Centros Miller

An Example of Spin from Steve Bryson

August 1 2006 - Concerning the results of the residents Survey

This 27 July 06 email was sent to It's Our City, council officers and various media outlets by 'Sultan of Spin' Steve Bryson, managing director of Centros Miller's PR company, Halogen.

The draft results of the residents survey were released by Halogen, too late to be taken into consideration by the July 25th Council Cabinet meetiing which approved the planning delivery agreement with Centros. Mr Bryson seems to believe that he is dealing with a bunch of unsophisticated northern barbarians who are unable to see through his feeble explanations for the delay in releasing this information.

Mr Bryson says that he wrote up the draft results of the residents survey some time ago and included them in an updated draft of his consultation report which he believed had been sent to the council's officers.

Is Mr Bryson asking us to believe that as managing director of Halogen, he delegated this task to some subordinate and then simply forgot about it until he was pressed for information at the It's Our City public meeting held in the Town Hall?

He then continues to patronise us, saying that there is nothing secret about the results of the residents survey and he will put all our minds at rest by attaching the draft section of the report which details the results of the survey. He says that he modified the original questionnaire in response to several modifications suggested by It's Our City.

The truth is, as you can see from the original residents questionnaire and the one included in the draft residents survey results attached to his email, that a single modification was made to the form. One objection must have to the negative connotations implied by the option of industrial units in question 1 and small workshops must have been suggested; but note that he has not included small workshops as a separate option in the residents questionnaire, but put it in the same category as industrial units, which in the context of a residential area, would conjure up negative images in most peoples minds.

In fact 24.4% of people who filled in the residents questionnnaire voted for this option and it is probably safe to assume they were voting for small workshops which would benefit small local enterprises rather than industrial units; or maybe he expects us to believe that a quarter of local residents would be happy to live next door to industrial units.

It is also interesting to note that the city centre questionnaire did not include this modification to include small workshops and only 8.2% of city centre respondents voted for this option. Yet on Centros Miller's website their city centre survey results claim that city centre respondents were given the option of small workshops as well which is false.

Mr Bryson says that the results of the residents survey broadly correspond in many ways to those of their earlier city centre survey and show that there is a common desire to see a broad mix of uses on the site.

This is a very broad correspondence indeed and a sweeping statement which doesn't address any controversial issues. Another interpretation of these figures might say that the greatest majority by far of both residential and city centre respondents wanted a Leisure/Cultural Quarter. In that respect the masterplan adds nothing new but sweetens the pot for existing cultural amenities by tidying up their surroundings. There are many ways these surveys can be interpreted and as we have said elsewhere, the surveys themselves are shallow exercises which omit relevant questions such as those which mention traffic.

	City Centre	Residents
Leisure/Cultural	54.1	72.5
Open Space	25.5	56.3
Shopping	46.1	36.3
Housing	19.2	33.2
Parking	18.9	31.2
Small Workshops/Industrial Units**	8.2	24.4
Offices	4.9	8.5

** Bearing in mind city centre respondents were not given the option of small workshops

Mr Bryson made a presentation to councillors who attended a series of update briefings on 2nd March. A chart accompanying his email came from that presentation and is a graphical comparison of the figures from the city centre and resident's survey.

This clearly reveals that some councillors knew about the general results of the residents survey five months ago. This is our 'public consultation process'.

The feeble excuse given by Mr Bryson for the fact that he has not published the results so far is that there were initial distribution problems with the questionnaires (A second lot were sent out around the beginning of February) and he was waiting for the last results to come in after It's Our City had requested that late returns would be included. In his email he says that the flow of responses has only recently dried up.

We wonder what Mr Bryson means by 'recently'. Though he does not specifically say when the attached draft results of the residents survey was created, it would be reasonable to assume that it forms part of a report (Section 4.3 in fact) which was used during the briefings of councillors in March which he mentions. The final number of returns he says, is now 301, which is four more than five months ago. Is he asking us to believe that he has waited five months for an extra four responses in his purported efforts to 'make everything in Centros Miller's consultation as open and transparent as possible?' as he claims in his final paragraph. This assertion is utter claptrap !

Conclusion

It seems remarkably convenient for the Council and Centros Miller alike, that the residents survey results were only made public two days after the cabinet meeting on July 25th, despite the fact that Mr Bryson was made well aware of this issue over two weeks earlier at the Town Hall meeting held by It's Our City on 10th July. As presented to us, it is still the same draft which was available in March and presented to councillors at that time so why did he not make it available following our public meeting.

Mr Bryson pretends that he is bending over backwards to accommodate residents concerns, but the fact is that Mr Bryson makes his living by twisting the truth. On his website, he proclaims