Thriplow Daffodil weekend

A good turn-out for the Sunday of Thriplow Daffodil week-end, with crowds of families enjoying the sunshine, strolling the lanes of the village admiring daffodils and gardens, eating ice-creams, queuing for sizzling bacon sandwiches, listening to a steel band, admiring sheep-dogs round up some geese, a troupe of morris men, shire horses, lots of cakes and buns and tea. Maybe in these uncertain times this reassuringly traditional week-end event hits the spot more than ever, and the money raised goes on good causes both near and far. As I cycled there, I reckoned I was
allowed an ice-cream!

Support the Thriplow village shop!

The Thriplow Parish Council AGM this Thursday heard how the village stores are coping since the closure of the Post Office. There is a big shortfall of revenue to make up, because the PO counter contributed a tidy sum to the stores. On top of that, the stores suffered a break-in recently, so the plan is to secure a grant from South Cambs to get some better security.

The message from the stores to Thriplow village is - every little helps. Now that the weather is getting better (!) I'll resume cycling over the hill to buy my croissants from them on a Saturday morning.

District Councillor report to Thriplow Parish Council 2008/09

I was elected councillor last May and am getting to know Thriplow and to understand what it expects from its district councillor. I regularly attend the full Parish Council meetings, and have been at meetings to defend the Post Office from closure and discuss the future investment of s.106 funds in Heathfield. I have attended the Duxford Airfield Liaison Committee, and have recently asked the Duxford museum director for more information about its proposed “Masterplan” for future development.

I have taken up issues and problems as people have asked me to. I have:

• worked with the parish council and South Cambs planning enforcement officers to secure a High Court injunction to prevent traveller caravans being moved onto a field next to the A505;
• ensured the views of local residents opposed to a house being built next to the bus stop at the entrance to Heathfield were properly listened to by planning officers, and that South Cambs took a proper interest in the long running issue of inadequate playground facilities there;
• campaigned to improve the service of the C7 bus route, and opposed the reduction of it from half-hourly to hourly;
• helped sort out inadequate street lighting at Heathfield and am trying to get additional lighting in place in Sherrards Croft on grounds of personal safety.

As well as attending to my ward duties, I am also a member of the South Cambridgeshire District Council Planning Committee, and I chair the Corporate Governance Committee. This ensures that risk management and auditing are properly carried out by the council. In these uncertain financial times, I see this as an important check, and I am happy to report that South Cambs had no money invested in any Icelandic banks! I am also vice-chairman of the climate change working group and I am on the board of the shadow housing association which will form if council tenants vote to transfer properties to a new association, South Cambridgeshire Village Homes. As I work full-time as a civil servant all this keeps me pretty busy, but a lot of these meetings are in the evenings.

The two issues that have demanded the most of my attention during the year have been the threat from developers to build an “eco-town” of ten thousand houses at Hanley Grange, and the notice from Post Office Counters to close Thriplow’s Post Office.

I worked closely with the affected parish councils on opposing Hanley Grange: getting people signed up to the huge petition that was part of the campaign, speaking at meetings and writing to the press. I challenged the poorly worked up assumptions put forward by the developers at meetings of South Cambridgeshire District Council, and used my past experience of public relations to work with our local MP, Andrew Lansley and his advisers on the media efforts to see off the Tesco backed plan. I was very pleased that the developers eventually withdrew their proposals.

On the Post Office, in mid-September I went round and leafleted every house in Thriplow alerting people to the meeting being held to oppose the closure, spoke out against it in the press and supported the local campaign led by parish councillors. Although the logic and force of the arguments for retention that we put forward were very strong, the Post Office will be closed. We did however make some useful links with bodies that could help secure the future of the village stores.

