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Way back when, when I was once a city councillor, I did take quite an interest in the development of the Town Hall. It's a great building, built by public subscription in the late nineteenth century to be the civic centerpiece of the city to match the grandeur of the university's buildings all around it. I imagine it was a vibrant place, all lit up most evenings with balls and dinners. It has housed the main courthouse in its time and the main city library. It was the drill hall presumably for the locally raised militia. All sorts of things have gone on there.

There are all sorts of unused spaces, and it has become a little frayed at the edges and no longer truly responsive to the city's needs for modern twenty-first century entertainments. It's a dark blot on the city's main central crossroads. A site probably worth much more than it is on the books for. A fantastic opportunity. And I've kept in touch with the progress of various schemes to redevelop it over the years with interest.

I took a proposal to them from a shopping centre developer who was interested in developing the unused lower floors to sympathetically produce retail space that might help draw people in. And I took part in a consultation exercise back at about Christmas time 2005. And the one additional comment I made on my response was that in Open Capital Partnerships I believed I had a mechanism that would allow the City Council to carry out their redevelopment proposals without handouts and that I was very willing to help explain the idea to people.

So to say that I was pissed off when I saw this last week in the Oxford Mail/Times...

Council abandons plans for £9m Town Hall revamp

...was something of an understatement. Now I am sure people think that many of my financial ideas are completely barking mad. But when a citizen offers a positive possibility, surely the state and its representatives ought to at least hear them out. As it is, what was going to be an all singing redevelopment costing £9m is now going to be a lick of paint and a few new doors costing £1-2m. And that is still somewhat dependent on getting a handout from a lottery or heritage fund.

I was talking about a scheme that would not rely on subsidy and rent seeking, but bring money into the Town Hall as a viable investment for people, for the partners in the development. So I still reckon I could find a way of financing significantly more than what's been proposed this morning. But do they ask? Do they heck. A triumph of bureaucracy. There are so many ways according to the book of doing something and nothing else.

And of course councillors, being amateurs, in the best sense of the word - lay people - do not necessarily know to look elsewhere. When you see a report you assume, most of the time, that all avenues have been explored, and by people paid more than you to do just that. Six years ago one of the favourite meeting bingo phrases was "out of the box thinking". When the box is drawn by official experts who are not rewarded for taking the risk of innovation, and robustly built, it's very difficult to think outside of it.

Yet councillors are probably the only people who could get through. Unless they are actually invited, other experts and the general public seem viewed with suspicion - after all, most of the time when you consult, you only get responses from people with objections. I suppose I should just accept that however I put my suggestion over it didn't reach the right people. But I hope the possibility of resurrecting it is not now closed.

Technorati Tags: community land trusts, localism, monetary reform, oxford

In her defense of the surveillance state (sorry if I've misunderstood but that's what it sounds like!) at CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder there's one little sentence that gives it all away. She says:

There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days.

Maybe that's because there is no such thing as "the benign state", now or at any point in history that immediately comes to mind.

I find the story of Farepack's collapse heart-rending. Whilst I'm none too fond of the notion that Christmas is something that should put such a burden on families that they feel they have to save up for a whole year to give their families a decent time (I believe a decent time should depend on the people and the spirit of the festival not the material goods that go with it) those who have chosen a savings scheme, rather than a spend-now-pay-afterwards credit card Christmas, have been doing the really responsible thing. And they've been left completely in the lurch.

Not only that but Farepack also allowed people to become their "agents" and collect from friends and other family members, so there's bound to be a bit of resentment in some households.

Presumably Farepack would have to have been a licensed deposit taker? And regulated as such by the Financial Services Authority? Their collapse should I hope, be dealt with as firmly by those authorities as any - Barlow Clowes springs to mind. I know running a business can be a fine balance between keeping the confidence of your customers and dealing with what might have seemed at the time - in June or July when they knew they had some cash flow issues - like little mid-year difficulties that they were confident they could get over. But it's not as if we are talking about sophisticated investors here who might have been watching for signs of trouble, just people paying into a relatively simple conceptually savings scheme that would guarantee them some fun over Christmas.

So it seems to me that HBOS do have some responsibility here. They were issuing warnings months ago to Farepack, and must have known the nature of their business and their customers. To allow it to go on till mid-October, when there's really little chance of people being able either to get what payout from an insolvency they might end up with before it was needed for Christmas or rustling up the same amount of money to replace what they had paid in and now lost, seems almost callous.

Farepack and similar schemes started life seventy and more years ago as mutual savings schemes. Maybe they've got too big to have the kind of care about their customers and the local savings club did of its members. Would that we had more credit unions that conscientious savers could have used instead. After all, how difficult can it be - you collect money over a year, put it all on deposit, even make a little interest for the members in doing so, and then all club together and go shopping in bulk, and start again the following January.

I hope someone steps in and offers these hapless but responsible people some material comfort at what promises to be a pretty miserable time of year for them.

A little piece in a well researched blog on house prices around the world I keep an eye on:

Fighting over their castles:

"OF ALL the forces that have changed Britain over the past decade or so, the long bull market in housing is perhaps the strongest—and the most anonymous. High house prices have done their work quietly, reshaping concentrations of wealth and stoking clashes over supply. Other rich countries have had house-price booms too, but Britain's has been faster and more furious (see chart). And high levels of home ownership (Britons are more likely to own bricks than even Americans but less likely to own equities) have magnified their effect."

"Generational Equity" features highly too. Read it all here.