Prue Bray

….it would be altogether too gloomy.

First we have the recession, terrorism and climate change (not sure which one is immediately worst and of course they all have an impact on each other), and more locally we have a council that is among the worst in the South East - and our analysis shows it is nothing to do with the funding, because other poorly funded councils are doing pretty well, especially compared to Wokingham.    And instead of either a Labour government or a Tory council  administration that holds its hands up and admits its failures we have refusals to accept reality.

Oh well, onwards and upwards, and let’s hope 2010 is altogether a better year!

Looks like Wokingham’s gritters did a reasonable job on the main roads - unlike Reading, where I unexpectedly had to spend the night after getting trapped in the gridlock on Monday afternoon. 

As we drove home this morning the contrast between the main roads in Wokingham and the main roads in Reading was marked.  But Reading cannot be totally to blame - because how could gritters get through gridlock?

On BBC Radio Berks I heard Martin Salter (Labour MP) praise Reading council (Labour) for its efforts (and the rest of the public services) whilst this morning Rob Wilson (Tory MP) attacked it for not doing enough.   Funny that.

 As for Wokingham, the brick pavements in the town centre were lethal in the slushy snow- hope we can make sure that any new pavements in the town centre regeneration have surfaces as non-slip as possible.

Looks like the snow will be on the ground for Christmas - and then melt.  Floods over the bank holiday to look forward to?

Merry Christmas everyone!

Last week Wokingham was again told its safeguarding service was “poor” and was lumped together with the likes of Haringey in the bottom 9 councils in the country for child protection.  This follows on from last year’s inspection, that came to a similar conclusion.  Just so you are clear, an organisation that is judged poor is (to use Ofsted’s exact words)An organisation that does not meet minimum requirements

That does not mean that nothing has improved.  But it does mean that Ofsted don’t think there has been enough improvement.  And they still have concerns over safeguarding. 

There is a whole new team in place in Children’s Services, and a new Exec member.   And the money that was chopped out of the service about 3 years ago has been put back in.  It is going to be tough to recruit permanent social workers, because it is for everyone.  And there are other problems to do with strategic education planning that are going to start rearing their heads soon.  But probably the service is finally getting better rather than getting worse.

But it never should have got into this state.  Why did it?  In my view it was a result of the Tories focusing more on saving money than on the effect of cuts on the services they were cutting.  Plus of the Tories not listening to what we or officers told them.  Plus the Tories doing everything in secret, so that no-one could find out what was going on.  

And why do I think that?  Because the Tories were warned by officers in September 2007 (yes, 2007) that there were problems with safeguarding - problems that were being made worse by the extra spending cuts they were demanding.  And officers also drew attention to the fact that these problems had been flagged up as far back as August 2006.  How do we know?  Because in early 2009 (yes, 2009) I got the papers we had asked for under a Freedom of Information request in Spring 2008 (yes, 2008), and in those papers was a previously secret report, which said all those things.

Did the Tories immediately try to fix the problems?  No they did not.  They just cut a further £300,000 from the budget, instead of the £1.2 million that they had been intending to cut. 

They did not seriously start fixing anything until after the Joint Area Review  report came out - available to the council in September 2008, and to the public early in 2009.    It appears that once the information became public, they realised they had to act.   Absolutely disgraceful that they waited until then.

This year’s Ofsted judgement still gives cause for concern on safeguarding.  You can read what they have to say about Wokingham at http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/oxcare_providers/la_view/(leaid)/872 

Being the Leader of the Opposition on the council, I was interviewed about all this by the BBC last Friday.  As the reporter made clear in the piece, the interview had to take place outside, in the fog, as I was forbidden to use my office.  Clearly, the council are feeling just a touch defensive about their performance.  And with good cause.

It has been a bit wet lately, in case you haven’t noticed.  And all the usual drainage issues continue. 

For example, Arbor Lane - something wrong with the fall and with the ditch, plus the drain just peters out somewhere under the open space behind Arbor Meadows.  So the ditch fills up but doesn’t go anywhere, and then the drain by the end of Barley Gardens overflows, and a stream forms down the side of the road.  But the rest of the drains still have capacity, so some of the flow goes into them.    And the drain on the other side of the road has no water going into it at all - because all the water is on one side of the road at that point.   But where it swaps over, by the bend, a huge puddle forms.  It has always been bad, but more and more houses have been built along the road.  Is it my imagination that the puddling has got worse?

And will the Arbor Lanes of this world be affected at all by the Flood & Water Management Bill that is about to have its second reading next week?  I think not.    The bill gives local authorities more responsibility over drainage and flooding issues - but no money.  Local authorities will be tasked with auditing all the “things” (the word used in the bill) which are significant for flooding in their area, and also with preparing strategic plans.  Doesn’t say they have to sort flooding out in those strategic plans, mind you.  And why is there no money?  Because - according to Defra - the money councils will save by not having so many floods to clear up and by having better sustainable drainage systems in their area, will more than offset the cost of the additional work they have to do, until at least 2018.   In Defra’s dreams!

Those of you who know Winnersh will know that when it rains hard a large puddle forms in the road by the station ticket office.   When I say “a large puddle” I mean a mini-pond which stretches more than halfway across the road and is deep enough to lap over the kerb onto the pavement.  It is of sufficient size for my fellow-Lib Dem ward councillor to have suggested we purchase a fishing gnome for it.  And it has been much in evidence since the beginning of November, due to us having rather a lot of rain (don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed).

