20mph Zones

Back in May the local Lib Dem manifesto included a committment to introduce 20mph zones where residents want them to improve road safety.

The reasoning behind implementing 20mph zones is really twofold. Firstly it does reduce the average speed of traffic within the zones even when other traffic calming measures are already in place. More importantly, the 20mph zones are a sign and an encouragement to local residents that they own the streets, not the motor cars. The 20mph zones make the streets safer for other users, whether pedestrians of cyclists or even small children wlaking to school or visiting friends.

Lib Dems in Portsmouth were the first major city council to introduce 20mph zones and they did it on a huge scale covering the whole city apart from the main roads which stayed at 30mph. These zones have now been in place for two years and have been shown to reduce overall traffic speeds. The effects on accident figures  are much less clear with little or no reduction. However, the key question of residents’ attitudes to the new regime on their streets is much more difficult to measure but the received wisdom is that if traffic speed is reduced then people will feel safer about walking and cycling and also about allowing children out. I have not yet seen any actual data on this.

Trees to be Felled

Council officers have reported that a number of trees around the town are in such poor states of health that they require felling. Sadly the list includes the old horse chestnut tree in the Triangle which has been a landmark in Tilehurst for the last hundred years. Other trees to be felled in Tilehurst include one in Teviot Road growing too close to a house and one thorn tree outside 82 Elvaston Way.

It is always sad to see trees felled and it always takes a long time for replacement trees to grow. I have asked the Parks and Open Spaces Department  about plans to replace the felled trees and also the trees felled some time ago such as the one in front of the bungalows at the bottom of Corwen Road.

Thankfully, the council now has a Tree Strategy (thanks to a Lib Dem initiative over the last year) and soon it will have a full inventory of the trees in the Borough and budgeted plans for planting more, not just to replaced felled ones but to add to the number of trees, especially in those areas that have very few at present.

Trees in Reading and other towns and cities bring huge benefits to local people apart from making the place look more attractive. They help reduce air pollution, they provide shade in our parks, they reduce stormwater runoff and they also provide an improved habitat for much of our urban wildlife. We need to look after the trees we do have and replace the ones that we inevitably lose over time. Better still, we need to plant more trees where we can.

Pincents Hill – Blue Living Appeal

Well the inevitable has happened and Blue Living, the developers, have launched an appeal against the decision by West Berkshire’s Planning Committee to refuse them permission to build a whole new suburb with 750 homes plus shops and other facilities on land at Pincents Hill (see my posts last year on Pincents Hill)

Interested parties have until 21 September to send in comments which can be done online at www.planningportal.gov.uk/pcs . Or at least you will be able to very soon, it is not there yet. The case reference is APP/W0340/A/10/2133957/NWF.

This planning application by Blue Living is opposed by the vast majority of residents who live nearby and also by the majority of residents of Tilehurst who stand to suffer from a huge increase in traffic using City Road and Chapel Hill which will be used to access the new suburb and also provide the quickest root through to Reading’s town centre. It was on these grounds that I based my own objections when the planning application was first discussed.

There is something wrong with the planning process if this appeal is allowed as it will make a mockery of both the local planning process and also screw up Readings plans to reduce congestion on its already crowded road system. Needless to say there is no prvision in the plans for improving any transport links into town.

Please please please send in your own comments on this  unwanted scheme.

Tilehurst Bus Shelter Update

The bus shelter lots of peoploe in Tilehurst are waiting for is the one by the Plough opposite the Triangle in Tilehurst. It should appear in two weeks time after they complete the one outside Park Lane School. Pierce’s Hill, the other bus shelter that a number of people have asked me about is not due till October, as is the one at the top of City Road.

By November all the nearly 200 original bus shelters will have been replaced but it is thanks to the previous Labour  Administration that we had such a long gap between losing all our bus shelters and new ones being installed. There are a lot of folk, especially the elderly ones, who are quite angry at how this transition has been managed. This is no way to support public transport in Reading and, frankly, Labour have let the town down.

