Maggy Daniell

This week saw the approval by MDC Planning Board of an application to build a new health centre next to Frome Hospital.  As an ex-nurse, I could see why the medical practice needed more space both for current needs and for future development, so I welcomed this decision from a health perspective.  We are lucky to have some very forward-looking doctors and they plan for Frome to have more locally-provided services in future.

However, all new building and new ideas come at a cost.  This application involved a long consultation and much work to sort out all the issues that people raised.  I was involved with some of the transport problems and went with some of the team to Bath to discuss how buses could be redirected to provide a service to the new site.  That was quite an eye-opener, both as to the very tight schedules that buses run and the cost of introducing a new service.  Hopefully patients will now use the buses and make the routes viable!

As I live in the south of Frome, quite close to the Park Health Centre, I shared the concerns of my ward residents about the distance to travel and lack of provision in our area.  This is something the team did take on board and are making plans to address, especially for the many elderly residents in sheltered accommodation.  It must be remembered that wherever a unit is sited, some people will have to travel further, others less, so it is not black and white - and most people come to Park Road by car anyway!

Another issue raised was the loss of green space, and there is no getting round the fact that recent changes to use of the old Showground have altered its character.  The new hospital took a large bite out of one corner; the new Collegians pitch, although still open and green, used up a bit more; the new play area, although also green, has taken more still.  There is still a large area of recreational open space, and the dog walking areas are relatively unaffected - so for me, as the space has been adapted for current and future needs, I find this acceptable.  That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t keep a close watch on our green land - we definitely should try to protect them; but we should also remember they aren’t just there to be seen, community benefit is a bigger issue. 

On Saturday I was at the official opening of the Collegians’ new football pitch, on the Showfield near Selwood School.  This is a real success story for supporters in and out of the club, and a great relief to its President, Graham Clarke, who has been working for this for 20 years.  All three current Frome County Councillors helped with funding from our Community Budgets last year, but although this gives us extra interest, it needed far more than that.  So congratulations to all those who helped raise funds over the years.

Collegians does a great job with Frome youngsters, with an amazing number of youth teams (boys and girls), who are keeping fit and healthy, learning team play, and - perhaps - starting a career for England!  Certainly the teams I watched played with more enthusiasm than our national team showed in the World Cup.

I want to help increase the user-friendliness of getting around in Frome.  So I want to hear your experience of local roads, especially your own street.  Nobody can know it from the same perspective as the people who live there.  There are quite a few problems within Frome Selwood, and I have got many of them into the in-box of the Highways department, but these are the more obvious ones and your own particular bugbear might not be amongst them.  If you have any ideas about how to improve traffic flow, pedestrian safety, street parking design, or bigger issues for the town - like which routes HGVs should use - please do get in touch with me by email or phone or letter:  MDaniell@somerset.gov.uk  or 07854 818 286 or 70 Oakfield Road, Frome BA11 4JH.

If you wanted, and enough people show an interest, we could get together with maps and discuss this as a group.   To get workable solutions we do usually need to see how they would impact on neighbouring roads.  You probably already know there isn’t much money around for big schemes, but Frome and the immediate surrounding area of Selwood would in many cases benefit from relatively small changes, so these are what we need to come up with.  Over to you!

For a long time I resisted - and objected to - being called a politician.  It wasn’t where I was coming from, I just wanted to be a councillor.  There is no way of getting away from it however: in order to get things done within a political structure, you have to be a politician.   In recent years politicians have been lowest of the low in public opinion, but although I can see why, I don’t think it is fair to have such a low opinion of all of them/us.  (I would say that, wouldn’t I? )  Politicians are people, so are as varied as any other group.  And within all groups you have people who are behaving politically.  So Politics definitely isn’t confined to Politicians, nor human nature to non-politicians!  What is unfair is to say that ‘they are all the same’, when usually the people saying this haven’t a clue what their local MP, Town, District or County councillor has done or should be doing, and often could not even name these people!

Politics has a function.  It has been called ‘the art of the possible’, which is quite a good way of describing how I try to do my job, so I don’t mind being a politician in that sense.  Whatever our political beliefs, we have to take what we start with and do the best we can with it.   As councillors, that means making decisions on behalf of the residents of our Town, District or County.  These decisions will affect the future of those places, some of them won’t please all the people affected, all of them will use money from Council Tax paid by the residents.  So it is a big responsibility and it is important to elect the right people for the job in the first place, and then those people need to act in the best interests of the whole Town, District or County, as well as the particular interests of their own ward or division - as they see it.