This week I got very excited because some men turned up and dug a hole right where the puddle forms.  But no, they were not there to fix the surface water drains.  They were there to connect some new houses opposite into the water system. 

On the second day of digging they had to call out the emergency drainage people because their hole had been flooded out with surface water……

A couple of weeks hiatus in posting has been due entirely to a by-election on Earley Town Council.  Carol Mitchell, a Lib Dem town councillor in Radstock ward, sadly died.  The Tories refused to co-opt anybody but a Tory so we called an election.   And, last Thursday, we won!  Hooray!

Radstock was split last time it was up in 2007, 2 Lib Dems and 1 Tory, so it was always going to be close.  But we ran a decent campaign, with a good candidate (Steve Scarrott - congratulation, councillor), and won 618 to 600, in a straight fight with the Conservatives.

Now normal life can be resumed.  Just in time for Christmas……

For some reason the Conservatives are not very happy that we Lib Dems have a) put a motion in for the council meeting on 18th November criticising their lack of progress on bringing council housing up to the Decent Homes standard and b) dared to put a written question in criticising the fact that council tenants had to read about the Tories’ plans for a housing stock transfer in the local paper, rather than than having been communicated with first.

Now there is no doubt at all that councils up and down the land are struggling with the finances of council houses.  But the problem with the way the Tories in Wokingham have handled that problem is the crux of our criticism.  First, although they have been in charge of the council for 7 1/2 years, they don’t appear to have got to grips with the Housing Revenue Account until very recently - and even now I am not sure they understand it.  Second, they have presided over a right old mess as the housing department has struggled to overcome their indifference and the lack of money and some historical management issues.  And thirdly, they have not apparently even noticed that there has been no Decent Homes programme in Wokingham for the last three years.   We’re the ones who’ve been asking what’s going on, not them.  So for them to whinge at us because we are holding them to account is, to put it in a nutshell, a bit rich.

And as for the stock transfer - yep, the situation with the funding is difficult and all options have to be explored.  But surely you start by explaining all the facts to the tenants and then exploring with them what those options might be.  You don’t make up your mind to sell people’s houses out from under them, and then tell them.  Unless you’re a Wokingham Tory, that is.

I spent Saturday with the community wardens, police, Neighbourhood Action Group and parish councillors listening to issues raised by residents on a local estate.  Mainly anti-social behaviour, but also ditches and play equipment  - but not pot holes, which is just as well, as some of the roads have not been adopted by the council, and the others were only taken on this month.

The anti-social behaviour is infuriating and caused by a small group of people.  Everyone is working hard to sort it, but how do you tell residents to be patient while the powers that be grind through all the necessary steps and still expect them to be happy? 

Not for the first time where the Conservatives in Wokingham are concerned, I find myself asking what on earth is going on.  Quite a while ago now, the Conservatives decided that Wokingham & Emmbrook football club should be offered a new home at the council’s main sports centre at Cantley.  The club had aspirations to move up the Ryman League but wouldn’t be able to unless they played at a ground with more facilities, such as floodlights, a PA system and a stand. 

Being the Conservatives, they simply announced the move, without any consultation with the residents living next door, the other sports clubs who use Cantley, Wokingham Theatre, which is based on the site, or the Cantley House Hotel, which is right next to the pitches. 

We Lib Dems were not very happy about the rather highhanded way this was being done.  Surprise, surprise, neither was anybody else.  Eventually the Conservatives set up a forum for all the people affected, including Wokingham town council, and over a very long and painful series of meetings, and following considerable expenditure on consultants etc, a solution which was broadly acceptable to everybody was hammered out.  And planning permission was granted in February 2008.  It was a painful process, but one which seemed to have come out almost ok in the end.

Funding for the changes was dependent on getting a grant from the Football Foundation.  The council made the bid in 2008 but didn’t get the money.  The reason, according to the council, appears to be that they bid to upgrade the pitch to one of a type that the Football Foundation did not support.   You would have thought that it would have occurred to somebody that maybe such a bid wouldn’t succeed….

The club were then told that they were free to bid for money themselves from the Football Foundation to enable them to move.

But suddenly out of the blue, they have now been told they can’t have a lease at Cantley after all.

That leaves them at Lowther Road - which is neither convenient for them nor for the residents that live around that pitch.  And means the council appears to have spent a fair amount of money for nothing and caused an enormous amount of upset and wasted a large amount of time for everybody concerned.

Why have the Conservatives changed their minds?   Perhaps they do want to allow developers to build houses at Cantley, as suggested in the Wokingham Times a couple of weeks ago?   This is not the place to discuss the merits and disadvantages of that idea.  But even if they were going to concrete over Cantley in the long run, they would surely intend to get the said developer to do a land swap, so that they could transfer the sports facilities somewhere else, but somewhere less suitable for building houses on.  So they could still offer the football a lease - it would just have to be one which took account of the fact that they might be moving the pitches to a different location at some point.  But instead they are simply saying “no”.

Which brings me back to my original question.  What on earth is going on?

Much has been said this week about Labour’s proposed great asset sell-off - flogging  the Tote bookmakers, the Dartford crossing, the Channel Tunnel rail link, the student loan book and the government’s stake in a consortium which helps create enriched uranium.  (Let’s hope they don’t sell that last one to Iran).  

The Tories are apparently all in favour but say it doesn’t go far enough - but Vince Cable got it right when he said that a depressed market was not a good time to be selling anything.  He also pointed out that the previous Tory government had sold off nearly everything worth selling, so this really does amount to scraping the bottom of the barrel.  It was Vince that called these proposals selling the family silver.

