An Irish saga at Southreef

You’ve heard of planners bringing development to a halt, but a foreign government?
We haven’t had confirmation, but it looks like that’s what happened with Southreef on Canal Street, which may be in the running for the prize of Nottingham’s longest-running development saga.
A £30m mixed-use scheme which occupies a prominent pitch in the city’s prized Waterside zone, it features a mix of apartments, offices and other commercial space.
Or it will do when it’s eventually completed. By any measure, Southreef was an ambitious landmark on an important route into the city centre and it ticks many of property’s most important boxes with ease.
Timing isn’t one of them, though. First unveiled in 2005, it finally got underway in 2007. 2007 was, of course, property’s annus horribilis, the year when a tidal wave of mortgage defaults pulled the rug from underneath any investment in bricks and mortar.
The problem for Southreef lies not in the design or the developers, all of whom have long-established track records round here. It lies with its backers, over-extended Irish banks who eventually had to accept bail-outs from the Irish government…in return for security in the shape of some of the assets they had title to.
These passed into the hands of Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (based, ironically, in Grand Canal Street in Dublin). Which is why an unfinished landmark in Nottingham has, arguably, been at the beck and call of the Irish government.
Administrators were called in to take over Southreef Properties, the business responsible for trying to finish the development, last week. One assumes that’s because no more money has been forthcoming from Ireland.
It won’t stop the development being completed. Southreef is already earning money from high quality office occupiers like Crytek and tenants inside its apartments.
Southreef will be a great development when it’s eventually finished, as it will be. Just as it may be a while yet before that happens, so it will be sometime before it shakes off its undeserved status as an outpost of the Irish economy.

What those customer services letters really mean...

I’ve been shaking my head in pity at Simon Dare’s vain attempts to get Virgin Media to wake up out of its self-satisfied slumber and realise that when it asks customers for their opinions it might not be a bad idea to turn its ears on.

It’s not fair to single out Virgin Media, of course, because I think we all know that the one area where consumer-facing businesses are always consistent is in being pretty crap at customer service.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer satisfaction surveys, the complaints handling or the new product roll-outs, this is what they really meant to say in that welcome letter...

Dear [insert your misspelt name here]

After carefully considering our own views, we’ve concluded that one of the best ways to continuously improve our business is to continuously empty your pockets (again).

Accordingly, we’ve decided to make a series of changes to your service which will make it cheaper for us to deliver it. That, of course, means that we will have to take a load more money off you.

These clear and simple amendments, which won’t make any difference to anything we do, are explained in the enclosed 96-page booklet of completely impenetrable terms and conditions.

We’re sure you agree that any ideas which improve service will make your life easier. If you can think of any, please tell our customer services team, because they’ve been a bit busy recently trying to flog you something.

If you have any queries about the changes we haven’t made, don’t hesitate to use our new, 13-stage process for getting in touch. Our advisers are always available to talk to you, as long as you call our premium-rate 0845 number, at an hour to suit you – specifically, 3am to 4am on the 12^th of Never.

If you have any additional comments about our service, please tell a mate down the pub.

Assuring you of dim-witted indifference,

Mr Illegible Signature

Head of Customer Response Analysis Programme

[C.R.A.P]

http://www.we’rebigandwe’velosttouch.com/

A lot of noise and a real scandal

I don't think there will be a single journalist out there who isn't concerned in one way or another about the hacking scandal.
It involved practices which are indefensible, often beneath contempt, and saw ordinary people suffer unforgivable intrusions and prominent people dragged through the mud for no good reason.
Journalism is a trade where gossip is a way of life, and at least a few of the 'revelations' about News International didn’t seem to me to be revelations at all (not least because quite a few of them – notably Gordon Brown's 'allegations' - appeared in a book published three years ago). Neither are they confined to News International.
Before mobile phones came along, hacking was preceded by private inquiry agents going through the rubbish bins of celebrities and politicians. Dark corners of the Metropolitan Police would exchange information for drinks or money as long ago as the 1960s. And Fleet Street's favourite bars have regularly been propped up by numerous fixers, fraudsters and chancers.
So this modern scandal is, I'm afraid, only the latest iteration of tabloid journalism's eternal desire to find ways of teasing out private, often embarrassing and shocking, information. Sometimes they have done so by routine inquiry, forensic guile or simple luck.
Hacking was not routine or forensic, though. It was brazen law-breaking. In particular, the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was despicably warped.
Beyond its extremity, the problem with hacking is the dirty 'principle' which lurks underneath it: for entirely commercial reasons, the end justified the means. The News of The World played with fire. Rightly, it got burnt.
The fall-out from this issue is not black-and-white, though, for three reasons.
First, the accusers.
No journalist will enjoy the spectacle of politicians wagging their fingers at the media and offering sage observations about the shameful decline of professional ethics. In that respect, many of them are long-term residents of glass houses and really shouldn't be lobbing boulders (and that includes Mr Brown, whose serial scheming and media manipulation is documented in Andrew Rawnsley's book The End of the Party).
Similarly, it is difficult to take seriously the lofty pronouncements of other media, not one of whom is a disinterested party. Some have unpleasant skeletons of their own.
Yet while their observations may be hypocritical and partial, they are all true.
What I do take huge exception to is the sly suggestion that if national newspapers did this then may be locals did too? This is self-serving nonsense for which there isn't a shred of evidence.
Local newspapers don't need to engage in vile subterfuges because they don't operate at a distance from their community. They depend on a long-term relationship built on respect, and any newspaper which stomped like a hooligan across its circulation area would pay a swift and heavy price. For the regional press, there is no logic on any level in tabloid bombing raids.
The second issue is where you draw the line in terms of privacy - which is, I suspect, what politicians will surely try to do.
Politicians and regulators have grappled with this issue many times before, struggling to come up with a definition which doesn't compromise the right to know or the right to privacy.
The issue has become more complicated still in the online era, where rules in one part of the world have been rendered meaningless by online publication in a different part of the world of the world which is available to all.
The third issue is one of proportion.
It is a clear matter of public interest when a prominent part of one of society's major institutions – in this case, the Press - behaves in an anti-social manner and betrays public trust.
But it is only a part of that institution. The direct impact of its activity is confined to a comparatively small number of people. The indirect impact is that millions of newspaper buyers were unaware of the basis of some of the stories they read.
Nevertheless, the News of The World is now history, so are the practices associated with it. An inquiry into Press ethics might usefully outline the bounds of acceptable conduct and how they should be policed, but I suspect it will draw conclusions recommending practices which are routinely followed by most of the media already.
The day-after-day prominence of the hacking scandal reflects not its importance to peoples' everyday lives, but the navel-gazing tendency of the media and politicians - whose desire to exert influence over the media is riven with self-interest (especially in the wake of their own expenses scandal).
The relationship between public, media and politicians does need to be a healthier and more respectful one. And the phone hacking scandal is a lousy reflection on media standards - perhaps another example of a period when the chase for financial reward led up a disastrous blind alley.
But this 'scandal' will not cause long-term damage to the social or economic fabric of Britain. Communities will not be devastated by it, no one will suffer enduring hardship.
My last blog was about the disastrous decision to deny Bombardier a rail contract. That is a scandal and it will cause lasting damage.
Yet in London, little is being said.