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Councillor Christie's Weblog

From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie

Previous entries

13th January '08

Anyone travelling out from Bideford along the Clovelly Road cannot help but see that work on the new Asda store at Atlantic Village is proceeding apace. Work on the site may be going ahead but the firm was only granted planning permission on the basis that they would also pay for improvements to the roads that will serve the shop. The main thrust of this was to upgrade the whole Clovelly Road right down to a new mini roundabout at the bottom of Torridge Hill and provide cycle tracks on other approaches. Asda was meant to come back to both Torridge and Bideford council with a range of options as to what might be done but, according to Humphery Temperley, one of Bideford’s county councillors, they have only presented one scheme – and that at very short notice – a move denounced by councillor Temperley as an ‘outrage to democracy’. Seeing that the scheme as it stands apparently involves a cycle track down one side of Moreton Park Road which would effectively stop all parking along there it clearly needs to go to public consultation. I do wonder how they are going to tackle the problems outside Westcroft school - a major pinch point which is absolute chaos at set down/pick up periods. Councillor Temperley is to demand a longer time for public (and council) consultation as if Asda do not get it right now it could be leaving problems to fester for many years.

I sometimes wonder if the councils I sit on shouldn’t keep ‘league tables’ of how many motions members bring forward. If Torridge did then the easy leader would be Green councillor Miranda Cox who at the last Full meeting of TDC put forward another 2 motions in her own name and 1 jointly with me. Her first covered the phasing out of paper based agendas in favour of electronic ones – which was supported with one or two councillors e.g. Sam Robinson wanting us to pressurise BT into upgrading broadband provision in Torridge in order to allow all councillors and members of the public to be able to access our agendas easily. Councillor Phil Pennington did point out one inconsistency- as a council we have voted to support small post offices and this move to supplant post with e mails seemed to contradict this position! When the vote came, however, it was overwhelmingly in favour of the motion.
Councillor Cox’s second motion was to enter discussions with local shops to phase out plastic bags – a move that has become a nationwide phenomenon following the lead of Modbury in South Devon. Discussions have already started with Morrisons in Bideford and there is talk of producing cotton bags bearing the TDC logo. Councillor Des Shadrick supported the idea reckoning ‘our use of plastic bags is obscene’ and we cannot go on the way we are with ‘no day of reckoning’. Not everyone was in favour, for example, councillor Royston Johns liked the bags as he put his runner beans in them – but when it came to the vote it was mainly positive and the idea will now go on to be looked at in detail.

I spoke to the third motion which was to draw up a plan to reduce Torridge’s CO2 emissions by 60% by 2030. This is a very challenging target but I and councillor Cox went through the arguments for it which got a lot of support. Mention was made of Appledore Shipyard possibly turning to helping make/service the offshore wind turbines the government has recently committed itself to building. Councillor Sam Robinson surprised some when he widened the debate to say we needed to reduce our dependence on energy from ‘obnoxious sources’ quoting as an example the current Iranian regime – and declaring that alternative energy was the way forward. Not everyone shared his views indeed councillor Chris Leather said he didn’t accept man was having an effect on the climate and he ‘didn’t subscribe to the current mantra about global warming’ he being backed by 2 others even though councillor Cox characterised such global warming deniers as ‘dinosaurs’! The council Leader James Morrish joined in here saying he was in favour of a ban on gas-guzzling cars - and looked meaningfully at the Chief Executive who is well-known for his relatively large collection of high performance cars, which got a round of laughs from the assembled members. In the end only 3 councillors voted against the motion with the rest in favour of taking on this very challenging target.

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