Communication

This is the reality of 18 years of piss poor communication from Thanet Councillors. Promises made and broken by a series of Conservative and Labour Councillors and lack of a will to take the land back and develop it for Leisure.
This is the press release from FORS on the 1st of September 2014 and sod all has changed. The only thing to change hands is the Freehold of the land.

Dated: Monday, 01 September 2014

Re: Pleasurama Site

Following the release of the Cabinet papers today Friends of Ramsgate Seafront would like to make it clear that the proposed deal with the current builders Cardy allowing them to rewrite the Development Agreement with TDC is inappropriate and is the wrong use for the site.

Allowing for the caveat that Planning has been granted in 2004 and “work” had started it is unbelievable that TDC would still be considering allowing housing on this site despite their own call for leisure related activities in their own plan (Ramsgate Renaissance documents) in 1998.

Notwithstanding this we believe that 3 things are made clear in the new Development Agreement that will have to be signed by TDC and Cardy before building can start.

1. The Freehold of the site must remain with Thanet District Council and not be sold to Cardy or any other party
2. That the cliff face maintenance be part of the leaseholders responsibility as it used to be up until the current leases were assigned
3. That proper “due diligence” be done on the new developer to ensure that Shaun Patrick Keegan and his associates cannot benefit in any way from any profits ensuing when the development is sold

FORS want to make it clear that we in no way condone the Council’s actions however we understand the position past actions by previous administrations have placed the Council in a very difficult situation.

Further to this a previous member of FORS asked TDC in an Freedom of Information the following questions

Dear Thanet District Council,
Please provide details of any payments the developer(s)/buyer(s) of the Royal Sands Development, Ramsgate is/are contractually bound to pay Thanet District Council as per any legally extant planning permission, development agreement, contract of sale, memorandum of understanding OR any other document which might contain this information.
Where payments have or will be made please provide the following information for each amount:
(a) Name of organisation providing the payment
(b) Purpose of payment
(c) Date funds paid/will be paid to the council
(d) Details of any conditions attached to payment
Yours faithfully,

Their answer last May (2015) was to refuse citing the following answer

 Thank you for your communication received on 15/04/2015 where you
requested information about contractual payments regarding the Royal Sands
Development.
 
I apologise for the delay in responding to your request, it is the
councils intention to publish this information once the legal process
concludes so this information is exempt under section 22 of the Freedom of
Information Act and is therefore being withheld. 

So like any concerned ratepayer we all sat back and waited, well on the 20th July 2016 all contract work was concluded with the payment of the outstanding £3M and the required statement was made by TDC as follows:

"Thanet District Council can confirm that the sale of the former Pleasurama site on Ramsgate seafront completed on Wednesday 20 July 2016 with Cardy Ramsgate Ltd.
The council has received the monies from this sale.
The site has transferred to the south-east based firm who will be responsible for delivery of the scheme.
Once complete, the development is set to include a hotel, residential apartments, leisure/retail facilities, cafes, shops and a playground. This is in line with the existing planning consent.
The scheme is expected to employ up to 200 people. This would include opportunities during construction and jobs in the hotel trade, commercial units and in the servicing of the residential areas.
The council understands separately that Cardy Construction Ltd. has filed a notice of intent to appoint an administrator. The council does not have any further information in relation to this process at this stage.
The Sale Agreement for the site was completed on 13 March 2015. This marked the exchange of contracts binding the council to complete the transfer of the land.
As with the original development agreement, the council retains ownership of the cliff wall and completed works here in April 2016."

Now if you compare the promise to the actual it is patently obvious that the response last May is a denial of the right of the individual to have the truth. 

 18 long years Ramsgate has been waiting for this scandal to be sorted and time and time again what we get are broken promises. It has to stop. Administrations promise to sort out the messes caused by previous administrations yet all they succeed in doing is making it worse.

Follow the story on the original blog here http://pleasurama.blogspot.co.uk/

What do Friends of Ramsgate Seafront exist for?

In September 2014, whilst still the Treasurer of the constituted group I announced at a committee meeting that I was moving to Southampton as I was going to become a grandfather in May 2015. I made arrangement to sell up my business in the Medway Towns (anyone who has sold housing knows how long that takes) and get the business up and running in Hampshire. At the time the committee consisted of a few stalwarts like Dave Steele, Kandy Jones and a couple of others and thoughts were on managing Winterstoke Gardens and the possibility of another music festival.
However it became clear that Kandy was not going to have a festival working with Angela Stevens and by January it was clear it wasn't happening.
Reward for all an offshoot of the National Lottery Fund had granted us £10K towards the festival and it became clear this money would have to be returned as soon as it hit FORS bank account.
Mum became ill early February and was taken to A&E where I stayed all night. When I returned home to change clothes I received a phone call from Jones ranting at me over some FB comments and I realised that she had completely lost it. (She apologised later but it seems that was fake as well).
Communications were curtailed after that and I dealt with another committee member for the return of the unneeded monies and collated accounts up to and including the end of March and returned same to another committee member for safekeeping.