Both Labour and the Tories seem keen for local government to assist with the great asset sell off.  One politician I heard on the radio was rubbing his hands over the £200 billion of assets that councils apparently own and could sell.   Let’s see, what do we have in Wokingham Borough?  Well, the big ticket items are things like:  schools, leisure centres, residential homes, parks and playing fields, car parks, council houses and the council’s own offices.  

When you exclude the completely impractical or deeply undesirable, there really isn’t a lot left on that list.  In the long term it might be sensible to consider the council’s main office site in Shute End - it is a prime site, and the council could probably find somewhere cheaper to go to.   And maybe Rose Street car park in the centre of Wokingham could be used to help the town centre regeneration. 

 But parks and playing fields:  Elms Field anyone?    Though, hang on a minute, maybe the recent refusal by the Tories to allow the football club to relocate to Cantley Park after all suddenly makes sense…….   

As for council houses, both the Labour government and the Tories before them (and still, as far as I can tell) seem hell-bent on keeping a system that forces councils to sell off their council housing.

To bring in another local note, plugging holes in finances temporarily by selling off assets is a tactic that the Tories have used in Wokingham.  They sold the freehold of Woodley shopping centre, for example.  They made a bit of money - but the company they sold it to made much more when they sold it on shortly afterwards.  And in getting rid of it, the Tories also got rid of very useful rental income.  They also sold off the site of the new police station in Wokingham and some other shops and GP surgeries.   

So has this worked as a tactic?  Well, maybe briefly in the short term, but after that, no.  Wokingham is still struggling.  And any more disposals of council assets are going to be more difficult politically and take longer to sort out. 

If selling of the last few bits of silver is really how Labour and the Tories see the way forward for local government, not only is the market depressed but so am I.

I am only just recovering from the news that the whole of Bearwood Road is going to be shut for 3 days from 26th to 28th October.    At least it’s half-term that week. 

Now I have received notice that at some point in the next few months King Street Lane / Mole Road is going to be dug up between Churchill Drive and Mill Lane by Southern Gas, so they can lay new pipes.  As that is a major route for the morning rush hour and the work is likely to take weeks, I am now looking forward to lots of fed-up residents.  More news on this when I get some.

Those of you who have been following the local press will know that last week Lib Dem councillors in Wokingham and Reading both asked for a rethink of the two councils’ decision to hike the fares at the park and ride at Loddon Bridge - as well as cut the frequency of the buses, and the number of parking spaces.  Technically, this is a “call in”.    We were a lone voice - and the other parties (Labour in Reading /Tories in Reading and Wokingham) voted for the changes to go ahead.

I have been pondering this ever since.  The argument put forward by the Tories in Wokingham was that the service is losing money and has to break even.  But it turned out that there was no agreement as to what the service should actually consist of!   Or what the purpose of it is.  Is it to reduce congestion, or to provide a convenient way for residents to get in to Reading, or to make money?  How many buses an hour are needed to make the service run properly? 

In the Alice in Wonderland world of Tory local government - as one of the Tory councillors acknowledged - the only thing governing the decision was the need to make the service break even.   So if it broke even with 6 parking spaces and one bus a week, that would apparently be a successful service!

The Tories had done no consultation whatsoever with users and derided the whole idea of consulting people as too difficult. 

Worse, the rules of call-ins in Wokingham meant that all we could discuss was the price hike (roughly 20% on peak fares), because that was the only bit on which a formal decision had been made by a Tory councillor.  The reduction from an 8-10 minute frequency to 12-15 minutes, and the loss of 155 parking spaces were both decisions made by officers, and so could not be looked at.  We don’t even know when those decisions were made!

It seems to me that cutting the service and raising the price is more likely to drive people away from the park and ride than to encourage them to use it.   Running services with no idea of what the service is for or how to judge whether it is successful is not the way I would run the council.  And it also seems to me that it is not very helpful to have a process of reviewing decisions that doesn’t allow you to actually review most of them.  This is a bonkers way to carry on. 

Click the link at the side for a You Tube clip of me making a speech on council housing at the Lib Dem Conference in Bournemouth (September 2009).

Reading the papers, listening to the radio or watching TV, you might be forgiven for thinking that we Lib Dems have just spent 5 days in Bournemouth squabbling.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  We have had a fantastic time - great debates, best ever training, and packed fringe meetings - and lots of laughter, especially over being “love bombed” by the Tories.  

I don’t know why it is, but the national press seem only to be able to see national politics in two dimensions.  To them, there are only Labour and the Tories.  So they spend all their time trying to force the Lib Dems to get into the Labour or Tory box.   And naturally it is in the interests of Labour and the Tories to encourage this to continue.  

But the fact is we aren’t in either camp.  We don’t think like the other parties, we don’t behave like the other parties, our policies aren’t the same as the other parties, and, most important of all WE DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO EITHER OF THEM.  We are Lib Dems, and Lib Dems we will stay.

And here is a photo of me taken at conference with one of the reasons why I am proud to be a Lib Dem:  Vince Cable.    Neither Labour nor the Tories have anyone even remotely as sensible and trustworthy!

The deadline for putting in comments on the Airtrack Transport and Works Act order is Friday 18th September. 

