Bus passengers kept away from new station

Reading station is being rebuilt.  The whole station area is being revamped. We have fantastic plans for the new station buildings. We have Mr Madjeski’s skyscapers going up over the road. We should all be celebrating the huge investments being made in our town. Unless, of course, you are a bus passenger.

In amongst the hundreds of millions of £s of funding the council has decided that we do not need any sort of bus terminus outside the station, passengers will be dropped at bus stops in nearby streets and then also have to queue up there. There will be no information desk, no teabar, no loos, no covered walkways to protect against bad weather and no easy way to find your bus stop if you are not a regular passenger. No, Reading can do without these, they might get in the way of developing Station Hill. We may have excellent buses and a good network of routes but at the hub of the network there will be no central terminus and no facilties.

The plans for bus passengers at the new station are a shambles and will not serve the town’s current passengers let alone the doubling of numbers expected after the station is rebuilt. This is no way to encourage people to make more use of the bus.

In case you missed it, Reading Boerough Council has just finished consulting on Traffic orders to close Station Hill to through traffic as the first stage in redevloping the station area.

Hasty Consultation for the Buses

Reading Buses are consulting on changes to their routes but have given people only one week to respond. This is outrageous.

Their consultation is at

http://www.reading-buses.co.uk/articles/reading-buses-needs-your-views/?PHPSESSID=6528259f93572ed490cdab575cb3b714

If my reading of the changes is correct then residents living in the far west of Tilehurst will see a major reduction in frequency of their bus services. Many services (routes 33 and the new 33a that replaces the 15) will now terminate in the Triangle rather than carry on to the Bird’s Estate and Westwood Glen.

This is clearly unwelcome at a time when we should be encouraging people to use public transport and I shall be commenting to Reading Buses.

I have written to Reading Buses asking why they have given the public just one week to respond to their consultation.

In the meantime, your comments can be sent by e-mail to:-

consultation@reading-buses.co.uk

or by post to:-

Consultation
Reading Buses
Great Knollys Street
READING
RG1 7HH

Tory Party Funding

Today’s Observer headlines a lot of what is wrong with British politics. A major political party is endebted to a rich overseas financier of dubious probity to fund its election campaign. It is not new and it belies David Cameron’s attempt to paint a new picture of the Tory Party. Michael Ashcroft is currently bankrolling the Tory campaigns in marginal seats where they presume the next general election will be won. He is paying for lots of glossy Tory leaflets to be distributerd in places like Reading West, he is paying for telephone banks to phone residents in key areas like Tilehurst. In doing so he is undermining our very democracy. No party should be beholden to a rich businessman who does not even live and pay tax in the UK.

Todays story shows that Mr Ashcroft apart from being given a peerage, and funding the  Tory campaign (his companies also provide jet flights for leading Tories), he is also being taken with them on trips abroad. So, for instance, he recently accompanied William Hague to the USA. We should all be asking why ? What other reason would there be for meeting top US Governemnt officials ? He is pushing his business interests on the back of legitimate ToryParty activities. And he can do this because he funds them.

This is no way to clean up British politics.

Michael Ashcroft should be evicted from the House of Lords and sent back to Belize where he made his fortune and where he apparently still feels ‘at home’, until and unless he feels able to pay taxes on his income like the rest of us.

So when the Tories next come canvassing in Tilehurst (and they are busy phoning residents right now, and will surely be knocking on doors very soon),  just ask about who funds the campaign and why are the Tories peddling business for rich tax exiles like Mr Ashcroft.

The Observer article is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/01/lord-ashcroft-conservative-party  .

Fined for Breaching Weight Restriction in New Lane Hill

It is not often I get the urge to repeat a press release from the council but this one caught my eye.

Fine for Driver Breaching Weight Restriction on Road

A supermarket delivery driver has become the first in Reading to be prosecuted after a resident reported him for ignoring weight restrictions on a road.

Co-op delivery driver Kyrstof Adamski was spotted by a resident taking a short cut in his 33-tonne articulated lorry up New Lane Hill, to get to the Co-op on School Road, Tilehurst.  New Lane Hill is one of a number of roads in the Borough with a 7.5 tonne weight restriction limit on it.

Reading Borough Council has been prosecuting weight restriction breaches for some time, but this is the first instance of a driver being prosecuted following a report by a resident.  He was fined £200, plus an additional £100 costs and £15 court levy by Reading Magistrates, following an investigation by Reading’s Trading Standards team under its (OWL) Over Weight Lorries Scheme.

The proper route to Tilehurst for vehicles over 7.5 tonnes is via Liebenrood Road and the Meadway.

The OWL scheme was set up for residents to report overweight vehicles illegally using their roads for short cuts. Trading Standards carry out spot checks during the year but the scheme was set up so residents could report illegal vehicles as and when they see them.

For more information of weight restricted roads in Reading, visit www.reading.gov.uk/adviceandbenefits/tradingstandards/owls-weightrestrictions/ or contact Trading Standards on 0800 626 540.

 Well done that local resident for reporting the lorry !

Who Believes in Park & Ride ?

On Monday, together with my Lib Dem colleagues Kirsten Bayes and Daisy Benson (our Wokingham colleagues have also called in the similar decision made by Wokingham as this is a joint service between the two councils), we called in the Labour Administration decision to increase the fares for the bus service to Loddon Bridge Park & Ride. Never mind that the increases are many times the current rate of inflation, this Administration, aided and abetted by the Tory ‘opposition’, gave a two fingered salute to those of us who are desperate to get commuters out of their cars and to reduce congestion in Reading.

