Category Archives: Swale Borough Council

Councillor’s Report April 2024 – Councillor Rich Lehmann

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It would be remiss of me not to write something about the subject which has been the talk of Swale for the past month – bins.

The problems we’ve seen with late, or in many cases entirely missed, collections across large parts of the borough have understandably generated a significant volume of calls to our customer service team and calls and emails to councillors. They have also generated a significant number of posts and comments on Facebook.

I am very sorry for the inconvenience and distress that this service has caused across the borough during the past month. The switchover has clearly been a failure, although possibly not to the degree that many would believe. There are large parts of the borough that have received a ‘perfect’ service so far, and it is primarily the rural areas which have been missed (in many cases consistently). I’d like to share the reasons why this is, and what Suez have been, and are continuing to do, to remedy the situation.

Firstly, to respond to a question which I’ve seen raised, the reason we no longer have a contract with Biffa is simply that the contract we had with them expired. Along with our partners in Ashford and Maidstone, we put out a tender and Suez were the only company to bid for that contract.

More on this can be read online at www.tinyurl.com/SBCwaste

Some general reasons why the rounds are currently taking longer include:

New routes – the routes have been redrawn to be more efficient and resilient in the long term. We have more vehicles out in the same parts of the borough on the same day. This means that when a crew member is suddenly unable to work, (this work has a higher rate of injury than most), or there is a vehicle breakdown, we have other vehicles nearby who can pick up the rest of that round. The completion of the new routes will get faster and more efficient with practice, but it may take a few weeks.

New processes – the crews now have handheld devices which can be used to register which properties have been collected from and which haven’t. This additional piece of work may slow crews down as they get used to it, but in the long term will bring benefits in terms of more accurate data and a greater ability to send crews out to missed areas without them needing to be reported by the public.

The main reason the rural rounds have been hit disproportionately is that the new routes have not been assigned as efficiently as they should have been in terms of areas served by narrow lorries and those that have full-size lorries. There are large parts of the borough which can easily be navigated by the larger trucks and were under the previous contract. Suez have acknowledged this and are making changes to the routes to switch more properties and areas onto the full-size trucks. This will greatly improve their ability to complete collection rounds.

Suez have also employed a number of new staff, both on the driver side and the loader side, and this week, (week beginning 15th April), we are beginning to see the effect of those additional staff and a much greater proportion of collections being completed on the scheduled day. I am hopeful that this trend will continue and that we will reach a state of normal service by early to mid-May.

Rich Lehmann
rich.lehmann@kent.gov.uk
https://kentgreencouncillors.news/

Promoted by T. Valentine on behalf  of R.Lehmann (Swale Green Party) c/o PO Box 78066, London, SE16 9GQ

Swale Borough Councillor’s Report November 2023

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Parking Consultation

I know parking is often a contentious issue, and some of the recent changes to car parking charging have caused concern.

Swale are currently consulting on a draft parking policy, so this is an opportunity to have your say, by emailing comments to policyteam@swale.gov.uk

There are always competing considerations around car use so I would encourage people to take a wider view: car parking and road space are always going to be limited, and the appearance of free use of empty roads conjured up in every car advertisement needs to be recognised as an illusion.

Car parking charges form an important part of the Council’s income, so we will also need to balance this against the fact that for some people car use and car parking is unavoidable, especially given the state of public transport.

However, more use of public transport is a vital part of reducing congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, and if car parking charges are set too low, then this further tips the cost-balance against choosing to leave the car behind if you have that option.

There are also possibilities of using car parks to encourage travel options beyond conventional cars: how much space should be given to electric charging points or cycle/ motorcycle parking ?

I hope this gives some food for thought. The draft policy can be found on the Swale Council website here: https://swale.gov.uk/news-and-your-council/consultations/draft-parking-policy 

Alastair Gould

alastairGould@swale.gov.uk

Swale Borough Councillors’ Report September 2023

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Rich and I attended the Climate and Ecological Emergency working group meeting in August. Its title may be a bit of a mouthful, but it was really encouraging to see the work being done across so many departments in Swale.

Highlights are:

  • Trees: more than 300 to be planted across Swale in the coming season on council land
  • Electric charging: 18 new charge points
  • Solar panels: continuing work on getting these on council buildings
  • Car clubs: successful schemes in Faversham and Sittingbourne, with plans for an electric car to be added to the hybrids in Sittingbourne (there is already one in Faversham)
  • Walking and cycling : developing a Swale -wide infrastructure plan, so we have projects ready to go as and when funding becomes available
  • Recycling: looking at ways to improve recycling rates from bin collections
  • Climate literacy : this may not be an obvious topic to focus on , but is arguably the most important . It is about improving the understanding amongst staff and members of the council of the issues around the climate and ecological emergency that we are facing, helping people to see that everything can and should be looked at with the impact on the planet in mind: something all of us need to do.

