News Roundup week ending 26 April

This week’s Haslemere Herald features a short election address from each of the five candidates standing for election as our County Councillor to succeed Councillor Steve Renshaw.

 

 

I have to say – what an uninspiring bunch!  It doesn’t help of course that they have each been given only a couple of column inches to express themselves, but only the UKIP and Labour candidates have anything of any substance to say about their beliefs, vision or policies, and I suspect those will not play with enough of our neighbours to get them elected.  Do I really want to know how many children they have or how many decades they have lived in the town?  (In some ways, the longer, the worse in my view).  I want to know what their qualifications are for the role, and what their vision for the town is.

Also in the Herald this week, the article below about the Haslemere Vision.

 

HV is holding its open day for residents, to see what the process is about and how they might help, this Saturday.  Note that they encourage us all to come along and get involved.  I would join in that call – HV, whether we like it or not, is going to have an influence over how our town is managed in the years to come.  Their project could fail because they misread the mood of residents and then lose the referendum which will be the final validation of their project.  Worse, it could succeed in pushing through a vision to which residents are by and large either hostile or indifferent, again because people have not participated and so alerted HV to where it is going wrong.

Or, it could open its arms to all views, supportive or dissident to its current direction, and so know what Haslemere people want before they learn the hard way.

The letters page this week has only one letter specfiically about the electon, below:

The Windows “snipping tool” couldn’t accommodate the entire letter in one go at decent scale, hence split into two which don’t quite match.

Now, I have some sympathy for David Wylde’s message, as far as Waverley goes.  Whichever party has control there, and it can only realistically be the Tories or the LibDems, it is really not healthy for them to have almost every seat, as the Tories currently do in Waverley.  Who wants to live in a one-party state?

The position in Surrey is not that extreme of course, but again it is healthier for democracy if the leading party, whichever that may be, is kept on its toes by a strong opposition.  For that reason I will not be voting for Mr Mulliner - although I am prepared to accept his assurances that he will work a little harder this time.  I would also not vote for an independent – a strong opposition demands some degree of collaboration and co-ordination among opposition councillors, so that implies a "slate", a political party, I’m afraid, but which one?  At a local level, I would also prefer our candidate not to be under the influence of the same shadowy figures who dominate the Town Council and various NGOs in the town.  Does that mean the choice is between Patricia Culligan and Peter Nicholson?  Well, if that doesn’t provide enough contrast for the popular choice, what can?

The Petworth Zebra, a creature once regarded as almost as mythical as the Surrey Puma, has in fact now had a number of reliable sightings.  It is there, crossing Petworth Road outside Noggs, cocking a snook at our mayor in the adjacent Town Hall and our worthy shopkeepers at Woodie & Morris.  It is not yet operational, however as it awaits connection of the power to light the "Belisha Beacons" on either kerb, which are a statutory requirement for a fully legal pedestrian crossing.

The crossing has a curious recent history.  The planning committee of Haslemere Town Council considered the proposal at its December 2012 meeting, where it is minuted, under item 150/12 Highway Issues, as follows:

Pedestrian safety – the committee had a lengthy discussion about SCC’s proposed pedestrian crossing on the Petworth Road, particularly in relation to the loss of parking bays.

Cllr King proposed that the committee support the construction of the crossing, Cllr Piper seconded. The motion was carried.

 

(I have italicised the text for quoting, but the bold comes from the document itself)

A mere two months later, the matter was back before the committee again.  It seems that HTC were a little rash in agreeing to the proposal (not that their agreement or objection makes much difference – they are not the planning authority or the highways authority anyway) before they had been delivered of the Sermon on the Mount.  Here, in the minutes of the February planning committee meeting, at item 19/13:

The Committee unanimously agreed for Cllr King to feedback these concerns to Cllr Renshaw at SCC, with a view of possibly delaying the process for further consultation to take place with those who are likely to be affected.

Curiously, many of the objections delivered in the sermon were in direct contrast to the recommendations made in an earlier sermon, back in 2008 in the “Haslemere Initiative” report prepared by the same preacher.  (Curiously, this document was available to download on the Waverley website only a few weeks ago, but is no longer there.....)

Also, I am reliably informed that the committee were not unanimous about the decision to refer, and that this challenge was delivered to the clerk before the minutes were made public.  Curiouser and curiouser!

