OldNutter

Have a look here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-68440708

During the meeting, I am almost certain that I heard it said very firmly that the Peterborough Speedway licence is now in the hands of the Speedway Board of Control and that Buster had semi-retired and was no longer involved with the speedway team. If that is indeed the case, today could a big step forward with the plans refused and the ownership moving into new positive hands. It is quite possible that Peterborough Speedway Company Ltd might still technically still be owned and registered in Companies House to the the Chapmans, but it must be up to the SCB who actualy is legitimately allowed to race under the Peterborough banner - or am I wrong with that, Mick?

Well done guys. The plan must now to make sure that the track stays in whatever plans they come up with next. Butterfield went for the greedy option and got the biggest lump of houses and the leisure buildings for his pension fund, but the piece of land with the track, pits and stand survived pretty-well as is. (or what they have left has) The second FAILED application could be made viable if is brought back next time with the track in it. In the meeting, it was pointed out that the likes of Belle Vue has a track inside a housing development so it can be done. Oxford and Birmingham are not exactly out in the countryside eitther. Maybe the planning officers and councillors at PCC could make that clear to Butterfielld. That way, Butterfield gets his pension fund and we get our speedway without having to build anythig new! I wonder if the council would help and maybe Butterfield would put a 4/G pitch in the centre green?

I have had many insults over the years, but that one hurt. When the Labour Party effectively began the Green Belt in 1947 it was an attempt to make sure that the slums built by the Victorian factory owners would never be built again and tried to make sure that the workers would have worthwhile areas to live in. Anyone who listened to the proceedings of the Grenfell Tower enquiry and the new Government responses to the sort of repeats of the rip-off builders would realise that this government will not allow rip-off bojit and floggit developers and builders to repeat the minimum cost slums of the Victorians that destroyed the infrastructure of the country making big fortunes doing it. The new planning rules are going to be designed to try to move the new housing developments to be built where the locals want them and want them to be well designed to be worthwhile places to live - Local Plans are also to be strengthened. So I found a copy and studied the new labour Government 2024 version of the NPPF that is presently out for consultation. Guess what - even if the new modified 2024 document is accepted without any changes it will be too late to affect these two slum development proposals and the paragraphs I quoted from the Heritage section of the old Conservative document are not up for change anyway. Speedway has always been the epitome of working class sport and having a long lived heritage track within the local housing would be music to the ears of the 1945 Atlee Labour Government, so we should still fight this slum development and try reading the proper facts rather than rely on horrendously biassed dying newspapers.

Daniel, quota has nevr been any part of the argument so whether there is one or not is something we do not need to worry about. We have to argue within the planning system and make sure that the council planners are making the developers abide by the rules. Numbers of objectors are significant but it will be much tf they are showing that the rules that protect the speedway are met. Ideally we need to prove that the track etc are perfectly possible within the showground and tha fact that the proposd development is way over what was approved in the local plan and that there is enough space to accomodate the original number of houses and it is well within the bounds of the local plan with the speedway still there. If that means that AEPG must rebuild what they have vandalised in an attempt to prove that it is not viable, then so be it. If there are people who want the council to retainthe whole of the showground, so much the better, but we need to concentrate on why the speedway MUST be saved for the future whether the original numbers of houses get built or not. Ideally the track should be part of a larger sports site to improve viability.

I have only had a quick look at the main change but it is clear that AEPG have decided to try to completely ignore the existence of the speedway. The main relevant section that they have blanked is in the most importrant document in the system - The National Planning Policy Framework. When we object to the application we are advised that the main thread should be in relation to the NPPF. The document is here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/669a25e9a3c2a28abb50d2b4/NPPF_December_2023.pdf For us, the main area of interest is around Section 16 starting at paragraph 195 onwards where it deals with heritage assets. There can be both designated heritage assets and non-designated heritage assets and the speedway can be assumed to be one of these. I seem to remember the councillors trying to get designation for it along the way. Para 207 onwards is very important and we should find words to raise against the loss of a very long held speedway facility as a result of this proposed development. There are some words about not being allowed to destroy an asset to avoid it. This is the section of the NPPF that resulted in that section in the Local Plan about providing a new facility, so is important in the end-fight. We have got good support from the SCB etc that we can use to strengthen the heritage nature of the speeday and link it to the NPPF. I will be away for a couple of weeks, but when I get back I will have anothher go at my official objection.