Alastair Gould

alastairGould@swale.gov.uk  

Swale Borough & Kent County Councillor’s Report July 2023

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There are a number of consultations taking place right now and over the coming weeks, so I will take the opportunity to share the details of a few of them in this month’s column. Starting with the much-publicised proposal to close the Faversham Household Waste Recycling Centre (or tip, if you prefer the much shorter name for it!)

I was hoping to be able to share details of KCC’s Tip consultation in this month, but sadly KCC have taken a late decision to push back the start date to late July, so we are still in the dark about what exactly the consultation will look like. A new proposal went to the Environment and Transport Committee at KCC earlier in the month which now has four options on the table rather than three. Sadly Faversham is STILL lined up for closure in all four options.

Over the past few weeks I have been working with a cross party group of KCC and Faversham Town councillors, to oppose the closure. We organised a small protest outside County Hall ahead of the last full council meeting on 11th July and managed to get coverage in Kent Online and were also featured on BBC South East News. We are planning another protest at the full council meeting on 21st September, which I will share more details of next month.

When it finally goes live, the consultation will be available to respond to at https://letstalk.kent.gov.uk/

In the meantime, there are some other consultations on the same page which you may be interested in responding to:

The Community Wardens consultation has just opened. This is a service which provides 70 wardens across the county to be visible in local communities and help combat loneliness and isolation. KCC are currently proposing to cut £1m from this service, which would cut the total number of wardens across the county from 70 down to 38. There are currently four wardens across Swale, so this would very likely reduce to two or three if the cuts went ahead.

In addition to this, the ’emerging’ Local Transport Plan is also being consulted on. This is a critical point for roads and transport as KCC tries to balance an increasing number of vehicles on the road with a need to work towards net zero and a crumbling road network (especially in rural areas). The more people that can feed back to this consultation, the better.

And finally (and possibly most importantly), KCC have just opened their 2024-25 Budget Consultation, which seeks views on the areas residents consider most important for KCC to focus their limited resources on.

All of these consultations can be found at https://letstalk.kent.gov.uk/

RichLehmann@swale.gov.uk

Rich.lehmann@kent.gov.uk

Swale Borough Councillor for Boughton & Courtenay

Kent County Councillor for Swale East

Swale Borough & Kent County Councillor’s Report June 2023

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In a break from tradition, I’m going to deviate from my usual county councillor column this month and write a single column as a combined borough and county councillor or ‘twin hatter’ (the description used in political circles). Normal service will be resumed next month.
First of all, I’d like to say a huge thank you to the residents of Boughton and Courtenay for putting your faith in me and electing me to represent you at Swale Borough Council for the next four years.
As you may be aware, shortly after the elections I was elected to be the Chair of Swale Borough Council’s Environment Committee, a role which not only covers climate change and other ‘green’ issues, but also takes in everything from bin collections and churchyards to fly tipping and stray dogs, (and a great deal more).
After an intense first few weeks of getting to grips with the dual roles, my workload is finally beginning to settle into a routine and I’m looking forward to the coming years. I’ve found the culture at Swale Borough Council to be significantly more open and accessible than it is at Kent County Council. Senior officers are far easier to contact and more forthcoming with responses to questions and enquiries.
In the interest of balance, I should mention that there are a number of factors which may have contributed to this difference in culture. When I started at KCC in May 2021, we were only just coming out of the last Covid lockdown, masks were still commonplace and the induction day at County Hall still involved a fair amount of social distancing. The first two KCC full council meetings of the new council took place at Mote Park sports centre because the council chamber at County Hall was too small to allow councillors and staff to remain safely distanced from each other.
In addition to this, in May 2021 I was entirely new to politics. I think it’s safe to say I’ve learned more over the past two years than at any point since my mid-teens, and although I still have plenty to learn, I now know how best to get the information I need to carry out my role effectively. I have some big plans for the coming years. The biggest challenge will be finding ways to carry them out whilst working with the exceptionally tight budgets we have available.

