The New Hospital: Collateral Damage and the Lie about Warwick Farm

The Lie About Warwick Farm

Below is a letter from Alastair Layzell which was posted on the Jersey Action group and which highlights the disasters of the processing of the new hospital. 

But I would like to look at another aspect of it - site selection.

When the Gloucester Street site was first suggested, Warwick Farm was off limits. The Government had approved it for use under lease as a hemp farm shortly before the sites were being assessed, and we were told in no uncertain terms that the lease could not be broken. So when Overdale was on the list of sites, the shortlist again excluded Warwick farm.

Fast forward to 2022, and we are told St Helier can get extra green space with a new park there, and lo and behold, the lease can be broken! My question is this: if the lease can be broken for a new park, why can't it be broken for a new hospital?

The site is ideal. Virtually no buildings, so no messy and costly demolition and removal of asbestos, and far cheaper. On a large main road, so no need for extra road widening schemes. On a main road, and therefore capable of good connections to electrical and sewage facilities. So why not? We were told the lease could not be broken. And now, the government, the same government that excluded it from the shortlist that gave us Overdale, has said the lease - which could not be broken - can be broken!

A foolish inconsistency, wrote Emmerson, is the hobgoblin of little minds. But a massive inconsistency like that is the remit of cheats and liars.

A building which will cause enormous collateral damage
by Alastair Layzell


It looks as if the fate of Jersey’s new hospital will be decided not on conventional planning grounds but by weighing up the ‘Balance of Harms

‘‘ The landmark idea was a theme peddled throughout the week. I sensed that the government had been forced to go down this road by an incident on the second day of the inquiry when their landscape architect, attempting to be helpful, produced four images of the hospital that had not been seen before. There were gasps from those attending the inquiry as they appeared on the screen. - Says former Planning Committee chairman Alastair Layzell

WHEN it opened in 1937 the terminal at Jersey Airport was a wonder – and controversial. Controversial because it had run far over budget; originally estimated at £30,000, the final cost was £127,000. A wonder, because it was the largest building in Jersey. Fast-forward 85 years and we may now be given a building which will be the biggest structure in the Island, in the most prominent position imaginable. One which will make the 1937 Airport building look like a matchbox.

The new hospital is the equivalent of eight Cyril Le Marquand Houses assembled on top of this small island we call home. At its highest points it is over 100ft tall. At 70,000 square feet, it is a monster.

At the planning inquiry, to which I and others gave evidence, the government attempted to make size a virtue. On the last day, in her summing up, the English barrister representing the government rested its case on three main planks. First, clinical need and urgency. Secondly, the suitability of Overdale – the Bridging Island Plan contains a policy which specifically earmarks the site for our new hospital (it does, but any application still has to comply with the general design policies of the plan). Thirdly, this has been designed to be a ‘public landmark’ and ‘one of which Jersey can be proud’.

The landmark idea was a theme peddled throughout the week. I sensed that the government had been forced to go down this road by an incident on the second day of the inquiry when their landscape architect, attempting to be helpful, produced four images of the hospital that had not been seen before. There were gasps from those attending the inquiry as they appeared on the screen. One of them is reproduced here. It speaks for itself.

So, if it happens, the hospital will take the ‘biggest building’ title, but it will also enter the record books as the development which does the most collateral damage. As I told the inquiry, it is not just Overdale and its immediate surrounds which will be affected. The associated works will gobble up agricultural fields opposite the site to make way for a multi-storey car park.

They will loom over the Mont à l’Abbé cemeteries and the Jewish Cemetery, the earliest Jewish burial ground in Jersey.

The People’s Park, site of post-Liberation Day parades, will be reduced to accommodate the new road network. The setting of Peirson Road, one of the finest rows of intact late-19th-century houses in the Island, will be damaged forever. And part of historic Westmount, where Major Francis Peirson rallied his troops for the last land battle on British soil, is to be dynamited for a new highway.

All that, plus the demolition of 13 houses, some of them newly built, two of them listed.

The list of collateral damage is very long, and unprecedented, and the arguments on this point were well made to the inspector at the planning inquiry. But I am increasingly convinced that the fate of this behemoth will turn not on what we would recognise as conventional planning grounds but on the concept of ‘community benefit’. 

The inspector devoted two hours to this on the last day and called the session ‘Planning Balance’. I prefer to call it the ‘Balance of Harms’. This is a point on which arguments have been less well made and not so widely aired. Yet, it is almost certainly the prime issue the Environment Minister will have to consider when the inspector delivers his report on 13 May.

In the planning inquiry, there was some common ground between the applicant and the Planning Department. They agreed that a building of the size of the proposed hospital contravenes almost every relevant policy in the Bridging Island Plan. If the inquiry reaches the same conclusion, and the inspector recommends the application be rejected, the minister can either agree with, and uphold, that recommendation, or he can disagree and allow the project to proceed. If he allows it, he will have to rely upon the concept of ‘Community Benefit’. In other words, he recognises that the hospital and all its enabling works will seriously damage the appearance of our Island – as judged against the government’s own Island Plan – but the need for it, and the urgency, means that such damage can be justified.

The expression ‘Community Benefit’ appears throughout the Bridging Island Plan. So does the phrase ‘Public Policy Objective’. At the planning inquiry I gave the example of a pair of scales with the new hospital building (which, in terms of appearance, any reasonable person would label a ‘disbenefit’) in one … and community benefit (a modern hospital to replace our ageing health provision, a replacement which clinicians and Islanders believe is long overdue) in the other. But I think the matter is more complicated than that. To the first scale must be added all the other disbenefits which flow from allowing the hospital building: the serious damage to other community benefits and public-policy objectives to which we are signed up. Some of these have been agreed by the States, some speak to common sense.