The order contains the works Airtrack thinks are required to allow them to run their new trains.  It’s not what’s in it that’s the problem.  It’s what’s not in it: any proposals to do anything about any of the level crossings in Wokingham.  Or, come to that, any proposals to do anything about the unlit foot crossing across the Reading/Waterloo line off Wellington Road, between the cricket club and Southgate House. 

I have written and submitted an objection on behalf of the Lib Dems at the Council.  We like trains on the whole, as they are a ‘green’ alternative to the private car, but cannot support Airtrack going ahead without anything to sort out the level crossings or the foot crossing.

Gareth Rees, who has organised the petition about Airtrack (nothing to do with the Lib Dems, and a completely independent individual - and more power to his elbow for standing up to be counted over this), has kindly pointed me at some photos he has taken of traffic queuing for the crossings. 

This one shows traffic queuing in Waterloo Road.  You can find more at   http://www.panoramio.com/user/3640067  and you can find Gareth’s petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/waterloo-road/

If you want to send in your own comments or objections, or point out the need to do something about the level crossings in Wokingham to Airtrack and the government, you can email transportandworksact@dft.gsi.gov.uk but make sure you include your own name and address and say that your comment relates to the Airtrack Transport and Works Act order.   And remember, comments need to be in by Friday 18th!

….  To keep everyone up to date, we discovered at the council meeting last night (thanks to a Lib Dem question) that if the Airtrack proposals go ahead, the level crossing gates by the station in Wokingham  - currently down for 20 minutes every hour - will be down for 30 minutes every hour.  OMG!

There are two other crossings to consider in Wokingham - both are due to have the time they are closed to road traffic almost doubled, but neither of them will be shut for as long as the one by the station.    Although they are not as busy, they already have queuing traffic too.  Here are a couple of photos we took in June by one of the crossings (sorry the resolution is not brilliant, but you’ll get the idea).  One photo features me on the right with on the left Ray Earwicker, Lib Dem PPC for Bracknell, and in the middle, David Vaughan, a Lib Dem who lives near the crossing;  the other shows the traffic queue for the crossing in the middle of a weekday morning.  As you can see, it is quite bad enough already.

As part of the new rail link for Heathrow, Airtrack are planning to run 2 extra trains an hour on the Reading to Waterloo line.  Meaning the level crossing by Wokingham station will be closed for even longer.  Resulting in even more queuing traffic. 

There was a letter in the Wokingham Times about this last week.  I have sent in one in response.  Hopefully, it is self-explanatory.

Last week you published a letter asking what would happen if the level crossing by Wokingham station was closed more often to accommodate the 4 new Airtrack trains an hour serving Heathrow, while at the same time there was extra traffic trying to use the road because of the extra housing development due to come to the town.

Like the writer of the letter, the Liberal Democrats on the borough council can see an already bad traffic situation getting much worse if the level crossing is shut for longer.  Our worry is that Wokingham Borough Council is already behind in preparing plans to deal with the situation.  Other councils affected by similar level crossing problems in Egham and Staines are actively working with Airtrack, BAA and Network Rail to find solutions – but so far as we can find out, Wokingham has not joined in. 

The Liberal Democrats have written to Airtrack about the level crossing, and at the borough council meeting on Wednesday 9^th September, we will be asking the Conservative administration what they are doing to deal with the potential problems.   We will let the public know what answer we get.

Yours faithfully,

Prue Bray

Leader, Liberal Democrat Group, Wokingham Borough Council

Hopefully, come Monday 7th September years of misery, enduring potholes like this:

      and this:   

will be over for the residents of Bathurst Road, as the road is going to be resurfaced!  It will take about 6 weeks (well, it is quite a long road I suppose, having around 110 houses) but it should end up with the road in a better state than it has been in for years. 

One of the early pieces of casework I did when first elected was to help a resident get compensation from the council after he burst a tyre on a pot hole almost outside his house that had been there for ages, and I have had requests from residents for improvements on a regular basis ever since.   Now a complete new surface is going to be laid at last!   Hooray!

An interesting conundrum for our local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership, whose strategic board I am a member of:  what do we do about fear of crime?

Statistically, Wokingham Borough is one of the safest places to live in the entire country.  We have very very low rates of crime.  People - understandably - complain about anti-social behaviour, which we are doing our best to tackle.  And of course, the fact that, for example, there are very few burglaries is no consolation if you are the person who has been burgled.  But on the whole the borough is a pretty crime-free place when compared to everywhere else.

But although actual  crime is lower than most places, fear of crime is much higher.  So how do we persuade people that they don’t need to be afraid? 

It seems that people read about the worst areas in the country in the national press or hear about it via the news on TV, and think everywhere is the same.  And then there are unhelpful - and rather silly - statements by Conservative politicians comparing bits of the UK to the US: 3 fatal shootings last year in Manchester, I think it was, 391 in Baltimore, and Manchester has about 4 times as many people - thanks Chris Grayling MP for a ridiculous statement that Manchester now resembles Baltimore.  

But people are reluctant to let go of their opinions.  They just don’t believe us if we say Wokingham has almost no crime.  And even the act of talking about it draws attention to the subject, and tends to make people think we are trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

This is not going to be easy to solve. 

If you’ve read previous posts, you’ll know that there is a bit of an issue over the state of the crossroads by Sainsburys.  But, just maybe, there are a few indications that some of the problems are going to be fixed.   

Sainsburys erected a new sign in the flowerbed while I was away on holiday, telling people to drive in via the main entrance (instead of turning left into the side entrance, which is not designed for that to happen).  And yesterday I got an email from the Tory Exec member for Highways, responding to my pleas of a few weeks ago, suggesting that there were plans in the pipeline to deal with 3 of the 4 major issues I had raised. 

