Oh dear, the ship sails further towards disaster.

We have a comment from the Chief Executive that he is ‘waiting to be advised of developments’, should the man in this position not be insisting on answers ?

then from another senior Council Officer we hear

The cost consultant (Davis Langdon) and the constructor (Carillion) continue to work towards an agreed maximum price.  Regrettably there have been several setbacks since the County Council meeting with two of the lowest price sub-contractors going in to receivership and further tenders not being returned due the buoyant market for large construction projects

Several setbacks ?  I read minor setbacks as bad news, a few setbacks as very bad news financially, to admit to several setbacks in Officerese is total  standstill, disaster or moving backwards.  No this does not make good sense.

Many of you will have noticed that there is an almost permanent flood across the Waterloo Road just north of the Brookside Caravan Park.

In the past the County Council has regularly cleared the ditch alongside the road, which prevents the water from encroaching on the road. The County Council has apparently stopped doing this, if you look at the ditch it is now badly overgrown and blocked with silt. The policy is to insist that the landowner, in this case the owner of the field above the road, takes responsibility. The owner has been informed and he has made a valiant attempt to clear the drain under the road, however I would doubt that he has equipment suitable to clear the ditch properly.

The County Council has however managed to send a van out to erect two road signs stating ‘Flood’.

Back home after a break in the French Alps with my grandchildren.

My oldest son lives in a lovely village in the mountains which has many similarities to Corfe Mullen. An old established village, the Abbaye was established 1000 years ago, but recently the houses in the village have in many cases become second homes, half of the houses are now only occupied at holiday times. The population of the village has dropped to 2000 people (Corfe Mullen has 10,000) and schools are only surviving because young English families have come to live there.

We do not want Corfe Mullen to become like this.

I am back to work now, dealing with various residents problems and preparing our responses to the RSS and Hazel Blears.

The Higher Blandford Road (B3074), from Windgreen to St Huberts Church will be closed for resurfacing next week.

This bit of road was resurfaced this time last year, but as many of you have noticed the surface very quickly began to break up and was washed down into the A31 by the heavy rain we had at the turn of the year.

A whole raft of excuses were offered including the wrong sort of rain and the wrong sort of stones, this was occurring all over the County on roads resurfaced last summer, they obviously got a duff lot.

I am assured that this time they will do a good job and it will last, different supplier of stones this time.

Diversions will be in place and traffic will be directed through the village along the Wareham Road to the Limberlost traffic lights, up to the Henbury roundabout and back down the A31. Some local people may be tempted to find their own shorter diversion !

All over Dorset people are worried about losing their Post Offices and marching in protest. It has been said that since the Government has taken away many of the Post Office unique functions that they have effectively made them redundant. You can have your Pension paid into the bank, you can buy Car tax and a TV License on line, if you have a computer and an email address, and you can buy a book of stamps in the High Street.

I protested that the supermarket wouldn’t weigh your parcel for you. Today I discovered some other unique services. I can buy a book of 1st class stamps, and a book of 2nd class in the newsagent or the supermarket, (not single stamps) but I cannot buy a book of large stamps for a large letter. Nor can I buy airmail……………. only my Post Office can supply those !!

Keep using our Post Offices !!

Hi there Nick !! I am glad you have time to read this, I hope it keeps you amused !!! susan

Last week we had our quarterly meeting of the Beacon Hill Tip Liaison committee preceded as usual by a site visit.

If you go up onto the Tip, as we do, and see all the household waste from a community it is a horrifying sight. I defy anyone to see that and not return a dedicated recycler ! the less we can throw into holes in the ground the better and the longer we will retain our surroundings.

Saying that, it is interesting, it is a very technical business. Methane gas is produced by the rotting rubbish and collected, piped out and used to make electricity which is sold to the National grid. The methane plant produces 2megawatts of electricity, enough to light half the homes in Corfe Mullen.

The leachate, the liquid drawn off from the base of the rubbish, more in wet weather as the rain permeates the heap, is broken down and neutralised on the site, until the inert liquid is innocuous enough to be allowed into the sewage system.

The Tip attracts seagulls, the vermin of the skies, but they are kept at bay most effectively by trained birds of prey who are flown most days. A magnificent site to see.

The old brickworks building has been renovated and turned into a headquarters and training centre for Dorset Wild Life Trust.

Much as we didn’t want the Tip 15 years ago, it is not all bad !

The QE saga rumbles on, or does not, depends how you look at it.

We hoped to have resolution on July 9th but I don’t think work has restarted, still a quiet site. We hoped that the contractors could make great progress in the 6 weeks of the summer holidays, no students, good weather.

All that we do know is that the project is now hopelessly over budget, before even a brick has been laid. Increased by nearly a third since May ? and it was well over by then already. I cannot believe that it will stop there, I doubt we will see much change from £50m by the time students actually move in.

