124: Court Short

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certipro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the Private Eye offices with Adam McQueen, Jane Jane McKenzie and Sarah Shannon.

We're here to talk about all sorts of things.

We're going to be talking about Wimbledon later on.

We're going to be talking about delays in the court system.

That's a, I should have made the Wimbledon court connection before starting that sentence.

And we're also going to be talking right now about something that's happening on the day we record this podcast.

So exciting.

The Government Investment Summit, the International Investment Summit at Guildhall, which is basically the British government saying, please can we have some investment in all our marvellous stable government for the next four and a half years.

And it's been derailed by a massive row about ferries.

It's not just a conference.

Literally, as we speak, they've just unveiled the After Party as well, which is being held not at Guildhall but St.

Paul's Cathedral with Elton John doing the music and the King turning up as well.

Yeah, they're not messing about with this one.

Wow.

Yeah, no, this is Kier Starmer's big flagship.

Let's get lots and lots of money into the country and be positive about things after a few months of being negative about everything.

And it was, as you say, derailed very slightly last week by Louise Hay, the transport secretary, going on ITV News and calling PO Ferries a cowboy operator and saying that she was cracking down on the way they treated employees.

Now, this, readers might remember, refers back to the incident in March 2022 when PO Ferries, as opposed to PNO Cruises, which is an entirely separate company, they had to take adverts out at the time saying, It's not us, honestly, it's not us, because everyone was so cross about this.

Rightly so.

PNO Ferries laid off no fewer than 786 crew with no kind of statutory consultation period over redundancies or anything.

It was just you are out of the door or out of the porthole, I suppose.

And they were replaced by agency staff who recently, the PNO boss Peter Hebblethwaite admitted, are only being paid about £4.87 an hour, the national wage at this point being £11.46 an hour.

And Habelthwaite was quite open about this.

He admitted to a Commons Committee at the time that they'd broken the law over this.

because you do have to have a consultation period.

And you also have to notify the government if you're going to make more than hundred people redundant at the same time.

Didn't do either of those things.

And Labour were very critical of that at the time.

And then the problem is now that with the big international investment summit, the owners of P ⁇ O, DP World, huge great shipping company, they were poised supposedly to announce a billion pounds of investment in various ports.

There's a London gateway port that we're going to invest lots of money in.

And then they heard these comments by Louise Hay saying that we don't really like working with rogue operators and we're very keen to come down on sharp practice like this and they said well maybe we won't invest a billion pounds after all and that's the situation we'd got to over the weekend well i remember this being quite a big story at the time what what were people saying about it then as ever you read it here first in private art because i've just looked back march 2022 uh here's a piece saying calls for p and o ferries owner dp world to be stripped of its involvement in two new freeports one on the thames and in southampton as punishment for its summary dismissal of 800 seafarers misses a critical point the group's deliberately illegal conduct surely disqualifies it from a role that involves enforcing border laws.

Well, none of that sort of nonsense now.

We just want their cash.

We want them in and we want that port.

And that was very much the reaction of Keir Starmer, who slapped down Louise Hay publicly and said that is not the government's position.

And I did some sweet talking over the weekend to essentially ensure that DP World did go ahead with this £1 billion investment straight away.

But I mean, that is a very, very different tune from Keir Starmer at the time.

Here's the quote from Keir Starmer when the redundancies were made.

It's just disgusting.

It makes my blood boil.

It's a complete betrayal of the workforce, was what he said.

It's not a very good Keir Starmer.

But he wasn't the only one.

This is the most extraordinary thing about it.

This was an enormous scandal at the time.

And the government at the time, who were headed by a chap you might remember called Boris Johnson, were quite happy to be very, very critical of P ⁇ O and of DP World, their parent company.

Boris Johnson himself said that it was a callous decision.

Grant Shapps, who was Louise Hayes' predecessor as Transport Secretary, said, we will take them to court.

We will defend the rights of British workers.

Another quote from Grant Shapps here, here: PO has ripped up workers' rights and hung them out to dry, which are the sort of things that you might think Labour governments might might come up with, especially in the week, the very week last Friday, that

they introduced their new employment rights bill into the Commons, which is aimed at cracking down on exactly this sort of thing.

But instead, we've just got sort of Keirstarma rolling over and saying, No, no, no, let's not make a fuss about this.

Yeah, and on a side note, is it really all right to have a party in St Paul's Cathedral?

