Recently I launched another website, www.YourBury.co.uk. It is a discussion forum about everything in Bury St Edmunds in which anyone can raise and discuss any issue they please. Unlike a blog, which is dependent on the author to update, a forum can contain much more user based content. Please visit it, sign up and contribute to the debate. During the recent election campaign it became clear to me that some people do not feel they are being listened to. Hopefully this forum will help us all make a small step in the right direction but please remember unless you speak up your views will go unheard.
The aim is to get 500 users within the first year. We’ll be doing a few advertising campaigns to get the userbase off the ground – at the moment it sits at 28. Forums tend to snowball – so please sign up now and help get the project off the ground. You can raise any issue you please and there is no moderation in place. The only thing we ask is that users abide by the rules in the signing up agreement.
Click on the picture above to visit www.YourBury.co.uk
He suggested, quite rightly, that more of the £400,000 raised from on street parking in Bury should be spent in Bury, rather than elsewhere in Suffolk. However, the Park & Ride debate is far more complex than came across in the East Anglian article.
Let me first state that I am, in principle, in favour of a permanent Park & Ride solution for our town. The reason for this is not the often cited lack of parking – car parks in the town are rarely full and it is only at peak times such as Christmas that any real strain is seen. Even then the car parks are rarely at capacity for more than an hour or so. This, in itself, is not enough to warrant the introduction of Park & Ride nor make it financially viable (even with the £400,000 from on street parking). The reason I support Park & Ride in the long term is not due to insufficient car park capacity, it is simply because I don’t believe we have the infrastructure to cope ever increasing traffic flows. The problem isn’t with getting parked, it will rest, as traffic in the town increases, with getting to a car park.
The solutions to this are twofold. Long term, Park & Ride will become more and more feasible and should remain an ultimate ambition but I will come back to this subject in a moment. In the short term, we need to look at the town as a whole and see what improvements can be made to the town’s infrastructure to ease traffic flows – the signalisation of Tayfen Road is just one of these solutions. There is some excellent work being done by the Borough and County Councils but I have, for some time now, argued for the creation of a traffic management plan for the entire town rather than a more piecemeal approach where junctions are upgraded as and when the funding is available. This is an argument I will continue to pursue – it is only through looking at the town as a whole that we can begin to address problems with congestion.
Returning to the subject of Park & Ride, the difficulty is this: while people can park all day in the town centre for a couple of pounds they will do so. On the average weekday and weekend we have adequate parking and, despite the inevitable outcry, when there is an increase it remains comparatively affordable. Given the choice between paying £1.50 for a Park & Ride ticket and £1.90 to park on Parkway or Ram Meadow all day, the vast majority of people would choose to park more centrally and pay a little more for the privilege. It wouldn’t even attract the casual shoppers popping into town for 2 hours when they could park in the most central location for less than £2 or, on a shorter visit, on street for £1.60.
Where Park & Ride works elsewhere it is because town centre parking is prohibitively priced and reasonably scarce. For it to be a success the town centre parking charges would need to be such that most people would opt for Park & Ride. For example, a day’s parking in the Grand Arcade in Cambridge is close to £15. Furthermore, if Park & Ride is a success it would mean that some of the town centre car parks would fall into disuse – strangely the success of Park & Ride would probably see some town centre car parks (most likely the more outlying ones) close.
Some others, with whom I have discussed this topic, go further – they argue that for Park & Ride to work people need to be forced out of driving into the town centre and this would mean not only prohibitively priced town centre parking but also the closure of some car parks from the very outset. There is also the problem that we do not have the capacity for bus lanes on our roads; what use would Park & Ride be if the buses simply got stuck in traffic? The natural argument goes that a successful Park & Ride would free up space on the roads but this simply gives more weight to the argument that it would mean the need to force far fewer people to drive into the town centre on a daily basis.
This is, as I have said, a complex debate and personally I see the short term solution in improving traffic infrastructure in the town with Park & Ride as an ultimate goal.
To say we need a Park & Ride is easy. To say how we would make it a success is far more difficult – I’d be interested to see if the Chamber of Commerce would support its introduction if it meant fewer town centre parking spaces and large price increases. That is a much more difficult case to make.
