Police Set To Evict Travellers

Last night travellers invaded the Civil Service Sports Ground, cutting through the heavy locks on the gates.

I spoke with the police, a number of local residents, the head teacher of St Marks last night.

The Police initially told me that a section 61 order was being issued and that the travellers would be evicted by this morning. This hasn't happened, although the police have been on site today and issued a verbal warning to the travellers. They will be issue an eviction order tomorrow. If they don't leave by Saturday morning, the police will tow their vehicles away.

The Council have been in touch with the land owners, Bovis, who I understand have not been terribly helpful.

I very much hope that the travellers are removed as quickly as physically possible. My colleague, Cllr Brian Parnell has been down to the school this morning. They are rightly concerned as they have summer camp on at the moment and children are at the school. The Council are staying in touch with the school and giving regular updates.

I will update this post as I hear anything.

Rev Johnson Should Be Treated The Same As The Rest Of Us

I thoroughly agreed with the letter from Conor Burns, in yesterday's Southern Daily Echo. Mr Burns questioned why it was that when Rev Johnson writes in a column in the Echo letters page, it is called From the Heart, but when anyone else writes it is called In My View. The two columns appear in exactly the same place in the paper.

Rev Johnson seems to be treated differently to the rest of us. The title of his column seems to imply that his views (deeply old fashioned left wing views) carry some special weight.

Rev Johnson writes regularly in the Echo, almost always on political matters (criticising foreign policy, commenting on asylum, immigration or nuclear weapons - to name a few recent ones). He very, very rarely writes about faith matters.

The Echo's response was pretty unconvincing In My View. They argue that because he has written a column for some time, it should retain its title, even if it appears in the same section of the paper as the In My View column. To me it looks like favouritism and I applaud Conor Burns for saying what many, including myself have being thinking for some time.

Labour Have Had Enough Or Our Money Already!

Southampton Test's Labour MP, Alan Whitehead, is extremely keen on the state funding of political parties (see link to a paper on his website). In my view he is totally wrong.

His bankrupt Labour party is already using a phenominal amount of tax payers money to fund it's electoral ends. The Conservative Party has today revealed that the Labour Government has trippled the amount of money spent on Whitehall spin doctors since 1997. They now spend over £300,000,000.00 a year on PR men. Furthermore, analysis shows that spending increases dramatically at election time, suggesting that Labour are using tax payers money to sell their key election policies.

Since 1997 Labour have heaped more and more taxation on the country and wasted money on armies of press officers. They have politicised the Civil Service and created a cuture of spin at the heart of Government. Now Alan Whitehead is suggesting that we give even more of our money to Labour to help bankroll their bankrupt party!

Do Southampton City Council Take Complaints Seriously?

I sit on a City Council panel called the Resources Scrutiny Panel. This is a body of six Councillors which looks at Council policy and decisions on customer service, Human Resources, Information Technology and budgeting. The pannel is rather toothless, in that it can't make decisions.

All decisions are made by: 1) the whole Council (all 48 Councillors), the Cabinet (currently all Lib Dem) or individual Cabinet Members (currently all Lib Dem). Scrutiny Pannels can simply give advice or in some cases can delay a decision.

We meet roughly every two months, and our most recent meeting was last Tuesday.

One agenda item for the meeting was customer services. The Council are planning to introduce customer charters for the various council departments. These charters will include service levels which Council staff will adhere to when dealing with the public. They will also include internal service standards for staff themselves.

Whilst discussing this matter, we got on to the subject of complaints. Apparently the Council recieves about 1000 complaints a year. This may sound a lot, however when you consider that Southampton City Council receives approximately 2 million contacts from the public every year (telephone calls, emails, letters, visits to Gateway etc.), it is in fact a suspiciously low number.

I would be very happy if residents were so delighted with the service that they receive from the Council, that they only felt it necessary to complain 0.05% of the time.

However I suspect that it is more the case that the Council only records the most formal of cases as complaints. It may that where residents receive poor service and are frustrated by bureaucratic processes, it goes unreported. I would be the last person call for yet another layer of bureacracy, gathering statistics and shuffling paperwork. That said the Council should be looking at where it is not performing. It should be listening to its customers and seeking to improve its services and respond to feedback from customers. If it does not do this it will not improve. Having sensible statistics on where it is receiving complaints must be a part of this.