Why we have a coalition Government

There has been a lot of press speculation about the Lib Dems losing support and about our poor showing in recent opinion polls. This is contrasted with the Tories who are bounding ahead in the polls. It seems that the public willed us into a coalition and are now blaming us for having formed one.

There are two answers as to why we are in a coalition. First, there is the simple electoral arithmetic from May’s general election. Only a coalition with the Tories would produce a stable government. The second is about what we can achieve in government as opposed to being on the outside. See the recent speech by Simon Hughes at http://www.libdems.org.uk/latest_news_detail.aspx?title=10_weeks_on_the_Lib_Dems_have_had_huge_influence_in_Government&pPK=56581a41-74a5-4f93-b2e7-844d5e829448

Simon reiterates our key aims and sets out what we have achieved in 10 weeks of government. A  Tory government on its own would have looked very different and yes, we have had to sit with gritted teeth as they announce new directions for our schools and NHS which would see state control broken up and replaced by the free market,  not something that most LibDdems would happily support. But a coalition is exactly that, it means trading ideas and if we have to grit our teeth whilst we prepare the ground for electoral reform, so be it. Next May we will knock down the discredited  first-past-the-post voting system and the next general election will be a very different campaign. It goes without saying that without electoral reform this coalition does not make sense, but it is the only way of getting this vital reform.

Public support may be fickle but we, as a party, voted overwhelmingly to go into a coalition and we are strong enoughto stick with it till next May and hopefully to the next general election in May 2015.

Coalition Politics

I spent two hours in the Council Chamber on Tuesday evening listening to a debate on the Agreement proposed by the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition that now controls Reading. The Agreement sets out the objectives of the new Coalition Administration (available online at http://www.readinglibdems.org.uk/2010/06/the-liberal-democrat-conservative-coalition/ ).

Unsurprisingly, the Agreement contains bits of Lib Dem policy and bits of Tory policy and yes, there are bits that we do not like and there are bits that the Tories do not like but that is the nature of coalition agreements, there is give and take on both sides. What amazed me during the debate was spleen vented by  Labour at the Lib Dems for daring to enter a coalition, the charge of traitors coming from the Labour benches, how could we suddenly change trackaway from our erstwhile partners in progressive  politics? If the Labour Party was so progressive then we would not have witnessed the huge growth in the gap between rich and poor in this country since 1997 (and yes it widened under the Tories as well but they never pretended to be’progressive’), we would not have seen the introduction of tuition fees, we would have seen education treated as a priority and not just an election slogan, we would not have the largest jail population in Western Europe, we would not have wated billions on the ID card system, the list goes on.

So for all ‘progressives’ in the Labour Party, here is a thought. If we believe in proportional representation or even an Alternative Vote electoral system, the outcome will surely make coalition government more common and end the curent system where Labour or Tory governments make radical reforms to our country with the backing of only 35% of the voters. Very few elections give any one party over 50% of the total vote on their own. Don’t listen to the dinosaurs in your own party or you will be in opposition for a very long time.

Stop nicking our bus stops !

I am sure that there are lots of elderly folk who do not understand why all the bus stops all over Reading have been removed over the last month or why the bus stop on Pierce’s Hill in particular has never been replaced at all since an accident damaged it last year.

The explanation is that one company was awarded the contract to provide bus stops several years ago by the Labour Administration in charge of the Council. Just before the contract ran out, they tendered for a new contract and awarded it to a new company. Sadly the contract allowed them to pick up their bus stops for all over the town without any reference to the new company that apparently cannot start operating until all the old bust stops have been removed. Only when can they start installing new bus stops. It makes you weep when contractual arrangements like this end up as a right pig’s ear with the poor public losing out. Lucky for the people of Reading, we have had good weather over the last couple of weeks – otherwise a lot of people waiting for busses would have got soaked as well as having no place to sit down.

I sincerely hope that the new contract does not have the same pig’s ear of a mess when it eventually runs out.

Oh, and the one on Pierce’s Hill will eventually be replaced, we just do not know when.

That Scrutiny Vote

I have been asked why, in the light of my previous post, I voted for Conservative Cllr Skeats to chair last night’s CCEA Scrutiny Panel when I deputised for Cllr Epps.

