Where facebook should sit in your emergency plan

July 19, 2010

Hare tracks in the snow by Space & Light

There are people sitting in offices near you right now imagining all the worst things that could befall you and your neighbours. They don’t want bad things to happen to you, rather the opposite. On the other hand they recognise that bad things do sometimes happen to good people and they would like to minimise how bad they get. They are called emergency planners, they work in the emergency services, local authorities and some other public bodies and this post is addressed largely to them. You might want to come a long for the ride.

Planning for emergencies

So the job of an emergency planner is to plan for an emergency which is (in case you were wondering) any of these:

  • an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom
  • an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom
  • war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom

(from the Civil Contingencies Act 2004)

And they will have a series of plans covering situations like flooding, widespread power failure or pandemic influenza. The broad framework of these plans is usually pretty simple (complexity is pretty-much to be avoided when it all goes pear-shaped). There will be a trigger to activate the plan, a standby phase, an activation phase and a recovery phase. Much of the plan will identify what people and resources are needed for each phase, where they normally are and where they should be during this phase. There will be mention in the plan of how to communicate with the general public. I’d like to suggest that emergency plans could keep up more effectively with where modern communications are going.

Triggers

Information is needed to trigger a plan. Sometimes this information is reliable and from an extremely reputable source. If the Environment Agency say that the River Severn has broken its banks, you probably don’t need independent verification. If the police receive a phone call saying there’s being a massive explosion then they are probably going get some more information before triggering a mass evacuation.

Could social media play a role in triggering an emergency response? If there is a massive explosion in a town centre you can bet that within minutes pictures will be whirling around the twitterverse. This should carry at least as much weight as someone dialling 999. Should 999-responders and local authorities be monitoring social media sites for emergency triggers? I’m inclined to think they should and, short of that, they should certainly monitor this space for additional information once they’ve received a trigger.

Standby

Good organisations go to standby an awful lot. It’s good practice for one thing. If in doubt go to standby because you can always stand down in half an hour.They don’t usually make a big song and dance because they don’t want to worry anyone. The emergency plan will have a check-list of things to be done on standby. Wake up the chief executive, open the emergency control centre, contact a series of staff and ask them to get ready to stop whatever they are doing and do this instead.

I think that the checklist should include the following items:

  • designate a #tag for this incident
  • announce on appropriate social media platforms that the organisation is aware of the incident and is standing by, ask people to use the designated #tag
  • listen out on social media for information about the incident and respond to questions and concerns in real time
  • collate all social media feeds in the opps centre

Activation

At this point, something quite bad will have happened and the public bodies (Cat 1 Responders as they call themselves) will be working hard to try to make sure it doesn’t get worse. If it is going to get worse, they will be trying to minimise the impact on people and the environment.

Once the emergency plan kicks in, it will no doubt include an item triggering an emergency communications plan. Emergency Planners, in my experience, like to see their in-house comms staff as a nice safe buffer between the people managing the emergency and the media. I’m not sure this was ever a sensible way to behave but I’m convinced that in the 2st century it is unsustainable.

Social media has several roles to play

  • it can be a very useful way of getting information out in a timely fashion
    People who use social media really use it. That’s where they are, if you want to tell them to stay in doors and close the windows you have to do it there. Not to the exclusion of other media of course but as part of the mix.
  • it will still have an important role to play in getting reports in about the emergency
    Rumour, odd reports, speculation all fly around emergencies. Emergency planning training in the UK focuses pretty heavily on ways to process this data and turn it in to useful intelligence upon which some decisions can be made. Social media adds to the volume of that mix but also to its richness with audio, video and photographs all available in an easily accessible form.
  • it can be used to mobilise resources not simply the “We need 4×4s and drivers” but also “please check on your neighbours”
    Barrack Obama used facebook to get his supporters to get out his vote. We could do the same. If we needed to.
  • it can also provide data and even information that is not easily available any other way
    There is something beautiful about the uksnow map.  This examines twitter for the #tag #uksnow and then extracts simple information to map the movement of snow across the UK. It’s a proof of concept you would probably not use it to plan a military operation. You could set up a map of your county ready to pull information out of the twitterverse. You could display reports of road closures due to surface water flooding (data that is very hard to get in any other way). People could spoof the system but would they? And in reverse you could use the same system to map information only from your own twitter feed. So if you open rest centres they could be automatically mapped for everyone to see.