Labour's Garden Grab

Freemantle's Conservative Councillors have given their support to a new national campaign to protect local gardens from being concreted over and stop the over-development of local neighbourhoods.

Under planning rules introduced by John Prescott, gardens around homes are no longer classed as green space.

Councils must now follow rigid Whitehall guidelines demanding that new developments cram in as many buildings as possible. We saw this recently with the Woolston Vosper Thorneycroft development, where 1510 homes were given planning permission, of which on 73 were family houses. The rest were flats.

As a result of these Governmement planning rules, local communities and local councillors are increasingly powerless to stop suburban gardens being ripped up and the plots replaced with soulless blocks of flats. Labours planning rules are making it more expensive to buy a family home, whilst pokey flats often lie unwanted and unsold.

Further planning regulations on the horizon threaten to make the problem even worse, and the Labour Government is spending taxpayers money on proposals for urban densification which could even involve the compulsory purchase of gardens by state bureaucrats. Whitehall tax inspectors are also drawing up plans for the forthcoming council tax revaluation, and Gordon Brown is intending to levy higher local taxes on houses with home improvements, conservatories, patios or attractive gardens.

The new Conservative campaign calls for local people to be given a greater say on planning decisions, for communities to be able to protect the character of their local neighbourhoods and garden space, and for more affordable family homes to be built with gardens and sufficient parking spaces.

Conservative Opinion Poll Lead Points to a Conservative Majority

The latest Guardian / ICM poll puts the parties as follows:

Conservative - 40%
Labour - 31%
Lib Dem - 22%

This would give David Cameron a working majority of 10 seats in the House of Commons if the poll was reflected in the next General Election result.

This is an excellent result for David Cameron. It is a truely dreadful result for Labour who have dropped to a 19 year low.

Most intesting though (any worrying) is that it requires a nine point lead for the Conservatives to form a majority. This is because the current constituency boundaries have a built in bias to Labour. There will be boundary changes before the next General Election. However this prediction takes account of these changes.

Opposing Parking Changes in Bourne Road

The Council has sumbitted plans to remove 2 car parking spaces in Bourne Road (currently designated for Residents' Parking). It intends that the 11m strip instead be used for a Car Club scheme for commuters.

I have written to the Council formally opposing this, as I know how hard it is already for residents in the road to park.

An Update on the Civil Service Ground

Cllr Brian Parnell and I have just had a meeting with Green Issues Communications who are acting as consultants to Bovis Homes. We met with Harry Hudson concerning the former Civil Service Ground site.

Mr Hudson has already met with the head teacher of St Marks School and Alan Whitehead (Labour MP for Southampton Test).

He mentioned that he also plans to meet with Cllr Ann Milton (Lib Dem) to discuss educational issues.

Brian and I outlined the planning situation as we understood it and explained that we supported the land remaining as open space and that we are opposed to housing development.

Mr Hudson explained that Bovis were still a long way away from submitting a planning application.

Local Conservatives Launch Campaign Against the Government Home Information Packs in Southampton

Residents in Southampton are dismayed that they are to be guinea pigs in the latest Labour fiasco, Home Information Packs. On Friday it was announced that Southampton would be one of six test areas nationwide where people selling homes need to put packs together before putting properties on the market.

It is now accepted by most people in the industry that shifting the emphasis from the buyer to the seller to collate information about the property before it is sold is not the best way of doing things.

I am worried that this will drive up the costs of moving house, hurting homebuyers and sellers alike. I hope that the decision to trial these unnecessary and expensive bureaucratic packs has not been taken after the outspoken and ill-considered support from Southampton Labour MP, Alan Whitehead.

Mr Whitehead has been particularly keen to stress the environmental benefits of the packs yet in Northern Ireland we have already seen that we can put the environment first without Labour bureaucracy.

The Government claims that the packs are needed to implement an EU Directive to provide Energy Condition Reports when a home is sold. Yet in Northern Ireland the Directive is being implemented without introduction of Home Information Packs.

Ban the Bomb or Ban the Beard!?

