Mick Bratley

The developers are not keen on appealing to the Secretary of State a) they’re skint and b) they pretty much know they’ll likely lose because of the Coventry precedent.

A ‘call in’ on a planning application refusal has never happened before, ever. I’m not even sure it’s within the councils constitution and the scrutiny committees remit to even do it. Looks like the legal department will have been working overtime for the last ten days.

That’s too far ahead, I can’t answer that right now.

The Grandstand was fine after our last meeting. Four months later a commissioned report by the land promoters stated it was to be condemned and would take over £1m to rectify. The thing is, if you pay good money for a report to be commissioned, it will generally say what you want it to. Personally I don’t think there is anything wrong with the Grandstand and it could be serviceable almost immediately, when the parts removed are replaced. It’s not exactly made of wood, cardboard or straw.

They’re currently trading insolvent and have no assets to repay their £1.3m debts to the Agricultural Society. So unlikely.

Either way, it’s for them to pay for it, if they want to be National and Local planning policy compliant.

Well they’ve just sold the Hilton half built Hotel.

I would love it to be council owned and rented to us. The council would never treat us in such a poor way as the landlord's did. And to be fair here, the landlords, The East of England Agricultural Society, probably, well most likely in fact, would have had no idea that the people who they had employed to manage the day to day running of events at the Showground had treated successive club promoters so dreadfully. There is one exception to this and that is the last venue director prior to AEPG arriving on the scene, he was a lot more fairer, worked with the club, not against it and the club was able to operate a little more comfortably. During the Andrew Mercer era of management, I cannot tell you what and absolute rubbish that man was. He absolutely got pleasure out of treating us so bad.

That’s really good to know. Thanks.

Our door has always been open for dialogue. Chairman of the Planning Committee has been seen today on video saying better or equal provision must be made for Speedway.

Just ignore him. Attention seeker.

If Carlsberg made councillors. . . . . She has been 100% with us since day one, we cannot thank her enough for her unwavering support.

Oh yes, just when you think he couldn’t get any lower he does. You wouldn’t have seen it on the livestream but when they came in he turned around in his chair and just stared at me and smirked for the whole of their speeches, he wasn’t looking at them he kept looking in my eyes, he was trying to goad me. Of course I ignored it, but hey we had the last laugh.

There’s a lot of scenarios now how a satisfactory conclusion can be achieved. We are certainly in a better position now than we were 24 hours ago. It is an amazing achievement from a group of seven blokes who got together to fight this one year ago. Supporters should rightly celebrate this moment, let’s face it they haven’t had a lot to celebrate in the last year, but it’s important to understand we have only won a battle not the war.

One quick story. At the World Cup event we held in the early 2000s, we obviously rented the track to stage the event, a sponsor of the event had his banner placed over a banner for the Showground, because they hadn’t sponsored the event. After heat 3 I was called to a crisis at the back of the grandstand, the CEO of the Showground was holding the join of the tv feed (to the world) and said if you don’t take the banner down covering our advert, in five minutes, I’m ending this and everyone can go home. I got a ladder and removed it. Also a lot of people don’t realise that even though we paid rent to run Speedway the Showground wouldn’t allow us to hire in and receive payment for food and drink vendors, they took all of that money themselves. More recently our supporters even had to cut the grass in the car park and spectator areas and do the maintenance on the Grandstand as well, just to operate. They were not good landlords.