Tag: Swindon

It’s so nice to be labelled. Apparently, I’m deprived.

The rollout of the new centres is already making youngsters’ lives better in deprived areas…. Children’s centres exist in Drove Road, Pinehurst, Freshbrook, Middleleaze, Park North and Westcott Street and the final touches are being made to one in Gorse Hill.

In the list of areas that most locals might think of as being ‘deprived’, only some of those listed by the Adver would be included. Deprivation through wealth is rather novel, don’t you think?

Swindon Borough Council has now published a list of which streets will not have to use wheelie bins and will instead have fortnightly blue bag collections. There’s several things that are irritating about this. Looking at the list, it’s mainly of roads where the houses front straight onto the pavement. But streets such as The Mall, Faringdon Road and Park Lane, where the houses all have reasonably sized front gardens and the roads are level, are also reprieved, whereas the many terraces with a mere 3 ft front yard (Tennyson Street, for example) will receive wheelie bins, despite the difficulties of manœuvring them in such a confined space. This is inconsistent with both the council’s published basis of assessment of wheelie-suitability and that the slightly more generous criteria that councillors were told. Not surprisingly some people in Broadgreen are not impressed. According to the council’s director of environment and health

The survey was done by an expert refuse driver who walked the streets around the town assessing the road and properties to see which would be suitable. It has been done by someone who knows how the system works and understands the service and its needs.

He seems to be forgetting something. Services are there to serve the people and it is the people’s needs that are being forgotten. Also Councillor Wren is back spouting, appropriately for his council responsibilities, utter rubbish.

We mustn’t lose sight of the two key reasons why we’re making these changes. Firstly, we have to reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill, otherwise each and every one of us will be hit in the pocket. And secondly, it’s damaging to the environment to bury re-usable materials.

All of which is totally irrelevant to the issue of blue bag versus wheelie bin.

It’s not all sweetness and light for those receiving blue bags either. The blue bags will be twice the size of ordinary black refuse sacks. That’ll make them easy to carry when full!

It’s so nice to see that Councillor Montaut retains his ability to make stupid statements. This time, commenting on the Streets for Living project in the Broadgreen area of Central Ward which he represents.

It is a positive initiative that we welcome, because the area is in need of support. There has been massive investment in the town centre and it is crucial that attention is paid to the wards further afield.

Err… what was the name of the ward again?

I have found an explanation for the abysmal punctuality of First Great Western Trains. It seems the wheels are coming off their trains! Walking to work on Wednesday, there was a set of wheels lying on some short rails in The Park on Faringdon Road, near to one of the stones dropped a few months ago by the council, not far from the railway line. The wheels definitely weren’t there on Monday.

It’s so comforting to read of the reasons that a group of campaigners from Wootton Bassett are opposing the plan for the western end of the southern relief road around the developments on the Swindon front garden to be near Wootton Bassett and their homes.

Lady Inchcape and campaigners against the junction fear the changes would create more traffic on local routes and congest Old Town.

So magnanimous. Concerned for the people of Swindon rather than themselves…. Except that it is a bit like suggesting that moving the western end of the M4 from Pont Abraham to Aust would lead to greater congestion in central London. It just wouldn’t be right to allow some logic to get in the way of an old fashioned nimby campaign.

No, a Gateway that is full of only houses. It seems that now, not only is there no university interested in the plans to concrete over the area around Coate Water, but the GW Hospital is not interested either. Apparently the developers’ plans have not allocated enough space for the hospital, proposing instead that an area reserved for an expanded park-and-ride car park be used for hospital development. Guess that means there’ll be no alternative but to build houses over the entire Gateway site. I’m sure the developers will be distraught at the thought.

I see that whilst I have been away, quite a fight has broken out over waste and recycling collections in central Swindon.

Now that a quango has changed its guidance on alternate weekly collections, particularly in relation to food waste, Councillor Montaut has written an open letter to Mr Wren, the councillor in charge of waste and recycling, questioning the decision to collect ‘non-recyclable’ waste once per fortnight, and has then gone on to play petty politics with the issue. It is also worth noting that Mr Montaut is rather selecive in which parts of said quango’s guidance he chooses to take note of, with some of his points (e.g. about the effect of fortnightly collections on recycling rates) totally contradicting the same guidance document that he quotes elsewhere.

What Mr Montaut hasn’t questioned are the rules about who does and who does not get a wheelie bin, which seem to have been applied differently in the vicinity of the council leader’s home than the rest of central Swindon. But then, frequency of collection is, to some extent, an issue for all of Swindon, whereas the problem of where to put a wheelie bin is only an issue in the cramped terraces of central Swindon, so, as he lives in Moredon (oddly enough the ward of Councillor Wren), Mr Montaut is not personally affected.

(I note in passing that, according to the August edition of Swindon News, the start date for fortnightly wheelie bin collections has been put back from September to November, though they will be introduced over just two weeks from 5th November rather than over six months as originally advertised.)

The outline plans for concreting over the area around Coate Water have now been formally submitted to Swindon Borough Council. Anyone wishing to look at and comment on the plans can do so here and here.

If the government continues to believe it is doing so well on being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, why the continuing growth in private and now semi-public security? Swindon has not only the bouncers seen on pub and club doorsteps throughout the country, and the security staff employed by the local pubwatch, but now we also have a new ‘Street Team’ employed by the inSwindon company, a company backed by Swindon Borough Council, the South West Regional Development Agency and the public-sector New Swindon Company. Any doubt as to the latter’s role is dispelled by the images used on the inSwindon website.

I was, perhaps, a little premature in my suggestions of amnesia amongst our local councillors. Yesterday’s Adver carries a story about ongoing discussions between Swindon Borough Council and universities, but about a town centre campus, not a Coate Water campus. ‘Story’ is quite an apt description in this case. The leading paragraph suggests that discussions are well developed.

PLANS for a town centre university are in the pipeline and the University of the West of England is believed to be the top choice to meet Swindon’s higher education needs.

The quote from The University of the West of England* is considerably more guarded.

UWE, along with other universities has been involved in preliminary discussions with Swindon Council to which no outcome has yet been reached.

That reads like nothing more than ‘maybe’ to me. The figurative pipeline in the newspaper story could be very long.

*Mind that initial ‘The’. It’s in their legal title and they can get very picky about it.