Martin Tod

I’m surprised that the Chamber of Commerce and George Beckett are so negative about the impact of the move of the Police Headquarters from Winchester to Chandler’s Ford.

This is not the same as a big local business going bust or moving to the other end of the country. No-one’s losing their job. No families will see a big drop in income. The jobs aren’t disappearing. They’re moving seven miles down the road to Chandler’s Ford. No local families will be forced to move away from Winchester and there will be no reduction in the number of police officers working out of North Walls.

People also spend most money where they live, not where they work, so the extra houses in the town centre are likely to help local business, not hurt it.

Looking at Winchester as a whole, one of our biggest problems is lack of housing, particularly affordable and social housing, rather than lack of jobs. Every day, 18,000 people commute into Winchester and 8,600 people commute out. Thousands of families are on the waiting list for social housing. The move will help address that imbalance, reduce commuting and help Winchester house more local people.

Importantly, we will get these extra houses, which count towards government targets, without being forced to build on green fields.

Some businesses will be hurt by fewer people popping out to shop at lunchtime, but more will be helped by 294 more families living and shopping in the heart of Winchester. Overall, this move should be good for local business, good for local people and good for the local environment.

We’ve decided to switch our office to using electricity from Ecotricity - so the press turned up yesterday to take some pictures in the back garden of our office.

Reassuringly, it doesn’t cost any more than the standard tariff from a non-green supplier.

We’ve had pictures of Mark and I waving low energy lightbulbs around before when we switched all the bulbs in our office.

Here’s one of the rare pictures from yesterday where we’re not all waving light-bulbs around - only one of us is:

On a more substantive note, the head of ecotricity has a thought-provoking blog at zerocarbonista.com. His view is that the biggest barrier to more wind energy in the UK is the planning system - not lack of feed-in tariffs:

Two thirds of all wind projects are refused by District Councils at the planning stage, and two thirds of all appeals are upheld by the government – a lot of bad decisions being overturned, eventually.

And wind energy is the only major generation source that depends for planning on District Councils – the government deals with all others for very good reasons. District councils are not up to the job, on the whole.

I’m loth to see any decisions move towards central government without a very good reason - overall, I’d like to see more local decision-making, not less - but there may be a case for making it a county council decision - like minerals and waste.

I’d also like to see CO₂ as an explicit factor in all relevant council and government decisions. Crediting new wind turbine developments against councils’ carbon targets could be another, more local, way to address the issue.

More on the zerocarbonista blog about feed-in tariffs and planning here.

Another green energy supplier used by Lib Dems (including our national office) is Good Energy.

I popped along to the launch of the new Whizzgo car-club scheme at the Guildhall this morning.

As the Council’s press release says:

Car Club members will have access to a brand new Citroen car, for less than £5 an hour - including petrol, mileage, road tax, insurance, servicing, breakdown, recovery, maintenance and cleaning. What’s more, independent research shows that Car Club members can cut their total transport bills by half.

As well as cutting transport bills in half, separate studies have also demonstrated that the provision of Car Clubs results in a significant reduction in car miles driven, with members walking or cycling more, using public transport more often or simply re-arranging how they make journeys.

The first WhizzGo cars will be available for Car Club members in specially designated bays provided by Winchester City Council in their off-street car parks in Gladstone Street, Jewry Street, Colebrook Street and Middle Brook Street.

At this morning’s launch, they explained that joining Whizzgo also lets you use cars in Leeds, London, Brighton, Liverpool, Southampton, York, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Newcastle, Worcester, St. Albans and Belfast.

All in all, a very interesting offer.

Since my latest two car service bills alone have added up to more than my current car is worth (admittedly this is not a particularly high benchmark), it may now be the time to get rid of it and go with Whizzgo!

I was very encouraged to see today’s Hampshire Chronicle report on how Winchester’s local hospital is making progress in the battle against MRSA.

Back in January, following an invitation, I accompanied the RHCH Medical Director, Dr Kevin Stewart, on one of the daily ward rounds by the executive team to inspect the hospital environment and see that action is taken on areas that need work.

