than Google can, which from the correspondence I received from them seemed to be the way they have been going for the last year.

Next we come to their Adobe Flash Player header banner, this is promoting some major Thanet events but not the main one this week, once again this is something I tried to sort out with the council last year.

I have tried a slightly different approach this year, this started with my blog post http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2010/08/thanet-district-council-snub.html I am afraid that I deliberately couched this in terms that the council wouldn’t like hoping to attract some anonymous comment a member of the council. For one reason on or another they don’t usually comment under their own names about this sort of thing, certainly there is very little blogging on councillors own blogs recently.

This was mainly because I knew that if I approached the councillors directly or made some sort of official complaint one way they would use to avoid this issue would be to misunderstand what I was talking about. I would say to most people of reasonable intelligence promoting one major local event on their website while ignoring another is an indefensible position.

Well I did this and got what I needed and sent off the complaint on Friday, here is a link to what I sent http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop810a/id5.htm needless to say they didn’t actually do anything about the problem.

What I did get was an email telling me that I would receive a response within ten working days from customer services and nothing from the cabinet members who I had copied it to.

Coming down the council’s homepage we now come to, news, as I publish the Thanet press releases blog http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/ this interests me, since I started communications with the council about this some aspects of this part of their website have improved.

The solution that I suggested was that the council’s IT department set up a way that the council’s press officers could publish the press releases and associated pictures directly to the internet.

Many of the problems that have occurred during period (over a year now) that I have taken an interest in their press release publication, have been because the IT officer publishing the press release hasn’t written it and doesn’t understand properly what it relates to. These problems are often compounded because of the time they take to put right, that is if they are ever put right.

One way that I suggested that they could resolve this issue was to embed a blog into the council’s website and make all of the officers team members, I really don’t think that they liked this idea as it would have cost absolutely nothing from an IT point of view. Free solutions to otherwise expensive problems seem to be very difficult for councils to comprehend, with the current economic situation, somehow they are going to have to grasp this nettle.

I think the problem here is that it took some time for local government to catch up with the internet, and regulation of what internet facilities they can use seems to have started at some totally random point. As far as I can see the council use Youtube and Twitter but draw the line at Google and Blogger, hence the search facility.

Their approach seems to be putting money into trying to produce in house solutions, instead of using free facilities that already exist, they have got some way with this.

Feeds, these are the mysteries internet codes that allow updated content to be noticed, simply a way of letting people know when something new has appeared on a website, most of us use this on blogger almost without thinking about it as it is built in. the most common use of this is the recent posts on other blogs thingy on most of the local blogs sidebars. This is something that they have now mastered for part of their website, when they put up something new on that part of their website it now appears on the sidebar of this blog. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen when they put up a new document, like the notice of a meeting or some major planning application that effects a lot of local people. This does happen for the press releases though.

The next thing is pictures, sometimes they manage to get one of their very good pictures up with their press release see http://www.thanet.gov.uk/news/latest-press-releases/rainham-school-visit.aspx as an example, for the most part though they only manage a thumbnail that you can’t expand, that is if the photo ever sees the light of day.

This raises the obvious question about the cost i.e. why are we paying for photographs that don’t ever seem to reach the light of day?

Another problem is the amount of time press releases take to appear, on occasions a press release promoting some local event has actually take so long to appear that when it does the event is over. On the whole they seem to be getting better at this although still some of the press releases that I put on my press release blog take ages to appear on the council’s website, the latest one http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2010/08/changes-made-to-asset-disposal-plans.html appears to fall into this bracket.

There is also of course the business of actually attempting to communicate with local people, by this I mean some sort of moderated comments, the only place the council do this is on their planning site, there they have chosen to set the site so that any public comments are not visible to the public.

What comes next, well there are all their links down the left side and I may get to some of them if I get time, on to the right side of the page is “do it online” I will have a go at this some other time as it seems to be about paying things and joining things, something that would make it difficult, the first link precludes my participation as I don’t owe the council any money.

Have your say is something I have had a go at before and I will endeavour to have a go now.

The first link is called “asset management consultation update” it takes you to a page that starts:

“Cabinet meeting
Decisions on the future of 11 sites proposed for disposal as part of the 2010-11 asset management process will be made at a meeting of the Cabinet on Thursday 5 August at 7.00pm.”

It would seem that the update needs updating.

What I can’t find is the results of the consultation, by this I mean what the people who took part in it said, I will try the next links just don’t apply to me so I can’t really test them.

I don’t live in community housing, am not young, couldn’t get to the big event and so on.

Then we come to a section called events, this one is truly bizarre, partly because they already have the visit Thanet site that I believe lists these already and partly because each of these links to events takes you to part of the councils main website where the information is just odd.

Here we go:

1 Millmead Childrens Centre Surestart Summer Fete - 17 August 2010
17 August 2010 Tuesday 17th Aug 11-3

2 Lions Fete at Victoria Gardens 29 August 2010 Fete, stalls selling craft, bric a brac etc Also games such as coconut shy & trap the rat. Refreshments.

I won’t go on from here as you see the second event tells you where it is but not what time, you can follow the rest of these through if you like, why the council should be using their homepage to promote what are mostly relatively minor events arrange in some sort of random time scale, some are not even in this month, while at the same time ignoring this weeks main event, is just beyond me.

