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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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24th February '08
Walk through some of Bideford’s car parks and it is obvious that usage is not as great as it was before the fairly large price rises brought in early last year. Recently TDC, who run the car parks, had a breakdown of the revenue for the first 7 months of the financial year which makes interesting reading. The most successful was the Cattle Market facility which registered a 443% increase over its budgeted income – though seeing as how it was virtually unused the year before this isn’t that impressive. Springfield car park (opposite St.Mary’s school) took the grand sum of £488 over the 7 months which must be less than the cost of installing the ticket machine! Perhaps the most interesting were the Bridge Street car park where budgeted income failed to meet expectations by 3.8%, the Pill which experienced a shortfall of 0.14% and Honestone Street which was 20% below the forecast income. Indeed of Bideford’s 10 car parks 6 failed to make their target figure although in financial terms the difference between expected and actual figures in the town was only some £2500 - owing mainly to the increase in charges and the large rise in usage of the Riverbank car park. There are two possible reasons for this; the wet Summer putting tourists off, or locals (both Bidefordians and those who work in the town) choosing to park on the road rather than pay to park in the car parks. Given that expected income at Westward Ho! Slipway car park rose by 39% and at Churchfields, Appledore by 54% the ‘absent tourist’ argument doesn’t seem to hold water. It is fairly obvious that the car parks in residential areas are the ones that have experienced the largest drops in usage – and have contributed most to exacerbating on-street parking. The only real answer in the long term seems to be to limit households to just one car each – but it will be a brave government that introduces this!
Several months ago I wrote about the legal powers the district council now has to take over properties which have been lying empty for a long time in order to bring them back into use to house people in the area. At a recent council meeting councillor Chris Leather asked how many empty homes there were in the district. The reply from one of the council’s officers was enlightening. On 1 April 2007, the last time a survey was carried out, there were 652 ‘vacant dwellings’ of which 4 were council houses, 5 belonged to Housing Associations and the remainder were in the private sector. Of possibly even greater interest was that of the 643 empty ‘private’ dwellings some 355 had been empty for over 6 months – at a time when the demand for accommodation seems to be constantly rising. I have asked if Torridge has any plans to exercise their powers to take these properties over but have been told that, so far, no schemes are in place. Just to put those 652 houses into context I would add that the figure represents 1 in every 44 homes in Torridge.
Torridge is currently going through the gruelling process of setting its budgets and I have been intrigued at some of the points that have come up. Staff costs are a major outlay and various new posts have been discussed at great length to see if they should be created or not. One that caught my eye was an Asset Realisation Officer at £50,000 per year (this includes pension etc as well as direct pay). Given that the selling of Torridge’s assets has been a fairly contentious issue recently I did ask what this post holder would actually be doing and was told by the Chief Executive that Torridge actually owns about £30 million worth of assets and he was looking to ‘recycle’ some 10% of their value per year i.e. sell them off and reinvest the proceeds in schemes deemed as important by councillors. I am unsure how this total figure was reached but in Bideford alone it must include all the car parks along with the Town Hall, Victoria Park, Burton Art Gallery, the Sports Ground and Westcombe Depot – not to mention the Cattle Market and Brunswick Wharf. We already know the last two have been earmarked for disposal so presumably the new officer will facilitate this. What does worry me, however, is that 4 companies, which I assume are commercial estate agencies or some such, have already ‘expressed an interest’ in selling Brunswick Wharf for us. I did ask that if we are paying £50,000 a year for an officer will these sales now be handled ‘in house’ and thus save us some pretty hefty selling fees? Unfortunately this isn’t the plan so if this post is introduced by my fellow councillors I for one will be keeping a very close eye on both this new officer and the sums being paid out to private companies to sell publicly owned assets.
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