Agenda and minutes

The Chair welcomed everyone to the meeting.

The Chair will draw attention to the emergency evacuation procedure as follows:

If the continuous alarm sounds, you must evacuate the building by one of the designated exits and proceed to one of the named assembly points. The designated exits are sign-posted. Arrangements are in place for the safe evacuation of disabled people. The assembly points are: the front and rear of Riverside, Temple Street.

The Democratic Services Officer read out the procedure.

Apologies were received from Cllrs Tim Warren, Liz Richardson, Martin Veale. 

The Chair drew attention to the Parish and Town Councillors reception to be held on April 20 in Keynsham. All Parish and Town Councils should already have had notification of this date; official invitations will be sent out shortly.

All Parish and Town Councillors were welcome to attend. It would be helpful if Councils sent their own RSVPs detailing numbers expected to attend.

Suggestions from parishes about content to provide focus for the event would be welcome.

These were approved as a correct record and signed by the Chair.

The Chairman’s Lifetime Achievement Award was recently renamed the Peter Duppa Miller Lifetime Achievement Award in honour of Peter’s work for local communities. A short film will be shown honouring Peter’s work for the community.

The Chair welcomed Peter’s widow, Margaret, to the meeting.

After the showing of the video the meeting showed their appreciation of Peter’s service to the community with a round of applause.

Sara Dixon informed the meeting that the first winner of the Peter Duppa Miller Lifetime Achievement Award had been Joan Pearce of Combe Down. (Further information can be found at:

 http://www.bathnes.gov.uk/latestnews/volunteers-praised-chairman%E2%80%99s-awards-their-work-bath-and-north-east-somerset.)

Andy Thomas introduced the briefing note.

Andy said that Catherine Parker in Planning would be willing to take any queries from parishes about infrastructure investment.

The meeting noted the updates.

Councillor Charles Gerrish, Cabinet Member for Resources and Efficiency made a statement to the meeting. He said;

“Last November I attended a number of parish forums and went through the headline details of some of the budget proposals. However in the Autumn, although initially encouraging, the Chancellor’s statement proved far from the case, and when the settlement was announced in December, it showed a reduction in Government funding of somewhere in the region of £3.6m on what had been expected. It means that the overall shortfall for 2016/17 will be £12m. A lot of that £12m had been addressed prior to November, but an extra £3.6m at the last minute on top of that was somewhat more than we had hoped. A new management and service review will be completed by the Autumn to deliver a further £2.2m of savings, whilst in the short term reserves will be utilised until these savings are delivered, the target for that being 1^st October. Additionally funding has been provided totalling £360k for the mayoral referendum.

Councillor Warren and I visited the minister in London regarding the late change in the Government formula that led to the reduction. Transition funding was announced for two years. Due to its one-off nature, this extra funding cannot be used to support the base budget as it would cause further difficulties in subsequent years. As a result £749,000 will be used to provide temporary support for departments this year while they adapt to new ways of delivering services and providing contingencies for risk.

The budget does protect all essential services, children’s centres, maintains increased local youth services and environmental services, such as street cleaning and maintains the high quality of social care. To summarise, there will be a 2% adult social care precept plus a basic Council Tax rise of 1.25%, the first for 5 years, a rise that had been postponed with support from Government funding that is now finished. This is the smallest rise in the region, and we have also been able to make additional funds available for a welfare support fund for those who find the increase in Council Tax this year rather challenging.

£5m of savings have been achieved through increases in efficiency in service provision. There is £3m from new sources of income and £1m from more up-to-date calculations on the cost of growth and £1.4m from underspends and better than planned Heritage incomes, which has been built into the figures. I would like to highlight the following specific projects in parishes:

·  There will be support for a further year to adult advice and information centres before the Care Commission work leads to a total reformation.

·  £200,000 towards the Bath Enterprise Area and the new Enterprise Zone in the Somer Valley

·  An additional £0.5m for highways and infrastructure maintenance

·  £3m on LED street lighting, a further investment which will lead to a reduction in the cost of street lighting and further savings on energy use

·  Funds for bin replacement

·  £3.275 million  ...  view the full minutes text for item 29a

A briefing note the Council Monitoring Officer is attached.