Back to the middle and focus on Thanet:

The first link is called “Great events for young people” this takes you to a page that has a graphic on it saying “Why not do something less boring instead read more” I immediately clicked on, read more. This takes you to an error page explaining that the page it points at doesn’t exist. It wasn’t that bad as there was another link on the page that worked.
Next is a link about next years census, I will look at that next year.

The next one seems to be the one about social housing.

Then there is one about council procurement from local businesses, the council used to buy local history books from me for their tourist information offices, this stopped when it became to difficult for the people working in them.

Then there is shop local first, I haven’t got involved in this one as it involves giving discounts, I decided long ago that I would aim to have the best and most keenly priced book stock in the area and a simple problem then comes up which is if you are going to take money off you have to put it on in the first place.

Next is Margate’s Big Event, this is promoting an event held in June it even had a video of the 2009 event, not this years.

Thanet District Council's Secret Cabinet Reshuffle

I have just received confirmation that the portfolio for Ramsgate Marina been has moved from councillor Simon Moores to Councillor Robert Bayford.

I then contacted the council’s democratic services who told me that they were unaware of this situation and like the rest of us assumed that any change in portfolio would be decided at the council meeting to be held on 15th July.

My concern here is that this is an already done deal, made by the new leader of the council. Make no mistake here I have no problem with the cabinet reshuffling portfolios and these reshuffles being the subject of a council meeting agenda and the decision being made by council vote.

Where I do have a problem though is where the cabinet is making decisions and then using the council meetings as a rubber stamp, this is the difference between democracy and dictatorship.

I suppose there is the alternative of local government by dictatorship and I suppose that this would be reasonable as long as the dictator told us about major decisions effecting Thanet.

My attempts to elicit some sort of reply from our new leader so far have fallen on barren ground once again I am happy to accept individual councillors failing to reply to emails so I am happy to accept no reply from cllr-robert.bayford@thanet.gov.uk however I find no reply not even an acknowledgement from leader@thanet.gov.uk wholly unacceptable.

I consider questions about the Maritime Museum and The King George IV Maritime Heritage Pontoon, important to Ramsgate and worthy of some sort of answer.

Thanet District Council, The Royal Sands Development Ramsgate and The Freedom of Information Act.

After five months, I really have lost count of how many emails, I have finally had my request for the Pleasurama development agreement officially refused.

Click on the link for the correspondence http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/foi/id18.htm please leave the officers surnames out of any comments, my emails in red theirs in black to make it easier to follow.

This isn’t the end of the matter, as I will pursue it to the bitter end, something that will probably take several more months, mainly because there is a point of principle here.

As the Pleasurama saga roles on it would seem highly likely that the site will stand deserted for another summer season, during which it could be used both for parking and leisure, something that would be highly beneficial to Ramsgate during these harsh economic times.

So if you see some more bankrupt and closed businesses in the town during the next year, you may consider that a contributory factor to their demise will be a failure by highly paid and very senior council officers to face up to and admit the practical problems related to building on this site to the existing plans.

In this particular instance the development agreement is important because the council are using a technical regulation to hide information that would normally be in the public domain, for a development of this size and significance.

The key public document would normally be the planning agreement, something that most importantly when considering the years that this unused and hideous building site has blighted the main leisure part of the town, would have set out some sort of time scale for the development.

There is no development agreement because one isn’t mandatory and the reason it isn’t mandatory is because the council own the site.

The picture, click on it to enlarge is of the site being used normally.

Margate wins four million pounds plus, Ramsgate leaves with nothing.

Sound familiar, this time it’s about flood risk protection, this is a fairly complex issue and part of it relates to a freedom of information act request that I have in the pipeline, part of it is to do with the history of local flooding, something that means that even if you don’t believe in global warming or rising sea levels, you still need to sit up and think about this one.

Both Ramsgate and Margate have a very long history of flooding and storm damage caused by a combination of an exceptionally high tide and storm, fortunately for Ramsgate there is very little on the western undercliff to get damaged and Ramsgate Harbour protects the main developed part of the town that is low lying.

All this really leaves is Ramsgate’s eastern undercliff, the important part being from the Royal Victoria Pavilion to the car park that used to be the Marina Swimming Pool.

This area has a long history of flooding and storm damage – it’s designated “High Risk” by the Environment Agency - and if the sea level does rise the problems there can only get worse when we have a high tide combined with a storm.

During my discussions with various council officers about this area, the Royal Sands or Pleasurama development in particular, I was told by them that the council was due to carry out a “Strategic Flood Risk Assessment” SFRA on the various vulnerable parts of the Isle of Thanet.

The council have just announced that they have spent £98,000 on doing one for Margate, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2010/03/margate-flood-protection-plans-approved.html but nothing seems to have been done for the high risk area of Ramsgate.

My freedom of information act requests about these matters still rumble on with very little in the way of information from the council, click on the link for the email I sent them yesterday http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/foi/id18.htm I have uses the officers Christian names instead of nicknames based on their weekly salary this time as the nicknames seemed to irritate our chief executive and it’s information I want from him, not to get his back up.

The problem for Ramsgate in all of this is that the area of the town that most needs regeneration is the eastern undercliff and without properly dealing with the flood risk any regeneration there could well be money wasted.


The pictures are of storm damage to Ramsgate’s eastern harbour wall.