John Whitehouse

Yesterday I went to a seminar to hear about the Warwickshire LINk, which is just being set up. LINks are independent of Councils and the Health Service, and are intended to provide a strong voice for local people in the planning, design and commissioning of Health and Social Care services.

The technology and facilities being set up to enable public participation are impressive - full details are on the web site www.communityvoicesonline.org.

Less clear was how the new structure would operate in overall governance terms, how it would set its priorities etc. The government’s view seems to me that this will emerge in line with local needs, but this approach risks a lot of wasted navel-gazing time in the early months. Far better would have been to have put up a standard model to begin with, and allowed each LINk to then adapt this over time as required.

On Wednesday I accompanied Nigel Rock, our Lib Dem PPC for Kenilworth & Southam constituency, to a meeting at the University of Warwick with the Registrar and the Community Relations Manager. Half of the university campus is within Warwickshire (the other half in Coventry), and within my electoral division of Kenilworth Abbey. In addition the university is a major local employer, with several hundred people in my division working there in one capacity or another.

We had an interesting wide-ranging discussion covering national and local issues. I was particularly interested to hear about the activities of the Warwick Volunteers, which unusually is run by the university rather than the students themselves, and which gets many undergraduate students directly involved in projects and activities supporting the local community.

Tomorrow Warwick District Council launches a major public consultation on the “Core Strategy” element of its Local Development Framework, which will set the broad framework of planning policies that will shape developments in the District up to 2026.

Within the context of the Government’s agenda of building 3 million more houses over the next 20 years, the question for Warwick District is very simple - where will all the houses go?

As a county rather than district councillor I shall be a consultee rather than a decision maker in this vital process. When I have had the opportunity to read all the papers thoroughly I will comment further.

At the Annual Meeting of the County Council yesterday, the Conservative leader announced a number of changes to his Cabinet, to serve for the next year and until the county elections in May 2009.

The most striking change was the removal of a Cabinet member specifically for Schools, with these responsibilities now being subsumed entirely within the much broader responsibilities of a single Cabinet member for Children Young People and Families.

While understanding the statutory requirement for a single lead member with Executive responsibility for Children, Young People and Families, I do not see why the Schools portfolio could not have been retained in a separate but subservient position - there are precedents in national government for this. Certainly the change could reinforce the view of many people in the Warwickshire education world that the focus on schools has been diluted in the move towards more integrated working with Children’s Social Services.

The new Cabinet seems to me to be even more unbalanced, with the two members for Adult Services and Children Services respectively responsible for the vast proportion of the County’s expenditure, while the other eight Cabinet members cover a variety of other roles, some better defined than others.

The local press ran a lead story a week ago quoting Cllr. Norman Vincett, the leader of the Conservative-controlled town council, saying that plans for a  ”showpiece” civic centre at Smalley Place in Kenilworth were in trouble. This was confirmed at the Town Assembly on Thursday evening, when Cllr. Vincett admitted that current plans were financially unacceptable and unaffordable, but that work was continuing although no timescales could be promised.

I find it unacceptable to hear such news via the press, when I am a member of a joint Steering Group of county, district and town councillors that is supposed to be co-ordinating efforts to secure this prize for the people of Kenilworth. Until last May, under the then Lib Dem/Labour administration, a senior District Council officer was driving the project hard and keeping everyone regularly informed of progress. Since the Conservatives won the District Council, project leadership has effectively transferred to the County Council (also Tory controlled), but all sense of urgency and real commitment seems to have disappeared, while non-Tory members of the joint Steering Group have been kept largely in the dark.

The Lib Dem group here in Kenilworth has been forced to go on the attack, accusing the ruling Conservatives of letting down local residents by not being prepared to put up any “new” money to make this showpiece a reality - despite having moaned for years when they were in opposition on the District Council that Kenilworth “did not get its fair share”!

Having lived for some years in London, and with family down there, I took great interest in this year’s London mayoral elections.

