It’s four years since i stood for election and as i’m standing down in May I thought it worth a reflection on the achievements over the past four years as Town Councillor.
It’s certainly been one of the hardest things i’ve ever done. As a young apprentice at Rolls-Royce I was fortunate to attend several outward-bound style team work courses of the sort that Bear Grylls now does with celebrities. One of the phrases that struck me at the time is ‘beyond the age of 25 your capacity to take on new ideas disappears’. I can say with absolute certainty – that absolutely isn’t true for me, i’m still learning every day.
A slightly rocky if promising start…
I have to admit I look back at the election campaign I ran in 2021 with a bit of a wince. I was outraged at the ongoing destruction of wildlife habitat in Chippenham with house building, the poor quality of the built environment, and the lack of progress on tackling climate change – I was going to change the world or at least try! Unfortunately as I didn’t get elected as a Wiltshire Councillor but did succeed as a Town Councillor, my only mechanism was directly through the Town council and the small influence that comes from being a councillor, networking with outside bodies, and trying to influence Wiltshire Council from the outside.
My father had died at the relatively young age of 57 and this has always acted as something of a motivator for me to not waste time. At the back of my mind I was aware that I would be 57 at the end of a four year term, there was no time to waste.
The Housing Infrastructure Bid (HIF) is cancelled.
An early win (or so it seemed at the time) was Wiltshire Council’s immediate withdraw of the HIF road bid. This was a bid by Wiltshire Council for a Distributor Road with 7500 houses attached to the bid. The proposed road would cut straight through the cycle track and result in a large amount of housing on farmland. The reasons given for the withdrawl were environmental concerns, so it seemed that along with the huge public campaign the act of standing for election had an impact on policy. This was backed up by an immediate unanimous declaration by the Town Council to maintain objection to the HIF bid.
Ecological Emergency Declaration
I wasn’t the only independent councillor to be elected on environmental grounds. The Town Council had declared a Climate emergency in the previous council and we wanted to back that up by declaring an Ecological Emergency as other councils had done. We didn’t want to make a woolly declaration that didn’t actually mean anything, so we worked collaboratively for several weeks looking at the work other councils had done to include specific measurable targets that would be achievable.
It took some work and persistence to structure the motion in a format that was acceptable to be presented to the council.
On the night of debate doubts were cast on the proposal over the potential cost of the measures and the impact to the precept on the tax payer by the Lib Dem lead. An amendment was proposed to come back with a report on the cost of the measures and this was just supported on a vote. I was outraged! We had carefully researched all the measures and given that the majority of items in my opinion had little cost implications I could barely contain my anger and couldn’t speak to fellow councillors who had opposed the measures after so much work.
In those early days I was very much a purist. Though all of my comments were always driven by hours of research, I didn’t understand the political mechanisms needed to achieve goals or why anyone would even oppose such measures.
Four years on I think the sweet spot for a councillor probably hits about year three. At this point if you really work at it you can understand how best to help residents and also build relationships to achieve the goals you want, or at least make the best try. I’m still amazed that some fellow councillors turn up to meetings month after month, year after year, and don’t say anything – ever, and appear to have no opinions on anything – ever. Why do it?
Four years on, I am still considered something of a purist. I think if you lose that then perhaps you shouldn’t be standing.
Ecological Emergency Implementation
This was the point thing started to get really interesting. The report came back from Council officers on the cost of implementing the ecological emergency. Whilst costs weren’t enormous in the scheme of things, as presented it would have pushed the precept rise (CTC’s part of the council tax rise) to 7% or so. Whilst I was an environmentalist none of us wanted to increase the precept by this amount as we were also realists, we lived in Chippenham, we paid council tax too. My wife was always a good barometer check on reality!