On the first round of a secret ballot to elect a chair for the panel, I voted for a Labour councillor. The vote produced a dead heat and a run-off ballot was held between Cllr Skeats (Con) and Cll Lovelock (Lab). I abstained on this run and the result was a again a deadlock.

At this point the election of a chair was deferred to the next meeting and a vote was held to install a temporary chair just for the evening. I could not support Cllr Lovelock (and there are one or two other Labour councillors I would not support) and the only way to break the deadlock was to vote for Cllr Skeats, which I did, happy to leave the next run of an election for chair of the panel to its next meeting when Cllr Epps would be back. I took the view that this was preferable to having Cllr Lovelock in the chair for a meeting when the items on the agenda related to her time as Leader of the Council.

So there you have it.

Scrutiny on the Council

Many people may not realise it but the Council has a number of Scrutiny Committees that look at aspects of the council’s activities and allow members to question officers and lead councillors, holding them to account for their actions. Scrutiny Committees are public meetings so anyone can go along, and indeed speak at these meetings.

For many years under the previous Labour Administration the chairs of the Scrutiny Committees were handed to fellow Labour councillors who then proceeded to ensure that the committees did not upset the Administration in any way. It was not a fair or open way to conduct these meetings and as a result they were never very effective in holding the Administration to account.

In 2008 Labour lost their majority on the council and one of the changes that happened was that the Tory and Lib Dem groups wrested the chairmanships of the scrutiny panels away from Labour. I have been Chair of the Environment Scrutiny Panel for the last two years during which we have had some frank but helpful discussions on the Administration’s policies on waste collection, waste disposal and climate change strategy to mention but a few topics. I remember attending a course on scrutiny along with Daisy Benson (Lib Dem Chair of Housing & Health Scrutiny) and Mark Ralph (Tory Chair of Education Scrutiny) and learning that having opposition members chair these panels was the best way of holding the Administration to account.

However, everything has changed with the advent of a new Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition Administration. In the Coalition Agreementthe Lib Dems have accepted the Tory proposal for Chairs of scrutiny panels to be elected by panel members at the first meeting of the year. This could appear to be an invitation to Administration members to select their own scrutiny panel chairs and leave the Labour opposition out in the cold. This would do to Labour what they had done to us for many years but is not, in my book, a good way to conduct scrutiny.

It is worth pointing out that the Coalition Agreement also calls for a rethink of Scrutiny and how it is best achieved and, whilst not wanting to prejudge what might come out of this, I am of the opinion that Scrutiny Panels must be seen to be independent of the Administration and so I, for one will not be voting for any councillor from the Administration Groups to chair a panel on which I am a member.

Just because Labour had a stranglehold on power in the Civic Centre for many years is not a justification for  weakening scrutiny panels now under the new Coalition Administration.

Thankyou Tilehurst

I do not know what last weeks elections did for you but after a minor scare in the early hours of Friday morning when I thought we may have lost Tilehurst, it all came good when the votes were counted at lunchtime on Friday and yet again we had beaten off the the Tories in Tilehurst with a 257 vote majority. It all sounds so simple afterwards but behind that result was a lot of hard work from a small army of helpers, deliverers, tellers and canvassers who were truly magnificent. So thanks to you and thanks also to the electors of Tilehurst for giving me another term of office as councillor. For my part I will try and continue the record of service of local Lib Dems to the good folk of Tilehurst.

Nationally we also pushed our vote up and Daisy took over 20% of the votes in Reading West, our best result here in many years. Even more pleasing is the number of new members and helpers we have aquired during the campaign.

Tomorrow we are off to a Special Conference in Birmingham where the Lib Dems will discuss the coalition with the Tories. Almost all the members I have spoken to agree that this coalition is right for the country and  although we will need to hold our noses, the actual agreement contains an awful lot of our Lib Dem manifesto  policies. Coalition politics in Parliament is new to us all but is clearly not uncommon in other countries that seem to have prospered, notably Germany.

I shall listen to the debates and what Nick Clegg has to say with interest.