Tag: Swindon

Mr Jenkins of Thamesdown Transport claims that he wants to promote the park and ride bus services.

Both the council and ourselves feel that this is the best way forward to provide a park and ride service for Swindon. This is a very positive move and one that will secure the long-term future of park and ride in Swindon. It’s a very popular service and we really want to promote it during the off-peak times of the day.

By ‘promote’ he clearly means ‘advertise’ rather than ‘encourage more people to use’ as, upon taking over the service, Thamesdown Transport have cut it in half and on the northern half have increased the fares and decreased the frequency. Passengers on the southern half get a somewhat better deal with fares reduced, but the frequency is reduced as well and change will no longer be given. The northern half of the service is clearly being milked, not promoted.

There’s nothing wrong with making changes to improve profitability; there is plenty wrong with trying to pretend that you’re not.

Even when doing little more than regurgitating a press release, the Adver cannot resist applying a positive gloss in support of the proposals to re-introduce a canal to Swindon.

Canal would give town a big boost

THE plan to build a canal through the centre of Swindon has been given the thumbs up by a business expert. Paul Briggs, chief executive of the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce Group, has said that a canal could provide a big boost to the town. He welcomed the project as a key element in transforming Swindon’s town centre into a leisure and visitor attraction, disposing of its dreary reputation.

Only one of those sentences is true: that Mr Briggs of the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce said that the canal could provide a big boost to the town. Could. Not ‘would’ only ‘could’. The article then goes on to reproduce almost the entirety of the chamber’s press release, leaving out only the first paragraph. I’ll repeat that paragraph here, as it makes clear what Mr Briggs was supporting.

The Swindon Chamber of Commerce has welcomed proposals to debate the redevelopment of Swindon’s town centre through the creation of a focal waterway. The plans hope to attract people to Swindon by transforming the town centre into a leisure and visitor attraction, disposing of what some believe to be a dreary reputation.

That’s only a ‘thumbs up’ to debating the plans. It is a long way short of supporting the plans themselves. As the rest of the press release made clear, whilst he is clearly not an opponent of the plans*, there are many questions still to be answered.

* Anyone who thinks the impact of the canal could match that of the coming of the railway 100 years ago obviously has their rose-tinted spectacles on: the canal has already been and gone once, with limited impact; the impression left on Swindon by the GWR remains unavoidable.

I’m delighted to read that, at last week’s meeting of Swindon Borough Council’s planning committee, the latest plans for the tented market were deferred for consideration in June, with the chair of the committee describing them as unacceptable and officers recommending refusal because their appearance from Commercial Road is so poor. It’s nice to see that they agree with me, for once.

The developers say they will appeal if the plans are rejected: they are still open for comment, if you wish to add your weight to the officers’ opinion.

With the counting in the election now over, there’s hardly any change. The red nest regain a total grip on Central, taking the seat vacated by Ms Darker who has successfully run away to St Philips ward, but the blue nest have gained one of the two seats in Parks. I also see that the council leader Mr Bluh came second in Dorcan, where two seats were on offer, so he’ll be back up for election in two years’ time. ’Tis hardly a ringing endorsement of his performance, as a self-styled leader with vision, to be beaten by a novice.

Well, there ends one of the most lacklustre local election campaigns that I can remember. The blue and red nests have seemingly put all their canvassing efforts put into Parks ward, with the voters in the rest of the town almost been taken for granted.

With it being a couple of years since I last voted at a polling station there were a couple of things that struck me as I cast my vote this morning: the first polling station official didn’t ask me to confirm my name and address when I handed over my poll card; another didn’t bother to stamp the ballot paper with an official mark, just tore it from a pad and handed it over (perhaps they were pre-marked); yet another official sat reading a newspaper and didn’t even bother to look up to see what it was that I was putting into the ballot box. It’s little checks such as these that stop this week’s shaggy dog story being nothing more than a tale of naïve stupidity.

