OldNutter

Done direct

I took it as a challenge that most of us are stumbling around in the dark chasing shadows so I went digging for some basics of what could be happening. I came across a superb paper published by Manchester City Council that covers the machinations around the early troubles of the actions to get Belle Vue Speedway back on track after some seriously dodgy behaviour nearly took it and the National Speedway Stadium down around 2015-17. There are some cracking statements from the council towards the end that PCC would be wise to think about in justifying their involvement in the Panthers. The report is here: https://democracy.manchester.gov.uk/Data/Executive/20170308/Agenda/14_Belle_Vue_Speedway.pdf and I urge everybody here to read it. Another useful bit information is towards the end of this document: (Articles of Association of the British Speedway Promoters Ltd (BPSA) on Companies House). It is a very long read but is explains how speedway clubs are formed and governed. It refers to Members and says that they have to be operational Clubs. They can also be individuals or companies. Currently, there is still a Peterborough Speedway Ltd company with directors Cheryl and Keith Chapman. At first site it looks like it was worth an end of season operational value something between £0 and £10K. I would guess that Peterborough Speedway Ltd is still accepted as the "Member" for the Panthers registration with Keith Chapman as the club promoter and is the Peterbough promoter with BPSA and so was responsible to the Speedway Control Bureaux for running the Panthers. According to the paragraph 6.1.4 of BSPA rules they can remove a company registration if there is a change of control (eg no longer Buster &/or Cheryl in our case) so anyone trying to keep running the club cannot just take control of the company and keep the registration. Looking at what happened in the Manchester case maybe a new company such as Peterborough Speedway (2024) Ltd could apply to BPSA to be the authorised member for the future. Looking at the Manchester document, the numbers are eye watering and nobody in their right mind would try running a speedway team from scratch without the protection given by forming a limited company, some deep pockets and plenty of business experience to go with their love of the sport.

I am not the least interested in blaming anyone, but I am totally confused after this latest development. As far as I can see, Peterborough Speedway has currently got nowhere to race next year or any other year in the future as things stand. In my simple world that makes it exist only as an imaginary entity. If it cannot race and has no team, no track and no viable future. It has loads of fans who would like to keep the memories alive and get back to watching racing at Peterborough as soon as possible. As an imaginary entity surely it cannot actually exist in the real world. I am not sure how an imaginary entity can have an owner. It is worth bugger all if it is only like a puff of smoke. I asked a long time ago what is needed for a speedway club to exist. I still do not know. Chapman has lots of mates in the top layers of the sport and so is in a position to make whatever is needed in the way of permits to exist and complete in the sport, so could be an excellent friend to whoever has the wherewithal to get Peterborough Speedway running again. What that press release seems to be saying that he is the owner of this club that is worth the aforesaid nothingness but if there is anyone who can prove that they can bring our club back to life HE is the one who can give them permission to run it. In the meantime he wants to do nothing to actually move it forward but has given his permission for the consortium to behave as though they are the club owners. Again in my simple world, that is A about F. The consortium should be seen to be leading and Chapman should be feeding them any help and advice on how to sort things out and mates or not, the powers should be doing all they can to move to a point where the club again has something to own. I think the company registration should be showing the Chapmans resigning as directors ASAP and have the Consortium put in instead. Chapman has done that sort of switch quite a few times so he should be able to help it happen. At least that would look closer to a reality and add to the authority of the Consortium when dealing with the Council and everyone else, including the BSP. Or is it my world that is like a puff of smoke.