Recovery Phase

This is the phase of most interest to local authorities who, in the way of these things, have the responsibility for looking after people and cleaning up. That can take a long time, I mean years. Emergency plans already cover issues such as how to provide practical and emotional support to large numbers of people affected by a serious emergency.

It is already common for facebook groups to spring up after emergencies to rally support for public appeals or (in the case of Raoul Moat) for less pleasant reasons. The emergency plan should anticipate this and indicate how the organisations involved should begin to respond. This is not about publishing the location of the Humanitarian Assistance Centre on your council facebook page (though clearly you should do that) it is about using the technology to understand people’s wants and needs.

And finally

Emergency Plans are plans for organisations that help them to manage their response. The wider public will be doing all sorts of things while this is going on and they will be doing it, increasingly, on social media platforms. The flow of comment and opinion and information there can’t be controlled by anyone. Public bodies can make sure that their accounts are authoritative and trusted but that can’t be done on the fly. If you want your facebook account to be trusted in an emergency that happens in 18 months time you need to start building that trust right now.

Social media opens up organisations, they become more porous, information slips out and moves around speedily. Lots of people get involved in managing emergencies and all of them will have mobile phones and (on current figures) half of them will have social media accounts. You cannot stop this back-channel and it’s not sustainable to ignore it. Emergencies will have to be managed much more transparently than we are used to.

I know that proper emergency planners are shaking their heads silently. They worry a lot about the resilience of communications (they like pen and paper, land-line and satellite telephones and big generators). Social media is remarkably susceptible to failure. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the plan but it does mean we should not rely on it. But actually that’s the case for all media.

Photo used under a Creative Commons Licence the original is here

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Do the right thing

June 29, 2010

Photo is "Do the right thing" by Wadem

PR people should be the moral heart of their organisations.

Now I know that placing the word moral in the same sentence as PR is likely to generate, well, at least some cynicism. It may sound rather wide-eyed and idealistic. Not many people call me wide-eyed and idealistic. Not if they’ve met me. My submission is that it is both pragmatic and prudent.

Let’s take, oh just at random, the hypothetical example of a global oil giant losing an oil-rig, killing several employees and pumping loads of unpleasant thick black oil into a small and beautiful sea. I know it seems unlikely but bear with me. What’s the role of the PR team in all this? Damage control? Mopping up the fall out as fishermen go around mopping up the oil slick? Making sure the company gets its side of the story out there? This is the “in case of emergency break glass” model of public relations. It’s not right and it’s not sensible.

PR Practitioners are often culpable in maintaining this model. We all like to think that we’re important, the go-to guy in the crisis, the safe pair of hands. Who am I to criticise? I’m an Associate Member of the Emergency Planning Society.

And actually, within the profession (PR that is not emergency planning), we know how to handle crisis comms. It’s pretty simple. React swiftly, do everything you need to do to make people safe and to put right what went wrong, say sorry, and listen with respect to and act upon the criticisms of your organisation.

In short: do the right thing.

I’ve got to float the idea that do the right thing might actually be a sensible way to run an organisation. It seems mad but possibly, just possibly, it might be possible to run an organisation that listens to others, that does everything it can to make people safe and not to screw up the planet and that reacts to problems swiftly.

Now there are lots of reasons that drive organisations to do the wrong thing. What they really need is someone trusted at the heart of the organisation to stop them.

Now I’m not arguing that this role is the exclusive preserve of the shiny-suited ones. Clearly the more people who behave in an moral way within organisations the better.

PR people have less excuse than others though. They are trained to be objective and detached from the groupthink. They are trained to see the organisation as others see it. They have (or should have) the interpersonal and communication skills to help others understand why some decisions are just plain wrong.

So there you are, PR people the moral guardians. That’s either an exciting vision of the future or a sad indictment on where we are as a society.

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Krazy kippers batman it’s a facebook emergency!

June 21, 2010

EmergencyIn my quiet moments lately I have been musing about how the changes in online communication alter things for emergency planners. Others, I admit, play tennis or watch the footy to relax. Each to their own I say.

First, let’s establish what I think is happening in online communications. Broadly, I think that communication has flattened and speeded up. The barriers to publishing finally went when decent blogging platforms were developed. The barriers to distribution have also crumbled with the widespread use of social media tools. Only a few years ago, emergency planners scared each other with stories about how quickly Sky could get a film crew on site. Now anyone with a phone can beam live images, audio, video, commentary, whatever you want around the globe before the incident officer has been woken from their gentle slumber.