I'm not seeing that as okay.

But also, remembering back to that time when the seafarers all got the sack, it happened by Zoom or text message.

I mean, it was particularly callous.

And then they sent security guards on board the ships with handcuffs just in case anyone put up a struggle and needed to be dragged away.

And then they wouldn't even let the poor seafarers back on to collect their belongings afterwards.

I mean, it really was the shoddiest kind of employer behaviour.

It absolutely was, and it was universally condemned.

I'm not, I mean, this is the extraordinary thing about it this week, as it's been presented, as is everything at the moment, as yet another disaster for Kier Starmer and this very sort of Westminster-centric story of kind of fallouts between the cabinet and how things are happening.

But it was absolutely universal condemnation at the time.

I'd had a look back at some newspaper editorials.

The Telegraph was saying at the time, DP World should be penalised.

Government can take away lucrative contracts to operate two of the UK's planned freeport schemes.

It's amazing when one billion pounds is looming on the horizon, everyone sticks their fingers in their ears and goes, la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la.

It's a Labour government's responsibility as well.

And of course the Telegraph, like, oh, it's another disaster for Starma.

Here's the Daily Mail editorial at the time.

This makes it really, really clear.

The government must urgently review all lucrative contacts it has with the firm owned by Sheikhs in Dubai.

A passenger boycott of PO would also send a message about treating employees so shoddily.

You might remember that was something else Louise Hay said last week, that she'd personally been boycotting PO ferries.

And they said ministers should should now think twice about letting so many of our key companies be snaffled up by foreign predators.

Well,

Louise Hay was kind of suggesting maybe they should, but no, not anymore.

Not anymore.

Sarah, you've written a fair bit about the kind of treatment that's dished out to sailors.

Sailors, seafarers, they have such a rough time.

They're in international waters all the time.

Shipping companies treat them really badly.

Yes, it was particularly apparent during COVID when lots of them got stuck on board ferries and cruise ships for months, if not years, and they were sort of hanging out, please give us some food notices on the side of their ships because nobody really remembered them, but they were necessary to sort of keep the ships going.

But more recently, in December, I wrote about PO ferries and what they'd been up to, because we'd been contacted by the two trade unions that look after the seafarers, and they were telling us that PO was using this recruitment agency called Phil Crew that was based in Singapore and use itself recognises this trade union that's based in Slovenia, which the International Transport Workers Federation doesn't recognise, and funnily enough, is completely okay with seafarers being put on contracts where they have to stay for 10 months at sea and are paid under the minimum wage.

And these were the people that PO was using to recruit their workers.

So that was the view back in December.

And I'm sad to say I don't think much has changed.

Because when the story happened, it was 2022, and there were big announcements made about what might happen next.

Grant Shaps actually came up with some reasonable proposals as Transport Secretary.

One of them was you come up with

routes between countries which are kind of minimum wage corridors, basically.

Because Britain's rights only extend 12 miles offshore, so you can only ensure that people are given the minimum wage at that distance.

But if they're sailing to and from, like, Dover to Calais, you know, and France passes a similar law, you can have a corridor, if you like, of, you know, decent workers' rights along that route, which is fair enough because quite a lot of ferries, particularly, go from Dover to Cada and so on.

Thank you, Dominic Raab, for that particular insight.

And, you know, there were reasonable proposals about this, but the fact is that DP World kept being given huge government contracts for free ports, all of which came with tens of billions of pounds of government support and tax breaks and all this kind of thing.

So the changes weren't really being enforced at the time.

And this is just one of those awkward situations where you've got legislation to protect seafarers, which was introduced to the Commons a week ago, which is why Louise Hay was talking about this in the first place.

She wasn't trying to scupper the investment, Barney.

You know, that wasn't really the plan.

But it's just one of those things where campaigning comes into contact with reality.

Because not to go completely Dave Spart on this, but it's this sort of Mandelsonian view that you make it a principle not to have any principles.

You just kind of go, well, we're not going to stand up.

Because there is a...

Another Blairite term.

There was a middle way on this, surely, that you say, you know, we are grateful for all, you know, it's great to have all of these fantastic people we want to invest in in Great Britain and the Great Future, but also, you know,

we're going to work with them on employment laws and make sure that they stick to our rules and pay their taxes.

You know, there is a sort of, rather than just rolling over and going, no, no, no, we'll have no criticism whatsoever.