There are some paradoxes created by the differences between house spaces approved in plans and houses built. Big developments up the number of spaces available to be built but reality kicks in when it comes to buillding and big developers tend not start buildings unles they are sold first. This modus operandi means that small developments tend to be sold much more quickly once approved. The government is actually more interested in houses completed because you cannot live in an empty approved space or a part-built one. Currently a 1000 house development would take upwards of over 10-15 years to be finished and I wonder if whoever takes a site like this can always afford such a slow income. And I would expect this government to look at removing planning approval if houses are not built quickly. This is not over by any means yet

What a load of piffle from Butterfield. Well done Dotty nailing him with some of those questions. "Have you ever been to a speedway meeting? The answer proved that he clearly has not. I wonder if he paid his last couple of quid for a programme so he could follow it?. He really struggled to remember if he really did, couldn't say when and how he could guess (yes GUESS!) how many people were there. The speedway club knew how many people were there because otherwise the council wouldn't let them stay open and stage meetings under safety laws And to say he wants to see a full business plan from the club before he will have a meeting in that last few seconds of the interview shows just how frightened he is to argue his case face -to-face. The speedway busines plan is nothing to do with him. Reverse that argument to him and see just how thin his fag-packet operation is. Filed records show three out of the four companies he tries to show are "AEPG" really have one director and one employee - HIM, an existence of a couple of years and a reputation of zero viable successful history. The other company that he took over from the farmers has two directors (one him) and about a dozen employees. He has no record of doing anything like this before, so put against the over 50 years plus of viable life for the Panthers, which one is the most likley to be true, viable and reliable? He is less likely to be coming up with the truth even by the standards of the politians we have been hearing from in the past couple of weeks! He must be using the same fag-packet suppliers as they clearly do - he certainly uses enough. His knowledge of what a charity can and cannot do is pathetic and to use the spurious arguments he desparately pulled out of thin air at the end of the interview gives me a great deal of confidence that he will not win this one.

Butterfeld doesn't get paid as such by AEPG, but he has borrowed some money from the tin and will get a big pot if his plans work out. I think you will find there is a huge loan/mortgage or at least a mortgage /loan facility somewhere in the web of one-man-bands and the loans are facilitated via some murky money operations. The whole of the showground and the operation to keep it in good condition is "owned" by Butterfield but will drop back to the loan controllers if he runs out of road on the way. Presumably, the Agg Socy will have either a big pot of cash already, or at least a promise of one eventually with it gets sold to the builders to be built-on. Orbit 4 sell and/or operate database asset software to Fitness Centres (used to be called Gyms in my younger days) to manage their equipment as financial assets (sound familiar?). They are connected to a company with the name webuygymequipment.com although they do not appear to have any connection with the AEPG spiders web other than via Butterfield and/or his contacts. Wherever you touch the Showground web, mid-2021 crops up as when almost everything was started to make it happen.

That is because he is the only employee of the company that he is the only director of and beneficiary if it manages to make any money from his only project. There is a bit of a theme running through that.

Absolutely right. It is not selfish to ask for something if the request is reasonable, which this most certainly is. "Selfish" is trying to sqeeze every last pound from your "project" so you can run off with your pockets bulging with cash that has been created out of thin air doing more harm than good. Butterfield will not be using any spades no matter what because he never intended to do that. His aim has always been to blow the price of the land way higher than it should be just so he can get lorry loads of free cash from bodge it and floggit building merchants who follow behind his personal gravy train. These developer leaches who take good agricultural land and up the price of it simply by getting by the planning system with outright vapourware are the main reason house buyers have to pay inflated prices for the houses that are finally built. Costing the time staff would otherwise be sitting on their bottoms because they have to be there anyway and charging housing prices for floor space in buildings that would otherwise be empty is not subsiding anything if it does some good - it might even mean getting an easier ride with the planners and locals! That hard logic is typical of the developer world and the recent very welcome moves across the country that have not just acepted all the vapourware from these selfish moneygrabbers have come as quite a surprise to those who thought they would be given steam rollers to flatten local views in exchange for running off with lorry loads of free cash. Instead of pretending that tens of mates mates pretending they even know where Peterborough is, writing notes of similar pretend "benefits" in the usual silly words Butterfield should maybe take note of the thousand plus real speedway fans from around the world and stop showing what an ignorant nothing he keeps showing us he is by pretending he is somehow doing the people round here a favour by exchanging their useful fully working green spaces for his bank balance. The sooner he takes that silly nervous laughing away the better.