There is some good news. Social media platforms are being used, right now, to disseminate information that the general public needs to know about emergencies. Visit the website of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command and you’ll see facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, del.icio.us, digg, rss and even e-mail icons ranged in serried ranks. With 1/3 -1/2 of the UK population on facebook it would be madness not to try to give them important messages via that platform. You can’t invent this stuff on the fly. Or rather, of course, you can but you don’t need to and you shouldn’t. It would be more effective to gather followers and likers in advance of an event. This will help to establish authenticity and have a whole army of distributors of your message. This is important. It is a strange and lawless world out there my friend. Some people seem to have taken bpglobalpr at face value. Well BP encouraged them to be explicit about the fact that it is a visceral, angry and penetrating satire.

This subject was explored a bit at localgovcampy&h (in a session I helped out with). There are a few (a very few) examples of local authorities using twitter effectively to communicate school closures (for example). The best examples (such as Newcastle City Council) already had an established and popular twitter feed. People use social media differently too. They talk to it. Not like people shout at John Humphreys on the radio but actually interact with it. Your carefully crafted public message will be challenged, added to, and argued with. Do you need to respond? Yes, yes you do.

We could go further. You could have a map ready to read your twitter stream and map whatever you push into the world. I can see this being really useful for a rising tide incident (literally or metaphorically) closing roads all over the place. That would be of interest to your partner agencies and the public and, well, all of us.

We could go further. You could have a map that reads twitter generally and maps reports with a specific hashtag. You could use that to map flood reports. People could game the map but probably most people wouldn’t and you could keep an eye on that. Imagine that, moderate quality information and no-one needs to answer the phone.

In any case monitoring social media seems to be a must, not just for lonely journalists and PR merchants but for anyone with a professional interest in knowing what’s kicking off.

In a future post I’ll look at the sort of things that I’d like to see put into an emergency plan with regards to online tools. If that would interest your good selves.

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Eurostar Christmas: what it means for you

February 15, 2010

Tunnel Vision

I’m a little bit claustrophobic. Not to the extent that it really affects my life but I’m not thrilled by the idea of being trapped in a small space. So, for example, the idea of being stuck in a dark train under the English Channel feels me with a certain amount of revulsion.

I overcame this distaste long enough to plough through the Eurostar Independent Review which was published on 12th February. It’s a surprisingly good read (if you can keep the mounting horror of what some of the passengers experienced from the front of your mind). And it has lessons for all of us.

What happened
You may recall that a bunch of Eurostar trains were stuck underground just before Christmas 2009. Passengers complained of poor communication, disinterested staff and a lack of organisation. The independent report has looked in detail at what happened and made a series of recommendations to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Here’s an extract from the report summary just to jog your memory.
On the night of 18/19th December 2009, snow fell in the UK, with even heavier snowfall in France. The M20 was closed, as were a number of roads and motorways in the north of France. In these conditions, five Eurostar trains travelling to the UK from Brussels, Paris and Marne-la-Vallée (Disneyland Paris) broke down in the Channel Tunnel.
The first train to fail was recovered relatively quickly. The subsequent four trains then broke down in rapid succession and passengers from two of them had to be evacuated onto Eurotunnel passenger shuttles within the Tunnel. This was the first time this had happened in 15 years of operation in the Tunnel.
Following the train failures on the Friday night (18th), Eurostar services were suspended for three days, causing severe disruption to thousands of passengers.
In addition to organising the rescue of passengers from Eurostar trains, Eurotunnel had to deal with 1,000 cars belonging to its own passengers that were being held in the Folkestone Terminal. Some 300 cars were also held in the Coquelles Terminal along with large quantities of freight.
Whilst the rescue operation was carried out safely, passengers on all trains were delayed for a very considerable period before they arrived at their destination.
It seems pretty clear that Eurostar did not have a plan to deal with multiple train failures. Now on one level you might say that, being as this had never happened before, that’s pretty reasonable. I bet it didn’t look reasonable to the people in the control centre. I’ve worked in control centres handling crises. You do not want to be inventing the plan on the fly.
This is always the issue with crisis or emergency planning. You are necessarily planning for unlikely events. How unlikely does an event have to be before you don’t have a plan? It’s a reasonable question. On the strength of Eurostar’s experience I think we have to say “quite unlikely”.
The report makes a lot of recommendations based on the management of the incident and communications issues litter the report like, well… litter. The links between control rooms was by phone. The report says video would be better. Communication with trains and control rooms, between emergency staff and train crew and between train crew and passengers should all be improved. The company’s call centre wasn’t operating 24/7 at any point. A train was stuck between the channel and Paris because French railways wouldn’t let it come back to Paris. Passengers at stations had little information and the same applied to station staff and anyway there weren’t enough of them.
Then there were the training issues. In some cases staff didn’t follow procedures and this made the experience worse for many passengers. Overall I think the authors have quite a lot of respect for a wide range of unnamed staff who used their training experience and judgement to solve as many problems as they could.