Did the Tories not have a legal contract ? a binding price ? Have they learned nothing from the fiasco of Lytchett Minster School ? At the moment they are trying to keep the whole thing under wraps, ‘Confidential business’ they say. On Thursday, at the Council Meeting, we LibDems will attempt to get the whole story aired in public, the tax payers need to know.

The project will go ahead, but other capital projects in the pipeline will suffer.

 Both the Post Offices in Corfe Mullen are to stay ! Neither has been named in the first round of closures. However the consultation is not complete until September and so we must continue to support them and do as much business as we can locally.

The competition has now closed to entries so we must await voting and a result.  In view of this I have taken all the comments off the website, and we must wait and see what the public decide !

At least two local people are heading for Beijing, and I am sure there are more I do not know about.

Wendy is there already with the Torch bearers. Wendy and her assistance dog Caesar were chosen to be one of the special people to carry the torch through London, although that performance became more controversial than anyone had anticipated. Wendy was invited to Beijing to watch the end of the journey there. She decided not to take Caesar with her to China, they eat dogs in China ! So Caesar is safely in Dorset and Wendy is apart from him for the first time in 7 years.

Julia is off at the end of the week to join the Sailing team. She will be crewing in a pace boat, helping to tune the team boats and as a reserve for the team. At the moment the biggest challenges seem to be monster seaweed and pollution so bad that they cannot see where they are going !

They are both having an experience of a lifetime and will have a lot to tell us on their return !!

Are the Tories about to make a U turn ? Again ?

A couple of weeks ago Cllr Nick King (Tory) convened a meeting at Bournemouth Council Offices, using Bournemouth Council Officers, on the RSS in Bournemouth, Poole and SE Dorset. The invitation list read like the invitation list to a Tory cocktail party. Both Corfe Mullen and Lytchett are under threat of a great deal of additional building under this project and we have been working hard for 18 months in protest, however neither Fred Drane nor myself, both County Councillors, were invited to this meeting, each of our areas was represented by a Tory, one a town Councillor and the other a Parish Councillor.

At this meeting all sorts of protest actions were discussed and agreed and Nick King seems to be hailing himself the lead protester for the RSS.

May we remind the Tories that when the response to the original RSS was debated in March 2006, the Tory administration at Dorset County Council, the Tory administration in Poole, the Tory administration in Bournemouth and the Tory administration in East Dorset ALL supported the proposals for urban extensions into the Green Belt. The LibDems were the lone voices in protest. Subsequently the Tories on East Dorset reversed their stand, fearing a massive loss of seats at the local elections, however all the Tory Councillors who were also County Councillors who made a U turn continued to support the response at County level.

Sheer hypocrisy !!

I am delighted if the Tories, at this late stage, realise the damage these urban extensions will do, I am delighted if they make a U turn, but please do not take the moral high ground and pretend this is all your idea !

We have been fighting this vigorously and to the highest level for over 2 years !!

40 people eschewed the television and arrived at Barrow Hills at 9pm last night. The rain held off, the wind dropped, a bit, and we had a very successful Twilight Walk.

Two Night jars flew and played above us, clearly visible against the fading sky, and we all heard their churring and calling, as we learned more about how they arrive from Africa in May to lay their eggs in nests on the ground, and stay until September when they all return to warmer climates. They have visited Dorset and Hampshire since the 10th Century, some travel further up the country but not in great numbers.

We also saw a bat, then on the way back, as it got darker there were 5 glow worms hidden in the grass beside the path to light us home.

Thank you very much to Jane for organising it and Nicky from Dorset Wildlife Trust for leading us all.

All these creatures need undeveloped and uncultivated land to survive, to live, breed and find their food. We still have patches of this land in Corfe Mullen and we must keep it, if we build on it, it will be lost and it’s wildlife with it. We must fight to keep them safe, which is why we are upset about being asked to accommodate 700 more homes on our Green Belt land. I know we cannot stand still and I know we need more Affordable Homes in Corfe Mullen as our young people cannot afford to stay, but as Jane said ‘I am not against the houses, but we must not build them on land which is precious’.

Help us to ensure that we protect our precious wild places and the wildlife living there, and find more appropriate areas to build more houses.

Next event planned for August 9th, keep in touch with Corfe Mullen Nature Watch !  Link on the left hand side of this page.

Don’t forget ! 9pm tonight we have our first guided Nature Walk with Corfe Mullen Nature Watch (link on this page), Barrow Hills, just north of Corfe Hills school. We will be looking for glow worms, nightjars and other creatures of the night !

Good News ! Both our Post masters have had letters to say that they are not high on the list for closure. This does not mean that they are completely safe, yet, the consultation still continues, so we must all support them. however it does look as though the Powers that Be have noticed that we need both of them.

We need both our Post Offices !