Despite the amazing ease with which Reading uses TIF (Transport Innovation Fund, money given by central government to help reduce congestion)  funds to support bus services elsewhere in the borough (several times this year already), when in comes to Park & Ride they prefer to see more cars drive into Reading.

One explanation might be that the users of Park & Ride at Loddon Bridge do not tend to be voters in Reading whereas users of subsidised bus servcies within Reading do, or am I being too cynical.

The TIF bid for future funding includes money for replacing Loddon Bridge with an alternative Park & Ride site, its future is secure, so why reduce the bus service and put up fares by 20% ?

Local Labour and Tory politicians  should be asked to explain their action given that they have been trying to convince the rest if us that they support Park & Ride schemes.

Yet More on Pincents Hill

You could not make this up. I had just finished writing an article on Pincents Hill for our local Council Topics in Tilehurst explaining the amazing tangled web of deceipt from the local West Berks Tories doing one thing and then voting a different way in council, when I was alerted to a rather interesting new twist. If you look here you will find that the consultant to Blue Living is none other than Simon Hoare, a Tory councillor from Oxfordshire, chum of David Cameron and a PPC for a seat in Cardiff at the next general election.

As I said in my article  –  you can’t trust the Tories on development.

And it turns out that Mr Hoare and Blue Living have their eyes on not just Pincents Hill but White Hart Meadow in Theale as well.

And still the West Berks and Reading West Tories want to convince us that they are on the side of the residents against the developers. You decide !

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.
 

CRB Checks in the News Again

Criminal record checks are in the news again with the press wondering why anybody who might remotely come into contact with a child or young person must have a CRB check these days.

Labour Cllr Stainthorpe brought this up at the council meeting last month and proposed that all councillors must be CRB checked in case they came into contact with children. It is absurd that anyone that might even meet a child in the street must first have a CRB check. Even more absurd when you consider that the great bogey of our time, child abuse, is mainly carried out within the family rather than by strangers. We do not propose to have every parent CRB checked before hvaing their baby. Or maybe this is Labour’s new way of safeguarding families.

Whilst it is right that teachers and other people who work with children should have a CRB check to avoid employing undesirable people with convictions relating to children, this surely need not apply to every council worker in the Civic Centre, every newsagent, every ice cream man.  This is nonsense, another example of Labour’s nanny state overstepping the mark. The state should not be holding databases of 60 million people with intimate details of all our private lives and history, even if it could store data securely, which it demonstrably cannot do at present. 

Beware the Media Mogul

Hats off to Polly Toynbee in todays Guardian for showing how low we have really sunk as a nation. The entire political leadership of both Labour and the Tories are in thrall to one media mogul, a man powerful enough that potential Prime Ministers are forced to travel half way round the world to receive his endorsement, King Rupert Murdoch. Well actually no, not king, more like Warwick the king maker. The man who controls half the British press and makes Prime Ministers, apparently.

His paper has been found guilty of reading the voicemail of well-known politicians and celebrities to produce a series of stunning scoops for the News of the World. Typically although the odd journalist has been sent to prison, none of the bosses have ever faced charges because, they insist, they never knew about such murky goings on. Only one editor resigned, Andy Coulson, and he resigned not because he knew anything (oh no) but because these things happened while he was in charge.

Yes this is the same Andy Coulson who was then offered the job of Communications Director of the Conservative Party, hand-picked indeed by David Cameron when he took office. Well having seen Alastair Campbell play Machiavelli in Tony Blair’s government, you can see where the Tories  got the idea.

Anyway, Dave Cameron made a speech a week ago laying in to the vast number of quangos that have proliferated in and around Whitehall. In particular he laid into Ofcom, making it clear that he would neuter that body if and when he leads a Tory government. Why just Ofcom, you ask? Well they just happened to have upset Rupert, the king maker, Murdoch by forcing Sky (the jewel in the Murdoch Empire which just happens to own a virtual monopoly) to sell on rights to movies and premiership football to other broadcasters and much lower prices. A move which threatens to knock around £1Bn off the value of Murdoch’s media empire. Unsurprisingly the Murdoch press laid into Ofcom but then this was followed up by doughty Dave Cameron attacking Ofcom as well.

Blair and Brown were poodles in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, and now we have proof that democratic Dave is also kept on Rupert’s leash. What price democracy under a Cameron government!

Out with the Sleaze Bags – Vote Lib Dem !

Unbelieveable ! No not the millionaires from Chelsea winning the FA Cup, not the latest TV talent show winners – but a British newspaper actually urging voters to get out and vote Lib Dem.

All credit to the Observer for crediting the Lib Dems as the only party ready to put Britain’s case forcibly in Europe (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/european-elections-liberal-democrats)

and also for being the only party with a history of commitment to electoral reform, see ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/voting-reform-liberal-democrats ), the latest bandwagon used by the other two main parties in a desperate attempt to move the political conversation away from their MPs sleaze.

Lib Dems are also challenging the Tories on the funding they receive from their deputy Chairman, Lord Ashcroft. This is the man given a peerage by the Tories for making huge donations to their party (over £5m in the last few years) whilst never actually fulfilling his promise (made in order to become a peer) of  living in the UK rather than his very comfortable tax havens abroad. Yes this man from Belize is currently funding the Tories attack on scores of target seats for next year’s General Election. This includes my own Reading West constituency and , in particular Tilehurst Ward, where he his currently funding a glossy leaflet that hit doorsteps yesterday.

I challenge the Tories to say where the money for their campaign in Reading West has come from !