Houses In Multiple Occupation Decision

The Council’s Cabinet today confirmed a decision to implement planning rules which will give the council more control over the number and spread of houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). This decision follows several months of consultation with residents groups, landlords and the universities. The rules which come into force on 23rd March 2012 will mean that family homes in Southampton will require planning permission before being able to be converted into HMOs. This is called an Article 4 direction.

Between now and 23rd March further work and consultation take place, looking at a suitable planning policy to sit alongside the Article 4 direction. This policy will also come into effect on 23rd March and will set out when it is suitable and not suitable for HMOs to be given planning permission. Areas like Freemantle are likely to have more protection as there are already large numbers of HMOs in the ward.

Hypocritical Labour Shut Local Facilities But Say Don't Blame Us

The hypocrisy of Southampton's Labour Party over the closure of Portswood and Shirley police stations is absolutely incredible. It also offers a very clear picture of the approach they would take if they ever run Southampton City Council.

Southampton has two representatives on the Hampshire Police Authority; myself a Conservative and Cllr Jacqui Rayment, the Labour representative and Chairman.

At every recent Authority meeting I have spoken out against the loss of our community police stations. I spoke out against it at the public meeting at St Georges School along with 11 other Southampton Conservative Councillors. I have fought for future replacements to have front desks that are open to the public. I have suggested numerous ways to keep front desks, such as sharing facilities with Southampton City Council and the use of police volunteers. I voted AGAINST the closures.
Labour's Chairman voted FOR the closures, and has repeatedly defended the decisions in meetings, saying that our local police stations don't need to be open to the public in an age when people have the internet and telephones.

Now for Labour to say that they shouldn't close is not just hypocritical it is utterly deceitful. Their excuse? Don't blame us, blame the government. This is exactly the same excuse Labour in Manchester and Liverpool are using as they close libraries and Sure Start centres. Don't blame us they say when they close the local facilities, blame the government. Don't blame us for wrecking the country's finances, blame the banks, blame the Americans, blame anyone other than us.

They will do exactly the same in Southampton if Labour run the City Council. They will close our libraries, our Sure Start centres and leisure centres, cut the weekly bin collections and hike up council tax. And they will say don't blame us, blame the government. However it doesn't have to be like that. Southampton Conservatives will keep open ALL our libraries, Sure Start centres and leisure centres and we want community police stations that are open to the public and we will fight to keep them!

Conservative Budget Will focus on Protecting Council Services

Today the council released its draft budget for 2012/13. The council's financial situation is extremely challenging and next year £15M must be saved to balance the books.

Conservative Councillors are focused on ensuring that front line services are protected. This means keeping all our Sure Start Centres, leisure centres, libraries and other community facilities open. It means protecting the road and pavement repairs budget and protecting the vital bus routes that the council supports. And it means ensuring more support for the most vulnerable children in the city. I am very pleased that in my area of responsibility, Childrens' Services and Learning, there are no service reductions planned.

It is important that in these difficult times we keep costs down for local people. We have committed to freezing the council tax again and are keeping the 10% discount for pensioner households. We are ensuring that other charges like parking charges are frozen.

An important priority for Conservatives on the council is keeping front line council staff in work, delivering the services that residents pay their taxes for. We recently changed staff terms and conditions and this saw some pay cuts for higher paid staff. This was done to protect jobs and services and we are sticking to our commitment to protect 400 council jobs. Next year's budget will keep compulsory redundancies as low as possible, likely to be less than 50.

This is all in stark contrast to Labour in Southampton, who have said that their plans involve big increases in council tax, of at least 4.5%, the axing of 1,500 council jobs and the serious damage this would mean to front line council services.

Letter from No Southampton Biomass to Helius

Below is the text of a letter sent today to Helius Energy concerning their plans to develop a biomass power station in the Western Docks.

Dear Helius,

As the representatives of the public you are supposed to be consulting with, we are yet again politely requesting that you demonstrate some recognition of the fact that what is purely 'business' to you is actually impacting the lives of Southampton residents in a very negative way – we are the very same people that you continually say you want to work with and provide something which will be of great benefit to us all.