The results from yesterday’s Suffolk County Council elections are in and were as follows:
Mark Ereira-Guyer, Green 1,924 (elected)
Paul Farmer, Con 2,042 (elected)
Kevin Hind, Lab 624
Allan Jones, Lib Dems 625
David Nettleton, Ind 1,846
Richard Rout, Con 1,726
Daniel Warren, Lib Dems 641
Kevin Waterson, Lab 645
Sadly, while the Conservatives held onto the seat that Paul Hopfensperger won in 2005 we were unable to gain both. It was a remarkable result for Mark Ereira-Guyer who increased the Green Party vote massively – my congratulations go to him and to Paul Farmer on their victory.
One can dwell on the reasons for the result endlessly; the expenses saga and many people’s disenchantment with politics were doubtless factors as was the middle school issue but it would be churlish to blame any one of these.
Mark’s election does reveal that environmental issues are now, quite rightly, at the very top of the political agenda and that politicians both locally and nationally need to work to restore the public’s faith in them.
It was a long and hard campaign and I’m grateful to all those people who supported me and helped us along the way. It was much appreciated and I’m sorry that I didn’t deliver the victory that both they and I craved.
Given all the coverage in the press recently about MPs’ expenses claims I thought residents would find it useful to have an update on my claims as a local councillor.
Since I was first elected to Bury St Edmunds Town Council in 2005 and St Edmundsbury Borough Council in 2007, I haven’t claimed a single penny in expenses. Furthermore, if elected to Suffolk County Council on June 4, I will not submit any expenses claims in relation to this role.
Borough and County Councillors are provided with not insubstantial allowances and in my opinion these should be used to cover the expenses we incur. It is true to say that the allowances do not nearly compensate for the time involved (in my case over 20 hours a week) – in fact when I worked out how much my allowance compensated me for per hour each year it worked out at less than the minimum wage. It is also true to say that I and many of my colleagues could make a huge amount more money if we dedicated this time to our jobs. However, Councillors do not stand for election to make money and, personally, I could not claim for every short journey or indeed the occasional meal (which I would have consumed regardless of my location) with a clear conscience.
So to be clear – I have made no expenses claims since I was first elected in 2005 and this will continue to be the case regardless of which council I sit on.
I’ve had a couple of unsolicited marketing calls from the same company recently, so In thought I would write a short post about the merits of the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).
Individuals and businesses can register their phone numbers with the TPS and, after 28 days from registration, it becomes an offence for any company to make an unsolicited call to that number.
This has worked perfectly for me up until a week or so ago when I started getting unsolicited calls from someone “calling on behalf of Golden Charter Funeral Plans – largest independent funeral firm in the UK”. On each occasion the caller asked for someone who doesn’t live at my address (and never has), when I explained this I was told ‘it was my lucky day’ and asked if I had any plans for my funeral. They simply wanted to ‘confirm my address’ so they could send out an information pack to me. Now, hopefully I’ve got a few years ahead of me still but for someone elderly or vulnerable this could be quite a distressing call and they could quite possibly be swayed by it. I asked to speak to the caller’s supervisor on each occasion but as soon as I said that they hung up.
I’ve reported both of these calls to the TPS and lodged a complaint with Golden Charter Funeral Plans. Disturbingly, their very polite Operations Manager emailed me back saying they never embarked on such marketing operations and would willingly surrender their records to the TPS. Less than a week later I have received another call from someone claiming to call from the same firm. Either there is some external marketing being done or, more worryingly, another firm is ringing round pretending to be from Golden Charter Funeral Plans in order to send out their own promotional material.
The very polite response to my complaint from Golden Charter...6 days later I received a call from someone claiming to be from the same company
The TPS are investigating but, from what I gather, there is little they can do unless they know the number that is calling me (it was withheld).
Despite this recent blip, the TPS and the similar Fax Preference Service and Mail Preference Service are excellent at getting rid of the bulk of unwanted marketing communications and I’d thoroughly recommend them. As long as nobody suggests a Conservative Politician Preference Service…
We’ve had fantastic weather for the past few weeks and I thought it was worth mentioning just how good the Abbey Gardens have been looking. These photos were taken when I walked Rufus there last weekend.
View of the Abbey Gardens
The St Edmundsbury Parks department does a fantastic job keeping the gardens looking good all year round. Sometimes I think people forget just how fortunate we are to have an area like this in our town centre.
