It is now more than 2 years that our transition group has been running in the village and in that time we have had plenty of fun and organised a few things that may have slightly altered some people’s actions or beliefs – maybe, just a little.  Last week was the first ‘Forest Row local food week’ – as ever with transition events it seems slightly mad and I wonder what it is all about, but it is great fun – as I travel between taking my chickens down to the Forresters Green (not yet a football pitch!) for a ‘chicken chat/workshop’, sowing biodynamic wheat seeds with Peter Brinch at Plawhatch, and encouraging local foodie producers and caterers to network at the business breakfast we held.  All of it I will happily do again next year and maybe then we will have 30 people for the chicken chat, and a couple of heavy horses to help till the soil at Plawhatch….

For information about Transition forest row go to www.transitionforestrow.org, where you can also find a downloadable copy of the incredible ‘Forest Row in transition….’ document

The next focus will be on the ‘low carbon community challenge’ grant funding I expect – here’s hoping there are some more willing people to get going with that one.

I lay in the grass today looking up at the blue sky with my two girls 5 and 3 and we looked for cloud shapes.  We found beagles on broomsticks, a huge horse and plenty of ducks. 

I haven’t been able to blog since the elections on 3.5.07 as it was all too frustrating losing my seat by such a narrow margin (less than 5%) and on such peculiar grounds.  I have lost track of the number of people who have said to me ‘I usually vote Green but I voted for you because you are effective and are pushing the sustainability agenda’… and I am left wondering how many disillusioned Tory voters who we didn’t speak to (‘not really impressed by Cameron’ and those put out by the new fortnightly waste recycling collection – the bins for which did indeed arrive in many roads on election day!) may have actually therefore voted the Green party councillors in.  Democracy is a strange process indeed.

So I have been dealing with my feelings of personal frustration, getting involved in other things and in many ways I have surprisingly found it liberating as there is a little more time now in my life and I have a new perspective.  I hope it is in some way character building and I am appreciative of the view I have of the democratic workings from my experience of it. 

Those clouds keep rolling and I can enjoy spotting the animals – a precious time. I shall aim to blog from time to time as I am of course still hugely interested in what happens locally and how we leave our environment and world for our children but it will be from a different perspective and with a different, and non Wealden responsible, hat.  Every cloud does indeed have a silver lining.

Whoever they may be, it is their role to represent you and to assist as they can.  But remember you too can do more than you may think.  If you think you are too small to make a difference think of the experience of sleeping with a mosquito!

Charles Hendry MP was our key speaker at an Open Meeting last week – the hottest topic was local health service provision and the threatened downgrading of the Princess Royal.  Charles’ points on this issue mirrored the concerns of local residents – operations cancelled ‘on the day’ for cost saving reasons, a lack of willingness to investigate and diagnose, people being encouraged to go home at 4 am when actually they had just had a stroke but it had not been investigated and detected.  To support the PRH campaign go here http://www.supportprh.com/news.html  Your district councillor can do no more than you can on this topic so I would urge you to write letters to the heads of the Primary Care Trusts.   A clear issue is that we are East Sussex residents using a West Sussex PCT hospital so I would suggest you write to both.

Here is my statement to the meeting:

It has been a privilege to represent FR on the District Council for the past 4 years.  It is a beautiful, vibrant, and very diverse area that of course is the village and also many outlying very rural areas. It has also been a steep learning curve to find out what the different layers of local government do and also how to lobby effectively within it.  It has also been a frustration – at the extent to which locally elected bodies must dance to the
Central Govt tune of performance targets and funding allocations. My personal cause in the Council over the past 4 years has had a distinct environmental theme, reflecting my own interests, the interests of many in the village, and also touching the points that a District Council can actually have some say over – namely housing and waste.  For some time I have been convinced that climate change is happening and this past year was delighted to be given the role of Council Sustainability Champion to raise the activity in this area.  I am pleased to say that there has been a complete sea change in the council and more generally in public awareness over the past year particularly.  Wealden is now starting to move fast in this area having spent some time rather tied up in a messy appeal against our previous local housing plan that was taken right up to the Court of Appeal by a disgruntled developer.  The Council has taken some key steps to lay the foundations – though its budget and its officer structure – for some really good work on climate change that is already starting, the social housing team is busy working on renewable power projects for social housing in the district and on a Wealden tenants local food awareness project.  The Council has signed up to a car sharing scheme and Climate change is already on the agenda for one of the key Scrutiny committees this June – as fact that will delight which ever FR candidates get in I imagine. For the next four years I would like to continue this agenda and ensure Wealden continues to lead in this area.  I see Forest Row as a real seedbed of ideas, action and good practice that can be promoted and shared around the District.    As well as building on our successes in environmental issues, I am fully aware of many of our communities concerns over issues ranging from anti-social behaviour to rural speeding and traffic volumes.  If re-elected I will be campaigning hard for better provision for our young people, for example now that the rusting climbing frame has been removed from the Forrester’s Green area there is an opportunity to create a space for ball games here and I will working with the Parish Council to encourage this.  I shall continue to lobby Sussex Police for a better police presence in the village and outlying areas. The cost and provision of housing in our village is a concern to many and I will continue to press for more affordable housing in general and as part of any developments that go ahead in the village. Overall I hope that people in Forest Row have found me a good representative of their very diverse views and a standard bearer of village causes such a GM and the relief road.I have enjoyed the past 4 years and hope that I will have the opportunity to continue as your representative for the next Council term – I would encourage you all to make sure you vote next Thursday and to encourage those around you to question, debate and vote Conservative. 