John Davis had never been part of FORS not even when it was a steering group. I have never met the man and I suspect neither had any of the original FORS members.
To make it 100% clear there has NEVER been any Covenant in any paperwork owned by FORS neither has there EVER been any mention of a Covenant at any meeting attended by either the steering group or FORS when it became constituted in November 2013.
This story is entirely a figment of John Davis's imagination and its terminology is incorrect as if it existed it would be a restrictive covenant attached to a piece of land registered at HM Land Registry.

The Covenant wasn't burnt in any fire at Ramsgate Library. What was stored in the basement at Ramsgate Library was old files pertaining to Ramsgate Corporation which was merged into TDC in 1974. Ramsgate Library isn't Land Registry and if it existed it would still be registered not lost in a fire in August 2004. Neither could it be in Janet and Geoff Woods files as they would have used it against Ezekiel's administration in 2004 when they campaigned against Royal Sands in 2004.

Neither have I kept it, destroyed it, or otherwise disposed of it because it doesn't exist. John Davis seems to believe in the existence of an imaginary piece of paper and it subverting a constituted group for his own ends. I will make this clear he has no personal knowledge of myself and can only have gossip pumped into his ear by a deranged person or people.

Yes John, research done by Janet and Geoff and myself. Janet's was borrowed and photocopied and returned. John's grasp of reality is extremely strange especially as he has no 1st hand knowledge of events. I doubt he can name any of the steering group, when and where they met and how many petitions they presented to TDC. Maybe he can explain just why no one used a restrictive covenant for leisure when the campaign ran from late 2012 to Feb 2014 to stop the Royal Sands from being built on.
Now as I said I have NEVER had any personal dealing with the man so all his information must come from someone close to him but it is obvious he has no idea how long I lived in Ramsgate nor has he any idea of how to conduct himself in a public forum either.

So John I saw you discussing this with ex-councillor Vincent Munday some while ago, and do you remember the advise he gave you. "Put up or shut up" when are you going to take that advise and while you are at it wheedling yourself into a constituted group to subvert it takes a special kind of person.

History of the Pleasurama site

The history of the Pleasurama site goes back many years and as we are all waiting for something good to happen I thought I would provide a resume of the site back to the start.

The site is based on land reclaimed from the shrinking chalk cliff and is formerly a beach and in 1860-1865 the land was bought by the railways and a massive tunnel was dug from the beach up to the top of Hereson Road with the chalk spoil being used to raise the beach level to build a station.

In 1926 the railway decided to transfer their station into Ramsgate itself and close the "Sands" station and the land was sold to Ramsgate Corporation and they decided to lease the land for Leisure purposes and it underwent a transformation.

All went well until the 1970's when two unrelated incidents occurred, firstly Freddie Laker invented the "foreign holiday" and Ramsgate Corporation was dissolved and TDC came into being.
To bring things closer somewhere around the mid 1990's James "Jimmy" Godden attempted to change the Pleasurama site and rumours abounded with plans for "Yuppie" flats which were refused until the infamous blaze in May 1998.

From then things went downhill with plans being refused and then granted but no work was carried out. Patience finally ran out in 2001 when TDC decided to CPO the lease from Godden however this succeeded only after a controversial offer to Godden allowing him to keep the insurance money in exchange for not contesting the purchase.

In 2002 the then Labour administration advertised the site see this link In the beginning

By 2006 with Planning permission granted to a shell company owned by Shaun Patrick Keegan a development agreement was signed by the Tories under Ezekiel and Latchford we all waited for building to start and guess what NOTHING.
In 2009 the Agreement was amended, again under Ezekiel, with Cardy onboard as builders and again no building started.
In 2012 rumours started circulating that the Freehold of the site was about to be handed over and this was the last straw for many Ramsgatonians who banded together to petition TDC not to hand over the Freehold to these landbankers. See link to Vindication

The development agreement terminated in February 2014 however because it was "poorly" written a way needed to be found to remove SFP Ventures (UK) Ltd so Cardy came to the "rescue" something that many believe was contrived to save the blushes of TDC officers and has little substance behind it.
See link to "Goldan Balls" link

Now we have the unedifying sight of UKIP being left holding the baby with the wrong paint being used to stabilise the cliff face and no work contemplated until June 2016 at least.

Questions that need answering
Lin Fairbrass, Cllr Suzanne Brimm, and Chris Wells there are some questions that need answering and then communicated to people living in Ramsgate.
1. Do Cardy own the freehold to the site?
2. Has the £3M+ been paid to TDC?
3. Has Shaun Patrick Keegan been removed as principal shareholder?
4. Have the Leases been revoked?
5. When will building work start?
6. Who is paying for the repainting of the cliff face?
7. What has happened to the £1M paid to TDC in 2009 as a surety to ensure the work is done?

The people of Ramsgate deserve better than these two pictures. It has been 17 years since it burnt to the ground. Get it sorted and tell us what is going on.