Martin Tod

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.

Back in November, I wrote about the excellent public meeting held in Peter Symonds about parking in Weeke. The people there had concerns about the proposed parking hours on their local streets and, pretty unanimously, wanted to have shorter hours and fewer days with parking restrictions. These would have tackled the problem they had with student parking, while being considerably more convenient for local residents.

Now the officers have put forward their proposal and … the proposed hours that the parking restrictions will operate remain unchanged.

Very disappointing. This isn’t about high politics – it’s about trusting local people to know what’s best for their local area. I hope that the Councillors at the meeting next Tuesday see sense and vote for the hours that local people want.

You can find out more about the local campaign via Steve Feeney’s excellent campaign website.

After all our previous efforts, the council has finally moved the Winchester consultation meeting for the Local Development Framework to the Guildhall.

This means that there now spaces available on January 17th.

As mentioned previously, this is a hugely important paper for the future of the Winchester area setting out the strategy for major change across the District over the next twenty years – particularly in terms of planning and housing. It’s essential that anyone who is interested should be able to get a place in one of the consultation meetings.

There’s been an incredible level of interest. The meetings in Alresford, Winchester and Wickham have had to be moved to larger buildings and a new meeting has been set up in Littleton.

You can book a place at any of the remaining meetings via this online form.

After all our pressure back in December, the good news is that there is now going to be an extra consultation workshop for the City Council’s Local Development Framework in Littleton Village Hall.

But the two other consultations in the new Winchester Constituency – in Alresford and Winchester’s Discovery Centre are already fully booked out – with 9 or more days to go before the meeting itself.

We still need at least one more consultation in the City itself. The Local Development Framework, while sounding boring, has huge implications for our city over the next 20 years.

As I said back in December:

The proposals on the table (including an effective assumption in favour of developing on Barton Farm, Abbots Barton and Pitt Manor, and including possible further expansion north and east of the current Barton Farm site, on Teg Down, on Bushfield Camp and further into Pitt Manor Farm) are going to be hugely controversial across the city and also have a potentially huge impact in areas outside the city, such as Oliver’s Battery, Badger Farm, Kings Worthy and Compton.

We urgently need more consultation meetings to ensure that local people’s voices are properly heard.

Back in March 2006, Winchester City Council, then led by the Lib Dems, put forward a carbon management programme which committed the City Council to a 50% reduction in emissions by 2012.

It had clear targets.

It had a clear baseline measurement to compare against.

And it laid out a draft implementation plan to kick off the process of delivering those targets.

The Conservatives took over control of the council a few weeks later.. and since then – silence.

Their recently published strategy paper – Live for the Future: Tackling Climate Change – and the accompanying action plan – make no reference to these previously agreed targets – nor do they set any targets to replace them. Indeed, one of its most disappointing features is that the strategy paper sets almost no targets for anything.

So, while it’s good that the Council is thinking about CO₂ levels for the District as a whole, it’s not enough. They need to start by putting their own house in order.

Rather than scrapping, sidelining or ignoring their CO₂ target, the Council should be strengthening it.

Lib Dem-led Eastleigh Borough Council is aiming for Carbon Neutrality: I’d love to see Winchester City Council do the same.

Back in February, Keith House set the ambitious goal of making Lib Dem-led Eastleigh Borough Council a zero carbon council by 2012. This builds on Eastleigh’s climate change action plan launched in 2005.

Given the recent coverage of Winchester’s environmental footprint, you’d hope that our City Council would be thinking in similarly ambitious terms.

Last Wednesday, the Conservatives in Winchester agreed their plans for Winchester City Council (‘Live for the Future: Tackling Climate Change‘).

And their target for CO₂ reductions by Winchester City Council?

They haven’t set one. There is no target for CO₂ reductions by Winchester City Council in the climate change strategy they agreed last Wednesday!

The document is an embarrassment.

It sets one overall target – to reduce CO₂ emissions for the overall district by 30% by 2012 (even though much of what needs to be done to achieve this is outside their control and this target is barely more than the Government required minimum).

There are some specific targets on housing – although these are mostly inherited from the Lib Dem administration or mandated by government.

And then… nothing.

The officers have come up with a long list of useful ideas, but there is a complete absence of any serious overall framework and of any political commitment or leadership.

Almost all the feedback they have received has been fobbed off with waffle.

Overall, there is:

• No target for any City Council activities.
• No target for Renewable Energy.
• No target for Transport.
• No target for Adaptation Planning.
• No target for community involvement.

The one encouraging decision from the Council was to provide some grant funding to Winchester Action on Climate Change. I’ve been involved with WinACC since the initial meeting back in July and working as part of the Communications team to get the WinACC website ready for launch. (One of my contributions was the abbreviation ‘WinACC’, after it turned out that the WACC web addresses were taken by the World Association for Christian Communication and the Wichita Chamber of Commerce). It’s good to see all the work by WinACC volunteers (from all parties and none), especially the Convenor Robert Hutchison, recognised with some funding.

But, funding WinACC is not a substitute for serious leadership on climate change from the city council. And sadly, that is now proven to be seriously lacking.

The City Council has announced their consultation plans for Winchester City Council’s Local Development Framework.

This is a hugely important paper for the future of the Winchester area. To quote the paper itself, it covers:

what need(s) to change across the District over the next twenty years

and covers:

• The broad location and balance of development across the authority’s area,
• Management of the housing supply,
• The balance between employment and housing
• The delivery of affordable housing

Despite the critical importance of this strategy, it is currently proposed to have only two consultation meetings in the new Winchester constituency – one in Alresford and one in the new Discovery Centre. And the one in the Discovery Centre is in a room that contains fewer than 180 people (or 120 people if it’s organised for a workshop as planned).

The proposed consultation in Alresford makes sense, but the proposed consultation for the rest of the area around the city of Winchester is completely inadequate.

For perspective, over 450 people turned up to discuss the Tower Arts Centre in the Guildhall and over 200 people turned up to Littleton Village Hall to discuss the closure of their post office. Over 100 people turned up to discuss the Oliver’s Battery village design statement!

The proposals on the table (including an effective assumption in favour of developing on Barton Farm, Abbots Barton and Pitt Manor, and including possible further expansion north and east of the current Barton Farm site, on Teg Down, on Bushfield Camp and further into Pitt Manor Farm) are going to be hugely controversial across the city and also have a potentially huge impact in areas outside the city, such as Oliver’s Battery, Badger Farm, Kings Worthy and Compton.

There’s also a problem that not every option has been properly examined. Some villages are asking for faster expansion than proposed in the paper so that they can continue to support their local school. And important issues such as the Micheldever ‘eco-town’ are not being given the scrutiny they deserve.

In light of this, the proposal to have a single meeting in the Winchester area, in a room that holds 120 people, to discuss the future of the Winchester area over the next 20 years, is a total joke.