Getting to grip with the Finances
It became clear to me that to achieve the goals of the Ecological Emergency and other investment I needed to really understand the Town Council finances. To this extent I put myself forward as chair of the Finance Sub-Committee, a position I held for two years. This did have the side-effect of considerably annoying my Lib Dem colleague, who as an accountant considered herself perhaps understandably as the natural choice for the role. However, I had started and run my own business for many years, did all my own book-keeping and financial projections, financed by remortgaging our house, opened shops and a manufacturing premises, and employed 20 people at one point. Enough of blowing my own trumpet – you get the picture. Suffice to say I had financial experience and also knew what it was like to have financial pressures. However, I had little experience of chairing meetings and this led to some interesting experiences early on. It’s only the past year that i’ve really gained the confidence and relaxed enough to chair meetings.
As an aside the relationship between myself and my Lib Dem colleague remained fractious over the years. My colleague did eventually chair the committee when the political balance changed. I believe that this somewhat argumentative professional relationship meant that what could have become a rubber stamping sub-committee has worked well, leaving the Town Council in a better financial position than almost all its peers. This is underpinned by an excellent professional officer finance team.
Spreadsheets galore
So I set about recreating the Council’s management accounts in my own spreadsheets. Not detailed accounts, but broad brush projections using spending forecasts from each committee. I mentioned in passing conversation that I was doing this to council officers and perhaps understandably it wasn’t received in a positive light!
What the officers didn’t realise was that was a two way process. At one point I sent a summary spreadsheet to fellow councillors highlighting that some pathways led to the council having no capital in four years time! After a lot of ground work, a sound grasp of capital expenditure, and some compromise measures ; we were able to put in place funding for practical measures for the ecological emergency including cessation of pesticides and herbicide use, tree planting, a transition to organic pitch treatments, and employment of a Climate and Ecological officer; whilst keeping the precept rise to a level under 5% inline with inflation.
No more Glyphosate
Stopping the council’s use of Glyphosate led to some interesting debates with officers. I’d read Dave Goulson’s book Silent Earth over the Christmas break and decided that I would push the herbicide and pesticide aspect of the Ecological Emergency in the New Year. You may think this would be a ‘no brainer’, but things are never clear cut. Right wing newspaper headlines regularly taunted councils who had ‘gone green’ with pictures of weeds springing up everywhere in high streets. A symbol of failing councils and urban decay, ignoring the crash in insect and pollinator populations. So I had some interesting exchanges with officers, quoting research studies and having the counter argument as a reply. I proposed various non chemical machines and methods and as always cost became an issue. However the conversation mellowed and it turned out that the council actually used almost no Glyphosate anyway, and officers reached the conclusion that they could use alternative maintenance methods with the rare exception of invasive species. So the council no longer uses Glyphosate.
Tree Planting
As part of the ecological emergency and climate emergency the Town Council has undertaken a large amount of tree planting on its own land. This is an ongoing exercise. Social media is often critical on this – with one hand you’re planting tree whips, on the other hand developers are cutting down mature trees.
They’re right of course – it’s an Oxymoron, but you can only control what you can control as Donald Rumsfeld might say if he’d decided to stand for Town Council rather than become the US Secretary of Defense.
Save the Trees!
This became something of a theme over the four years, with some successes and disappointing failures.
The Langley Oak
One of my biggest headaches over the last three years has been the Langley Park development on the Westinghouse site. I’ll say more on this later, but early on as well as the ongoing efforts to try to pressurise developers to build to standards fit for the problems of the 21st century (which they don’t have to), I realised that several magnificent Oak Trees and Lime trees were at risk.
I started a social media campaign to protect the Langley Oak and received a huge amount of support and lots of planning comments to that extent. It did have an effect and we were able to put Tree Preservation Orders on a group of trees. The developers to their credit in this instance did change their plans removing a house allowing the group of trees to stay including an historic Oak and lime trees shown on the earliest maps of Chippenham.
However despite meeting with highways and planners exploring a number of innovative solutions to try and save the Oak Tree at the entrance no solution could be found that didn’t involve destroying the holy grail of outline planning agreed several years earlier when no one gave a toss about the magnificent ancient Oak.
The tree is still there, though like the Hitch Hikers guide to the Galaxy the myriad of species that it supports probably don’t realise they are scheduled for demolition. Unfortunately in the planning hierarchy roads win over trees every time, something that has to change.