Although I am a Lib Dem, I do not think that all Lib Dems are wonderful and that all Conservatives are dreadful.  I think that most councillors from all parties (or none) become councillors because they/we have ideas about how to do things better in some way.  Our differences lie in more general terms, our fundamental beliefs about what is good for people and what our role should be as an adminstration.  I didn’t used to have strong political views, probably because - like most people - I mixed with people I was comfortable with, who thought along broadly similar lines, and therefore did not encounter very different viewpoints on a daily basis.  Since becoming a councillor, I have been exposed to Conservative thinking which ranges from fairly like Lib Dem to extremely unlike it - a completely alien mindset to mine.  Unfortunately for my mental comfort in these circumstances, at both District and County levels I am a member of the Opposition and therefore have to witness decisions being made which are sometimes the exact opposite of what I want.  And that is another function of politics - to be in power, so that the decisions made are ones based on beliefs I share.  It is why being a councillor means also being a politician, working for the things I believe in; and why electing someone from a political party is useful - you do, broadly speaking, know the core values of your representative.  

At Cabinet this week the final part of a discussion about the sale of County-owned farms took place.  This has been discussed at Cabinet previously and the decision reached then was ‘called in’ for Scrutiny to look at by Acting Lib Dem Leader, Sam Crabbe.  He put forward an alternative proposal ,which was narrowly defeated there but included on the report by Scrutiny to Cabinet for those members to also consider.  I am a member of the Shadow Cabinet which means I can speak but have no vote.  Despite the verbal opposition of some in their party (in whose divisions these farms are situated), Conservative Cabinet members voted unanimously. Officially they voted to consider the sale of farms on an individual basis, but it is obvious by the Leader’s slip and other blatant comments by members that their intention it to sell them all. 

This totally ignores the human side of this, as well as the farming realities, and in my opinion is crazy not to look at possible alternatives (eg the sale en bloc to an agricultural management group like the Duchy of Cornwall).  Three farmers are under notice to quit already, others will be told the same as a result of the ‘desktop review’ to happen in the next two months.  A desktop review means decisions are made from an office, totally divorced from the people concerned and the situation on the ground.  The families occupying these County-owned chunks of land are tenant farmers.  The Conservatives blithely state that they will be offered the chance to buy their farms.  A few older ones may be in a position to do this, but for the younger farmers it is impossible in this economic climate.  Their financial investment has been in equipment and stock, and their hard work was an investment for the future.  They cannot afford to buy and there are very few farms available to rent, outside of the County system and a few ventures like the Duchy Estates.  This means their stock and equipment will be sold at a loss in a ‘farm sale’ and their hard work and experience will be wasted. 

At a personal level this will be hundreds of individual heartbreaks.  At a County level it is both short-sighted and unnecessary, the opposite of what should be happening to encourage a programme of localism and business opportunities.  The signs are out there that we will need our farmers more than ever in the next decades.  County farms are obviously not the only agricultural businesses around, but experience shows that when farms are sold the land gets used for pony paddocks and housing estates, so many of these would be a net loss to food production in Somerset.

The bigger picture is affected by little local decisions like this.  We all need to eat, and so we need a safe and local supply of food.  We need experienced farmers who are able to grow crops for us.  Internationally food is increasingly becoming a resource issue.  In other parts of the world the situation is so acute that there are wars because of food scarcity.  Climate chaos is already having a devasting effect on farming, and this also impacts directly on us all.  For instance, our ‘good summer’ has meant insufficient rain for a second crop of wheat, so its scarcity means its prices are high this year, which will result in higher supermarket prices further down the line.   Farmers cannot do much about the weather, but they are more experienced than the rest of us in adapting to it and surviving - and it is about time we started to value them more than we do at present. 