Faversham Household Waste Recycling Centre (Tip)

Kent County Council will be launching a consultation in mid-July to look at options relating to the Household Waste Recycling Centres across the county. Unfortunately for Faversham and Swale East, the Faversham site is currently lined up for closure in all of the very limited set of ‘options’ they have proposed.
My colleague Mark Hood is on a working group at KCC which has been tasked with writing the consultation document. There is cross party consensus that a significant volume of additional information needs to be made public for the consultation to be meaningful. The cabinet member for Environment at KCC has said that she would be open to alternative suggestions, but the lack of information given currently means any alternatives put forward would be largely based on guesswork.

RichLehmann@swale.gov.uk

Rich.lehmann@kent.gov.uk

Swale Borough Councillor for Boughton & Courtenay

Kent County Councillor for Swale East

Swale Borough Councillors’ Report May 2023

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It was good to see that the turnout in Boughton & Courtenay was one of the highest locally (40%), so thank you to everyone who took part in the democratic process by voting, whether for us or the other candidates. We are here to represent all of you at Swale council, so if you have views or questions on local issues, please get in touch. The best way is by email: alastairgould@swale.gov.uk or rich.lehmann@kent.gov.uk . We cannot always promise to get the answer you would like, but will do our best.

There are some potentially challenging times ahead: The finances at Swale are very tight, and there will be some difficult choices to come. We will need to pick up on the Local Plan, which will be used to allocate sites for housing and employment land, and will include the policies that govern development, although we are still waiting to hear from central government about changes to the National Planning Policy Framework. We have to follow this framework in putting together a plan, and it is a limit to the freedom we have to decide things locally.

Above all though, there is the task of moving the way things are done towards a greener, sustainable path. This is the reason we both became involved in politics; it has become so clear that “business as usual” and a relentless drive for growth at any environmental cost is a path that has to be left behind urgently; Swale’s budget may be tight , but our “Carbon Budget”, (how much more carbon dioxide we can emit from fossil fuels before we tip this world into catastrophe), is even tighter, and every decision we make has to take this into account. We are also convinced that these choices have all sorts of added benefits in other areas such as health, air quality and generally making the world a more pleasant place to live in.

Alastair Gould: alastairgould@swale.gov.uk

Rich Lehmann: rich.lehmann@kent.gov.uk

Swale Borough Councillors for Boughton & Courtenay.

Swale Borough Councillors’ Report March 2023

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Travel & Sustainable Development

A better way of getting about is possible! The problems with Dunkirk Hill being closed has again highlighted the problems of getting an adequate bus service and will have pushed some people to travel by car instead. However, when it comes to planning for new homes, we are often told that developments need to be “sustainable”, which is the idea that one’s daily needs could be met without the use of a car. This raises the question, what does a realistic alternative to using the car mean?

We feel it ought to be that public transport, and the cycling and walking network, are so good that using them would be the obvious thing to do. This might mean that buses came every 15min or less, and cost less than it would to use the car. They would run from early morning to late evening so shift workers could use them, they would be clean and comfortable. Cycling routes would be safe from traffic so all ages could use them with confidence and not be intimidated by fast and close-passing traffic.

Very often we are told that restrictions on development on highways grounds can only come if safety is involved, but this always seems to mean that there has to have been some injury or fatality before action can be taken. Apart from the fact that this is an approach to safety that would be unacceptable in any other sphere, it also is a very narrow definition of safety , and does not take into account the damage done by increased emissions, both of CO2 and other pollutants, and the damage to health done by time sat in cars rather than being active: even if it just walking to the bus stop. A recent study showed that just 11 minutes walking a day could cut the risk of early death by 10%.

It is a huge challenge to provide high quality public transport and walking & cycling routes in our rural ward. Swale Borough Council has been working on plans to improve walking and cycling routes in the ‘Parishes to Town’ project started through the Eastern Area Committee. It is critical that a better model to fund rural public transport must be found. This is a challenge for all levels of government, but it must be met if local plan policies for sustainable development and a transition away from the car for local journeys are to be anything other than empty promises.

Alastair Gould (AlastairGould@swale.gov.uk)

Tim Valentine (TimValentine@swale.gov.uk) 07752 191807

Swale Borough Councillors for Boughton & Courtenay.

Swale Borough Councillors’ Report February 2023

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Local elections and voter identification

All seats on Swale Borough Council will be up for election on May 4th. This will be the first election to be run under the new law which requires you to produce an approved form of photographic identification to vote. Now is a good time to check the requirements to make sure you won’t be caught out.