The Neighbourhood Plan
I started work on the Chippenham Neighbourhood Plan before I was elected. I volunteered as a member of the Economic Topic Group and proposed the Circular Economy Policy.
Once elected I put myself forward for the Neighbourhood Plan Steering group. For me the Neighbourhood Plan was almost a ‘Plan B’. That is if I couldn’t stop developers building on green fields and destroying wildlife, at least we could try to ensure that what was built was fit for the 21st Century. The only way to effect planning decisions was through Planning policy, and the only planning policy directly available to us was the Neighbourhood Plan.
Fortunately we had an excellent Planning Officer backed up by a Neighbourhood Plan expert. We also had engaged and knowledgeable residents and Sustainability Professional as chair. Consequently the Chippenham Neighbourhood Plan is one of the most detailed and boundary pushing Neighbourhood Plans created to date, something now recognised as it’s nominated for a planning award.
It wasn’t easy though. At each stage of the plan i encouraged residents to engage, particularly with the Local Green Spaces policy. This gave areas identified by residents across Chippenham as Local Green Space or Local Amenity Space. and therefore afforded strong planning protection from development. There was enormous push back from developers and Wiltshire Council at every stage.
The final stage of the plan was a referendum on the 29th May 2024. There was some confusion in the run up as to how much the plan could be promoted. There was also confusion with the ‘One Plan’ promoted by Wiltshire Council and Chippenham’s then MP that borrowed some aspects of the plan. The clarification came quite late in the process, and to ensure residents understood the key advantages of the plan from documents spanning hundreds of pages, I personally printed and delivered around 2000 letters to ward residents explaining the key points.
The plan passed referendum and is now ‘made’. I’ve been part of the monitoring committee to see how it’s policies are being applied. Though there’s still a way to go in some areas such as Energy Policy, overall it is being used in decision making and ensuring that developments in Chippenham are compliant with its policies.
The percentage of CIL money retained by the Town Council from development has increased as a result of the plan and that has improved the ability of the Town Council to invest in Community Infrastructure.
The Town Council is also supporting parts of the plan and this will shortly see semi mature trees planted in green spaces across Chippenham and the implementation of the Stainers Way Cycle Path part of a key cycle route to Hardenhuish and Sheldon School.
Social Media
When I was running for election four years ago i saw the comment a few times that ‘you only see councillors on social media when it’s election time’. There is some truth to this and it’s usually the time councillors don the high viz jackets and develop a craving to take selfies picking litter.
I’m not really a selfie person and haven’t felt the need to photograph everything I do. But I did take note and stayed on social media. Advice from the Council is to separate your council and personal page. However I completely messed this up by constantly using my personal page to respond and never using my Cllr page. As I never post anything personal on my personal page it doesn’t really matter.
I’ve spent four years trying to be reasonable, explain what I know, and be relentlessly positive in the face of a tsunami of negativity. I frequently put a counterpoint argument to many posts, based on what I believe and evidence. Whilst we represent the views of residents one of the Nolan principles of office is Leadership, and if you believe something to be the right decision or strategy you should state why and defend that position regardless of the apparent majority opinion. It’s usually the case that actually talking to residents in person shows a very different overall view point. Nonetheless the large Facebook boards are a useful counterpoint and sounding board.
Working with the Quarters
One of the most rewarding parts of the last four years has been working with the relatively new Town Quarters – The Artisan Quarter, River and Rail, High Street, and Heritage.
The movement was initiated by the Town team and really has to be attributed to the boundless energy of Sandie Webb at the Community Hub and Town team.
I attended the first meeting of the Artisan Quarter with a slightly sceptical perspective. However I found a group of small business owners who simply wanted to do something to improve the area they lived in and were willing to devote their time outside of work hours to try and make that happen.
I’ve tried to attend as many of the meetings as I can, listen to their ideas, and try and help. Like many things in life a huge amount of effort sometimes results in small successes.