And what it really, really reminded me of, actually, was that point when Tony Blair, do you remember when he cancelled the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the Al Yamamar arms deal, which dates all about, it was something our predecessor Paul Foote was writing about right back into the 80s.

And there was all sorts of stories.

I mean, it's a different sort of story, to make that clear, to a P ⁇ O story.

But it was all about slush funds and bribes and dodgy arms deals and things.

And it had been going on for years and years and years.

And Tony Blair just stepped in in 2006 and cancelled the entire thing on the grounds that it could potentially offend the Saudi royal family and risk the arms deals that they were trying to do at the time.

And it just seemed so sort of...

blatantly sort of Kitchen du-esque realpolitik.

But that was nine years in.

That was the point where Tony Bae was a bit kind of de-mob happy and about to hand over to Gordon Brown and wasn't scared of making unpopular decisions.

Starmer, we've got there in a couple of months, haven't we?

Maybe, but I think the DP World have had to change their hiring practices as a response to this.

They're no longer hiring international workers, which basically means non-Europeans, at a rate of about four pounds an hour, because of these transport corridors that were announced.

So that kind of is a difference there, I would say.

What I think is so interesting is how we're so sort of craven once somebody's in government about, you know, oh, you've got money for us, we're so grateful, as if it's some sort of charitable gift they're bestowing.

In fact, they're doing it for for you know commercial purposes they're going to be quite well out of this port they're going to make a lot of money out of running Britain's largest container port you know so we we don't have to be entirely you know schmoozy with them we can we can have a few reservations that was one of the things I mean at the time

even late prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate Ian Dale, even he was saying maybe we should nationalise P ⁇ O.

It was like everyone took a really strong line because it was such a clear-cut story at the time.

That's what I find so extraordinary.

It's literally two years ago.

And yet the mood on it has changed around.

And suddenly it's just become this Westminster story about yet another disaster for Starma.

In his first 100 days.

Well, this is something else I want to talk about, the first 100 days, because you see so many reports on it, and I assumed it was something that had been imported from America within the last like 10 years as just a kind of, you know, like irritating, confected holiday so that journalists have something to write about basically like Halloween.

But actually,

just a little quiz corner.

Does anyone know when it dates back to the first hundred days?

I do, actually.

Do you?

Franklin Bingo.

Franklin D.

Roosevelt, yeah.

Yeah.

In the 30s, post-Depression.

This is why we don't have you on off more often, Sarah.

You're too good at this.

It's Franklin D.

Roosevelt.

He introduced, I don't know,

you know the number of bills he introduced in the first hundred days, I'm going to be gobsmacked.

No.

77.

Oh.

And the huge changes.

Basically, you know, stabilized the economy, massive public works, and that was where where the first 100 days came from.

But he introduced it as a concept rather than everyone else saying, well, we're going to judge you on your first 100 days.

Because it's such a random amount of time, isn't it?

It's like three months and a little bit more.

Yeah, exactly.

Which also includes a long summer holiday for everybody and conference season.

That's all right.

There's very little actual parliamentary time in that 100 days.

Yeah, summer holidays when people were rioting.

Well, I did have a look back at reports of the previous 100 days of the last few prime ministers, obviously with the exception of Liz Truss.

Normally, either I'm going to do these marvellous things in my first 100 days, or my opponent is going to wreck the country in their first 100 days, or the first 100 days have gone badly.

There has not been a single prime minister who's had a great 100-day report from the overwhelming majority of the press.

It just doesn't happen.

Since Roosevelt.

Since Roosevelt, yeah, basically.

Boris Johnson rather typically got two first 100 days, one after he became prime minister and then one after the election.

Oh, so it reset the clock.

But his first one, after you know, becoming Prime Minister, so that was in July 2019.

You had his brother quitting the cabinet, you had lots of Brexit and the prorogation of Parliament, you had revelations about Jennifer R.

Curie, who was his tech advisor and kept getting you know invitations to trade missions and public money.

They are often actually quite indicative, which I found quite irritating, but I think they probably do set a tone.

Oh, dear.

Oh, God, that's depressing for the next three years, isn't it?

It's time to head back to school and forward to your future with Carrington College.

For over 55 years, we've helped train the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Apply now to get hands-on training from teachers with real-world experience.

And as few as nine months, you could start making a difference in healthcare.

Classes start soon in Pleasant Hill, San Leandro, and San Jose.

Visit Carrington.edu to see what's next for you.

