komadori’s green corner

Whilst wondering just how desperate for news the Adver (and me, for that matter) must be to be publishing a story about a cat pawing paint over someone’s carpet, I also can’t help thinking that any other person, having fallen asleep with their front door open, would just be grateful that nothing worse had happened (such as a burglar walking in), rather than complaining that neither their insurers nor the council would pay for the damage. The lady should just paws for thought and consider how lucky she was that things didn’t turn out far more serious.

If the press are to be believed, there’s no such thing as business travel. The 12% increase in bookings reported by Holiday Inn is just from holiday makers and not business travellers…. Hmm… I guess that explains why, even for a summer booking, they charge less for a weekend booking than for a mid-week one at either of their Swindon hotels.

I see that the latest pronouncements from Swindon Borough Council on their rubbish collections over the Christmas period has sparked off more speculation over whether what is collected for ‘recycling’ is actually recycled or still goes to landfill anyway. I can’t readily find anything that states what happens to Swindon’s rubbish after collection, but what I have found is that a fair bit of Dorset’s rubbish (the aluminium and some of the paper, to be precise) ends up being recycled in Swindon.

Just a day after I received a letter from Ms Snelgrove, I am now in receipt of a letter from Mr Buckland. Today’s letter from is slightly longer that yesterday’s letter from Ms Snelgrove. It naturally goes into more detail about the ‘cause’ of the proposed closure: a government initiated review. Rather unnaturally, it says rather little about what one might think of as a good conservative principle of running services profitably where possible. The local post office in Westcott Place only last year received a significant facelift and the branch would not, presumably, be a candidate for closure if that had been a success in bringing in greater custom. Not that this is a case for closure of itself: the Post Office are quite inflexible in their business model and the thought of paying sub-postmasters entirely on commission rather than having them salaried seems to be something they reserve for the likes of WH Smith.

Mr Buckland’s letter also brought to my attention that Ms Snelgrove’s letter is dated the day before the official announcement. Very speedy work.

Compare and contrast — letters to the left, forms to the right:

In a rare burst of like-minded thinking, both Mr Buckland and Ms Snelgrove say they are campaigning to save the local post offices that are threatened with closure. I’ve even had a letter from Ms Snelgrove. The difference between the two at the moment seems to be that Mr Buckland offers some reasons why the offices should not close on his website, whereas Ms Snelgrove offers ‘solid arguments’ against the closures only if you’re willing to give her your contact details first, thereby giving her the right to contact you for political purposes rather than ‘non-political’ constituency purposes. Nice.

Having noted yesterday that the Post Office seem to have written their branch access reports from a stance of total ignorance, this morning I checked the bus service at the bus stop outside Westcott Place Post Office. There is the grand total of three buses per day each way on Thamesdown route 26, none of which pass by Rodbourne Road Post Office. The exceptions to this are Saturdays and Sundays… when there are no buses at all. There may well be ‘a bus stop located 220 yards away both sides’ of Rodbourne Road Post Office, but they are not ones that the No. 26 bus calls at.

The post office has announced which post offices it intends to close in the Wiltshire and West Berkshire. The list includes three within Swindon: Westcott Place (Central), Cheney Manor Road (Rodbourne) and Guildford Avenue (Lawn). Just beyond the borough boundary, the post office in Toomers Garden Centre on Stone Lane, Lydiard Millicent, is also scheduled for closure.

The nearest branches for those affected will now be those in Commercial Road, Rodbourne Road in Even Swindon (the suggested alternative for Cheney Manor Road and Westcott Place, although parcels that could be left for collection at Westcott Place always seen to be deposited at the Old Town branch), Cavendish Square (the suggested alternative for Guildford Avenue … I can’t see that going down well with the residents of Lawn), Queens Drive and the main town centre branch in Sanford Street. Those displaced from Lydiard Millicent are recommended to use the Shaw Village Centre branch.

The main interest of the branch access reports for the urban offices seems to be whether their is a bus service between the closed and replacement offices… which is fine for those that live right by the soon-to-be-closed branches, and a fairly pointless observation for all others. For Westcott Place, the report states that ‘There is a bus stop located outside the branch.’ That’s true. What is not true is the statement ‘There is a frequent bus service between the two branches.’ There is no such thing: the bus stop outside Westcott Place Post Office is virtually disused. The reports were clearly written with zero local knowledge.

It is nice to see that Mrs Snelgrove has already stated her opposition to the closures, but given that is a result of a policy of her own party in government, which she always backs, regardless of local consequences it is difficult to believe this is more than empty rhetoric from her.

The consultation on the closure plans is open until 31 January 2008, though it appears to be of the We’re consulting because we have to but won’t take any notice of the comments type. Comments should be sent to:

Tim Nickolls
Network Development Manager
C/o National Consultation Team
FREEPOST CONSULTATION TEAM
Email: consultation@postoffice.co.uk.