For the Artisan Quarter a desire to green the area led to installation of new hanging basket gondolas at strategic locations on New Road, and these are maintained by the Town Council. The more ambitious scheme to improve the street scene of Union Road is also in progress, and as with many things highways related could take a long time, but it is a vision led by the local businesses to improve the gate way to the town. Bizarrely i’ve received quite a lot of personal attacks on this support, being accused of somehow financially benefiting from the scheme. Sometimes you can’t win, you’re either accused of letting the town slide through not supporting businesses, or only doing it to better yourself in some way if you do. But like the Artisan Quarter members sometimes you just want to try and improve the area you live in. More recently the Artisan Quarter put on a free Christmas event, which despite being initially cancelled due to a storm, was a great success!
The River and Rail Quarter had a desire to improve the bus shelters next to the bridge centre car park. Though owned by Wiltshire council, reglazing is taking place by the Town council with help from the Wiltshire Towns fund.
The High Street Quarter has been the hardest to directly help. I have taken ideas forward for Street entertainment and had a verbal agreement from the Town Council to consider a ‘Friends of the Market’ scheme.
To my surprise the Heritage Quarter had an issue with bins. I’ll never forget that 140 page photo presentation on – you guessed it – bins! Fortunately through partnership working we did manage to get some improvements there.
I hope to continue being involved with the Quarters even after I stand down as a councillor. They’re a terrific group of people working altruistically for our town.
The Folk Festival
I’ve always been a big fan of the Chippenham Folk Festival. But coming out of lock down I heard on the grapevine that they were struggling with ticket sales and the new board were coming close to make a go – no go decision. If the festival didn’t go ahead it seemed unlikely it would ever continue as the knowledge of how to set up and run such a large festival would be lost. I contacted one of the festival board members Dave Webber and we met for a coffee.
Dave talked through the finances with me and his efforts to reduce costs whilst still putting on a festival as promised on the tickets they had already sold. They were worried that the older demographic that paid for the Folk Festival tickets simply wouldn’t come back post covid.
So I put together a motion that I would present to the Town Council offering the council’s facilities at half the normal rate. I would have liked to offer them for free, but it seemed there wouldn’t be political support for that. The total cost to the council was around £2000, which given if the festival didn’t go ahead would most likely be a lost booking anyway, seemed a pretty straight forwards proposal to me. The festival brought in 1000s of visitors from across the country and offered a significant boost to the local economy. Many of the town centre hospitality venues were also suffering post covid and the festival was just what the town needed.
So I structured a motion, agreed it with officers, arranged for Dave to speak in support (he was brilliant) and put my best debating hat on. It still surprises me to this day that i received so much opposition to the motion in debate. You’d think I was offering £2 million pounds to a fringe community group rather than the only festival which took over the whole town and put Chippenham on the international map!
Fortunately despite the hand wringing and dire warnings about the effect on the precept (a one off 5 pence per resident that year, which would likely be lost anyway if the festival cancelled at this late juncture), the motion was unanimous supported.
One fellow councillor said to me after – if you do nothing else in the next four years that’s one of the best things you’ll ever do for the town.
The act in itself didn’t save the Folk festival – the Folk Festival board did that – but it gave the board the confidence to go ahead knowing they had the Town Council’s support.
The following year the Folk festival was in a much better position, but still not quite at pre-covid levels. So this time I put forward a similar motion jointly with a Lib Dem colleague. It still received opposition in debate and I still don’t really get why. Fortunately it too carried.
Long live Chippenham Folk Festival!
Water Water everywhere… but much of it full of poo!
As part of the ecological emergency declaration we said the Town Council would work with relevant outside bodies to clean up water quality in the River Avon. So when Wessex Water suggested that Chippenham should be part of two year project to improve Water Quality I offered to work with them and joined the Wessex Water Community connector panel.
One of the main causes of sewage overflow is our combined sewer system. Almost all of the older houses across Chippenham have rainwater systems that go into the same sewage system as our toilets. A particularly bad area was Long Close where a water holding tank would regularly discharge into the river with heavy rain. Worst than that it would flood sewage into some of the residents gardens. Not very nice.