Come and meet your local Conservative MP and myself and your other District Council candidate at the Community Centre, 6.30pm Friday 27th April.

Campaigning in Forest Row is hot between the Green party and the Conservatives at the moment – it is a great priviledge to get out and meet so many local residents and hear their views – not to mention the pleasure of walking and riding around the ward in this gorgeous weather.  If I haven’t had the chance to speak to you and you would like to ask me a question or send me your views please do comment on this blog or email me at rcmoore@btconnect.com 

I have just taken a look at the Green party videos and can’t decide whether they are a brilliant addition to local democracy or a cheesy marketing tactic…. Do people want to watch such things?  Are politics and issues really so easy to ’encapsulate’?  Does it tell you very much and if so what?  All credit to them for getting out and putting themselves forward, its certainly making local elections a much more engaged and real matter in Forest Row – would that all areas were like this one.

ps I think the idea of a basic football pitch with some basketball hoops on the land by the Forresters is a brilliant one, and one that my hubby coincidentally also had yesterday.  He returned from the village with our two young daughters who were most disappointed at the loss of the slide and the climbing frame from that same spot and said ‘of course it should be made into a football pitch’… so, an idea worth persuing after the elections I hope.  

 How would we stop the balls from going out onto the road?  Would that be an issue?

A resident emailed to ask me my views on a ‘Forest Row bypass’ so they are below.  A lot of talk and speculation has been made about a ‘bypass’ over the past 35 years and I would urge people to really question what they hear – there is some scaremongering. 

Traffic volumes and speeds are a more immediate issue.  The traffic calming in Hartfield Road may have had some positive effect (what would it have been like if it wasn’t there?) but in general people seem to drive more and faster each year.  Like many things I suspect here we will have to be the change we wish to see in the world, so if you want to see less traffic and slower traffic then we each need to start by examining our own travel and the goods we use (and therefore the lorries we encourage onto the roads).  Governments can do some things, District Councils can do little about this, but we can each of us, every one, have some small positive impact. 

Speeding is even more of an issue in ‘rural areas’ beyond the reach of the village 30 mph signs.  Conservatives are fighting hard nationally to reduce the national 60 mph limit that applies in so many of our village outer reaches, that deter people from walking and cycling outside their homes and make the roads generally more dangerous.

My views on a Forest Row bypass.  In a nutshell any bypass option is very expensive and highly unlikely and likely to create different traffic problems – and we should therefore continue to push for fewer homes in East Grinstead unless the traffic issue can be resolved (and I don’t think it can by a bypass type route though it may be helped by different attitudes to car driving, price of fuel, dramatically different larger scale road/ development plans in adjacent areas).My view is that there is no viable route for a ‘bypass’ for
East Grinstead.  If there is then I have yet to see it.  Any route that would also include Forest Row is way too costly and the land is too tricky – both topologically and because of various assignations such as SSSI etc. Therefore, if any kind of road is to be built you are left with whatever option East Grinstead pushes for which currently would be the Worth Way tunnel (now rejected) or else

1. A route that joined the A22 on the Brambletye bends (ghastly, likely dangerous and possibly impossible due to steepness of land)
2. A route that cut into
   East Sussex land and rejoined the A22 just before the pedestrian crossing by Tablehurst farm entrance. 
   East Sussex to date have said that they cannot support such a route as it would funnel traffic straight into the north end of Forest Row.  I agree with this view.

Fundingwise, I belive that unless there were to be some significant input from Central Government then nothing beyond the access roads around and through the new houses would be within the gift of any developer so any ‘bypass’ or relief road’ is a non starter in any event. Option 1 would be the one any district councillor (or ESCC councillor) would have least influence over as it could be built entirely on WSCC land – in practice I think the outcry would be so great that they wouldn’t be able to built it.  Option 2 I will continue to oppose as there is an enormous disbenefit to Forest Row.As a councillor I have little direct influence but I have and will continue to speak up at whatever road meetings occur (as I have done to date as a councillor, from this same standpoint for the past 4 years).  Most of what we can do as a Wealden DC is frankly reactive though I have spoken at length with our MP, and various ESCC councillors (including the council leader) and officers about this to date.

