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The social networking phenomenon of the last 12 months must surely be Twitter. It's often been hard to avoid references in the media to the microblogging service that lets users post messages containing no more than 140 characters - a sort of text message for the internet, if you like.

It may have started out in 2006 as an innovative way by which to share snippets of information with friends, but these days large organisations increasingly use Twitter to get their messages out to the general public.

The public sector is catching on to this, and two Twitter sites that may be of interest to you belong to Warwickshire County Council and Rugby Borough Council. Both sites contain breaking news stories, with links to where you can read more about the particular topic. These sites are often a good first place to visit on the internet if you want to source the most up to date information from your local councils.

Which begs the question, does Shilton Parish Council need a Twitter page? Leave me a comment below if you have an opinion!

Regional Spatial Strategy Update

The Regional Spatial Strategy continues on its long, slow grind towards completion. If you remember, the RSS is a West Midlands-wide policy document, prepared by the West Midlands Regional Assembly, that sets out the long term objectives for the use of land across the region. Included within this are policies about the scale and distribution of new housing development, where investment in transport infrastructure will take place, and policies for improving the environment.

It's been of particular interest for Shilton Parish Council because the RSS will also specify how many new gypsy and traveller pitches each council in the West Midlands must make provision for during the next 20 years. This is being done by estimating the likely need for new pitches across the region, and then deciding how many of these should be allocated to each council area. Once this figure has been settled on, the local council (eg. Rugby Borough Council) must agree its own planning criteria that, once applied, will result in planning permission being given for the number of pitches that it is required to accommodate.

In other words, the Regional Spatial Strategy tells each council how many gypsy and traveller pitches there must be within their local area, and then the local council has to decide itself where within its boundaries it will give permission for these pitches to be located.

Back in August last year, there was a public consultation on the proposals for how many pitches should be allocated to each council area. The consultation provided three different possible options from which to choose, and which would have resulted in Rugby borough having to accommodate either 66, 61 or 55 additional pitches in the period 2007-17, depending on which criteria was adopted for allocating the 939 total additional pitches that it was considered the West Midlands needed.

Bringing things up to date, the West Midlands Regional Assembly have now published their preferred option, based, in part, on the responses received to the consultation. And they've had a change of heart!

Neither of the three options consulted on has been adopted. Instead, they have come up with a new fourth option, which is to allocate pitches as and where the need arises (and that was the option that would have resulted in 66 new pitches for Rugby borough), but in an attempt to avoid too many pitches ending up in any one council area, each council will have its allocation capped at a maximum of 42. And that is the new total that has been allocated to our borough (the surplus 24 pitches from the original 66 having been reallocated to Coventry[12], North Warwickshire[6], Tamworth[3] and Warwick[3]).

As a county, Warwickshire will have to find a total of 152 extra pitches between now and 2017 to accommodate the expected increase in gypsy and traveller population. This will be divided up as follows:

• North Warwickshire - 16
• Nuneaton & Bedworth - 29
• Rugby - 42
• Stratford-on-Avon - 42
• Warwick - 23

These proposals will now be the subject of a further round of consultation, with a view to a final decision being taken by the West Midlands Regional Assembly at its meeting in March. Things could still change, but I'll let you know what's happened as soon as I hear!

A copy of the full report that contains all of this information can be read here. Pages 8-39 of the report specifically relate to the allocation of pitches issue.

Normal Business Is Resumed

Apologies for the lack of updates and stories for the last month. A technical problem with BT deprived me of broadband access just before Christmas, and it took until just a few days ago before the corroded wire was found, replaced and I was back online.

For everyone who's kept checking back for updates when there's been none - thanks for sticking with me!

Planning Application Consultation

This week, a planning application has been submitted by:

• Weavers Cottage, Lower Road, Barnacle - amendments to the planning permission previously given for the erection of a first floor rear extension.

Full details of the application (including site plans) can be found by clicking here. All comments on the application must be received by Rugby Borough Council.

Parish Council Meeting - 2 December

Last Wednesday night I attended the December meeting of Shilton Parish Council.

As well as updates from County Councillor Phillip Morris-Jones and Borough Councillor Neil Campbell, there were updates on a number of on-going matters the parish council has been dealing with. These included the proposed purchase of land in Ash Tree Grove, new seating for the children's play area in the playing field, and the proposed alteration to the speed limit in Wood Lane/Shilton Lane/Lower Road (which I blogged about here in July - who says it takes councils forever to do anything?!)

The parish council also formally signed the contract to purchase the red telephone kiosk in Lower Road, Barnacle that I blogged about here in September. The contract can now be returned to BT and the kiosk (minus the telephone equipment) should soon become a community asset and saved from removal.

Perhaps the most interesting topic of discussion at the meeting was the setting of the parish council's budget for 2010/11. As I've explained before, your yearly Council Tax aggregates the cost of four organisations into one bill - Warwickshire County Council, Rugby Borough Council, Shilton Parish Council and Warwickshire Police Authority. At our latest meeting, the parish council were required to agree what its element of the bill would be for the forthcoming financial year. This then gets added to the amounts required by the other three organisations and forms the bill that you receive through the post.