I am no expert, but I assume that for a speedway club to operate properly, it must be firstly registered with the BSP to get top level national ACU authority, be an operational business to trade financially and and finally have an authorised track to race on. Technically, Peterborough Speedway Ltd is still legal to trade and owned by Cheryl and Keith Chapman, as it has been since the end of the 2018 season. The principal place of business is registered at Kings Lynn Arena and registered office is in Downham Market! The two Chapmans also still own the current version of Kings Lynn Speedway Ltd as they have since 2021. The previous version of the company name began life in February 2016 but after a single season with that name changed it's name to become Leicester Speedway (2017) Ltd. in December 2016 when it was handed over by the Chapmans to Damien Bates (present BSP Ltd Director) until a couple of weeks ago. It's name changed yet again in February 2018 to the somewhat bizarre and slightly odd "Cool Runnings Motorsport Ltd". Bates handed it over a couple of weeks ago to Paul and Karen Cairns of Cairns Holdings Ltd. Looking at the latest accounts for December 2022, filed and signed at the end of August this year for Peterborough there is a part of a note that rather chillingly says " At the time of approving the financial statements, the directors have a reasonable expectation that the company has adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future". That last statement is worrying for us and if not true, puts the Chapmans in legal jeopardy because if we believe what Buster said over the summer, it was not going to have a viable track within the very forseeable future thanks to both him and AEPG. Either way it would seem that the club is still legally owned by it's executioner. The only alternative would be for a new owner to register something like Peterborough Speedway (2024) Ltd or even Panthers Speedway Ltd. They would then just have to get a track and registration from BSP and when you look at the structure of the top level that could be a bit of a fight.(not in my backyard?) Have I missed something though.

My apologies Bratters, my bad. Having done the sums again based on more realistic valuations I agree that I got the final pre-build values wrong and the whole site with full planning permission is likely to be more like £90-100m unbuilt. Using a better real basis using local figures Land A is about 18-22 usable hectares and at around 1.6m per hectare fully planned would probably be worth around £30-35m unbuilt. Land B would be around twice the size but at the lower density of housing is probably worth more like £55-65m. My original current starting values were based on it being undeveloped grassland and yours would probably have included the working Arena and a good chunk of ongoing goodwill that has been thrown down the drain. What it will be actually be worth after being packed down with permanent parked cars and lorries is anyone's guess. Thanks

A few facts. Sorry it is long, but I feel we are at or near an important crossroads and need to concentrate on the real enemy. The showground is probably worth about £1.3m as agricultural land. If planning permission was granted for the whole site it would be worth about £20m. The speedway site was in the area called “Land A” and that is about one third and could hold the 650 houses in the plan 23/00412/OUT. That land area represents a current value of around £400K as farm land and would have a value with full planning of about £8-10m before a brick is even laid. The Land 2 area is not likely to be worth much more than that because it would have schools and more of the support activities like the mini golf course, an unnecessary hotel and the overload 800 houses that are not required to meet the current city plans. AEPG is a one-man band that came into being in early 2021. Three subordinate companies were also formed around the same time from scratch.. AEP Residential AEP Land AEP Arena All four have one Director (no surprise who), one share of £1 and one employee Butterfield also took over the showground operating company off the Agricultural Society called East of England Showground Services Ltd. That company appears to be currently funded by the unplanned DPD contract now there are no events to provide any money for AEPG. The Access Earning Planning Group (clue of their business aims is in the name) has one project with one aim to get planning permission for 650 homes, sell the up-priced land with it’s planning permissions to a building developer, move onto Land B with some of the profit and get planning permission for as much else as possible. Be assured that none of those AEP companies is not going to build a single thing. The phase one master plan was to get planning permission for at least the 650 homes signed up by March 2024 in time for the next round of annual company reports and have it sold off to a Bodgit and Scarper to build the houses. Hence the need to remove the speedway to enable completion of the land sale ownership change before the start of the 2024 season, as AEPG has spelled out! The latest publicity stunt on affordable homes shows how detached with reality Butterfield is. The mix of unaffordable so-called affordable homes ( social housing to the rest of us) is likely to be changed as the builder submits variations to reduce their numbers because he couldn’t sell them. - it happened round here when a developer requested a change half-way through the estate build to reduce the number of affordable homes and was allowed to reduce the percentage to half overall by not building any more in the second half of the build! The critically weak points in the plan are to do with timing and content. Borrowing costs are mounting and the March deadline is looking unlikely to be met– they need a Plan B. The Land B development will not provide the necessary infrastructure or much more free money. Add the fact that the PCC planners realise, possibly as a result of all the objections to the plan by local and regional fans of the showground who coalesced around the emotion from speedway fans, that the showground is too much of a Peterborough institution to allow it to effectively be destroyed. As the PCC document points out, the current plans were going to effectively totally destroy the essence of the showground and replace it with a lump of houses plus schools, nurseries, medics, a load of infrastructure, poncy pretend pseudo-sporty stuff and that unnecessary hotel. The plan is fatally flawed. Whether a chancer from the outer reaches of West London is ever going to understand the power of local knowledge and emotion is unlikely. It is now either back to the drawing board or try this particular "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" scheme somewhere else with the wreckage of this one. The further away the better.