We still feel you are choosing to ignore the inadequacy of your application to date and we will summarise our reasons once again for your consideration:

· The original public consultation had to be extended after questions of its adequacy and timings were raised by residents and Southampton City Council who felt your efforts fell short of what they should have been.
· The consultation was then extended to include additional public exhibitions, but as previously detailed to you, as a community we felt that the public exhibitions fell short on a number of grounds. These failings prevented the community from fully understanding your project proposal and therefore gave rise to our calls of inadequacy as you failed to meet your statutory obligations with regards to the public consultation.
· Instead of submitting your application to the IPC after the completion of the public consultation, you chose to add an additional phase of consultations based on revisions to the scale and siting of the project. To us, that meant the project was changing so drastically that it could no longer be regarded as an extension but should form a completely new application for avoidance of confusion on what exactly this project is.
· You originally stated a summer consultation for this additional phase; we requested you delayed this until Sept/Oct time to prevent any issues with the (School) summer holiday period. You refused this request and stated that was why it was planned as a 10 week consultation period.
· No direct contact was made with any of the parties that had registered an interest in this project to alert them to the new timetable. You advertised only through press releases and your own website.
· Then, four weeks later, during the very week when the planned consultation was supposed to start, you announced – via a Press Release – that you were delaying until Autumn for the benefit of the residents.
· Again there was no direct contact with any of the registered interested parties. To state your reasons as being for the benefit of the residents is laughable and, to cite the cliché, effectively added insult to injury. Your press release claiming your actions were for the benefit of the residents could be assessed as the most ill-advised piece of copy writing to date!
· By refusing to listen to and work with the community you affected peoples holiday plans and caused great distress and inconvenience.
· We waited throughout September for details of the Autumn consultation. Nothing was announced.

We now discover via an update to the IPC website that the expected application date has moved to April/May 2012. This indicates that there have been discussions between Helius and the IPC, yet nothing has appeared on the official site or the main Helius site.
The community feel that your previous actions to date have led to a complete mistrust and a feeling that you purposely plan things to go "under the radar" and co-incide with the worst possible times for the residents! We are also aware that there are legislation changes that could affect your business plans/investment chances and as such we are now asking for answers to the following questions:

1. Do you now have a definite time plan for the additional public consultation period that will enable you to submit an application in April/May 2012?
2. If you do not have the answer to the above could we have a definite statement of "not before this date" so that people can go about planning their lives without the fear and threat of missing something important from you?
3. In light of the unknowns, the obvious delays to your plans and the fact the consultation to date has been so inadequate, we ask once again whether you could abandon this proposal and come back when you have a project that is acceptable both to you as a business proposition and to us as a community?

In doing the above your company could create a project proposal in a timescale that fitted entirely with your company’s plans and with no pressure from a waiting community. This fully complete application could then be promoted by yourselves using the feedback received by the public and statutory bodies on the current inadequate application, to ensure that the new, changed project had the level of community involvement needed to adequately consult with us in explaining and presenting your new plans. The whole point of the IPC process was to provide speedy applications and decisions yet Helius seem to want to slow down the application at every point - In our opinion this in itself leads to mis-understanding and confusion with the public, as people ask why a developer would want to do the very thing the IPC was set up to prevent happening to developers?

As a community we would also benefit from having a well thought out project, one that is also fully organised and would then concisely and coherently be presented to us for our engagement and feedback. This would allow any new project to be judged purely on its merits, unlike the current project that is dogged by the ongoing mis-information conveyed by your poorly expressed plans and mis-management of the consultation process to date.

The advantages of your doing what we suggest is that your actions would immediately cease to have any negative affects on our community - in fact your company could benefit from being shown to have actually listened and worked with a community, allowing future plans to be accepted under a more welcoming banner than the response your company currently receives within our community due to the problems (outlined above) over your previous interactions with us.

Yours Sincerely,

Steven Galton

On Behalf of the No Southampton Biomass Group

Conservatives to Freeze Council Tax for a Second Year

Residents in Southampton will have no increase in council tax next year. This will be the second year running that council tax has been frozen.

The Conservatives went into the last election saying we would freeze council tax for two years and I am delighted that we are keeping to this commitment. We are all feeling the pinch at the moment and this will definitely help.

The Conservative freeze in council tax in Southampton is in stark contrast to Labour's last term in office locally. Few will forget their 19% increase in their last year. Labour have made it very clear that if they run the council again residents will face big increases in their council tax bill. Labour have also pledged to scrap the council tax discount for city pensioners, meaning even bigger rises for pensioner households.