You may already have an acceptable form of identification. You can use any of the following:

  • Passport
  • Driving licence (including a provisional licence)
  • Blue Badge
  • Certain concessionary travel cards
  • Identity card with PASS mask (Proof of Age Standards Scheme)
  • Biometric Immigration Card
  • Defence identity card
  • Certain national identity cards
  • Kent County Council ENCTS bus passes (for older and disabled people)

To check exactly which forms of identification are acceptable visit: electoralcommission.org.uk/voterID  If you already have an accepted form of photo ID all you need to do is to take it with you when you go to vote. If you don’t have one, or you’re not sure whether your photo ID still looks like you, you can apply for a free voter ID document, known as a Voter Authority Certificate here: http://www.gov.uk/apply-for-photo-id-voter-authority-certificate

You can avoid having to get a photo ID by registering for a postal vote instead of voting in person. Now is also a good time to make sure you are registered to vote. If you have moved recently or just become 18 you may not be registered. You will find a link to register to vote or apply for a postal vote here: electoralcommission.org.uk/voterID 

You have until April 17 to register to vote and until April 18th to register for a postal vote.

Tim Valentine (TimValentine@swale.gov.uk)

Alastair Gould (AlastairGould@swale.gov.uk)

Swale Borough Councillors for Boughton & Courtenay.

New Waste and Recycling Contract

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Swale Borough Council – working together with Ashford and Maidstone Councils, as the Mid Kent Waste Partnership – have awarded an eight-year waste and recycling contract to Suez Recycling and Recovery UK. The new contract begins in March 2024 and will bring improvements to the existing service and make use of the latest technology.

Fortnightly collections of waste and recycling will continue across the borough, with one wheeled bin for dry recycling, alongside the regular weekly food waste collections. The new contract aims to increase recycling rates and improve route efficiency.

Lower emission vehicles will be used along with better technology to keep residents up to date. The new vehicles are being funded directly by the councils to help save costs and will be more modern vehicles that use electric bin lifts, reducing the consumption of diesel dramatically and helping lower the services’ carbon footprint.

 Suez will also deliver the street cleansing service in Swale. The new contract includes improvements to the level of cleansing in rural and residential areas, as well as quicker response times for the removal of fly-tipping.

As part of the tender process, the council consulted residents about their views on the current service through a survey and via the Swale Area Committees. It was very clear that residents wanted to continue to use a single bin for mixed dry recycling, rather than have a separate bin for paper and cardboard (as used in Canterbury for example). There was a widespread view that street cleansing in rural areas was not adequate, and there was concern about the time it can take to clear fly-tipping. The tender for the new contract has reflected these priorities.

The current service will continue to be delivered by Biffa until the start of the new contract in March 2024. Staff working on the existing contract will be transferred to the new contractor.

Tim Valentine (TimValentine@swale.gov.uk) 07752 191807

Alastair Gould (AlastairGould@swale.gov.uk)

Swale Borough Councillors for Boughton & Courtenay.

Swale Borough Councillors’ Report November 2022

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The Local Plan

In the August magazine we reported that Swale Borough Council had adopted a new timetable for the local plan. At that time changes in national policy guidance were expected to be published in July. The aim was to publish a revised plan for public consultation (known as regulation 19 consultation) in November which would take account of the new policy guidance.

Since the summer there has been considerable politic upheaval in central government. Liz Truss said that housing targets for local authorities would be removed. Plans for investment zones were announced, which would remove virtually all planning restrictions. Kent County Council has proposed several investment zones in Kent, but fortunately none in Swale. There is considerable uncertainty as to what changes are still on the table.

With the policy guidance expected in July still not having been published and further uncertainty added by the changes in government, Swale Borough Council is in a very difficult situation. There is little point in spending considerable effort and expense producing a consultation document which may be out of date before it is published. Therefore, along with many other councils, Swale has decided to pause the local plan process. Work in gathering evidence to support the revised local plan will continue, so the council will be able to publish a robust plan once the required guidance has been received. There is no set timetable in place, but it is expected that a revised local plan will not be published for 12 – 18 months.

The existing (2017) local plan remains in place and all planning applications must be evaluated against the local plan policies. However, as an update is overdue, it does allow developers to argue that the plan is out of date. In addition, as a revised local plan has already been consulted on, it too has some weight in planning decisions. In effect the situation is similar to that which has applied since February 2019 when the previous administration could no longer demonstrate a 5-year land supply. Under these circumstances a ‘tilted balance’ in favour of sustainable development applies. However, development still must be in the right place. Inappropriate development can be refused. The council has been successful in defending refusal of inappropriate development at appeal.

Tim Valentine (TimValentine@swale.gov.uk) 07752 191807

Alastair Gould (AlastairGould@swale.gov.uk)

Swale Borough Councillors for Boughton & Courtenay.