Every election, some people tell me they haven’t heard from any of the candidates including me, and are therefore not going to vote.  In Winnersh the Lib Dems do try to knock on doors both at election time and outside election time.  This year there has been less of it than usual, because we were campaigning hard to win seats elsewhere and so didn’t have as many in our local team here.  But I still did knock on quite a lot of doors myself.

But there is a lot of difference between knocking on doors to speak to people and going door to door delivering leaflets.  The Lib Dems in Winnersh produce leaflets several times a year outside the election period as well as within it, and we do aim to deliver those leaflets to just about every house.  But there are a very few that get left out – and here are the reasons why:

• you live in a block of flats we can’t get into.  A lot of blocks have external letter boxes, so no problem there.  Most others have Trade buttons and we can use them to get in to deliver. But there are one of two blocks where we can’t always get the Trade buttons to work, or that are completely gated off.  This also applies to a couple of houses with electronic gates and no external letter boxes.
• you live a fair way from any other houses – in which case outside elections we may post leaflets to you;  in an election, spending is capped by the rules, and a stamp is quite expensive.  I think this covers 8 properties.
• you live above or behind a commercial property.  Access to those flats is not always obvious and nor are the letter boxes.  Sometimes you get left out by accident.  Maybe 8 properties could be affected.
• you’ve told us directly that you don’t want our leaflets – very very few people.  We can’t always guarantee no leaflets, as our volunteers sometimes get into an automatic rhythm and just deliver to every house on their route.  But we do our best to observe your wishes.
• you have a sign up saying “no political leaflets”.  Lots of people have signs saying “no junk mail”.  We tend to ignore those because most people don’t put our leaflets in the same category as pizza coupons and estate agent cards.  But “no political leaflets” does mean “no political leaflets”.  There are a couple of houses in this category.
• you are known to us as a Conservative activist: delivering to you would be a waste of our money.  Hardly anyone in that category!
• the deliverer can’t find your house – it does happen occasionally.

The biggest reason of all that we don’t deliver, is dogs.  Either dogs loose in the front garden or dogs that we know are lurking in the hallway ready to try and bite us – we can mostly hear or see them, but the really scary dogs are the ones where the first you know about them is when there is a huge thump as they throw themselves at the front door.  I’ve been bitten myself, and I would never force someone to deliver to a house in those circumstances.

So if none of those covers you, and you still don’t think you have had any leaflets from us, what went wrong?

Unfortunately, probably, you did get the leaflet, but didn’t notice it.  We try hard to make our leaflets stand out but we know that people don’t look that closely when things come through their letter boxes.  It is quite easy for someone in the house to put our leaflet with all the offers to do carpet or gutter cleaning and it goes out into the recycling without being read.  That’s why at election time we do some addressed letters, as they tend to get noticed.  We don’t have the resources to do that outside an election.

If you don’t get our leaflets in future, please let me know.  We want you to know what we are doing – otherwise why should you vote for us?

 

 

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