There was a serious road traffic incident (I hesitate to use
the word “accident” – we don’t know the facts yet and in reality few road
collisions are entirely accidental) on Wednesday afternoon around 5pm, on Lower
Street outside the station. It appeared,
from the scene still present at 8pm, to have been at or close to the pedestrian
crossing just by Kings Road.
A 17 year old girl suffered serious head injuries and was
airlifted to St George’s Hospital Tooting.
Lower Street is an unpleasant and dangerous stretch of road
for pedestrians, especially the bit close to Fosters Bridge, where the road
goes underneath the railway tracks by the station. The sheer unpleasantness of this area must
surely be part of the explanation as to why Haslemere is effectively cut in
half, with old Haslemere to the east and Weyhill to the west.
Too many cars drive too fast through this stretch, but the
real issue is the poor design of the interchange with the station concourse –
tailbacks formed due to vehicles seeking to turn into the station, either due to waiting for a
gap in oncoming traffic or because the concourse is already packed solid,
generate impatience and aggressive driving behaviour as motorists finally break
free.
The whole area is a mess, and with the anticipated additional pressures on our transport hub owing to development in Fernhurst and Midhurst will only get worse unless
some imagination is applied to the road design there.
Anyway, Surrey Police have issued an appeal for witnesses. Call 101 and quote P13315006.
Finally, my daughter, a student at Godalming College, tells
me that the girl is a fellow-student of hers.
They have heard in College that she has regained consciousness and is
expected to recover. Let’s all wish her
well.
The front page of this week’s Haslemere Herald reports on the abandonment of the Waverley Core
Strategy, and the departure of WBC Chief Executive “Mistress” Mary Orton (now Mrs
Pett) “to develop her career”. The mole
in the Burys who blogs as Waverleymatters.com, who has long harboured
unsympathetic sentiments about Mrs Pett, is said to be “over the bleedin moon”
The abandonment of the core strategy follows a critical
inspector’s report and the planned imposition on the borough of a revised
Strategic Housing Market Assessment of 8,500 new homes, or 470 new homes per
year. WBC had proposed 240 per year,
which was judged to be inadequate.
WBC is between a rock and a hard place really. There is no doubt that as a nation we need to
raise our game significantly on building new homes, and with fledglings in the
nest I am only too acutely aware of the difficulties my own children would have
affording a home anywhere near their parents (always assuming of course that they
wanted to live anywhere near their parents – as my daughter wants to go to Uni
in Canada I might have cause to doubt that), but finding places to build these
new homes is bound to go down badly with WBC’s existing constituents.
As can be seen at Sturt Farm, where objectors are opposing
plans to build 130 homes, 40% of which “affordable” for housing associations or
shared ownership schemes, on a 33 acre site just off Sturt Rd. Objections include concerns about the ability
of utilities to cope with the extra demand (the utilities companies will simply
build the extra capacity, if they see more sales, and the site is hardly
remote) and the landscape value of the site (well, can anyone point to
available sites around here which don’t have landscape value?)
Much of the opposition seems to come from residents of Sun
Brow, who would lose the views of open countryside they currently enjoy. Sun Brow was built as council housing,
although much is now in private ownership.
It was built on land belonging – wait for it – to Sturt Farm!
Also in the Herald, the Fracking saga continues. In an article on the front page headlined “SDNPA
[South Downs National Park Authority – Ed] fracking meeting is attacked for
being one-sided” the Herald reports on a presentation given to the Authority
members, in public, on issues relating to fracking. It was – like the Waverley Local Committee of
SCC and WBC councillors - a meeting held in public, not a public meeting, so
members of the public could not ask questions or make comments.
It was clearly felt by many that the presentation was
heavily biased towards the “pro” camp. One member asked
And then
At this point, I would like to draw your attention to a
campaign which, if you share the anti-fracking point of view, you might like to
join. “Wrongmove” enables you to find out whether fracking could be carried out
under your property. If so, on current
law, you have the right to refuse permission for them to drill under your land
because your rights to that land continue downwards, and are not confined to
the surface. That may not last – the government
is looking at changing the law – but for the moment you could make a nuisance
of yourself that way. If enough people register their objection, it might become impossible for frackers to show that they are not drilling underneath an objector's property.