Bigcatdiary has spotted a document on the planning portal at PCC that all of us should have a quick read of (thanks for that). It is the one dated 22 Novermber and is listed with all of the objections. It brings their views out into the public following the meeting for the two planning applications that were turned down recently that should have curdled Butterfield's breakfast cereal. Probably the most significant bit of it is an overall theme that the tactic of splitting the site into two parts was a monumental mistake. Far from making the plans slip under the various portal doors, it has actually opened up the whole plan for what it is - an attempt to concrete the showground in an attempt to make loads of money in exchange for replacing a major Peterborough asset with little more than a thumbnail of silly unnecessary money making pretend sporting venues, a few corner shops and an unnecessary hotel. Clearly from this document, PCC planners, helped by local councillors lots of active locals and proper sports fans, have finally seen right through the whole charade. The tenure of that 22 Nov report is that the Local Plan was designed and passed into law with the aim of possibly adding a few new houses (although it is clear here that there are enough already on the planners books anyway) and keeping the showground as a working and very positive asset for the local area. The loss of all those events that Butterfield and his cronies actively killed off by stopping them booking the showground are highlighted in the report and it is very clear indeed that the PCC planners didn't buy all those sneaky tactics and saw them for what they were - a gigantic con trick. (applause please!) There is a section on LP36 that points out that the way the development has been planned does almost certainly not meet the requirements spelled out in LP36 to retain the character and use of the showground with either the two plans or a big single one. It specifically identifies the loss of the speedway in this part of their comments. The section on LP30 is absolutely devastating. It specifically says that AEPG should not have served notice on the club to take the safety infrastructure and lighting down to make the club non-viable. This is a loud barbed reference to the fact that making the club vacate the site is the real reason for Peterborough Panthers not being able to complete in speedway next season. It also highlights the objection by Sport England, so a second round of applause. please. I would venture to suggest that this PCC document is an excellent repost to any idea that Butterfield thinks it would be a good idea to appeal to the SoS against the first stage of the application that was so comprehensively rejected. A third and hopefully final round of applause please to all those who helped to highlight all of the flaws in this silly idea and let's make sure we keep our boots on their throats until the whole Butterfield gang are ejected southwards back down that lovely newly surfaced bit of the A1(M). I really do hope they will see the error of their ways although I am sure they will keep bashing away so we must keep our eyes peeled for the next chapter in this sorry saga.

Tomlin got the wrong end of the stick and AEPG were deflecting the loss of their income from them crashing the showground business. The speedway was providing the only business income at the time (apart from the somewhat "illegal" unplanned occupation by all of those cars and transporters) so in AEPG sums, all of the costs to keep the showground open were piled onto the speedway and that was down to not wanting anyone booking the place for anything that did not pay them direct and operate under their full control. So in the end they might have been being almost partially truthful in that it could have been costing them more than they were getting from the speedway but that was totally down to their stupidity in thinking they could walk over the council and locals and hire the showground space out to DHL to get all income with no expense. Their business plan was to clear the showground of all those pesky customers and use it as a gigantic grass car and lorry car park. What the 150+ workers they said would have been doing to fund AEPG,'s loan repayments is anyone's guess unless they were going to operate money printing machines in the Arena since nobody can tell them not to in their fantasy world.

Oh dear. That comment should quite rightly sound the end of anything they might want to do here. Basically they are saying stop telling us what we can to do with "our land" as is up to us what we do and none of the controls that apply to everywhere in this country apply to them. Basically sod-off and leave us to make loads of money concreting it over and if it is not what you want - tough. And as to running loss-making events at the showground, the charity has rightly made a lot over the years from running them all - if anyone has cost them all that income it is AEPG and their get lost attitude to all those events - just look at the latest accounts. Do they really think that there is no such thing as licensing (wholly controlled by PCC)? Who do they think controls the access to the site (controlled by PCC and HIghways England) (already pointed out to them when they tried to run an aggressive business without bothering with planning permission - oops!) Who will they want to take over all the roads and green spaces when they build them to plans passed by PCC (or not if they carry on trying these bully-boy anarchic tactics)? The site might be very close to the Great North Road, but the kind of behaviour at the heart of that sort of speech was outlawed when Dick Turpin was seen off along with all the other highwaymen. I can hardly believe they have actually said all that if thy are wanting to carry on trying to push this hopefully doomed plan onto the local people. I am not sure they have any more feathers left - never mind ruffled, let's make sure they are completely plucked when they finally head off back down the A1. Maybe the cold up here is affecting their thinking.