We are delighted with our new bus to Poole and Wimborne, and I notice that it is being well used, even more so while Canford Bridge is being repaired.

However the people of Wareham are less pleased with adjustments to the bus timetable there. The buses used to arrive at the railway station 5 minutes before the trains to London, just the right time to catch the train. Now they arrive 5 minutes after the train leaves, 25 minutes is far longer than is necessary to buy a ticket and board a train………….

Last week I went into Rushcombe, where I am a Governor, to do a course on Safer Recruitment with the Head Teacher, Miss Faucett.

It was interesting, well constructed, much was of course common sense, which does sometimes need to be pointed out, but there were aspects and strategies that were new to both of us, and valuable.

We had to be tested at the end, and we scored 75%, which I was delighted with, however Leonie was aiming for 100% !

It is terribly important, as we all know, to ensure that anyone ho is employed in our schools and who comes into contact with our children, only has the interests of the children at heart. We all know that there is a minority of people who try to get close to our children for their own ends and we need to identify them and make sure they do not work in our schools, with our children.

I have seen some glow worms on Beacon Heath this week. When I take my dog out for his late walk, if it is after dark, we often see glow worms at this time of year.

A Nature Walk is planned this coming Saturday (July 5th) at 9pm looking for Glow worms and looking for and listening for night jars at Barrow Hills just north of Corfe Hills off the Higher Blandford Road.

Nature Watch Corfe Mullen now have two events finalised, one on Saturday (as above) and another on the 9th August a mini-beast safari at Cogdean Elms Nature Reserve. Both are detailed on the website at

http://www.naturewatched.org/corfe-mullen-wildlife-news-events.html

Do come and explore the hidden corners of Corfe Mullen with a guide.

Yesterday (June 28th) Vince Cable and his wife Rachel visited us in Dorset.

In the morning he was in Mid Dorset and North Poole, he came to Lytchett Matravers to a meeting of CALM (Community Association of Lytchett Matravers) and listened to their problems around the ghastly threat of building 2750 new houses in the area.

• He said that the Green Belt was created to stop our towns from merging into each other and to protect our areas of countryside and that this is still valid, Green Belt land is not for building on
• The increase in the number of homes needed in the South West over the last 20 years has been exaggerated and the current downturn in the economy will reduce this demand even further
• Many of homes in the South West are used as second homes and this is increasing as their is an even greater tax advantage now with the reduction of the rate of CGT
• Relying on developer contributions to provide Affordable Housing is not sustainable, particularly at the moment when the big developers are drastically cutting back their building programmes and some may be in danger of going out of business
• Building of affordable homes, much needed in the SW must be a seperate and seperately funded programme.

They then went on to visit North Dorset, managed a quick walk on peacful Hambledon Hill and ended the day at the Annual Constituency Dinner in West Dorset, in Dorchester.

He spoke to us again after dinner. About how we should tackle the downturn in the economy, which he thinks is serious and may last some time. He says we must not compromise our ideals for the environment, lifting tax on petrol will achieve nothing but future misery, we must simply take this opportunity to consolidate and make better use of what we do have, and I agree with him.

He also urged to be optimisitic about the future, our poll ratings are good, twice as good as they were last time we doubled the number of MP’s we had in Parliament so the future is bright !

Well who would be in Gordon Brown’s shoes this anniversary weekend ?!! The Government lost their deposit in the Bye Election ! Down the poll with the Monster Raving Looney Party and the whackos.

and well done to Stephen Kearney who came a very respectable second !

Dave Everett was re-elected on to the Parish Council at a Bye Election yesterday.

Nearly 500 people voted, which is a lively turnout for a Parish Council Bye election, it shows that the people of Corfe Mullen take notice and do care about their community.

Dave Everett polled 322 votes and

Bill Honeyman came a very respectable second with 154 votes

Very well done to both candidates, and we look forward to welcoming Dave back at our next parish council meeting.

Tomorrow, June 26th, we have a Bye Election for the Parish Council in Central Ward.

Councillor Ivan Harrington resigned his position in April after serving for several years.

We have two candidates.

Dave Everett has lived in the village for most, if not all of his life and played an active part.  He was on the Parish Council for over 20 years, latterly as a valued Chairman of the Planning Committee.  After a short break he has decided he misses us so much he would like come back on the Council !

Bill Honeyman, also local, served on the Parish Plan Steering Committee when the Parish Plan was being produced 3 years ago.  This taste of the village has wetted his appetite for more !

Please all go out to vote (Central Ward residents only) tomorrow at the Village Hall.

Answer, nothing at all.