Clearly after that performance, Butterfield knows nothng about sports club finance. Making £7,000 profit would mean that Panthers were more profitable than 90% of EFL clubs, but building houses over all the grounds in the country is hardly a vote winner. I hope the PCC will have a look at a definition of a great noun in the Cambridge Dictionary before making a decision about this one-man project, one-man band of vapour-ware companies pushing fiction and send him back to flogging gym kit software. The noun - "Snake-oil salesman" The definition - " someone who deceives people in order to get money from them: " Example - " In other words, don't take the ramblings of snake oil salesmen (like self-appointed cheerleaders who tout playlists and conduct seminars on how their "creative" views create solutions) too seriously"

The point Butterfield missed (either intentially, ignoranty or both?) is that following a professional sport team is tribal in nature. In this case, it is like saying that if Old Trafford closed, Man U fans could travel to Anfield and watch Liverpool matches - it's football after all isn't it? - wouldn't happen in that case any more than saying Peterborough and Kings Lynn are "in reasonable proximity" LP30 is about providing a facility within reasonable distance of Peterborough for the Panthers FANS to watch their team race for honour and league points rather than travel the better part of another hour just to see independent riders racing one another purely for a few quid.

The local planning issue round here that got cancelled a while ago has resurfaced in two guises. The plans that got rejected are going to a full blown planning inquiry and a new version with some very expensive alternatives that the developer doesn't really want to go to is coming in as a new application. I have have been sent documents about the inquiry here and the real key feature is that not only do all the documents submitted to the original failed application get the microscopic check, but it is possible to add new information that will be seen by investigated forensically by the inquiry from what are called "interested parties". That means should the EoES end up in a planning inquiry, anything that contradicts what AEPG have said in public and proves that they have lied along the way will be seen as long by the head of the inquiry as it has been submitted. So, all the lies around that recent press statement would be exposed as long as they are submitted by someone who knows the real facts. There is also currently a fair bit of positive press about the new British season and the increase in foreign riders wanting to ride over here in the prime league needs to be kept in play to counter those doom and gloom comments made by AEPG about speedway in this country going downhill. It will all help our case if the planing inquiry is called after the council and AEPG cannot agree on the applications.

Just a few questions - where are the school and doctors surgery going, how can he justify the comment about the EoES not being the home of the Panthers when they have been there longer than he has been an adult and where does the £70K loss come from? Finally, can we vote for the first target at the indoor axe throwing in the indoor sports hall?

While I was wandering through the planning portal looking how it was sitting within officialdom, I came across a list of important dates. One that sprang out was "The Agreed Expiry Date Sun 31 Mar 2024 ". Looking though Googledom it would seem that this date is important and signifies a seismic shift in the processes. It is apparently the date after which the first full phase of the planning cycle has come to an end with no agreement between PCC and AEPG and the process moves into the Government Planning Inspectorate. In the next stage, either AEPG can start again with a new plan based on the original one, or appeal against the PCC refusual on exclusively planning grounds. This is probably where the Local Plan really bites into things. This is where the Coventry Speedway manoeuvres lay for several years. If this process doesn't result in the plan getting approved, it goes to the Secretary of State and is where that end stage of the Coventry restoration came to in court. Because this phase is now potentially a long spell, the move made by AEPG to issue the notice to remove the Speedway Company assets (track, lights and fence etc) has become critical. Had they not done that they could have inevitably come under pressure to relent and let the Panthers resume activities. Those activities could have come outside of the league structure again following the lead that Coventry took when they moved a low team to Leicester for a while and had freelance meetings with previous Panther riders to keep the speedway alive in Peterborough. That tactical move might just backfire on EAPG because it shows bad faith and could be used to expose that bad faith in the planning process itself - never a good thing. I think I said in the early stages of the EoES application that the process is incredibly biassed in favour of the developer and can end up a very protracted game of legal ping-pong to sort out who has got the longest temper. For us, the longer it takes and the further it gets the more it will cost AEPG because of the loan charges they will incur and the more chance there is of of it getting binned when the Farmers lose faith with their chosen Land Developer. After all, from the reports, they have not been getting much in the way of charitable income already for a couple of years Our biggest problem is going to be the lack of visibility for us general public now the process has moved to the Planning Inspectorate. I suspect it will be up to the helpful councillors to keep us abreast of things.

