komadori’s green corner

It seems that Mr Wills is having difficulty with his memory. His local red nest colleagues seem to have similar similar problems too. They may be keen to blame the local council or the post office management for the impending closure of local post offices, but let us not forget a couple of facts.

• Mr Wills voted in favour of the government’s programme of post office closures;
• Ms Snelgrove voted in favour of the government’s programme of post office closures.

According to Mr Wills,

Instead of trying to help the people of Swindon the council is just trying to make a party political point

Perhaps he should have thought of helping the people of Swindon before casting his own vote last January and before opening his mouth now just to make a party political point himself.

Always ones to make a crisis out of a drama, the Adver have excelled themselves, allowing one woman’s imagination to turn a minor accident (one wheel of a bus going off the road) into a near tragedy.

Melody Lyall, the landlady at the Red Lion Pub, in Castle Eaton, said it was a very near miss. “The only thing that kept that bus upright was a small wall that it wedged itself against, otherwise it would have tipped over into a flooded field. Because both the front doors were on that side things could have turned very bad very quickly. It was quite dramatic. I was in my conservatory drinking my morning coffee and I witnessed the whole thing. The field on the other side is flooded at the moment – it is under several feet of water. You can imagine the outcome if it had toppled over…. I would have said they were pretty lucky as it would have been tough to get them all out of that bus without it going over on its side.”

Wow! Children safely alight from a bus with one wheel in a ditch. Whatever next? I dropped a slice of bread on the floor recently. Perhaps I should ask the Adver round to see how close I came to starvation in the time it took me to cut another slice….

The latest in a string of red nest ministers to fly into Swindon to prop-up their Swindon colleagues ahead of the May local elections, Ms Flint has not made quite the impact on the Adver that she might have wished.

HOUSING Minister Caroline Fleet made a flying visit to Swindon during a tour of the south west to talk about affordable housing.

Caroline Who? The mistake is repeated twice more in the story: only the photograph caption has her correct name.

Ms Flint’s own comments about Swindon Borough Council are hardly faultless either.

The current administration has failed to meet its own housing targets

Aah… smell the hypocrisy. According to her ministerial biography, until January,

Her ministerial responsibilities included the labour market, welfare to work and child poverty.

Clearly, Ms Flint is someone very familiar with missed targets.

Not for the first time, building work in Swindon has been interrupted by a nesting bird. Whilst, naturally, komadori feels he should defend the right of other feathered creatures to nest where they feel it is appropriate, there are limits…. Delaying work on Swindon’s new library for one collared dove (out of a mainland population of over 200,000) is beyond that limit. The law that requires builders not to disturb any nesting bird is, though well-intentioned, distinctly bird-brained.

You’d think that, with the reputation large public-sector computing projects have for being late and over-budget, any public body would want to avoid headlines blagging about multi-million pound savings from some new gee-whizz integrated computer system. Wiltshire County Council clearly has a lot to learn….

Business streamlining project will save up to £11m a year
A project to streamline the way Wiltshire County Council supports front-line services has taken a significant step forward.
Members of the county council cabinet have selected Logica to work with it to enable many internal services to be provided much more efficiently.
The business management programme will simplify and standardise the way many processes such as invoicing, procurement, payroll and human resources are undertaken, through the reorganisation of services and the installation of a new, fully integrated computer system.
The move will potentially save the new One Council for Wiltshire between £9m and £11m a year after the initial investment of £8m is repaid.

It’ll only take a little over-optimism on how big the savings will be, combined with some traditional public-sector mismanagement of the computer project, for those savings to shrink to zero.

If you’re going to splurge vast sums of money of IT consultants and feel the need to publicise it, ’tis far wiser to do it somewhere nobody will look.

Whilst others may be concerned about the disappearance of a cinema from one of the town centre redevelopments, there are other, smaller things that developers would like to remove elsewhere. It seems, if the supporting documents to their planning application are to be believed, that the Outlet Centre has previously been given planning permission for more shop space than their buildings can actually contain. Their proposal to get round this (as opposed to replacing some of the office and other non-retail space) is to remove — or as they put it relocate — the children’s play area.

Erection of a glazed enclosure and removal of existing canopies to provide additional retail area and relocation of the play area.

If you’ve got a spare half hour or so, have a look at their plans, in particular the ones labelled ‘Plan-Play Area Relocation’ and see if you can find where the play area has been relocated to. It is noticeably absent. The drawings do show an anonymous red rectangle on the east side of the centre that might be it, but there is nothing saying so. If it is, then it’s a small fraction of the size of the existing play area.

As an aside, I hope the Outlet Centre’s designers’ ability at building design is much better than their website design, where one has to chase a floating circle around the screen in order to navigate the site. There is an important balance that should be maintained between creativity and practicality. Sadly, it’s one that some architects and designers seem never to learn.

I’ve seen the new new illumination of St Mark’s church during some of the testing. It’s pretty, but not quite up to Mr Bluh’s now customary exaggeration.

St Marks is a stunning building, and lighting it up is a simple yet effective way to showcase that architecturally, Swindon has more to offer than some people might imagine. It will also benefit Swindon’s nightscape generally.

As the council’s own press release states,

The Church will be illuminated by energy-efficient LED lamps mounted on the building itself, rather than by floodlights. This allows the features to be picked out more effectively and with more subtlety.

Subtlety, not a concept Mr Bluh seems to be familiar with. When illuminated the church appears as a low-key glow across the Park, rather than a ‘new and positive landmark to identify the town’… especially when one considers that the David Murray John tower is prominent nearby.

I’m sure that if a late demand for payment of a fine had been sent to anyone else and had then been dropped, the Adver would be complaining about people being let-off. When it’s themselves on the receiving end of a demand for payment, the story is rather different.

This ability to chase people whenever they like means you could have fines hanging over your head for decades.

If you don’t pay up, then so you should!

Yesterday I received a letter through the post from Ms Snelgrove. Not the most local affair, having been printed in London and with a return address on the envelope in Newcastle upon Tyne. Apparently, she’s had an

Action Team in Central to listen to your concerns about anti-social behaviour and the mounting rubbish on your streets.

The letter even solicits for volunteers to her ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’. Ms Snelgrove seems not to realise that listening is not itself action. Even if it were, her ‘team’ have been most noticeable by their absence. The rubbish is now subsiding, especially since the council started putting little orange ‘Council aware’ labels on bags of rubbish left for days on the streets. The rubbish was ‘mounting’ on the streets several months ago, when Ms Snelgrove’s ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’ didn’t even exist… not that there’s any evidence it exists at all. There’s no evidence of in on the local red nest’s website, nor on Ms Snelgrove’s.

The only things that are mounting now are the local election campaigns… and Ms Snelgrove’s hypocrisy. Real action speaks much louder than words.

Wiltshire County Council is planning some new lighting schemes which they claim will save up to 50% on energy use in summer. The saving is obtained by turning the lights in housing estates off in the middle of the night when nobody’s about. This, apparently, requires a high-tech system with central control.

Does nobody in local government remember the low-tech option? komadori can remember timer-controlled lighting, replaced in the late 1970s, which went off at 1 am and came back on at 5 am. No central control room, no expensive electronics, same effect. Such is ‘progress’.