We spent two hours visiting the hospital - mainly in Florence Portal House - seeing the improvements that are being made and discussing the infection control programme.

I’ve been particularly interested in infection control for several years.  Earlier in my career, I was involved in setting up public hygiene programmes in developing countries - teaching mothers and children basic handwashing habits can have a dramatic effect on infant health and mortality -  and have previously met with experts in infection control to learn more about it.

It was very encouraging to see how totally committed the hospital’s management team and staff are to improving infection control and creating a culture of cleanliness within the hospital - and how hard the staff are working to improve things.  It was clear that their top priority is to get the essentials right: regular hand-washing and hand-sanitising - reducing unnecessary use of antibiotics - making the hospital easy to clean and keeping it clean.  I was amazed how many hospitals didn’t mention handwashing or sinks in the recent Panorama survey the BBC published alongside their ‘How clean Is your hospital’ programme (although RHCH did).  Hand sanitiser (essentially alcohol with bit of glycerin and perfume thrown in) is good as far as it goes, but, if there is any dirt on the hands, it is not as good as soap and water.

We also talked about their programme of ‘prescribing’ the insertion of cannulae. It’s been getting great results and it’s very good to see RHCH taking a national lead on finding innovative ways to go beyond the basics.

Most of the time, the best thing that politicians can do about the NHS is stay out of the way of local health professionals. The one area where they can need more support is in ensuring they have enough funding to pay for the right number of beds for the number of patients they have and to modernise the wards to make it easier to isolate people who get an infection.

I know Mark Oaten and I are committed to doing everything we can to make sure that the hospital has the funding and support it needs to do this.  As recently reported on Panorama, if beds are used too intensively, it can increase the risk of infection - even if everything else is done right.  It’s essential that the hospital gets the support it needs to keep reducing bed occupancy rates and to continue driving down infection rates.

We’re all stunned by the great results of the elections last Thursday:

• More votes and more seats in the Winchester District and the new Winchester constituency than the Tories
• Highest Lib Dem share of the vote in Winchester district or county elections since 1998 
• Swing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats for the second year running

We knew that our campaign for a greener, fairer and safer Winchester was getting a strong response - and that people were reacting well to the strong record of our candidates - but getting the highest vote for 10 years was more than we expected!

The picture in the new Winchester Constituency was even better: 49% of the vote, vs only 43% for the Conservatives, and 12 out of 17 seats.  Unfortunately we missed winning Hiltingbury West by only 20 votes or it would have been 13 out of 17 seats.

Even if you include the latest results from the wards which weren’t up this year (which are all Conservative), we still beat the Tories by 48% to 44%.

Overall, a very encouraging night.  And a big thank you owed to all the people who worked so incredibly hard and, most of all, to all the people who voted for us on Thursday.

Post-note: I’ve just checked the County Results.  Our results outperformed those as well - so I’ve updated the post accordingly.

Conversations at various WinACC meetings, while out campaigning with Winchester Friends of the Earth for aircraft emissions to be included in the climate change bill (see above) and in Green’s after the monthly Winchester Friends of the Earth meeting have thrown up several interesting local environmental websites.

First off, there’s Dave Walker-Nix’s ‘One World’ website at http://www.wwn-oneworld.co.uk. Dave organised the Friends of the Earth aviation demonstration in the town centre (that’s him on the left wearing the mask).  His site has a collection of fascinating inventions for tackling climate change. Very thought provoking and well worth a read.

David Morgan turned up to his first WinACC open meeting last Saturday.  He has an environmental blog at http://www.reallifenews.com/environment/ as part of his real life news website with a local and personal take on living a greener lifestyle.

The Greening Oliver’s Battery team has set up a website at http://www.greening-ob.org.uk/.  It’s great to see Terena Plowright’s inspirational Greening Campaign starting to roll out across the area.

