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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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12th July '09
I notice one of the latest local planning applications concerns the old plumbing supplies shop in North Road currently playing temporary host to a pet shop whose premises are undergoing renovation. The owner has asked ‘to develop a redundant commercial building in disrepair into six much needed dwellings’. The town council supported this as it will both remove an eye-sore and make more accommodation available – the same reasons we put forward in support of a similar application for an old warehouse at the rear of Somerfields - where I see the developer has now started work. More similar renovation work is going on to an old factory behind the toy shop in Grenville Street. All this is good news and one can only hope that owners of similarly run-down buildings in Queen Street, Bridge Street and Grenville Street, to name but a few, will take note and think about tackling the state of buildings they own.
Town council meetings are usually pretty sedate affairs – though I can recall 2 members squaring up to each other and one female councillor having to be escorted out – but at this month’s meeting we witnessed councillor David Fulford storming out after the Mayor Andy Powell refused to let him speak on an item concerning the new ‘Heritage Trail’ leaflet. The sight of the Mayor strenuously banging his gavel and a councillor demanding to be heard is unusual – but as one of the members of the public who attended said to me afterwards ‘Thank you for a very entertaining evening’ so at least someone enjoyed it!
The NHS prepares an annual ‘Health Profile’ for every district in England and Wales and the latest has just been published. For Torridge it reveals some fascinating statistics. The district has some 44% of its residents classed as in the two most deprived groups out of the five possible – although I suspect this low score stems from low wages and poor transport availability rather than overwhelming poverty. Where we do score very poorly is in terms of obesity amongst adults where our score is 26% against a national average of 23.6% i.e. more than 1 in 4 are obese – which means our figure for healthy eating adults at 21.5% (national average 26.3%) isn’t really surprising. Even more worrying at first sight is the figure for physically active children – 87.4% compared to the national average of 90%. I think, however, that this is related to organised activities where attendances can be counted. Here in Bideford and Torridge as a whole we don’t have anywhere near as many such planned group activities as cities do - yet go down Westward Ho! and there always seems to be hordes of surfers and swimmers. We also score badly on GCSE pass rates (at least 5 A-C grades) at 44.2% to 48.3% nationally. This has long been a problem in the area but the opening of the new Bideford College next year should be expected to redress this failing. On a happier note we are well below the national average for violent crime, smoking in pregnancy, teenage pregnancy, binge drinking amongst adults, death from smoking and even early deaths from cancer – all of which give us a better life expectancy viz. Torridge males 78.4 and females 83.3 to the national averages of 77.7 and 81.8.
Hello, what’s this dropping through my door? It’s a glossy leaflet entitled ‘Geoffrey Cox reports’ telling me what our MP has been up to over the last year. What is especially eye-catching is the number of times a photograph of the gentleman appears on this leaflet. Several years ago Private Eye ran a competition about this with, I seem to remember, the winner having 32 pictures on one leaflet – so congratulations to Mr.Cox on managing to get his face reproduced 37 times! Even more interesting is the admission in the small print right at the end of the leaflet that it was ‘Paid for by the House of Commons Communications Allowance’. Now who actually finances that? – oh yes, you and me the taxpayer. If our MPs want to rescue their tattered reputations could I suggest they don’t waste our money on these rather cheesy PR leaflets – and if they think these things are really vital to the working of democracy then can they pay for them themselves?
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