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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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11th January '09
As a councillor I have to sit through many, many ‘presentations’. These are to help educate us about certain topics but my heart sinks as speakers often descend into jargon filled, acronym stuffed, gobbledygook which leaves councillors looking at each other wondering what we have just been told. One such ‘presentation’ came the other day when all of the district councillors sat though one on ‘Local Area Agreements’ and affordable housing aspirations in Devon. Cutting through the verbiage the message seemed to be that, sadly, much of what had been planned has now been overtaken by events, especially the almost complete cessation in new house building, which has made previous targets on the provision of affordable homes virtually impossible to meet. I did ask if any council in the county had used existing powers to take over housing that has been empty for a long time – and was informed that Exeter had done a fair amount of work on this which was being shared with one of Torridge’s housing officers. I did point out that of Torridge’s 29,474 ‘dwellings’ some 906 were claiming the 10% reduction in council tax as ‘Second Homes’ whilst another 314 were getting a similar 10% discount as being ‘Long Term Empty’ i.e. some 4% of the district’s houses are or have been empty for much of the time – with notable concentrations in the Bideford-Northam area. In Bideford, for example, with our 7389 ‘dwellings’ we have 72 ‘Second Homes’ and 68 ‘Long Term Empty’ (i.e. about 2%) whilst in Northam/Westward Ho!/Appledore the comparative figures are 363 ‘Second Homes’ and 80 ‘Long Term Empty’ i.e. about 7%. I find these figures actually quite shocking and am pushing to get Torridge to examine whether it would be financially viable to take over the ‘Long Term Empty’ properties in order to house local people. What also intrigued me about the figures were the number of people claiming the 25% council tax discount for being single person households. Such a discount is actually entirely fair but in Bideford the number is 2612 or 35%. This number of ‘singleton’ households is forecast to grow rapidly in the next decade with many implications such as increasing the pressure on available house numbers and even on the level of tax income being received by the town and district council. Going back to the shortage of affordable homes it was interesting to hear from councillor Andrew Eastman that a Community Land Trust is being set up in Appledore to make land available for such housing. Whether this works or not has yet to be seen but we may have to go down this path in Bideford.
I have said before that the Long Bridge is Bideford – without it we would not be the town we are and we would not have developed the way we have. Its floodlighting by the town council has enhanced its beauty at night greatly – but over the last year the breakdown of certain of the lights has led to a very patchy appearance which has added nothing to its attractiveness. At the moment, of course, the county council are carrying out the badly needed refurbishment work but I understand that as this approaches completion the county engineers will be discussing what we want for the future in terms of floodlighting. It did occur to me that there might be an opportunity here to harness the tidal power in the Torridge along with some solar energy and even a dedicated wind turbine. Additionally we will need to make the floodlights themselves more accessible to enable any broken ones to be easily replaced – one of the current drawbacks with the present system which leaves the bridge looking like a nice mouthful of teeth with an occasional missing one!
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