Forked tongues

I ask the question does our Liberal Democrat (Lib Dem) Council speak with fork tongue? I say this having voted Liberal Democrat in the past and delivered leaflets for them.

I am really concerned about the lack of opportunities, particularly for our young people, but the Lib Dems do very little about job creation especially those that are easily accessible. When I asked one of our local councillors about this the answer that I got was there are plenty of vacancies in our shops.

Where there are jobs with longterm career prospects they are not close to the town and are not served by reliable transport links, hence people are required to drive, but the cost of cars and the running of them are out of reach for many people.

The Lib Dems are always complaining that they are chronically underfunded by Government, if this is correct how were they able to find £10 million to loan to Woking Borough Council?

Cllr Imogen Shepherd -DuBey, the councillor responsible for finance was asked what would happen if Woking couldn’t repay the loan. She replied government officials step in to take control of their finances. So if Woking can’t pay then the £10 million plus interest will be paid to our Council out of central Government funds i.e. us as tax payers will foot the bill.

At the same time Wokingham Borough Council (WBC) are proposing to increase our Council Tax charges to the maximum possible, it will be just under 5%.

The Lib Dems pledged to reduce the level of housing development and to listen to the concerns of local residents and yet we find that in practice they play lip service to the latter. Only recently upon the recommendation of their planning officer, the planning committee approved the building of 42 flats with the provision of 34 parking spaces on a small industrial site off of Latimer Road.

I accept that this is a brownfield site and is suitable for housing. These plans constitute the overdevelopment of the site with the building so high that it will grossly overshadow the homes of local residents. Also as there is a lack of parking spaces there will be significant parking problems not only for the local residents, but also for those who occupy the flats.

As a result of this development this will no longer be possible, as a result delivery vehicles will have to park outside the shop in Barkham Road. causing huge congestion problems.

Despite objections to the proposed development WBC have granted planning approval.

I would ask:

How come WBC planning officers recommended that this development should proceed given its obvious problems. Did they visit the site at peak traffic times, or were they working from home.

What happened to the Lib Dems pledge to listen to the concerns of residents? If they are past history would show that they are not very good at it.

Take for example the wheelie bin issue, they held a public consultation part of which was the replacement of the blue bags with wheelie bins.

At the time there were 177,500 people in the Borough, unfortunately only 9,000 responded.

The Lib Dems lumped together those who were in favour with those who were neutral and as a result they claimed that there was unanimous support for the wheelie bins and the changes to the collection of general waste every two weeks.

In this consultation there was no mention of the costs of these wheelie bins, or of their replacement at the end of their life, or the cost of helping those people in manoeuvring those bins to the kerbside.

Trevor Sleet, via email