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20s plenty Sandra Gidley Speeding

Great response to ’20s plenty’

We’ve been getting a great response to our campaign for ’20s plenty’ right across the constituency. It makes sense in many residential streets in urban areas, especially outside schools. As you can see below, we’ve already been campaigning on it in Chandler’s Ford (with Sandra Gidley), Harestock, St Bartholomew’s and St John’s.

Sandra Gidley, Martin Tod, Pam Holden-Brown, Alan Broadhurst campaigning for 20 mph limit in Chandler's Ford

We’ve also been campaigning on it in St Luke – and Mark and I will be doing some further campaigning about speeding in Stanmore later in the month. Please let me know if there are any streets or lanes near you that you think would benefit from a 20 mph limit.

Categories
Crime Nick Clegg

Meeting with Nick Clegg

Martin Tod and Nick Clegg discuss crime survey

After a meeting with Mark in his Westminster office to discuss our campaign plans, I went on to meet Nick Clegg MP to discuss the crime survey that we are launching in Winchester. We want to hear local people’s experiences with crime and their ideas on how to make our community safer.

The important thing is that we are focusing on sensible, pragmatic and liberal policies that will reduce crime and the fear of crime.

One obvious step would be to reverse Labour’s planned cuts in the number of Police Community Support Officers in Hampshire. We shouldn’t be spending billions of pounds on compulsory ID cards for innocent law abiding citizens when that money could be better spent on front line policing.

The local community should also have more power to close pubs and clubs that cause trouble. People of all ages should feel safe going out after dark in town or city centres.

We’ll have a chance to discuss all this with Nick in more detail later in the year when he speaks at our annual dinner.

Categories
Crime Ming Campbell Nick Clegg

We can cut crime!

As some of you may have seen in the news, earlier today Ming Campbell and Nick Clegg launched our latest campaign – ‘We can cut crime’.

It lays out five Liberal Democrat priorities:

  • More police officers on the beat
  • Taking back town centres by giving communities more powers to close pubs and clubs that cause trouble
  • More honesty and clarity in sentencing
  • More work and training in prison – to cut reoffending
  • Better compensation for victims – paid for by prison work

You can find out more about the campaign at the campaign website at www.wecancutcrime.com – which you can also sign the party’s online petition.

You can also read or watch a subtitled video of Ming’s introductory speech via his website.

Categories
Trip to the Shops

Trip to the Shops – making progress

Ken Thornber, Leader of the Conservative County Council, wrote to the Hampshire Chronicle last week responding to our ‘Trip to the Shops‘ campaign announcing funding to improve the pavements in Winchester High Street – an encouraging start to the campaign. We won’t be easing off: we’re continuing to report problems (particularly flooding in the last few days) and push for improvements.

I’ve written back to the Chronicle as follows:

I was pleased to read Cllr Thornber’s letter in response to our continuing ‘Trip to the Shops’ campaign announcing that funding has been made available to repave some of the city centre areas most affected by lorry damage.

All I would ask is that the County Council doesn’t exclusively focus on areas affected by lorry damage. Many of the problems that we have reported have been caused by inadequately supervised repair work by water, gas or cable companies. As the City Centre manager pointed out the same week, there is more work by utility companies to come: it will be essential that they are required to do a better job than they have in the past restoring the pavements afterwards. It is also important to note that by no means all the problems that local people are unhappy about are in the city centre.

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Liz Leffman Mark Oaten

Parliamentary Team

Liz Leffman, Mark Oaten and Martin Tod

Mark Oaten, Liz Leffman – the new PPC for Meon Valley – and I had an excellent meeting on Friday to discuss how we can work together most effectively.

Mark is very supportive of both our campaigns. Indeed, I started the day with him doing a visit to the site of the new Trinity Centre site and will be working closely with him on constituency issues from now onwards. Liz will be doing the same in the Meon Valley part of the current Winchester constituency. We also discussed ways to work together most effectively on local and national campaign issues.