Visit carrington.edu/slash SCI for information on program outcomes.

All right, well, let's talk about something more cheerful in that case.

Let's talk about environmental pollution.

Oh, Jane.

Well, a hundred days will be extremely quick going for an environmental agency prosecution.

At the moment, they're sort of running sort of more in the years.

A lot of cases that have been won recently.

And it's great that they are finally winning some prosecutions of illegal dumpers and people polluting and people stacking huge piles of tyres up in the countryside and so forth.

But if you look at the details of these cases, they're from years ago.

It's taking so long to bring prosecutions against people who are polluting.

Now, I would have thought that if it's an environment agency-backed prosecution, as it were, that they would be able to do things quite quickly.

But is it not really a function of that?

Is it more a case of what days are available in the courts and no one gets priority?

Yes.

I mean, some of these cases, I mean, they really do seem to have been pretty slammed dunk and often have guilty pleas and sort of the witnesses are environment agency officers who went on site and had a good look at the pollution.

So they're not taking years because they're complicated cases.

They're just sort of part of this whole mess that the court surface is in with massive, massive delays.

Now, I mean we're seeing the same issue with other kinds of criminal cases, prosecutions brought by the police, prosecutions brought by the health and safety executive.

I was writing about a case, well, a series of cases involving construction accidents last issue.

Was this the Balfor Beatty story?

This is the Balfour Beatty story.

They've recently had to pay a large fine for an awful accident in which a scissor lift was knocked over by a crane.

And one person died, and one person was really badly injured.

And they've finally been prosecuted for that.

But again, it's taken years for that case to get to court.

And in the meantime, they've had two other dreadful construction accidents.

Yeah, it was in your piece.

I think you said it was 2020 that this incident occurred.

Yeah.

And this is the fine has just been levied.

It's just been levied.

Now.

Because, as well as a sort of retribution kind of element to prosecutions,

there is a preventative one that people are learning from these mistakes.

Absolutely.

This is what the the health and safety sort of prosecution process is supposed to be about both the company involved and the sector should be learning from the cases so if they don't make it through the system for four years then those learning points are not sort of public for four years you've you gave a rundown of all the various fines levied against Pal for BT and the the learning appears to be slow the learning appears in fact not to be happening they could do better

I think yeah do the delays in the system mean that it's harder to prosecute because witnesses' memories have faded just like with a criminal case, you know, with historic cases are so much more difficult because you know defences can always use the well your memories

recollections seem to vary.

Several years ago, Your Honour, we can't be here.

Yeah, I mean it's a horrible situation.

It's sort of eyewitnesses' recollections, victims' recollections, and indeed sort of the victims got to wait years and years knowing that it's sort of looming to give give evidence.

Does this relate to their compensation as well that they might be getting?

The civil courts and compensation cases for sort of injuries and things like that also have years and years of delay at the moment.

The whole system is

the worst it's ever been.

Is this

a COVID thing?

So COVID was a big impact.

The barrister strike had a big impact.

So that kind of caused a big backlog.

And then there are some other issues.

There is a shortage of judges because

it hasn't been funding for trading up and providing new judges.

And there's a shortage of courtrooms because some of them are falling down.

Is that the concrete?

That is partly the concrete.

It's so nice when Toothridge Dovetail.

I mean, it's not nice, but it's just, you know.

All stories are one big story.

Yeah, I mean, apparently, half of all courtrooms are at risk of sudden closure at any time.

My goodness.

And that's worse in winter because one of the things that can cause closure is that the heating system conks out or the buildings leak.

But you don't need special rooms.

I mean, I know you do need special rooms, but surely you could just have a...

Can't we use the Nightingale hospitals?

I know they've been sold off, but basically, can't we have large open-air trials happening?

Just give over Wembley for a few months.

One of the things that's happening to try and tackle this, there is there are a number of Nightingale courts which are running.

Oh, really?

Now

they can only handle because they're in hotels.

Get me into the policy of that.

I'm sorry.

Do you think they could have come up with a different name for them, considering the Nightingale hospital reputation?

Sorry, they're in hotels.

Like conference rooms in hotels.

There's a number of they can only hold the kinds of cases that don't need like a custody suite beneath us, things like that.

But for those kinds of cases, and there are plenty of cases where you just need to all troop in and stand in front of a judge.

Right.

Yes, they're using a number of hotels around the country.