I have just read Rev Ian Johnson's From the Heart Column in the Echo. I normally don't read his extraordinarily regular columns, letters, articles etc. in the Echo, which tend be on any subject other than that of religion or even the Church of England. However on this occasion I made an exception as he was writing about an event that he and I both attended last Sunday (a commemoration of the lives lost as a result of the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of WW2).

Rev Johnson's article was about his involvement with CND in his younger years and the campaign to ban the bomb. He also argued strongly that Britain should give up its nuclear deterrent when Trident becomes obsolete.

The two atomic bombs are estimated to have killed up to 300,000 Japanese (including those who died immediately from the bomb blasts and those that died, often years later from the radiation). This was a dreadful and tragic loss of human life from a dreadful war.

It should however be noted that the argument for the use of the atomic bombs was that it would secure an immediate and unconditional surrender from a fanatical enemy who was willing to fight to the last, and that by ending the war early it in fact would save many more lives.

By the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese had been fighting a losing war for over a year. The American invasion of the small Island of Okinawa lasted two and a half months. In that battle 100,000 Japanese soldiers, 170,000 Japanese civilians and 12,500 American servicemen were killed.

Had the Allies had to invade the main Islands of Japan, the war may well have continued for much longer, with huge loss of life on all sides. A conventional campaign against the mainland would have meant the conventional bombing of civilian Japanese targets and likely hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Shortly after WW2, the USSR obtained the Atom Bomb. Stalin himself was known to view atomic weapons as simply larger and more powerful bombs to use on the battlefield. Stalin of course killed approximately 30 million of his own people. In those early years of the Cold War, it is very clear that NATO's nuclear determent kept the USSR from using its own nuclear arsenal.

Today the Cold War is over and we face the prospect of an extremist government in Iran obtaining a nuclear bomb. This is a Government that openly states that it wants to wipe another country of the face of the map.

To give up our nuclear deterrent in a dangerous world would be very foolish. All Governments of both main political parties have supported maintaining Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. I see no reason why they should abandon that policy today.

Planning And Rights of Way Meeting - 15th August

There is a meeting of the Planning and Rights of Way panel on Tuesday 15th August.

I have listed below the applications in Freemantle Ward that will be considered in the meeting.
The meeting is in Conference Room 3 in the Civic Centre. You can just turn up if you are interested. If you want to speak about an application being considered by the panel you let the person on the door know and they take down your details.


10am - 11am

78 Northlands Road - 06/00944/FUL. Click here to view the papers online.

This is the Tudorwood application. Linden homes are planning to tear down the old house on the site and build a block of new flats. This is a resubmission as the application was previously turned down. Linden Homes have since had a ecological survey done to look at what local wildlife is in the area. There was some concern about disturbing bats in the woods and that might be in the rafters of the house.

11am - 12pm

31 Greville Road - 06/00924/FUL. Click here to view the papers online.

Update: 15/08/06 - Both the above applications were approved by the Planning Panel today.

Labour Councillor Slams Government Policy at CND Rally

It was billed as a commemorative event to mark the loss of life resulting from the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of WW2.

However it rapidly descended into a declaration of outright political warfare by Labour Councillor Denis Harryman on his party in government.
Cllr Harryman was the guest speaker at a CND rally at Riverside Park last night. Also in attendance in his official capacity was Cllr John Slade, the Mayor of Southampton.

The event which was organised by CND and had been advertised on the Stop the War Coalition website, was more a political rally than a commemorative event. There was no religious aspect to the evening as one might expect; no prayers. Instead there was a very political speech by Cllr Harryman in which he was deeply critical of his own party in Government.

Cllr Harryman devoted only 1 minute of his 16 minute speech to the subject of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament he claimed that secret decisions had already been taken to replace Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent. He called for the Southampton Labour party to bring forward motions to the next Labour Conference condemning this.

Cllr Harryman went on to criticise the Government on a range of foreign policy and domestic issues, including housing policy and tuition fees (which incidentally both Southampton's Labour MPs supported).

I was quite astonished that he held such strong views and that he was so opposed to Government policy and that as a senior Labour Councillor he felt that he could remain part of the Labour Party. I was also amazed by some of the comments that he made. Here are some which I found particularly bizarre:

Cllr Harryman claimed that the CND movement was responsible for averting nuclear war during the Cold War! I mean come on really! As if during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev was on the phone to CND sorting the problem out!