Done on both. Sanitised, de-personalised and re-pointed.

That document on the PCC planning portal that gives the AEPG rebuttal of the speedway at the EoES is very telling. The obvious anger in the tone of it shows how much Butterfield is hurting and how much the fact that he had no idea at all about anything to do with speedway was in his mind all along.. The fact that he didn't even understand the position of speedway in the sporting hierarchy of the country is an obvious open personal failure on his part. It shows that he has had no intention at all of even considering speedway as a part of his thinking when he used the standard proforma approach to the development planning structure. That exposed level of incompetence has become personal now. In that document he has exposed the extent to which he was intent on only considering the bog-standard development type carbon copy that has succeeded when used by others in the past down south. That hollow personal crusade approach makes it very clear that the sort of activities that have made the EoES so valued by the community were never going to line his pockets to the extent he thinks he needs to survive. That makes him simultaneously both dangerous and vulnerable. The AEPG approach is to make a significant point in the low number of times a section of the EoES would be used for speedway. On it's own that simplistic outsider understanding is obvious in every part of the Butterfield plan. No separate proper spectator sport can ever hope to get close to making a profit without becoming a part of a shared multi-use volume occupancy. Even the new Spurs stadium has been designed to take in American Football, Women's Football and huge pop concerts plus more. Moreover, if you are shouting your mouth out about only allowing one more year of occupancy to anything, including speedway while you draw your plans up was always going to make sure that having more than one speedway team riding at the EoES was going to be impossible to justify. The lack of speedway in Peterborough is solely down to one misguided outsider. Any multi-use sport facility of the kind that anyone with a single brain-cell would contemplate to future-proof the continued community value of the EoES would have to be designed to accommodate a wide range of sports, both inside and outside. The areas under the grandstands could be able to house gym-type sporting facilities, squash, badminton, martial arts and so-on. The centre green could be used for grass type sports like local school football and hockey championships and so on. Add that to the fact that the local plan only approved 650-ish houses by including the LP30 sections because it was making sure that there were proper large spaces to carry on the EoES legacy of events rather than the Butterfield concrete jungle of houses, the hotel/pub that no brewery will ever want to take on and daft posh-boy psuedo-sports concrete shells, mean this ill-conceived pile of dross should be consigned to hanging on a piece of string in the smallest room so it is at least doing something useful.

Technically the existence of a grandstand is not on the list of "must haves" in the Speedway Board of Control Regulations. At the worst a few plastic seats screwed into a few rows of concrete steps was enough to seat a few oldies at Rye House just before it closed down, so as long as the steps are there and there are some seats on eBay, seating could be a feature alongside the current track. Peterborough Speedway Ltd is still apparently registered as a viable company at Companies House - normal sports operations are currently suspended pending agreement with the land owners for suitable land to restore the track/mandatory facilities to the satisfaction of the SCB and for a promoter to be appointed. The suspension was enforced by the lack of an agreement between the club owners and the developers. The planning regulations do not allow a developer to close down a viable sporting facility just for the purpose of development without making suitable alternative arrangements. (it looks as though that even applies to wonky pubs as well!). Suspension is not closure! And I am sure the fans are still prepared to object to the development of the EoESG.

Past viability can and has been used as an argument against development if the loss of viability is/was due to actions of the developer having induced the loss of viability in support of the changes. Clearly, the actions taken by AEPG when they took ownership of the management company for the Showground from EEAS in refusing bookings from all of the existing events can be used to prove that the closures were induced. That could mean that the viability evidence is already cast in stone, ready to be unearthed at the right time. The legal system has the capability to effectively wind the clock back if that is likely to affect material evidence. Add that to the consideration of precedence in legal cases such as may occur if the planning decision is taken to appeal and the case could well already be well established. Biding time can be a double-edged sword, and borrowing lots of money is no longer as cheap as it was a few years ago, making time much more of an enemy than it was a few fears ago.