The proposal was to retrofit rain water diverters, water butts, and rain gardens into gardens in the area. Initially with a pilot project and then ultimately retrofitting several thousand houses across Chippenham. I duly recruited some residents in the area and the pilot project commenced.
Unfortunately Wessex didn’t get funding to go beyond the pilot project, and though I had several long discussions with managers at Wessex I wasn’t convinced. Apparently they had applied for an R&D fund, but the technology wasn’t proven. Those water butts – cutting edge unproven technology.
Eventually Wessex did upgrade the network by going for the more traditional dig everything up and stick a big tank in approach. Much more carbon intensive and still requires pumping enormous amounts of rain water around Chippenham to treatment plants. What a shame.
Wessex did run a number of interesting community projects throughout the town and I volunteered to be a member of the Wessex water community connector board to help with these.
Toxic Town Chippenham
One of the biggest challenges of the past four years has been challenging large scale developers to build better. Part of this has been helped by the Neighbourhood plan which at least gives local Planning Policies fit for the 21st century. I’ve been trying to prevent Green Field development and support brown field, however sometimes it’s a case of beware of what you wish for.
The Langley Park development, or old Westinghouse site is commonly known is such a brownfield development in the centre of Chippenham. Most people in Chippenham knows someone that’s worked there, and as a young 25 year old I worked at Westcode Semiconductors (still going strong) for two years.
The Westinghouse part of the site is known to be contaminated, and many of these buildings border with residential housing on Hawthorn Road and Tugela Road. This has led to what has been an enormous effort by residents to try and demolish and build in a safe and considerate way.
Initially demolition was started before the required Construction Environmental management plans had been put in place and permission given to start demolition or agree boundary treatments. That led to the first Planning Enforcement and demolition stopped for several months. I’ve had hundreds of emails and conversations with the residents and had some success setting up an email group.
I’ve realised over the four years that empowering residents to join together is one of the best strategies to help them. So plans were eventually signed off, crush piles moved, demolition methods changed. Sites walked with residents. Tense meetings….
More recently the contractors changed and further enforcement action has been necessary. As a town councillor it’s been quite hard to get traction on what is a Wiltshire Council responsibility and it sometimes needs several councillors to act together. Once again the developer has now agreed to change their methods, dampen down the dust, change their methods.
Several of the residents next to the site have young children and consequently their has been comparisons with the Netflix Toxic Town series.
It seems that whatever documentation and plans are put into place ultimately it ends up with a guy with a digger crushing things next to someones house.
Power to the People
I realised right from the start at Planning meetings that comments put in on behalf of a group had more gravitas than those of an individual, at least that’s my perception.
North Wiltshire Swifts and Cycle Chippenham being exemplars on this. Cycle Chippenham in particular are experts at planning though low key in publicity. If it weren’t for this volunteer group constantly pushing developers our cycle infrastructure would be a good deal worse than it is, and I know it’s not great.
I became involved with the Marshfield Road Safety group quite early on and helped them with their campaign through the Town Council process. There’s nothing quite like residents turning up on mass with a focussed argument to sharpen a councillor’s mind!
When the Causeway had a similar problem I joined them together with the Marshfield Road group and they formed the Causeway Safety group, again a successful campaign that has at least got through the first town council support in principle hurdle. The first concept design has now been drawn. I’ve similarly supported London Road and Wood Lane residents.
Where I haven’t been successful is with Residents’ parking. I’ve tried to join together groups across town on this but it appears the process is too complex to sell to their fellow residents. I’ve come to realise that if you can get a resident’s champion willing to carry something forward then it’s worth the time and effort, but if the resident isn’t willing to work with you on what are often very complex issues or simply wants to blow off steam on social media, then you have to step back. I have at times tried to solve everything everywhere all at once and it’s not good for your physical or mental health.
I similarly encouraged local ecologists to form the Nature Matters group and give them advice and guidance where I can. It’s been impressive to see their progress into an effective planning force for nature.
Stanley Park
I have to admit that before I became a councillor I knew very little about Stanley Park. My friend’s daughter played rugby there, and my boys had taken part in a primary school olympic games, but that was it.