Our income from the Council Tax that you've paid during this current year is £15,580 (which is paid to the parish council by Rugby Borough Council [to whom you pay the tax] in two equal installments in April and September). Parish councillors held a full discussion on the range of possibilities for next year, and finally decided that our Council Tax precept for 2010/11 would be £15,700 - an increase of 0.77% from this year's amount.

Councillors were mindful of the difficult financial position many households were currently finding themselves in. Whilst the cost of the services that the parish council funds may well increase year on year (eg. street lighting, maintenance of the playing fields and cemetery, and the business rates on the new Church Street car park - which I told you about here in May), it was thought inappropriate to increase its share of the Council Tax beyond the very smallest of amounts.

It'll be interesting to see how the increase compares against the larger councils that make up the vast majority of your Council Tax bill. I fully expect this to be a big issue when the bills begin to land on people's doormats in March/April, to be picked up and exploited by the national political parties leading up to next year's General Election. All councils, large and small, are under pressure to keep Council Tax increases as low as is practically possible, and your parish council has recognised that fact in the budget it's set for 2010/11.

Photographs Around Shilton and Barnacle

Reading other blogs, it strikes me that one thing my blog lacks is pictures and video. The work of a parish councillor can get a little dull for even the most interested of reader, so I shall try and lighten things a little with one or two photographs taken by me from around Shilton and Barnacle.

In the first of an occasional (and probably infrequent) series, here are a few shots taken in a field near to Sowe Fields Farm during the course of an enjoyable hour-long walk this morning. (If the quality is a little poor, it'll be because they were taken on my mobile phone.)

The next post will get back to the council stuff, I promise!

Fosse Division Community Forum - 1 December

On Tuesday night I attended the Fosse Division Community Forum in Pailton. This is a quarterly public meeting organised by Warwickshire County Council to discuss matters affecting, and of interest to, the Fosse area of Rugby.

The main topics of interest for me were proposals for a rural CCTV system being rolled out in interested parishes throughout the borough. The system is being promoted by the county council and provides for a camera that sends images, via the internet, back to a central control area, which can be retrieved at a later date by the police if there was suspicion that criminal activity had been captured by the camera. It's important to stress that these cameras would not be continously monitored, so it would be unlikely that a crime would be observed as it was taking place, but they could provide additional evidence to the police for any subsequent investigation or prosecution.

A trial of the system will be held in Wolston in the new year, and I hope to go and see it in operation to judge its potential value for Shilton and Barnacle. The officer leading on the project also agreed to attend a future meeting of the parish council to give a fuller presentation on system's capabilities.

The use of CCTV cameras can be controversial, with some people objecting to the principle of being filmed and recorded whilst they go about their daily business. Other people find some amount of comfort in the deterrent effect it can provide (especially with the relative sparsity of rural policing). If the parish council did seek to have a CCTV camera installed in either village, I would be seeking a full consultation exercise with residents to ensure that they supported the measure. In the meantime, if you have an opinion on this issue, leave a comment at the bottom of this post or contact the parish council direct.

The forum meetings also provide an opportunity for the public to suggest local policing priorities in the area for the next three months. Shilton Parish Council has been aware for a number of months now of instances of alleged drug dealing/taking on the Shilton Village Hall car park. I raised this as a priority to be addressed, and it was agreed that Warwickshire Police's Safer Neighbourhood Team would focus resources on the car park over the coming months.

The police are required to report back on the outcome of their work at the next forum meeting. Helpfully, this meeting will be held on 23 March at Shilton Village Hall. I hope that as many local residents as possible turn up to the meeting to hear what the police have done about this particular problem, and to question officers themselves about any other concerns that they may have.

A number of other topics were discussed, including:

• The county council's Cabinet are to consider a report on the outcome of the Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service's consultation exercise at their meeting on 28 January. If the outcome of that consultation exercise is to recommend changes to the existing Fire Service (including the potential closure of a number of fire stations in the county which I blogged about in October here), a final decision on this will be taken at a meeting of the full county council on 9 February.
• A presentation was given on the planned housing and business development proposals at the former Radio Station site on the eastern side of Rugby.
• A presentation was given on the role and work of the Warwickshire Probation Service and the Community Payback initiative. This is the scheme whereby unpaid work is undertaken by convicted offenders in order to make the community a better place to live. It was reported that 60,997 hours of unpaid work had been carried out by offenders throughout Warwickshire during 2008. This may be something that the parish council looks at utilising locally to help improve the look of the area, eg. by undertaking litter picks.
• The Rugby Community Safety Partnership gave a presentation with advice and guidance for protecting yourself and your family from being the victim of crime, safeguarding your property and building safer communities. I collected a number of 'goodie-bags' containing helpful tips and advice (and a few free gifts!) which I'll look to hand out at the next surgery at Barnacle Village Hall. If you want a bag for yourself, leave me a message or let me know the next time you see me.
• A regular update was given by Warwickshire Police. There had been 30 incidents in Shilton and Barnacle that had been reported to the police in the three months September - November. There was no further breakdown of what these 30 incidents actually were, although the police did undertake to have this more detailed information available at future meetings. They also highlighted the new online Crime Mapper service, which provides information on reported crime levels for the county, borough or ward areas. If anyone is interested in seeing the actual levels of crime in our area, this website is well worth a look. (And you give you a headstart, I can tell you that there were two burglaries, no robberies, five vehicle crimes, one incident of violent crime, and seven instances of anti-social behaviour in the Fosse ward during October).

