Martin Tod

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.

Bad news on the Tower last Friday as you can see from the following news report:

Despite Ken Thornber being forced to wriggle on the issue of rapidly increasing head office costs in Recreation and Heritage (because the Tower is being cut to fund head office costs - not adult social care); despite his officers being forced to admit that the ‘evening programme fund’ proposal is completely half-baked; despite his refusal to even address Alex Hoare’s outstanding speech on how John Tellett and the Tower Arts Centre have nurtured arts in Winchester - and the critical role of artistic direction in a successful arts centre; and despite his failure to address almost any of the points raised by Jan Moring, Ken Thornber decided to go ahead with the paper proposed to him and transfer the Tower to Kings’ School, slash local arts funding, and set up a tiny ‘figleaf fund’ - supposedly to support the evening arts programme in Winchester.

It’s frustrating. It’s infuriating. And it’s tragic to know that so much of the work of John Tellett and his team will come to an end this April.

The ‘Save Tower Arts’ campaign tried everything. I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues tried everything. The Lib Dem controlled Town Forum signed up to put money into the project. We were regularly talking to our local Conservative opposite numbers, asking them to do whatever it took to save the Tower. And we were more than happy for them to take the credit for it, just as long as the Tower was saved as an arts centre.

But it was not to be.

The infuriating thing is that the failure to save the Tower is not due to financial crisis. It’s due to lack of political will and lack of political vision.

The last few months have been a farce. The Conservatives have organised a consultation – and then refused to listen to it. They’ve asked for a report into different options – and then ignored it. They’ve said that they need more details of their preferred option – and then decided to proceed anyway when they don’t got them.

This goes beyond party politics. Ultimately it’s a question of competence and commitment to the arts.

We’re not giving up just yet. There’s a very small chance that we can stop the current proposal. We certainly need to try and improve it. However we can’t deny that last Friday’s decision is a very heavy blow.

Here’s the speech I made at Ken Thornber’s decision day:
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A good session helping Winchester Litterpickers at the station this morning. They meet every Monday at 9.30 a.m. on the Station forecourt - anyone who wants to help is very welcome - equipment will be provided if you don’t already have a litter picker of your own. It’s both amazing and depressing how much litter can build up in a week - and very satisfying to help pick it all up.

The Litter Pickers are a great institution and make a really important (and noticeable) difference to the city: it was excellent that John Green-Wilkinson’s role in setting up the Litterpickers was recognised in the New Year Honours with an MBE.

I was invited along to their annual party on Friday night as one of their occasional helpers - but unfortunately could only get there towards the end due to a public meeting at Peter Symonds about proposed parking restrictions in Weeke.

This was set up by a local resident, Steve Feeney, who also set up a helpful website to explain the issue.

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Up bright and early yesterday to join the campaign to save the Romsey-Winchester rail-link bus. This entailed getting the 7.04 a.m. bus to Romsey, putting on a Santa hat, and travelling back at 7.35 a.m. with Sandra Gidley and a bus full of protesters from the Save Our Bus campaign - before collecting signatures on the concourse from local travellers. Eleanor Bell joined us as the bus came back through Hursley.

It seems hard to believe that, so soon after all the County Council’s previous bus cuts, we’d be seeing another but cut - this time from South West Trains. As with all the bus cuts so far, it puts pressure on the environment, parking and congestion and severely impacts off-peak travel for people without cars (generally pensioners and the young). In this case, it will also cause major problems for people commuting to and from London before and after peak hours. It follows on from SWT’s off-peak fare hike at the beginning of the year and the upcoming closure of the travel centre and makes a mockery of the various promises from the County and the Government to have a joined-up travel system.

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Another excellent evening at the Tower on Friday night listening to Angela Brown and the Mighty 45s. The Tower was completely packed. The band was on fire. Angela Brown was awesome! A brilliant end to the week and start to the weekend.

There was just as much energy in the room (although much less on stage) at the public meeting on Thursday night about the future of the Tower Arts Centre. Alistair Marsden has written at some length about the evening (the public meeting that is, not Angela Brown) on the Save Tower Arts blog.

The continued incompetence and - more worryingly - obstinacy shown by the County Council on this remains breathtaking. As time goes on and the County makes no attempt to budge, more and more people are getting more and more angry at the situation. The original decision was embarrassingly half-baked. The combination of Thursday evening and the consultant’s report has confirmed what we knew all along (and which the County denied):

• The Discovery Centre is not going to be any kind of replacement for the Tower
• The current proposal to transfer Tower Arts to Kings School will effectively end the evening programme
• There was a complete lack of consultation behind the original proposal
• The County has made no serious effort to find partners - or even work with the City Council - to keep Tower Arts open
• The County (or at least the Portfolio Holder on the County) has no apparent vision for arts provision in Winchester or in Hampshire - and no idea of the value it brings to the economy and quality of life to the city and the county

Ken Thornber was right to ask for a review - and the extra time should have been a chance to sit down round the table with possible partners and seriously try to find a way forward that preserves and builds on what’s so special about the Tower. But the clock is ticking and there is depressingly little sign that the County is going to move.

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