Now, I have heard that before.  Umpteen times in fact, over the past 5 years.  But perhaps this time something may happen.  You never know…..

Well, well, well, who would have thought it!  Overview & Scrutiny last Thursday (see post below) decided unanimously (yep, all the Tories plus the 2 Lib Dems, and the recommendations were tweaked by mutual agreement to accommodate just about everything a Lib Dem could have dreamed of) to recommend to the Executive that they NOT proceed with the introduction of charging for on-street car parking in Wokingham town centre.  Not only that, but we also recommended that the council develop a comprehensive parking strategy for the borough.  And that O & S be involved in producing it.  Amazing!   Sanity prevailed over party politics.  Finally O & S comes of age?

Now we have to wait and see what the Executive decides to do………

… not exactly raring to go, as I have been hit by a summer cold (no, not swine flu).

What has happened on the council while I was away?  Well, despite an Overview & Scrutiny recommendation to the contrary (my suggestion, I am proud to say), the Tories decided that they would after all carry out their consultation on introducing charges for on-street car parking in Wokingham in August.    There is another O & S meeting tonight, to come up with recommendations to the Exec on the whole on-street car parking idea - should be interesting, given the evidence we heard from councillors, residents and traders (all agin it).  

And some sort of warfare appears to have broken out over a Woodley bus route.  The Tory Exec member appears to have taken exception to the fact that the Lib Dems have told the press we aren’t happy over a reduction in service.  Horrors!  How dare we “politicise” the issue (i.e. express an opinion without their permission)!

And, oh joy - just to make sure I know I am really back from my hols - tonight, before the O & S meeting I have a Constitution Review Working Group revision of the financial regulations of the council to look forward to!  Yahay!

The schools have broken up and council-related meetings are about to stop for the summer.  I am about to go off on holiday for a couple of weeks.  Time to reflect.

Sad things have happened in the past few weeks.  Alan Spratling, long-time Lib Dem councillor - 25 years up until he stood down in 2008, former Leader of the Council, has died of cancer.  Paddy Higgins, 16 year old son of a teacher at the school my son attends, where I am a governor, died on holiday in Newquay.   Makes you hug your own children closer.

At the end of July our political assistant, Margaret, is retiring.  What will I do without her wisdom, organisational skills and humour? 

But other things are carrying on, most notably, the issues at the traffic lights by Sainsburys, including people who turn the wrong way in and out which have been the subject of complaints for 5 years.  But now a new twist - for the last couple of weeks the queue for the lights in Robin Hood Lane is now there from dawn to dusk 7 days a week, instead of just at peak times Mon- Fri.  Just had a call to say the engineers are still investigating.  Wonder if that will be fixed by the time I come back?

And on the national stage, same old, same old.  I thought there was a chance of some serious constitutional reform, following all that duck house and flipped mortgage outrage.  But it seems the two major parties have been busying themselves kicking it all into the long grass.  And I had hoped that the credit crunch would mean that we could have some reform of the financial sector and get some green policies in place.  Silly me.  We’re back to bankers’ bonuses already.

I think I might need a holiday…….

….that’s what my case load has consisted of so far this week.  And it’s only Tuesday.

John Healey was due to give a speech today on the changes the government is proposing to make to council housing.    The biggest one - as far as Wokingham is concerned - was flagged up yesterday by the BBC:  letting councils keep all the money they get in rents from their tenants, instead of handing over about half of it to the government in the so-called “housing subsidy”.

The loss of this money is crippling councils’s ability to deliver a decent housing service - which is why an awful lot of people having been lobbying for it to be changed, including, to give him his due, David Lee, the Tory Leader of Wokingham Borough Council.

Could it be it is really going to happen?  Will councils really be allowed to hang on to their rents and be able to use the money locally on social housing?  If so, what’s the catch?  (There’s always a catch).

On closer inspection I discovered that the government is NOT actually promising to let councils keep the money.  It’s only promising to CONSULT on whether it should happen.

The devil is in the detail of course - which is why I am so anxiously waiting to find out exactly what John Healey has told the LGA…..

This is the way out of a parking area behind houses in Wheatsheaf Close, Sindlesham.  Just about manageable for the people who live in the small block of houses concerned.  But there is a planning application in to put flats on a site next door - and to have their parking also accessed through this tiny gap. 

There are of course other problems with the proposal - but it went to the Planning Committee on Wednesday with a recommendation for approval.

My fellow ward councillor Malcolm Armstrong, residents, the parish council and I (by proxy, having my statement read out because I couldn’t physically get to the meeting) have persuaded the committee to visit the site.  Let’s hope that when they come to make a decision at their next meeting, the committee reaches a sensible conclusion.

Two interesting days on Friday and Saturday participating in masterplanning the Strategic Development Locations with residents, other councillors, planners and developers.  The Strategic Development Locations are the four places (North Wokingham, South Wokingham, Arborfield Garrison and South of the M4) which the Tories identified for large chunks of development to 2026.

The days were aimed at producing ideas - hopefully by consensus - as to which parts of each SDL should have houses, where the green space should go, identifying sites for community facilities, shops, schools etc.  We did that - by putting little coloured tiles down on maps, all to scale - and achieved quite a lot of consensus.  Although perhaps not as the council envisaged:  for some reason all the groups seemed to want secondary schools in their SDL, meaning 4 schools, while the core strategy only has 2.   