View of the Abbey Gardens
Similarly, Nowton Park has been looking pretty spectacular over the last month - as the images below testify.
Nowton Park
Nowton Park
Best of all, both the Abbey Gardens and Nowton Park are completely free to visit.
More information on the parks in St Edmundsbury can be found here, sadly the photographs on the website don't really do them justice.
I have already posted a news story about the problems with litter and dog mess around the cycle path between Beetons Way and Spring Lane. While this post retreads some of that ground, I am more interested in your views on the wider problem.
The blame for the amount of litter can’t be put at the door at any one group of individuals. However, its concentration seems to be greatest in those areas around, and on popular routes to and from, our town’s schools. I have certainly witnessed many young people in the town simply dropping litter in the street, often within 100 yards of a bin, and walking nonchalantly on. Is this an increasing problem or are my advancing years just making me more conscious of it?
The route I am most familiar with in terms of daily quantities of litter is down Springfield Road, along Spring Lane and down the Cycle Path to Beetons Way, up past the Barracks (along the footpath) to Risbygate Street and back to Chancellery Mews. This is one of the main walks I do with Rufus and there is quite clearly a big problem with litter. The Google Map below shows the route I take.
Parts of this route (excluding Springfield Road) are also heavily used by school children and students. Now, whether the amount of litter is simply a reflection of the amount of traffic coupled with irregular cleaning (when compared to the town centre) or whether it is down to the people using the route, I am not certain. What is certain is that it does not create a very good impression of our town.
My questions to you are as follows:
Do younger generations simply feel it acceptable to drop litter or is it a wider problem across all age groups?
Is it more a case of less frequent cleaning regimes coupled with more people using certain routes?
Are there simply not enough bins?
Should we be much harder on those who drop litter?
Rest assured I will be pressing for more litter picks in the identified areas but, clearly, preventing the litter being dropped in the first place would be the preferred solution. I’d be interested to know your thoughts.
Click here to read the news story about my proposal for more bins between Spring Lane and Beetons Way.
My new website has launched today and I’d appreciate your feedback. I am aware of the missing dates in my meeting diary – this is a glitch on St Edmundsbury’s website, from which mine automactically draws the figures. Otherwise, I’m very happy with it and look forward to keeping you up to date through its pages.
This is my first blog on this newly launched website – finally everything is in one place. My main complaint with the blogger setup, which I experimented with briefly last year, was that it couldn’t be properly integrated into another website.
One of the new additions to this site is the integration of my Twitter feed, displayed to the right. I was sceptical about Twitter when I first looked at it last summer, however, I am now well and truly converted. Many of you will have seen Stephen Fry on the news talking about the joys of ‘tweeting’ or Jonathan Ross inserting the word ‘salad’ into his BAFTA speech after asking his Twitter followers for a suggestion of a bizarre word to throw into the proceedings. It is fantastically accessible, easy to use and has yet to become a huge sprawling monster of a website – a fate that has befallen other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
It is, in essence, a micro-blogging site. In 140 characters or less (including spaces) one describes what one is doing or what is on one’s mind. Often people will ‘tweet’ about a news story and provide a link to it or illustrate their point with a photograph. Recently, especially in the United States, news stories have broken on Twitter before they hit the major news networks – this was the case when Captain Chesley Sullenberger heroically landed US Airlines flight 1549 in the Hudson River. More locally (and admittedly much less impressively) I was tweeting from the opening of the Cattle Market development using my iPhone; I was able to comment and post pictures on Twitter before any of the journalists and photographers had left the launch. It really has revolutionised how news breaks and spreads.
I could explain more about how Twitter works but there are other websites that give a far better explanation than I could ever manage. For something so simple it is very difficult to sum up succinctly.
My tweets will continue to stream on this site but it really is worth joining Twitter and giving it a try – I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not everything I tweet about is politics or council related, it would be awfully dull if it was, and occasionally I may bore you with what I am doing for dinner or what havoc my dog, Rufus, has just caused. For this I make no apologies – it is part and parcel of Twitter and makes it a much more diverse experience.
I tend to Tweet when I am on a way to a meeting or going through an agenda – feel free to send me an @reply if you have any questions or if you wish to put a point across about an upcoming issue.