I used to think watching speedway was exciting, but it seems that Butterfield's mate's mates have invented something more exciting for the people around the M4 corridor to get their "excitement" fix. It seems that some of the sad clowns around there seem to think that waiting for houses to grow in the northern reaches of Cambs is exciting for them by the odd cloned objections overusing that adjective on the PCC planning site. They all appear need to use that odd sort of pre-formed property developer's English phrases to recently pretend they support the AEPG application(s). At least the majority of proper objectors still seem to be able to express their objections in their own words - I am sure PCC will be able to separate them. Not sure if it would be be sad or pathetic if I were to meet them in a "drinking establishment" round this part of the world in ten years time. Mind you I would probably stick to the pub.

Just come across a piece on the PT at https://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/people/search-for-for-jobs-saving-solution-goes-on-after-east-of-england-showground-car-depot-plans-were-rejected-4400651 that shows that the objections to the EoS closure have put an effective and very painful boot on Butterfield's throat. He has gone bleating to the council about the loss of 160 jobs if the DHL parking has to close down. The article also comes clean and exposes what we already know that the DHL contract is his way of paying his loan on the site for the next FIVE years and that all of the closures of events were so that he could get somebody to pay him more than the events would pay while he got his development sorted out without having to do any work himself. Clearly, all those showground events need not have been evicted/rejected, never mind the close-down of the speedway for quite a while and the plans might well have slipped through without all this hoo-har if Butterfield had been less greedy. It just shows how little research was done to study the local area and people rather that just opening a little office in the town and pretending to be a local. At least now we know just how little this gang considered the people of Peterborough and surroundings. The 160 jobs being claimed are just there to keep this awful lot in business to pedal their retirement fund plan along. I hardly think the prospect of the transporters and pollution from that depot for the next five years is quite in line with the aims of the farmers who created the showground before the magic money tree growers came along and not quite what all of the neighbouring residents had in mind until they heard this real truth forced out. Keep the boot on their throats and watch out for the next panic money-making plan to surface.

From evidence we have seen it looks like he has a very large loan to service so he is probably losing a lot of other people's money. And with interest as high as it is, that loan gets a lot bigger the longer it is not fed. Someone owns that loan and may be looking for some way to re-assess the risk profile somewhat. Could be "interesting" if the money drought continues much longer.

The showground used to bring a lot of jobs and money into Peterborough. The people who attended the events at the showground came from far and wide together with their money staying in local hotels and spending their money at the events and in the surrounding businesses. If any of the fictitious jobs from this fantasy development cannot bring that old value plus new money into the area, then losing the showground will be a net negative to Peterborough. This proposed development is already affecting a lot of people up and down the country, so I am sure that the council cannot just pull the drawbridge up and close their minds to regional and national populations.

Well done everyone. The training and sharing seems to have succeeded this time at least. Good Start. How long have they got to get out of their unapproved property out? At least the cold weather will stop the grass growing when they have gone, so will not need as many goats and cows to keep it down for a few months.

Not just that but at last a journalist who understands the problem and doesn't just spout the AEPG garbage as FACT.

They seem to think we are all as stupid as they appear. The majority of the added costs were probably due to the need to keep the whole site open without anything else operating there rather than changing it round so that the speedway was fenced with an enclosure in it's own area for operations, parking and security. The pre and post-match security alone to check that entire site would have swallowed a fair lump of cash that would not have been necessary had they not been so pig-headed as to keep trying to clear a part of the site that will now just rot away just so they could carry on pretending the speedway was no more viable than all the events that used to use the site that were evicted s well so they could make more money getting houses and roads built on it. The grandstand, track and pits were actually closer to the entrance gate than almost the whole of the rest of the site and could have easily been separated off for years. And I would have thought that the EEAS members could have provided loads of goats or cows to keep the grass short on the rest of the site so it was at least doing more good for the charity than just leaving it to waste while they get their act together for what is likely to be a 10-year plan at the very least.