A new school is planned, the contractors are on site and the area has been cleared and big holes dug. As any teenage who goes to QE can tesitfy since early April not a machine has moved on the site. There is a webcam on the school website that records the total lack of progress for all the world to see. However one of my LiDem colleagues has been censored and threatened with legal action for the reporting the same. Confidential information the Council Officers say.
The Govt has given us £29m for a new school, ‘Wow’ you think, but the contact is being renegotiated, and any teenager will be able to speculate that it is not being renegiotated downwards. If it is renegotiated upwards, £Xm or so where will this money come from ? The County Council of course. and where will they get it from ? Most teenagers would expect it come from the Schools Budget, which means that some other schools will find their plans delayed by a mere £5m or so.

This I can assure you is mere speculation, not a leak of Confidential information, worthy of today’s average school student.

Last night we had a superb Constituency Dinner at the Canford Magna Golf Club, our annual excuse to dress up and eat well in excellent company. It was fun, all together with old friends.

Don Foster MP spoke to us, with great humour, he had us laughing all the way. Lots of money was raised and fun was had by us all.

This morning, I managed to get the whole wonderful team together to visit our two Post Offices in Corfe Mullen. Stefan says he has had a letter saying his Post Office is not under immediate threat but he should make no definite plans until September, how can you run a business on that basis ?  At the Hillview Post Office all the staff were so busy that they couldn’t spare the time to talk to us. Let us pray that sense prevails and we can keep both vital Post Offices.

We managed a team photograph, a rare occasion, so you can all see the whole cheerful team, and this is the morning after a good night out for us all !

Left to right Paul Holland (East Dorset District Councillor), Anne Holland (East Dorset District Councillor), Philip Cuckston (East Dorset District Councillor), Susan, Annette Brooke MP, and Stewart Hearn, East Dorset District Councillor.

The next round of Post Office closures, to include Dorset, is due to be announced on July 15th.

Will our Post Offices in Corfe Mullen be at risk ? I am afraid they will.

We all know how important our Post Offices are to us and in Corfe Mullen we know that we do need both. The Village is long, spread out along nearly two miles of the Wareham Road, each Post Office serves a different group of people, and both are busy.

The loss of either would be a big blow to all their customers.

Please do what you can to help us save them both. Each are running petitions, please go in and sign.

This evening I went along to Corfe Hills, where I am a Governor, to see the 6th form Art, exhibited ready for the examiners, Year 12 and Year 13.

As always I was taken aback by the raw, screaming talent on show there.  Each student’s work is highly individual, all quite different, the variety of styles, materials and presentation is quite staggering.   Colourful, provocative, thought provoking, we not only have some very talented young people there, but we also have a staff who draw out the best from each individual talent.   Hard work and dedication, but lots of fun too !

Last week I went off for a few days R&R with my grandchildren who live in the French Alps. It was fun. Colder than here, but the wild flowers were just wonderful. The mountain streams and waterfalls were spectacular too, all the rain helped !

Carnival over for another year !

Yesterday we had the really successful finale of our Carnival. A really lovely day, a superb procession headed by our Carnival Queen and her princesses followed by lots of enterprising floats full of Brownies and Cubs and youngsters.

All converged on our beautiful recreational Ground for watch the displays and to browse among the many stalls. Hundreds of people and families streamed in, everyone met with friends and all the stall holders did good business.

Carnival is a splendid example of the whole community pulling together, making money for local Charities, getting together and also having fun, ice cream, burgers, tea and cake !

Very Grateful thanks from myself and all of us to the valiant Carnival Committee who work so hard all the year round to give us this one week of fun.

Lots of money goes to local Charities, Dorset Air Ambulance and East Dorset Mencap were the main beneficiaries this year, but usually a couple of smaller Charities are given some funds too, when all is counted up, and each of the Charity Stalls will have gone home with a profit as well.

Today I went to a lovely event. The Barnardo’s branch in Dorchester held their annual Coffee Morning and a lovely private house buried in a most secluded part of Dorset.

As the Regional Chairman I had the honour of making a presentation to Beth King

in recognition of her remarkable 76 years of fundraising for Barnardo’s. Beth first started to collect money for Barnardo’s at the age of 10, with her mother, and has been an active supported ever since. She runs the Raffle in Dorchester and bakes cakes, a queue forms every time for her Lemon Meringue pie, and I can testify that it is the best I have ever tasted.

Some of you may have seen that their is talk of designing a Dorset Flag.  David White, in Wimborne has designed a flag using the St Wite’s cross and is promoting it with vigour and enthusiasm.

Keith Lawson is not happy with the design, he would prefer a multi-faith cross rather than the Christian cross and he has come up with something similar using a heraldic cross.  On his flag the main background colour is green to denote the green countryside, with yellow (the sea and sand) and blue (our clear blue sky).  The quadrants of the flag denote our neighbours, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, all linked by Dorset in the form of the heraldic cross.

I would like to see a healthy competition between the two,  with entries from anyone else as well.  At the moment the St Wite’s cross seems to be getting most of the publicity so we must ensure an airing for alternative’s as well.