When I say “for some reason”, of course I mean “for perfectly understandable reasons, such as wanting a school of reasonable rather than vast size, within a reasonable distance of the pupil’s homes, and providing a reasonable range of facilities for the community, such as any reasonable person might envisage being a good idea”.

Under what the council has announced so far,  all those reasonable people are going to be unreasonably disappointed.

….. that at tonight’s Overview & Scrutiny Management Committee meeting I was able to explain in huge detail to the rest of the committee how the projected variance on the council spending was worked out and what the figures meant.   I really must get out more…….

Just having a look at all the things the other Lib Dems on the council and I have been asking about over the last couple of months.   Here’s a flavour.  Can you detect a pattern at all?

1   The decision by the Tories to save money by removing all the dog waste bins and getting people to put dog poo in the normal litter bins

2  The decision by the Tories to save money by closing all the public toilets, and signing up businesses to let the public use their loos instead

3 The decision by the Tories to save money by closing 4 sports pavilions, meaning teams hiring the attached pitches will have no toilet facilities

Can’t see the connection?  Here’s a clue:  a penny for your thoughts……….. 

….. in two ways

First, literally.  We had a by-election on the Borough Council in one of the Conservatives’ safest seats on 4th June.  Yes of course they won.  But we came second, doubling our share of the vote (from 13% to 26%) and more than doubling the number of votes we got (302 to 711).  Went as well as we could have possibly expected.   And at the same time, the Woodley team took a seat on the town council from the Conservatives - by 90 votes, too, so not even close.  Excellent!  

Second, a group of residents had asked for my help in persuading someone to cut down a couple of leylandii trees that had got excessively tall.  So I wrote him as nice a letter as I could a couple of weeks ago.  And yesterday he cut them down!  Amazing!    

All anyone wants to talk about at the moment is the MPs’ expenses scandal.  Indications are that people will be staying at home for the European elections on Thursday in order to express their disgust.   That will give the fruitcake tendency (UKIP) and the nasties (BNP) more chance of getting MEPs, as it will take fewer votes to reach the required proportion of the vote.  

Labour are useless.  The Tories are driving us to the margin in Europe.  The Greens are a one-woman band (sorry Ms Lucas, but they are).  Only the Lib Dems have anything positive to contribute in Europe.   SO GET OUT THERE AND VOTE LIB DEM on Thursday!

The Wokingham Times reckons most councillors in Wokingham have clean hands.   They have raised a few queries - but none of them are about any Lib Dems. 

The most bemusing claim is one by Tory Anthony Pollock (yes, the same guy who presided over the Icelandic Banks investments).  He claimed £99 for a book called “Mind of a Fox”!  Apparently it’s about management theory or something.  Clearly didn’t do him much good!

On a related point, Nick Clegg has come up with some jolly good stuff on what should be done to reform Westminster.  Read it at 100-days-to-save-democracy.pdf

It has taken me a bit of time to calm down from the Annual Council Meeting.  

On the Tuesday before the meeting, the Overview & Scrutiny committee received a report on how the council had come to have £5 million invested in Icelandic Banks, the last tranche of which went in on 1st September 2007.    The report was written by a panel of Conservative councillors, plus one Liberal Democrat, and you can read it by picking up the agenda of the Overview & Scrutiny Management Committee meeting of 13th May 2009 at  http://www.wokingham.gov.uk/council-meetings-democracy/minutes-agendas/agenda-and-minutes/2009-meetings/ . 

It is clear from that report that the Exec member (Con councillor Anthony Pollock) had not exactly covered himself in glory.   I suggested he might like to resign from the Exec. Not because he had made mistakes, but because the culture he had presided over was one in which rate of return appeared to have priority over the security of investments, AND because from the report he had not asked any questions about what was being done with the money.

The Tories were a bit cross (that’s understatement by the way) that I had had the temerity to suggest one of them might be held accountable for something.  Resign from the Executive indeed!  From the Leader of the Council’s reaction you might have thought I was suggesting he be paraded naked down Broad Street for a ritual disembowelment outside the Council offices. 

At the Annual Council meeting the Tories decided to attack the Liberal Democrats in general and me in particular.  They used the slots at the end of the meeting which were supposed to be for Deputy Executive members to add a brief verbal update to their written reports on the past municipal year.  One after the other they stood up and read out prepared speeches which were not about the municipal year at all, but instead were about such things as how I had to learn that my place on a steering group had to be earned because I had behaved so appallingly on it - naturally they didn’t say what appalling thing I had done, other than to say I had been quoted in the press.  Oh dear!  And another one talked about the need to keep the Liberal Democrats’ “grubby little hands” off council money.  Charming.  After the fourth one started, and after protesting to no avail to the Mayor, we walked out.

It was reminiscent of the worst days of the previous Leader of the Council.  It’s not that we can’t handle being attacked - in some ways it’s great because it means we have hit them where it hurts - but we do object to abusive attacks being made in a meeting where we have no opportunity to speak to rebut what’s being said.    But if you read the Leader’s comments in the Evening Post, apparently it is we who behaved badly!  According to that article, Anthony Pollock was the one being denied the chance to defend himself by some “local government rules” - preposterous.  He had two days to speak up, and he can talk to the press or anyone else.    There are no rules preventing that! 

Walking out is not something we are likely to do again.  We haven’t done it before.   We just did not see why, we needed to sit there and listen to abuse, when we had been denied the opportunity to speak, especially as it was the end of the meeting and there was no other business.