Because there is an awful lot of just sort of of administrative stuff that has to take place in a courtroom but can be done quite quickly.

I mean we've all done court reporting and quite often you'll turn up for the kind of the day's main event but before that there are three or four kind of processing bits or sentencings or you know

formalities that have to be done in front of a judge that they get.

But presumably that takes up an awful lot of time

as well, doesn't it?

So you know those are the things that if your case is cancelled that day and you know there's there's no room to hold it and no judge to host it, then you know all those little bits also get pushed back and cause chaos with scheduling.

Just to join all stories together, aren't our old friends Serco sort of slightly at fault because they don't manage to bring the prisoners in the vans to the courtrooms.

That is certainly another issue that causes cases to be days to be wasted.

Why are they not doing that?

They can't find the prisoner sometimes in an overcrowded prison, or they've got sort of underqualified drivers that find it hard to get a sort of difficult defendant to get in the van and they don't know how to handle them so it has to be you know delayed wow there is one proposal that what has been covered and i think it's in this month so this is um by baroness carte the lady chief justice fantastic title she has asked hasn't she for a a boost in the number of sitting days that crown courts are able to sit on that's right but she has asked for a boost of five and a half thousand sitting days per year she's been told that the increase in sitting days is actually going to be five hundred slightly under ten 10% of what she says is required.

Which means they're not going to be able to clear this backlog.

Doesn't sound like anytime soon.

No.

And the backlog, we should say, at the moment, just for anyone counting, is expected to hit 80,000 next year, which is a lot.

Gosh.

Is justice delayed, is justice denied?

And presumably, in the case of criminal trials, this means a lot of people being held on remand as well in the massively overpopulated prisons that we're having to release people from.

Also, at the highest number ever, there's over 17,000 people currently on remand.

And there is a deadline when you've got people on remand.

You can't hold them for three years until a courtroom and a judge become available.

It's six months, isn't it?

You have to let them go after six months.

Because they may be innocent.

You've

not actually been convicted of anything.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm still getting over this idea that all stories are one story.

We were living in a private eye-extended universe, which is fantastic.

Yeah, it does.

I mean, it does feel if they're increasing the number of days by 500.

And we should say in context, the total number of days that Crown Courts sit each year is 106,000.

So an increase in 500 is

a small boost, basically, half a percent, you know,

which doesn't feel like it's quite in scale to deal with the problem.

Are the Nightingale courts potentially going to help matters here?

But they're really only helping to pick up for the slack for things like Harrow Crown Court having a rack concrete problem and things like that.

So they solve the spacious issue, but not the personnel issue.

Not the personnel issue, they didn't.

right they're really expensive aren't they well i would imagine they're paying for hotel space is not uh not the cheapest approach okay here me out crime ferries right so we take all the ferries that we've seized from potentationalize and we just make them into roving

you know um courts oh i think charles dickens was quite big on sort of prison courts in the marshes wasn't he i'm not sure this is the direction everyone's a crazy one maybe we could more it in portland because that went really well

um okay but no, I mean, we do try and look for a sort of ray of sunlight at the end of some of these stories, Jane.

I feel like you're going to resist giving us one here.

How about if everyone stopped doing crime and like causing industrial workplace accidents and that sort of thing?

That would be reduced.

Just to be helpful to the country.

Yes, that's done so.

Patriotic duty.

We could stop with the waste dumping and we could all kind of just catch up with the ones that still need to go through the system.

Okay, that's probably about as good as we're going to get, isn't it?

All right.

Now I think we genuinely can turn to something a bit more cheerful:

tennis.

Sarah, are you going to ruin tennis for us now?

No, we all love the tennis.

And Wimbledon, obviously, beautiful grounds there in SW 19.

And the All England Lawn Tennis Club look after that.

And in their wisdom, they decided that they needed more land for tennis courts.

And this is because they're worried, apparently, that they're going to fall behind in the sort of league table of grand slams, which they've obviously got in their head.

But everybody else still seems to think Wimbledon's right up there.

But anyway, the All England club are worried.

So they've bought a golf club, which sat a local golf club, which was directly opposite Wimbledon Grounds in Wimbledon Park.

And they bought that back in the 90s from Merton Council with a covenant attached saying that there would not be any development on that ground.

Squirrel thought forward a few years and they paid £65 million to buy out the golf club members who included Gus O'Donnell, former cabinet secretary, and

God

and TV presenters Anton Deck.

They all got £85,000 each.