He suggested that if Britain abandoned its nuclear weapons, then this would inspire Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions! This is incredibly naive!

Clearly Cllr Harryman is deeply at odds with Government policy and Labour Party policy. I wonder how he can seriously ever again stand for elected office on a Labour Party ticket.


Was it right for the Mayor to be there?

Of course Cllr Slade can attend anything he likes as a private citizen. However is it right for him to attend a deeply political event such as this, in his official capacity, wearing the chain of office, accompanied by Council staff and arriving in the mayoral car? I personally do not think this is right. After all it’s our taxes that are being used.

Labour's B&B Tax Sucks

Conservatives have launched a campaign to save the great British holiday from John Prescott and Gordon Brown's latest money grabbing ruse - a new stealth tax on British holidays.

Labour are looking into a new levy on hostels and bed and breakfasts in England and Wales. This would be on top of the existing business rates and VAT on hotel bills and could potentially add a further 100 pounds to a typical British family holiday.

Freemantle's Conservative Councillors have been calling for the bed tax idea to be scrapped when it was brought to our attention in April by local B&B owners. I am delighted that the party nationally is now formally opposing this mad idea. In Freemantle we have lots of local B&Bs and it would be a disaster for the local economy if the Government introduced it.

The prospect of holiday accommodation costs increasing was dramatically raised when in response to a request from the Chancellor and Deputy Premier John Prescott, former Labour councillor Sir Michael Lyons drew up interim proposals for new local taxes, which would come on top of existing business rates and VAT charged on hotel bills.

Based on similar taxes in other countries, the new levy could potentially add 100 pounds a week to the cost of a family holiday or visit to Britain's tourist destinations. Less well-off families would be the hardest hit.

Mr Swire, the Conservative Shadow Secretary for Culture, Media & Sport, commented: "The brilliant summer weather has shown what a great place Britain is to spend a short break or a holiday. But the great British holiday is under threat from a 'bed & breakfast stealth tax' - Gordon Brown's latest money-making ploy. There's nothing wrong with choosing to travel abroad, but no-one will benefit from making British holidays a rip-off."And Mr Pickles, Shadow Minister for Local Government, declared: "Gordon Brown and John Prescott have already hiked up council tax bills. Now they want to hike the price of a British break. John Prescott travels the world on foreign jollies at taxpayers' expense, from Sydney casinos, to Maldives scuba-diving, to Wild West ranches. Obsessed with the trappings of power, he doesn't give two cents for the struggling British seaside resort."

The Government's current review into local government finance in England will report by the end of 2006. In his interim report in December, Sir Michael Lyons suggested that a hotel tax might be introduced, noting "the most frequent proposal was for a local tax on hotel and similar accommodation", and stating that "I am interested in exploring this issue further". Meanwhile Tourism Minister Shaun Woodward has refused to rule out the new tax, and has stated: "We have to balance the books."

To find out more and sign the e-petition against the tax click here.

Click here to send Gordon Brown a postcard telling him what you think.

Woolston Riverside - a Sink Estate of the Future?

This week Southampton City Council approved the planning application submitted by the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) for the comprehensive regeneration and development of the Woolston Riverside site.


It includes some 1,510 new homes.

The Daily Echo reported this the other night in a very favourable light I thought. However I wonder whether people will look back and regret the decision taken.

Rather than building family houses, all 1,510 homes will be flats, packed in as much as possible. People are already moving out of the City because of the shortage of family housing. Our school roll numbers are dropping and increasing people with children are, not only sending their children to schools outside the City, they are moving out of Southampton. This has led to the current situation where the Council is planning to close schools on the east and west of the City.

Parking Problems in Cawte Road

I am continuning to press for a residents parking scheme for Cawte Road although frustrating progress is glacially slow.

To make matters worse a planning application has been submitted for 24 new flats at 2-10 Cawte Road. The design consists of two blocks of 24 flats (40 bedrooms in total) with only 17 car parking spaces. Whilst this is more than recent developments along Shirely Road and Richmond Road, this is going to further add to parking problems.

I have objected to the application on the grounds of inadequate parking and excessive density. All the paperwork for the application can be found here. The planning reference is 06/00977/FUL.

I have had a number of letters of objection sent to me and also complaints from church goers attending Freemantle Church, complaining of parking problems.