And what did the Tories achieve?  Nothing except a further erosion in the relationship between us and them.  We still think Anthony Pollock should resign.  And we will keep on saying so.  

We don’t expect that we will see eye to eye with the Tories.  It is our job to hold them to account for running the council.  If their reaction to criticism is to heap abuse on us, then they need to get over themselves. 

All the news is about MPs expenses, claiming for everything from moats to kitkats.  Wonder when someone is going to get round to councillors.  I’m sure there are some abuses to be found, and so we will all get it in the neck.  It is getting embarrassing to say I’m in politics, never mind having to admit I’m trying to become an MP.  

For the record, I haven’t claimed any expenses of any kind for around a couple of years at least.

At least the excesses of the Lib Dems are not on the scale of those of the Tories, who, on the evidence of tennis courts, swimming pools, stables, moats and vast gardens, appear to provide cast-iron evidence that the class divide is alive and well.

But oh, Chris Huhne, did you have to claim for framing a photograph of yourself?

……yet again this morning someone ahead of me turned the wrong way into Sainsburys.  Enough is enough. 

Lib Dem Councillors Prue Bray and Malcolm Armstrong, campaigning to sort out Sainsbury’s entrance, in March 2007!

One step forwards, one step back on the crossroads. 

There are still some snagging issues left from the expansion of Sainsburys about 5 years ago, plus a number of extra things which need fixing but may not count as snagging, such as the narrowness of King Street Lane because of the traffic island, which makes it difficult for lorries to turn right if they are coming from Reading.  And of course, the fact that people are still turning left into Sainsburys in King Street Lane, instead of using the entrance on Reading Road.

I first sent a list of issues that needed fixing to the council in April 2004.  Since then there have been lots of different highways officers, new highways consultants, and new agents for Sainsburys.  And very little has happened.  Except, after banging on for 5 years about the problems, I am now told that meetings have taken place between Sainsbury’s former agents and council representatives, and they have agreed that fixing snags is Sainsbury’s responsibility.  All they have to do now is agree which the snags are!  Good grief!

Along with the Brownies, community and junior wardens, several parish councillors and the parish clerk, and a few assorted residents,  I spent an hour and a half on Sunday morning picking up litter around Winnersh and Sindlesham. 

I worked my way along Arbor Lane, from Kelburne Close up to about halfway along the ditch beside the school, and got half a sack of sweet wrappers, half a sack of drinks cans and plastic bottles (mostly beer of various types and lucozade), and a number of empty bottles - mostly vodka.  Hardly any cigarette packets though - which I am going to take as a good sign!

I reported a major blockage in the ditch -a full black plastic sack, and two traffic cones, which had become wedged in to form a dam, and needed digging out by a stronger and better equipped person than me - gloves and boots a minimum, as you would need to stand at the bottom of the ditch, which is full of mud, water and leaves and about as deep as I am tall.  The borough council drainage engineer has asked contractors to remove the blockage, so hopefully within a couple of weeks, the ditch will be able to drain properly.

We know there have been problems for a while in Danywern Drive, caused mainly by a combination of commuters parking for the station and 6th formers parking for the Forest School.  This week we have put out a letter to residents in the road, suggesting possible workable solutions.  The council requires 75% of residents in a road to agree before they will even look at proposals, so we are hoping for a good response.

The letters we put out have a reply slip for our freepost address, but such is the power of email that I had several responses before I even got back after delivering the letters!

UPDATE Monday 27th April: A very, very, nice lady in Danywern Drive has rung to say she has got all but 4 houses in the road to sign up to the idea of parking restrictions - and 2 of the 4 she hasn’t got are empty. What a star!

Those of you who have been following the story of the Reading TIF bid, can skip to the next paragraph.  Those of you who have no idea what I am writing about, read on.   Reading are putting a bid together for £340 million of government funding over the next 15 years, for transport schemes for the Reading ‘urban area’ - which includes bits of Oxfordshire, West Berkshire and Wokingham Borough (parts of Earley and Woodley).  It includes lots of public transport improvements, the possibility of a Third Thames Bridge - hallelujah! or get out the garlic and the silver bullets, depending on your view - money for cycling and walking and all sorts of goodies.   This is known as the TIF (Transport Innovation Fund) bid.  Just one catch - signing up means agreeing to demand management sticks if the carrots don’t help reduce traffic.  And the biggest demand management stick is congestion charging.

So, the $64,000 question is:  what about the possibility of congestion charging? 

To which I say:  it’s “ifs, buts and maybes” at the moment.  So let all the local authorities proceed with the TIF bid at the moment, and cross the congestion charging bridge IF (and I mean IF, not WHEN) we come to it.   I know a lot of people object to it in principle and it would be easy to score cheap political points by running a scaremongering campaign against the dreadful spectre of congestion charging, but it wouldn’t be in this area’s long term interests to say no to congestion charging in principle now and cut off a possible major funding source before we have had a chance to get our hands on some of the cash.  IF (and I mean IF, not WHEN) a congestion charging scheme were to be proposed by Reading, it wouldn’t be for at least 5 years - think how much we could get done before that happened!  And it is extremely likely that there will be a change of government before then, so who knows what might happen.