Yeah, I know.

They're so crushed, don't they?

Exactly.

And anyway,

they sold up, and that meant that the golf club was in Wimbledon's hands completely at that point.

And

but they weren't allowed to build on that.

Well,

the development plan, as was unveiled, involves putting 38 grass courts on that land and building, wait for it, an 8,000-seat stadium, which is

100 meters long, and also nine kilometers of paths and driveways to sort of service and go between all the courts.

So that was quite a lot of development.

And I know there are patches of green grass in between those, albeit with very short grass.

But the local people did feel that this was a bit of a travesty considering there wasn't supposed to be development.

It's in a conservation area and it's metropolitan open land.

And as anyone that lives in a city knows, green space is, you know, something that we have to hang on to.

And the idea that a big commercial organisation can trample on that is really unfair.

I've got a few questions about this.

First of all, we should say why we talk about this now, which is that the fantastically named.

Now, is it Jules Pipe or Jules Peep?

I presume it's Jules Pipe.

Deputy Mayor of London, either way.

Yes.

Because Sadiq Khan has recused himself from this matter because he said a few years ago, I think it's quite a good idea.

He did.

He's now removed himself entirely from the discussion.

We reported it, so Sadiq had to withdraw from

the discussion.

Well, so Jules or Jules Pipe or Peep has announced that it is going ahead.

Or rather, it can go ahead.

There might be something like a judicial review to hold it up or that kind of thing.

But basically, it has cleared.

Yes.

So first, yes.

So it has jumped the net.

So first,

Merton Council passed it.

And then because Wimbledon Park sort of falls between two boroughs, Wandsworth Council had to have a look at it.

And they didn't pass it.

So with a split decision, it had to go to the umpire

to, and that was City Hall.

And they've sit on a really tall chair.

I wish they had.

No,

they said yes, despite the fact that the local campaigners had got 21,000 people to sign a petition saying, Please don't do this.

And they'd drawn up lovely plans how they could restore the park to its original state.

It used to be a capability brown landscape park.

And

both local MPs, Tory and Labour,

supported these campaigners and spoke out against the development.

Fleur Anderson has spoken to Private Eye a bit about what she thought about it.

And she was at the hearing at City Hall.

And she said it was just very unfair because she felt that the burden of proof that the campaigners had to provide about damage to environment and loss of open space and so on was much lower than what the All England Club had to provide about, you know, their claims about boosts of employment and how they had to keep this fabulous reputation for Wimbledon.

Right.

I've been on the website of the Lawn Tennis Club and I've been reading their myth-busting page.

Not all of which is convincing, but one of the things they point out is it's just a golf course.

As in at the moment, it's not a public park.

We are not going to be using a public park, they say.

No public park is going to be lost.

It's going to be golf turning into tennis.

Why should I, as a non-competent...

Non-competent, I meant non-competent in either of these sports.

I'm also coincidentally non-competent at them.

Why should anyone mind that?

Really?

Really?

Yeah.

Well, I think green space is green space.

Whatever it's being used for.

It's a golf course.

I'm not allowed into it.

I'm not allowed to go public course.

You're usually allowed to wander on public paths around it.

Oh, are you?

Around the fairways if you're careful when they shout for and

dodge.

A grass tennis court must be one of the sort of least biodiverse forms of green space imaginable.

I mean, golf courses aren't terrific for biodiversity, but

there's a lot of like birds to kind of flap about on exactly and to put it into context they're having to cut down 800 trees to

do their development and and that's got to be a massive biodiversity loss.

And also if there isn't going to be a golf club there anymore because they bought them out, it could have been a public park.

I mean how do they get around the covenant saying you're not allowed to build on this?

Aren't those binding?

I mean

covenant sounds binding.

It does sound binding but I think that that you know Wimbledon was persuasive and has big funds and excellent marketing and good myth-busting pages on its website.

And

the campaigners, you know, they've been, I feel sorry for them, they've been slightly dismissed as NIMBY's, that they only care because of the view or whatever.

But yeah, they are going to have eight years of development with lorries trundling past them.

And they are, you know, but actually, they're not all sort of rich Wimbledon dwellers in big houses.

It's quite intensive housing around there.

There's lots of flats, and it is, you know, a green, open area within this that where they live.

And that's now going to be.

And Wimbledon have really sort of said they're putting some things out there for the community, but it's slightly crumbs from the table.

