Parish Council Annual Report 2008-2009
Chairman’s Report
This year has seen some changes in our composition having begun the year with just 5 councillors.
In July we welcomed David Mason onto the council and asked him to take the lead role in our work to support and provide facilities for our younger residents.
No sooner were we back to our full compliment than unfortunately in November Belinda Drew had to resign as she was leaving the area. During the 18 months that Belinda served she proved to be a valued and enthusiastic member of the council, we appreciate and thank her for her efforts.
Belinda’s resignation has created a vacancy that has been advertised in accordance with the regulations. We are hoping that we will have co-opted a new member before the Annual Meeting.
You will recall that last year I told you that we were doing our best to share the workload and that has continued this year.
Stuart Norman has continued with the lead role on roads and footpaths and is also our representative on UVHAT.
John Dickens has continued with the lead role on matters relating to our Recreation Ground and also continued as our representative on the Neighbourhood Action Group until January when that role was taken over by Celia Davies to complement her valued work as our Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinator.
Tracy Seelig has continued with the lead role on matters relating with the play-area of the Recreation Ground and has taken over from Belinda as our representative on the Harwell Site Liaison Committee.
I have temporarily taken the lead role on planning matters as well as continuing with my responsibilities for amenities and communications (Upton News and Website).
Clare Lightfoot has continued to give us excellent support in her role as your Parish Clerk and Finance Officer.
This has been a year of mixed achievements with just about equal amounts of success and disappointing outcomes.
I will deal with the disappointing internal outcomes first.
One of the downsides (there are many upsides) of having a young council is that other than myself they all have to earn a living and three of them also have a young family to consider and that means as volunteer councillors they have limited time to spend on council activities. This needs to be taken into account when looking at the short-comings we have experienced this year. A disappointment to me personally has been our failure to get the energy saving project off the ground despite agreeing that 3 councillors should take this idea forward some 18 months ago. The idea of this type of project, which has been so successful in many other villages in the county, is to help us all save energy and to make us all aware of the ways available to us in which we can improve our carbon footprint. When the initiative was seen to be floundering within the council we asked for help from the village, none was forthcoming and we will need to agree at the meeting that this initiative is unfortunately dead.
Another internal problem has been our failure to find a member who was prepared to take on the role of Parish Transport Representative following the “retirement” of Peter & Juliet Gardiner who have done sterling work in that role for the past 10 years. This is a very important task if we are to continue to have our say on the standard of bus service we receive and have any influence on other local transport issues. Once again when we realised we had difficulties within the council we asked the village for help and sadly no one has come forward.
The third disappointment for me was our decision not to go ahead and enter the Village of the Year competition. The decision, which I believe to be the right one, was a combination of the difficulty in finding a group of volunteers to organise and present our entry and our feeling that we had not sufficiently moved on from the position at the time of our previous entry due to our failure to make progress on the energy saving and on an environmental improvement project.
On to the disappointing outcomes where we have tried our best without success.
The council did everything that it could to try to prevent the closure of our Post Office. On your behalf we spent a lot of time, sent out many protest letters and made countless telephone calls to all parts of the UK including Ireland. Right from the outset we were told that Upton had the lowest usage of any of the offices under threat in Oxfordshire and was the No 1 target for closure. Undeterred we made every effort including asking the Post Office for conditions under which the council could consider a deal where we covered the losses being made in this parish. The terms that they eventually offered just a week before the closure included us having to pay to them a non-negotiable £30,000 security up front to show we were able to cover the losses and were a capable organisation. We could not consider such action and at that point we had to reluctantly accept the inevitable knowing that we had done our best to prevent it.
You will recall that as soon as an application for an additional exit from Beeching Close onto the hump in Station Road was approved by the District and County Councils we called a public meeting because of our concern over safety. Over 50 of you attended with 20 more apologies and left us in no doubt that we should do our best to get the planning decision reversed. We wrote letters to the leader of the District Council and the leader of the opposition at the District Council. The leader of the opposition has still to reply but the leader of the council set up a meeting for us to go down to Abingdon to air our grievances and to seek a review. At that meeting the District Council agreed to seek clarification from the Highway’s Dept. on the contents of their erroneous report. The Principal Highways Engineer has replied with a less than factual response. We have pointed out the errors in his reply to the District Council but it would appear they have accepted his comments, or at least they have failed to respond to our latest letter.
We have now taken the matter up with Ed Vaizey who at the same time has been working with the residents of Beeching Close on other areas where the County Council have behaved in a manner that is less than acceptable.
The way this application has been dealt with by the District Council Planning Dept. and the County Council Highway’s Dept. clearly shows the difficulties we have in dealing with them. To both of them we are a minor irritant that keeps asking awkward questions and won’t go away despite their attempts to ignore both ourselves and some of our parishioners. I regret that despite our showing up the obviously flawed practices of both councils the exit will go ahead and the local residents will I am afraid have to put up with the safety consequences.
