John Whitehouse

As the county councillor representing the area in which Kenilworth Fire Station is situated, I have studied the Improvement Plan proposals very carefully and have asked a lot of searching questions.

The Community Speed Watch (CSW) scheme which we piloted in Kenilworth has been a great success, and is now being rolled out progressively across Warwickshire. Feedback from the general public has been almost universally positive, despite the occasional offensive gestures from motorists who feels they have a divine right to speed in residential roads.

This week I went out with the Police to identify a number of new locations for CSW volunteers to operate from safely. This should give us a much better coverage of the area, and satisfy some of the large number of residents’ requests for action in their roads.

Yesterday I attended my first meeting of the Warwickshire Waste Partnership, which brings together elected members and officers from both the county council (the waste disposal authority) and the five districts and boroughs (the waste collection authorities). From first impressions the rate of progress towards real partnership working has been painfully slow! Liberal Democrat policy is for a single waste collection and disposal authority for Warwickshire, which would be a far more efficient structure in my view.

However, the rates of improvement in the waste management statistics (recycling rates etc) in 2008/09 were good, and improved targets for 2009/10 and 2010/11 were agreed at the meeting. This further reinforces the need to downsize the waste growth projections currently underpinning Project Transform (replacement of the Coventry incinerator in 2016).

I also attended my first meeting of the Project Transform Members Advisory Panel last Friday. Important undertakings were made that the ‘reference project’ (a 305,000 tonnes incinerator) is not a done deal in terms of either sizing or technology. I shall be playing an active role in overseeing this major project over the next 4 years.

Last week I attended an exhibition showcasing the achievements of pupils attending Warwickshire’s Early Intervention Service Teaching and Learning centres during the past year. Elizabeth Featherstone, Head of Service for Family and Community, showed me round the exhibition.
The work exhibited is by students who have either been reintegrated back into mainstream schools, participated in work-based learning or improved their learning behaviour through working together, or had success in GCSE exams.

Very impressive - some real talent on display.
 

Tonight I heard that Warwickshire County Council is to sign up to the national “10:10” climate change initiative launched at the Tate Modern in London last month.

As an individual I signed up on Day 1 of the campaign, and am committed to trying to reduce my personal carbon footprint by 10% by the end of 2010.

At last week’s full Council meeting I asked the Leader of the Council whether the council would sign up to the initiative. Today I heard that the decision had been taken to follow the example of other councils by joining in this nationwide campaign.

An initiative like 10:10 is an opportunity for public leadership, and momentum is all important. I’m very glad that my question has accelerated Warwickshire’s thinking and had a positive outcome. Now it needs to deliver the results!

My blood boiled seeing our local Tory MP on TV on Monday night, standing in front of Kenilworth Fire Station and promising to fight its closure.

 What hypocrites the Tories are! They have a dominant majority on the County Council, and it’s the County Council that is proposing to axe seven fire stations across Warwickshire, including that in Kenilworth.

What’s that old adage - you can’t fool all of the people all of the time? Well, they’re trying to!

Yesterday Warwickshire Fire & Rescue Service (WFRS) announced proposals to close seven of the current twenty fire stations serving the county, and to merge two others. Included in the list of planned closures is Kenilworth Fire Station, located in the heart of my county electoral division.

These proposals have been known to county councillors since a Cabinet meeting in July which approved them for consultation, but until yesterday we were unable to say anything publicly about them.

I released the following statement to local media today:-

The news of the planned closure of Kenilworth Fire Station has come as a great shock, but less of a surprise. Rumours have been circulating for a long time, and the Conservatives running the County Council have done residents a great disservice by keeping their plans and intentions secret for so long. The plan was agreed by the Cabinet in July, but it is only now that county councillors are free to talk about it.

The documents released yesterday show that Kenilworth Fire Station costs ? 95,000 a year to run, or about ? 4 a head for every man, woman and child in the area it covers. This seems remarkably good value to me, and a small price to pay for the security and peace of mind that people get from having their own local fire station based here in the town.

The Fire Service state that they can meet the County Council’s current response standards (10 minutes urban, 20 minutes rural) for the Kenilworth area from the fire station based in Leamington’s busy and congested town centre. Kenilworth residents will find that very hard to accept, especially given the traffic delays between the two towns at peak times. It seems that no allowance is being made for traffic delays, or for other unforeseen events such as road closures, flooding etc.

The plan even assumes that the whole of Burton Green, at the northern edge of my county division, will be covered from Leamington fire station, despite the fact that it adjoins the city of Coventry and is only a few minutes away from a major West Midlands fire station.

There is now a twelve week consultation period before the final version of the plan is drawn up and presented to the Cabinet in January for decision. My promise to local residents is that I will use that time to make sure that proper and effective consultation takes place, and that their voices are heard by those making the decisions. Let’s be clear though - it’s not the Fire Service who will make the ultimate decisions, but the Conservative-run County Council.

Since June I’ve become Environment & Economy spokesperson for the Liberal Democrat group on the County Council. I still retain an interest in the children’s agenda, but a Stratford colleague Peter Balaam (an ex teacher) has taken on the spokesperson responsibility in this area.

I’m very excited by the challenge of my new role, because it encompasses many of the big issues and challenges facing the council. Not least of these is “Project Transform”, a joint project between the County Council and neighbouring authorities in Coventry and Solihull to build a major new facility to process residual municipal waste, to replace the current Coventry incinerator.

This is a huge project, costing over £1 billion over the lifetime of the proposed facility, and it is vital that the right decisions are taken on financial, technical and environmental grounds.

I have been appointed to a Members Advisory Panel for Project Transform, made up of three elected members from each of the three local authority partners, and our first meeting is next week on 25th September. Watch this space …..

I’ve had a long and inexcusable break from ‘blogging’ since the County Council elections in June. Blame it on exhaustion after a very hard-won victory perhaps, but also the county council always winds down its activity levels over the school summer holidays. I’ve never really understood why …..?

Anyway, I’m back blogging again now, and not before time - there’s a lot going on at the moment!

On Thursday I managed to hold my county seat by the massive majority of 15 votes!! I’d hoped for a bit more breathing room after winning by 56 votes four years ago, but it wasn’t to be. Kenilworth Abbey has always been like this ….

Anyway, I’m extremely grateful to everyone who voted for me, and I look forward to an interesting four more years on what will be a very different County Council. The Conservatives now have overall control with 39 of the 62 seats, and two net Liberal Democrat gains put us on 12 seats ahead of Labour’s 10 - so we are now the official opposition.

The new Lib Dem county group has an initial meeting tomorrow, and then the first full council meeting on 23rd June will establish the shape and structure of the new council. Will the Tories rejig the committees, and will they grab all the chair positions? We’ll have to wait and see …..