From Wokingham’s point of view, transport improvements are desperately needed and there is no other way to get any money for them.  By the time anyone knows whether congestion charging will be necessary - which it only will be if carrots and other sticks don’t work - the political landscape will have changed.   People’s views on charging may have changed too.  We don’t know what exactly a charging scheme would look like.  It would be a real shame to say no now, just because there is a possibility of having a congestion charge introduced at some unknown point in the future.   Why cut off your nose to spite your face?

“Proceed with caution” seems the right way to go.  If all the local authorities involved agree, then by this time next year this part of Berkshire might actually have got its hands on some cash to do something about transport locally.  And that can only be a good thing!

Winnersh Residents living alongside the Emmbrook in Sylvester Close are not going to be very happy that - nearly two years after they were flooded out of their homes in 2007 - the council has still not got any plans for how to help them.  

   Sylvester Close in June 2008 - when it flooded again!  You can see the caravans in the drives - where people were still living while their homes were fixed after the 2007 floods.

 The residents themselves have been doing a lot, including with the Environment Agency, and I have been working on their behalf too, but progress from the council is almost nil.   In the Autumn the Tory Executive voted on prioritising work for areas at risk of flooding, but here we are in April, and the latest news is:  ” We were well into the financial year when the priority list was agreed by Executive and officers are still working through this list with a view to producing detailed designs/feasibility studies.  Sylvester Close is one of the sites on the list that has yet to be worked on.”

Meanwhile, residents in Wedderburn Close are suffering from a blocked drain in a parking area, which causes their front gardens to flood every time it rains.  The drain is the council’s responsibility.  It is blocked by tree roots.  But the council won’t do anything about it because apparently they only have the resources to tackle flooding that gets into people’s houses.   The fact that this flooding gets into their garages apparently doesn’t count.  NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  

  Wedderburn Close in March 2009 - the blocked drain has flooded the whole parking area, pavement and front gardens of the houses - but the council won’t do anything to clear the drain.

Tonight was a town centre forum meeting, looking at the general principles to go into the brief that is going to be given to developers as Wokingham Borough Council sets out on the competitive dialogue process to get a partner to work with the council on redevelopment in the town.  Or rather, on the “renaissance” of the town centre as I see it is now being called.  This is a 10 -15 year project, and by golly Wokingham town centre needs it.

I have hope that this might actually work.  At least the council appears to be looking at it strategically, and has a proper process in place, both things which are sadly lacking elsewhere in council business.   And the people who are in the forum have hope that it might work too.

I am trying to contribute positively, and not get too worked up (yet) about the things which might go wrong.  The one thing that will truly scupper it is if the council decides that Elms Field is available to be built on.  That will just turn everybody against them again - including me!  At the moment we are getting vague reassurances that won’t happen, so I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for the best - while keeping a very close eye on what’s going on…..

On Friday the Council removed all the dog bins.  The idea was to save money by getting people to put their dog mess in the normal litter bins, thus enabling the council to cancel the contract for collecting waste from the dog bins.  Never mind what I might think of that as an idea, unfortunately somebody decided the savings had to be made IMMEDIATELY, before the end of the financial year.  So on Friday 27th March,  all the bins were removed.   But because they hadn’t told anybody what was happening, and didn’t put up any signs, nobody knew they could now use the normal bins - if there was a normal bin, that is, as in a lot of places apparently there isn’t one. 

So what happened?  Exactly what you would expect.  A lot of wooden posts which dog bins used to be attached to are now festooned with little plastic bags full of dog poo.  Delightful.  I wonder who is going to have to clear that lot up?

You couldn’t make it up.

Segro (that’s Slough Estates in old money, the owners of Winnersh Triangle Business Park), the Winnersh NAG and the Council’s Countryside Rangers organised a really successful action day on 28th March in which we planted 1,000 trees and cleared paths in Winnersh Meadows, the open space behind Arbor Lane.

   Collecting the plants                  Having a chat!

The rain held off except for 5 minutes at lunch time.  Segro gave us a great lunch and even provided portaloos.

Only problem was that I was completely exhausted after all that fresh air and yawned my way to bed at about 9.30!

The council is in the process of putting its plans in place for where houses will be built between now and 2026.   This is called the ‘core strategy’.  The draft core strategy is currently being examined by a Planning Inspector at a series of hearings in Wokingham, to see if it will do what it says on the tin.  The plan rests on building most of the houses in large lumps - 3,500 at Arborfield Garrison when the army moves out, 2,500 around Spencers Wood / Shinfield /Three Mile Cross, 2,500 to the south of Wokingham town, and 1,500 in Emmbrook.   Even with those so-called Strategic Development Locations, hundreds of houses will still need to be built in other places.

Lib Dem councillors voted against the plan when the Conservatives presented it to the council.   Our main concerns are that the Arborfield site does not have enough houses - there is scope to build a sustainable new settlement there on old Ministry of Defence land - and that Emmbrook has too many houses - we don’t believe that the roads can take the traffic and there is a lot of doubt about what new transport measures could be put in place.

Because we objected I ‘appeared’ (technical term for being allowed to participate in the discussion) at some of the sessions of the examination last week and this week, along with some of the residents associations, who really did well, speaking for local people.   The main participants are the council and the developers who want to build the houses. 

I tried to put all the points that I could, from schools to flooding, cemeteries and allotments, and lots of other things.   We’ll see whether it has had any effect when the Inspector makes his report in the summer.

The hearings are continuing for the next few weeks, to cover some of the outstanding issues, like strategic infrastructure.

This is a new web page to advertise what I do as a councillor in Winnersh ward of Wokingham Borough Council.   I will add new content as quickly as I learn how to!