We had a great day today at the Suffolk Show.
Pictured from the top, pony chasing, heavy horses, best and second best in show, a steward, a spotted pig, and a highland heifer
On the left is the interior of my garden shed. The picture was taken yesterday morning. I am rather proud of the shed this year since it really is very full! It is, of course, that time of the year when all the little plants are getting pot-bound, but I hesitate to put them out into the garden before the magic date of 1 June, when frosts really should be a thing of the past. Gardening has become more of a preoccupation in recent days because, with the exception of a bit of a row at the Development Committee today, life at Babergh has gone rather quiet.
The Council Meeting due to be held on 3nd June has been cancelled due to lack of business, and even the agenda for the Development Committee, at which I was a substitute this morning, was rather a short one. Members did get rather excited towards the end of the meeting, however, when they were invited to discuss a draft report about the activities of the Committee over the past twelve months.
The report by and large showed that the Committee had been doing a good job, making decisions which were on the whole sensible and not taking too long about it. It seems that we are in the top quartile when it comes to having our decisions upheld on appeal, which means that by and large we follow the guidelines that we have set ourselves.
There was a good deal of heated discussion however about what has happened to the money already received by the Council as a result of Section 106 agreements. This is rather a technical subject, but concerns funds that developers agree to pay into the community when they receive planning permission for their schemes. Councillors are of course eager to get their hands on the loot on behalf of the electorate, but it seems that the failure to produce an appropriate protocol for the distribution of the money is holding up the process.
We are promised a report on the matter soon, but I have to say that I am constantly amazed at the slow pace of activity in matters such as this. At this rate Babergh will be dead and gone before the community gets its hands on the money, which in some cases runs into thousands of pounds.
I will be returning to this subject at a later date, but as I said in the meeting, I really do think that the failure to sort this matter out in a timely fashion is very disappointing, and actually rather shocking.
Inevitably the Local Government Reorganisation Review currently being carried out by the Boundary Committee was one of the topics discussed at the Seminar for Babergh Members held on Thursday.
The date for the preliminary announcement with regard to unitary arrangements for Suffolk will be 7th July. The Committee will come up with just ‘one option with a possible variation’. This means that some of the Councils in Suffolk, who have already been asked to express their preference, are likely to be disappointed, since there is little or no consensus across the county with regard to the ‘right’ way ahead.
In contrast to Babergh, which true to form did what they were asked to do by the Committee and then got on with the day job, many other local authorities (notably the County) invested a good deal of time and taxpayers money on working up and publicising quite detailed schemes.
Their action has meant that the Committee has been obliged to go back to a number of Councils for clarification. Our Chief Executive, hearing about this, and having heard not a peep from the Committee herself, became rather concerned that our submission had not been of much interest to them. (You will remember that Babergh argued for an East/West split, but submitted a paper to the Committee which ranked the various possibilities in accordance with the criteria set by them. The paper is available on the Babergh website for those who are interested)
We were gratified to hear that Pat Rockall, Babergh’s Chief Executive, was told that far from being uninteresting, Babergh’s efforts have in fact been very useful to the Committee and our comparative thinking on the question has saved them some time and effort.
Let’s hope this means that they will settle on our suggestion for two unitary authorities for the county. The more I think about it, the more I feel that the One Suffolk Unitary idea would be a really bad for local democracy. Cheapest isn’t always best, and it is arguable that it wouldn’t even be the cheapest.
Recently, Babergh imposed Tree Preservation Orders on a number of trees on and around the proposed Chilton Woods Development. This seemed to me to be an encouraging move. A small number of these orders was objected to by the County Council, the Landowner, and Ashwells , the developer, and as a result the orders had to be reconsidered.
The notice in the picture above caused some amusement among the assembled party; unfortunately the airfield has become somewhat notorious as a target for fly-tippers, but Councillors had not appreciated that the problem had reached such a scale! The unsightly heap did however go some way towards convincing the Committee that the airfield has some areas that are sorely in need of screening.
I’m not actually sure if this was a contributory factor, but the trees themselves were looking in fine form and the Committee decided to leave the orders unchanged. In fact the tree preservation orders will not of themselves prevent development, but they will offer some element of control since they will have to be actively taken into account when plans are submitted.
I don’t think that there was anything sinister in Ashwell and the County’s objections. It would have been administratively easier for them in the future had the orders not been in place. I do however find it a little ironic that the first official encounter between the landowner, the developer and the Babergh was on the face of it an attempt to take some of the ‘woods’ out of Chilton Woods.