For instance, tourism is certainly a public-policy initiative. The hospital will be the first thing visitors see as they arrive by air or by sea; I suspect the building will be visible from the Minquiers. It will challenge the setting of tourism assets such ‘ as St Aubin and its bay, and Elizabeth Castle. It will destroy the view looking east from Noirmont. Holidaymakers who stand there may wonder at the huge hospital and then gaze on the coast of France – and wish they were there, instead. This is the ‘intervisibility’ which was discussed at the inquiry; the idea that some of our most precious bits of heritage are visible from each other and from Overdale.

Heritage is an important public-policy objective in its own right, even if Jersey came to it later than elsewhere. The island is a signatory to the Granada Convention and to the Valletta Convention for the Protection of the Architectural Heritage of Europe.

Last year, the Council of Ministers agreed new strategies for arts and heritage.

Of what they called ‘A 20-year vision for the heritage sector’, the council said: ‘The Heritage Strategy provides a framework which aims to help Islanders understand, value and enjoy Jersey’s unique and precious heritage assets, as well as ensuring that government can fulfil its obligations to protect and manage the Island’s heritage assets as per the international treaties to which we belong.’ The government was no doubt influenced by a survey undertaken by Jersey Heritage in 2016 which included the words (in the section covering environmental impact): ‘Heritage is a tangible part of Jersey’s distinctive and special identity, underpinning local character and generating a sense of place’ – 88% of local people agreed that heritage ‘plays an important role in modern society’ and 93% felt it is important ‘to conserve Jersey’s historic buildings to pass on to future generations’.

I take that to include the settings of those buildings.

Into the ‘harm’ scale must surely go the lives of the hundreds of people whose surroundings will be changed forever, either as neighbours to a hulking building or as residents whose outlook has changed from park to busy highway network with all its associated paraphernalia. Add to them the many for whom quiet reflection at the final resting-place of loved ones will now be spent in the precincts of a busy and noisy general hospital – alive, and illuminated, day and night.

Then there is the ability to enjoy parks – which can certainly be defined as a ‘community benefit’. The enjoyment of the People’s Park, Westmount Gardens and Victoria Park will undoubtedly be affected by the development associated with the new hospital.

Finally, put into the harm scale the irreparable damage to planning in general.

The Bridging Island Plan will lack credibility.
A dangerous precedent will be set.

Senior planning officers, who advised strongly against the scheme, will be demoralised.

Islanders will, justifiably, lose confidence in the planning system; they will feel that the Government of Jersey has been allowed to do something they would never be allowed to do. The single act of approving this building will undo all the good work of successive planning committees and ministers who worked to give the environment the attention it deserves (and which had been sadly lacking), notably the committee led by the late Nigel Quérée from 1996–2002. Approving a scheme which is so careless of all that work will, in my view, do enduring, harm to the credibility of the government and the States.

Suddenly, the scales are tipping alarmingly and the single community benefit of having a new hospital – arguably a great benefit when viewed in isolation – is being outweighed by the severe damage to a string of other community benefits we hold dear, and to the bond of trust between people and the body politic.

States Members voted for Overdale, though they did so in the face of repeated advice that it was unsuitable. They specifically ruled out reworking Gloucester Street or having a two-centre hospital. But that was before they saw the detailed plans for Overdale, before they saw the collateral damage, and before they knew that the Government’s own senior planners had advised the hospital development team that the hospital would break the rules; advice which was all but ignored. Now, States Members must realise that this hospital building will do irreparable damage to the appearance of island.
If the application is rejected, there may be a call for a different type of inquiry: one charged with determining how we got into this muddle.

If not an inquiry, certainly a series of investigative articles setting out the whole story. It is in the nature of drawn-out projects like these that the nuances of decision-taking are lost on the public. Islanders lead busy lives. It has fallen to a few dedicated souls to try to document the full saga. I have just finished re-reading The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the minutely detailed record of Richard Nixon’s last weeks before his resignation in 1974. The two Washington Post reporters realised that, although their heroic reporting of Watergate had achieved its aim, much had been overlooked.
So, they went back to interview the major players. It took a year.

Overdale is not Watergate, but the principle of thoughtful and unhurried analysis applies equally to both and might allow us, here in Jersey, to improve our political processes. For instance, who knew that on the long road to Overdale the Chief Minister held a series of meetings with backbenchers to take their views on the site for the new hospital? This was in 2019. The general view of States Members was that the Island Plan was inhibiting the process and that there were ‘ways to work around the plan’. Some even ‘voiced the need to change legislation to enable the planning process/public interest test to be smoother/quicker.’ In other words, Government should be allowed to change the rules to suit itself.
How refreshing, then, to discover that the current Health Minister held a different view. In response to a report of the Hospital Policy Development Board, he wrote: ‘There is a sense amongst board members that planning should be subservient to health and, indeed, this aspiration is recorded in bold print in the report.

The fact of the matter is that planning is not subservient to health and was not in 2012. Government has to comply with the requirements of the Island Plan in just the same way as citizens. Some States Members may wish to formulate special rules for government projects, but these do not yet exist.’
I could not have put it better myself.

" The hospital will be the first thing visitors see as they arrive by air or by sea; I suspect the building will be visible from the Minquiers. It will challenge the setting of tourism assets such as St Aubin and its bay, and Elizabeth Castle. It will destroy the view looking east from Noirmont. Holidaymakers who stand there may wonder at the huge hospital and then gaze on the coast of France – and wish they were there, instead.