So when proposals for a new 3G pitch were suggested I put myself on the Stanley Park Working party to dive into the detail. I dislike all forms of plastic grass so a new artificial football pitch certainly wasn’t high on my agenda.
However having spent several meetings working through the business case, a detailed report on sporting facilities in the area and future population needs, and potential usage by Abbeyfield School when their pitches were waterlogged in the winter, it made a sense in terms of a community facility. The tipping point really was the two years of work put in by the Stanley Park team to secure funding for two thirds of the cost from the Football Foundation.
The pitches are constructed from a rubber crumb which essentially comes from recycled car tyres. Whilst this gives an extra life to the tyres there are concerns regarding micro plastic particles.
In the end I framed the decision in terms of Doughnut Economics. That is I weighed up the social impacts of a new sports pitch that can be used by Abbeyfield school in the winter for outdoor PE, and teams and individuals who might otherwise travel outside of Chippenham.
From a financial and business case it absolutely made sense with a significant grant available from the football foundation and capital investment from the town council. So I supported the new pitch.
Warm Rooms Motion
As energy bills rose driven by the Ukraine crisis i and other councillors became increasingly concerned that residents might not be able to heat their homes. Informal discussions with officers and fellow councillors led to the idea of using the Town Hall reception as a ‘warm room’ available for residents. This had been implemented by other councils and at that point Wiltshire Council hadn’t announced their scheme. We even had the idea that councillors could volunteer to serve vulnerable residents tea and coffee and work with other community groups to try to help residents. A small budget was mentioned to facilitate this.
So I and several other independent Independent councillors put together the Warm Rooms motion. Again much to my surprise what I thought would be an absolute certainty turned into quite an angry debate which is still hard for me to comprehend.
How dare we try to help people! – what are we thinking of? Town Council officers aren’t trained to deal with this kind of thing! (and Librarians are?). How dare several councillors all sign up to a motion! I was even more surprised that council officers spoke expressing concerns and a real can’t do attitude.
We just won the vote. Despite this, in my opinion the motion was never implemented as intended. The Town Council reception sign posted other warm rooms around town, but never actually ‘officially’ declared itself as a warm room. Which was a bit odd given as a public reception you couldn’t exactly stop people going in there if they were cold.
This was certainly a low point, and one where I felt let down by officers and that democracy had failed Chippenham residents.
Island Park Tree Motion
Around a year before the last general election It dawned on our then Conservative MP that she wasn’t particularly popular in Chippenham. Clearly the initiative needed to be taken. A plan was needed – One Plan to rule them all. The way forward was to be the new ‘One Plan’ initiative. In a Tolkienesque way the One Plan was forged in depths of County Hall Trowbridge and a task force was put together that seemed to heavily involve stakeholders who were property developers. It didn’t involve town councillors or local groups, and many including myself felt excluded and completely in the dark. We were the councillors on the ground – why involve us?
The plan was hastily put together and borrowed elements of the Chippenham Neighbourhood Plan (much to my annoyance), a proposal from the Environment Agency for the radial gate replacement, and drawings showing the Island Park paved over taken from an old scheme regarding the Chippenham riverside. To put the icing on the cake a hastily put together consultation foolishly offered the ‘replace as is’ option for the radial gate, something that the Environment Agency (EA) learnt to regret.
The One Plan consultation was widely shared and heavily promoted through the Quarters and social media to the point where it gained a life of its own and received thousands of responses. The picture of the Island Park paved over drew widespread horror. As most of the people drawing up the plan didn’t live in the town (including our MP), they completely misunderstood the impact of this apparently simple scene of paving stones on the Island Park.
My initial thought was to try and put Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs) on all the historic trees in Island Park. However after detailed consultation with Town Council officers and digging out historic maps, it appeared that fortunately the ancient tree line was on Town Council owned land on Island Park. A TPO wasn’t advised as it would mean the town council needed to apply for Planning Permission every time tree maintenance was required. So a motion was worded to express the importance of the Ancient Trees on Island Park to Wiltshire Council and that any development needed to retain and enhance the beauty of Island Park’s natural setting.