I’m in favour of houses being designed to be as energy efficient as possible, but I do have some concerns about the designs that feature in Kevin McCloud’s initial thoughts for his Hab Housing company’s front garden development. Both in the gallery on his company’s website and in the photographs shown at his recent event in Swindon, wood-clad buildings feature heavily.

Mr McCloud has made a comparison between Swindon and Harlow. As I’ve noted before, I have lived in a couple places where architects have experimented, of which Harlow was one. Both those places featured many, many wood-clad buildings. Those in the St Ann’s area of Nottingham were built in the early 1970s… and demolished at the turn of the millennium. The many wood-clad buildings in Harlow have lasted somewhat longer, having been build in the 1950s and 1960s, but the majority have had the wood replaced with uPVC. The few that remain in wood look decidedly tatty.

Wood may look nice when newly painted or varnished, as in the photographs that Mr McCloud uses, but it’s a high maintenance building material and that look doesn’t last. Swindon has enough problems with flawed housing designs, such as the sytem-built pre-cast reinforced concrete houses of Parks, Pinehurst and Penhill. Lets hope that an obsession with making things ‘natural’ doesn’t add to that.

(And just in case anyone is tempted to get overly sentimental about a TV personality leading a housing development, McCloud’s Hab Housing is partnered by Footstep Homes, a joint venture company backed by some fairly unabashed capitalists.)

The Adver has reported the outcome of the council’s Pride of Place poll, launched in October. The attraction of which people are most proud is Coate Water. What is perhaps more revealing is just how few votes some of the other ‘attractions’ got. The results in full:

• 31% Coate Water
• 25% Lydiard Park
• 13% Town Gardens
• 10% Barbury Castle
•  6% Magic Roundabout
•  5% STEAM
•  4% Swindon Designer Outlet
•  3% Link Centre
•  2% Oasis Centre
•  1% Wyvern Theatre

Given the question (Which attraction are you most proud of? ‘If you had just one day… where you’d take a visitor’ rather than ‘Which attraction is your favourite?’) it’s probably not surprising that the two leisure centres didn’t do too well: whatever their merits, the two centres are definitely showing their age and have been surpassed by similar facilities in other towns. Similarly for the Wyvern, which was still shut when voting started. However for STEAM museum to come below a roundabout, a hilltop and what is, though an attractive park, nevertheless just an urban park, says little for the museum.

Did the poll succeed in the objective of making me feel connected with my council? Not really, especially as the most popular attraction was one that the council was intent on surrounding with concrete.

With it being less than a month since Swindon Borough Council introduced weekly kerbside recycling, it’s far too early to draw conclusions as to its impact… unless you’re Ms Snelgrove that is. We can, as always, rely on Ms Snelgrove to jump in with a bit of cheap political point scoring.

Figures I have seen have Swindon Council’s recycling and composting rate at 32 per cent, and it is excellent that they are doing what they are doing. But when you look at Wiltshire County Council it is recycling 38 per cent of the waste it collects. So although it looks like we’re doing okay what we need to be doing is exceeding our targets. MPs need to keep the pressure on our councils so that they beat their targets quickly and we can all reduce our carbon footprints.

Recycling is about re-use of materials; reducing carbon footprint is about reducing energy consumption. Ms Snelgrove isn’t the first to assume the two are inextricably linked, but for her to restate it does highlight her ignorance of the issues.

Mr Bluh, leading the defence for the council, has, presumably, seen some more up-to-date figures than Ms Snelgrove has.

We’ve already achieved 38 per cent currently, and that will climb once the new service has settled down.

You may also recall Ms Snelgrove’s previous statement that she always puts the concerns of her electorate first. Compare and contrast.

Ms Snelgrove:

One of the big problems we have in this town is that the main recycling point we have is in the northern part of the borough. I think we need a new facility in the south of the borough. It could be a one-off capital project. Once up and running it would not cost too much to maintain and it would make a huge difference to the amount we recycle. We all know the council is receiving a fair amount of cash from building works – I cannot think of a better issue to put money into.

Mr Bluh:

All the changes we’ve made this year have cost the council an extra £2m to introduce, yet we’ve had no financial assistance from the Government to do it…. When we consulted residents about what they thought our priorities for waste should be, they placed a comprehensive kerbside recycling service for the whole borough, including plastic bottles, above a second waste site. We’ve now delivered that.

I suppose it should come as no surprise really that Ms Snelgrove is trying to spend more of our money and would no doubt be the first to complain if council tax had to rise to deliver her plans. That said, there couldn’t be a more apt monument to Ms Snelgrove than a centre for collecting and recycling rubbish. I trust she’ll be at the front of the queue when it opens, with copies of most of her press statements and parliamentary speaches.

The introduction of the new recycling service may have been incompetent, but in picking her latest target for petty political point scoring, Ms Snelgrove has totally missed the main concerns of her electorate.