Assuming the application goes to the planning committee, there are some really serious rules that the councillors will have to follow. Actual members of the committee will be voting on it after all the discussions at the meeting and the rules governing what they can and cannot do are very strict, so even if they have been convinced the application should be rejected, they must not say or do anything to display those feelings or they will be barred fro voting when it comes to that in the meeting. For instance they cannot really speak other than strict information only. This can be a bit depressing for people have objected because it seems as though the deck is stacked against them in the meeting - that is because it is. Facebook and Twitter(X) can be quite deadly in these circumstances. Councillors who are not on the committee can speak for or against the application, so it is worth identifying those councillors and making sure they get the majority of the lobbying . There is a document spelling all this out at:https://democracy.peterborough.gov.uk/Data/Council/20050914/Agenda/$050914 - Council Report - Annex A - Planning Code of Conduct.doc.pdf Sections 7.5 to 7.8 are worth a couple of minutes reading if you are going thinking of going to the meeting. Based on my experience, the chairman of the meeting will be ruthless about who can officially speak and how long they can speak for. Both members of the public and non-committee councillors will probably only get 3 minutes for their session. Where it can get interesting is if there is a decent number of members of the public there. Those in the public gallery cannot officially speak, but they can get a bit rowdy up to a point before getting told off (shades of "order, order"). For example, one of the official speakers will be the applicant (presumably Butterfield) and it would not be surprising for the public gallery to get a bit noisy when he comes out with the sort of BS we have become used to. At that point, the chairman will probably have to intervene to quieten things down (hopefully) but the level of discontent having to be put down can have the desired effect without having to use any words. For instance, nodding heads, rolling eyes, muttering etc of the sort you see and hear in the House of Commons, can work wonders for communicating discontent or disapproval without words or permission to speak and that can influence the members of the committee if they think things are not quite a as right as they might have thought. With the numbers of objectors to this awful plan, despite many of them not strictly in line with planning challenges, there can be no doubt about how badly the public consultation phase has actually turned out during the pre-planning stage and this is very important in the scheme of how the planning system should work. Huge numbers of objections are not supposed to happen in the way the system operates properly because the pre-planning moves are supposed to iron out all that stuff with proper believable realistic plans being produced in line with the Local Plan and local wishes - no surprises is the order of the day. And one final gem I picked up is that the plan as it has been tabled cannot be changed once it is presented, so for instance the planning committee cannot say it might work if you changed it a bit Mr B - he would be told he will have to go back, change the plan and re-submit it again once updated and go round again or appeal the decision using the law. It is a strict yes/no gate at that meeting and Mick has shown how important that looks like being to the future of the showground.

Very true. The figures make the AEPG one-man band look a bit smaller than an average corner shop except that at least some of the shops have a web site with more than barely a handful of old worthless pretence on them. Amazing what a few glossy computer printouts and a load of copy-and-paste imagination can pretend to portray. Trouble is that there are not too many speedway stadiums in Surrey to copy pictures from. But they must be registered with HMRC otherwise they wouldn't be able to use an offset from their tax to pay for sponsorship sweeteners.

That sponsor stuff is so straight from the Planning Play Book. Biggleswade had a similar raid made a couple of years ago when it looked like another 1500 houses were going to be built alongside the 4,500 that have just about finished here after around 10 years in the making. There was a bloke running it and a publicity savvy female alongside buttering up the council. They bought a couple of pubs in the town centre that were going down the tube and promised all sorts of wonderful stuff happening when they re-built the two pubs. It all went to rats when the leading character started to believe his own rubbish and ended up service at HM pleasure for not paying loads of hotel bills he had racked up with the money he did not make quickly enough. There were a number of bizarre single use companies formed much like the ones at the EOS development now. That gang had previously developed some old land in Nottingham promising all sorts of wonderful things and loads of affordable houses. The final development ended up with the one of big building firms building half a dozen or so council flats, about a quarter as many new-build houses and none of the glossy shopping centre etc that was in the glossies. It's an old game, but the councils are so strapped for cash they are prepared to fall for it over and over again. Perhaps the best thing we have got going for us is that the original plans for the showground did not even acknowledge the existence of the speedway in their plans, let alone even spell it in the so-called master plan. I would even venture they did not even know that such a sport existed. They do now and I hope that will come as so much of a shock that they think of how they can get it sorted for as little as possible other money as possible, other wise, the gravy train will be doing an HS2 with any luck. I hope they now fully understand that speedway does exist and there ar a lot of people pushing for it to continue existing. Maybe they could be persuaded to build something like the National Speedway Stadium with the structures under the grandstands housing their sports village stuff. Most football clubs couldn''t exist without some sort of additional income in their grounds like conference facilities or gyms etc. Why not a speedway stadium the same here. Now that might get more publicity to allow the rest of their money machine to churn over?