I put the Island Park motion together with Cllr Grimes of Monkton Ward and it was unanimously supported by all my fellow Councillors
Local Highways and Footpath Improvement Group (LHFIG)
As a councillor motivated by sustainability with a life long love of cycling I wanted to do all that I could to to improve cycle and pedestrian routes across Chippenham. The only mechanism easily available to do this was the newly formed Wiltshire Council LHFIG committee. I had supported Cycle Chippenham’s work through the Town Council Planning Committee and wanted to see what happened on the other side of fence when it was determined by Highways. Fortunately Cycle Chippenham had chosen a pragmatic approach of joining together cycle routes using quieter back streets. Whilst not the utopian dream they or I had, it had the advantage of largely receiving cross party support and allowing small scale local fund raising,
The other reason for joining LHFIG was sheer quantity of road safety complaints i was receiving. It seemed that the majority of residents in Hardens and Central ward wanted safer roads, slower traffic, less air pollution, and safer crossings. The only people against were the motoring lobby on facebook.
So I did my very best to support every request and support them at the quarterly LHFIG committee. The idea of the LHFIG process, of giving residents a way to action small scale improvements at a local level is a really good one. The down side is even laying a tiny square of tarmac seems to costs thousands, and the budget for LHFIG was minuscule. At times it felt a huge waste of effort when the remaining budget was a few hundred pounds. Even worse the budget was spread across Chippenham and the surrounding villages.
Despite these setbacks LHFIG was a positive experience and everyone on the committee really wanted to do their best for residents.
Major achievements were the 20mph zone in Hardenhuish – as expected controversial for some but a route to primary and secondary schools. Marshfield Road safety improvements received funding and should go ahead later this year. Learning from the Marshfield Road experience I tried to help the Causeway residents by forming their own safety group and joining the two together to learn the process. I’m hopeful the Causeway will receive similar funding in coming years.
There are too many other requests that I have supported to mention – including Abbeyfield school, Wood Lane, and crossing improvements on Park Lane.
Festivals and Events
I’ve always believed festivals and events are one of the most popular things a council can do. I believe the town council events have improved significantly over the last four years, largely down to proactive officers willing to try things and supportive councillors.
Eco Future-Fest
This was the first eco festival run by the town council and I hope it will run again. I was part of the organising team and gave a talk myself on our experience working in Madagascar as well as helping to organise some of the live music performers.
The Whale was also a successful one day event highlighting plastic pollution in the environment.
Climate Action
Climate action of course formed an important part of the term. This split into two parts – getting the Town Council itself to net zero, and getting the wider town to net zero. The latter obviously being more challenging.
I was particularly pleased to see Stanley Park become effectively carbon neutral through installation of rooftop solar, MVHR, and heat pumps. Similarly the transition to electric vehicles has continued. I supported the Town Council vehicle hub moving from a rental building to Stanley Park and this now offers the pathway to an EV charging hub. The fly in the ointment is the transformer which is too small even for innovative solutions such as the 3ti Solar charging canopy. I am confident that with a fair wind the council now has the long term funding and hopefully political will to continue the process through replacement of the town hall and museum heating systems.
The new Community Environmental forum is working well and the first Sustainable Business Event was well attended.
Deputy Leader
For a year where the political balance was even I was voted in as Deputy Leader of the Council with my friend and colleague Pete Cousins as leader. We discussed between us who should stand for leader and Pete was equally happy for the roles to reverse. However I felt Peter was politically the better choice. We’d had a somewhat turbulent first year and I felt that as we were bedding in that all councillors working for the good of the town was what everyone wants. Pete had worked with the Lib Dem leader before when he was Deputy Head at a local school and she was governor. Similar Pete lived in the same street as the Conservative group leader and they had a good working relationship. So I felt it best for council unity that Pete run for leader.
We worked really well as a team and achieved a lot in that year. It also created a much better working relationship with the CEO that had been somewhat arms length until that point. It was a good year.
