Parish Council Meeting - 2 March

On Tuesday night I attended the monthly parish council meeting in Shilton. This meeting was particularly interesting to me because of two issues that I've taken an interest in.

First up, the council received a presentation from Paul Collett, the Community Safety Project Officer for Warwickshire County Council who spoke about the Rugby Rural CCTV Network project. I first mentioned this project following a meeting I attended in December last year. Essentially, the scheme provides for up to eight secure CCTV cameras in each rural parish, that sends images via the internet back to a central police control centre, to be retrieved at a later date by the police if there is suspicion that criminal activity had been captured by a camera.

Parish councils that wish to apply to join the network would only need to fund the cost of the cameras themselves and the internet connection to send the images back to the control centre, which means that the total amount needed to be spent is within most parish councils' means.

The scheme is initially being launched in Wolston, and then rolled out to applicant parishes who wish to sign up to the CCTV network. Parish councils are being invited to see the system in Wolston once it is in operation to gauge the suitability of it for their own areas.

Shilton parish councillors were impressed by the capabilities of the CCTV cameras, and it's something that we will be following up on once the Wolston trial is up and running.

Those of you who read my last post with have gathered that the problem of litter and waste has become something that I want to try and do something about. Therefore, I proposed at Tuesday's meeting that as a start, the parish council could agree to fund the hire of two large skips (one for each village) to be sited in a central location on a given Saturday to enable local people to safely, easily and cleanly dispose of any bulky refuse that they have been holding on to.

The two nearest Household Waste Recycling Centres (that's what you and I would call the council tip!) involve a round trip of over 16 miles (to Tuttle Hill, Nuneaton) and 26 miles (to Hunters Lane, Rugby). Perhaps unsurprisingly, people therefore accumulate junk that they need to throw out, but just never get round to doing so. And whilst I'm sure no resident of Shilton or Barnacle would ever choose to fly-tip this rubbish, I do think that the parish council can give people a helping hand by providing a skip to encourage a spring clean and general tidy up.

The parish council unanimously backed this idea, and if it proves to be successful and popular, would be keen to make it a regular event.

None of the detail of what day the event will be held on, or where the skips will be located has yet been worked out, so keep an eye out in the next edition of BASIS for this information (and keep reading my blog because I'll have the news here first!). But with a bit of community support, and no-one taking too much of an advantage of the situation, this should result in a worthwhile event being put on by parish council to help make Shilton and Barnacle a cleaner, and nicer, place to live.

Keep checking back for the latest news regarding the CCTV initiative and future litter clearing projects, and leave a comment below if you have any views on either of these subjects yourself.