Litter picking on a lovely morning!

Acton residents David Johnson and Peter and Margaret Maybury chose a lovely day to try out Babergh's litter picking kit along the road that runs to the north of Ten Tree Road between Acton and the edge of Great Waldingfield. Margaret is pictured to the left sporting very fine pink wellingtons and her litter picker.

A good deal of interesting crud was found along the verge and in the ditch, including several tyres and various articles of decomposing clothing of dubious provenance. Also collected was the sign below, which dates from 2006, and which Abbots have been asked to remove on several occasions. Time to name and shame I think!



A brilliant effort by all concerned.

Incidentally this stretch of road is part of the route that Suffolk County Council claims to be safe for children to use when walking to school. Spending some time there this morning as cars and vans whizzed past did not convince me that their opinion is correct!

Spring visitors to the Horse Pond

Local environmental group Woodland BATS has done sterling work in clearing out the Horse Pond in Chilton Grove and this is now clearly paying dividends!

In addition to sitings of Great Crested Newts, recently two rather more elegant visitors have been observed as can be seen from the picture sent courtesy of the Chairman, Peter Clifford.

It is worth spending time by the pond which is now a very pleasant spot for contemplation!

A Happy Easter to all readers of the blog.

Litterbug fined!

I have to say that I was very pleased to receive the press release below. I am so sick of people littering along the side of roads. At times I see some really horrid sights on my morning dog walks and simply cannot understand why people think it is ok just to chuck litter out of cars and vans.

A commercial vehicle driver has been fined £60 after an offence of littering was caught on a hidden camera.

Babergh District Council’s Environmental Protection Team uses hidden CCTV cameras to deter people from fly-tipping and littering by placing the camera in known hotspots and monitoring the footage.

And while reviewing camera footage recorded at a hotspot in the parish of Freston, in February, Babergh’s enforcement officers witnessed the driver throw litter out of the window of a lorry and then drive off.

The driver was traced with the assistance of the company responsible for the vehicle, and faced with the evidence against him, admitted his actions and chose to accept a Fixed Penalty Notice (FPN) of £60 as an alternative to prosecution.

With litter in mind, there is to be a litter pick in Acton on 8th April. If you would like to participate please contact Margaret Maybury, the organiser, through me on 01787 378310.

Spring events

It is really great that the weather is getting warmer and that once again Saturday mornings are populated with events around the Ward.
Yesterday morning I went to two fundraising events: an auction in Chilton Church and a Table Sale at Acton.
The auction was the first event to be formed by the newly created Friends of Chilton Church and was a success. Over £200 was raised from the sale of a good many interesting ‘unwanteds’. I managed to pick up an attractive black and white religious plaque which comes from some Slavic country, but I have to say I am not sure which. I also collected a nice wallet, an old leather bound copy of Omar Khayam and a couple of potential raffle prizes for use at future events. Recycling is a wonderful thing.
Chilton Church is officially redundant and is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, but its own trustees need to raise money for its upkeep. It is a truly beautiful place with some outstanding monuments and an interesting history. If you want to get involved with securing its future, and also meet some new people by joining the Friends, contact me and I will put you in touch with the right person.
Five services are held at the Church during the year, and a concert is planned for early June. The next service is on April 18th at 3 p.m.
The auction was so absorbing that I only had a short amount of time left to visit Acton. I did manage to pick up some more books to read over the summer although I think I missed most of the bargains.
Acton Village Hall is one of the many organisations in the District that now have to find additional money to pay a proportion of their business rates. I would therefore urge people to support the Hall Committee’s fundraising events.

No postcode lotteries?

The other day I was at a meeting at which five Citizen Advice Bureaux were represented. We were discussing future co-operation and at one point someone made the point that the County Council was very anxious to avoid ‘post code lotteries’ when awarding grants. This decoded as ‘it’s better for Sudbury CAB not to try too hard to be independent and work hard since you won’t be any better off as a result’

Well that may very well be the case when the County is distributing largesse, but it is certainly not so when they are trying to penny pinch. In what must be the ultimate example of a postcode lottery, and recipe for social divisiveness, some 13 families in Acton, living to the East of the village, have received letters telling them that the hard won bus passes that mean free travel to All Saints Middle School are to be withdrawn in September. What is more they were told that there was no right of appeal for 5 years! By which time of course it is quite possible that the school will be gone!

