Yesterday I went to the National Association Of Local Councils (NALC) Conference, the last time I had a 5:30am alarm I was going on holiday to the USA in 2014, I had to scrape the ice off the car before I could get underway, I managed to collect my passenger and arrived at Yeovil Junction with time to spare, thank goodness the ticket office/waiting room was open and warm as it was -3 outside. The train arrived on time and out trip to London was uneventful, we did however see a spectacular sunrise over the cold frosty countryside.
Having arrived in London we grabbed a cab to the Royal National Hotel for the conference, and we caught up with old friends and councillors we have met over the years, that was very pleasent, and the venue was, as it always has been, excellent, speakers in the morning included; Professor Jane Wills and Teresa Pearse MP. Both speakers were very interesting to listen to, but the conference subject was “Changing Places” and in the real world it was difficult to apply what they were preaching; Jane gave a history lesson and explained how Henry VIII had taken over the church and devolved power to the communities both big and small while putting in place an overseeing judicial system to keep law and order, this she said was the birth place of “Localism”, I did find the theory interesting although I doubt if Henery VIII citizens would of agreed.
When Teresa took the podium she told us how, as Shadow Home Secretary, she was working tirelessly behind the scenes to better the Town and Parish Councils position, and to discourage government from imposing a “council tax cap” on town and parish councils, she said it would be counter productive and would not encourage local councils to accept devolved responsibility and take on services that principe authority’s can no longer provide, I’m not sure she can deliver it, but I will watch this space with interest.
The afternoon breakout sessions were disappointing for me:
The first breakout session was Diversity and Equality, This was interesting but in a rural community we has different needs to the big cities, this session was biased to the cities, there is always a need to mindful of how you treat other but often, certain community’s are very insular and do not wish to engage.
The second I attended; Devolution and working between the tiers; where Bradford Metropolitan District Council, were busy parishing their area and in turn devolving things like open spaces and what we call streetscene, the money doesn’t always follow so the pariishs are having to raise the opportunity money through their preceipt. Yeovil Town Council and SSDC already do this and have done so for years. Nothing new here and their approach was not as good as ours.
The journey home after the conference was a lot more interesting, we discovered that due to a big fire in Fleet Street that caused gridlock on the cities roads, we had to walk to Waterloo station, along the way I a took the photo you see below from Waterloo Bridge. On arriving at Waterloo we found our train had been cancelled due to a problem on the rails near Basingstoke, we had to wait until around 7pm before the problem was fixed, the line had been closed for most of the day, so the station was very congested, a real nightmare for country folk. When we finally got underway, at Tisbury we were told of another hold up as we had to wait for a train to pass on the single line, when we got to Yeovil Junction at 9:22pm I had to scrape the car for a second time in one day, after our London adventure we got to our respective homes at 9:35pm.
bloomingyeovil 