The Museum and Art Gallery
I’ve always loved the museum since I first moved to Chippenham and took my two toddlers there as a way to while away the hours.
So I was delighted to support their expansion to an Art Gallery taking over the building next door when it was vacated. We made sure that the relatively small finances to open the gallery were in place and i’ve delighted in attending the gallery openings.
The talent and energy of the museum team is such that a huge amount of nationally important regional art from the Bath School has been donated, backed up by a host of volunteers.
It’s great to see it go from strength to strength.
The Neeld Bar
As a member of the Neeld working party I was pleased to see the renovation of the cafe bar at the rear of the Neeld. I had been critical many times at the lack of a business plan and I believe this has played out in what I still think is an underused facility. Nonetheless the development itself was completed on time, and whilst more expensive than first budgeted due to post covid building material inflation, was completed to a high standard with great design features.
I hope to see the bar continue to grow in usage and there’s been some good youth music events recently.
The River Project
One of the most surprisingly controversial projects in Chippenham, that got off to a rocky start with the One Plan, but has found its feet with many detailed consultations.
I attended every consultation, put every view point to the environment agency, many of which weren’t mine but were put to me by residents. I expressed particular concerns for St Mary Street residents and put a strong case for the canoe club.
The environment agency listened to these concerns and made adjustments to their design.
I believe the compromise option of mini rock weirs to replace the radial gate could be very effective and beneficial for wildlife. I hope the money is forthcoming to make the project as good as it can be.
Emery Gate
The Emery Gate planning application has been one of the most difficult i’ve had to consider. Fortunately we have an excellent Town Council Planning officer and the made Neighbourhood Plan. I focussed a lot of my role with talking to the shop keepers, local architects for design perspectives, nearby residents. The design presented had a lot of positives going for it, but there are also a lot of residents concerns regarding the loss of retail and changing nature of the town centre.
I believe we have been able to improve the initial design and it has the potential to be transformational for Chippenham if done to its full potential. There is a long way to go yet so I will watch with interest. It will be hugely disruptive to the already fragile town centre, so I tried to get a town centre manager funded for the transition period.
I plan to continue to work working with the Town team on this and help where I can.
Council Finances
When elected the Town Council finances were in a good position. I’m pleased to say that handing over to the next council the finances are in an even better position. I like to think I played a considerable role in this along side an excellent officer finance team. The making of the Neighbourhood plan has significantly improved the capital position allowing the next council to continue to invest in town community infrastructure. No new loans have been taken out over the term and we even considered paying off the small longterm loans the town council had from previous investments in the Neeld and Stanley Park. Though as these were low interest public works loans it didn’t make much sense.
This year we kept the precept rise to 3.7% despite employer National Insurance rises and nationally agreed wage rises outside of our control. We’ve also increased the amount transferred from precept to capital to balance out some of the maintenance costs creating greater financial structural stability. There is now a planned maintenance program implemented by officers.
If you consider that neighbouring town councils had precept rises ranging from 8 to 13% this year you can see that’s a considerable achievement.
Other stuff
There are too many other things to mention in detail. I’ve one of the highest attendance records of all councillors and if you count community work probably the highest. Essentially it became a full time unpaid role. I’m not sure how sustainable that will be without some form of financial recompense for town councillors. It’s simply too busy a role for someone that works full time to easily undertake.
I’ve done small thing like put up bus stop timetable holders (tracking down the person with a stash of them in a depot), and worked very closely with the Police over a number of years. I’ve read every paper and researched every decision in as much detail as I can to form a decision. I’ve kept the Nolan principles of office at the centre of everything I do.
The Future
I’ll continue my voluntary role for Zero Chippenham and my trustee role for Small Steps for Africa. I’ve been coopted into Cycle Chippenham due to the planning knowledge i’ve gained, and I hope to continue to help the Town team and quarters.
As I finish writing this it’s election day, so we’ll have to see what the new council mix brings.
I thank all the residents of Hardens and Central for voting for me four years ago and wish you all the best for the future
Matthew