It seems that some jobsworth at the County has discovered that these few families in the village live just within the three mile limit which means that transport must be paid for. Acton Lane, the most direct route to the school, has already been judged too dangerous , so our inventive bureaucrat has devised a route of great ingenuity and complete impracticality. This goes along a road with a 60mph limit and no footpath, through Great Waldingfield, down to the Homebase roundabout and up through the new development to the School. They have added that children using the route should be accompanied by an adult! This is completely nonsensical of course; how many parents have the time to walk 12 miles a day to accompany their children to school? More cars and pollution will of course be the inevitable result.

The rules with regard to free transport to school are arbitrary and unrealistic and should be changed. in order to encourage bus travel when appropriate and yes, walking when feasible. What really enrages me about this however is the secret decision making and mean minded discrimination against a small group of families who happen to live 100 yards or so too close to a particular school.

Luckily Colin Spence, our County Councillor, who was not informed about any of this, has moved rapidly to have the decision with regard to the right to appeal overturned. This means that the families affected will now have the chance to have their voices heard so well done Colin!

There is as a result of Colin's actions, some sign that common sense might yet prevail....but it worries me very much that anyone thought that this sort of high handed, secretive, decision making could be acceptable in today’s society.

Keep a look out for lorries!

An alert resident of Great Waldingfield recently spotted a Brett Aggregates lorry on Valley Road, which, as we all know, carries a 7.5 tonne weight restriction. He has written to the management of Bretts to point out the illegality and is now awaiting a reply.
If you see a similar breach of the rules please do get in touch with me or with Peter Clifford, the Chairman of Chilton Parish Council. Records are being kept which should help to support any future campaigns against quarries and other industrial activities in the area.
On this subject, I was very sad to see the report of the latest fatal accident on the A134 at Newton. The Highways Department can hardly claim to be unaware of the dangers of this stretch of road by now and should be looking to make improvements.

Community engagement-at the community's expense

On Wednesday I went to a conference in London on the topic of community engagement...at least I think that was what it was about! It was run by the Improvement and Development Agency which is part of the Local Government Association and which ‘works’ with local councils to ‘improve performance’. In my experience this really decodes as spreading central government propaganda at your expense. The conference was entitled: Future Communities/ Future engagement.

I went because I was keen to find out what Babergh and I can do better to reach out to people in the District who don’t go to meetings but might be encouraged to, or who might want to let us know what they think in some other way. I am not sure I came away any the wiser.

There is a real confusion between the concepts of community engagement and community empowerment, a confusion that was not resolved at the conference. It is one thing as an elected representative to make sure that one engages with the people that have elected you, but, in my view it is something quite other to cede the decision making powers of elected representatives to the community as a whole (or at least those members of the community who shout the loudest). The idea of community empowerment was very close to the heart of Hazel Blears (remember her?), and it is clear that remnants of her enthusiasm remain with the current lot. We moved seamlessly from engagement to empowerment in the course of the day, to the point where we were being asked whether there was any need for elected councils at all. (You may well think not of course!)

As a Russian scholar, I am reminded immediately of the Bolshevik call for ‘all power to the Soviets’ (The word Soviet roughly translates as local party committee, but can be taken to mean ‘the people’ in a wider sense.) In Soviet Russia the call to empower people with this different sort of ‘democracy’ actually meant an awful lot more concentration of power at the centre!

Anyway I spend a happy day surrounded by a few fellow councillors from around the country and an awful lot of very pleasant and intelligent local government officers with titles like ‘Service Development Lead Specialist’, Locality services Area Co-ordinator’ ‘Localities officer’ ‘Engagement officer’ etc. etc. Most had spent a happy night at their council tax payers’ expense in the rather elegant central London hotel at which the conference was held.

I hasten to reassure readers that since the conference was ‘free’, and I was in London anyway, my attendance cost Babergh nothing, but I fear that the taxpayer was probably picking up quite a hefty bill overall.

Surely this sort of nonsensical event represents one of the last gasps of this over-bureaucratic, over-meddling, over-spending Government?