Thanks Both. Trying to be a bit more accurate and only using information in the public domain, the operating company, East of England Showground Services Ltd changed hands between 2021 and 2023. There are now two directors, Ashley Butterfield and Lee Sharp. Lee Sharp became a director on 24 November 2021 and AB became the other director on 21 April 2023. That company pays £300K per year to the Agricultural Society for the Showground. The reason for that payment is not fully visible, but from the wording for it, is almost certainly ground rent on a Lease. The Agricultural Society has also openly agreed to sell the Arena and other showground buildings (presumably mainly referring to the buildings we would have seen around the track) for £2.75m by 2024 subject to successful planning consent. Finally for completeness, there are three single director companies clustered around the main single director AEPG company. Those companies are: Asset Earning Power Land (Aepl) Ltd Asset Earning Power Residential (Aepr) Ltd Asset Earning Power Arena (Aepa) Ltd All have a single director - Ashley Butterfield. East of England Showground Services Ltd has Ashley Butterfield and a Lee Sharp as directors This type of multi-company behaviour is commonplace in these planning-to-building uplift schemes. We have frequently seen oddball named single use companies that are presumably used for perfectly legal actions to do with legal, PR and tax activities. What we have also seen is the same sort of vague ludicrous promises that always evaporate as the development progresses to reality over the many years it takes to complete them. I note AB has described this development as "unique", much like all of the others were at the same early stage.

I think I may have found the key word to describe the current position. The word is "LEASE" As I understand it from what little is in the public domain, AEPG has been granted a lease to own the showground for an agreed exchange of gold and until an agreed date when theoretically the ownership reverts to the farmers decendants. That money for the lease has been borrowed from somewhere on surety that AEPG will pay it back when the planning application succeeds. The planning succeeding is absolutely vital to this money-making exercise because on that day, the land price will increase from being farmland fit for farming to development land that has a set of agreed planning approvals. That value change is astronomical. However, that will only actually become "money" rather than "value" when somebody buys the LEASE off AEPG at the new very much higher rate that development land commands rather than farming land (expect someone like Bellway (- known round here as Bojjit and Floggit) to buy AEPG out. AEPG will then melt back to the Home Counties and probably never be seen again once the money has been extracted from the company and this legal money making scheme closes and the building company get building and flogging to recover the money they will have given to AEPG in exchange for the LEASE with planning consent. Looking at that word again, the speedway equipment/grandstand etc (probably not the air fence because that is a relatively new addition and is not stuck down )will have been sitting there as a result of an agreement with whoever owns the club whereby they have LEASED the site on an agreement and cost basis until the LEASE expires. That LEASE expiry date is the point at which the club no longer has any right to sit on that bit of land and could, in theory allow it all to be owned by AEPG because while they have a valid LEASE they effectively own the land for the duration of their LEASE with the farmers.. That scenario would certainly explain the timing and the language over the past year or so. Stage 1 of the original plan was when AEPG bought the showground LEASE and tried to shut the speedway down in the early summer to make it non-viable before going for the planning application. An exchange of money probably occurred to AEPG when we began hearing that due to some "friendly talking" (AKA some more dosh), the LEASE was extended to a date in October not long after next Saturday making it possible to get to the end of this season. That could explain why everything was "must end - that was the date at the end of the LEASE Extension. Clearly, LEASES and LEASE Extensions for car storage are much more cost-effective than speedway and the cost of extending the speedway LEASE was set too high for the club to survive. It is not beyond possibility because of this strange behaviour when the LEASES for the grandstand and track etc end that the whole lot could probably be owned by AEPG when the LEASE on the speedway site ends next week!!! And as long as the stuff on the land is not listed or something similar, if you own something you can do more or less anything with it. (as long as you take the relevant steps to stop any asbestos being mishandled) A grim scenario, but completely legal and almost certain. Paperwork probably already completed. The ending of the speedway club LEASE held by the whoever owns the club with whoever owns the showground is really the end of speedway for the foreseeable future at least and is really goodbye to the showground. Nobody wanting to do put their money and heart where their mouth is, no money, no LEASE extension, NO SPEEDWAY on the showground. A sad end to be effectively created from two words - GREED and LEASES.