What this means for you

OK running high-speed trains underground and between two countries with different rail systems is a complex undertaking. Your solicitors’ firm is probably several orders of magnitude simpler.
Even so you should plan for unlikely but serious incidents (loss of the building, loss of your IT systems, being evacuated without notice, loss of telephones for 2 weeks just for example). You should test these plans. You should make sure that everyone you are expecting to play a role in the plan is properly trained and gets to practice. And you must make sure that you can have a huge amount of resource to put into communication. With your customers, your suppliers, and your staff. Much more resource than you think you will need.
This is a big reputational issue and there are two ways to approach it. You can take the risk that it will never happens. Or you can can plan for the worst.
You know that calm figure, often in uniform, who stands in front of the TV camera and says “we planned for this, we trained for this, we can handle this”. That should be you that should.
Image is Teleport tunnel! by orsorama and used under a Creative Commons licence

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United Breaks Guitars

December 8, 2009

Mashable has a fun post of “The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2009″

In at number 7 is the marvellous “United Breaks Guitars” a rather catchy sing-a-long number. As the song explains, it was written because Dave Carroll’s guitar was broken en route on a United flight and he felt that their response was not satisfactory.
He happens to be part of a professional music outfit. They made a simple and witty video, they mixed the song well. They put it on youTube.
And, so far, it’s been viewed well over 6 million times. It will stay there as well, just sitting there, waiting for people to stumble across its catchy refrain. Literally all I know about United Airlines is that “United Breaks Guitars”.
Play it to senior decision makers who don’t take this social media seriously.

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And now for some bad news…

September 27, 2009

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but it looks like there are going to be some cuts in public spending heading your way. Possibly savage, certainly significant. In a twitter poll run by the LGC asking for the big issues facing the local government sector my contribution was

“how to do a bit less with much less but still do what matters all with wide understanding and consent”

Clearly I am a master of pith and wisdom but the question you are no doubt asking is “what does this mean for communication in local government (and other local public service providers)”. Well it means you’re going to have to communicate cuts. Cuts are bad news of course and we don’t like communicating bad news, there’s a temptation not to announce cuts and hope that nobody notices. Press Offices will suddenly find that senior managers and elected officials are strangely reluctant to appear on the radio or address public meetings. The public will feel frustrated, petitions will be got up, rallies will be held, pickets may be organised. And if you’re not careful there will be u-turns, inconsistent decisions and commitments made in the heat of the moment being considerably repented at considerable leisure.

But, my children, it doesn’t have to be this way. OK you can’t convince people to be pleased that you are cutting their schools, or bus route or swimming baths but you can involve them in the decision. You can, and I hesitate to suggest this, treat people like adults.

1- Let’s talk about cuts. Everyone knows they are coming so let’s start talking about it. Let’s localise the issues and help people to understand what Alastair Darling or George Osborne’s weasel words actually mean in Selly Oak, Jedburgh or Kilpeck. Why not have a bit on the web site about spending cuts (under the fabulously useful link to swine flu information perhaps).

2- Let’s involve people. This bit won’t be easy because we need to involve partners, the citizenry and other stakeholders in a bit of abstract thought. Now people are pretty good at abstract thought (just picture where your car keys are for evidence) but involving people in concepts is always trickier than involving people in reality. Even so, it should not be beyond the wit of, well someone reasonably witty, to have a conversation about how spending decisions will be made. Not just in terms of what issues should be a priority but in terms of what other issues will be taken in to account.

3- Let’s share the burden. If you are about to take away Granny’s dial-a-ride service then I’d rather you weren’t simultaneously inflating your own pay (or allowance). You may deserve it, it may have no significant impact on the bottom line of your £900,000,000 revenue budget. Tough, just don’t do it.