We have a lovely brave and enthusiastic person who has volunteered to look after the Windgreen roundabout for us.   Thank you so much.  Angela Williams and her husband have retired after looking after it beautifully for many years and they are delighted that it will continue to bloom.

You may have noticed it was cleared last week and planting has now started. Keep a weather eye on it when you go past !

Boris has confirmed that he is stepping down as MP for Henley, as he promised when he was running for London Mayor.

Still no date for the by-election but an announcement must be imminent. Most people are expecting a resounding victory for the Conservatives, given their national improvements. I wouldn’t be so sure myself, by-elections are strange beasts and the usual form book is useless.

I think we have a sporting chance, it seems clear that the dynamics are different to the Crewe election, and the Conservatives will have a different set of problems to overcome.

I suspect they will have some difficulty mobilising their troops for a potentially safe seat - it is hard to motivate people to go to something they think is a foregone conclusion. In Crewe, they knew they were in with a chance of a historic victory and so the masses came.

The media are another unknown quantity - they can’t paint this one as a Labour/Tory fight, so they might look for new targets, and the Tories are the obvious one.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the weather and competing social events could play a role.

I hope to be going to help, and I shall report back on the vibes in due course.

Several years ago a weight restriction was placed on a short stretch (200m) of Wareham Road just north of the entrance to Beacon Hill landfill site.  This was to prevent heavy lorries from coming right through the village.

Now more and more lorries are ignoring it and using Corfe Mullen as a short cut between the A350 at Limberlost and the A31 at Lake Gates.

We will be monitoring the weight restriction with our Community Beat Officer, PC Paul Mellor, and reporting offenders to the Police and the Dorset Trading Standards Office.

For those of you who have been concerned about my Ghost Coi, Herbert, he is at last back home.

Renovations and repairs to his pond took much longer than planned and he was confined to a tank for 3 weeks. Over the first weekend he jumped, through the netting, and back into his pond, by now drained and 5 feet lower down, with only 3 inches of rainwater in the bottom. I must have found him fairly quickly because he miraculously survived.

He is now back in the restored pond. He celebrated by doing circuits! The next day he was offered a companion, she had been made homeless a week before when her pond was filled in. They have been inseperable ever since, swimming round close together.

Our MP, Annette Brooke, has been in Bangladesh this week, with the Micro Finance group.

Micro Finance lends quite small amounts of money, mainly to women, to start up small businesses. The success rate is very high, most of the loans are paid back very quickly, and in full, and the women succeed with their business and manage to feed and educate their children.  Many expand fast and quickly employ other women in the village.

In the less developed countries a small investment can go a very long way, the multiplier effect is something like 4 or 5 times greater than in Britain.

The consultation on the awful prospect of 700 additional houses built on our Green Belt in Corfe Mullen is still in progress. We are being urged by Keep Corfe Mullen Green to write as many individual letters as possible. Let us hope that KCMG are right and someone actually reads all these letters.

Please can we urge you, if you are against the principle and the fact of broaching our Green Belt boundaries for additional housing, to write to

The Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government
Eland House
Bressenden Place
London
SW1 5DV

And/or to the man in charge of planning for the South West

Dave Jones

Planning Manager

Planning and Housing Delivery Team

2 Rivergate
Temple Quay
Bristol
BS1 6EH

Last night the Parish Council re-elected Cllr Peter Haward as their Chairman for another year.

Cllr Haward has been an excellent Chairman for the last 4 years and we are delighted that he is prepared to be our Chairman for one further year. He has worked very hard, and effectively, in all aspects, the most important of which was his representation of the Village at the Examination in Public of the RSS (Regional Spatial Strategy) in Exeter a year ago.

He lead the team who rigorously defended the Corfe Mullen against the threat of the building of an additional 700 homes in the Village. Not I am afraid that the Panel took much account of what anyone who appeared before them said.

He will lead the Parish Council into a further year when we will take over responsibility for running the Village Hall from the exisitng volunteer committee.

One Parish Councillor disagreed. He has disagreed with everything that the Parish Council has done since he was elected a year ago. He has done nothing positive for the community, has offered assistance for nothing at all.

He has however wasted quite some Council time and wasted the time of the Parish Council staff. He has written a series of offensive and potentially libellous letters which have upset some of the more sensitive members of the Council.

I will support the democratic process until the day I die, however I do wonder if the residents who voted for this person, on the basis of remarks which were a tissue of lies, realise how little he has done for them.

Tuesday morning, report from the Parish Clerk:  Last night it was the turn of the toilets, all the loo rolls set alight, untold damage, and they tried to break down the new door to the Ladies.

All this damage has to be repaired and the cost is borne, ultimately by all of us, the Council tax payers. The bill for removing the latest round of graffiti was £246, that is £246 we have not got to spend on improvements in the Village.