I couldn't agree more with that first sentence. However, I seem to remember either last year or 2022 there was a big Monster Truck event in the infield - it did quite a lot of damage to the grass if I remember right! That sort of event and many other social events that need a decent open area with a grandstand for spectators could use that space a lot. Last year was a bad one for such things, because the last thing our owner wanted to do was any time marketing something he had little heart in other than just getting to the end of the season in one piece, but it could be done by new progressive management. Coventry and Rye House had Go Karts on the infield and the last time I went to Rye House just before it closed, there was a cross-country buggy course in the infield. Add the new rules about having to have at least two league teams and/or junior meetings and speedway would be a lot busier as well. Also, our position on the A1 would make the site attractive to the northern based Stock Car/Hot Rod drivers if the extra barriers were incorporated into the new fence that will need to be built anyway to replace the one that was taken down - Big Saturday Night F1 BRISCA Stox anyone?. That sort of spread of sport and community events was what I was aiming at, not the dead hand we were forced to have at the tiller last year because of the blindfolded Butterfield curse. We need imagination of the type that the likes of the Oxford re-birth that showed could be made to happen and we have a much better site for that than Oxford have had to make the most of.

Not really anywhere near the full story - Man City and West Ham for example. Most football grounds are owned separately from the club and oddly, it is the lower league league clubs that tend to own their grounds - Walsall for example have recently managed to return the Bescot ground to being owned by the club and are now paying mortgage cash not rent!.. The size differential between the likes of Spurs and Man U and such as Forest Green makes comparisons between football and anything else somewhat pointless. Many clubs (eg Man City/West Ham) who do not own their grounds split the ownerships into the football and F&B services income. Most EFL clubs only have between 50 and 150 actual employees. Most of the off pitch activity is business to make money not sport. If you actually look at most sports, the actual sport activity is minimal in a business/ownership sense and they would not even exist financially without all of the ancillary cash raising activities like F & B, overpriced merchandise, weddings and company meetings etc. If we are going to fight on to retain the speedway at the showground we will need to use all of the ammunition we can and delving down into real facts and tenuous supporting links will be vital. If you doubt that, have a look through the huge pile of paperwork that Coventry Speedway (who did own their stadium and lost the lot in the first instance) have released about their fight. The Peterborough consortium have quite a fight ahead and we will have to support them the whole way.

These sorts of stuff can be somewhat "imaginative" and even somewhat nebulous. Think about a football stadium - 24-ish days a year for 90 minutes probably equates to or is even less than a two-team speedway venue. Any team sport, particularly a geographically-based one generates supporters and they are a substantial element of local wellbeing. The loss of speedway at the showground could be said to reducing the numbers of the community in Peterborough from visiting other entertainment and eating/drinking local facilities to exchange chat about their local speedway team. I would say a major part of the value that Posh brings to the community in Peterborough can also similarly justifiably be used to support the need for speedway in the town ( at the showground, where it has been for years.) All meetings/events of the Supporters Club or equivalent also add to the community of a local sporting activity and improve the well being of that community. Travelling fans bring value to places around town like petrol stations, ev charging points, hotels and restaurants and lots of other businesses in the city. There must be many more things that come into this holistic view off the value of a local speedway team beyond just the actual meetings. And none of these are provided by loads of houses.

Looking through the Coventry files (well done to one of my old tracks - would love to go to their opening night!), it might be a lot better to stay where they are and fight for the whole showground to be restored to green uses as well as the speedway, If the grandstand survives the most likely damage usual in these cases, together with the car parking, superb access from the A1 and the security fences, it would be a helluva lot less for the consortium to fund in the first instance to justify carrying on where they were.

The owner of Brafield (Northampton) changed the old tarmac track to a shaleway a few years ago and there has been a lot of development done recently at Brafield to improve it so that it could hold the BRISCA World Championship in September and it made a great job of it and it also now has lighting. Firstly, would transferring Peterborough to Northampton be a good idea and secondly, would it be possible or wanted by the owner. The facility at Brafield is well away from any houses, so there should be no problems with neighbours. Just a thought as it is on the east side of Northampton and not too far from Peterborough and there is currently no speedway within an hour of Brafield. Obviously not ideal, but at least we would have a team in this area even if this is only a Plan B.