If you would like to contact me please call me on 07825 876582, or email me at cllr.topping@scambs.gov.uk. If you want to read about what I am doing, I post regularly blogs online at www.petertopping@blogspot.com

Red Lion Hotel, Whittlesford Bridge

The Red Lion Hotel's planning application to build a modern bedroom block behind the historic hotel has been successful. I supported the application when it came before Planning Committee of South Cambs District Council, because it seems to me that it provides an opportunity to put the existing family run hotel on a secure footing and benefit the area in terms of jobs and trade. It is a large block, but running alongside the A505 and the station, not near people's houses. It will be attractive to the Americans visiting the air museum at Duxford, and may provide another restaurant in Whittlesford. I also think a bit more activity in the evening will reduce the problems of the rail station, as it will be less isolated.

The spectre of Hanley Grange - it just will not lie down

Next Tuesday will see South Cambs District Council identifying sites for development to meet the requirements of the Regional Spatial Strategy. Even though the RSS is a huge volume of bureacratic gobbledegook, it is nevertheless something we need to pay attention to.

Because of the building slow down and other recession reasons, big developments like Northstowe are not coming on stream as quickly as they should, therefore we have a shortfall in the numbers we originally put into the RSS and we need to find them.

We have to do this, because, as nature abhors a vacuum, if we don't, then a speculative developer could pop up and say "here's a site all ready that could take upwards of 12,000 houses." If the district planning committee then turned down those proposals, then the planner would be off to the Planning Inspector to appeal, quicker than you can say "eco-town, sneako-town" and the appeal might succeed.

So we have to do this. As the Americans say, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.

Climate Change - whatever!

I spent some time talking to schoolchildren this week about climate change issues and how it affects them and what they think. It was suprising to get their response, which was generally that there were plenty of problems in the world and this was just one of them.

I'm vice-chair of the climate change working group on South Cambs District Council and one always assumes that this is a big issue that people are really conerned about. If we are going to change the ways people think about climate change then maybe we need to sense check that the messages are hitting the spot with our audience. Food for thought!

Congestion Charge - no thanks!

At South Cambridgeshire District Council's full council meeting last Thursday I seconded a motion from Councillor Tom Bygott opposing the idea of a congestion charge for Cambridge. I've attached what I said below. It was a good debate and got a lot of local press coverage. Our argument was not that we opposed improvement to public transport, but that those improvements should be in place and given the chance to work, before any introduction of a congestion charge.

"In order to be able to second this motion, I’ve just come from London. I used the train, the bus and the tube. I was able to do that because the infrastructure of public transport in London went in, in the century before last, and it is still pretty effective. Two weeks ago I was in Manchester, using its fast and reliable metro tramway that reaches out across the city.

But if I compare that to the small rural villages which lie at the southern end of the C7 bus route into Cambridge, villages like Whittlesford, Heathfield and Thriplow, then the picture is very different. Because of its hopelessly circuitous route, hardly anyone uses this bus from these villages. If your job was to open a shop in Lion Yard at nine o’clock, or run the day shift in the Intensive Care Unit at Addenbrookes, you could get seriously old and very frustrated trying to use the public transport systems in and out of Cambridge.

And that is the point: the public transport infrastructure for south Cambridgeshire has to be far better developed before we should consider, or contemplate, or even remotely entertain, the idea of a congestion charge.

At the moment, the lure of Treasury gold to spend on public transport is in danger of distracting us from the stealth tax that goes with it: a tax on the people who work in the shops, staff the hospitals, and do the basic jobs.

The residents of the villages of South Cambridgeshire know that Cambridge is a place that wasn’t built for cars, and it jams up. They want to see innovative transport solutions, for the area. They do not want to see solutions developed in and for Cambridge City, while the rest of the region gets the very basic transport services that there are now, and the congestion charge to boot.

The Lib Dems in Cambridgeshire have said and say today that this debate is premature, and that they will note vote on this motion. Let me tell you what a Lib Dem Berkshire councillor thinks about Reading’s idea for a congestion charge. Councillor Alan Macro says “I don’t see why people should pay a congestion charge if they are going nowhere near Reading town centre.

Is he confused, or jumping to premature conclusions, or is he being sensible and cautious, as we must be. We must not allow the congestion charge to be brought to Cambridge, to burden people, on the back of the Transport Innovation Fund proposals. "