It's things like,

I think it's 20% of the area is going to be for public access, except during Wimbledon when that becomes a car park.

And also, the public is going to be allowed to use some of the tennis courts.

Well, that's really nice, isn't it?

But they're going to be allowed to use seven of the tennis courts for a few weeks after the tournament, and then they're closed again.

So I don't know.

This is actually the only time anyone plays tennis.

They get inspired by Wimbledon.

I've got a racket in the attic.

And then they either have heart attacks or get bored.

Yeah, but if we're trying to, you know, fight childhood obesity.

And anyway, the whole point is that these courts are here to become the new qualifying tournament for Wimbledon.

And that currently takes place just down the road at Roehampton.

So, you know, there's a sort of case of why do you need to do this?

And the campaigners are suspicious that it means, you know, more corporate expansion of, you know,

the nice marquees where you have your pims and strawberries.

So you can.

And I think they've said, haven't they, that they're going to get people, more people watching the qualifying stages?

Because at the moment, Roehampton can accommodate about 2,000 people to watch the qualifying.

If this goes ahead, it'll be more like 10,000 people who are able to watch it.

So it's basically more tennis all the time for everybody.

And they also say that, you know, it makes young players feel a part of the tournament.

But I don't know.

The cynic and me sort of things.

Well, it's the All-England tennis club.

They don't have to just be in SW19.

They could have done their qualifying tournament in Rochdale or something and actually

taken tennis to a new area and encouraged, you know, been a bit more inclusive.

So is it going to go ahead, do you think?

Is it going to go to judicial review as threatened?

I don't think it will, but I do think now the campaign and the MPs that were against it will sort of

swivel towards making sure that Wimbledon live up to their promises for community use and perhaps pushing them on those and persuading them to do a little bit more to make their neighbours happy.

Right.

Can I just point out that if it did go to judicial review, it would clog up a courtroom and thus become part of the private eye extensive universe.

Jane, you write a lot about

architecture development, dodgy or otherwise.

I don't.

What can be done to prevent this going ahead?

With your extensive rollo-decks of sharp practice by developers, how would you advise the campaigners to proceed?

There's nothing to go on fire, really, unfortunately, because it's all grass.

No.

I mean, there is that.

It is that planning process.

You can object at all the stages.

But ultimately, if you don't have the money to take things to judicial review, then you come unstuck at that stage.

So,

yes, I mean,

it would be to convince a benefactor.

to or or many through crowdfunding to fund your your next step it's interesting because someone who really hates tennis well really lost that fortnight when there's nothing else on telly.

Golf.

But that's it.

Both of these sports are very, very bad in terms of land use for the number of people you get playing the sport.

They're both really quite elitey, you know.

Whereas if you were all playing something, what's a much denser game?

I mean, football is a lot more dense.

Rugby's got more people in Rugby than you ever football.

Rugby, that's 30 people, isn't it, on a pitch?

That's quite a good use of land.

How many are a Kabaddi team or a Shinty team?

Probably the Eaton Wall game is actually incredibly dense in terms of land.

So maybe that's it's actually a much more egalitarian sport than we'd like to do.

Very good for the environment then.

Okay, so is it watch this space for the moment?

Yes.

For now, watch this space.

Watch this space.

Or if you would like to invest in Private Eye magazine.

For much less than a billion pounds, you can have access to a prime bit of real estate.

It's delivered to your door.

It's incredibly reasonably priced.

And it's full of fascinating stories just like the the ones we've been talking about today.

Go to private-i.co.uk and get your subscription now.

For now, that is it for this week's episode of the podcast.

Thank you so much to Adam, Jane and Sarah, to you for listening and as always, to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

Cybersecurity is evolving quickly and the visionaries shaping its future are gathering this September at the fourth annual Global Virtual SASE Summit hosted by Fortinet.

Discover how AI and the convergence of networking and security are transforming the way organizations deliver secure access to users and devices anywhere.

Register today at 40net.com slash SASE Summit.

It's one day of game-changing strategies you can't afford to miss.

Cybersecurity is evolving quickly and the visionaries shaping its future are gathering this September at the fourth annual Global Virtual SASE Summit hosted by Fortinet.

Discover how AI and the convergence of networking and security are transforming the way organizations deliver secure access to users and devices anywhere.

Register today at 40net.com slash S-A-S-E Summit.

It's one day of game-changing strategies you can't afford to miss.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be honest!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to equal!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.