As you will have seen, there was a big gap in entries between January and July.  I am not a natural ‘blogger’, so it only took a few technical hitches to stop my regular input, and then of course it was election time and I was out campaigning.  That seems to me a far more natural way of communicating.  I really love being out on the doorstep, talking with residents, and - more importantly - listening to their views and concerns.  Although elections can interfere with council business (as all of us are political, very few meetings happen for the duration), it works the other way too - it is possible to get so busy with committee meetings that we don’t have enough contact with our residents.  In Somerset we have elections nearly every year, for one tier or another (County Council and EU in 2009, Westminster in 2010, District and Town due in 2011) so this does give us a chance - and time - to get out on the doorstep.   But at that point we find that most residents have busy lives and are not in (or do not want to answer the door).   It is lovely to meet up with those who do want to have a chat; and that applies to other times as well.

I’m also on a Facebook, but I’m definitely not an addict.  I’d rather have small ‘f’ friends than hundreds of Friends I barely know.  It has its uses, but the bits of it I like best are the photos and comments from real friends or family.  I have no wish to ‘tweet’, which seems a very disruptive form of chat.  With both of these, it seems to me you can spend an awful lot of time talking about what you are doing rather than actually doing it.   It isn’t communication as I understand it, but this is probably a generational thing.  A lot of the time it is just talking about yourself with token comments about the other person, rather than talking and listening.  But then if you think about ordinary face-to-face conversations, many of them are the same, so maybe it is just the way we are.  And Facebook at least enables you to ‘communicate’ at a time that suits you - as does this blog!

I am on the Minerals and Waste working party at SCC.  It is currently putting together the policy for minerals extraction in Somerset for the next few decades.  This may sound dry, but is actually quite interesting.  It is important to get the balance right between what can sustainably be taken from the ground for use as building materials and aggregates (eg for roads), and the effects this will have on our beautiful countryside.  Quarries provide jobs on site and in associated industries, so are important in an area like Frome which is so close to them.   The stone used in restoration and new build helps preserve the character of the county.

This ties in nicely with my role on the Regulation Committee, which  meets monthly to look at planning applications for, amongst other things, quarries.    Whereas the policy sets the framework, this committee looks at the detail eg the hours of working, noise levels etc - and takes into account how they affect people in local communities. 

There has been a very long gap between entries.  This wasn’t because I was doing nothing, rather the reverse!  In the interval I was working to keep our excellent MP, David Heath, and then catching up with council meetings.  (Councils go into ‘purdah’ during an election, so it is always busier than usual immediately afterwards.)   We had a successful General Election result locally, followed by a surprising one nationally.  I have mixed feelings about the Coalition (in common with many in both the parties involved!) but do agree that something drastic needed doing about the dire economic situation the country found itself in, and so support their actions to deal with it - in principle.  That doesn’t mean I like how it affects us on the ground, but I do know we have to endure it and hope for better things in a few years’ time. 

Some cuts were welcome.  As councillors we have been trudging through treacle in recent years, with far too much bureaucracy and too many dictats from Westmnster.  The recent repeal of some of these was a real lightening of the load.  However, some of the changes mean we don’t currently know which bits to carry on with and what the rules of the game are or will be, so clarity on that in the near future will be welcome.

Our current Local Transport Plan was designed to give Somerset some strategic direction until 2011.  A new one is being put together this year, which will replace it.  What happens on our roads affects us all, so the public will be asked for their views as local users.

Last week, with some other County Councillors, I took part in the initial consultation for the new plan.  We don’t yet know how much money will be allocated for it, but we can decide how it should be prioritised.  At this level, we are talking about the strategic view - how much priority should be given to each of a number of identified needs within Somerset as a whole.  Such a huge county has a wide range of needs and so this translates into a number of difficult choices, eg How important is it to reduce bottlenecks, compared to improving linkages between train and bus services?  What percentage of the budget should road safety have, compared to new traffic improvement schemes?  

After June, the draft plan resulting from this discussion will be presented to the public for their input at a local level.  Watch out for your chance to contribute to this.  If there is something to do with your local road network that you have wanted to get changed for a long time, this will be the time to say it!  After this consultation with residents/users, the plan will be revised.  That final version will be presented to the council for approval by the end of 2010 and come into operation next year.

Somerset County Council will be carrying out its regular road inspections, but is also calling upon members of the public to report new potholes. This can be done online by logging on to www.somerset.gov.uk or by ringing 0845 345 9155.