News roundup week ending 24 may

Mrs Barton has evidently been busy in her second week as our county councillor, as her report on her website reveals.  Good for her – I am sure we will all appreciate her making an effort on her residents’ behalf, at least with regard to those elements of her policy which we support.

I have selected three items from that report for your delight.  Firstly:

Lower Street/Shepherds Hill railings: Thursday, May 16th, 2013

In response to local residents’ complaints about new railings installed in the Shepherds Hill (and recently in Lower Street) conservation area…….

It is clear that lessons need to be learnt from this situation, and all parties agreed that in future, proper consultation with residents must be carried out when any proposals are brought forward.

Well, Mrs B, I am certainly pleased to see that you attach so much importance to proper consultation with the residents who have those railings in front of their homes.  Does this mean we can look forward to you consulting as assiduously with those residents who have non-residents’ cars parked in front of their homes?  I’ll look forward to that.

Secondly:

Mentor Meeting: Friday, May 17th, 2013

Met with Carmel Millar, my SCC mentor in Haslemere today.  Carmel is head of Human Resources.  Joined by Richard Oldham, Manager Haslemere Hall and Cyndy Lancaster.  Raised concerns about Local Area Committee structure and its diys/function, shared Haslemere’s experiences of parking debacle and the general community loss of confidence in SCC.

I believe Mrs B obtained the votes of 1,208 out of the nearly 10,000 voting residents of the town, that is one in eight.  Just over a third of those who turned out to vote, 20 votes more than the Conservative candidate.  Perhaps there has been a general community loss of confidence in SCC, but I don’t think Mrs B’s election is evidence of that.

Finally, this snippet which I have instead lifted from the website of her good friend, election agent and volunteer editor:

To be fair, I am not sure you can read much specific meaning into her words here – after all, when something doesn’t work properly, it is normally a good idea to fix it – but the fact that just this one item was highlighted by the HAG website, whose “volunteer editor” also happens to be Mrs B’s election agent, strikes me as significant.  Residents of Kings Rd, Longdene Rd, Courts Hill Rd, Popes mead, Chestnut Tree Avenue etc – it is clearly not over yet.

Another snippet from the wasp-yellow blog, retweeting a tweet from SW Surrey LibDems - who show here how they are just as opportunist in local government as they have proved to be in Parliament, watching out that they are not electrocuted by that third rail of local politics:

I’ve never been to Braintree, so I can’t really comment on their parking policies.  I have however been to plenty of other places.  You can queue around the block in Guildford, say, at any time during the business day, waiting for a parking space which will cost you typically £1.20 per hour anywhere close to the High Street or North Street.  In Midhurst, where the first two hours are free,  I have never seen the car park more than about half full.  You can watch the 4x4s queuing around the Waitrose car park, illegally returning down the lanes looking for a second chance at a space, despite the charge of 80p for the first hour and £1 for the second hour, more or less throughout the opening hours of the supermarket, but on a Saturday, when there are no commuters, the Tanner’s Lane car park will be virtually deserted despite costing only 50p for two hours.  A bit of reflection will tell you that when demand is elastic but supply is not, price is a necessary tool to regulate supply.  What use a 10p parking charge, if you can’t find anywhere to park due to all those bay-blockers who got there before you?  At least the next item indicates that some of our traders are more thoughtful about what really impacts them.

The front page of this week’s Haslemere Herald features this article about the shopping experience in the High Street, West Street, Weyhill and Junction Place areas. (read to bottom right of each block before moving to top left of next):

What is interesting about this article is that it barely mentions parking at all as an issue for retailers – it merely proposes a Waitrose-style scheme to refund parking charges, in this case the second hour on production of the parking ticket slip showing that two hours has been purchased.  It does however identify the retail mix as being an issue – Keith Clayton, who has a jewellers’ in the High Street, identifies in particular the lack of a butcher (in the High St/West St) or a mobile phone shop, and too many Estate Agencies and coffee shops.

More to the point, Mr Clayton evidently identifies the issues as ones which fall to the retailers themselves to fix – of course they can’t force Phones4U or a butcher's to open up but they can arguably do more to market the town and attract visitors to a wider range of shops, as Mr Clayton admits.

Far cry from the response of the Haslemere Chamber of Trade (and somehow the article gives the impression that this initiative is independent of the CoT, although Mr Clayton is a committee member there) which would simply demand to know “what are they going to do about it?” (by “they” meaning the council and “it” meaning reducing parking charges).

Do we have too many estate agencies and coffee shops?  Estate agencies, yes, indeed I would say that two is one too many, although I think we would be in real trouble if we had more mobile phone shops than estate agents.  Coffee shops?  I am not sure that our baristas would be too pleased to feel that their town council doesn’t want them all, and there I feel Mr Clayton and our new mayor Mrs Piper have it wrong – they always seem to me to be all substantially full and buzzing, because all of them are excellent, even the one chain outlet, and surely if you want shoppers to commit to a two hour visit they will need the attraction of somewhere to sip a latte and munch a slice of lemon drizzle cake while catching up on the paper?

On the Letters Page very little of interest this week.  Robert Serman writes in response to one of last week’s letters:

“My attention has been drawn” heh?  Is he too important to read the Herald for himself, he has his people read it for him?

He refers to the letter as “anonymous”.  In fact, assuming that it is the letter I referenced here last week, it is “Name & Address Supplied”.  As far as I am aware newspapers, the Herald included, do not publish letters from anonymous sources, demanding that correspondents provide a name and a street address although they will sometimes withhold these, either at the request of the writer or on their own initiative.  Does he know different?

But it suits Mr Serman’s purposes to sneer at the letter, presumably to attempt denial of the valid points it makes:  perhaps the Haslemere Society is not Mrs B’s sponsor but many residents take the view that there is no distinction between the Society and Mr Serman himself; Mrs Barton’s election platform comprises - and needs to comprise - a great deal more than just the parking issue, and in any case her mandate for her parking policy is weak to say the least;  if Mrs Barton is to be successful as our County Councillor, and to be successfully re-elected in 2017 if that is what she wishes, (and that might well be a jolly good thing, all things considered) she will need to look beyond that campaign to the wider interests of her fellow residents.  And his final remark says it all – he dismisses it as motivated by a “personal association” and I don’t think there can be any doubt who he means: the individual to whom residents turned for succour in face of the onslaught of the parking objectors.

One final article from this week’s Herald, from page 93: