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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
Previous entries
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6th April '08
The price of houses is falling – great news if you are a struggling first time buyer, not so good if you have recently bought. Whatever your view there is still a shortage of good quality homes in this area. Torridge’s efforts to provide ‘affordable homes’ are still glacier-slow in producing results – and yet as I noted recently there are some 652 empty dwellings in the district. I have looked further into my suggestion of the council taking over long term empty houses via the use of EDMOs (Empty Dwelling Management Orders) and have been told that the council intend adopting an Empty Homes Strategy during this year. Hooray – another exciting ‘strategy’ - but I would rather see some action. The first step has already been made possible in that Council Tax records now allow us to identify the owners of these long empty properties – and they will be getting a letter ‘encouraging them to bring their properties back into use’ – and offering grants to help them do it. Sadly I understand that EDMOs are expensive to implement and even though the council could receive the rent from any properties they compulsorily take over and do up the management and maintenance costs would eat into the rents charged so much that ‘there was the possibility of a deficit’. I do wonder if the possible deficit is higher or lower than the current outgoings spent on emergency housing by Torridge – along with which are the unquantifiable but very real psychological costs to people desperately looking for decent housing? The council is to carry out further research into this subject and I for one await the findings with great interest
At the March town council meeting one of Bideford’s county councillors Humphrey Temperley was asked by councillor Tony Inch if the alterations being inserted into Meddon Street/Clovelly Road to improve road safety and cater for changes in traffic numbers arising from the new Asda development included any plans to help residents from Devonshire Park cross New Road? The county councillor said there would be a ‘refuge’ in the middle of the road for pedestrians but this was all – there were no plans for a pedestrian crossing. I did suggest that a new crossing was provided plus another one outside the Police Station. This would allow Devonshire Park residents to get to town easily and would also serve walkers from East-the-Water who crossed by the Swan public house – a much quicker route than going to the existing crossing near the East-of-the-Water restaurant. I suspect local councillors will have to push hard to get this put in place even though both seem eminently sensible – not unfortunately a good lever in local government terms.
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