I have recently become concerned about one or two young adults who have failed to be eligible for Student Loans and Student support because they have fallen foul of the 3 year residency rule, a rule few people know exists.

When you fill in the application form for a Student loan you are asked whether you have lived in the UK and Islands for the 3 years prior to the start of your course.  If you declare that you have not, this triggers off further enquiries which may deny you the right to a Student loan and Student support.

I have recently come across young adults who had set off on Gap Year travel, got themselves involved in something and stayed away much longer than they first intended.  After a few years they realise that a University education is really what they need after all so they come home, get a place at University and apply, unsuccessfully, for Student Support.  These young adults are told that the 3 year clock starts again when they returned to the UK and Dorset, so they will not get funding for another 3 years.

In each case the young person has come home fired up with enthusiasm, more mature than a school leaver and poised to do very well at University.

While I can perhaps understand why this  rule was made, I am sure it is not in place to deny young people such as these the chance to do a University degree at 25 or 28 years old.  Our present Govt talks about Life Long Learning, which we all support, and declares that we should all have access to education throughout our lives.

I am taking up this anomaly with  my MP Annette Brooke, and Jim Knight, Minister of State for Education and MP for South Dorset.

I would be interested to hear your views on this please.

I have spoken to the Youth Club and the District Council about the increasing level of disturbance in Corfe Mullen and they have very quickly agreed to fund an Outreach Youth worker for 10 weeks for Corfe Mullen.  This is an extra couple of Youth workers who will go around the village in the evenings, together, to talk to the young people who are not in the Youth Club.

Excellent news, they did this for us for 6 weeks last year and it was very helpful.  10 weeks should take us through into the summer holidays.

Sita, at the Beacon Hill Waste Disposal site are putting in plans for some expansion made neccessary by European legislation, they need to sort the waste to a greater degree before landfill and recycle as much as they can.

As part of these plans they hope to include a Household Recycling area for local people. this will mean the usual recycling bins, glass, cans, paper, cardboard and Garden waste ! This will be a great help for local people.

More news later.

Bye election in Poole yesterday and Matthew Gillett, LibDem candidate doubled the LibDem vote in Branksome,  a usually stolid Tory ward !

The days are getting longer, the evenings lighter, the weather warmer and our young people are spending more time out of doors which is wonderful.  However a small minority of them get bored and entertain them selves by causing trouble.  Some of them call themselves the Corfe Mullen Crew (CMC)

We have had

• graffiti sprayed in several places in the village, some of it quite personal.
• A dozen beer bottles smashed on the brand new surface of a children’s play area in the Library garden
• The glass in a bus shelter smashed
• The entrance to the Library trashed
• The brand new artificial wicket on the Rec (cost £6,000) damaged immediately after it was installed
• And more seriously, our longtime elderly custodian of the Village Hall, pushed and verbally abused by a local lad as he was helping the Blood Donors crew leave the Hall before he locked up after them.

All these things need to be repaired and the burden of cost falls upon us all as Council Tax payers, the money used to repair the damage could otherwise have been used to create positive things within the village.

We do not want these events to escalate.  If anyone sees anything untoward or knows any young people who may be involved please tell the Police (01202 222222), the Parish Office or me, you can use this website without revealing your name. 

This weekend I went to the Pantomime at the Youth Club which was great fun, Congratulations to all involved !!

It was excellent, lots of lovely singing and dancing and big bangs, but the overwhelming attribute was how enthusiastic all the cast were and how much fun they were evidently having.

Postponing the production from Christmas, when we all have so many things to go to, until easter, was a masterstroke !  I would recommend it again.

Travelling people have arrived in our area.  The Police escorted some of them away from Mannings Heath and it was thought they might head for Broadstone and Corfe Mullen.  In the event they have settled in Kinson.  However as a precaution we have closed off some of our open spaces.  We will review the situation after the weekend and I hope we can reopen them.  In the meantime we apologise to any one who is inconvenienced and cannot park their car in their usual spot when walking.

Yes on Sunday April 6th the Wimborne Flyer really did start coming through Corfe Mullen twice every hour!  It goes all through the village on it’s journey between Poole, Broadstone and Wimborne.  Please use it

Have you seen the new site, created by Jane ?  http://www.naturewatched.org/

Jane is collating all the wild life in Corfe Mullen and she needs all the residents to help her by reporting the wildlife they see in their gardens and on their walks.  Jane feels it is important for us to know just what we have in Corfe Mullen before we lose any more, perhaps to new housing.

Please log on to  http://www.naturewatched.org/, look at Jane’s lovely videos and pictures and add your reports.

We have the details of the proposed new hours for the opening of the library after September and they are as follows.