The Meeting noted the arrangements for the referendum.

A background briefing note on delivering local infrastructure, including information on the Community Infrastructure Levy, is attached, designed to complement the briefings to parishes on CIL which took place recently.

Attention is drawn to the following:

·  The Council is in the process of updating the Schools Organisation Plan to reflect any changes since the Plan was last published and this will be discussed at the Children and Young People Policy Development and Scrutiny Panel on 22nd March and will also be reported to Cabinet on 4th May.

·  Two working groups (for Keynsham area and Chew Valley and Somer Valley and Bathavon, respectively) on the Joint Spatial Plan have been established, including representatives from parishes. Information on these working groups has been circulated to parish councils.

·  The Council aims to develop proposals to remove through traffic from the city. This work will continue with discussions with Wiltshire, highways England and the DfT. The objective will be to develop these options for inclusion in Highways England’s next funding programme.

·   As part of its development of transport strategies for the Chew Valley and Somer Valley, the Council has recently examined road safety along the A37 corridor. We will engage with local communities on this in the near future.

The Meeting noted the briefing.

A briefing note is attached.

Andy Thomas introduced this item. He drew attention to the working group of Parish Clerks, which it was proposed would work on the specific issues raised by ALCA under the Parish Charter.

Nick Stevens of Freshford asked whether the working group would also review the Parish Charter itself. He believed Parish Councillors should also be involved. All parishes had been sent a questionnaire about the Charter in 2009 and Freshford had submitted a very detailed response. Would the responses of parishes in 2009 be considered in the review? Andy Thomas clarified that reference to the clerks working group was due to the nature of the specific issues being raised under the Parish Charter. He agreed that there was an opportunity to review and update the Parish Charter and that Parish Liaison should be involved in this.

Nick Stevens referred to the provision of the Charter that B&NES would allow not less than 21 days for consultation with parishes and said that this timescale would often deny parish councils the opportunity to consider an issue at a formal meeting. A longer consultation period would be better for parishes.

Geoff Davies, Parish Clerk of South Stoke, suggested that now the sending of paper plans to parishes had been discontinued, a zip file containing all the documents relating to a planning application should be available from the B&NES website, as was the case in Wiltshire. Parishes generally did not have internet access in their halls, so if a presentation on an application was to be given at a parish meeting it was necessary to download every document relating to the application separately beforehand. The zip file should also be given a meaningful name, not just a number. He said that he had raised this with a planning officer at a previous meeting. Andy Thomas replied that he understood that a software change would be required before this could be implemented. He had not previously been aware of the issue about file names. Geoff Davies said that he could not see that a software change would be required. Martin Robinson, Chairman of Dunkerton and Tunley PC, was concerned that some drawings accompanying planning applications could not be viewed online because of their poor quality. He suggested that there needed to be basic quality standards for these drawings.

A delegate said that with slow broadband speeds it was difficult to examine plans, and it was impossible to see them properly on tablets. He suggested that either appropriate technology should be provided to parishes or paper plans should continue to be sent to until these problems were resolved. Andy Thomas said there was help to assist parishes with IT. Planning had said that they would continue to provide paper plans for major applications. Andrew Pate said that a paperless approach had huge advantages and suggested that the way forward was to identify the gaps that needed to be filled to make technology work for parishes.

A delegate said that he felt the response on  ...  view the full minutes text for item 31.

Dates of Meetings of Connecting Communities Forums meetings

FORUM  DATE  KEY AGENDA ITEMS

Keynsham Area  17^th February  Community safety

Chew Valley  22^nd February  Transport and Broadband

Bathavon  23^rd February  Developing the Forum

Somer Valley  25^th February  Enterprise Area

Information on the Green Spaces strategy will be available at each Forum meeting.

Chief Inspector Kevin Thatcher will provide an update on Policing matters at each Forum meeting.

More information is available here.

The dates were noted.

The following dates are at present scheduled for future Parish Liaison Meetings:

11 May 2016

12 Oct 2016

15 Feb 2017

It was noted that future dates of meetings were:

11 May 2016

12 Oct 2016

15 Feb 2017