Illogan - back to the Dark Ages (or at least a few years ago)

Illogan Parish Council have decided to ban tweeting and other real time social media reporting.

There was no apparent reason for the ban apart from a general dislike of the concept.

In my mind this is an entirely retrograde step for any government body that believes in modern and open communication with its electors.

MPs can tweet from Westminster and have only recently voted decisively against it being banned - despite claims that it would distract members from the matter in hand.

In reality I doubt if there is any highly charged audience waiting expectantly for real time updates from an Illogan Parish Council meeting. My concern is that we need to attract younger people into local politics and young people understand social media and banning its use is just further discouragement to getting them involved.

I reccomended that we should allow the use of Twitter etc, but on the basis that any Member did not break any of the myriad codes of conduct/protocols that councillors abide by through that use.

In the end I was the only one who voted against a ban.

Does anyone have a slate and chalk that I could borrow please?

Illogan to Develop a Neighbourhood Plan

Tonight Illogan Parish Council voted to begin the process of devloping a neighbourhood plan as envisaged by the coalition's (anything but) Localsim Act.

It was clear that, across the board, there was frustration with the whole planning process which will not allow the people in Illogan to decide how Illogan is to be developed or more importantly if it should be developed at all.

We voted unanimously to constitute a body to take the neighbourhood planning process forward.

What was particularly heartening was the desire of the whole parish council to involve the community in the way the plan will be completed.

We want to engage in real consultation and not the indoctrination being carried out by Cornwall Council in relation to the Core Strategy (but more of that in another blog).

Of course we won't be able to produce the plan that residents have already indicated they want when the Parish Plan was finalised - but we hope to ensure that the door is not left open to developers to move in and push for more development than even Cornwall Counil's agenda for growth demands.

Illogan Parish Hub, the Problem with Tory Ideology - a Case Study

Before the Christmas break Illogan Parish Council set its budget and precept for 2012.

This was only achieved after a long and sometimes hotly contested debate. The underlying budget was basically flat compared with the previous year, which meant a saving in real terms. However, the final budget was increased considerably over previous years (+28.9%) because the Council decided to make allowance for the cost of the Illogan Hub project, should it go ahead.

The main thrust of the arguments (for and against the Hub project and therefore the 28.9% increase) were as follows:

For:

a) The Hub project will deliver a much improved Village Hall faclity which will benefit the community as a whole and reflects the thrust of the research undertaken when the Parish Plan was created.

b) The project will provide new office facilities for the Illogan Parish Council (the first time the council has ever had its own premises). This will result in long term savings for the people of Illogan as there will be no need to rent office space.

c) The project, as a whole, will hopefully attract funding, thereby reducing the final cost.

Against:

a) In the current economic climate any increase in the precept is a lot to expect people to pay.

b) If we were to continue to rent an office then there would be no increase in the precept.

In the end a recorded vote was requested. I voted in favour of allowing for the project to continue and the overall result was 5 - 4 in favour.

The reason that I voted for the project and, therefore, increase in precept was that I believe that the project will be a big boost for the community when it is completed and will also deliver long term savings to the expenses sheet.

One of the things that we considered was postponing budgeting for the project until we were absolutely convinced that the technical and legal problems that face the project had been surmounted. We might also have made a smaller allowance now and looked to increase further in subsequent years.

For me these last two alternatives would have been preferable. What made me decide against was basically Tory ideology.

The problem that all Local Councils face is that in the future they may well face a cap on their expenditure by a Tory led coalition which believes that cutting all public expenditure is the only way to organise public finance. If we had decided to wait until better economic times or gone with a staggered increase then we may have found that we were unable to proceed with the project at all as we would have been prevented from doing this because of capping.

I believe that there is far too much 'short-termism' going on at the moment. If we want a society that looks after itself then we need to invest real capital expenditure in it. PFIs and all the other ways of keeping expenditure away from the balance sheet simply end up in a long term deficit in the profit and loss account. In other words a short term saving now results in a long term loss to our children.

I believe that we should try to do what we can now in order to help our children and grand-children - rather than saddle them with our debts.

Illogan Parish Plan

The Illogan Parish Plan has finally been completed and launched.

The process has taken several years and has involved gauging the opinion of the people of Illogan through questionnaires and then a 'roadshow'.

There is no question that an awful lot of hard work has gone into the plan, which has been created by a steering group made up from the Illogan community. A massive amount of data has been collected and opinions have been collated to show where people believe Illogan's strengths and weaknesses lie. Congratulations to all of those involved in putting this document together.

For me though there is one big disappointment. I believe that the most important part of any plan is to provide a clear signpost as to how to achieve the objectives within the plan. In a plan such as this there should have been strong 'SMART' goals.

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Unfortunately, it seems that, instead of using SMART principles, the action plan has been made up of some rather non-descript and generically grey 'bureau-speak'.

Cllr David Ekinsmyth, chairman of Illogan Parish Council, and the driving force behind the plan, has said that he wanted a plan that will not gather dust on a shelf. It's hard to see how the action plan will lead to anything but this. Worse still, the final action plan is so vague that there is a danger that it may be used to justify future activity by IPC instead of driving it. It would be very easy to fit any normal, day to day council activity within the action plan and put a tick in a box somewhere.

If you are interested the plan can be found here