Julia and I had a lovely holiday in April where we spent two weeks in Australia with my brother-in-law and his family. He has a great work-life balance and in comparison I didn’t – I realised this needed redressing starting with stepping down from my Parish and District council duties and this has had a positive effect already.

So I am happy to report that I am in good health and thoroughly enjoying a better work-life balance. You will see me around the village in my shorts and flip flops recreating the chilled Australian effect. G’day!

I have worked with John over the last year as a Parish Councillor and have been impressed with his enthusiasm, pro-activeness and willingness to see projects through to the end. I’m sure he will make an excellent District Councillor for our villages.

This holiday has highlighted to me just how much stress I have been putting myself and my family under and how detrimental this is proving to be to my wellbeing.

It has been a difficult decision to make and not one I have taken lightly, but i have decided to resign as both a District and Parish Councillor with immediate effect. I have considered alternative approaches with my Council work, but in the end concluded, for now at least, that I need to resign completely from the Council.

My decision to resign has been purely for personal and health reasons.

I am not quite sure yet what I will do with this website. I may continue with it in some way, but this resignation will mean that there is little to post here going forward.

I have yet to decide what I will do about my better broadband for Lytchett project, but for the short time at least this also will be on hold. I am unlikely to involve myself in any other projects or issues that I was working on whilst being a councillor, so if any of those affect you directly then I would suggest you contact either the Parish or District Council representatives.

You can read their press release here. And the consultation can be found here.

Ad-Lib, the Dorset group of ‘friends’ of libraries are recommending option 2. This option put forward by AD-LIB recommends that the cuts in the library budget is spread throughout the library service, all libraries would be kept open but with limited reduced opening hours.

So much community work is carried out by volunteers so it was great to see them recognised for all the work they’ve done in their communities. And with cuts left, right and centre to local governments, volunteers will become ever-more important in communities.

Each volunteer was introduced by their nominee and presented with a certificate by the Chair of the Council.

Pictured above is Ron Whitelock who won a certificate thanks to a nomination from Morden Parish Council – well done Ron!

He said that the Council would continue “consulting” on the proposals although it’s not clear in what format that consultation will take, although the proposal is for it to last just 3 months, which Fred is fighting as unreasonably short.

The AdLib organisation (which has been set up by all the “Friends” of libraries across the County have put forward a proposal on saving money by reducing library hours across ALL libraries rather than cutting 20 libraries – they rekon this could save a significant amount of money and reduce the need for closing libraries.

Fred continues to fight for our library arguing that our public transport links are sufficiently poor to mean that travelling to other libraries in the area is not easily possible.

The Parish Council has yet to receive a formal response from the DCC Audit & Scrutiny about how it decided on which libraries to close.

Unfortunately it would seem that despite significant petition signatures against the school crossing patrol, very little was considered on this issue and according to a letter to the Parish Council it would seem the Council ratified the decision to cease school crossing patrols across the County. Fred said that the Council will continue to consult with communities on how alternative solutions can be provided and that this consultation will probably continue up to the end of the year.

The budget was quite straight forward in terms of it being unanimously supported by the Council and the proposals voted through. Sadly, as with all public monies, times are tough for PDC at the moment with the proposed government cuts much worse that we expected, but the Council officers and members have done a great job in making up the deficit. The big budget news story though is that to be able to benefit from a government grant, PDC have managed to keep the council tax increase at 0%. You can read more about that in the Council press release, and if you want more detail of the facts and figures the details are available online here (Report L and appendices).

As I already mentioned the other hot topic was a proposal to remove the public participation session from the Planning Board. Specific agenda items on the Planning Board (i.e. planning applications) have a specific public participation session before each application is discussed, but the Board also has an open public session at the start of the meeting. Across Dorset this is quite unusual and what is allowed to be discussed is often quite complicated and is left to the Chair of the Board to decide whether something can be discussed or not.

The main concern was by having a session where members of the public make representations on particular planning issues without the other affected party necessarily there to respond could leave the Council open to legal challenge (more details are available online here), so the proposal was to either remove the open session completely or have some control in terms of pre-meeting oversight of what was going to be discussed (i.e. potential speakers had to pre-register their intention to speak).

Having received some correspondence on the matter and with representations made by 3 members of the public at this meeting”s public participation session it was clear that some members of the public felt very strongly about the public session at Planning Board being lost.

After a debate and a number of counter proposals being laid before Council, the Council eventually voted in going out to public consultation before anything changes. The full details of the debate will be available in the Council minutes, which will be published here when they’re ready.

From a community action point of view, the project has been a resounding success with a volunteer group acting on behalf of the Council, raising tens of thousands of pounds in grant money (via Viridor and SITA) to pay towards the area. Sadly though it has not been without controversy and even weeks after it was completed the play area continues to face objections from local residents.

Whilst the Council received petitions against the play area being built back in May 2010, the petition was considered and discussions were had with the protestors on possible options and the Council concluded it wanted to go ahead but with a smaller than planned play area more in keeping with the size of the original plans shown on residents’ deeds. This was communicated with the petitioners and nothing further was heard until the developers started building the play area in January this year (despite the Council continuing planning discussions at every Full Council and E&H meeting since May).

Whilst as chair of the Parish Council I remain proud of the fact that thanks to the volunteers we have managed to deliver a great asset for the village that will be enjoyed by residents for years to come, I feel it is very sad that this success has been marred by recent objections which at times have been very personal and rude.

I’m further saddened that the Police have had to get involved with evidence of theft of the play area sign and contamination of the play area equipment with oil, and most recently with oil and what looks like compost.

The residents objecting to the play area have stressed on many occasions that they are concerned about young people hanging around on the play area late at night and of anti-social behaviour. The village, as with most places, suffers from ASB from time to time, but we’ve never seen anything of this type, where play equipement has been sabotaged in a way that would put the children who play on it at risk.

It’s not for me to speculate who are the culprits in this case – that’s for the police to sort out and maybe some kind of CCTV may be the answer to catch whoever is doing this.

Personally I found the last month or so very difficult. It’s not nice to face some of the accusations or being verbally abused. As for the objectors to the play area, they had 7 months in which to engage with the Council on the design and to continue to raise their objections.

Was it worth the hassle? Of course it was. Lytchett now has a brand new play area in an area of the village that was identified as lacking in play area facilities; it has shown the power of the volunteer, as without the help of the volunteers we would never have sourced funding towards the play area to the scale that we did and it shows that the Parish Council can deliver for the village (even when some of the village object to it) and be effective.

For the time being perhaps my colleagues and I need to have a thicker than usual skin to get through the continuing objections and personal comments, and hopefully the Police will get to the bottom of the unusual activity occuring at the play area and put a stop to it, so that the children can get on and enjoythe play area, and the Parish Council can get on with its important roles liking supporting those fighting the library and school crossing patrol closures.

It was a very useful meeting and enabled all parties to exchange information and viewpoints on the proposals.

I’m glad to say that the parents at the meeting were willing to set up an action group who will co-ordinate an action plan for saving our school crossing.

This will become even more important now that the County Council has ratified the decision to cut the patrols – this means as a community we will need to decide what we want to do, whether we can keep a crossing patrol and more importantly how it will be funded or supported.

The first step appears to be to hold a dialogue with the County Council and assess the options. Alan Proctor from County has written to the Parish Council stressing the importance of such a meeting.

I will be supporting this group as much as I can, primarily in my role as District Councillor but also as a parish councillor.

The work will start 4th April 2011 and last approximately 8 weeks and will involve the use if three-way traffic lights.