IT has taken a lot longer than I expected, but I now know on which panels I will be serving at Taunton Deane Borough Council.I have been appointed to the Housing Review Panel, and to the Health and Leisure Panel.
At the same time, I have the right as a councillor to attend and speak at any other panel or committee which is held, and I am told that is often difficult to tell at meetings who is actually on a panel and who is not.
So, while it looks like the two areas of housing and health and leisure will be my specialist subjects, I will also be able to personally raise any other topic on behalf of the people in the Blackdown ward.
In addition, there are a lot of outside organisations to which the council appoints representatives and I do not yet know on which I will serve.
It is a little like being a phoney councillor at the moment, as I have the title – yes, it is official now the annual meeting has been held (although again I missed it due to work commitments).
However, I am on the case and have already attended the parish council meetings in Churchinford and Pitminster and introduced myself to the parish councillors.
I have also attended the launch of the Keep Somerset Local referendum campaign. You will be receiving a postal ballot during June in order to vote to say whether or not you think it a good idea for the county council to abolish Taunton Deane council and the other councils in Somerset and create one huge authority which will decide everything across the county.
I shall be voting ‘No’ in the referendum, not just because I want to hang on to my seat at Taunton Deane, but because I don’t want to see my council tax bills continue to go up just to fund the tens of millions of pounds it will cost to reorganise.
I also fail to see what Minehead has in common with Frome, or Wellington with Burnham-on-Sea, or Otterford with Dulverton when it comes to deciding planning applications, building affordable housing, etc etc.
You will hear the line from the county councillors that it won’t be like that because they will set up area panels to decide local issues. My response is that we already have an area panel – it is called Taunton Deane Borough Council.
I have also asked our area county councillor for an early meeting to discuss the traffic concerns in Blagdon Hill.
I put it to him that it was up to the county council on which he serves to actually do something about the speed of traffic and weight of heavy lorries using the road through the village, as they are the highways authority. He agreed.
I also put it to him that, given this is a situation which has existed for some years, I was mystified as to why the county council continually refused to do anything about it. He also was mystified – so if he as a county councillor doesn’t know what’s going on, what hope do we have?
I will keep banging my head against the county council wall on this one, and, as some people will testify, I have a thick head, so eventually we should see some cracks appearing – in the wall I hope.
I think some parish councillors may have been a little surprised at my approach to parish affairs.
Now the election is over, I believe we should all be working together regardless of politics in order to achieve what is best for the community, or at least what the community desires, and no, the two things are not always the same.
One area which is topical at the moment where elected representatives believe they know best is the subject of Post Offices.
The Government is telling us that we don’t need 2,500 of the Post Offices we currently have.
In Taunton Deane, that means closure looms in the next 18 months for probably six more Post Offices.
Communities will say they need their Post Offices and on this one I totally agree. It is not a question of how much it costs to keep a Post Office open, it is a question of how much a Post Office is valued in a community.
We only have two Post Offices in the ward at the moment and I will be visiting both of them shortly to discuss with the Postmasters what measures the borough council can take to support them.
It was a subject which came up on the doorstep while I was campaigning and my feeling is that we need to approach it in the same way as we approach farming, where we encourage diversification.
Don’t ask me what POs can diversify into, as I don’t have a definitive idea, although I have one or two small suggestions which may help.
I have been listening to Mark Formosa, who is the Taunton Deane Parliamentary candidate for the Conservatives, and he has a lot of good ideas on this subject and has been campaigning on it for some time.
If anybody has some solid suggestions to put forward, I will certainly be interested to hear them.