Mike Grenville ran the follow-on Transition Town event this week and gave a very thorough presentation about Peak oil and the end of ‘cheap oil’.  The fascinating thing about the transition town initiative is that it appears to be truely grass roots bottom up and seems an excellent way for a community to get involved actively together.  Whatever your passion, whether it be gardening, sewing, cooking or a concern about climate change or a whole host of other things I can see ways that people can get together, share, enjoy and make things better.  Take a look at the transition town site link listed in the blogroll….

I attended the SEERA (South East England Regional Assembly) Climate Change Conference 30th March 07 in Brighton which delivered a clear message that climate change is happening and we all need to do something about it.

Their published figures of what we can expect in the SE by the 2050s are:

• avg summer temperature around 3 degrees warmer

• avg summer rainfall decrease by around 40%

• avg winter rainfall increase by up to 20%

• sea level rise by up to 40cm

Most of the conference reiterated topics of which we are well aware – sign up to Nottingham, look at Woking and their individual route to innovation in this area.  Brighton and Hove and Southampton are making names for themselves in the ‘sustainability’ stakes and Brighton in particular are notable in what they are requiring from development in terms of build quality and renewable power (e.g new One Planet Living Development of 170 flats, aiming at zero waste, allotments on the roof and CHP in the basement).

In answer to several questions from the floor as to why not all councils were as fast moving in the area of climate change, I asked my own question as to why we in Wealden seemed to be frustrated at every turn to implement policies for more sustainable building along the lines of Merton etc.  Was it just that the timing of our LDP and LDF was lousy or that we had more reticent Planning Inspectors.. or.. or.??  The answer from a senior chap in the Planning Inspectorate was that we should be getting more consistent messages from Planning Inspectors but also that national regulations were rising so fast (particularly with regard to carbon neutral new build by 2016 and 45% improvement in build efficiency by I think he said 2013) that most planning authorities should just keep in step with national requirements for build quality and use National Standards to describe them.  A large element of his approach was around ‘taking the general population with us’.  Note also however that one of the recommendations from the summit was that National standards needed to rise faster.  

 This Senior Planning inspector did however indicate that we as an authority might like to look into renewable power generation as clearly we would have developers doing significant development and needing to access different carbon neutral power sources.  Very interesting. 

Clearly the Wealden social housing team who are looking into CHP woodchip boilers for replacement boilers for some of our housing stock are on the right track.You can view all the presentations and the guide that the Assembly launched at the Summit aimed at planners, local councils, developers, regulators and service providers via this link:http://www.southeast-ra.gov.uk/southeastplan/key/climate_change.html

 Christian Aid is a brilliant campaigning organisation. Think back a few years – their main campaign for several years from around 1997 was ‘break the chain of 3rd world debt’.. then around 2001 they moved to ‘Trade Justice’… in each case significantly raising the issue up the national consciousness, changing behaviours and government action and helping  outcomes.  There have been debt writeoffs and the value of the fairtrade market continues to soar..

And now they are focusing on climate change and campaigning to get the UK to cut its carbon emissions by 5% per year.  Because its the poor who will likely first pay the price of climate change.

‘It is not the Kings and the Generals that make history, but the masses of the people.’
Nelson Mandela

http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/index.htm

http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/campaign/why/index.htm

It is salutary to witness man withdrawing from an attempt to control nature as the effects of climate change come to bear.  The South coast, already affected by Isostatic effects (I had to use that word – means the way that the landmass of Britain is tilting over time with the south going down and the north going up for more see:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostasy#Eustasy_and_relative_sea_level_change ) will have this effect compounded by the effects of sea level rises due to climate change.

At Environment Committee today a review of Coastline policy raised the issue of the Cuckmere Valley which the Environment Agency is advising should no longer be maintained as a ’sea defended valley’ but allowed to return to its more natural state of a salt/ mud estuary.  Saving money of around £17m in the process over the next 100 years.  For more about local concern over this see  http://www.rescuethecuckmerevalley.com/index.htm

This is the first time that climate change effects have impacted on council matters and it is awesome and somewhat scary.  ‘Tough conversations’ was the EA man’s words… I am left wondering how many of those we will have to have in my lifetime.

A horrific statistic that appeared in the Times this weekend.  Apparently:  30% of all supermarket purchases go direct into the bin (?! surely) at a cost of £460 per year per person.  It smacks of a world gone crazy when what we put into ourselves counts for so little….. And what we deprive others of in the resources taken to make it and get it into our shopping bags….

Not to mention the carbon emissions of all that food and production.

I am guilty of throwing out some, though thanks to composting and chickens, much less than we might.  Reminds me that so much of life is about the little things.