Pincents Hill Hypocrites

Our lovely local upright Tories have long been saying they are opposed to any planned development of large scale housing on Pincents Hill (in West Berkshire between Calcot and Tilehurst). Yesterday’s announcement that Blue Living had put in a Planning Application for 750 houses on the site reminded me of the Tory hypocracy on this issue.

A month or two ago, after Alok Sharma the Tory PPC for Reading West and the local Birch Copse councillors (all Tories) and said publicly that they opposed the development, there was a vote on West Berks Council on the Pincents Hill development. You can guess what happened:  Cllr Emma Webster abstained, Cllr Joe Mooney voted for the plans without amendment and Cllr Tony Linden did not even turn up to vote.

I expect we will hear a lot more from the Tories now that the application has gone in, and they will all be doing their best to oppose it. Until, that is, the Conservative Party in West Berks tells them not to. Whereupon they all slink off and hope nobody notices.  Actually this kind of bellicose verbosity before a vote, followed by abstention or even supporting the other side during the vote, is strangely reminiscent of our local MP, the great Martin Salter. Yes he who campaigns against the Iraq war, against tuition fees and many other causes, but strangely does not manage to actually vote according to his ‘beliefs’. 

If politicians were rewarded for their principles Salter would not be our MP and the Birch Copse Tories would be out on their ears.
 

Bottle Banks in Tilehurst

Reading BC is under pressure to increase the amount of glass it recycles. For years it has collected all the kerbside recycling in a red bins provided free to each household. The recycling materials are then sorted at the new Materials Recycling Facility in Smallmead. Glass is excluded from this collection system as it would shatter and create a hazard for anyone sorting the recycled material by hand (and even in Smallmead some of the sorting is indeed done by hand). So for years now tonnes of glass are thrown into the grey non-recycled bins and end up in landfill. It is one of the major components of the waste that Reading sends to landfill.

The answer the council have come up with is to put out many more bottle banks around the town to try and encourage people to recycle more of their glass bottles. That is a good aim but convincing local residents that a bottle bank close to their house is a good thing can be a bit tricky. Sending out letters explaining the reasoning behind the bottle banks has not generally produced a flood of comments being fed back to the council.

The council have identified 3 potential sites in Tilehurst for bottle banks. The first one in Harvaston Parade got very little response (only 6 out of 50 letters sent out) so the local Lib Dem team sprang into action and surveyed the houses near the proposed site, door to door. The result was 21 residents in favour and 16 against and whatever the result it was a lot more representative than the council’s letter responses.

More recently sites were proposed atoutside the Horticultural Society Hall in Gratwicke Road and on the green in Lansdowne Road. Again the council’s response rate to its letters has not been brilliant. Again the local Lib Dems carried out surveys and found that residents in Gratwicke Road were 15 against to 14 for the bottle bank whilst over in Lansdowne Road there was a big majority, 9 to 2, against the bottle bank. In fact on the latter site there appears to be a petition now being circulated to oppose the bottle bank.

All of which goes to prove that if you want residents’ opinions on local issues, the best way to find out is to go and talk to them. Relying on folk to write back is not good enough.

Toads of Newbury Hall

The Transport Innovation Fund (TIF) mechanism will pump hundreds of millions of £s into tarnsport schemes in and around Reading to relieve congestion. Following the collapse of the one-way IDR scheme, RBC has tried to work with neighbouring authorities to develop a TIF bid to secure a large chunk of funds and asked their neighbours what schemes they would like included so that they can all be put together in a package that will have a major effect on Reading area transport over the coming 10 years or so. The TIF bid being put together recognises that if all the proposed measures do not seriously lower the levels of congestion in Reading town centre in the coming years then some form of charging will be needed. This might take the form of a Low Emissions Zone where heavier polluting vehicles are charged for entering the town centre.        Toad

Conservative West Berks councillors, in their wisdom, have decided not to participate in anything that might eventually lead to any form of charging. The Toads of Newbury Hall apparently could not care less about the poor peasants in Reading who are desparately trying to reduce congestion in their town. They still think thay have some inalienable right to drive their cars anywhere they damn well please and that congestion is obviously a Reading problem so why should West Berks be at all interested.

As it stands, the Toads will have their way, there will be no park and ride schemes to the west of Reading, no bus improvements and the A4 will remain as clogged as ever. In fact the A4 will get much worse when the developments approved by West Berks on Pincents Hill and around Theale are built and hundreds of new residents try to drive into Reading.

What a shoddy display of Tory ‘I’m all right Jack’ attitudes from the Conservative West Berks councillors !

RESCUE in Tilehurst

Yesterday I took part in the annual RESCUE clean-up operation run by Tilehurst Globe. I spent a couple of hours clearing rubbish from Blundell’s Copse, one of several wooded areas that make Tilehurst such a pleasant place to live. The woods, of course, attract kids and apart from being a place to walk the dogs, they are a huge free-range playground.

One of the perverse joys of clearing up the mess that had accumulated over the last year was discovering what our younger generations had been up to in the woods. There were countless discarded blue plastic bottles of cheap cider and not a few empty beer cans which belie any notion that we are successfully cracking down on under-age drinking. Interestingly, there were almost no fag ends or signs of smoking, just lots of bottles and cans and piles of domestic refuse, especially close to any of the neighbouring houses.

So I started to think what lessons I could draw from my time in Blundell’s Copse and here are a few thoughts.

Kids do still obtain cheap booze and consume it in out-of-the-way places where no-one bothers them. Is this better or worse than staggering round the streets of Tilehurst whilst a little the worse for wear, or is this perfectly normal, acceptable, behaviour from youngsters with little else to occupy themselves ? I think the general view was that if that’s all they got up to then leave them to it. If only they would take their bottles and cans away when the finished !  Thankfully, our youngsters do not appear to be that much taken with smoking, which can only be a good thing.

Secondly, people do abuse our woodlands by fly-tipping all sorts of domestic rubbish and some of the worst offenders are those who live closest to them. We have a long way to go to convince residents that woods are nicer without the heaps of rubbish and endless bits of litter.

My thanks to Tilehurst Globe for organising this annual event and to all those who take part.