The later letters on this issue I have posted on our website so that you can make up your own minds on the competence of those involved in imposing this decision upon us. Please look under ‘Village News’ for an item titled ‘Planning Communication – Station Road’.
Having got the downsides out of the way let us turn to this year’s achievements of which we can be proud.
First an internal plus.
In November we suddenly stumbled on a directive that we must set up a system in which we had to make available to the world a vast array of documentation and it had to be in place by 1st January 2009. We obviously were not the only council caught on the hop as a few days later the deadline was extended but we had to be seen to be underway by 1st January. You will be pleased to hear we were much better organised than we might have been and had much of the documentation within the council but had not made it available to the public.
We were very grateful to Brian Rippon who worked miracles on the new website and soon had it set up and tailored for us to use. I estimate it has taken about 100 hours of councillor’s effort in writing, collating and posting documents to get to where we are now. We have now completed the task and this week with more help from Brian the Parish Council section of the website has been tidied up. You now have access on the web to all the council’s documents that the government says you should be able to see, we will be very pleased to hear back any comments on the way the section has been set up and on documentation we have produced. Whilst at the time we were definitely not pleased with the government edict we can now look back and see that the effort we have put in can only improve the way in which both ourselves and future councils will work. The size of the Parish Council section on the website and the number of documents involved has left us with an on-going problem namely the amount of work that will be necessary to keep it up-to-date.
And now to the areas where the village can be proud.
The volunteer spirit within the village is still alive. With the help of a generous donation from Infinium the village volunteer work force has installed new safety mats under the swings and the climbing chains and has made good use of the best of the old safety mats by putting down an all-weather surface to allow greater use of the ball wall.
On another front that volunteer spirit has allowed us to make an enormous improvement to our Recreation Ground by allowing us to take control of mowing our own grass. The work of the 13 volunteers who manned the mowers for us during last summer was great and from the number of compliments that I received about the state of the Recreation Ground I know how much many of you appreciated their efforts. Due to the higher price of petrol and the fact the grass grew so well last summer we have not saved quite as much as I had predicted but including a generous write off on both mowers we still saved over £500 as well as improving the use and the appearance of our amenity.
It is largely down to savings like this by using our volunteer work force on so many jobs over the last 4-5 years and by very sensible forward planning that the Parish Council have been able to put up the sum of £9000 towards the cost of building the extension to our Village Hall. This initial promise from within the parish together with the news that something approaching that sum was also being raised by the residents has enabled UVHAT to go out to other organisations and obtain promises of funding that hopefully will allow work on the extension to begin in the next few months. Had the council not been able to put up that sort of sum I doubt that UVHAT would have had the same success. We hope by this time next year our enlarged hall will be in use and all the volunteers who have helped the council save money and all the councillors past and present who have sensibly planned the council’s finances can take their share of pride in that achievement.
If you have read the earlier version of this report with the note on the Litter Pick you will be delighted to hear that we did match last year with 30 volunteers going out on a cold but fine morning to do their bit in tidying up our parish. Those passing the Recreation Ground will see the results of our labours.
The above items are just some of the topics that has kept us all busy during the last year, there are many others that we have done our best to take forward with various degrees of success including getting part of our AONB tidied up, improving the safety of Chilton Road, creating a cycleway to Blewbury and improving the state of Frog Alley and the adjacent stream.
Mike Brown
Chairman Upton Parish Council
28/03/09
Finance Report
At the time of writing this report, which is not quite the end of the financial year, the council’s bank account shows a holding of £14,630. When the contribution of £9000 towards the village hall extension is made this will give the council reserves of just over £5000 which should be seen as very healthy for a parish of our size. With no further large projects looming in the foreseeable future your council will budget in future to maintain its reserves at that level.
It should be noted that about £400 recently donated by parishioners for improvements to the children’s playground is being held by the council and will not be spent until the extension to the village hall is complete.
The decision to undertake our own mowing has resulted in a saving to the council of just over £500 compared to the cheapest quotation that we received. It has been agreed that both mowers will be written off over a 5 year period at £450 per year. The saving on mowing whilst very acceptable was not as high as we had predicted due to the higher price of petrol last summer, a healthy grass growing year which meant more cuts and a higher than predicted maintenance cost.
Other significant outgoings during the year were
Clerks Salary £1900
Burial Ground Loan £826
Insurance £337
Playground Improvements £850
Village Hall Planning Approval £356
Our total spend in the financial year is predicted to be £6800 with a predicted income of £8000.
Next year we will see a loss of income due to a large drop in bank interest and a much smaller sum invested.
In the coming year the Parish Council will be heavily involved in handling the finances of the hall extension, in order that this in no way interferes with the normal council business separate bank accounts and income/expenditure reports will be set up.
Mike Brown and Clare Lightfoot
Chairman and Finance Officer Upton Parish Council
25/03/09