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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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16th Aug '09
I don’t know if you are as bored as I am with all the anti-EU rants/letters that appear with monotonous regularity in the local papers? We rarely seem to hear about any good news from the EU yet here in Bideford we have the new Leader 4 offices. This odd sounding scheme channels EU money into this area to help finance regeneration and business expansion – with help from the district and county councils. Over the last three years, for example, Torridge put £127,000 into the previous Leader+ scheme – and got back some £5 million in total benefits. Leader 4 is the latest tranche of funds, some £6.87 million, to come down and Torridge is unsurprisingly supporting its inauguration by helping with £82,000 over 4 years. Unfortunately funds are only released when applicants can demonstrate that they have accessed ‘match funding’ which all goes into the pot. The first two schemes have now come forward. One, called ‘Northern Devon Food and Drink’ is designed to encourage local food producers whilst the second, ‘Harvesting for the future’ will train agricultural producers in a wide variety of new skills. Sadly Torridge seems to have no funds to help with the initial development of these ideas and councillors, in any case, weren’t too impressed over certain aspects. Chris Leather, for example, thought these schemes ‘only kept quango members in jobs’ and he queried what ‘real results’ we saw here in Bideford and the surrounding area. Phil Pennington picked up on this reckoning that in the next few years all Westcountry quangoes will be asked to spell out exactly what they have been doing – and he thinks many will be closed as they are so expensive to run. Steve Clarke wondered where other matching cash might come from as all he could see was the disappearance of all funding streams. The net result of all this talk was a vote to support the two schemes specified above – but not to guarantee funding for the next 4 years as we considered this would potentially hamper our freedom in budget setting.
Once again the spectre of PPS25 is looming over Bideford. This is the new government directed guideline which forbids most types of new building on flood plains – and thus ‘sterilises’ four of the town’s five major development sites. Torridge is now carrying out a ‘Strategic Flood Assessment’ which is due to be completed by the end of this month and is looking at all the sites now affected by this ruling. When we discussed this at a recent committee meeting councillor James Morrish expressed surprise that the council’s Westcombe depot was now placed in the category of sites at risk. Of course, when one considers that Northam Road was once a causeway linking Raleigh Hill to North Road and the Kenwith valley was a massive arm of the estuary it isn’t that surprising. When asked by councillor Chris Leather what would happen if Torridge gave the go-ahead to build houses on the flood plain our solicitor told us, in no uncertain terms, that we would be seen as acting unreasonably and would almost certainly be over-ruled. The recently announced new plans to build houses on Richmond Dock in Appledore will, if the plans actually materialise, be a test case for this policy but it is hard to see how they could ever achieve planning permission in the light of what councillors have been told about PPS25.
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