Services for Vulnerable People or Tax Cuts

Tonight’s Council meeting really set out the difference in approach to running council services. The Tories attacked Labour for not sticking to their budgets. Labour accusd the Tories of not caring for vulnerable people. The spat arose over what to do with a windfall of £3.6m that Reading BC has been given from the government as a result of overpaid VAT. The Tories want to use it to keep next year’s Council Tax increase down to 0%. Labour want to use part of it to to pay off some iof the extra sopending incurred by Childrens Services and Adult Social Care in catering for a huge increase in demand for these services which has affected almost all local councils this year (as a result of some highly publicised abuse cases).

The Lib Dems sided with Labour in the votes and opposed the Tory idea of cuts across the board to pay for these overspends this year in order to have their0% council tax rise next year. They were never specific about where they would cut the money other than calling for ‘across the board cuts.’ This, from the party that could not even produce a budget last March and insists on being the party that knows how to run government.

I told the Tories that they could not run services for vulnerable people as though they were running a corner shop and that they could not simply ignore the increased demand this year, or slash other front line services to pay for it  when this windfall was available.

I also pointed out that the Labour Government knew exactly the level of demand currently being experienced by both Childrens and Adults Social Care Services up and dowm the country but had chosen not to provide councils with any more funds. They had been quite happy to spend billions to prop up broken banks but would not spend a few millions to support broken humans.

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 !

Speeding Yet Again

I note that this week’s TMAP (Traffic Management Advisory Panel) meeting will receive a report on the current Road Safety Awareness Campaign. The campaign consists of erecting signs (including a Smiley Sid flashing speed warning sign) along known traffic speeding hotspots for two weeks at a time, then moving on to the next hotspot. The theory is that you make an impact in the first two weeks but that beyond that time, the impact falls away dramatically as drivers get used to the signs.

The good news is that the Smiley Sid signs also detect average  vehicle speeds from each site where they are installed so RBC now have useful data on average traffic speeds. The not so good news is that they have no action plan on how to deal with the speeding hotspots now that they know definitely where they are. They have spent a year on a campaign that has told them where the hotspots are, something that local councillors already knew pretty well, and their only plan of action is to ask the local neighbourhood police to enforce speed limits at these hotspots.

You may remember that it was me that came up with the idea of providing local neighbourhood police with speed guns (see my post from March this year) and that I got them inserted into the budget for 2009-10 months after the Speed Awareness Campaign had kicked off. Well my information is that council officers have only ordered 2 out of 4 speed guns and we are still some weeks off seeing them in action. None of which says very much about the effectiveness of our coyuncil when it comes to tackling speeding even though it is a major issue for many residents, especially those living in the outer suburbs where traffic flows freely and motorists speed by default.

I did not realise what a struggle it would be to get speed guns into the hands of neighbourhood police teams. It seemed like such a straightforward solution to the problem of speeding which required some form of enforcement.  Anyway, some of them will be available for use soon and I look forward to seeing them in action, especially on the Tilehurst Roads where residents regularly complain to me about speeding cars.

The issue about speeding is not that is just dangerous (which it patently is) but that it also creates the perception in residents minds that there is nothing that can be done about it and that  their own streets are no longer safe places to walk in or to let children walk in. This is not good enough. The council and police, between them, need to re-assure our residents that speeding is taken seriously. We have never really tackled this issue before as it has been too difficult and we did not have the technology.

Speeding is a bit like crime, every time you hear about or see  an incident, it creates more fear that you or your children will be the next victims. It takes a long period with very few incidents to re-assure the public and change their perception.

In the meantime I look forward to some explanation of why it has taken the council so long as I intend to ask questions at this week’s TMAP meeting.

Updated Update on Pincents Hill

The closing date for comments on this planning application is now 18 September. Many thanks to the planning oficers at West Berkshire for seeing the light.

I have sent in my own response concentrating on the effects of the development on traffic around the local roads in my neighbouring ward of Tilehurst. Given the size of the proposed development there is widespread apprehension locally about the numbers of cars that will use Tilehurst Roads (especially City Road) to access the top end of the development.

Update on Pincents Hill

Well, I got back from holiday late on Wednesday night and whilst leafing through the local press discovered that Blue Living (the developers) had put in a planning application to build 750 homes, a primary school, a hotel, a health centre, creche, library and shops, on the land at Pincents Hill. The details are now available on both Reading (09/01302/ADJ) and West Berks (09/01432/OUTMAJ)council websites. They expect comments by 14 August having allowed just three weeks over the main holiday period. I am not sure what West Berks officers are playing at but this is a ridiculously short space of time. You can draw your own conclusions.

You can bet your bottom dollar that Blue Living chose their time to put in their application but why have West Berks officers limited the consultation time to just three weeks ?

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.

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.