I’m really sorry that Boris won, and I’m sure Londoners will regret it eventually. However, what was really interesting in the results last night was the way the second preference votes worked out. Boris had the most first preferences of course - that was to be expected - but there more were more than enough second preference votes available to have defeated him if Ken Livingstone had been successful in his “Stop Boris” strategy.

In the event the second preferences split pretty evenly between the two of them, and so Boris won. If we assume that most of the Greens followed their leader’s advice to give Ken their second preference, and most BNP went for Boris, then the great majority of Lib Dems in London didn’t go for either of them!

Perhaps, collectively, London Lib Dems came up with the perfect strategy to unmask the “new” Tory party. Give them something real to run, and see what a mess they make of it!

I spent most of Thursday over in Harbury, helping Liberal Democrat Bev Mann in her campaign to unseat the Conservative incumbent in the Stratford District Council elections. Bev is fairly new to the Lib Dems, but very well known locally after six years as a parish councillor, and coming from a long-established local family.

The result was incredibly close, but ended up with Bev winning the seat by a margin of 11 votes (861 votes to 850). Perhaps those last few people that I “knock up” at 9 o’clock at night made all the difference!

Anyway, winning is a great feeling, especially as the Lib Dems made a total of five gains from the Tories across Stratford District as a whole. I’m off to the post-election party tonight, which will definitely be quite a celebration!

Last year I took part in an in-depth review of the Demand for School Meals in Warwickshire, which resulted in the acceptance by the county council Cabinet of a wide range of recommendations to improve school meals and promote healthy eating. The background to this was of course the Jamie Oliver programmes on TV, that had had the unfortunate consequence of putting people off school meals across the country, so that demand was down and many local authorities school meals services had been pushed into deficit.

Yesterday at the Children Young People & Families Overview & Scrutiny Committee we had our first review of how our recommendations had been followed through in practice. There has been limited but real progress in some areas, and the good news is that demand is creeping back up again and deficits are reducing. A lot more remains to be done, though, and we shall review progress again in another six months.

I have long been a supporter of the K2L cycle route between Kenilworth & Leamington, and have been frustrated that it has not yet been able to gain funding priority within the county’s Local Transport Plan - although it is highlighted as an opportunity to pursue if and when funding becomes available. My colleague Cllr. Eithne Goode (Liberal Democrat, Leamington North) is a long time advocate of the scheme on the county council, and has been instrumental in at least getting street lighting improvements over the Chesford Bridge along the route.

A plan came to the county council Cabinet today to install traffic signals on the Thickthorn Roundabout over the A46, one of the current obstacles to cyclists on the K2L route, and I was pleased to obtain assurances that provision for cyclists will be considered during the design phase of the project, and that any changes will not compromise future cycleway plans. I hope that in practice we can do better than this, as the signalisation project offers the opportunity to improve matters for cyclists seeking to negotiate this difficult roundabout.

I am a governor at St. John’s Primary School and Nursery in Mortimer Road, Kenilworth. The road is part of the diversionary route for buses and other vehicles during the 25 week closure of the Warwick Road which commenced yesterday morning.

It was therefore the worst possible morning for the usual school crossing patrol person to be away ill, as traffic volumes were much higher than normal. Conditions were so difficult for children and parents crossing that the headteacher ended up going out and stopping the traffic personally - far from an ideal state of affairs.

Luckily in the afternoon the local police Safer Neighbourhoods team were able to respond with a PCSO on duty, and this morning the sergeant did the honours, for which the school was extremely grateful. Hopefully our usual crossing person will be back on Monday.

What this demonstrated was that there is no back-up available in the system at all, not even in such exceptional circumstances. The county council’s Road Safety Unit, who manage the school crossing service, could provide absolutely no one to cover on an emergency basis. While the legal position is clear, that parents are responsible for their children’s safety until they reach the school gate, the reality is that many families come to depend on the school crossing service to enable their children to walk to and from school unaccompanied.

I plan to take this matter up with Cllr. Martin Heatley, the county council’s Cabinet Member responsible for the Environment. While I know resources are tight, the safety of our school-age children must be a paramount concern for all elected members.