I circulated a note on this with a link to various people
and it was interesting to see how some people reacted. The commonest hostile response was to ask how
feather-brained opponents of fracking imagined they would charge their iphones
or boil their kettles without securing gas supplies. This strikes me as a morally and intellectually
bankrupt argument. You might just as
well ask if you think it is OK for people in Derby or Teeside or Didcot to be
poisoned by emissions from local coal-fired power plants just so that you can
boil your kettle, or for political prisoners in Russia to be locked up by a
regime fed by gas exports. You might
also ask how out governments were so incompetent and lacking in vision that
they got themselves into the position where they have to drive bulldozers over their
citizens in a desperate scramble for energy to prevent the lights going out,
when they could have been developing clean alternatives like wind, wave and
tide for the last five decades – instead of which they blew it all on nuclear
power development, so that they could collect the by-product fissile material
for military use.
I think perhaps the most extraordinary response though was
from one addressee who is an elected local government official, who responded
with great asperity that he is sick and tired of receiving emails on this
subject. Well, excuse me, but isn’t that
what elected officials are for? Are
they not elected to represent the views and interests of their constituents? They are permitted not to like them, but I don’t
think it is incumbent on them to ignore them or stick their fingers in their ears.
Just a couple of reminders: firstly, the Waverley Local
Committee of SCC and WBC meets on December 13th (probably Godalming
Baptist Church) and will then review the Haslemere parking schemes. If you have any comments, primarily technical
comments or suggestions as it is not intended to make fundamental changes at
this stage, you can make them to David Curl in the highways dept, david.curl@surreycc.gov.uk
It does look like comments in a couple of areas have been
taken on board already. The double
yellow lines in Kings Rd were extended around the Royal Mail sorting office and
Herons area because commuter cars were parking ever further out and causing a
hazard. Moe recently, it seems that
Bridge Rd residents have commented on the explosion in parking on the south
side of Bridge Rd, previously almost unoccupied, causing an obstruction to
traffic. It had its benefits, in that it
slowed down traffic through there, but it was probably a hazard to appliances
from the fire station departing in that direction on emergency call-outs, so,
as the picture shows, the Police are taking action against cars which obstruct
the highway.
It would be nice if they paid similar attention to West St, outside Roxtons (formerly Taylor & Roberts) where cars park illegally on the double yellow lines. It had become almost out of control, and although it does seem to have got better I still see illegal parking there. It too represents a hazard for fire appliances seeking exit in an emergency.
Secondly, if you have not already done so, please complete
the Haslemere Vision survey, which can be done online here. I assume you can still obtain paper copies
with various retailers in town such as Nobbs, and drop off your completed
survey if you prefer not to do so on-line.
Finally, it may not have escaped your notice that there was
a teachers’ strike this Thursday. We had
a letter from Godalming College informing us of the strike and assuring us that
the disruption to classes would be minimal.
My daughter attended college as normal.
The Herald had two letters this week on the subject, one supportive
of teachers, the other critical. It
comes as no surprise to me that the critical correspondent should not wish to
share his (or her) name with the Herald’s readership – judging by the arrogant,
judgemental tone and the sheer inaccuracy of their rambling it was probably
wise for them not to expose themselves to the ridicule of their neighbours. Among their raving was this gem:
Compare this with the information received from Godalming College - from the Horse's Mouth, so to speak, so I have confidence in its verity (emphasis mine):
What we all share at Godalming College
– teachers, support staff, managers, governors – is a deep concern at the
levels of funding cuts which are being imposed on 16-19 education and which
therefore affect sixth form colleges disproportionately. To put you in the
picture, the difficult situation we are in can be summarised as follows:-
·
Starting in 2011 and continuing
through to 2016-17 sixth form colleges on average are having to absorb a 25%
real terms cuts in funding, far steeper than the levels of cuts which pre-16
education is having to absorb.
·
Because of this in the previous two years
staff have not had a cost of living pay rise, and this year the pay settlement
will be a token 1% rise
·
In addition, to absorb these cuts we
have had to increase the caseloads of teaching staff who are now teaching more
classes and students on average than was the case three years ago.
·
Unlike academies and schools sixth
form colleges have to pay VAT on goods and services which costs sixth form
colleges on average £250,000 per year. This anomaly is unfair and helps make
our situation worse than it would otherwise be.
·
Changes to teachers’ pensions mean
that contributions to the pension funds are increasing for both employers and
employees and the retirement age will rise to 68 years. These changes too are
eroding the standards of living of teachers.
The other writer clearly has little time for ignorant
comment, writing here about a letter in a previous edition of the Herald,
rather than the one just across the page of this week’s paper
This writer goes on
He (or she, hard to tell from the name) goes on to observe
that employees in the private sector have also suffered pay attrition, but that
doesn’t mean that teachers should have to follow them in a race to the bottom,
any more than teachers have historically been able to follow the rises in pay
enjoyed in the private sector.
As for the stated cuts in sixth form education financing,
all I can say is “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first send mad”
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