NEWS&views CAMPAIGN group Save Dartington’s spokesman and chair of planning at Totnes Town Council Georgina Allen explains the ongoing effort to preserve the iconic Dartington Hall’s great Estate.
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AVE Dartington is a campaign group set up in November 2019 in response to the firing and gagging of the last CEO Rhodri Samuels and the subsequent decision by the Dartington trustees to sell several fields in the village for development. We were very concerned at the direction of travel of the Hall and their public claims of near bankruptcy needed answering. It’s been a complicated and difficult campaign. There are about 1,800 people in the Facebook group and roughly 8,000 people have signed our petition. We have had articles in the Independent, the Times, the Western Morning news and the Daily Mail. There has been a lot of interest and an encouraging amount of help and engagement. There have been meetings of several hundred people, we’ve been on the radio, discussed on air and quoted widely. Originally our aim was to get the trustees to open up to the community. We hoped they would hold back from the sale of the fields and discuss with us other routes, less disastrous for their neighbours, but which would help them with their financial woes. We wanted them to continue in the spirit of Rhodri Samuel’s approach, which was to include the community as much as possible and to be transparent in their approach. Sadly that was not to be the case. I think it’s fair to say that most of the core group of campaigners, those who came forward at the beginning, have come to the conclusion that the trustees as a group need to change. We have no faith in those who are there any more, so our focus has shifted from trying to work with them to solve their financial issues together, to the position that unless the executive group go, Dartington will lurch from bad to worse. We haven’t reached that conclusion easily. The key thing in my mind about this group is the decision we made right from the start that we would not be a group who would demonstrate or oppose those at Dartington Hall; we wanted to work with them, we were very clear about that. We wanted answers to serious questions of
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course. Not one of us thought much of the management at DHT that’s fair to say, but we wanted to improve the relations between the Hall and the community and help solve the financial mess they had created and that was our primary goal. Dartington was too lovely, too important to let fail without a fight. We have spent a lot of time, energy and effort trying to do this. We originally approached the Chair Greg Parston to ask for a meeting, but there was no response until a group made up of XR and another campaign group Don’t Bury Dartington Under Concrete demonstrated outside the Trustees meeting and were eventually asked in and a further meeting was agreed. An experienced accountant in the group had constructed a memorandum of financial questions designed to help give a fuller picture of the Trust’s accounts and this was sent to Greg Parston in the hope that we as a group could help. The letter was never shared to the other trustees. In our first meeting, we asked again for some answers to these queries and also suggested some ways that the Trust could help finance itself. We were a very professional bunch with a lot of contacts that the Trust might have made use of, but it was clear at the meeting that the trustees were just going through the motion and our suggestions fell on deaf ears and our questions remained unanswered. This has been the pattern since then. We ask questions and suggest things, they ignore us. It turned out later that of course, despite denials to the contrary, the Trust were finalising the deal with Baker Estates, that their promises of limited eco style houses were inaccurate to say the least and that their financial situation was not quite what they were making out. They had also been approached by another local builder offering millions for one of the other fields, but for reasons known only to them, they had turned him down. One of our number began to investigate old business deals and sales by the Trust. Everyone knows that DHT has been living off its assets for over 50 years, but as Greg Parston put it, they now have nothing left to sell. They will continue to sell off land we believe, until there is no more land to sell either. After a few more letters and representations were
Photos by Gillian Modrate
The saving Dartington Hall Estate campaign
ignored, we went to the charity commission. A lawyer, an expert in equal rights and an investigator put together a letter of notice and then the nearly 30 page complaint. It is depressing reading, a list of mistakes made, people and businesses ignored. It paints a picture of a Trust contemptuous of local people, totally isolated and far too willing to sell off what they wanted to keep the illusion of Dartington as a great estate, alive. The charity commission promised to keep an eye on them. We then heard that the Trust had been keeping tabs on some of the people in the group and had created a list with personal information on it, which they attached to an all staff folder. This was a clear and alarming breach of data protection, which the press quickly heard about and which we went to the ICO regarding. Our hopes of working with the trustees had obviously disappeared and it was no surprise to hear that the fields in the village had been sold to a mass developer. The campaign is now focussed on two areas. We have one group working on issues of air quality in the village, talking to lawyers and SHDC officials and trying to limit the damage the development of the fields will cause and the other group is still looking to bring the Trust back from the brink. There is no financial plan going forward that we can see and as a planning officer from SHDC said to us, ‘the plan I believe is to continue to sell and continue to build and to do that until there is nothing left’. We very much hope that this is not the case, but the evidence we have to accept, points that way. l Visit the Facebook page Save Dartington and sign the petition to Save Dartington Estate here: https://www.change.org/p/dartington-hall-trustsaving-dartington-hall-estate/u/26730698
Editorial: 01392 346342 editor@reconnectonline.co.uk
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