4- Let’s be open, honest and clear. Let’s have press releases announcing the withdrawal of funding. Let’s not wait for a local journalist to get a call from an aggrieved volunteer. Let’s recognise that people are going to be upset and respect their positions. OK you didn’t get elected (or become chief executive) so that you can be beaten up on BBC local Radio every day but that’s the luck of the draw. Sometimes there will be mistakes, actions have consequences and some of them will be unforeseen. Let’s not hide from that. Let’s apologise and explain what’s going to happen as a result.

If you are clear, if your decision tree is transparent and based on a shared understanding of how these issues should be approached. If you do treat people with respect and explain your actions in a consistent manner then you might be surprised at how people will react.

No-one at a local level looked for this. We didn’t great a dangerously unsustainable property boom or allow dreadful risks to be run by critical financial institutions. We didn’t drive the country massively into debt to stabilise the global economy. We didn’t do any of these things but voters will make their judgement about those things soon enough.

We’ve just got to get on with the world in which we – all of us – find ourselves.

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Slip up

August 18, 2009

Now as you are aware people normally pay me for my professional advice and counsel but, just for you, I’m going to give you a piece of my wisdom completely free and gratis.

Should a woman give birth on the pavement outside your hospital. Do not, when quizzed by a reporter say:

“We are disappointed that Ms Blake was not happy with the advice and care she received and will of course investigate any complaint. We are pleased that both Ms Blake and her daughter are well and healthy.”

As PA reports a spokeswoman for the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust did.

Don’t do this because it makes you sound like a bureaucrat rather than a human being. Try saying:

“We were really shocked by this story. Clearly something has gone badly wrong. Of course it is great news that Ms Blake and her daughter are well and healthy but we need to make sure this never happens again. One of our senior managers is investigating exactly what happened and as part of that will be talking to Ms Blake as soon as they possibly can. But at the moment it sounds like we got it wrong in this case and we apologise sincerely for that”

Just a suggestion. And maybe put your side of the story on the web site..?

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Eeyore considers the ostrich

August 11, 2009

I am not, by nature, Eeyore. I like to think of myself more as a Tigger character. My glass is resolutely half-full, I am positive, I am optimistic. And yet, and yet, I find that I will tend to be the character in the corner fretting about risk, worrying about what could go wrong, appearing to be the donkey who got the thistles.
This used to worry me, until I realised that many, possibly most people, are ostriches. Confronted with hypothetical risks, they feel daunted, they feel out of control. They choose to bury their heads in the sand and hope that they will not come to pass.
I’m sorry to have to say it but they are wrong and I am right. The only sensible and rational response to risks is to assess them and work to reduce them. You can reduce them by making them less likely to happen or you can reduce them by making their deleterious impact less but reduce them you should.
In house PR people often love crisis comms, in theory. They see themselves as uniquely calm under pressure, focused, clear sighted while all around collapses. They may even have some talent at heading difficult comms issues off at the pass lowering the likelihood of a communications crisis hitting.
It’s less common to get them to look at the other side. How do you manage the crisis if it does, in fact, hit? Who makes the decisions? Who carries them out? Where do the resources come from? Have they been trained and exercised.
The Improvement and Development Agency has published a case study on how Hillingdon Council handled crisis comms relating to swine flu. It’s well worth a read and it’s not too long.
Two paragraphs leap out:
“Get your contacts and roles sorted straight away. Managing something like this means working quickly and effectively with a variety of people. Make sure you are clear on who the lead authority is and who your main point of contact is internally.”
“Think the unthinkable and be prepared for it. The media are always looking for the ‘new’ story around any big issue and it might just be your council. Put plans in place for the communications that you will provide at certain ‘trigger points’, for example, first case in the borough, first death, first in the council etc.”
Do that now, while there isn’t a crisis, while you aren’t trying to return 300 journalist enquiries or working out where you can park 15 TV crews. Work it out and then practice to make sure everyone understands.
Eeyore you see. Not ostrich

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Morpeth has much to teach us

April 20, 2009


In September 2008 there was bad flooding in Morpeth, Ovington, Rothbury, Ponteland,

