Exclusive: Company linked to former Boris Johnson adviser accused of gaming planning system in Sheffield

‘I feel I have been duped into lending my support’

Sheffield was still covered in a thick blanket of snow earlier this month when Joanna got a call out of the blue one morning from a mystery caller. The mobile phone number which came up didn’t mean anything to her, but she answered it anyway. “They seemed pleasant enough,” she tells me at her Parkhead home. Soon, the caller was asking her to support a local planning application and she began to smell a rat.

The female caller didn't identify which organisation she was ringing from but said she wanted to discuss “the current housing crisis”, which Joanna readily agreed was a serious issue. “She asked me whether I thought it was awful that there weren’t enough houses available for everyone who wanted one,” she says. “Then she said they were campaigning to build lots of homes for people.”

But the plan by Nottinghamshire-based developer Inspired Villages to build 125 new homes in a retirement village on the site of Dore Moor Garden Centre wasn’t something Joanna wanted to support. In fact, she uses the garden centre regularly and says it is both a valued facility for local people and a significant employer. Perhaps most importantly, the site also lies within the city’s Green Belt.

For the past few days, we at The Tribune have been trying to understand what led to the anonymous call, and have discovered it was made by a company linked to a former adviser to Boris Johnson, whose company is seeking to influence a local planning process in Sheffield. The piece we’ve produced is a members-only story, but as always on Thursday we’re sending the first part out to non-members in the hope that they will be persuaded to sign up. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join up now to read this piece and get all of our exclusive reporting, analysis and recommendations in your inbox every week.

This is the kind of journalism we can only do because of our 1,266 paying members. So much coverage of planning and housing in Sheffield and South Yorkshire amounts to re-writing press releases from developers. But stories like this one involve making lots of calls, scrutinising the claims made by companies and checking information that people have posted online. If you think journalism needs to be more than just PR, please do join up today if you haven’t already — a membership costs just 23p a day.

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Mini-briefing

🛝 Sheffield’s newest park will be open in time for the Easter holidays. Pound’s Park is part of the Heart of the City development and has been built on the site of Sheffield’s former fire station. It is named after the city’s first fire chief John Charles Pound. The council says the park, which will open on Monday, 3 April, features a 3x8-metre climbing boulder reminiscent of a Peak District rock face as well as a “significant” new children’s playground. Our piece from October last year about both the new park and the vital importance of play is here.

🏚️ A great piece in The Star by former Sheffield town planner Simon Ogden looks at the history of Campo Lane. The road first appears as a narrow track on a map from 1736 but the area started to change when Sheffield’s first bank was built at Hartshead. The road later attracted doctors, lawyers and was the centre of the city’s journalism industry for 200 years. In the 20th century it was devastated during the Blitz but in more recent times has reverted to its original residential function and has also begun to attract new restaurants and cafes.

🎛️ Another week, another piece about Sheffield’s DIY music scene. However, while our story last weekend was focused on the city’s indie music ecosystem, this latest piece in Time Out extols the virtues of Sheffield’s underground club culture. One place mentioned which I hadn’t heard about is a club night for ageing ravers at Shakespeare’s on Gibraltar Street (I shall definitely be going next month!). However, the danger with so much coverage like this is that what is currently underground won’t stay that way for very long!

Things to do

🎻 Since being selected for financial support by Music in the Round in 2015, the Marmen Quartet have established themselves as a leading string quartet, with a worldwide touring schedule and an impressive list of major prizes to their name. For their return to Sheffield’s Upper Chapel on Friday, 24 March (7pm-9pm), the quartet will be treating audiences to three of the greatest pieces in their repertoire by Mozart, Janáček and Beethoven. Tickets are priced £5-£21.

🚲 The Park Hill Uprise urban cyclo hill climb returns to Sheffield on Saturday, 25 March. The course is only short but includes a number of challenging climbs on Park Hill’s historic cobbles. There will be adult men’s and women’s races as well as older and younger junior’s competitions. However, the main event will be a “Brompton Bash” complete with an exciting “Le Mans-style” unfolding start. Booking closes at 12pm Friday (adults £12 and juniors £5).

🖼️ Starting on Saturday, 25 March at Bloc Projects in Sheffield city centre is a new exhibition featuring the colourful work of Andy Welland. In Brighter in Real Life, the Sheffield-based artist brings explosive colour, shape and form to life in his signature large-scale collages. Think giant plasticine reliefs in bright candy-colours, lipstick-thick oil finger-paintings and energetic neon. The free exhibition is open daily from 10am-6pm and runs until Wednesday, 29 March. A private view with the artist takes place on Friday, 24 March from 5:30pm-8pm.

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Exclusive: Company linked to former Boris Johnson adviser accused of gaming planning system in Sheffield

Joanna, the woman who received the mystery call, didn’t feel that the development in question was appropriate for the area. But in her view the proposal to create a large community of elderly people miles away from any of the services they are likely to need and without good public transport links didn’t add up in another way too. She is currently caring for her husband John and is reliant on constant deliveries as well as visits from doctors, district nurses and health visitors. The prospect of creating a retirement village in a remote area of Sheffield on the edge of the Peak District didn't really chime with her own experiences of being a full-time carer.

In the end the phone call did prompt her to comment on the application, but not supportively. She wrote to voice her opposition to the plan but also to warn others not to be taken in by cold callers trying to drum up support for the application.

However, the council’s website shows around 20 people did register their support for the application. The comments all came via a website called Just Build Homes, a portal which allows users to enter their postcode and find applications that need support in their area. The site also appeals to housebuilders to lodge their applications with the system. On one page, Just Build Homes staff member Millie Dodd appeals for developers to contact them if they want to discuss “generating support for your housing project”.

The Dore Moor Garden Centre in Dore. Photo: Dan Hayes/The Tribune.

Just Build Homes is part of an organisation called Shared Voice Ltd, a public relations and communications firm set up by, among others, Alex Crowley, a former political adviser who worked with Boris Johnson during his time as Mayor of London from 2008. He was later a senior adviser to Johnson’s campaign to lead the Conservatives in 2019 before becoming an adviser to the Prime Minister later the same year. In 2019, he was criticised for setting up two supposedly grassroots Facebook campaigns which broke the social network’s funding disclosure rules, one to push for a no-deal Brexit and the other criticising Labour’s tax plans.

A spokesperson for Just Build Homes told The Tribune that the voices of younger renters who stand to benefit from building more housing were rarely heard and that they were helping address a “democratic deficit” in the planning system.