Down Memory Lane

 

See below a flyer which was handed out to publicise the original pay & display parking proposals at the very beginning of last year, and a public meeting at the Haslemere Town Hall to protest them.

Now, a test to see if you have been paying attention:  what is the maximum charge envisaged under the Surrey CC proposals for a full day of parking?

• £11.50

•  £7

• £5?

The flyer does in fact point you to more information on Surrey’s website, but it mistypes the web address – deliberately?  How many people would actually take the trouble anyway?  I have looked on the relevant page and to my no great surprise the pay & display proposals are no longer there.
 

You can get to them though by reading the papers for theWaverley Local Committee meeting at which they were discussed.
 

Here, at Item 11, para 2.42 on page 9: “The proposed tariff for long term parking (5 hours or more) on residential roads around the station is £5 during the operational hours. This is shown as a medium tariff on the plan in Annex A. It is also proposed to charge £1 per hour for periods up to 5 hours. This figure derives from the fact that SWT charges £6 per day, in recognition of their premium location at the station and that Waverley Borough Council charges £4 per day, so the County Council would want to encourage better use of their off-street car parks.”
 

You will note the flyer’s emphasis on High Street, West Street, and Weyhill – in other words, shopping parking, not commuter parking.  As noted in para 2.14, on page 5: “The High Street, West Street, Shepherd’s Hill and Wey Hill have existing limited waiting bays fronting all of the shops and businesses, with a maximum waiting period of 1 hour. It is proposed to introduce on- street charging here, but with a free initial 30 minutes, to encourage better use of the car parks and improve the enforcement of the 1-hour bays.”
 

So, in fact, commuters would pay less than they would in the SWT car park (were they lucky enough to have been on the waiting list long enough to get a season ticket) and a little more than for the WBC car parks at Tanners Lane or Weydown Rd, the latter of which, I can attest, remains at least 25% unoccupied at least until the 8am Waterloo train is due while nearby streets have filled up, hence the desire to encourage their use.  Shoppers would not have to pay at all if they were simply “popping in” for a pint of milk or their copy of the Herald.

But the focus on those shopping streets in the flyer does in fact tell you quite a lot about the parking campaign.  It is largely about the retailers.  This also becomes apparent if you look at Mrs Barton’s “Haslemere First” Facebook page – photos of her poster in various shop windows, supportive comments by shop-owners, etc.  While admitting that I don’t spend my days cruising the streets of Haslemere, I have yet to see a single one of her posters on display anywhere else.

Retailers’ fears of the negative impact of parking charges on their business are well known, and loudly voiced, but they are not supported by evidence.  When SCC says in their report, at para 2.16, page 5: “This would help improve access for visitors and shoppers”,  they mean it, and they have evidence to support their claim, not least from the study published by the Transport Research Laboratory, “Parking Measures and Policies Research Review”.   They really aren't trying to stiff the retailers, they are trying to help them, even if they don't articulate this terribly well.

Whatever.  I had thrown at me recently, in a private email, the assertion that 4,000 signatures had been collected on a petition against the pay & display proposals, represented to me as more than the turnout in the 2009 Surrey Council election in Haslemere.  I have no reason to doubt the number of signatures, or that they exceeded the election turnout, but so what?  An official government election (national or local) is a professionally managed affair, regulated and invigilated to ensure fairness.  Fraud is certainly possible, but relatively rare, difficult to achieve and a criminal offence.  You know where you stand with state franchise elections.

Collecting a petition by accosting passers-by in the street is an entirely different affair.  How can we know how many times some people signed?  Who signed?  How many signatories were children, or pets?  How many signed as “D Duck” or “M Mouse”?  How many of the signatories actually lived in Haslemere, or even in Surrey, if you are going to draw comparisons to the local electoral roll?  You would have to obtain the original paper petition from Surrey and do your own review because it is unlikely that Surrey would have done this themselves.  In any case, how many people signed because they were accosted by someone with a clipboard and just wanted to get on with their business, didn’t really think about what they were being asked to sign, or perhaps even wanted to avoid a “scene” by refusing?

 

A more representative view on petitions would be the contemporaneous on-line petition on the Waverley website.  Here you actually have to go onto the site and sign up, just as you have to go to the polling station, or take your postal vote to the post box for a council or parliamentary election.  It got 12 signatures