Overall, it was a very interesting meeting. If it sounds like it's your sort of thing, then come along to the next meeting on Tuesday 23 March at 7.30pm at Shilton Village Hall.

Free PCs for Community and Voluntary Organisations

Warwickshire County Council has 100 recycled computers to give away free to community and voluntary organisations throughout the county.

I've reproduced that press release from the county council for anyone who may be interested in acquiring one of the PCs for their organisation:

Warwickshire County Council has 100 recycled computers available FREE to community or voluntary organisations within Warwickshire. Applications are invited by 5.00pm on Friday 18 December 2009.

There are up to two computers available per organisation. Each computer package will consist of a Dell Gx240 desktop computer, with a Pentium 4 1.5GHz processor and 256Mb memory.

It will include a monitor, keyboard and mouse, plus OpenOffice 2.0 software. Modems are also available if required. A three-month warranty is offered with each computer, though no on-going support or maintenance will be available. Laptops may be available.

For further details click here.

Sarah James
Grants Officer
Environment and Economy Directorate
Warwickshire County Council

Would You Pay More?

Would you be prepared to pay more Council Tax to Shilton Parish Council to receive a higher standard of local services? This was one of the issues discussed at the November meeting of the parish council.

All of the local government services that Shilton and Barnacle receive are provided by either Warwickshire County Council, Rugby Borough Council or Shilton Parish Council. The costs of the services provided by the county and borough councils are funded partly by the Council Tax that each household pays, but primarily from central government grant (which in turn, of course, is paid for out of general taxation). The parish council is unique in that all of its income (except for a small amount gained from the fees and charges that it levies for things like burials in the Church Road cemetery) comes from the Council Tax.

The services that each tier of council provides is clearly laid down and specified in law, eg. the county council provides social services and education; the borough council empties the bins and runs leisure centres; the parish council provides street lighting and the aforementioned cemetery. However, some parish councils, unhappy at the services provided in their local area by their bigger brothers, are now beginning to look at doing it themselves where they think they can provide better services than those that they currently receive.

This can be done primarily in one of two different ways:

• the county/borough council already provides the service, but the parish council thinks that it can do the job better. This could relate to litter picking (borough council job) when the parish thinks that taking over responsibility for its own, more local, area would result in a better service. The borough could delegate the responsibility (and hopefully the money!) to the parish council, who then takes over job of keeping the streets clear of litter.
  
  
• the county/borough provides a service, but the parish council agrees to pay the county/borough extra money if it provides an enhanced service. This is sometimes seen with grass cutting, where the borough council may only cut the grassed areas in a village, say, eight times a year, and then the parish council pays the borough an amount of money to cut it an extra three times.

The key issue in either of these situations is that the public is likely to end up paying extra money to their councils to get a better public service than they would otherwise receive.

So are people prepared to pay more, to get better? Critics argue that the Council Tax payer ends up paying twice for a service that should be properly done in the first place. Proponents will say that you get what you pay for, and you can get better if you're prepared to pay more.

At the last parish council meeting, we received notice from Warwickshire County Council of the gritting programme for the forthcoming winter period. I happen to think that the villages are well served by the gritting programme we receive. However, despite our continued protests, the one through road that will not be gritted is Shilton Lane (from its junction with Lower Road to the Coventry boundary at Lentons Lane).

Should this be gritted? Yes, especially for the cars travelling at speed from the Coventry direction into our area. Will it be gritted? No. So the parish council agreed to ask the county if they would grit it if we paid them the cost of doing so.

This doesn't mean that it's going to happen (and certainly not in time for this winter). The county council have got to agree to do it, they've got to tell us how much it will cost, and we've got to agree whether or not we want to pay this in order to get the enhanced service that we would otherwise not receive. But it's a good example of where ambitious parish councils can make a real difference to the lives of its residents (assuming of course, that its residents are happy to pay the price!).

If you have an opinion on this issue, leave me a comment below.

Temporary Road Closure - Shilton Lane

The parish council has received notification that Shilton Lane will be closed to traffic for one day on Wednesday 2 December whilst Warwickshire County Council undertake highway works.

The diversion for motorists affected by the closure is via Lentons Lane, Coventry Road, Top Road and Lower Road (and vice versa).