Ashington, Newcastle and Gateshead. Several hundred people were evacuated and, for the first time ever, every fire appliance in Northumberland was out at the same time. It was, in short, an emergency.
The Northumberland Local Resilience Forum (that’s the committee responsible for planning and co-ordinating emergency response in the area) has published a report into the response of the agencies. It is well worth reading, with lessons for all communicators but especially local authority communicators.
The overall assessment of the report is one that would be familiar to anyone who has worked through civil emergencies in rural parts of England. There was a good response, staff worked hard and professionally and people were kept safe. However many things that were supposed to happen didn’t and many things could be done better. And one of the threads running through the report is communication.
The Environment Agency issued a series of Flood Warnings and the Police declared a Major Incident. These are words that sound like you know what they mean but, in fact, the organisations involved didn’t have a shared understanding of what the words meant and what they should do in response.
Using phrases and guessing or inferring what they mean is a pretty normal way to be a human being but it’s a real problem in emergency communications. Words have to mean one thing and they have to mean that thing to everyone. This is why the emergency services often have a slightly stilted way of talking. “Make Ambulances Four” is an unambiguous message on the radio “We’re going to need three more Ambulances down here” might be subject to misinterpretation.
The response struggled in handling wide communication. They needed to warn people that their properties might flood, they needed to ask people to leave their homes, they needed to discourage people from travelling to look at the floods, they needed to keep the media informed, let their staff know what was going on and co-ordinate and share information between themselves. They needed to get information out on-line and to monitor the airwaves and the net. They struggled.
If you work in comms in a local authority, take this as your cue to go and check the procedures for crisis comms because I’ll lay you a pound to a penny that they are under-resourced.
For a medium-sized incident (for such this was) you need to handle, let’s say 150 media calls per day, peaking in the day but coming in round the clock. You need to put information on-line in a timely and accurate fashion. You need to be getting ready to produce leaflets, posters, and newsletters. You need to be supporting your incident management team providing resources and support to Gold and to Silver and liaising with the comms teams of the other agencies involved. And you need to be working with the recovery planning team developing the communications strategy for the clean-up and support of scarred and fractured communities.
Got enough staff trained to do that for two weeks round the clock?
Thought not.
OK that’s clear enough for local authority communicators. What about the rest of us?
Well. The agencies involved in the response to the Northumberland floods have a legal duty to plan for and to work together to tackle emergencies and some of them deal with emergencies so often that they are called “The Emergency Services”. They train together and they train apart and they co-operate on planning and they regularly run joint exercises and they still managed to generate 44 substantive recommendations for how they could do this better next time.
If you read this blog then I know you have a crisis comms plan.
But: how often is it tested? are you using terms that might be ambiguous? when was the last time you held a live exercise? what would you do if the situation was worse than your planning assumptions?
So take this cue to dust off the plan and to test it in a live exercise. Kicking off at three o’clock on a Sunday morning. And see how many recommendations you come up with.
Photo is of Telford Bridge on 6 September 2008 by Tzdelski and used under CC-A-3.0.

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Wealden and Noel Edmonds (forsooth)

February 12, 2009

Dangerous stuff dealing with planning applications.

As every local government wonk knows, people miss the point about planning. The Council spends years trying to interest people in the planning polices that it develops to ensure that your district develops in the way that everyone wants. No one pays any attention. The Council decides that your application to build a delightful holiday cottage complex is not in line with these policies. Suddenly planning seems interesting.
Wealden District Council refused an application to build a home for a crippled soldier because it was not in line with the policies of the Council. Unfortunately for the Council, Noel Edmonds has a lovely new show and so Sky TV waded in on the act (as Mark Borkowski explains). The story went national and even the Prime Minister exhorted the Council to think again.
Now Wealden is a good council and makes good planning decisions. I know this because the Audit Commission says so. They also now appear to be inflexible, unpatriotic and abitrary. Journalists (like so make of us) do not understand the planning system and so it would be too much to hope that the outraged stories in the Sun or the Express would explain why they came to the decision they did.
It would not be too much to expect that the Council’s own web site would explain. But I reproduce below, in its entirety, the detailed explanation of the truth lying behind this national news story:
A scheme has now been agreed in principle which planning officers consider is supportable.
Mr Carter who is Joe’s grandfather will now submit a new application.  Mr Carter said “We have had a fruitful discussion and I am optimistic that the scheme will meet Joe’s needs and will receive a fair hearing.  I am grateful to the Council for being open to a new approach”.
Councillor Pam Doodes, Leader of Wealden District Council said “We have been anxious to resolve this difficult issue from the start and are glad that a solution has been identified.  However, this case has raised a number of deep concerns over national policy and I shall be writing to the Prime Minister urging him to issue further Government guidance on the provision that local authorities make for servicemen and women disabled in the service of their country”.
Another way of writing this would be

We’ve changed our minds because Noel Edmonds got lots of publicity for this story.

Which surely can’t be what they intended. Can it?

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