Proposed hours 20

Monday 10.30am - 1pm and 2pm - 5.30pm

Tuesday closed all day

Wednesday 2pm - 5.30pm

Thursday closed all day

Friday 10am - 1pm and 2pm - 7 pm

Saturday 10am - 12.30pm

Maybe we could have some volunteers to cover the lunchtimes (Mondays and Fridays) which are currently going to be closed times ?

At last Wilts and Dorset are remembering about Corfe Mullen !

from April 6th the Wimborne Flyer (number 3)will be rerouted, 2 buses every hour will go through Merley as at present and the other two will come through Corfe Mullen !

The number3 will be rerouted from Broadstone Way, into the Broadway, right into York Road, left into Grange Road and left again and again into the Broadway to stop at the bus shelter outside the Lloyds TSB, then up into Corfe Mullen. I hope the route through Corfe Mullen will be Springdale Road, Hillview Post Office, Wareham Road, Wimborne Road to Wimborne Square.

We will lose the No 4, that will terminate in Broadstone except for the last bus in the evening.

Excellent news and please use the bus !

Several people have complained about the state of the road surface on the Higher Blandford Road going down to St Hubert’s Church and the A31. It was resurfaced less than a year ago, and in the torrential rains at the beginning of the year much of the surface washed down the hill to come to rest close to the A31.

Sadly this is not a problem unique to Corfe Mullen, all over the County residents are complaining about new road surfaces breaking down. I am afraid that the short answer is that Dorset Works bought a duff load……….

On Wednesday the new Sure Start Centre had an initial meeting and Open Morning so we all learnt a bit more about it.  Lots of activities planned for young families, young children, young mothers and so on.  Initially the Library is to be used as mainly an outreach centre for the staff who will go out to the young families.

Once the Library hours are reduced in September there will be sessions with families and children in the library premises.

Some of you may have noticed that the County Council have replaced the pavement along the Wareham Road from the Hillside Post Office to Waterloo Road.  Residents who walk along there are delighted.

I did ask if they had any money/time to repair any other pavements in Corfe Mullen but I am afraid, no, not for the moment,

Corfe Mullen Library is open again after alterations.  The reduction of hours is not planned to take place until September.  I believe that the Sure Start programme will be using the Library quite soon, but we have not been told in what capacity and how the two will manage alongside each other.

The results of our Library survey are being considered now, we had input and comments from nearly 40% of people who hold Library cards.

The Library Service is determined to go ahead with installing RFI (Radio Frequency Identification) at a cost of £1.3m.  I personally, am offended that the new Book Fund has been halved 2 years running, yet £1.3m is available to install metal tags in all our books.

At the end of last year the Tories at DCC announced they would need to close 6 Day Centres, to save money. The users of these Day Centres would be bussed to the next nearest Day Centre, in some cases nearly two hours in a bus.  Swanage users were to be bussed to Wareham, and everyone knows how long that journey can take in the summer months !  Attendances had dropped because the criterion for eligibility had been raised and people, even existing users, were being turned away as ‘not sufficiently in need’.

The users, and particularly their carers, mounted a very vigorous campaign pointing out how vital a local Day Centre is to a community, (we could do with one in Corfe Mullen !).  In the event the County Council’s settlement from the Government was increased by £4m so we managed to argue that 5 of these Day Centres be saved, for the moment.

The Day Centre in Blandford, which is for learning disabled adults, tragically we failed to save.  DCC want to redirect many of the users to other Day Centres and make plans for the remaining ones.  The people who use this centre are vulnerable, very anxious about change, and need consistency in their lives, their routines and their friendships. Plans for them should never be made hurriedly.  However we LibDems failed even to achieve a few months extension to this plan. DCC do not have plans in place for everyone, they intend to have plans in place by May when the centre will close to users and become an administrative centre.  We argued strongly, along with a vocal group of carers, that the plans need to be made and tested, everyone needs to know that they are catered for and are happy and confident with the plans, before the Centre is closed.

The Tories at DCC want to close the Therapy Pool at Sturminster Newton to save money. This pool is a valuable resource used by people with mobility problems and at least two Special Schools. Vigorous protest has enabled us to broker a deal whereby if the Community can run it, at no cost to the County Council, then it can remain open. However there is a very tight deadline, May 2008. It will take longer than that to put in place a Business Plan, proper funding, perhaps apply for Lottery funding and so on. We LibDems could not gain an extension on this deadline.

The Fire Authority received a paltry settlement from central Government this year, following years of underfunding, so some cuts will have to be made.

One thing that concerns us particularly is that we must make plans and provision for the Olympic Games in 2012 when we have all the Sailing events in Weymouth which will include a lot of extra visitors and a lot of extra boats.  So far we have been given not a penny towards this and preparations and training should begin this year.

I am sorry, we have been without an internet connection at home for a month ! Very trying, back online this weekend, thank goodness.