In their first — and possibly last — offering of this year’s election campaign, the leaflet stuffed hurriedly through my letterbox this evening is, like their manifesto, long on what the blue nest have done, but short — very short — on what they intend to do in the future. It tells of things done and things being done, but nothing of things yet to be done… from which I can only conclude that they are intending more of the same. (Guess they’re not called Conservative for nothing.) They also seem to be struggling to distinguish their positives from their negatives.

Since the Conservatives took control of the Council in June 2004, we have ended Labour’s unacceptable Council Tax hikes,… We believe in positive campaigning and are the only party that will set out a positive agenda.

Their three-year-old agenda may be positive, but in a deteriorating economic climate some of it, particularly town-centre redevelopment, is looking less than realistic.

With just three days to go to the local elections, it’s a bit late to be running stories about the use of social networking sites to encourage voting.

Facebook used to galvanise voters
Social networking website Facebook is being used by a Wiltshire council to encourage people to vote.

Swindon Borough Council said the aim was to help make it easier for citizens to find information about the election and to exchange ideas with others.

Swindon Borough Council actually ‘said’ very little: the BBC has just copied the words from the council’s website. And if they’d bothered to check, they would have seen that they have hardly galvanised anyone: the Facebook group has just eleven members, three of whom are administrators.

There is a story here: it is one of poorly promoted experiments and inefficient use of council staff time.

In his latest election leaflet, Mr Ali seems to be having difficulty remembering what has been the work of his red nest colleagues.

The Tories have introduced a waste and re-cycling scheme that has failed to address the needs of Central’s multiple-occupancy homes. After over a year of campaigning for recognition of this problem your local labour councillors have an agreement that a specialist waste warden will visit the multiple-occupancy homes.

Whilst not disputing the failings of the waste collection scheme, I could have sworn their had been others more active on this issue.

Swindon needs a road system to match the Labour Governments town regeneration project.

Strange… as I recall, one of the main features of the town centre regeneration planning has been the unwillingness of the government to contribute to improving transport infrastructure.

The Tories solution is to narrow key roads and increase traffic volumes on Central’s residential streets.

Err… that’s the canal that is part of the regeneration plan is it? Who did you claim that project for? Being a bit selective in what you claim as your own perhaps? Lets not forget either that the impact of the canal on traffic is much more complex than Mr Ali and his colleagues would have us believe. Yes it would increase traffic at the Broadgreen end of Central ward, but traffic at the Kingshill end would be decreased. He also seems confused over schooling.

They have also failed to… provide sufficient local primary education, forcing parents and children to undertake unnecessary costly journeys.

Yet on the red nest’s website he says something different.

I am proud of Labour’s huge investment in new schools.

Contradictions like this hardly give an impression of a reliable, trustworthy person.

It’s nice that Mr Ali alone among this year’s election candidates has made any attempt at communication in the run-up to the election. It’s unfortunate that so much of that communication is untrue.

After a long absence — and very little presence even then — the red nest’s Action Team (sic) have made a reappearance, though their ‘action’ amounts to no more than dropping a leaflet through my letterbox. They have a strange concept of ‘working hard’. They have, apparently, been

working together to keep the Westcott Place Post Office open.

They’ve clearly not been working very well, as their colleague Ms Snelgrove has consistently voted in favour of post offices being closed. One of their other claims is rather odd too.

Stop the diversion of town traffic onto Central’s residential roads.

Being a rather narrow ward reaching into the town centre, do they really expect the main roads in Central not to carry town centre traffic? There are very few side streets offer any diversion into the town centre either, so this just reads like scaremongering. Perhaps they’re thinking of the impact of the proposed canal, which would lead to greater traffic in Broadgreen, but less at the Westcott end of the ward. Is it too much to expect that a ward candidate might one day campaign as if there is more to Central than Broadgreen?

As for their other claims of action, they’re indisinguishable from claims made by the other parties.

Drivers delivering to the Wichelstowe development works may be somewhat confused when approaching from junction 16 of the M4. The last stage of their journey is along a road clearly marked as ‘Unsuitable for heavy goods vehicles’. Perhaps the houses with which Swindon’s Front Garden is to be filled will just be rather lightly constructed….