I served on the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Executive with Donnachadh McCarthy at the time of the Iraq War.  He’s now left party politics and is a full-time eco-auditor. He recently came to speak to WinACC about his work and to give advice on a greener lifestyle.  You can find out more at his website http://www.cix.co.uk/~dmccarthy/

The final site isn’t strictly an environmental site, but WinACC wouldn’t be what it is without the brilliant facilitation of James Martin-Jones. WinACC open meetings are fun, constructive, inclusive, positive and action-focused - and also run exactly to time (always 90 minutes!).  The next one is on June 7th.  Several people I spoke to after the last one commented on how much better they are than ‘normal meetings’.  This wouldn’t happen without James; you can find out more at http://jamesmartinjones.com/.

That’s it for now.  As I find more, I’ll post them up and add them to my links.

(Needless to say, none of these links imply that any of the sites, organisations or people mentioned endorse me or anyone else - they’re just sites I hope you find interesting)…

Winchester had a wonderfully gentle atmosphere on Friday evening.

Around 10,000 people (according to the Echo) were in the centre for the Winchester Passion.

The evening started at Oram’s Arbour and then moved to the Great Hall, followed by the Law Courts, then the High Street and Butter Cross, and finally the west end of the Cathedral.

David Spender has some great photographs of the event - and has set up a Flickr group for the Passion to pull together everyone else’s as well.

The following video (shot on a digital camera at quite some distance) is not great quality, but it does give a sense of the atmosphere outside the cathedral during the crucifixion scene.

Winchester Passion 2008

Very pleased that Winchester City Council Planning Committee backed the campaign to save the Stanmore this morning.

All credit to the councillors of both parties (and none) who spoke and voted in favour of keeping the Stanmore as a community pub.

I’d built a website to help the campaign and the response it got showed how strongly people feel locally about keeping the Stanmore at the heart of the local community. After the officers recommended closure, a lot of people were telling us we didn’t have a chance. Sitting in the pub last night, preparing for today’s meeting, it felt like a last charge. Everyone, especially Glenn Sumner who spoke at the planning meeting on behalf of the Save The Stanmore campaign, was determined to give it their best shot.

Following through a link in Jonathan Calder’s Liberal England blog to an article about Greg Mulholland in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, it turns out that we did it in CAMRA’s Community Pubs Week!

The CAMRA Community Pubs week website has a list of things to do to support the week, but I couldn’t find a reference to ’saving the pub from closure’!

The campaign isn’t over. It’s still possible that there could be an appeal - and so we’re still asking people to sign the petition in case we need their help again. But that doesn’t stop today being a very satisfying day indeed.

Good news! The Conservatives have finally given in to popular pressure on the start time for over-60s bus passes in the Winchester District.

Current bus passes allow free travel from 9 a.m.  Back in September, the Conservatives announced that they intended to move the start time to 9.30 a.m.

We objected to the plan at the time, increased the pressure at the Council Meeting on January 9th, launched a petition against it last Thursday, January 17th (see photo left), launched the ‘Bad Timing’ website as part of the campaign on Monday and press released the launch on Tuesday.

The campaign got off to a very encouraging start.  Even though it was pouring with rain when I was out collecting signatures, almost everyone we talked to wanted to sign up.

As late as Tuesday, the Conservative administration on the County Council were still arguing for the 9.30 a.m. start at a meeting of Parish Council leaders.  But earlier today they did a u-turn and decided to go back to the original timing.

Good! Local bus services have been attacked enough by the Conservatives running the County Council without the City Council joining in too.

Many congratulations to Steve Feeney and his team in Weeke for their successful campaign to get sensible parking hours in their local roads.

As previously blogged, I was concerned when I saw that the Council Officers were planning to overrule the points raised by local people at the final decision-making meeting on Tuesday.

I hoped the councillors would see sense and back the hours that local people wanted.

The good news is that they have. 

Councillor Wood started the parking meeting by announcing that they would be going with Monday-Friday 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. - in line with residents’ wishes.

As Steve Feeney points out on his campaign website, this doesn’t mean Weeke’s parking problems are now sorted, but it is undoubtedly a good step forward and a credit to his work and the work of local people.