What is Peterborough Speedway? We are not talking limited one-man band companies here, so presumably if someone gets BSP approval to run a season branded as "Peterborough Speedway" it would still technically exist and no amount of documents could prove otherwise. But does such a someone(s) with the necessary cash actually exist? It is not beyond the possibility that PCC could reject the current planning bid because it has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese and nobody wants to run the speedway racing while PCC sort out the mess that have got themselves into. I am suspicious old sod, but why does the last meeting publicity say "Farewell to the Showground" and not mention what or who is saying farewell to what from the showground. Is it a farewell to the showground for Buster but not speedway? The publicity also points to making contact direct to Buster's mobile if you want to sponsor anything at the meeting? I get the feeling we may have been peeing against the wind for the past month ore so in expecting anything positive to happen. I do hope not, but the next few weeks will be pivotal.

That council leader meeting a couple of pages ago had me thinking. Clearly the leader does not understand how the local plan should work. He talks about not spending public money to help the speedway. The public money spent on producing the plan was obviously spent. It is now time we should be getting some of that value for our spent money. The Local Plan should be used to ensure that developers develop in line with the overall city planning objectives, not just the developers pockets. The council are responsible for accepting or rejecting plans that do not comply with the local plan. The excuses that no members of any Western Home Counties golf clubs ever discuss the last night's meeting at Belle Vue or Foxhall will not wash round here. AEPG are FULLY responsible for producing plans that provide for compulsory elements of local plan in the plans they submit to the council planning department. Under the National Authority of Local Councils Guidance, the council can provide intermediary assistance between developers and existing property owners but the requirement to plan and pay for the re-provision of a speedway stadium in the EoS if they are not going to leave it where it is falls entirely to AEPG. If they do not, the council must show them the door The actions to insist in speedway at EoE ending this season and using that to claim non-viability are contrary to planning law and can be used to insist that these two combined applications must be rejected out of hand. AEPG, as current owners of the showground, would be fully responsible if there is any criminal damage to the speedway facilities and it is found that they either collude with the those potentially doing damage or order it themselves. (shades of the wonky pub and Brandon Stadium in Coventry.- same rules) Another interesting document if the footy gets too boring: https://www.nalc.gov.uk/library/publications/1634-planning-explained/file

Not expensive compared to the size of the mortgage they already hold that is designed to keep them going prior to the end of Phase One. That is the problem. the money tree harvest they are looking at would probably keep the whole of British Speedway going for tens of years. That is the scale of the unbalance in the British economy these days. How is it that a bunch of so-called petty consultants can put a scheme together with a few glossy brochures and a one-page web site with their previous absence of any previous experience and make almost enough to buy Manchester CIty FC without put lifting a finger to actually do any work that looks like being able to steamroller this plan through - UNLESS.

Just losing this application(s) will not settle this. If this application fails, they will have two options, they can appeal to the Secretary of State to overrule the council or they can opt to make some changes and hit the go button again, or both. Butterfield seems to be essentially a one-man-band who has managed some of those "health" clubs we are looking to get if he wins. with a convincing manner and not a lot else, other than a bunch of mates who want to follow him scrumping in the property magic money tree orchard. AEPG is a front that holds the operating company taken over from the Agricultural Society. AEPG has only got one director and assets of £1 according to Companies House. The operating company now only has two directors, Butterfield and a mate who is apparently the new CEO. The rest of the people who appear on the web page of AEPG are the groups, consultants and finance people who have put this dreadful application together. The money for the first part, while they wait for the cash flood to start once Phase One is built, comes from one of these so called partners in the form of a mortgage, thought to be somewhere around 400m -ish. Because the planning system is normally all a forgone conclusion, the mortgage would have been quite a reasonable bet when the package was put together so if the house of cards collapses, somebody is going to be in deep dodoo for a very long time. That said, and with that threat looming, the normal outcome is that we will see things getting very dirty. So even if we win this time, there will be a huge incentive to return using every trick in the planning play-book and the making money play-book, so be prepared.