Now I must try to remember all that has happened in this last month. At Dorset County Council much of the time has been spent on Budgets for the coming year.

The report on the Examination in Public of the Draft RSS (Regional Spatial Strategy) for the South West Region was published on Thursday, January 10th. Rather a mouthful !!

In laymens terms you may remember that we have been protesting for a couple of years about a suggestion that Corfe Mullen should be asked to accept 700 new houses, probably down Pardy’s Hill. Last Spring a delegation from the Parish Council went down to Exeter to put our protests to the Panel there. We said that that village was too crowded already. We said our infrastructure was groaning, the schools were full, the Doctor’s surgery groaning, no dentist, the roads were crowded and the A31 stationary most of the summer months. We couldn’t accept any more houses until we addressed these problems.

In addition this land was Green Belt and we expected and wanted it to stay that way. It is pretty, it is home to wild animals, birds and wild flowers, we have little enough green space left and not enough places to walk as it is. We can’t lose any more.

Thursday’s report was the result of all the comments of all the people of the South West. In short, it looks as though the Panel have not listened to a word we said.

They have decided we must accept at least 700 houses, probably more, East Dorset needs to accommodate not just 2,400 but a further 1000 that means 3,400 in the next 20 years. No offers of any improvements at all. No regrets about building on our Green belt, simply move the boundaries they say.

We are very disappointed. However if we feel sore I think Lytchett Matravers and Lytchett Minster feel even worse, they have to have 2,750 houses. The Lytchett’s and Upton will merge into a seamless mass.

We all know we need houses, but do they all have to be on the South Coast ?

We will battle on, but we are running short of weapons.

Before Christmas we all had the opportunity to give our views to the County Council about their plans for the future of our library in a survey, forms for which were delivered to nearly every household. We were all asked questions like, were we prepared to volunteer to help in the library, whether we thought the Parish should pay to cover the 10 hours that we might lose, and which days would we prefer the Library to be open. However, before the results of this survey have been analysed the County is already making preparations for the future.  (So much for Local Democracy!)

The Library in Corfe Mullen is to be closed for 10 days at the beginning of February for reorganisation and a bit of refurbishing. The County Council plans for the future of the library include it being closed (as a library) on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Children’s Services are already planning to use the building on those days for a Sure Start initiative programme. Not sure exactly what that entails. I hope this will benefit children in the village, but it may also include children from other areas, and some outreach work ? The Library shelves will all be changed to ones that can be pushed out of the way to open up a play area for the children. Sure Start seems to have the funds that Library Services lack.

I will tell you more when I know more. What might be good is if the Library, which would still be nice and warm after the children had been there all day, could be opened, manned by volunteers, for a couple of hours on those evenings.

Brook Road Household Waste site is to be closed for 3 days for Springcleaning !  Closed Tuesday  January 22nd, 23rd and 24th and reopening all sparkly clean and rearranged on Friday morning.

Happy Christmas to all residents, and a Happy New Year !!

We hope to enter 2008 fired up with will and enthusiasm to

Keep our library lively and to

improve our Bus service so that we can restore something of the flexibility we had a couple of years ago.

At last the pavement is repaired ! Your Councillors have fought long and hard to improve the pavement along the north side of Wimborne Road, now it is just wonderful and no more danger of pushchairs and wheelchairs sliding into the road.

The 30mph speed limit is very soon to be extended to just past the Lamb’s Green Pub so we hope that Wimborne Road will be a safer and more pleasant road to walk along.

It has been rumoured that the library service wants to introduce selfservice kiosks into our smaller libraries at a cost of at least £1.7m. They say this will be needed if volunteers come into the libraries to help the librarians.

Library supporters feel this is a lot of money to spend and wonder if this is the right time or even the right direction to be going in. We are asking a lot of questions about the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) system that has been earmarked.

The Tories on East Dorset District Council have voted to stop the supply of black sacks to all residents!

As a result of a cost cutting exercise there will be no more supplies of black sacks, harvest the ones you have carefully, once they are finished you will need to buy supplies from the supermarket. This really does seem mean, it will apparently save £93,000 a year.

All your Liberal democrat Councillors argued very strongly against this move but the Tories won the day.

Public pressure and hard work by your LibDem Councillors has persuaded the Tory administration not to close any libraries, however fairly massive cuts in the service are planned.

The Book fund will be cut, most of the burden being on Adult Fiction where the budget is to be halved. Expenditure on Newspapers and magasines will also be halved. Hours are to be reduced, in Corfe Mullen from 30 hours per week to 20 hours. This means that the Library will only be open on three weekdays, Monday, Wednesday and Friday and for just 2 and a half hours on a Saturday morning.

Your comments are welcomed and a survey is being sent out to all households very soon, please reply to it giving your views to the Library Service in Dorchester.