From our Reporter at the Parish Council Meeting
"Rocks Ahead", and "Learning Letters"
How confusing it must be, for Trevor (Chairman) and Karen (Secretary) to be
quite unaware, beforehand, of which particular items on the Agenda are going to
cause the hold-ups. (If you know which of those patches of rough water in your
sight represent Rocks Ahead, you can steer a course to avoid them). Who could
have foreseen that "Policing" would hold us up for half an hour, and
a routine planning application would take us 20 minutes? The delays usually lie
with "Travellers", "Whiteway Drove" and "Playground
equipment"; but this time the Drove and the equipment were barely
mentioned, and the Travellers did not feature until after the closure of the
meeting.
Some good news was given to us early on the Agenda list: the long-awaited road signs for UPWARE are even now being made, so those Spanish/Portuguese/French lorry-drivers will get some help. A name-board-sign for Swaffham Prior village is also being made, and will incorporate a "slow-down" sign. (To be placed where? Nobody had a very clear idea).
The lengthy "Policing" item was mainly concerned with PCSO's. And if you don't know what they are, well, nor did I. It was never actually mentioned. But I gathered that they were slightly down-graded policemen1: grander than Special Constables, but not as grand as Real Policemen. If we wanted to see more police on the beat in our village, we could have a PCSO, if we paid £23,000 p.a. for him ourselves; or perhaps we could join with two or three other villages, so that each village would paid a part of the cost, so the PCSO would spend (say) Mondays at Swaffham Prior, Tuesdays at Burwell, Wednesdays at Bulbeck-and-Lode.... And so on. People asked - If it is going to cost all that much, why can't we get more Real Policemen, employed by the county? Charlotte Cane said: the County Police Force has to be distributed around the County according to need, and East Cambs is a lowrisk low-crime area, so police are thin on the ground. So if you feel you want more police, you must pay for them. The PCSO's will stay with you, or with whoever is prepared to pay. So it went on. Fascinating stuff.
There was an item which was designed to nudge us into the 2lst century: Trevor told us that the Government wanted all Councils (County, District and Parish) to be On Line by the year 2005. Does that mean, - we must all have a web-site? Yes, we think so. How do we go about it? Who will become our web-master? Is there some computer-whiz-kid in our midst, who could take on the job? The pages are all there ready waiting for us to fill them, said Trevor. We could put "Web site under construction", said Karen. We decided to inspect other villages' web-sites to see the kind of thing; or perhaps how not to do it.
It is observable that more and more of the Parish Council's business is conducted by means of initials, acronyms, and abbreviations. This is becoming a code, or private language; and for occasionals such as myself, present only at every third meeting, there is time to forget between visits the Letters Learnt last time. In addition to the unexplained PCSO's we had CALC's2; and during Fitch/Cane financial discourse, we had RPI3. Karen might consider handing out a Glossary or Vocabulary to members of the public at the start of each meeting.
1 Police Community Support Officer.
2 Cambridgeshire Association of Local Councils
3 Retail Price Index