Hale End & Highams Park Lib Dem councillors

As councillors, we get asked a lot about recycling - what goes in the black box, what doesn’t, and why not. The good news is, from April 1st (and no, it’s not an April Fools gag!), more day-to-day waste will be able to go in the black recycling box and get collected.

New things that can be recycled will be plastics like yogurt pots, food trays, plastic bags and drink cartons. These can go in the box alongside your usuals like cardboard, paper, cans and glass. They’ll get taken away to be recycled rather than just dumped in a landfill. So it works for you when you’re recycling, and it’s good for everyone in the long-term too.

Unfortunately we still wont be able to recycle things like kid’s toys, ceramics, CDs or video cassettes - but I’m sure the local charity shop would be glad of them! If you can’t carry them down there, then do drop myself, Jane Morgan or Sheila Smith-Pryor a line via this website and we can pop round and help take things to the charity shop for you.

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At the beginning of February, Thorpe Hall School celebrated their 75th anniversary. We were delighted that the Lib Dems were represented by Cllr Bob Belam. The theme of the assembly was the history of the site.

Last year, Cllr Jane Morgan arranged for a blue plaque to be put up at the school. Congratulations to the staff and pupils at the school on the anniversary, here’s to the next 75 years!

A new planning application for Larkshall car park in being heard by the council’s Planning Committee on Tuesday 2nd March. The application is for a major development, and your local Lib Dem councillors will be speaking against it.

The application is being heard at the same time as an appeal is being processed for a separate but very similar application on the same site. The car park is opposite when the proposed Tesco will be, and we’ve heard a lot of residents object to the size of the proposed development. It is big, and when you consider it alongside the massive Tesco proposals, we think it’s a huge over-development in Highams Park.

Lib Dem councillor Sheila Smith-Pryor will be speaking against it, and we expect a number of residents to attend the meeting, which starts at 7.30pm. We’ll let you know what happens.

Nick

On Thursday 25th Feb we had a Full Council meeting to discuss and agree the council budget for the coming year. Full council meetings can be a strange experience. All 60 councillors across the borough come together to debate and vote on issues affecting the borough. Sometimes the meetings can turn into an exercise in partisan point-scoring, exactly the sort of thing that turns people off politics.

The Full Council to set the budget is different though, as we know the impact of decisions made will have implications for all residents in the borough, and the ability of the council to deliver services, be it traffic management, refuse collection, health and education services, or anything else.

I was really pleased that the Waltham Forest Lib Dem councillors voted to freeze council tax and put money into priority services. We know the last thing people need is worrying about finding extra money to pay for council tax increases.

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Your Lib Dem councillors in Hale End & Highams Park are Nick Bason, Jane Morgan and Sheila Smith-Pryor. We try and keep this website updated as much as we can, to tell you what’s going on in the ward and what we’ve been doing on your behalf.

However, we’re also on Twitter! Twitter is a social networking site, you may have noticed a Twitter feed on this website on the homepage. If you want the latest information on the ward, and what we’ve been doing, head to www.twitter.com/nickbason and follow us. You can even ask us questions there - if you message us, we’ll write back!

It’s not a very sexy subject, but no one can fail to have noticed the number of potholes appearing in the roads recently. A combination of recent freezing temperatures, high use of gritting salt and long-term underinvestment in the borough’s road network have caused a lot of the roads to break up.

A council assessment shows that there are over 5,000 potholes, and more will probably appear as long as the severe weather continues. The council estimates that the cost of repairs is around £350,000. Out of the existing roads budget, £100k has already been re-directed for urgent pothole repairs.

So, what else can be done?

We’d still like people to report potholes, either to the council or to any of us Lib Dem councillors, and we’ll pass them on to the council. Priority is being given to potholes depper than 40mm - they should be filled within 24 hours.

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